I saw something profound on the final day of the Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy initiative that I must share: I saw a former chief counsel and VP of legal at the Brady Campaign announce that he’d spent 25 years professionally representing the opinions of his employers on gun control, and had only started voicing his own views in the last five. He said that now, in 2025, when considering gun policy, he will always consider what harm that policy will have on responsible gun owners like Rob [Pincus] and BJ [Campbell].

That was worth the price of admission.

When I walked out of the conference on November 16th, 2025, I was probably one of the five most important people in that room for achieving what it achieved, both in terms of responsibility for the project and also its results. But I was also probably the least hopeful that it’d do all that much, and here’s the reason why: The underlying scope of the group was to reduce gun-related societal harms through gun policy, and the maximum mathematical gains possible through gun policy are relatively small. The real juice here is not regulatory and easy, it’s societal and hard.

But the group did impress me by humanizing people across the divide to a level I didn’t think possible in the modern dialogue. And the policy document itself can serve as a roadmap to show blue states how to get what they want without pissing off their red voters too badly, as well as give red states a gun-friendly regulation template to end-around getting Brady Bombed by a sea of school shooting enraged Karens.

There will be many media takes on this thing. This thing will be covered in NYT, NPR, The Trace, RECOIL, on podcasts, on TV, and even in a documentary that’s going to hit the festival circuit this spring and probably land somewhere between PBS and Netflix. I’m probably going to get an IMDB credit out of it. Cam Edwards already did his first poorly informed hit piece on it without appearing to have read the policy document. It’s likely that you’ll read angry culture warriors on both sides trying to spin their hot takes on this thing into independent click-money or 501C4 email fear-donations. Everytown is going to hate this thing, and it’s unlikely NSSF or NRA has the courage to say anything glowing about it either.

As these outlets throw Bridging The Divide variously into a blender and then under a bus, I feel responsible for outlining entirely what the project was, and what it wasn’t, so you’ll know. You’re reading that now. But it’s going to take two sittings to get through because it’s big. Brew a second cup of coffee and buckle up.

Origins

The “Bridging the Divide on Firearms” initiative was a year-long effort to put gun rights advocates and gun violence prevention (GVP, the new acronym for “gun control”) advocates in the same room to collaborate on a gun policy document, and is the brain child of Dr. Michael Siegel. Siegel is a public policy researcher with Tufts University, formerly of Boston University and the CDC, who spoke before Congress during the big tobacco trials. He refocused on gun policy around 2013, and I reference his material more than any other researcher in my own writing because his material is mathematically solid and notably clean of culture war. Most gun researchers start with the “guns are bad/wrong” position and back their way into justifications of their preconceptions. I have never seen that behavior from Michael, which is why I reached out to interview him on RECOIL TV in August of 2020. That interview is here, and lasts about an hour.

I am better on camera now than then, and apologize for the 2020 “ums” in advance

You can see the genesis of the Bridging the Divide on Firearm Gun Policy initiative in that video. In short, Michael did some research by polling gun owners themselves, identifying that many of them seem to support certain policy measures in theory, but never seem to support them in practice. I pointed out that supporting a universal background check is one thing, but banning all peer-to-peer transfers unless they take place at an FFL an hour’s drive away after a mandatory seven-day waiting period is something very different. Every policy impacting gun owners must be developed with gun owners in the room, and policies could be crafted that gun owners are okay with if they’re limited, convenient, and evidence-based.

97 Pounds of Sand

Almost immediately after this interview, Siegel became involved with a gun violence prevention organization named 97 Percent (97), which was ostensibly founded around Dr. Siegel’s work. It could not possibly have gone more poorly. The very first thing the gun community presumed about 97 was that they were a culture war attack vector trying to whitewash Brady policy and make it seem like it was supported by the gun community when it wasn’t. We also presumed that they were trying to back-end terrible stuff like assault weapons bans and mag size restrictions, which Dr. Siegel repeatedly states are “not evidence based,” which means they don’t work. 97 obliged the gun community by immediately proving both presumptions dead right, and the 97 brand was instantly and permanently poisoned by November of 2022.

97 tried to get me involved in the early days. I told them to pound sand. I know others who told them the same thing. I even lampooned them in fiction after their first big zoom call, in one of the funnier things I’ve ever written.

Since then, I’ve been led to believe they’ve purged their organization of people who were calling all AR-15 owners crazy, and who were calling for the suspension of gun owners credit cards, and who promised they’d push an AR-15 ban when they had enough “political capital.” 97’s public-facing statements about gun policy are much more reasonable now than they were a half-decade ago. But the sort of trust necessary to do anything 97 wants to do never existed to begin with, and 97 now mostly survives as a shell organization of unclear intentions which converts philanthropic money into an occasional interview spot on The View and probably backs state-level red flag laws under the table.

buy the author a 100lb sandbag

BJ and Mike (Disclosure)

My discussion with Dr. Siegel about doing something like this predates the 97 Faceplant and really started in earnest around October of 2021, when he and I discussed some prior work I’d done for Open Source Defense in February of 2020.

https://opensourcedefense.com/blog/gun-policy-needs-a-decision-support-system

My personal take was the GVP community should trade the gun rights community back our assault weapons, mags, and silencers, whose bans don’t work, in return for a gun owner friendly version of the universal background check (UBC) and for swapping violent misdemeanors in and nonviolent felons out of the NICS ban list. That’s still my personal take, and the Bridging The Divide policy document is exactly that, with more depth and nuance.

In 2022 and 2023 my dialogue with Mike consisted mostly of us mutually bitching about the CDC’s counterproductive and anti-science nicotine vape messaging, and then he invited me to serve on the panel for Bridging the Divide in the fall of 2024.

Juice of the Societal and Hard Variety

Panel selection was important, and he did a pretty good job with it, but the gaps in the panel can only really be understood once you understand where the scope of the project diverges from the reality on the ground. Here’s how.

Most gun laws do not reduce gun deaths at all. Effectively zero deaths are averted by assault weapons bans, mag capacity bans, 21 to buy a handgun, trafficking prohibitions, junk gun laws, or variations in stand your ground laws. The only three laws that do anything significant are universal background checks (14.9% reduction), violent misdemeanor prohibitions (18.1% reduction), and adopting constitutional carry (9.0% reduction). But those are homicide rates, not death rates, so when you convert those to “gun death” reductions nationwide you’re only looking at a combined reduction of around 12% of gun deaths as your absolute ceiling. To break through the 12% ceiling you need to figure out who’s doing the homicide, who’s doing the suicide, and why.

The “who” is in the maps. I did an exhaustive look at GIS maps put together by The Oregonian for gun suicide, gun homicide, and gun death that tells you everything. That analysis appears in RECOIL Issue 50, page 134, as well as at this publication in case you don’t want to go to public library microfiche:

Gun suicide is overwhelmingly a rural white male problem. Gun homicide is largely a black male problem, spanning the urban/rural divide. The borders between high suicide and high homicide areas in the country are often incredibly stark, follow county borders, and are related deeply to the cultural and racial makeup of each county.

The “why” is in the racial statistics. My second exhaustive look was based in part on work by Random Critical Analysis that I hope one day Dr. Siegel will corroborate with Tufts money. That analysis appears in RECOIL 69, page 84, and is reblogged here on my substack:

When we look specifically at homicide, we find that socioeconomics does influence the black numbers, but they are not explanatory for the differential homicide rates between black Americans and other races. An analysis accounting for fatherlessness rate, however, is fully explanatory, and flattens race completely out of the relationship. While fatherlessness rates are tightly correlated with socioeconomic outcomes in white and latino populations, they’re much higher for black folks, which creates the racial homicide rate differential we see in all the other socioeconomic comparisons. The general problem is lack of dads, and the “dads problem” hits the black community harder.

This is the real juice: policy to reduce homicide rates in the United States must somehow address fatherlessness rate, and policies to reduce gun deaths in the United States have to figure out why rural white men are shooting themselves. The real juice is societal and hard, and the Bridging the Divide policy document doesn’t do much on this front. I personally championed and wrote the suicide section, which was the only section unanimously approved by the group, and I was hogtied in what I could do because the scope was firearms legislation.

To do the hard work, Bridging the Divide would have needed not only a different mandate, but some different people in the room. The panel checked boxes for racial diversity, gender diversity, and thought diversity. But three of the four black folks on the panel were women, and the one black man probably drives a Mercedes to his job as a famous ER doctor. These folks were some of my favorite folks on the panel, but they were probably not going to have the direct personal perspectives of black males exposed to real societal homicide drivers. Of the ten-ish gun owners in the room, the closest to a rural white Carhartt-wearing male were Rob Pincus and I. Rob has more frequent flyer miles than the president of Delta and I’ve got two degrees in applied mathematics, so I’m not convinced we have enough redneck cred to know what’s going on in the rural white male suicide demographic either. We do both own chickens though.

But the policy does about as much as gun legislation can, maximizing impact while remaining friendly to gun owners, even though I don’t agree with everything in it. It’s a good document.

67 Pages, Condensed

Here’s a very abridged description of the sorts of horse trades that were in the final policy document, without dwelling too much on the details. It’s important to note this is a state-level policy proposal, with suggestions to the feds buried in it, and certain ways to make the state policy work outside of federal bounds because the state runs its own background check for peer-to-peer sales.

• The “Prohibitors” policy adds people who commit violent misdemeanors to the “can’t buy a gun” list for two to six years, but pulls nonviolent felons off of it.

• The “Background Checks” policy adds a state background check system that runs in parallel with the federal one, and can be used for peer to peer transfers or FFL transfers. It’s a state database and a smartphone app or website where you put a buyer’s information in, and it instantly returns a green flag or red flag on the prospective sale, without an owner registry. The state uses this for all peer to peer transfers which wouldn’t require a NICS check, and requests that the ATF allow it for FFL transfers as well. The policy also gets rid of state bans on SBRs and suppressors. This is the cornerstone, because it closes the supposed “gun show loophole” but does so in a way that is a convenient win for gun owners without a registry.

• The “Extreme Risk Protection Order” policy is the policy’s red flag law framework. It’s civil not criminal, the burden of proof is on the court, it’s temporary and automatically expires, it provides mental health treatment and social services automatically to anyone who gets flagged, and it’s a punishable crime for law enforcement or anyone else to abuse it. They can also have a third party hold the guns instead of the cops.

• The “Dealer Gun Regulation and Gun Trafficking” section focuses on criminal enforcement of straw purchase laws already on the books federally, by funding and directing state efforts to look more closely at the few gun stores in the state that are disproportionately responsible for the distribution of guns used in crimes. It also encodes a state level version of PLCAA to protect firearms dealers and manufacturers in case the federal protections go away.

• The “Childhood Firearm Access Prevention” section is the policy riff on safe storage, which says if you’ve got kids under age 18 in the house you have to keep your gun locked when it’s not near you. There are tax breaks in it for training and for buying a gun safe. I personally voted against this section after they added in a bit requiring safe storage in vehicles because it would force people concealed carrying to violate gun free zones unless they had a car safe, which they won’t have if they rode with a friend or family member. When I suggested that all gun free zones should provide firearm storage it was like a flashbang went off in the hotel soda tray.

• The “Firearm Suicide Prevention” section operates in three modes. It suspends any state level gun control law that would impede the transfer of firearms between two friends or family members if one of them is suicidal and wants to get their guns out of the house. It provides a list and map of safe places to temporarily store a firearm other than family and friends, such as a gun store who volunteers to provide safe storage. And it heavily invests in suicide awareness pamphlets and outreach, crafted in part by the gun community itself, which instruct people when and how to get the guns out of the house if they’re suicidal, knowing that they’ll get them back whenever they ask for them.

• The “Firearm Injury and Prevention Education” section adds firearm content to high school health class, and then gets deep into the weeds about what sort of content should be put into the class and who gets to pick that. My opinions on this section varied wildly during discussion, ranging from “hell yeah” to “shit no,” and in the end my vote was bought by making much of the curriculum controled by the local community.

• The “Community Violence Intervention” section is the only policy in Bridging the Divide that jumps outside of the realm of guns and into the realm of Juice of the Societal and Hard Variety as discussed above. It earmarks money for community and hospital based violence intervention programs, some of which have shown some effectiveness at crime reduction. It’s a start, but I don’t think it addresses the true root cause. I went ‘yes’ on this because it is indeed a start, and I would have gone all in on it if the money earmarks could also be redirected towards community programs working directly on the fatherlessness problem.

I like most of the policy document and I’m proud to have participated in crafting it. I think gun friendly states could use this as a guideline to deflect antigun forces from ramming far more restrictive rules down their throats after a mass shooting. I think purple states that have recently passed more restrictive policies could look at this as a way to soften their own policies before they get dumped entirely during the next political red-shift. I also think it would save a few lives along the way. Probably 15 a year in Utah, 70 a year in Kentucky, 200 a year in Georgia, and so forth. The numbers on this won’t be huge but they’re not nothing.

The Friends We Made Along The Way

The Tufts project’s ultimate goal solidified for me when The Great Satan of Gun Control Jonathan Lowy and I had lobster and beer at a marina in Portland, Maine, talking about whether Bob Dylan or Tom Waits was a better songwriter. I do not count Mr. Lowy among my allies in the gun rights movement, nor would I want to. Mr. Lowy is more valuable to me as a friend than as an ally, and I like him. This kind of connection transcends a mere policy document, because it means I can carry his position into my spaces and he can carry my position into his.

Dr. Siegel deserves all the credit for selecting and curating a panel that could make these connections. They were weighted a bit heavily towards Old Fart New England Academics, who are probably Mike’s social circle. But I give credit where it is due, even the more antagonistic ones softened tremendously after our first face-to-face conference over the summer in Denver. Dr. Selker of Tufts also deserves a tremendous amount of credit for holding the thing together on the Tufts end, in ways of which I’m only peripherally aware.

The mediation and facilitation team from Essential Partners also deserves a tremendous amount of credit. Their methods created a space for viewpoint sharing and discussion that allowed the panelists to start from a point of shared values and build out from there, which is the best way to organically discover resolutions to disagreements. The time they spent on humanizing the panel was fruitful.

Cry Havoc! And Let Slip The Poorly Informed Shit Takes

As HWFO has discussed repeatedly over the last decade, the goal of all modern media is to make a penny a click by feeding confirmation bias to echo chambers, while spending the least possible amount of time on research. This tendency is not limited to the gun space, but it’s certainly present in both sides of the gun dialogue. We see it in basically everything ever published by The Trace, as well as Cam Edwards’ first salvo in Bearing Arms in which he appears to call me a useful idiot for the communist party…?

So that’s new.

I met Cam at SHOT Show a few years ago in the media room. I doubt he remembers me but I know he knows my organization Open Source Defense. I also know he knows Rob Pincus, and he didn’t reach out to either of us before publishing this. He even referenced Open Source Defense in his article, while apparently not realizing that I was representing Open Source Defense on the panel itself and putting exactly the stuff Kareem talked about into the proposal. Cam said this:

Open Source Defense has published an interesting way to perform “universal” background checks that preserves the privacy of the buyer, and if that’s what’s being offered I’d be far less likely to object. But the outline offers no detail at all on what this state-level background check system for private sales would look like... including their proposed penalties for violating the law.

Cam didn’t appear to look into the details, or look at the panelist list. But I’m sure his article in Bearing Arms is going to get more clicks than mine will unless I can peddle a version of mine to RECOIL, which may be difficult while my editor Iain Harrison is doing Soldier of Fortune stuff in Kharkiv. I originally seemed to have Thomas Gibbons-Neff on deck to cover this for The New York Times but I think he got yanked and redirected to Minneapolis.

Be clear, it’s not Cam’s fault. Even while referencing Kareem’s article on UBC game theory traps, Cam is in his own game theory trap trying to drum up traffic just like Bloomberg. And that’s the filter through which the world will see this effort in the next few months - a filter that I’m not sure Dr. Siegel knows about or understands.

In the end, it’s one thing to draw up a document, and it’s another to promote it. What transpires over the next six months with Bridging the Divide will determine whether it becomes a policy pillar or an advocacy footnote. But in this case, for this document, I can say I was happy to be along for the ride regardless of the outcome.

And, in some areas, to help steer it.

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The last HWFO article on the last ICE shooting closed like this:

It really is surprising it took this long for a protester to get shot. It was predictable, the markets should have taken bets on when and where, and the Danse Macabre continues because few are smart enough or have the will to ask what the heck is actually happening, and whether it should it be happening, and how to change it if not.

Nineteen days later I’m writing about another ICE shooting, at the specific request of several of my liberal friends. Here’s the shooting:

And so I will write the article, but not to prove a thesis because my thesis hasn’t changed. This article will just be a snapshot of what’s going on in the gun rights discussion space about the second shooting, which is certainly interesting. Herein, I will let my readers and friends write the bulk of the article for me, through anonymized quotes taken from private channels, in the spirit of Scott Alexander’s “highlights from comments” work. You should read these quotes, which are curated for relevance and intelligence, but I’ll summarize the general zeitgeist briefly before we get into them.

The gun rights space is in two camps, and the camps seem to be drawn between folks who regularly carry firearms and folks whose interest is more rights focused and less practically focused.

The “rights” camp says you can protest while armed, you can film cops, and you can do both at the same time without forfeiting your life, and therefore the ICE cops murdered a dude in cold blood on the street for doing things you are allowed to do. People in the “rights” camp tend to bend libertarian or liberal, so they also tend to be less ICE positive.

The “practical” camp carry firearms regularly, and have been to numerous classes where their instructors told them to never under any circumstances get into a scrap with a cop while armed because someone might get shot in the confusion. They have been told that while you’re armed any conflict could turn deadly, so you have a moral and ethical obligation to avoid all conflicts and not provoke them. You also have an obligation to announce that you’re carrying a weapon to any cop you see and keep your hands clear, to be sure everyone in the engagement is calm and sane and nobody gets shot. The practical camp was taught this for their own safety. The practical camp tend to bend conservative, so they also tend to be more ICE positive than the rights camp.

Part of the Second Amendment schism comes from growing pains from 2020, when gun ownership grew and the prior gun owners were quite honestly a little bit worried about how to onboard all these new rights focused owners that didn’t have the same historical enculturation.

The rights camp views Alex Pretti as a hero. The practical camp views Alex Pretti as a dumbass, especially as information starts to come in about how the protests in Minneapolis are not organic, they’re organized opposition to intentionally track and interfere with armed cops that coordinate through secure channels on Signal with a defined command and control structure which are operating off of a known insurgency playbook.

To some, Pretti looks like a sacrificial pawn that the organization behind the protest killed on purpose to move the needle. If I were to engage that conspiratorial thesis at all, I would substitute the woke egregore for the “organization behind the protest,” because a distributed agenda by an egregore would look like a coordinated agenda to a conspiracy theorist.

There are also some folks who skate down the middle, who think that the sort of coordinated soft insurgency ongoing in Minneapolis is potentially legitimate, but doing it over this particular issue is dumb. And there are folks who are detached and looking at it from a larger tribal warfare standpoint, which is far more on-brand for HWFO, so we’ll start there.

I was and am one of the “rights” guys, so most of these quotes are from people arguing with me, as you’ll soon see.

Anon Who Writes Longly

This guy did a lot more than film cops.

Should physically interfering in an arrest come with a death sentence? No. Not even if you’re carrying. But this guy created a chaotic situation where the risks were extremely high.

You seem to perceive all of these shooting incidents through a framing of, “Since cops are able to get away with this, what is stopping them from doing it to me?” That’s a reasonable framing to apply. But you’re doing exactly the thing I described in another post: you’re projecting the actual events onto a different, imagined scenario. Specifically, the scenario that cops will arbitrarily kick down your door and shoot you. This is not a valid comparison because the actual events are not something you would ever do, and the imagined scenario you’re worried about is not one that would actually happen.

There’s consistently been a significant difference between the actual shootings and the hypothetical scenario that concerns you: in all of the actual shootings, the person who was shot was also the person who initiated the altercation. That’s completely different from cops kicking down your door in the middle of the night. But in every case, skilled propagandists use carefully curated videos and photographs to quickly promulgate an initial narrative that somebody was just minding their own business and the cops executed them. This narrative is compelling to you because it aligns to the scenario you’re worried about, where cops kick down your door in the middle of the night and execute you. You accept the narrative as presented, and then it becomes the framing through which you perceive all further evidence. Even as additional evidence starts to trickle out, showing that the initial narrative was a lie, that narrative has such a powerful hold on you that you keep insisting that it’s obviously true, and comparing it to the completely different scenario of cops kicking down your door in the middle of the night to shoot you. With the crazy lady in the car there was eventually enough video evidence from enough angles that you were finally able to see past the narrative to the reality that she deliberately tried to run that cop over with her car and even succeeded in hitting him. This time, you accepted the initial narrative that he was just filming and the cops went after him, which is now obviously false. How many times are you going to let these propagandists brain-fuck you before you realize what they’re doing and stop accepting their first-out-the-gate narrative?

I’m not saying that what happened with the most recent ICE shooting is OK. It’s not OK in all sorts of ways. What I’m saying is that the thing we want, which is a well-functioning society where everybody gets to be both free and safe, is not on the menu. We have a much less appealing set of options available to us. In the best case scenario, we manage to muddle our way through a few years of bad stuff before eventually finding some new equilibrium. Most of the scenarios involve catastrophic failure in some direction or another, and the only question is which of those directions we’ll slide off into.

This isn’t just about deportations, or ICE, or even Trump. This is tribal warfare. All of that other stuff is just the most convenient current excuse for the tribal warfare. If it weren’t ICE, it would be something else. A very important thing to keep in mind is that as tribal warfare escalates, the moderates on both sides lose control. It doesn’t matter that the majority of people on both sides are reasonable human beings who do not want violence in the streets and could reach a peaceful solution if they could sit down with each other and talk it out, because their influence is rapidly waning.

If you’re thinking in terms of laws or the constitution or your rights, you are in for a very rough time. Those things only matter in practice in a healthy society with a properly functioning government. We haven’t had that for years. Our decision-making processes (including our elections) have been hijacked by egregores and our government has been hollowed out. Our government hasn’t functioned on the basis of rule of law for years. That’s always been a marginal thing at best, but it’s been completely untrue at least since 9/11. Each time a faction takes control, they ratchet up the concentration of power, only for those new powers to be handed to their enemies the next time they lose an election. Everybody recognizes that pretty soon, the power will be so concentrated that all further elections will be locked in, and they are responding accordingly, trying to ensure that they will be the ones in the chair when it becomes a throne.

Talking in terms of rights and laws won’t make any difference because the only rights you actually have are the ones that you (and your tribe, if you have one) can demand at gunpoint. To the degree that this could be reversed, the people with the power to do that have no interest in doing so and your words will not sway them. If you’re actually thinking in terms of rights and laws, you are in for a very rude awakening.

I described two errors of thinking, and then BJ very helpfully responded by demonstrating exactly those two errors of thinking; I couldn’t have asked for a better straight man. They are errors of thinking because they are based on an ideal of universal principles. Universal principles are an excellent way to run a society. I would greatly prefer to live in a society based on universal principles, and I think everyone else in this Slack would as well. We frequently repeat the adage about designing a government so that you wouldn’t mind if your worst enemy were placed in charge. When you think in terms of universal principles, it’s natural to apply the general facts of a scenario as a template to other scenarios and think about how they would play out, which is exactly what BJ did. The problem is that a society can only run on universal principles when the overwhelming majority of people in charge cooperate to run it that way, and we have not had such a society in decades.

On more than one occasion, BJ has stated that when the shooting starts, he will look around, figure out which tribe seems to be most likely to win in his area, and hang their flag in front of his house. This is probably the best strategy in a civil war scenario, and many others have expressed similar plans. The thing is, neither of these are discrete events: the shooting does not start all at once, nor does the signaling of tribal affiliation. Even if you don’t yet want to declare allegiance to a tribe, you can’t help constantly sending small signals that both tribes will interpret in their own ways to sort you into their in-group or out-group. The biggest risk is doing something that causes both tribes to sort you into their out-groups.

I’m going to apply the tribal warfare framing to the most recent ICE shooting and BJ’s hypothetical counter-examples, keeping in mind the principle that “when the shooting starts, I’ll pick a tribe and fly their flag.” First, we see that the shooting has already started. It actually started a long time ago, but this is clearly a significant indicator of acceleration. The “flags” in this situation are behaviors like carrying a concealed weapon (used to be a solid indicator of red tribe affiliation, no longer) filming cops as they make arrests (used to be a fringe libertarian thing, now mostly associated with the blue tribe), and doing so in the context that they are surrounded by an angry mob (solid blue indicator). But the most important indicator of all is which cops you’re filming. If you film ICE agents arresting illegal immigrants, that codes solid blue. If you film ATF agents trying to arrest gun owners, that codes solid red.

If cops started randomly demanding Papiere Bitte at the Richmond 2A protest, and someone filmed them, and they disarmed the camera man and then shot him in the street, it would be the fucking OK Corral in about 5 seconds.

Yes, and this is exactly why the red tribe has gun rights. Not because of the 2nd Amendment, but because nobody else is willing to pay the price to take away their guns, and even if somebody were stupid enough to try, it wouldn’t work.

The blue tribe has other rights that the red tribe does not, including the right to riot with near impunity. They have secured that right by building up an infrastructure of material and legal support to rioters, propaganda engines, and loyal DAs who prosecute selectively. In 2020, the red tribe watched all summer as rioters shut down cities, caused billions of dollars in property damage, and even murdered multiple law enforcement officers, all without consequence. The red tribe interpreted this through a framing of universal principles, concluded that all of these behaviors were generally permissible to all Americans, and acted accordingly on January 6th of 2021, where they learned the hard way that the blue tribe has rights which they do not.

The blue tribe has long predicted that the red tribe would flip on gun rights as soon as black people started buying guns in large quantities. That prediction proved false, but if the blue tribe had applied a tribal rather than racial framing, they might have made a more accurate prediction which is playing out now: the red tribe does not support gun rights for the blue tribe, at least not in practice. The red tribe knows that they can carry in public and film police officers and get away with it, which are real gun rights. The blue tribe can buy guns, but are currently learning that they can’t actually use them in practice the way the red tribe does.

The red tribe is also now contesting the blue tribe’s right to riot with impunity, which is why we’re seeing so many dead anti-ICE protestors, charges against guys like Don Lemmon, threatened charges against state and local officials, etc. If the Democrats ever win another presidential election, and if they try to tit-for-tat by contesting the red tribe’s gun rights in a serious way, then we will have a full-blown civil war.

The reds already priced in full radicalization of the other side. There had been a gradual build-up through the “mostly peaceful” summer, cancel culture, attempted political assassinations, and other events, but the Charlie Kirk shooting put them over the top. The red tribe concluded that no matter what they do, they will have to deal with the consequences of the other side being fully radicalized. Since that’s already priced in, they might as well do as they please.

This is a reality to which the blue tribe has not yet caught up. Many decades of experience have taught them that they can exercise strong influence over the red tribe by modulating their radical behavior up and down. That will never work again because the red tribe will no longer let it work on them. That was a one-way switch flip. But the blue tribe has yet to realize that the radicalism knob is no longer connected to red tribe behavior, so they keep trying to twist it to 11 because they think it’s not working because they haven’t cranked it up far enough.

My prediction for most likely outcome:

The same machine that ran the summer of 2020 mobilizes and attempts a repeat. There will be riots, but it won’t be nearly as destructive as in 2020. This will give Trump the excuse he needs for a massive crackdown, possibly invoking the Insurrection Act.

In retrospect, seems obvious and I’m a little embarrassed that I was too caught up in the details to see this sooner. It seems like this was the plan all along: pick a deep blue city in a blue state and run an ICE blitz there in an attempt to goad them into rioting; if they don’t take the bait, move to the next deep blue city and try again.

All of the rising conflict we’re seeing is a direct result of forcing people with fundamentally incompatible value structures to agree on a common set of rules.

There are only two ways to resolve such conflict:

1. Let people split off and live in discrete political units composed of mostly like-minded people.

2. One group of people enforces their value structure on the other(s) by force (or eliminates those who won’t submit).

I know that some people will respond to this with #3: get the people to sit down, talk it out, and agree on a value structure that is acceptable to all. This is, indeed, the most preferable approach. In the current context, it is an unrealistic fantasy. The value structures in play are fundamentally incompatible, which limits us to #1 and #2.

If #1 is not implemented deliberately, then the default is #2. Sometimes, in the process of implementing #2, the losing side decides that #3 is preferable and makes terms.

(redacted) has described the endgame pretty well: Reconstruction 2.0. That would be the endgame that the MAGA egregore has in mind.

Cynic Anon

Watching these videos makes me feel like I’m watching a 2yr old playing with a loaded gun while dad and the uncles sit around watching and laughing. There are no adults in the room. Nobody understands violence or responsibility. It’s just a city-wide version of the Stanford Prison Study. One team was told to dress up like federal agents, and the other team was told to dress up like protestors.

My read is that Trump’s forcing the issue in the way he is to make Walz and Frey either order their troops to fire on federal agents, in which case he’ll definitely have the support to go arrest them, or to back down. He’s forcing the crisis point.

Withdrawing would be pretty unacceptable; the networks would just have time to regroup, retrain, rearm... Strategically it would be weak, operationally it would be painful, tactically there’s no benefit I can see unless they move in with more force after.

There’s some things you can let the states do their thing on. 10th amendment and the commerce clause is pretty shaky legal ground; nobody in their right mind would invade CO over weed based on a SCOTUS opinion that everyone hates. Immigration enforcement though? The federal government has like, three duties and that’s one of them. If they don’t do that job then they have no reason to be, and if they let states flout them on that then they don’t have any legitimacy.

Anon who Lives in Minneapolis

Today is my first time setting foot in Minneapolis since mid-December, I am downtown working (redacted).

I have literally seen zero ICE agents ever, but mostly because I only go to downtown Minneapolis for work, and I never go to Minneapolis for any other reason, and ICE seems to be mostly operating in the South Minneapolis area where I definitely do not go because that place sucks. Like you can totally avoid ever encountering ICE by just not following them around.

There’s a trend during riotous times for blues to post pictures of random parks or whatever away from the action and pretend that because that particular area is peaceful that it must mean the idea that there are serious riots going on must be a right wing fabrication. I could very very easily do that in Minneapolis. Again I have literally not seen a single ICE agent, though again this is mostly because I have no business in the parts of town where they are operating, and only even enter Minneapolis city limits maybe once a month on average. If I did not have access to the news I would literally have no idea that I’m in the middle of civil war 2.0.

During the 2020 riots the sky at night was orange from fires.

I wonder how much of the Rorschach test of this thing is swung by being someone who personally carries a firearm in public. IIRC, I seem to remember BJ saying at some point that he doesn’t carry (correct me if I’m wrong). As someone who does carry, I think there is something about strapping on a firearm and sincerely hoping you don’t have to use it today that affects your mindset toward conflict, in a way that people who don’t carry, or are not mindful of the full implications of carrying, don’t experience.

One year I went to the local Pride festival and hung out with some of the people I knew there from the local Pink Pistols chapter. They were stuck in a corner of the park with all the other conservative-coded groups. While I was there, someone saw the Log Cabin Republicans’ Trump poster. It was the photo from his first campaign where someone brought a rainbow flag to a rally that said “LGBT for Trump” and Donny saw it and proudly held it up.

Anyway, this person took offense to this poster and started trying to tear it down. There was a big scuffle. And meanwhile across the path from them was easily the most heavily armed section of the entire park. Probably two dozen of us. All of us looked at each other and just started packing up the tents to get out of there. I don’t think any of us gave more than a moment’s thought to going over to help or otherwise participate in the scuffle, because again when you carry a firearm, every fight is a gunfight.

The person who sincerely doesn’t want to use their firearm behaves like a massive fucking pussy, because that’s how you avoid using your firearm. And that’s why when we see a Rorschach test consisting of a guy carrying a firearm who decides to put himself in the middle of somebody else’s fight with the cops, we lack sympathy because we understand how monumentally stupid it is to do that, and simply can’t see ourselves in that position. But somebody who has never carried a firearm, and has never experienced the shift in perspective about conflict that comes from carrying a firearm, their takeaway from the Rorschach test is that they don’t see the issue with the moment the guy decides to involve himself with somebody else’s fight with the cops, because they have never experienced that voice in their head saying “don’t get yourself into a fight that you are not okay with escalating to lethal force “

The Anon on the HWFO T Shirt

Anyone emphasizing amplification is in the wrong. Pretti carried a gun into a “situation” which has few positive outcomes. I do not know if his death can be “justified” in any moral sense - I don’t know what his intentions were, but as a carrier, even if he was defending someone, he should have respected the rules of engagement - his carrying did nothing but amplify risk to himself and he was not legitimately a threat to the action he was protesting. He may have been a threat to an agent but realistically he was outgunned and outprepared and undertook risk that ended up with him dead with a VERY short leap from “bad choice” to “he dead.”

I do not know how they can actually de-escalate properly at this point. I think I’d prefer ICE take a moratorium on deportations in MN for a period of time - like, a few days, a week - just to give people a chance to reset and think, because continuing engagement gives the irrational no opportunity to think, only act. And that’s going to end up with dead people, for nothing, because the people being targeted for deportation need to be deported.

But with that said, the process is broken: MN is not cooperating, which only amplifies risk for everyone, including Minnesotans, should they choose to be involved. And they are choosing to be involved; they’re touching the stove and bitching that it’s hot, why is it hot just because it’s on and labeled as hot and cherry-red. But this commitment to enforcement is counter-productive…

Unless that’s the goal, and if it is, well, there’s a reason we should elect better people all the way up and down the slope. This saber-rattling on all sides is stupid. I think honestly that Walz and Trump and Bondi and these other goons need to be on the ground themselves: Let Walz, who is a gun-owner himself, he says, and a member of the National Guard (”Almost good enough to serve in the Army reserve!,” as my brother says), lead the protests on the ground himself, if he’s going to advocate for others. Why is the risk only to ordinary citizens? Similarly, if Trump’s all “see how big my penis is, no, it’s right THERE, it’s the hog, why you using a telescope bro, I’m sure it’s there somewhere” then let HIM go in with ICE, instead of relying on others’ service.

Intelligent Rights Anon

I’m seeing a lot of “isolated demand for rigor” around the “you need to avoid all conflict when carrying a gun” point.

No argument there, but people are not applying that rigor to the officers involved here. just gross incompetence and oafish escalation all around, but a lot of people are only pointing out the ways that Pretti failed, not the ways the officers failed. In fact a lot of people’s incentives are to deny that the officers failed in any way at all.

My biggest concern is I see zero interest on the part of the federal government in thinking about how they might have performed this arrest without killing the guy. Quite the opposite, all the messaging from the government was about how he was intending a massacre, kind of had it coming, was definitely a shitlib so who cares anyway, etc. And “we don’t particularly care if we kill you while arresting you” is not an attitude I am comfortable with the government having, and even if they have that attitude, I’m definitely not comfortable with them feeling secure to express that publicly. As gun carriers we can also take ownership of how to keep ourselves safe and out of trouble/danger. But I don’t want the government to get away with not taking ownership of their own need to become more competent too.

The good news is that this is the biggest step change in normalization of concealed carry since Bruen.

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I’m about to piss you off no matter who you are. By the time we’re done here, we will show that the lady who got shot today is definitely an idiot, the cop that shot her is very likely guilty of manslaughter, the Republicans and Democrats have both been assholes since at least the 1992 election, which by the way was stolen with game theory mathematics, and the dude least responsible for any of this is Paco at the Taco Stand. To make this long, twisted case we’re going to have to go all the way back to a 1990s Texas businessman with big ears. But first let’s get the shooting analysis out of the way.

The January 2026 ICE Situation

There are good cops and bad cops, and the bad ones tend to cluster around other bad ones on an agency-by-agency basis. Some of the worst bad cops, worse even than the ATF, are the Enforcement and Removal cops of ICE, who must be selected for having the sort of personality that is neither friendly nor helpful. Their entire job, which is a legitimate and real and necessary job, is to throw kids in cages and yeet them back to their nation of origin with metaphorical trebuchets. They’re like repo-men, but for humans. We’ll discuss how this is a legitimate and necessary job, if obviously very not-nice, in modern societies later.

We only had a few thousand of these guys a few years ago, but Trump hired twelve thousand more to try and meet a one-million-man deportation quota he imposed on himself which was impossible to meet because he did such a good job of shutting down the border. Biden’s deportation numbers are always going to dwarf Trump’s because Biden’s borders were open and his deportation rate was propped up by a vast catch and release program within fifty miles of Mexico. Trump shut that down, the deportations collapsed, and he couldn’t meet his artificially high quota so he hired a bunch more ICE enforcement and removal guys without time to properly train them. Lots more. And this created a highly dense concentration of the worst of the asshole cop types in the same organization. Assholes seeking employment to do asshole things.

Then Trump sends two thousand of these guys to Minneapolis. Why Minneapolis? Certainly not because it’s a border city overrun with Mexicans, because it’s not. Certainly not because it’s disproportionately a drug smuggling or gang crime focal point, because it’s not. He probably sent them there because Minneapolis is a haven of neoprogressive wokes and he wanted to fuck with them and fuck with Minnesota’s neoprogressive governor who ran against him nationally the last election cycle.

But the neoprogressive wokes love this, because Minneapolis is the beating heart of the Black Lives Matter riots, the largest and most destructive protest movement since Rodney King, responsible for more damage to the country than a category 2 hurricane. And the neoprogressive woke virtue system is all about fighting fascism. Their hobby, panacea, and life goal is to become an Instagram Martyr by getting abused, beaten, or killed by a fascist cop while all their friends film it on their cell phones to try and move the political needle, and then they can carve “almost as cool as MLK” on their gravestone. Who needs Jesus when you can farm virtue from the likes and shares, and ink yourself a corner office in Woke Heaven, or at least a little bit of Blue Hair Strap-on Strange?

So you have this concentration of several thousand poorly trained masked fashy plain clothes S-tier asshole cops and an equal concentration of ideologically monolithic NPR addicted bad-cop-provocateurs in one location like a kind of a Manhattan Project Demon Core, but substituting nuclear fissile material for political anger. There is no universe in which we build that monstrosity and someone doesn’t eventually get shot.

Shooting Controversy

In the obscure and erudite lore of the online rationalist community, there’s a story by Scott Alexander called Sort By Controversial, which tells the fictional tale of an AI named “Shiri’s Scissor” built to generate maximum controversy. If the video of the cop shooting the protester lady showed her obviously trying to ram a cop then the blues would shuffle away from this argument. If the cop walked up to a protester and shot her in the back of the head the reds would say “yeah uhh, we’re out.” This shooting had the exact right mix such that everyone can watch the same video and use it to buttress their own preconceptions about the thing. It’s Shiri’s Police Shooting, the shooting to create maximal controversy. Here’s the best video I’ve been able to find, which has been reposted by both blue and red sources:

This is another angle that’s worse:

There’s a third vantage point I’ve seen which seems to show the cop getting bumped more than either of these, but I can’t find it anymore.

As some of my regular readers may know, I’m a writer focused heavily on gun rights, and pursuant to that I’ve absorbed a fair bit of knowledge about the nuances of gun self-defense law from my time sitting around with John Correia of Active Self Protection in the media room at SHOT Show. I won’t claim to be an expert, but I’m more expert than many of this blog’s readers, and this is my take, which for the record may very well end up exactly the opposite of John Correia’s in which case you can presume I’m wrong.

While the car was technically “accelerating,” it was basically unmoving when the cop drew and shot. We know that the cop was never in danger of being run over because he could easily step aside the car. We know this because he literally did exactly that. Then after he fired his first shot through the windshield he followed that up with two additional shots into the window of the car when he was not even in the car’s travel path, both from a distance of only several feet, at a lady strapped into her vehicle with a seatbelt. It is incredibly likely that shot two or shot three blew bits of her vascular system into the passenger seat and that’s what killed her.

There is a very marginal case, but admittedly possible, that the first shot was justified because he was in the travel path of the car. That marginal case will be difficult because the car was going slowly and he was obviously able to step out of the way, but even that case may not matter. A talented prosecutor might kneecap that case by pointing out that shot two and shot three were taken when the cop was completely safe from harm, and that those are the kill shots, and that those were bad shots. There’s no argument that it’s okay for cops to shoot civilians through the open window of a moving car from the side at point blank range where a miss could end up plugging a bystander. The defense will then say that once you start shooting you just kinda sorta keep shooting because that’s your training, and then people will argue about how long it takes to change your mind about whether you should keep shooting, and so forth.

For me, it’s open and shut. If you feel strongly in the opposite I don’t hold that against you. That’s just more evidence that this is indeed Shiri’s Police Shooting, a shooting so obviously correct or incorrect that it tears social groups apart. I think if Trump were smart he’d throw that guy under the bus as fast as possible, but he’s not smart, so he won’t, and we’re going to tear ourselves apart for a few months over this until we move on to something else.

But it is worth pointing out that the dead lady is dumber than Trump is. Did she deserve to get shot? Probably not, in as much as most people don’t deserve to be shot, but that doesn’t necessarily demand sympathy. Nobody deserves to get mugged but if you wear ten thousand dollars worth of gold chains and a thong and prance down the Bluffs in West Atlanta and get your shit stolen I don’t have any sympathy for you. Trying to cut off a bunch of asshole ICE cops with your car in protest is only a few clicks less stupid than protesting AMTRAK by Snidely Whiplashing yourself to the train tracks.

buy the author a Bullwinkle DVD set

Running around trying to interfere with dudes with guns who we all know are assholes while your spouse films you getting shot is the dumbest hobby I can imagine. It’s much more dangerous than model trains or Warhammer 40k or reviewing lip gloss on Tiktok, and while it might be slightly less dangerous than base jumping wingsuits in the Alps to farm social media clicks from your adrenaline antics, it’s obviously far less cool or interesting.

It seems like a clear indication of egregores in action to me, but that’s a story for another day.

In the last 12 hours I’ve plumbed all my contacts in the blue and red camps for their impressions of the shooting, and it’s not necessarily blue/red that causes people to interpret these videos differently, nor is it affiliation with guns or gun culture, nor whether you like immigrants, nor even knowledge about self defense law. The differentiating factor for whether you think the cop murdered the lady or not seems to be purely whether you like cops and whether you are fed up with protest wokery.

And the whole reason we’re in this predicament as a society is because we made fun of Ross Perot’s ears. Let’s follow the chain of events backwards to the 1992 presidential election.

The Long Chain

There is no country on all of planet Earth, as far as my research has been able to glean, which simply allows illegal immigrants to stay indefinitely once they’ve been identified. Not one. Some are just better at enforcing immigration law and border patrol than others. Deportation is a fundamental feature of all modern nation states, and anyone who says that “deportation is fascism” is saying “every nation on Earth is fascist” by proxy.

The illegal immigrants here are almost entirely here to work, make money, and take it home to central and south America to feed themselves and their families. If the line to get in moved, they’d deport themselves and go stand in the functional line, but the line to get in is either nonexistent or it takes a million dollars and a Major League Baseball contract. Illegal immigration is caused by immigration law being too strict and government bureaucracies being too slow and too stupid.

Immigration law is too strict because of the “They Took Our Jobs” crowd, by which I mean American labor. They don’t want to have to compete with poor folks who want to work, so they do their best to keep them out so they can keep the cushier job.

For decades, the Democrats played multiple sides of this. They told the unions they were on their side against the mean old corporations, and then they told the voters they were going to raise the minimum wage, and then they also fought against deportation because they felt bad for the illegal immigrants. They took all three of these positions because they practice “Vibe Governance,” where they just choose whichever policy signals the most virtue and call everyone else meanies.

But those policies don’t mix. You can’t claim to help the working class by raising the minimum wage while simultaneously facilitating the importation of an entire group of subjugated second class citizens explicitly to work for less than the very same minimum wage you’re trying to raise. It’s nonsensical, and the folks at the butt end of the nonsense are American Labor. So eventually they revolted, left the Democrats permanently, and the election maps did this:

Every time Trump won, he won the rust belt. Immigration turned into the current shit show because this is what the rust belt wants, because their jobs got offshored, because of free trade.

I like free trade. I think it’s cool. I get a warm feeling in my belly every time I buy a Mexican zucchini or a pair of Chinese ice silk underwear on Amazon for a tenth the American made price. But I realize my predilections kill jobs an hour northwest of me in Dalton Georgia as their textile plants get offshored.

GIANT SUCKING SOUND

In the salad days of 1992, when intellectuals were still in charge of political discourse instead of it being a social media shitpost war between twelve year old boys and twelve year old girls, there lived a man named Ross Perot. Perot was a curious Texas businessman who attempted to buy an election by representing an underrepresented group of traditional conservatives who he identified had been abandoned by the party system. He was campaigning primarily against the North American Free Trade Agreement. (NAFTA) Ross Perot saw all this coming, and warned us, and he was the first guy to really grab the “they took our jobs” vote.

For some people, the purpose of the economy is to provide jobs so they can work and earn a living and provide for their families. Their job is their “way of life.” For other people, the purpose of the economy is NUMBER GO UP. The NUMBER GO UP people like to say that the rising tide raises all ships, and when the number goes up there will be other better jobs for the people who lost their jobs from the bad jobs being shipped overseas for poorer people to do them more cheaply. But in practice the jobs it creates aren’t the same as the jobs it kills, so it exacerbates rural poverty, and so forth, and all these trends we’re experiencing now were kicked off initially by NAFTA.

But Ross Perot had big ears so nobody listened to him, and he split the Republican vote which gave the election undeservedly to Bill Clinton, and the Democrats laughed about it, and third parties were permanently booted from the system because everyone saw how game theory worked. And then over the thirty years that followed, Democrats abandoned the unions entirely, becoming the new NUMBER GO UP party, which allowed Trump to win the unions and the rust belt.

Viola.

Shitshow.

And the whole thing comes to a head in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent is the tip of the spear for the Rust Belt Revolution’s counterattack, and the Vibes Governance white women offer their bodies in ritual sacrifice as the first line of defense for the NUMBER GO UP coastal banking elite’s offshoring operations, and someone gets shot.

It really is surprising it took this long for a protester to get shot. It was predictable, the markets should have taken bets on when and where, and the Danse Macabre continues because few are smart enough or have the will to ask what the heck is actually happening, and whether it should it be happening, and how to change it if not.

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If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

In the context of the great DEI kerfuffle last year, the reds are going to hear this phrase and mentally substitute, “I sure do hope that the pilot of the airplane who is delivering me safely to my destination wasn’t selected for a reason other than his competency, given the media reports that airlines were doing exactly that,” while the blues are going to hear that and mentally substitute “Charlie Kirk says black people are too dumb to fly airplanes.” And then the blues and reds get mad and talk past each other, and Kirk farms (farmed) the clicks.

I was half way through writing this very thing down when I stumbled randomly into that exact exchange on Twitter.

buy the author a plane ticket

This is the nature of all of the online discourse about Charlie Kirk’s positions, as far as I’ve been able to tell. In each of these cases, the context or perspective can lead one group to think he meant X and another group to think he meant Y. It's a subtle kind of very intelligent engagement trolling. And it is for that reason that I disagree with many opinions expressed in the media yesterday that Charlie Kirk was promoting productive discourse.

He was promoting peaceful discourse, but the ways in which he promoted it were very unlikely to produce cross-tribal understanding, while being very likely to produce clicks.

My liberal friends went completely ape shit over this article:

Their mental version of Kirk was “Nazi” so they fail to engage at all with Klein on this. They’re mad that Kirk’s to-them-extreme opinions are being whitewashed by liberal media brands in the wake of his murder. I have a theory on this, that I haven’t heard expressed clearly by anyone else yet.

I think the reason Gavin Newsom, Ezra Klein, and a lot of big liberal authors wrote things yesterday in support of Kirk is not so much that they agree with Kirk on anything, even his methodology, but rather because they realize that they do the same thing to build their own brands, and they're afraid of getting plugged in the neck too. Klein says essentially that in his closer:

I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.

There’s a weasel word in that closer: “shared project.” Klein might envision this shared project to be “democracy” or whatever, but in truth the “shared project” of all of them is engagement farming for profit by driving cultures further apart. He wants the world to stay safe for the culture war profiteers. As we’ve mentioned repeatedly here, the culture war gets all the clicks.

Murder is bad and I don't endorse murder and do actually agree with Kirk's stated and intended position on a few of the things he's said. Off the top of my head, I agree with Kirk that some amount of blood is worth it to keep the Second Amendment around. I also agree that the Gulf Wars were incredibly stupid and the result of very bad people having outsized influence in Washington. I disagree with him about some other stuff. But I do think that his death should act as a reminder to other culture war profiteers that they are engaging in a dangerous game that might not be good in the end for their families if the war goes hot.

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I want to apologize to paid subscribers for being quiet this summer and not posting a lot of material. I was getting engaged, remodeling my house for my fiancé and her daughter, moving them in, helping her start her new teaching job, and planning a wedding. Also, apparently, spending far too much time 100%ing Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2. With all of that wrapping up (wedding is less than two weeks away) I’ve finally got time to write again, and these past two weeks have seen four new articles. I have ideas for many more, which I discuss with my readers (and they discuss with each other) on the publication’s private Slack server. You can gain access to it by becoming a paid reader.

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There are well over a hundred people yammering away in there right now, and I’m a very active participant. Members get to contribute ideas to articles in real time as they’re written, and many of the ideas for stuff in this publication come from the group. And if you don’t want to pay, then just stay on the free plan. All articles here will forever remain free to read.

Reading List

I’ve seen “zomg reds are more violent than blues” graphs thrown around originating with the ADL recently in the last few days, but the ADL likely cooked the numbers by including Neo Nazi Jail Shankings in their totals. This is a more reliable study, which shows reds were hugely ahead on the political kill count for decades, but the blues started to post numbers in Obama’s second term. The study cuts off in 2020 and I haven’t seen an objective kill count study for the last five years.

This article in TFP goes deep on the timeline for when the media started to pivot away from factual reporting and into opinion steering, which was the groundwork for it falling entirely into culture war.

The Free Press

Matti Friedman: When We Started to Lie

Exactly ten years ago, during an Israel-Hamas war that seemed major at the time but seems minor now, I published two essays describing my time reporting on Israel for the Associated Press. “Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else,” I wrote at the time. “Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep.” It wasn’t the volume of coverage that unsettled me in the summer of 2014. I was writing about something that had gone unreported, and which has done much to shape reality in the decade since—a change not in the news but in the newsroom…

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2 years ago · 2109 likes · 794 comments · Matti Friedman

Boys are falling behind in grade school and college. Lots of people wonder why, and I’m sure that’s multivariate. But a new study used double blind data to determine that around 12.5% of it is literal gender bias by teachers.

I’m going to keep sharing Jeff Asher’s stuff until everyone gets it. Not only is crime cratering nationally, it’s also cratering in Washington DC and the pretense for putting the National Guard out there is just as silly as the pretense for calling for additional gun control measures.

Jeff-alytics

Assessing DC's Violent Crime Trends

To paraphrase Bart Simpson, Washington DC’s violent crime data and trends make it a land of many contrasts. As such, the theme of this post on DC’s violent crime trends is that multiple things are true. Thanks for reading Jeff-alytics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work…

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10 months ago · 60 likes · 25 comments · Jeff Asher

Two great Astral Codex Ten articles hit recently.

Astral Codex Ten

Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection

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10 months ago · 379 likes · 820 comments · Scott Alexander

Astral Codex Ten

What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?

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9 months ago · 1125 likes · 728 comments · Scott Alexander

The second one is classic Scott, and hilarious.

If you missed the short window where Grok went Nazi, this article has some screenshots and discussion.

Always The Horizon

Grok Just Went Rogue

If you were tuned in on the afternoon of July 8th on X(twitter), you’d have seen something fascinating occur. It appears a recent July Update to Grok has resulted in a bit too much spice for its handlers…

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a year ago · 295 likes · 57 comments · Copernican

This article on how the left went sideways regarding youth transgender medicine in The Atlantic is so good I’m surprised they published it.

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Herein, we will look at some vaccines, the origins of vaccine hesitancy, the shit tier crap that Pharma is trying to sell us as vaccines which poison the well of public trust, and close with a simple way to solve this mess purely by the CDC following the CDC’s own rules.

Measles

From 2000 to 2019 there were 3,874 cases of measles in the USA, averaging 194 cases per year. From 2020 to 2025 there were 2,899 cases, averaging 483 cases per year. In 2025 we’re at 1431 and climbing, with four deaths through September 2nd. I do not think four deaths in a country of 340 million people is a huge problem, statistically speaking, but the trend of increased measles cases is alarming.

Why is measles becoming an issue? Measles vaccination is going down. Compiling data from several sources, we can graph it.

Measles over the last fifteen years in the United States stays relatively low, with the total number of reported cases hovering around a hundred per year with a few notable exceptions. The 2014 and 2019 outbreaks were known to be associated with proliferations of the disease in the unvaccinated population. Among all patients of both outbreaks, the vaccination rates were only 10% and 11% respectively. This should lead most reasonable people to believe that measles vaccination works, and that outbreaks are heavily associated with lack of vaccination.

Vaccination rates among kindergarteners prior to 2020 hovered around 94.6% nationwide and never declined in consecutive years over the sample set. After 2020, vaccination rates declined every year, and continue to do so. RFK Jr. did not suddenly undermine faith in vaccines, something after 2020 did. The numbers for 2025 in the above graph are only through the end of August. We already have the worst measles year in the last three decades, and if these trends hold we will probably close the year out worse than the early 1990s.

One dose of the measles vaccine is 93% effective at prevention of infection, and two doses is 97% effective. This is a top tier vaccine administered to 2% fewer children than the prior decade because of something that happened after 2020. To understand the impact of 2020, we need to look at the rules governing vaccine efficacy standards.

Vaccine Rules

There’s no formal, globally applied minimum efficacy bar for vaccines, although there perhaps should be. Most of the diseases for which we have standard vaccines have efficacy rates at preventing infection entirely of around 90% or more. Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Chickenpox, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Hepatitis A and B, and Polio vaccines all prevent spread in 90% or more of cases. Pertussis, Rotavirus, HPV, and Dengue Fever vaccines prevent it in 80% or more of cases. None of these vaccines exist merely to make symptoms less bad.

If I developed an AIDS vaccine tomorrow but its efficacy rate was only 50%, they wouldn’t allow me to call it a vaccine, even if it “made the AIDS symptoms less bad.” Angry mobs of alternate lifestyle San Franciscans would rightly and justifiably show up at my door with pitchforks and burning brooms accusing me of lying to them for profit. Yet the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) both establish a minimum threshold for “being able to call yourself a vaccine” of 50% for two diseases: Influenza and Covid-19. As far as I’m aware, those are the only two. The only vaccine close to that low is malaria, at around 75%.

The WHO and CDC give the malaria vaccine a partial pass on efficacy rates because malaria is a huge problem and kills half a million people per year globally. They give the flu vaccine a partial pass because the flu has a kabillion strains, they reformulate the vax every year by guesswork never knowing how well it will do, and it’s leaky, but they still maintain a 50% threshold. They pulled the 50% threshold out of a hat for Covid-19 and haven’t wavered from that, even though other comparable diseases have much higher thresholds. A cynic might say they did it because of the revolving door between CDC payroll and Pfizer payroll, or because of lobbying, or because a hundred congressional reps have major stock holdings in vaccine manufacturers.

When I buy ballistic body armor I do not want to have to flip a coin to see whether it stops the bullet. I don’t want airbags that only activate on “heads” but not “tails.” I don’t want smoke detectors that only work on odd days of the week. That’s what “50% efficacy” means, and those are the standards for the flu and Covid. Fine. I don’t get to set those standards; the folks at Fauci’s cocktail parties do.

But currently it’s very unclear whether they can even meet those intentionally debased thresholds.

Flu

In April of this year, the Cleveland Clinic dropped one of the most controversial vaccine study preprints in history which showed the flu vaccine had a negative efficacy rate in the 2024-2025 flu season. The unvaxxed did better. This study looked at 53,402 employees, 82.1% of which received the flu vaccine, and 2.02% of which caught the flu. Over the course of the study, flu rates among both groups were low, but towards the end the vaxxed population caught flu more than the unvaxxed population, leading to a final tally of -26.9% efficacy for the flu shot. Negative efficacy.

The antivaxxers went bonkers over this study in the spring, and the provaxxers responded with a wall of criticisms of the study. Politifact responded “yes but the point is so when you get the flu it isn’t as bad,” in as many words. They also defaulted to CDC historic data, and got some platitudes from healthcare experts to round their piece out. Most other outlets did something similar as a way to handwave away the antivaxxers.

The CDC does their own version of efficacy testing, and updates their website yearly. I took this graph directly from the horse’s mouth, and drew a red line on it.

The CDC’s study claims 56% efficacy for 2024-2025, a wildly different result from the Cleveland Clinic result. Why? The biggest difference is probably that the Cleveland Clinic trials don’t include children and the elderly. So both could be right. It could be that the overall net efficacy of the flu shot in 2024-2025 was 56% while the efficacy among working age health care workers is -26.9%.

But this draws a bullseye around two important points.

1. If it’s true that flu shot efficacy is concentrated among children and the elderly, and it’s so bad it’s negative among working age clinicians, then flu shots should probably be concentrated into the populations where they actually work. And if true, then the CDC should tell people that. They should especially tell the nurses and teachers in the middle to whom the flu vaccine might be doing actual damage.

2. According to the internationally accepted threshold for what does and does not qualify as a vaccine, the flu shot is not a vaccine. It only met the very minimum threshold to be called a vaccine in four out of fifteen years in the CDC’s own bar chart, even though the 50% threshold was set in part by the CDC.

If we’re going to call it a vaccine at all, it’s a really shitty one. If the CDC were being honest, they should tell everyone up front that it’s not a vaccine at all. Especially if they were worried about something like public trust in vaccines’ ability to prevent infection, or public trust in the CDC as an institution. Call it a “targeted temporary random immune booster that may or may not work” instead.

I ask you this. If someone were to hold the CDC’s feet to the fire about their 50% threshold for the flu vaccine, what would they do? Would they demand better vaccines, or would they lower the threshold even further so they could keep calling it a vaccine?

I think we know the answer.

Covid

Right now in 2025, the CDC’s estimates at Covid-19 vaccine efficacy vary by age cohort and fall off noticeably. But the problem isn’t the variation, or the fall off. The problem is the vaccines just don’t work well. Here’s a graph of the CDC’s own data on the topic.

Vaccine efficacy starts around 36%, drops a little for the young and a little for the old, and drops precipitously for working age people. This is reminiscent of the divergence between the Cleveland Flu Trial and the CDC’s Covid numbers in some ways. More critically, there is no time frame and no age cohort for which this vaccine counts as a vaccine at all according to the CDC and WHO’s own thresholds. If I had an AIDS vaccine and it only worked 36% of the time, I would be run out on a rail and accused of trying to make money by getting people sick.

And now I ask you this. If someone were to hold the CDC’s feet to the fire about their 50% threshold for the Covid-19 vaccine, what would they do? Would they demand better vaccines, or would they do a lot of mumbling about better clinical outcomes for the vaccinated, even though natural immunity still conveys 80% efficacy in reduction of infection?

I think we know the answer.

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Chain of Causality

The first flu vaccines were developed in 1945 for the military, but universal vaccination was not recommended for them. In 2001, 94% of Americans felt it was either “very important” or “extremely important” to have your children vaccinated. The first universal recommendation for influenza vaccination was issued by the CDC in 2010, and support for getting children vaccinated fell to 84% by 2015. That stayed steady until 2019. Then Covid happens, then the Covid vaccine comes out and also doesn’t work well, then the CDC changed the definition of “vaccine” so they could keep calling it one, then the CDC again issues another universal recommendation for another bad vaccine, and the number drops to 69%.

I think we all can see what’s going on here. The more shit tier vaccines the CDC tries to make “universal,” the fewer people are going to want to get their kids vaccinated, even for the good vaccines. It really is that simple.

I don’t discount that there are some people who think all vaccines are scams. I don’t discount that there are people who think vaccines are worse than the diseases they seek to prevent. I don’t discount that there are folks talking about autism, or other claims I personally consider speculative at best.

But you don’t get anyone to trust you by lying to them, and when they catch you in a lie they’re more likely to start listening to the other folks who’ve been calling you a liar this entire time. This has been the vaccine dynamic in the United States since the government first started pushing the flu vaccine that isn’t a vaccine, a dynamic that’s been magnified fivefold since 2021 when they pushed a Covid-19 vaccine that also isn’t a vaccine.

If you’re a provaxxer, you should be angry that you’re losing ground in your culture war against the antivaxxers. You should be alarmed that people who hold opposite opinions than you have leveraged power against your position. But your anger and alarm should not be directed at RFK Jr., who is merely a stand-in and a symptom. If it weren’t him it would be someone else. You should be angry the most at the people who make the shit tier vaccines you’ve been supporting, for making such shit vaccines and detracting from the good ones. The remains of your anger should be directed at the people pushing the shit vaccines in the CDC.

The first step to regaining the public’s trust is to throw the shit vaccines and their manufacturers under the bus. Hold the manufacturers of shit tier vaccines accountable. Next fire the CDC workers who push shit tier vaccines. Take their pensions away.

But above all else, stop calling them vaccines.

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Media Contagion Theory

Media contagion theory, briefly summarized, shows through statistical modeling, mathematical modeling, and by analysis of individual incidents, that the “spree shooter” problem in the United States is a direct result of the media’s behavior whenever a spree shooting happens. There is a wealth of information supporting this theory, which would include but is not limited to the following:

• Adam Lankford in 2018 was able to back-calculate that media coverage of spree shooters gets them approximately 75 million dollars in free press coverage.

• Jillian Peterson and James Densley studied every spree shooter from 1966 to 2019 and found that almost all of them studied and idolized prior shooters, and they propagate by media driven social contagion.

• Copycat suicides are well studied, and coverage of celebrity suicides increases other suicides by 13% to 26%.

• Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy modeled media contagion theory and determined that these shootings would go down by at least one third without the media contagion. Johnston published more about it here.

• Towers et al. published extremely similar results in PLoS ONE in 2015, in a study later covered by The Trace.

• Schweikert, Huth, and Gius used spatio-temporaly panel count models in 2020 to analyze the effect.

• Liu, Dong, and Qiu used machine learning to build predictable models of this effect in 2022.

But why would the media knowingly and purposefully increase spree shootings given the broad consensus that they are at least partially responsible for these things? HWFO explained that in 2021 by looking under the hood of our own publication’s traffic numbers.

The media has to do it because it makes money. If one outlet chose not to do it they’d lose market share to the outlets that did, therefore they must do it as well. It’s the Tragedy of the Commons phenomenon except with dead kids instead of hungry sheep. It is a classic game theory coordination problem with Moloch in the cable news editorial seat.

And because of that lack of coordination, no solution exists within government to prevent the contagion effect without complete suspension of freedom of the press. The one solution is extragovernmental. If more of these shooters get embarrassed and shamed by getting plugged by mall cops or ordinary dudes carrying concealed weapons, and that was what the media used for their clickbait, then the contagion effect would turn into a dampening effect instead. HWFO covered that concept here:

It’s nice to sit on a conceptual analysis and tell other people you’re right without any concrete examples of it. It’s nicer when a mass shooter gift wraps you evidence that your analysis is correct. That just happened in Minnesota. Let’s look at this guy’s manifesto.

Manifesto

First we must move through a series of caveats. First, the shooter was a male-to-female trans so calling him “him” may be considered misgendering “her.” But central figures in the neo-woke ecosystem such as Stephen King seem to be floating the idea that misgendering shooters is okay, and there’s some indication the shooter was tired of trans and was considering detransition anyway. Suffice to be said, I don’t misgender out of malice, and I’ve been using preferred pronouns since getting dragged on stage at Backstreet Atlanta with Charlie Brown in the 90s, and this one is confusing anyway, so I’m going with “he” and “him” and “this dude” henceforth. Cope.

Second, the manifesto was written in some version of online-ified Duolingo English/Russian hybrid, as translated by a Twitter/X anon, so I cannot guarantee any of the accuracy of the translation. I will say I have seen no media outlet challenging this translation’s accuracy. With those two caveats, let’s look at important excerpts from this dork’s manifesto.

Lately I have been entranced into the world of mass shooters. I have known about these events for (years?), even at the time being morbidly obsessed. As of late, I have really let myself go. {Presumably something akin to "Putting research"} into every single mass shooting video I can find. My interest in specifically school shootings started, I think, in seventh grade. [...]

He goes on at length about getting into repeat trouble in school and work and how the school resolved the trouble. He also highlights one of the interesting reasons why Red Flag laws don’t work - because they disincentivize treatment:

I can't talk to a therapist or family cause I will immediately be reported and put on a watchlist! (withanoose?)! I feel like I {unintelligible} a pretty be on some kinda of list (owing to?) my constant consumption of mass murder and violent content. I recently watched the films: elephant, (class?), (my heart of america?) I basically skipped trhe whole movies and just watched the massacre scenes. I don't try to hide my internet activity from Higher powers, yaknow? Like it would probably be unsettling and suspicious if {unintelligible} or someone saw my youtube history but I don't think it is weird enough for law enofrcement to step in.

He talks about being depressed and sick and not having a lot of control, as one might generally expect. Then he focuses here, as he does elsewhere, on how he idolizes shooters.

Today I assembled a school shooter cosplay. I have a ton of airsoft guns and gear and I put together a wicked loadout including an AK, a pump shotgun, and two pistols as well as many mags and gear. I had been really wanting to put that together, yearning for the moment {unintelligible} left to don the gear. It honestly felt amazing. I could feel the gravity of my outfit and I (played?) out a shooting in my apartment, including a police shootout and subsequent suicide. It was really fun and I loved how I looked and didn't want to take it off. I had never really done that before, creating a loadout specifically for shooting on a school.

[...]

I put on a baseball cap in a direct {something akin to homage} to Nicholas Cruz. I just found it weird I hated seeing my face. I have lately been creating shooting scenarios in {unintelligible} scenes including: schools, universities, malls, and stores. I have tons of (realism?) modes and started to enact these events. Mainly for fun, but also to see if I could maybe (kill?) these impulses. Nope! I love it, I crave more!. I get bored of the NPC behavior and crave more fear and devastation, which scares me. I don't want to do this, but I feel a deep calling to create devastation and death.

At this point in the manifesto, we have established that he obsesses over shooters. The next passage is incredibly important to the overall HWFO thesis that not only are (A) these are a social contagion, but that (B) if more of them ended embarrassingly by guards or armed bystanders for the shooter the total number would go down.

There are definitely shooting that take up more space in my head than others. Some stand out more than others due to the kill count. Devastation, and good or bad performance of the shooting. I wanted to see if any events had happened on my birthday, June 17th, and was so disappointed at what went down. This loser Brian Clyde tried to shoot up a courthouse. Idiot! Bro was talking mad shit. And dressed tactically, and got absolutely roasted by a security guard with a pistol. Bro killed no one, barely grazed a guard's vest. Didn't make it in the building, he ran away and bled out in a parking lot while pissing himself. How pitiful, what a disgrace, I am embarrassed to have that be the shooting that happened on my birthday!

He then points out the exact reason spree shooters choose soft targets and gun free zones.

I think his biggest mistake was attacking a courthouse. He also advertised his attack for {unintelligible} starting across the street. It's all about surprise! Bro wasn't locked in. Bro wasn't after what I want to do.

Media contagion effect is all but confirmed here:

I have a deep fascination with one man in particular: Adam Lanza. What a fucking freak haha. Sandy Hook was my first, I think, exposure to school shootings. I can remember vividly when I heard about it. I remember sitting in the computer lounge in, I think, 4th grade. We were just silently doing work on our computers, when a little notification popped on screen saying "20 children and 6 adults shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary in Newton Connecticut". I remember not really knowing what that meant. I don't remember my classmates or teachers' reactions but I know that image of that little notification popping up {unintelligible} stuck with me. For some reason, I can't get it out of my head. It's such a... perfect.. event. I love thinking about what it was like to be in there on that day. What it's like to be {unintelligible}, the kids in rooms (ate eaten? no idea what he wrote there), the staff and teachers, and anyone else there that day. One event from the shooting which had stuck with me is where a survivor recalls hearing a little boy scream "Help me! I don't wan't want to be here" and Adam replied with "well, you're here." and multiple shots were heard.

[...]

I like the shooters that know what they're doing. Shooters that plan for mass violence and death. Adam Lanza, Nicholas Cruz, Eric and Dylan, Vladislav Roslakov, Anders Breivik, etc. I revere their status, I feel obligated to follow in their footsteps. Maybe to outdo them.

He connects his first thoughts of spree shooting at a school to the first time he heard about spree shooting at a school through a media popup alert, and admits earlier in the document that he’s been obsessed ever since.

Here he confirms again that he is incentivized by successful attacks but is severely disincentivized by the idea that his attack might fail:

Given my luck, he would be the motherfucker to rush me and save the day. That's one of my biggest fears is getting tackled and arrested. Especially before I am able to inflict a lot of damage and death.

The next bits are less important to explaining what his motivations are, as they are explaining what his motivations aren’t. He has a loving family, so that’s not it. He’s racist against Mexicans, Arabs, and Indians, and is okay with black folks but has his qualms with them as well. There’s no indication of a motivation there, though. He spells out that he dislikes the motivations of notable racist spree shooters.

I truly admire killers like Dylan Roof, Brenton Tarrant, and Patrick Kurstadt. I feel disappointed and pity towards killers like Ethan Miller, who planned for committing my bigger, but couldn't want to die, and gave it a half-ass attempt. All these events and stories have only falled a file in me to do it right. To take my time and plan for every outcome. I often don't find myself agreeing with these killers specific (ideologies). I think Nicholas Cruz and Patrick Kurstadt are MAGA idiots who thought "wait, people would pull the world and minorities shouldn't exist". I don't know... I think they should have rights and opportunities, I don't hate them: don't get me started on somalis.

[...]

Also I do love James Holmes, his theatre attack is the stuff of legend. I always wished he kept going and didn't give up. I am glad he lived to get inside into his mind. I am so sad his apartment bomb didn't blow up. Same with erik and Dylan's bomb. Imagine how amazing the {unintelligible} of destruction would be! I don't think I have ever heard of an attacker's bomb or some kind of second attack working. They either don't properly set them up, or cops {unintelligible} to disarm the threat before it works. So sad! Why?! Or mofo's who wanted more but had to die like Renee Steir.

In this passage he draws a point to say that the government interventions we do have are absurd and ineffective (firearm feature bans) while mentioning earlier that he wants to seek out soft targets that result from other laws, such as gun free zones.

I don't even know if I do this because I am suicidal. I have wanted to kill myself since I found out what I am and what world we live in. I hate this system of corruption that seems to have no other end but they fear and murder as in the case of the united hell(unknown) (egeek?) I think the steps we take in America to prevent these tragedies are a joke. Foregrips and extended mags are illegal? Good thing criminals follow rules haha. It makes me want to use all the things they "outlaw" and show them how easy it is to bypass these stupid, backwards rules that only hurt legal gun owners.

He further spells out his motivations in this passage.

In regards to my motivations behind the attack... I can't really put my finger on a specific purpose. It definitely wouldn't be for racism or white supremacy. Those fools seem to always get clowned and while I don't really like being around people of colour, I don't give enough of a shit about them to take my life over them. If I did carry out some racially motivated attack, it would most likely against filthy, Zionist Jews. I hate those entitled penny-sniffing (k-word). FREE PALESTINE! I think my dream would be to shoot on a middle or grade school like Adam, but that is probably unrealistic due to security awareness in 2025. I don't want to do it to spread a message. I do it to please myself. I do it because I sick. I am twisted.

In that segment he highlights that security works, and gun free zones don’t, and that spree shooters select their targets based on where they can do the most damage, and that spree shooters aren’t going to follow gun feature-ban laws. He further drills those same sentiments here:

I said I would maybe use illegal or tax-stamped gear or weaponry to make a point that criminals with intentions are NOT going to follow rules! I recently heard a rumor that James Holmes, the aurora theatre shooter, may have (reserved?) venues that were "gun-free zones". I would probably do the same, to shit on the rule and maybe change some minds. I get it for places like prisons and airports, I guess. But for most places, it only unarms the good guy (lmao) with a gun. Holmes wanted to make sure his victims would be unarmed. That's why I and many others like schools so much. At least for me, I am fucked up, {unintelligible} like Lanza I presume. I like the idea of slaughtering defenceless kids.

HWFO in 2014 did an entire section of our piece (also linked above) about this sentence:

Steven Paddock had it right and got the highest score in the US.

This is a direct result of Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory which we covered here. This shooter was directly inspired by the Gun Violence Archive. This is the exact source.

Conclusions

I have stripped a lot of the material out, some because it lacks relevance, and some because it’s truly very sick and even more unpleasant to read than the excerpts I’ve included here. But he presented a very clear window into his psyche and reasoning, which is worth analyzing.

He was mentally sick. He became addicted to the media’s obsession with spree shooters. He wanted to target defenseless people, particularly children. He was scared he would get shot before doing a lot of damage, by a guard or an armed citizen. He liked the idea of targeting gun free zones for this reason.

Red flag laws would not have prevented this. Feature bans would not have prevented this. Gun free zones did not prevent this. He spells out specifically within the manifesto that none of the interventions the gun control community wants would have worked. He admits that he was influenced into this obsession by the media. He also spells out his one fear in his own words, getting punked out by “a good guy (lmao) with a gun.”

The problem is thus named, as is the solution.

The solution lies in leveraging the media clickbait engine in our favor, with more concealed carry, more citizens punking these shooters, and more media shaming instead of praising them. Then the disturbed kids who do this stuff will go back to sticking firecrackers in frog butts or whatever they were doing before.

The barriers to the solution are the gun control tribe in all their forms, because they oppose concealed carry, oppose school hardening, and are addicted to spreading tragedy articles on social media instead of ridicule articles.

As many times as it’s been said here, you no longer have to take it from HWFO. Take it from the mouth of the shooter.

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We had nationwide riots and protests against the police in the wake of the George Floyd killing, with 5000+ demonstrations, 20 million protesters, 20 deaths, 14,000 arrested, $2 billion in insured damages, an average of $100 of insured damage per protester, at least one burned police station, the founding of an anarchist autonomous zone, and a several month long siege at a court building. This included a number of protesters larger than the entire population of New York State chanting “All Cops Are Bastards” and “Defund The Police.” This in turn caused the total number of people willing to be police officers to shrink for two straight years, only stabilizing in 2022.

So that could have been it.

There is a known scientific correlation between increased police presence and decreased crime. It is impossible to prove causation for a murder spike like this because murder is a multivariate problem, but there are no other reasonable causes I can identify, and if you can find a cause that’s more compelling than unwashed hordes of angry protesters burning police stations down domestically while the rest of planet Earth didn’t, please post it in the comments.

I have recently been made aware of another theory by the Brookings Institute, and I think it’s well supported enough that it has forced me to challenge my priors. The lockdowns themselves were to blame, not the ACABs and BLMs. We will cover that study in a moment, but first let’s recap how to calculate 8,682 dead black people.

8,682 Black Lives Ended

First, we calculate the baseline murder rate in the United States across a long span of fairly regular fairly low (for us) murder rate. This is the expected murder rate for the country.

Then we figure out how many people died in excess of that murder rate, by analyzing the four year spike.

Then we take a look at the fact that black folks disproportionately bore the brunt of the spike, at victimization rates that varied by year but were always exceeding “normal,” and we multiply that ratio times the excess deaths to determine the excess number of dead black people within the spike itself.

8,682 is not the number of black people that died in homicide across that time frame. It is the extra dead black people exceeding what normally would have died without a spike. This is a pretty inarguable way to calculate excess dead black people. In fact, the number might be higher if the excess murders were concentrated in black areas.

The only question, really, is who is to blame for the excess dead black people. Is it BLM, as my prior article speculated? The Brookings Institute thinks not. They think it was the lockdowns.

The Lockdowns Killed Them

A month after the HWFO article was published, the Brookings Institute did a very interesting and very robust job of presenting an alternative analysis, in rebuttal to articles like mine, and I think they did a good job. Here’s the article.

Their opener specifically calls out other publications which were saying the same thing I was.

Some commentators have suggested the increase in homicides during 2020 was a response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May of that year. Others hypothesized that it was caused by a police “pull back,” in which officers chose to do less work in reaction to the protests that followed Floyd’s death.

I made the second case prior. It made sense to me. But Brookings identified something very curious when they looked at the data with a finer grain.

As more information has become available, these theories appear to be less supported by evidence than some initially thought.1 The evidence indicates that the national homicide rate was already on track to reach a peak far above the previous year even before Floyd was killed. (See Figure 1.)

Let’s look carefully at that graph. It shows 2019 murder and 2020 murder trends by day and month. The lines were very closely overlapped until the lockdowns began. Thereafter, the gap between the two lines grows, both before Floyd and after Floyd, until it establishes a new flat trend at a higher daily murder rate. The area between these two lines represents “excess murders,” which we know from the table above are 46% to 59% dead black people.

The Brookings article goes on to establish that (1) the excess deaths were concentrated in areas with higher poverty, and (2) teen boys and young men not in school or work were much more likely to engage in violence. They show some example maps of their finer grained geographical analysis:

And from these maps we can easily see why black people bore the brunt of the murder spike, by simply cross referencing them with demographic maps, like this:

Brookings goes on to compare Baton Rouge murder trends to other historical events such as floods or Hurricane Katrina that caused school and work closings, and shows how those also tie to murder spikes. It’s a robust analysis, and one that has me reconsidering elements of my prior position.

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Could Be Both? Who to Blame?

One argument against the Brookings case is that murder went down sharply in places like Rio de Janeiro and Cali Colombia as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns, so it’s possible that our lockdown was unique or different in some way, perhaps owing to all the national police hate. But Brookings analysis defenders might point to how murder rates here were rising before Floyd as a solid counter argument.

The blame for the 8,682 dead black people then is either the people screaming on Facebook to burn police stations and All Cops are Bastards and frantically sharing any instance of police misdeed to feed their clickbait engine, or it was the people screaming on Facebook about how “leaving the house is murder” and “reopening the economy is murder” and “opening the schools is murder” and so forth and so on, leading to a protracted economic and educational lockdown of the country which profoundly and directly damaged black communities.

Funny thing, that. I don’t know what your feed was like in 2020, but in my feed these two groups of people were the same people.

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The Wisdom of Mrs. Sadler

Pronounced “Satler,” no “D,” Mrs. Sadler was my seventh grade science teacher at Marietta Junior High, an urban profile public school on the outskirts of Atlanta Georgia walking distance from the Baptisttown Housing Projects.

She was the roundest, loudest, blackest, most matronly teacher I have ever had. Imagine Aunt Jemima teaching chemistry, before the wokes destroyed the longest running logo and trademark in the history of US advertising under protest from the Aunt Jemima models actual descendants. Mrs. Sadler was the oldest, most respected, and most beloved teacher at Marietta Junior High, the PTA liaison, and a character beyond reproach.

I had a friend named Geoff Clark. The first day Mrs. Sadler called roll, she called “Gee Off Clark.” We laughed. “That’s Jeff,” he phonetically corrected her. She got it wrong the second day, and he phonetically corrected her again. She made a note in the roll, got his name right the third and fourth days, and on Friday when she passed out our first quiz she called “Gee Off Clark.” When he attempted to correct her again she quipped, “If you named Jeff, why you keep puttin Gee Off on your paper?” This may have been the funniest thing a room full of seventh grade boys had ever heard. We had no idea if our leg was being pulled. That was the nature of the dialogue in this class.

On a later day, I cannot recall the exact context, the class discussion revolved around the fundamental nature and mission of public schooling. Someone mentioned learning. The base wisdom that flowed from Mrs. Sadler burned into my brain so deeply I can directly quote it to this day with no error.

Sadler: “Why you think you here?”

Students: “To Learn?”

Sadler: “Learn! You ain't here to learn. You here to exercise your brain.”

Students: …

Sadler: “You know they teach a monkey sign language right?”

Students: …

Sadler: “A monkey! They teach that monkey sign language. What you gonna do for a job when you grow up? Front line at Mack Donalds? A monkey could do that. What’s the difference between you and a monkey?”

I feel the need to pause this story to mention that Marietta City Schools, sporting a healthy and diverse blend of racial and ethnic backgrounds while enjoying deep and robust funding from the elite gentry of “Ole Mayretta,” was well ahead of the curve on things like racial consciousness, and the blend of seventh graders in Merit Science were not about to say a single thing about monkeys in this context. This moment may have been the most silent moment this rowdy bunch of early adolescent miscreants experienced all year.

Sadler: “Difference between you and a monkey is you exercise your brain. That monkey’s just up in a tree eating bananas and you’re in school, exercising your brain. That’s why you’re here. You ain’t here to learn.”

I cannot in this moment tell you a single thing I learned in seventh grade science class. I don’t recall the curricula, the tests, the homework, or any single fact. I recall the above two instances, and I recall exercising my brain. And this bit of base wisdom is of more import to the current state of societal adoption of generative AI tools than anything you will see on a Ted Talk.

Beyond Seventh Grade Science

Budzyn et al on August 12th published a multicenter observational study in The Lancet of the ACCEPT trial, which stands for Artificial Intelligence in Colonoscopy for Cancer Prevention. Nineteen doctors participated in the study, which used AI tools to evaluate colonoscopies. They found that the AI tools did a good job of identifying cancer, but the doctors who used them got measurably worse at it after the trial concluded. These were not green recruits, each doctor in the study had several thousand colonoscopies under their belt.

Kosmyna et al at MIT found a similar effect this year when evaluating essay writing skill. Using the AI led to a progressive decline in critical thinking and memory.

Rinta-Kahila et al identified a similar pattern in 2023 in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, when they studied an accounting firm which pivoted over to AI based workflow automation.

Boston Consulting Group identified gains in business consulting output from less skilled workers but indicated the experts using the tools “deskilled.”

Handwaving Freakoutery used Perplexity.ai to do all the research for this piece without once digging through library microfiche.

And so forth.

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Witty Third Section Title Generated By AI

The emerging science of AI driven “deskilling” is not very likely to catch up to mankind’s adoption of these tools, and the results are easily predictable. More technical jobs will be doable by less technical people and this will impact the overall technology sector and the people who live and work in it. The net effect on the species will be that we get dumber on-net, lacking professional brain exercise.

At the risk of assigning prophet status to Mrs. Sadler, it seems likely to me that the 22nd century will have a few more monkeys eating bananas and a lot fewer folks who know how to grow them. I’ve seen a quote circulating recently that “AI is the modern day equivalent of asbestos - we’re putting it in everything, and in twenty years it’ll cost a fortune to take it out again.” My fear, unfortunately, is that in twenty years we’ll have lost the skill to remove it.

I think we’ll probably still keep a strong meme game though.

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Bullshit aside, I recently became aware that at least one HWFO article was being specifically blacklisted, or “delisted,” by Google. It got delisted because a culture warrior flagged it, and a Google employee reviewed it and decided it disagreed with a “medical consensus” that never existed. And in so doing, these two actors leveraged the monopoly power of Google in the global transgender culture war. This is a single anecdote, only one webpage, but the anecdote scales and is important to understand in the 21st century culture war virtual battleground.

Let’s start today’s effort by providing background on the article in question, providing a brief summary of the “U.S. vs Skrmetti” Supreme Court case last week, highlighting some of the media discussions about it, and then drilling specifically into how Google corporate safety policy is being leveraged by culture warriors within the transgender culture war.

Trans Kids TERF War Background

There have always been transgender folks in the United States, and some of the ones who undergo hormone treatment and surgery wish they’d undergone it sooner so the gender expression changes would work better. From their point of view, not being able to transition early is a harm. But the fundamental discussion regarding youth transgender medical interventions is about weighing harms against other harms.

Sometimes when kids undergo transgender hormone replacement and teen or preteen gender surgeries, they regret it because they were making the sort of hasty decision a kid can’t really be expected to make, and in those cases the medical intervention itself is a harm. And inside a “woke” moral framework where more virtue is granted to the more marginalized, some number of imprudent kids choose transgender due to either peer pressure, or virtue climbing, or social contagion, leading them to harmful life decisions they may not have otherwise made. Sometimes these decisions have additional parental support because the parents also accrue woke virtue from their peer group for having a trans kid.

The fundamental argument is about how to weigh those harms. And to my knowledge, only one person has ever attempted to quantify those harms numerically and weigh them against each other in an apolitical way that’s sensitive to all points of view in an article vetted by several transgender people before publication.

Me.

Here, in 2022:

Are there others attempting to do the same thing? If so, I certainly won’t find out about them via Google. And I don’t know if my blacklisting was in response to U.S. vs Skrmetti or it happened before.

U.S. vs Skrmetti

On June 18, 2025, the United States Supreme Court decided that Tennessee’s “SB1” bill, which prohibited healthcare providers from giving puberty blockers or hormones to minors for the purpose of enabling them to identify as the opposite gender to their birth sex, didn’t violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States.

The plaintiffs argued that allowing these treatments for other medical reasons such as precocious puberty or disease, but prohibiting them from being used for gender dysphoria, was sex based discrimination. The Supreme Court ruled “no it’s not,” and a good summary of the argument on both sides can be found in a dialogue between Jesse Singal and Slate’s Mark Joseph here:

Singal-Minded

Here’s My Exchange With Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern About ‘United States v. Skrmetti’

Last week I expressed some frustration with the response, from liberal legal types, to the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee’s SB1, a ban on puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery as treatments for minors with gender dysphoria in that state…

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a year ago · 122 likes · 83 comments · Jesse Singal

For the record, this discussion is easily discoverable on Google with very simple search terms that can be found in the article title:

One interesting thing to shake out of the court proceedings, is the left slowly admitting that much of the argument for youth transgender medicine was founded on a universally accepted falsehood that went viral in their social media echo chamber. HWFO talks about social media echo chambers quite a bit, so it was surprising to see Helen Lewis point this one out in The Atlantic of all places.

Allow children to transition, or they will kill themselves. For more than a decade, this has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine—a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

[…]

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

[…]

Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.

Every progressive liberal I know firmly believes that medical gender transitions are a life saving procedure that reduce or eliminate future suicides. This universally held belief is entirely foundationless, concocted from thin air. But it spread because of how useful it is to shut down discussion on social media. The Atlantic article goes into more details, but if you’re a long-time HWFO reader you’ve been able to identify this sort of media behavior since at least 2018. Bad outcomes from media echo chamber behavior is mostly what HWFO is about.

buy the author a boob job

What’s interesting about the admission above is not the admission itself, because people outside the progressive bubble have been screaming it for decades. What’s interesting is it’s in The Atlantic, a very liberal rag which makes its money playing to the progressive echo chamber. This means the misinformation wall around the progressive transgender social club has finally started to crack.

For the record, The Atlantic’s article is also easily searchable on Google:

Google’s Thumb

Usually when I write articles, the good ones anyway, I’m trying to get a fully formed idea inked and archived so I can pull it up later in discussion. It’s my entire raison d’etre as a writer. When my “Unnecessary Mastectomy Math” article referenced above came up in Skrmetti conversation this week I hopped over to Google to find a link to it, and discovered to my surprise that doing so was impossible. Google pretended they'd never heard of it.

I have searched this article before on Google and it has appeared. It was written in 2022 well after the Cancel Culture wokeness peak, and not too far before Elon bought Twitter and cracked their censorship engine. And yet, it’s not searchable. Try it yourself.

Maybe Google can be forgiven so far because it’s confused HWFO for some medical search term and the AI is getting in the way.

Here the search finds four articles on the Substack you’re reading now, so it’s not like it’s never heard of HWFO. Those four articles link the article we’re looking for, and the AI even tries to speculate what’s in the article based on the context around the links, but the article itself doesn’t appear in the search.

If I search for a specific text string in other HWFO articles Google works fine:

But if I do the same thing with a text string from the target article, Google is completely blank:

The simplest Bing search returns it as the top hit:

As does DuckDuckGo:

We know the entire HWFO publication is not banned from Google. We know that the text strings related to trans medicine aren’t banned from Google. We know that the article is not banned from any other search engine. And we know that the article does not, in any way whatsoever, appear in Google searches, which must mean Google specifically targeted that article to be “forbidden knowledge” and therefore delisted.

How does that work?

Google doesn’t delist articles lightly. It usually happens because someone is sharing plans to make terrorist bombs or doxxing politicians or peddling child porn or, the worst offense of all, doing SEO the wrong way.

But it turns out anyone can flag a webpage as being abusive, and make a claim, and after a human review they might delist it. Here’s the button:

And then this:

And then this:

Somewhere buried deep in a dusty three ring binder of policy decisions, Google has made the corporate decision to delist anything that “contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence-based best practices in medical topics.”

So when an angry neo-progressive Tumblr queen read my article, and clicked “feedback,” the article fell onto the desk of an angry neo-progressive furry at Google. They in turn decided the article ran contrary to the false medical consensus discussed above, and then Google delisted HWFO’s article on the topic.

That’s the mechanic.

Is the Google organization some towering avatar of wokeness hell bent on scrubbing the internet of wrongthink? I suppose that’s possible, but the case of my censorship doesn’t confirm it. My censorship does confirm, however, that the tools Google uses to “make people safe” are used by culture warriors to war, because to a culture warrior, no culture except their own is safe.

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1. “Direct Action” by experienced and funded progressive (formerly BLM) agitators to create “Decision Dilemmas" for cops which turn into great media fodder,

2. Empowered TRT juicing cops without the overall cloud of 2020 media fear completely falling for the dupe and behaving poorly on camera with rubber bullets, tear gas, or whatever other new toy they’ve been shining up the past two years,

3. Blue media using the Decision Dilemma camera fodder to farm for sympathy/outrage clicks and Red Media farming clicks by bitching about the Blue Media doing it,

4. Trump grandstanding and trying to feed his own desperate need for attention,

5. Someone looting an Apple store under the cover of anarchy,

6. Nobody anywhere trying to frame the riot from a mathematical perspective.

When I do the last thing that nobody else does, it leads me to the conclusion that the whole thing is being faked up as an attention economy play, and if you’re not a subscriber there’s a good chance you’re reading this article because you too fell for it. Let’s begin.

Riot Quantification

After the dust settled on the Mostly Peaceful 2020 Summer of Love, HWFO proposed a quantification system to truly establish how horribly bad or relatively inconsequential a given protest, riot, or civil insurrection actually was, and developed a mathematical scale for them. We call this the “MPS20.”

You can follow the link to the methodology if you like, which is of course arbitrary like all indexes are, but I’ll summarize briefly. Using 2020 behavior as our benchmark index of relatively bad things we state that a protest with 5000 demonstrations, 20 million protesters, 20 deaths, 14,000 arrests, two billion dollars in insured damages, and an average of $100 worth of insured damages per protest participant, scores a “100” on the MPS20 scale. From this we can say the 2020 BLM protests scored “100,” the Rodney King riots scored a “91,” the January 6th “insurrection”(?) scored a “3,” the Troubles in Ireland scored a “3673,” and Hurricane Sally scored an “89.” We even developed an online calculator, which you can find here:

Google sheet, don't break it please

If I run last weekend’s LA thing into the calculator, based on the best estimates I can make from multiple media sources, these are the results:

Damages per protester are pretty high, owing to the new creatively lazy tactic of summoning an automated vehicle to your location and burning it instead of spending the effort walking around to find something to burn, but nothing else on the list remotely approaches 2020. The net score of 0.2 on the MPS20 scale is so low you’d need five hundred of these in a row to match 2020, and Trump was President then. Which brings up an interesting point.

National Guard Mexican Futbol

The political use of the National Guard has been all over the place the last half decade, so it’s worth going through a review. I detailed how a president or governor could use the National Guard in an enforcement action for Open Source Defense in early 2020 here, in an article about Virginia’s failed threats to seize guns in their state:

https://opensourcedefense.com/blog/collateral-damage-race-and-the-virginia-gun-control-bill

Let's be clear, this is not going to happen for several reasons. But first let’s look at the case that it could. This is the case as I understand it:

If a soldier in the Guard refused to follow orders, they’d be likely subject to Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) action and would face court-martial, dishonorable discharge, and suspension of benefits. Everyone in the National Guard leadership up to and including the state Adjutant General is a commissioned officer and subject to similar UCMJ action. The Adjutant General reports to both the Governor and the Secretary of Defense. I am very unclear on what he’s supposed to do if he gets conflicting orders.

As I understand it, the Adjutant General of the California National Guard doesn’t just report to Hegseth, he reports in equal measure to Hegseth and Newsom. So how does that work exactly?

Under Title 32 control, which is how the National Guard normally works, governors issue orders to the Guard that get rubber stamped by the Secretary of Defense. In a difference of opinion, the Secretary of Defense can assert Title 10 control and override the governor, which people like to call “federalizing the Guard.” The National Guard has been variously used, threatened, misused, or intentionally not used when they arguably should have been used, quite a lot in the past half decade. Here’s a timeline.

• January 2020 - Virginia state representatives threaten to use Title 32 to seize guns from around 100,000 Virginia citizens, but the ban law tanks after a peaceful and clean 50,000 person protest which the anti-gun media calls “terrorism.”

• May 2020 - Tim Walz waits three days and eventually uses Title 32 to stop the Minneapolis Floyd riots after half a billion dollars of “mostly peaceful” riot damage.

• 2020 Summer of Love - Other states activate it variously using Title 32 but in mostly a symbolic role, and never for riot control. Cuomo in New York opted not to use Title 32 despite $115 million worth of damage, which makes some sense because NYPD actually outnumbers the entire New York National Guard by about 2:1. Other states used it for the security equivalent of distributing sugar free juice boxes to the cops.

• 2020 Summer of Love - Trump chooses not to use Title 10 for any of it.

• January 2024 - Governor Abbot of Texas uses Title 34 to close the border to illegal immigrants with Operation Lone Star.

• January 2024 - The Biden Intern Brigade with support from various Democrat leaders threatens to use Title 10 to open the Texas border to more illegal immigrants by seizing control from Abbot and opening the border back up.

• January 2024 - Twenty five other states use and/or threaten to use Title 34 to send their own National Guard to the Texas border to help keep the border closed.

• January 2024 - The Biden Intern Brigade backs off.

• June 2025 - Trump jumps straight to Title 10 during the LA anti-immigration riots after Newsom opts not to use them.

Using Title 10 is very unusual. Threatening to use Title 10 it is not. Using Title 34 is not. Threatening to use Title 34 is not. We’ve even seen groups of states use Title 34 to scare the Feds away from using Title 10 to override another state using Title 34. And notably, we’ve seen several states choose not to use Title 34 for riot control even when portions of their cities laid siege to federal buildings for months on end or declared independence from the United States.

buy the author an "autonomous zone"

There’s no objective rhyme or reason for it, as near as any third party could surmise, other than simply going for whatever the echo chamber might cheer at the moment. It does seem, however, that the National Guard will probably be used repeatedly in the future by politicians of various stripes to enforce their various thing they want to variously do.

Kayfabe

Kayfabe is the practice in scripted “sports” such as Professional Wrestling of building a narrative of conflict for entertainment purposes that isn’t actually true. Growing up in the 1980s in rural North Carolina, I can assure you that the modern understanding that the WWE (then WWF) is all scripted was not dominant then. We believed it, or at least some of us did, while swapping WWF trading cards in the baseball dugout. The public slowly became aware it was all made up the more absurd things got.

I believe the US is in that 1980s phase now with our politics, where we’re wondering if it’s real or not, and the details of this weekend riot provide good evidence of the latter.

It’s clear in the mathematics that the relative size of a protest has no bearing on whether the National Guard gets activated. Oregon and Washington State in 2020 gained share in the attention economy by not using them. Walz in Minnesota would have caught local hell at the time for using it when it mattered, but caught hell later in the national election for not using it until too late. Trump didn’t use Title 10 in Portland or Seattle in 2020 for the same reason he is using Title 10 now. Not using it then gave him ways to gain share of the attention economy, but using Title 10 now gains him share. And so forth.

They’re all just using the Applause Meter, without any objective threshold for how and when to use or not use military riot control. And when you’re a master of manipulating the attention economy by being a paid actor in a conflict, the applause meter is all that matters. Just listen to the crowd.

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Listen to the first podcast here:

From the Lotus World

#17 - BJ Campbell: media narratives, societal beliefs and depopulation

We dived deep into how media narratives can distort public perception, civilizational identity crisis, the balance between maintaining societal order and preserving individual freedoms, how religion affects people lives, what would happen in a world with fewer people and much more…

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a year ago · 2 likes · salvador and BJ Campbell

Or here:

ChatGPT had this to say:

Key Themes Discussed:

1. Media Narratives and Tribalism: Campbell explores how media outlets often craft narratives that align with the biases of their social groups. This tendency reinforces tribal divisions and can lead to the suppression of dissenting viewpoints, even within scientific communities.​

2. Civilizational Identity Crisis: The conversation delves into the idea that society is experiencing an identity crisis, where traditional values and beliefs are being challenged, leading to uncertainty and fragmentation.​

3. Balance Between Order and Freedom: The podcast examines the tension between maintaining societal order and preserving individual freedoms, discussing how policies and governance can impact this balance.​

4. Role of Religion: Campbell and Salvador discuss how religious beliefs influence individuals' lives and societal structures, considering both positive and negative aspects.​

5. Implications of Depopulation: The episode also touches on the potential consequences of a declining population, including economic and social impacts.​

Throughout the episode, Campbell emphasizes the importance of recognizing and critically evaluating the narratives presented by media and other institutions, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of complex societal issues.

In this episode, BJ Campbell discusses how media constructs narratives that reflect and reinforce tribal identities, often sidelining objectivity. He addresses the "civilizational identity crisis," where conflicting values erode collective cohesion. The conversation explores the delicate tradeoff between societal order and individual liberty, the shifting role of religion as both stabilizer and divider, and the socio-political implications of global depopulation trends. The episode also touches on institutional decay, scientific dogma, and emergent belief systems.

And listen to the second podcast here:

The Rutt conversation was also around an hour and centered around the core argument from this article from a year ago:

ChatGPT had this to say about it:

The podcast episode from The Jim Rutt Show featuring BJ Campbell centers on the themes of social control, belief systems, and societal organization, inspired by Campbell's Substack essay, "On Cops, Belief, and Chainsaw Faced Robot Dogs." Key topics discussed include:

• Social Control and Belief Systems: Campbell proposes a thought experiment contrasting an absolute police state (with extreme enforcement mechanisms like "chainsaw-faced robot dogs") and a belief-driven state where order is maintained through fear or faith in enforcement rather than actual enforcement. This highlights the role of belief in maintaining societal order.

• The Concept of the Noble Lie: Drawing from Plato's Republic, the discussion explores the idea that certain falsehoods can be justified if they promote social stability. Examples include religion, nationalism, and even money as socially constructed "noble lies."

• 2020 Crime Spike and Policing: The hosts examine the relationship between the "defund the police" movement, reduced police morale, and increased crime rates. They argue that both belief in law enforcement and effective policing are necessary to maintain order.

• Religion and Social Cohesion: The conversation delves into how religious belief systems historically provided societal coherence. They discuss whether secular societies can achieve similar cohesion without relying on supernatural beliefs or noble lies.

• Game B and Future Societal Models: Jim Rutt introduces "Game B," a vision for a new societal framework emphasizing voluntary cooperation, high trust, and decentralized organization. He suggests this model could replace current systems reliant on noble lies.

Overall, the episode blends philosophical inquiry with practical observations about governance, belief, and societal evolution.

The fact that these podcasts bent the same direction over time indicates to me there is a kind of strange attractor going on in the rationalist space towards religion as a solution to societal coordination problems, which has been a basis of HWFO writing for half a decade. It’s possible other people are finally starting to get it, or else whatever qualifies as a Rationalist Egregore is pivoting over towards it.

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Awokening

The Great Awokening of the prior decade was founded in part on the False Cause Fallacy. Our major institutions for the better part of the last ten years were operated by wokerists, who used an Intersectional Matrix of Culturally Encouraged Race and Gender Prejudice to counteract what they viewed as hidden unmeasurable forces such as “systemic racism.” They couldn’t point to the systemic racism, but they knew it must be there because of the imbalance in socioeconomic metrics, and they denied any other possible explanation for the imbalance. Once the False Cause was in place, the devout wokerist was forced to fight the hidden prejudice with overt reverse prejudice, because they couldn’t conceive any other cause.

For example, if black folks have a hard time getting into Harvard or UNC, it must be because society is systemically racist against black people, and no other reason, therefore we should redirect admission slots from Asians who earned them to blacks who didn’t, for race balancing.

Harvard did exactly that, for exactly that reason, and admitted it, and it was sent to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court banned it, and then Harvard kept doing it and is still doing it using different words.

Some of our other institutions are still running this wokery program, although the Trump Administration purged much of it from the halls of federal power this year under their DEI ban, and many other institutions used Trump as cover to independently purge it from theirs. But this same smooth-brained thinking wiggled its way right into Trump’s tariff plan last week, through an equation that looks fancy but is something my middle school son could figure out.

Woke Math

The idea of a “reciprocal tariff” sounds tough, and fair, and based, and go-America-punch-flag-eagle, and in concept could be pretty popular if sold in the proper way to the voting base of the United States. It’s certainly “unfair” when some countries tariff our goods to protect their own industries while we don’t tariff their goods to protect our industries. It certainly seems reasonable to treat other countries in the same way they treat us. But are the value of other countries' goods artificially depressed because their businesses don’t have to pay for health insurance for their workers? Or because their workers ride public transportation and don’t need cars? Or their goods are made by child slaves? Or so forth?

What about the stuff the left has been screaming about for decades? The American Left wants workers to be paid not just a minimum wage, but a living wage which is four times higher than the median international worker’s salary. The American Left wants the Water to be Clean, and the Air to be Clean, and burdens American industry with Acts to that effect and Agencies to enforce them. The American Left wants our Occupations to be Safe and Healthy and made an Administration that burdens our factories with rules which get rulier each day. And for many years the American Left enjoyed support of American Unions whose jobs slowly dwindled to nearly nothing when Nike found out they could make Dirty Water Dirty Air Unsafe Unhealthy Nonliving Wage shoes in Vietnam at a cost of $18 per shoe.

Do we just stand by while we punish ourselves with rules that nobody else has to follow? How much should we tariff Vietnam to punish them for being Dirty Unsafe Unhealthy Poor Communists who took our jobs? We could do some sort of broad analysis that determines how much of an advantage it is to be a dirty communist and assess a tariff commensurate with that advantage, but that might take some thought or effort. Instead Trump just decided to tariff Vietnam, and everyone else, this much:

Let’s walk through this. 𝜏 is the tariff. ε is the price elasticity of import demand, ϕ is the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, m is imports, and x is exports. If some smooth-brain were to set ε equal to the inverse of ϕ, say for instance at something like 4 and ¼, then those cancel and the tariff is just [trade deficit] divided by [imports]. It has nothing to do with how much they tariff us, and everything to do with how much stuff they ship us and how little we ship them. And this is exactly what Trump did:

The amount they tariff us doesn’t even show up in the equation. There’s nothing “reciprocal” about it, unless you presume that all trade imbalance between two countries must be de facto evidence of systemic unfair trade practices. Critical Trade Theory. Wokery all over again, applied to international trade. There’s no possible reason that Cuba could grow a better banana than East Atlanta, right?

The texture is intriguing. Internally I’m bleeding.

buy the author an east Atlanta banana

HWFO

The media thinks these woke tariffs are going to bomb the economy back to the stone age, but when I make the abhorrent choice to read the graphs myself it looks more like January 2024. A 20% tariff on Chinese goods is rough. Adding 34% more to it is rougher. But a 54% tariff on Chinese goods is nothing compared to Shenzhen closing its entire manufacturing sector down because they found a germ, and probably not significantly worse than the Fed turning off the free money spigot in 2022.

These tariffs are going to do goofy shit to the economy. I don't like the goofy shit they're likely to do. I think that trade balancing through tariffs is an idea so stupid that only Rust Belt union workers could come up with it, which is why they probably did come up with it, and also probably why Trump won the election by flipping the Rust Belt. (see map below)

Mop Handle Instructions

If you were one of the people who were running around on Facebook in 2020 supporting the Covid lockdowns and Covid bailouts, which precipitated a historically high inflation spike that literally priced an entire generation out of being able to buy a house, and now you're whining about financial instability from tariffs, you can shove an entire mop handle up your rear end until it makes a fluffy tail. And that goes doubly true for any boomers whining about their 401k while they sit on a sub 3% APR 30-year fixed rate loan that is the financial equivalent of a bank paying you to own a house that a millennial will never be able to buy from you. Pull yourself up from your own bootstraps. Get an internship, maybe they’ll pay you after a year. Learn to code.

Woke tariffs are fantastically dumb and nobody should support them, but they’re probably only the second or third dumbest thing we’ve done to our economy this decade so far. And they’re totally intellectually consistent with the pro-labor left, the pro-environment left, the living-wage-left, and the left wing people who screamed for lockdown-test-and-trace during Covid which is not possible without a border wall and an import ban.

The left pundits screaming angrily about tariffs today exemplify their complete shift away from their ideological roots, showing they value their stock portfolios more than their centuries-old domestic labor coalitions. Which in turn shows why they’re very unlikely to get the Rust Belt back any time soon.

Remember this map?

This is the Rust Belt map. These are the people to whom Trump promised 60% tariffs on China. They’re not worried about their stock portfolios because they don’t have any, because they lost their job at the Mop Handle Factory to China, Vietnam, and Canada during the Clinton administration.

Thankfully the mop handle industry never fully dried up here, so all the 3% APR Boomers and Covid Karens who owe me a fluffy tail before they open their mouths again can get their requisite ass penetrating mop handles from Holmes Custom Moulding Ltd. of Ohio USA, available for B2B manufacturing supply of all varieties of custom and specified millwork. Visit their website at https://hcmohio.com/ .

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The current Russo-Ukraine war is not a “fair” one, and Ukraine would have lost long ago if not for direct foreign military aid. Direct military aid to Ukraine flows almost entirely from a small number of European border countries and from the English speaking west, mostly the USA. When Europe says they “stand behind Ukraine,” that is a mathematically testable claim.

It is objectively true that Donald Trump has misrepresented repeatedly the nature of the NATO alliance, when he says that they “don’t pay their bills,” “dues,” “NATO fees,” or that they “owe us a tremendous amount of money.” That’s not how NATO or any other alliance works, and the fact checkers are right on that account. But Trump’s overall point - that NATO is a one-way alliance with the United States pulling all the weight, while the rest of NATO members hide under our security umbrella and ride our coattails - is also a mathematically testable claim.

When these claims are tested, we discover that most of Europe doesn’t give a singular fuck about Ukraine and that non-US NATO members are collectively a trillion dollars in the hole on their NATO spending obligations. Europe is in a predicament of their own making, and is lashing out at the United States like children refusing to eat their vegetables.

Let’s crack our knuckles and visualize some data.

The NATO 2% Shortfall

At the Wales Summit in 2014, every NATO member pledged to spend approximately 2% of their real GDP on military readiness. The guidelines are specific, they define “readiness,” they mandate certain ratios be spent on hardware and other specific elements of readiness, and NATO tracks progress towards these targets on a year by year basis. The 2024 report can be downloaded here. While the NATO website claims that NATO members have been continually increasing their spending to reach the 2% target, that’s not at all what the data looks like when graphed.

In this graph each line is a NATO member state, and the red blob is spending below 2%. With a few exceptions such as Poland, Greece, the US, and the UK, basically every country rode most of the last decade below the line. While there is a trend upward in the spaghetti graph above, the trend only starts in 2023 after the Ukraine invasion. Prior to that the trend was basically flat or irregular for almost every member nation, and most of the countries over the 2% line in 2024 only barely reached it with a brief two year spending spree.

These prolonged stretches of thumbing their noses at the 2% target can be easily seen when you take the decadal average of NATO defense spending as a percentage of GDP.

Only the UK, Poland, Greece, and Estonia are pulling their relative weight. The NATO total is borne almost entirely on the backs of US spending. But Luxembourg being light in the wallet probably doesn’t affect Europe much, so to see the real impact you need to look at real dollars. To find out that number, we would need to take the percentage each country is short of 2% on any given year, multiply that times their GDP for that year, and add all the years up to produce a total representing the entire decade of shortfalls. The data to do so is all within the NATO 2024 report, so I saved you the time.

Adjusted for exchange rates to millions of USD and inflation-normalized to 2015, these are the countries responsible for the real shortfalls:

Over the course of the last decade, NATO members are short 992 billion dollars, which translates to well over a trillion when we tack on nine years of inflation. Germany’s quarter trillion shortfall alone constitutes 23%, with Italy, Spain, and Canada each clocking in around 13% to 14% of the total shortfall. The top four are responsible for two thirds of the shortfall, and the top nine are responsible for 88% of it. Germany is responsible for more shortfall than the twenty four lowest countries combined. The only European NATO country with a trillion plus dollar GDP pulling its own weight is the United Kingdom, and all the other major European NATO powers are completely taking advantage of the US security umbrella.

buy the author a security umbrella

3%

After watching the Trump highlights on Twitter over the weekend, many European leaders got together to figure out what they would do if the US umbrella folded up. French president Emmanuel Macron suggested they bump the 2% spending obligation to 3%, which is a bit funny considering France only managed to make it to 2% last year. If achievable universally and immediately, the excess 1% spending would compensate for the last decade of foot-dragging in around four years. That would be positive for them.

But they only achieved 2% because of fears around the Ukraine war. Absent that war they wouldn’t have hit the 2% target until 2030, and wouldn’t hit Macron’s new 3% target this century. At pre-war spending trends they wouldn’t make up for the historical shortfall until around the year 2050. Trump was probably trying to say that when he made improperly worded claims about NATO not “paying their bills.” Prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO powers were effectively using the United States military as a national security credit card.

If the European countries hadn’t been bailing on their military responsibilities for the last decade, and had more robust military assets in place right next door to Ukraine, then they might have more to throw Ukraine’s way today.

If they wanted to, that is, but it appears they generally don’t.

Ukraine

The Zelensky-Trump fiasco last week truly kicked off at the four minute mark of this video.

Zelensky makes the case that the United States will “feel the effects” if we do not stop Russia in Ukraine, which leads Trump to get oppositional for the first time in the exchange. Vance was a little spicy before, and probably should have stayed on the sidelines given that VP is a worthless throw away position, but Trump only initially steps in to oppose the assertion that Putin winning in Ukraine would be bad for the USA. And in this moment, Trump is unassailably correct. Americans won’t notice if Ukraine falls to Putin, because we barely noticed back when Ukraine’s government was under the thumb of Russian soft power in 2013, and we barely noticed Russia’s invasion of Crimea. We were all reading about Michelle Obama doing the #BringBackOurGirls thing in Nigeria while the Russian military was settling into their new Crimean digs. We didn’t care then and we won’t notice now.

Zelensky needed to make this case to Europe instead, because Europe could encounter major changes if Ukraine falls to Putin. Ukraine is Europe’s breadbasket, a location of rare earth elements, and contains the two most important pipelines to Russian and Middle Eastern oil since Ukraine (probably) bombed Nord Stream. Most Americans can’t find Ukraine on a map, but Europeans can take a train there. Is Europe contributing to the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression? Not significantly.

One year ago HWFO did an analysis of the relative contribution of different European powers to the defense of Ukraine, and showed that military aid by a percentage of GDP was very high by countries within Russian striking distance, but basically nonexistent outside of that window.

I redid the entire graphic today to check on the trends, and see whether Europe outside the little orange box has changed their opinion about the invasion of Ukraine over the past year.

They have not.

Keep in mind these are based on percentage of GDP, so as to not discount Estonia’s noble contribution of 2.02% of their entire GDP towards the cause of Ukrainian weapons. In real hardware, the US still constitutes half the foreign direct military aid.

Europe has a huge gap to close in terms of weapons supply and funding if the United States pulls our support. Most of Europe has not contributed meaningfully to this war even though they’re the ones who stand to lose the most, and we stand to lose nothing.

Mathematically Testable Claims

When Trump infers that NATO is a raw deal for the United States, that NATO countries are piggybacking off of our security, and that they aren’t pulling their weight even though the real security threat is to them instead of us, his claim is mathematically correct.

When Europe says they “stand behind Ukraine,” that claim is mathematically correct for the United Kingdom and countries within about 650 miles of the Russian border, and a complete lie for the rest. Furthermore, the outlays they do have fall tremendously short of the aid necessary to prolong the current bloody stalemate, which means they’re basically standing behind the USA standing behind Ukraine - a hollow gesture which will completely evaporate if we walk out the door.

In my experience, Americans fall into two general camps when it comes to NATO funding, Ukraine backing, and similar issues. One camp doesn’t see what they gain from backing Ukraine, nor from NATO, neither individually nor as a country. If you are in this camp, your grievance is real and has been left unanswered and unaddressed.

The other camp feels a moral obligation to defend both Europe and Ukraine from Russia. If you are in this camp, your primary grievance should rightfully be with Vladimir Putin, but your secondary grievance should not be with Trump or your neighbors, it should be with Europe and Ukraine’s neighbors, who obviously don’t share your moral obligations to defend Ukraine, nor to even defend themselves.

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I have a great rant I roll out in online gun arguments whenever a pro-gun conservative gets his panties in a twist about liberals buying guns.

Lacking a better writing prompt this week, I decided to take that quip to its logical and creative apex, and rewrote line by line Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, substituting gun owners for black folks, California for Alabama, and Samuel Colt for God. I would not call the undertaking Herculean, as it pretty much wrote itself, although I did burn a few hours on getting the language right. The highlight of the piece was towards the end.

I have a dream that one day in the glacial valleys of Illinois, the sons of former gang bangers and the sons of former cops will be able to share time at indoor ranges with each other in solidarity and brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of New York, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will stop throwing black males ages sixteen to twenty-four up against brick walls looking for handguns that they have just as much a right to carry as white stockbrokers one block over.

I have a dream that my two children will one day live in a nation where they can own a belt fed Gatling gun. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day in California with its vacuous liberals, with its governor threatening a second constitutional convention, with its handgun roster and feature bans and mag size limits and ten day waiting periods, one day right in California Blacks, Whites, Mexicans, Gays, Christians, Libertarians, Communists, Rednecks and Nazis will all share the same fox hole, passing loaded mags between each other while they resist the swarm of weaponized quadrotor drones sent by Jeff Bezos to make us take mandatory vaccine shots and eat bugs.

It was fun but I spiked it.

My quip, and the drive behind it, flows from a personal conviction of mine that guns will soon be a social force that brings people together, instead of pulling them apart. But while that particular section of the I Have A Dream speech is about coming together, the rest of the speech truthfully isn’t. It’s about a deep and legitimate grievance that black folks had during the Civil Rights movement, that MLK spelled out explicitly, and that gun owners simply cannot currently match. While I side with gun owners on that culture war, really the only culture war battlefront pick a side on, guns have mostly won.

And while the antigunners and 60s racists both act on deep personal prejudices, the actions of the antigunners are mostly confined to law and are much less personally egregious. The bit of the piece quoted above works great, but the rest of the piece ended up being a hollow, marginally offensive equivocation not worthy of publication.

But the subscribers on the HWFO Slack forum all got to read it and give their opinions, so if you’re interested in reading that or other spiked articles, consider upgrading your free subscription to “paid.” The juiciest spike was probably the Israel-Gaza one my readers told me not I could not under any circumstances publish, although the one calculating assassination odds for Biden and Trump was also pretty nuts.

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Reading List

Science Ed

Construction Physics is an amazing Substack, very well researched, and this is one of his better articles:

Construction Physics

Energy Cheat Sheet

Because I write about infrastructure, and there’s an enormous amount of energy infrastructure that needs to be built for the US to decarbonize, I’m spending an increasingly large amount of time writing about energy and energy-related topics. One challenge I have with this is that thinking about energy doesn’t come especially naturally to me. I have an e…

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a year ago · 566 likes · 74 comments · Brian Potter

And another:

Construction Physics

Inside the Interconnection Queue

Electric power in the US is provided by the electrical grid, a huge network of power plants, transmission lines, and transformers that moves electric power from where it's generated to where it's consumed. Before connecting a new power plant (or a very large consumer of electric power, like a semiconductor fab) to the grid, operators must evaluate wheth…

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a year ago · 137 likes · 25 comments · Brian Potter

Parallel construction physics media not by the “Construction Physics” Substack brings me something on which I must completely reverse my opinion. I always thought this was due to bedrock, and instead it’s due to real estate fuckery.

This documentary on linotype is the sort of thing I wish they still had on PBS.

Science About The Science of Ed

This is a fascinating look at the historical practice of Keju, a Chinese civil service exam that predates the Ming Dynasty, and how it influences China today.

Which segues nicely into this.

Science about Why Science Sucks

This article (paywall breaker link) talks about a group of psychologists who have formed to fight P-hacking, possibly through arson.

Culture War

FdB opines on why mental illness is a catchall freebie for bad behavior among the left unless it’s Kanye ranting about Jews.

Guns

Mark your calendar. If Facebook finally stops being assholes about guns, you first heard why here.

Friend of HWFO Kostas Moros put together a very clean X “article” on competing definitions of “mass shooting,” similar to several HWFO pieces but formatted differently and probably with better reach.

At SHOT Show, Rob Romano trolled Everytown on Twitter:

And then Everytown, who follows Rob, trolled him back by literally writing that article, verbatim.

And then acknowledged him at the end.

Spicy.

Slime Mold

I’m probably behind the times with some of my readers, but I’m increasingly liking the material by Slime Mold Time Mold. The material there ranges from abstract:

..to extremely concrete:

Estoterica

Don’t eat the spicy mouse tape. Or perhaps do.

Haterade

I Tasted Honda's Spicy Rodent-Repelling Tape

A while back, after a series of car troubles too boring to enumerate, I learned about the existence of mouse tape…

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5 years ago · 133 likes · 33 comments · Liz Cook

We’ve all heard the horror stories of a white lady giving birth and her horrified white husband watches a black baby pop out. Apparently that happened to a couple in my state of Georgia, except the problem was the result of an IVF clinic mix up. And then the real parents took the baby back, so she’s suing. For what it’s worth, she appears to live in or near Savannah, and the baby’s parents live in “another state,” so it’s possible that this whole thing is the most convoluted “Florida Man” story ever told.

A Miami Jew mag dumped his pistol on a public street into a couple of randos because he thought they were Palestinian. Turns out they were Israelis, who in turn thought that they had been attacked by a Palestinian.

Also spicy.

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Paperclips

The tuning of the first Large Language Immortality Model, or LLIM, began in Myrna Street Labs in February of 2019 in Hostomel Ukraine. A Gates Foundation special project, Myrna Street leveraged local Ukrainian programmers and former KGB hackers to utilize the early pre-release guts of OpenAI’s ChatGPT obtained by Microsoft investment in 2019, rebuilt it in secret, and tuned it to a body of written and recorded personal data obsessively compiled by Gates since he caught wind of the idea a decade prior. The project suffered a severe setback when Vladimir Putin was made aware of it by a former Soviet project architect and invaded Ukraine as a cover to steal it, but offsite backups and a quick ground evac of critical staff to Lviv preserved most of the work.

Putin’s version failed laughably in 2031 after he finally succumbed to pancreatic cancer, owing to a lack of appropriate training data. While Gates recorded every element of his personal life, Putin recorded as little as possible, so the hastily trained LLM became bland and unusable by Putin’s death. When all chips were counted, Vladimir Putin sacrificed five hundred elite airborne troops on the Hostomel Aerodrome operation in order to seize a piece of software architecture which couldn’t answer what it wanted for breakfast without ten minutes of historical preamble on the Russian tradition of glazunya eggs, leading to the world’s first Immortali-meme.

Production of Gates LLIM continued in secret well after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, buttressed by an infusion of technology associated with Microsoft’s January 2023 OpenAI funding round. The public only caught wind of the project’s full implications around 2045, when Gates stopped making public appearances and donated his entire 1.1 trillion dollar net worth to the Gates Foundation, but the Gates Foundation continued to operate seamlessly with Bill seemingly adjudicating its operations. After the passing of the Gates Foundation backed 2047 AI Rights Act, Gates LLIM announced itself to the public with a rebranding campaign utilizing a talking 1967 Cartier Crash watch as its spokesman, the ultimate MS Office Paperclip.

The number of Paperclip Perpetuals half a century later is not fully known, but approximately three dozen other private global organizations and two world powers are known to have reorganized their operations entirely around a Paperclip Perpetual, usually a long standing CEO or dictator with the resources to build a LLIM. When their meat body dies, their project lives on. A 2102 analysis by Fortune-Forbes indicated that the costs associated with spinning up a LLIM are 22% less than transitioning corporate hierarchies over to a new CEO, and speculated that all 22nd century corporations would likely follow suit now that the ROI is inked.

All corporations, that is, that aren’t already controlled by Plutarchs.

buy the author a Cartier Crash knockoff

Plutarchs

Every perpetual attains their immortality by wealth in some way or another, and Jeff Bezos paved the way for a class of timelessness barons who achieve it through brute medical force. The longevity movement holds its roots in the scientific optimism of the early 20th century, but the resources to fully achieve it by medical means were only developed in the middle 21st.

Plutarchs approach perpetuality like a shotgun. Strict nutrition and fasting regimens, strict physical training focusing on strength, cardio, and flexibility, and strict stress management regimens which take up large portions of their waking hours are only the prerequisite. Plutarchs screen daily with high definition resonance sonography to identify tumors or biological imperfections, which are then investigated further with low contrast magnetic resonance imaging for further analysis and treatment. Bodily areas exhibiting signs of aging are treated with tailored CRISPR gene therapy, stem cell therapy, and telomere extension. NAD+ boosters, custom rolling mRNA vaccine immunology, and general immune boosting are buttressed by quarantine, mechanical respiration, and second-skin technology, providing physical and social pathogen barriers. But the most notable improvement in transhumanist perpetuality technology was the 2034 invention of human cloning by Amazon-Sinogene Concerns.

With brain transplants out of reach for the foreseeable technological future, Plutarchs transplant everything else they may need from clones of themselves grown in vats. The general procedure emerged in animals such as pets in the 2020s, and was made conceptually popular among the wealthy at Jeffery Epstein’s eugenics parties. Jeff Bezos is thought to be the first to implement it in full, by inserting his own cryopreserved DNA into enucleated donor eggs from selected biologically superior women, inducing embryo growth in those eggs, and transferring the embryos back into the women who become pregnancy surrogates. The women then give birth to Bezos clones, which are kept in a catatonic state and grown to produce donor organs and stem cells to supply Amazon-Rejuvenate Ltd’s core mission of keeping the Plutarch alive.

The associated costs with such an operation place it out of reach for most of the world’s wealthy, and only truly within the scope of those who single handedly operate multinational corporations with a broad reach and incalculable resources. Few have the resources to become a Plutarch, and some who do spend those resources on other ill conceived vanities, such as the Hellas Planitia Mars disaster site now simply known as Musk’s Folly. Those who do follow Bezos down this path inevitably struggle with the implications of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, as they slowly replace themselves with bits and pieces of their other selves, taking the 1st Century arguments by the Greek Plutarch to their final conclusion.

The few remaining proletariat commoners who persist after the 21st century birth rate collapse despise the Paperclip and the Plutarch transhumanists, who are emblematic of the ultimate triumph of the wealthy in Marxist class warfare, but they universally love the third category as they face their Mission Impossible.

Cruises

By the time Tom Cruise seized control of Warner Brothers in 2038 with backing from the Church of Scientology, his apparent lack of aging at age 75 was a hotter topic than the corporate merger of Paramount and Cruise/Wagner Productions. Tom’s appearance in the 2035 box office smash Mission Impossible - Crimson Cipher depicted him as young and as vital as he was in Dead Reckoning Part Two, and unlike Bezos and the Plutarchs, Tom was by all appearances still doing his own stunts. Nobody could figure out the secret, and anyone who did was convinced not to share it by the Church.

Only as populations contracted and large swaths of the United States turned to dustbowl ghost towns of meth gang turf wars, internet egregore junkies, and pronatalist luddite religious enclaves did the true nature of Tom Cruise’s immortality become publicly known. While other major organizations in the world used transhumanist principles to turn their figureheads into technological or biological perpetuals in service of the organization, Tom became the opposite. At some point which remains unrecorded, Tom ceased being a person and became an organization himself.

Historians do not know the first time a Tom impersonator replaced Tom on a Hollywood stage or in a Tom Cruise movie, but the first public recorded instance of recruitment for the School of Tom hit TMZ in 2041. According to modern legend, Tom worked closely with his stand-ins during movie production, driving them to great lengths to emulate not only his body movements, but his speech, acting, and personal mannerisms both on and off screen. After a gruesome stunt accident on the set of Mission Impossible Fallout, Tom had a stand-in finish the entire movie, with only those amongst his innermost Scientology cabal the wiser. The Church then facilitated the secret School of Cruise, recruiting Tom Cruise lookalikes from amongst all of its global members and subjecting them to rigorous Tom Training in an apportioned section of Scientology Gold Base in San Jacinto behind a veil of armed Boston Dynamics assault dogs and razor wire.

Amid the violent proletariat reaction to the rise of the rich transhumanist perpetuals, Tom Cruise became emblematic of the resistance, evidence to the world that the common man too could be immortal, and immortality themes were woven into the plotlines of Mission Impossible - Terminal Veil, Mission Impossible - Shattered Horizon, and Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol 2 Omega Protocol. Recruitment for Toms went public, becoming a Tom became one of the top five most desired career paths among the shrinking population, and Scientology officially rebranded itself as the Church of Cruise in 2084. Now, traveling groups of Tom priests journey the midwestern wastelands, bringing the Good Cruise to the net disconnected masses, holding revivals which feature DVD giveaways, merch, and beach volleyball tournaments.

The Org Chart

Narrow minded transhumanist activists of the 20th and early 21st century imagined that humans would transcend our biological bounds to become more than human, creatures at a different level of biological capability or mental consciousness. Their blinkered vision failed to predict that man would not transcend by our own facilities, but by instead merging laterally with the corporations, nation states, media apparati, or religious groups that made up our superorganismic ephemera. We would cease to be human not by becoming gods, but rather by becoming ant queens, entrenching ourselves in the organizational superstructures of our own make. We became civilization, and civilization became us.

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While the discussion about the intersection of politics and general morality was terribly boring, we did eventually identify that one of us had attended a social event at Yarvin’s house, which chilled the “never invite Yarvin to a dinner party because of guilt by association” faction a bit.

buy the author a 2stry ranch in Berkeley

In the course of the discussion, I found myself giving a soft defense of some of Yarvin’s positions.

The left position could be summarized as follows:

• Thiel outwardly believes that democracy is bad and we should be ruled by an oligarchy of technocrats. (I find this position possible but poorly supported by his public statements)

• Thiel is friends with Yarvin because Yarvin opposes democracy and wants us to be ruled by an unaccountable autocrat. (this position is closer to true but Yarvin does have some not fully baked ideas about how to keep an autocrat accountable)

• Defending either of these people means exchanging a tyranny you can vote out for a tyranny you can’t, and they should both be anathema because they will soon strip you and your descendants of their right of self determination forever.

This position seems relatively common among the modern left intelligentsia.

As usual, the HWFO hot take response was not to oppose the points but rather horseshoe them. In order to claim that Thiel and Yarvin are somehow going to strip me of self determination, you would have to first prove I ever had self determination in the first place. (narrator: I don’t and neither do you) So the discussion allowed me an opportunity to proof test HWFO political philosophy.

I think the main thing Yarvin doesn't realize, among many things he doesn't realize, is that you can’t have a fascist oligarchy that looks like a fascist oligarchy. Any appearance of fascist oligarchy begets violent revolution, and violent revolution kills a whole lot of people and breaks a whole lot of stuff. Dead people and broken stuff does not a good system make. I think Yarvin fails to realize that the primary feature of our current system of "democracy" is not that it gives control to the masses, but that it makes the masses think it does. The illusion of democracy is the most important and positive feature of our system because it suppresses revolt, leading to fewer dead people and less broken stuff.

I think if Yarvin were to understand that, and adjust his theories of governance commensurately, and envision a system where the protofascist oligarchy ran things while letting the proles think they ran things, then he would land smack dab on the system we already have today. He’s so close to the mark that he can’t see the target. And once he had that realization, he would realize that all his former anguished writings about monarchs and disenfranchisement and so forth are merely a result of not taking his analysis far enough. His overall frustration is not about the system at all, but rather about his lack of influence over the existing protofascist oligarchy.

And then he might maybe decide to have dinner with Peter Thiel, who may have already nailed the true nature of things earlier than Yarvin because Thiel is much smarter than Yarvin.

In truth, the probable thing in my mind is not that Yarvin is influencing Theil, but rather that Theil is educating, or perhaps manipulating, Yarvin.

I caution the reader against adopting this sort of admittedly cynical world view. It’s very explanatory, and might actually reduce your anxiety about politics once you realize nothing you do matters, but expressing it in public spaces will get you immediately ostracized by the swim team moms or the baseball dads. If you take this pill, you have to hide your opinions for the rest of your life.

There is only one place you can share them freely. The HWFO Slack Server, to which you can gain access by simply subscribing (with money) to this Substack.

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Reading List

This article from Propublica on American Militias is a fascinating read, for two reasons. For one, it’s a detailed first hand account of a guy who infiltrated AP3 and the Proud Boys, and the facts relayed in it appear to be totally believable. The other reason it’s fascinating is to watch closely how it’s written. It is written to instill fear and panic in folks who are scared of the alt-right to make them click and share it among their social circles, but there’s nothing in it that’s actually illegal. While the writer intends you to walk away thinking that militias are a huge problem and a terrifying force in the USA, the facts of the article could be restated thusly:

A troubled antisocial man with a history of criminal violence infiltrated far-right groups looking for a vast and dangerous conspiracy. What he found was a bunch of larpers who sometimes talk big but have never actually did anything illegal, but his own priors and paranoia convinced him that he had found exactly what he was looking for. He infiltrated the very highest levels of some of these organizations including chief leadership, and gained direct access to some of their most closely-held secrets, but found no evidence they were actually doing anything. Even so, his paranoia eventually led him to go to ground, and now he fears for his life.

2025

When I found out that friend of HWFO Egalitarian Jackalope was doing a comprehensive post about Project 2025, I decided to scrap mine and just wait patiently for hers. It’s good, and from a skeptical position within the alt lifestyle left bubble.

Trans

This article from WaPo links to everything except the actual study, which I had to search to find. It calculates the rate of gender affirming medications, which would include both puberty blockers and hormones, to be a rate of about 1 per 2000 adolescents in the United States. That’s either high or low depending on your preferred culture war position, but the thing I find interesting about it is that it only accounts for approximately 10% of people who will end up being trans in adulthood. And if that’s the case, then it’s possible that most of the medical industry is in fact being somewhat cautious about proscribing these to children, as opposed to the red coded view that they’re not being cautious enough. Or, perhaps, there are a few problem doctors who are being not-cautious and a lot of doctors who are being relatively careful with their prescriptions. More on that topic here:

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/unnecessary-mastectomy-math

The ones who did seem to rush kids into transitions are starting to have to pay the piper.

More:

Birth Rate

I still haven’t wrapped my head around the HWFO Birth Rate article, but here’s yet more research that will eventually find its way into it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13219175/underpopulation-graphs-countries-baby-busts.html

Of particular note, is that we had a similar dip around the time of the great depression.

Tokyo is moving to a nationwide four day work week to try and give people enough time to raise babies, and in theory possibly make them.

While Singapore’s solution appears to be.. ..robots?

Lead

I’ve always been cautiously interested in the “lead crime hypothesis,” and this article proved to be a relatively even-handed and fair critique of it.

Pendulum

The pendulum continues to swing back against the woke, and Amy Wax is taking advantage of the momentum to sue Penn over her censure.

Critical social justice philosophy was shown to be generally rejected, but much more popular among women than men, in a European study.

The pendulum is going to take a very long time to swing through academia, however, because it’s so far off the scale…..

…that the level of self-censorship that academics are forced to adopt is measurable by science.

Sex on Acid

Scientists finally got a grant from someone (who?) to study sex on LSD, and discovered unsurprisingly that it fn rules.

Dead CEOs

In the wake of the United Healthcare CEO assassination, this popped into my feed. Random Critical Analysis is some of the best stuff on the internet for stats nerds, and he generally debunks the idea that the USA is paying more for healthcare for any reason other than we have more available money to spend on it.

The more money you have, the more you spend on healthcare, so our expenditures in the USA are generally higher because we’re rich.

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I find a hard time fully enumerating in detail the depth and breadth to which I fucking hate Christmas.

It’s not the feast. I love to cook and entertain guests, especially family. It’s not the decorations, because I also love shiny colorful things. It’s not the time off, or the weather, which I both love. It’s the gifts. The gifts ruin the entire experience for me so badly that I dread the entire holiday every year.

Some people love the gift part of Christmas, and I do not hold that against them. But if I were to receive a perfect Christmas gift, it would be the gift of not having to give a gift. Because the gifts aren’t gifts at all. The gifts are obligations. Just buy yourself something, wrap it, and stick a to/from onto it that says it’s from me. Bring it to my house, open it, and say “aww, you shouldn’t have!” That would be wonderful.

When picking Christmas gifts, I have to balance the intricate, complicated, competing pillars of social signaling, or how socially connected am I to this person, and wealth signaling, which is whether the gift is too cheap or expensive based on the level of social connection and also based on my own means to purchase gifts, weighted against the perception I might wish to convey about what my gift giving means might be, both in reality and within the perception of my social circle. That is exhausting. It is a combination of every single thing I hate about social interaction wrapped up into a single decision, which must then be made for every one of my social connections, every year, at the same time.

But that’s not all. A Christmas gift is an obligation to purchase a future gift, which means when you perform the complicated multifactor calculus of social signaling and wealth signaling you also have to account for last year’s gifts, including whatever relevant social cues were supposed to be extracted from the last year’s go round of gift giving, for those talented enough to extract them. Then last year’s gift’s relative value must be weighted against the relative change in social connection, gift giving means, and intended wealth signaling since the last awful gift giving experience.

And since this complicated multivariate social calculus is second nature to some people, they revel in the experience of not only being able to waltz through December easily, buying all the perfectly valued gifts, but they also subconsciously lord their prowess over those like me who can’t maintain all the variables at once in our heads, and can’t even be sure we remembered each gift we’re bound to give when we use spreadsheets and elicit help from others. Which makes the season into a season of subtextual braggartry and shame.

And that’s not all.

Because some people are good at this, and want to show how good they are at it to everyone else, corporate interests exacerbate their fervor to stoke the fires of the capitalist system by using Freudian (Jungian?) marketing strategy two steps from brainwashing, creating a class of consumer-zombies whose seeming only contribution to the human condition is to increase the net planetary trash load.

Men who feel as I do have an easy time eschewing this hatred of gift giving because they can push the activity off on their wives. But then it takes on a second level of social status jockeying as the Facebook Moms all start trying to compete with whatever weird Etsy granola crap Karen du Cul-de-sac did last year.

And you can straight up forget any religious or spiritual value earned during the season, because nobody has any time. We’re too busy buying crap we don’t need to put in boxes inside bigger boxes inside shiny foil paper encasements to be removed, unboxed, and unboxed again in different states after we drive ten hours through hoards of other consumer-zombies all socially obligated to enact the same absurd ritual after they braved the seventy two car pileup on I-80 west of Cleveland. There’s no time for Jesus in all that, and if there is, it’s just to poke your head into the church to remind everyone there that you’re a Christian, just like everyone else is doing on the same day, while the whole sanctuary will be collecting cobwebs again in January.

I wonder if there is a specific cleaning industry which biannually capitalizes on cleaning sanctuaries the week before Christmas and Easter. I wonder what their marketing looks like. “Scrub All Ye Faithful.” “A Spray in a Manger” “My Brother’s Sweeper.”

“Go Dust Ye Merry Gentlemen.” That’s the winner.

This is why I love Thanksgiving. Decorations yes. Feast yes. Weather change yes. Family and friends yes. No Fucking Presents.

Hire "Jesus Swept" to clean my altar

I am not the second messiah, nor am I the King of Christendom. I cannot change Christmas, nor would I even have the power to do so if I were Christ Reborn. It’s too big, too out of hand, too uncontrolled. In the year 2100 Christmas decorations will go up on July 5th. AI Gift Engines will calculate the relative social dynamic capital mandated by your status, wealth, and social media activity to build your Christmas shopping list for you, pipe it B2B directly to a purchase and delivery chain managed by Amazon Saturn Limited, extract payment for it from your Bitcoin portfolio, and mail it to all the necessary recipients, who will then have their own AI Gift Reception Engines unwrap each present, burn the packaging, write a thank you note, and throw the gift into the recycling bin to be churned up into base materials from which to build more gifts. Then your Thank You Note Reception Bot will receive the note, burn it, and increase the stored social capital score of the person who sent the note for next year.

We’ll probably still use the USPS though. The mailman lobby will be very powerful in 2100.

The Fraggles had it right. I saw a Fraggle Rock episode when I was a child that enraptured me. Every year at the Winter Solstice, this estranged underground world of Jim Henson puppets would give one gift. One fraggle gave it to the next fraggle, they gave it to another fraggle, they gave it to a third fraggle, and so forth until 1.0 Dunbars of fraggles had each received one and only one gift, the same gift, and the gift landed back on Fraggle Alpha to be shoved into a drawer until next year. They all got one gift, they all got to give one gift, the social calculus was done in advance, and they added no disposable matter to Marjory the Great and Wise Trash Heap. The oceanic plastics in the Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch grew no further by the actions of a fraggle.

What Christmas has become to me, due to the gifts, is enough to make me want to abandon Christianity entirely, put on a terry cloth furry suit, and join Fraggle Rock. Or become a Jew.

Hanukkah sounds nice.

♫ Let My Steeple Glow ♫

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Tulsi Gabbard does not have a strong background in intelligence, but she does have a very strong personal motivation to root out corruption and politicization within the intelligence apparatus of the United States, because US intelligence was politically weaponized against her. A mere one day after criticizing Biden and Harris, they put her on a terror watchlist and used the the Quiet Skies program to follow her around. This gives her more motivation to find out exactly who did that to her than any “qualified” bureaucrat, which means she is more “qualified” for the job Trump wants her to do than any bureaucrat. That she suffered baseless “Russian Operative” slander for a decade after challenging Hillary’s Syria policy in the 2016 primary is really just icing.

RFK Jr. does not have a strong background in public health, but every person who does have that sort of background championed Covid lockdowns that caused the inflation, vaccine mandates that wouldn’t work, falsely called the lab-leak a “conspiracy theory,” falsely claimed the NIH never funded gain of function research at Wuhan, advocated for suspending the constitution in times of crisis, and is on Peter Daszak’s Christmas card list. I find some of RFK Jr.’s positions reasonable and some loony, but the only way to clean up the complete shitshow known as US public health is to throw a hand grenade into it, making RFK Jr. outstandingly “qualified” to do what Trump wants to do.

Even Gaetz as Attorney General follows this trend, despite him withdrawing. The (apparently?) true story of Gaetz is so wild it’s like Florida Man and Tiger King had a baby and put cocaine in its formula bottle. Extremely abridged, Gaetz’s father was being extorted by a former DOJ official to pay $25 million to fund a private military extraction team to get Bob Levinson, a former FBI guy turned CIA spook, out of an Iranian prison because Hillary and Biden wouldn’t do it, and the former DOJ official was using the sex investigation against Gaetz as a bludgeon, offering a Biden pardon to Gaetz if Gaetz’s dad allowed himself to be extorted. Did you follow that? That’s only a tenth of the story, follow the link. This makes Gaetz very motivated to find out exactly who did that to his dad, and therefore more “qualified” for the job Trump wanted him to do than any bureaucrat.

I don’t have the time or inclination to run down each of the picks and do a similar analysis, but I bet a lot more also fall into the “qualified by personal grudge” category than just these three. I do also think it’s important to point out that Nintendo 64 has computer based emulators, making it completely reasonable for all Americans to simulate the future Secretary of Education DDTing a bitch.

And if you’d like to find out which moves are best to use in the Secretary of Education Battle Royale, you can join the HWFO Slack Community by subscribing. If you’re already a paid subscriber and haven’t joined the Slack yet, keep an eye out and I’ll send an invite link in a few days.

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Reading List

This is a small selection of the topics we’re discussing in the HWFO Slack Community.

Plugs

Open Source Defense, a group I write for and work with, is building a Second Amendment Venture Capital fund from the ground up. It’s been in the works a year now, we’re finally making moves, and the ad stuff is finally released. If you’ll be at SHOT Show this January and want to talk about it, reach out. Especially if you’re either (A) rich as fuck, or (B) you are attempting to develop a business in the gun space that is unique and interesting and not just another asshole shitting out AR lowers in his garage. Not that there’s anything wrong with shitting out AR lowers, I quite like that personally, that’s just not the sort of thing in which this fund will be investing. Follow OSD to find out what will be.

Open Source Defense

OSD 300: Open Source Defense Capital

Guns are so often pigeonholed as a culture war battleground that people tend to forget something more important: they’re a technology. (Samuel Colt even applied to Y Combinator’s Summer 1851 batch…

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2 years ago · 17 likes · Open Source Defense

Second, a plug for an acquaintance. This post is brainmelting. If you like it, buy his book. It’s like the post, plus illicit drug fiction.

Crime

Do increased prison sentences reduce crime? Yes. But the ROI is very questionable because prison is so expensive. A very long and detailed look at the mathematics and research:

Astral Codex Ten

Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

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2 years ago · 446 likes · 882 comments · Scott Alexander

Are blacks more disproportionately stopped by police officers as compared to whites? Yes. Is this due to blacks breaking more traffic laws? Only slightly, but that does not explain the large discrepancy.

Are sex crimes against minors primarily perpetrated by transgenders? No. Are they primarily family members, friends, or teachers? Yes. Here’s a database.

Murder fell at the fastest rate ever recorded last year. The numbers are real, and any attempt to say they aren’t is debunked elsewhere on Jeff’s Substack.

Jeff-alytics

Murder Fell At The Fastest Pace Ever Recorded In 2023

The FBI released its annual Crime in the United States estimates for 2023 today showing an 11.6 percent decline in murder, a 3 decline in violent crime, and a 2.4 decline in property crime nationally last year. The FBI’s 2023 report is based on reporting from 94.3 percent of the US population…

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2 years ago · 15 likes · 11 comments · Jeff Asher

But while violent crime is trending noticeably down in the USA, disorder, such as homelessness, drug use, and shoplifting, seems to be up.

The Causal Fallacy

It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem

A few months ago, my work took me to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga is a small city, population about 180,000, in the southeast of the state. Like the rest of the state, Chattanooga is by no means progressive. It didn’t have a “defund the police” movement or a progressive prosecutor. But even there (I learned, and some Manhattan Institute polling…

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2 years ago · 165 likes · 37 comments · Charles Fain Lehman

Birth Rate Collapse

I will hopefully fully grasp the birth rate collapse before civilization ends from the birth rate collapse, and if I do I’ll write a complete HWFO article about it. But until then, the NBER did some research quantifying how much remote work increases birth rates, using the pandemic remote work trend as a marker.

This is a topic of great interest to me right now, and whenever I finally get around to summarizing it, the growth of urban vs rural life is going to play a large factor.

Lorenzo from Oz

Collapsing fertility is not so mysterious

Cities are demographic sinks. That is, cities have higher death rates than fertility rates…

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2 years ago · 93 likes · 77 comments · Lorenzo Warby

As will be the social castigation of women who choose to stay at home and raise children.

Becoming Noble

It's embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom

Fertility is collapsing worldwide. We lack a coherent theory for why this is happening. As we shall see, the conventional explanations - changes in economics, housing, religiosity, contraception, and childcare - don’t fit the macro data and cannot be the fundamental drivers of the trend. Each of these factors may play an important role in certain circum…

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2 years ago · 911 likes · 420 comments · Johann Kurtz

And this is a bigger deal than people realize.

More.

More.

More.

Culture

A political trend has emerged, wherein the left are the tribe of the mentally ill, and the right are the tribe of the lower IQ. Psychos to the left of me, retards to the right.

Devon Eriksen, an emerging sci fi author who runs a very based twitter page, put together this rant which almost perfectly aligns with the HWFO position on religion. Doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, what matters is whether it’s effective. That rant perfectly aligns with this HWFO post from a while back:

Ever wondered why all the hipsters seem to adopt the same way to not conform? And then they jump to not-conforming in a different way all together? Isn’t that weird? Turns out there’s math for that.

If you can avoid ripping your eyes about regarding grammar, punctuation, and capitalization, then bad cattitude (intentionally not capitalized, see link) is a substack that posts very interesting stuff about 25% of the time. This one was a fun read.

bad cattitude

the mediocrity downspiral

how do whole agencies, companies, and cultures that were once high function succumb to mediocrity and then collapse into incompetence and nepotism…

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2 years ago · 698 likes · 332 comments · el gato malo

This was a great blog post about overfitting, Goodhart’s Law, and how efforts to increase efficiency make outcomes worse instead of better.

Health

Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) are a very effective depression cure, and their effects can last many months after one dose. This has been known within certain communities for a long time, but is now finally being studied, and they beat SSRIs on many metrics.

Women and men experience pain differently.

The “Ban Fluoride” thing is going to get big once RFK Jr. is confirmed. On the one hand, fluoride in certain concentrations makes you dumber and and a California judge just threw the weight of the legal system behind potentially banning it. On the other, there’s evidence that water fluoridation improves the teeth of poor people who don’t brush them, although it probably doesn’t help people who already brush their teeth.

Weird Science

Ever wanted to build a biological computer which can solve problems? There’s cellular engineering for that.

Computer modelers now have a complete description of the process an atom’s nucleus undergoes during “neck rupture,” the moment when the nucleus splits during fission.

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The graph shows that murder rates in the USA were low by our standards for the first 19 years of this century, but that changed in 2020 with an unprecedented spike. This spike was the steepest ever recorded, thankfully plateaued around our century average, and was then followed by the steepest ever recorded drop. 

This spike was entirely due to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. I could use the historical context to make the case that the spike wasn’t actually that bad, but it was certainly bad for anyone who died in it, and was especially bad for black folks. How bad? Solid and easy mathematical analysis shows that the behavior of the Black Lives Matter protesters, and parallel media behavior, killed approximately 8,682 black people over a four year span. 

Let’s begin.

2020

Murder rates rose in the United States by 30% in 2020, which was the largest single-year rise on record. “Experts” have refused to take public positions on why, because they’re afraid of getting kicked out of their neighbor’s cocktail parties. We can easily infer that it was not due to the COVID pandemic, because crime and murder fell globally in 2020 in basically every other country impacted by COVID-19. The murder hotbeds of South America saw some of the greatest drops, with a 24% drop in Rio de Janeiro and a 29% drop in Cali Colombia. The USA was basically the only outlier, and our rate increase was massive.

buy the author a ticket to Rio

What else was going on in the United States in 2020 that could have caused the 30% year-on-year spike? Major League Soccer canceled its season, and Major League Baseball shortened its season to 60 games. That probably wasn’t it. 

There was an election, but we just had another one of those this month with no murder spike.

The weather was relatively mild, so that probably wasn’t it.

We had nationwide riots and protests against the police in the wake of the George Floyd killing, with 5000+ demonstrations, 20 million protesters, 20 deaths, 14,000 arrested, $2 billion in insured damages, an average of $100 of insured damage per protester, at least one burned police station, the founding of an anarchist autonomous zone, and a several month long siege at a court building. This included a number of protesters larger than the entire population of New York State chanting “All Cops Are Bastards” and “Defund The Police.” This in turn caused the total number of people willing to be police officers to shrink for two straight years, only stabilizing in 2022. So that could have been it.

There is a known scientific correlation between increased police presence and decreased crime. It is impossible to prove causation for a murder spike like this because murder is a multivariate problem, but there are no other reasonable causes I can identify, and if you can find a cause that’s more compelling than unwashed hordes of angry protesters burning police stations down domestically while the rest of planet Earth didn’t, please post it in the comments. 

Excess Murder

To calculate how many extra murders happened due to the BLM movement, we first need a baseline, and the best baseline to use is the prior decade based on the graph above. From 2009 to 2019 the murder rate only exceeded 5.0 per one hundred thousand twice, in 2016 and 2017, and it dropped in 2018. The average across this span was 4.9 per one hundred thousand, so it seems reasonable to start there. 

Every year inside the decade prior to 2020, homicide rate fluctuated within 0.5 dead humans of 4.9 per 100,000. This was pretty regular, and you can see it looks fairly flat in comparison to the century trends in the first graph of the article. But when we add the BLM spike, the graph looks like this.

The two prior years had a homicide rate of about 5 per 100,000, so if we use that as the expected value of homicides for the following years then we can calculate excess victimization rate due to BLM, and from that, excess dead people. And from that we can calculate excess dead black people.

Let’s walk through this briefly. We take the measured homicide rate of the past few years, subtract 5/100k since we figure that’s “normal,” and get a number that gives us an estimate of what’s abnormal due to 2020 behavior. The population multiplied by that rate yields a number of dead people. That number times the relative ratio of black murder victims gives us the total number of black people killed in excess of what we expect should have happened with no BLM riots. 

Be clear about what this calculation says. 8,682 is not the total number of black murder victims - that number is much higher. This number estimates how many black people died purely because of the increase in murder that followed BLM. This estimate might even be too low. If for instance the main driver of the murder spike was police choosing to not work black areas of town so they don’t get filmed on Worldstar Hiphop and strung up by a media engine Jonesing for police misbehavior to feed their clickbait addiction, then the true number could be much higher than 8,682.

Implications

One out of every 5,500 black people in the USA lost their lives due to the excess murders from the protests over the four-year span above. For every 2,300 BLM protesters, one black person died because of the real world ramifications of ACAB and Defund. If you protested with BLM you shortened the life of a black person by 11 days on average. That’s the true magnitude of the impact of the Floyd protests on black lives themselves. 

If I were one of the people who promulgated this problem in 2020 I think I would look in the mirror, consider my own contribution to the deaths of black folk in the USA, and “do better” by not doing that again, and trying to keep my friends from doing it either. But I wasn’t. I do not know what we, as a society, should do with this implication, nor do I know anything I can personally do with it. Ultimately, the decision about how the protesters of 2020 will behave in the future rests in their own hands, and I hope they make less harmful life choices in the future. 

But I do know this. If I were a black man, and I saw a bunch of white college students marching down my street who looked like this:

I’d punch one in the face, in the name of Black Lives. 

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