I’m surprised by the ease with which I’m taking this. I was far more worried in ’16, but Trump will have far fewer constraints on his worst impulses this time around, and is poised to bring on average a much worse group of people to his admin than during his first term. The main reason this doesn’t seem nearly as dire a prospect is that Trump himself has declined so noticeably in vitality, and so rapidly that he may well already lack the energy to really yeltsin things up. We might even be lucky enough to have this be an abbreviated term, with him stepping down at the two-year mark to focus his last years on hedonism.
The effect of burnout and normalization can’t be neglected, neither. As creatures of flesh, there’s only so much we can chemically expend on panic before we burn out. This may well be a much worse term than the first. For as old as DJT is, he’s still only a year younger than Ayatollah Khomeini was before his own assumption of supreme leadership. The Imam was hardly the picture of health in his dotage, and his chaos machine tragically spins on almost half a century later.1 It’s best to not underestimate the damage an unchecked elderly man with unlimited power and an unquenchable sense of grievance can inflict. But our feelings don’t care about our facts. Their chemicals have already expended themselves upon us for as long as we have invested ourselves in this shameful drama. For our youngest voters, such has been nearly half their lives.
But who is Your H.R. kidding? DJT did not win because of “normalization”. November 5th was a massacre. Worse in many ways than the more devastating Electoral College defeats of Mondale and Dukakis, as Harris’ principle shortcoming was not with any individual demographic she failed to sufficiently woo, nor whom switched votes, but with the well-over ten-million Americans who voted in 2020, and stayed home in ’24. Both candidates received lower vote totals than their parties performances four year ago. But even if neither candidate managed to convince anyone from 2020 to change tickets, and even if every voter from 2020 was still voting in 2024; then for every one absent Trump voter, there were over ten Harris voters who did the same. An eight-figure loss in voters. Nearly a sixth of the prior cycle’s coalition.
When John McCain lost to Barack Obama in ’08, the Republicans were short only a twentieth of the prior cycle’s numbers. Hillary wasn’t even a hundredth short of Obama 2012; losing only due to the quirk of the Electoral College. Romney, Kerry, Dole, and even Dukakis all improved their popular numbers on their party’s prior presidential performance. The last and only time the Dems — or any other American political party, including the ones that no longer exist — have seen an eight-figure loss in voters was 1968, and that was with one of their own candidates running a poison-pill independent campaign as revenge for the passage of the ’64 Civil Rights Act. Even without a George Wallace, the Democrats have lost in Humphreyesque fashion.Subscribe
But at least this loss was convincing. There will be no coup attempt this January at least. Nor will there be any way to frame this loss as a matter of tactics. It’s not possible to lose a real election this decisively because of merely picking the wrong V.P., or not visiting the right states. This was a strategic defeat. Woke is not dead, but the American public, having the agenda forced upon us by the majority of our intelligentsia and our institutions, with a general trend of increasing intensity since the Civil Rights Movement, reject the theory with each degree it forces itself to be practice. To the point where we will actively choose the dumber and more criminal option if it means keeping the saddle of racial and sexual bolshevism off our backs. Though I myself personally think this was still the worse of the two options, Your H.R. is only one man. Millions of others, who only four years earlier gave the Democrats a chance to show they could be our return to normalcy, felt betrayed enough by their about face to either switch teams or not care.
A major shakeup is in order. One which may well not be for the better. Plenty already are calling the Harris candidacy a failure due to being too centrist. A preposterous argument, but one which might well win out anyway if a sufficiently charismatic, ideologic, and demagogic figure can capture the ’28 nomination. But such a deep commitment to recapturing the dumb-people vote would be a tremendous negative step for the nation, as we already have one party so skilled at the art as to be futile to challenge. The far better option would be for the Party of Elite Human Capital to finally realize that the longstanding liberal rejection of human biodiversity, or even the very concept of innate ideas and capabilities, will always fail upon contact with reality. And any attempts to undo this condition of mankind via social engineering will be doomed to failure, disappointment, and the needless infliction of cruelty on endless generations of fresh victims. Genetic engineering, IVF, or even a rise in public awareness of the importance of genetics for human intelligence: all could well bring the meaningful gains that generations of social policy have failed to provide. But policy must be made for the real world. Not imaginary ones. And even if and when we do bring about these meaningful gains, they still won’t mean we won’t have general intelligence gaps between both individuals and groups, as well as gaps in all other talents and abilities. Far better to accept the world as is and restore and recommit to our historic Anglo commitment to individual liberty, rather than foolish Franco commitment to group equality.
Unlikely? Yes. But it’s still an option.
Far more pressing is that the Republicans have now elected an honest-Injun2 HBD-pilled presidential ticket. This offers tremendous opportunity to undo decades of bad policies. The Hananian reform agenda, lain out in The Origins of Woke, may well see enactment, and the retard brigade selfishly promised jobs by our grovering chief executive may well prove only as lasting as Scaramucci. Much can be done by the Republicans to persuade smart people to vote for them again, in particular the breaking of disparate impact standards at the wheel, and the further securement of the Supreme Court to ensure the expungement of as much Warren and Burger awfulness as possible.
But Your H.R. won’t get his hopes up too much. Rightoid brainlessness and bigotry was a pressing enough concern to lose my vote even after the Biden administration proved even more of a failure than the first Trump administration. Those who willingly seek the exploitation of such forces are to be trusted even less than those sincerely stupid enough to be true believers, but the chance to avoid dealing with these people entirely was tossed aside long ago. Shameful toadying, sadly, will be the best option for many, including most of all those that deserve better. If Zelensky has to rename the Crimean Peninsula into Donaldea, or offer daughter Oleksandra’s hand in marriage to Barron,3 if such indignity be the price which need save Eastern Europe from Ruskie belligerence and restore the sovereignty of the post-Soviet era, so be it. The world as is must be the measure of our options, and many cruel choices await us, but though our short-term hopes be shattered again and again, the hope of long-term victory only grows more promising. The generation-past wish of America being more like Europe now appears hopelessly foolish even to the same leftoids who once supported it. The threats of Russia and China, though real and growing, have been again and again exposed for their extreme crookery and hollowness, masturbating themselves and their populations with chauvinism until they’ve comfortably covered up the memory of their extensive corruption and tremendous poverty relative to the Free World. History has not ended, but there is still no conceivable rival to the United States of America as the World’s supreme power, and even our worst presidents can’t ruin things enough to change that course in the foreseeable future.
We are still, by far, the country to bet on. That covers up a lot of heartache. Even for those suffering so large a defeat as November 5th.
Thanks for reading H.R.’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Well, ya can’t win ’em all.
I’m surprised by the ease with which I’m taking this. I was far more worried in ’16, but Trump will have far fewer constraints on his worst impulses this time around, and is poised to bring on average a much worse group of people to his admin than during his first term. The main reason this doesn’t seem nearly as dire a prospect is that Trump himself has declined so noticeably in vitality, and so rapidly that he may well already lack the energy to really yeltsin things up. We might even be lucky enough to have this be an abbreviated term, with him stepping down at the two-year mark to focus his last years on hedonism.
The effect of burnout and normalization can’t be neglected, neither. As creatures of flesh, there’s only so much we can chemically expend on panic before we burn out. This may well be a much worse term than the first. For as old as DJT is, he’s still only a year younger than Ayatollah Khomeini was before his own assumption of supreme leadership. The Imam was hardly the picture of health in his dotage, and his chaos machine tragically spins on almost half a century later.1 It’s best to not underestimate the damage an unchecked elderly man with unlimited power and an unquenchable sense of grievance can inflict. But our feelings don’t care about our facts. Their chemicals have already expended themselves upon us for as long as we have invested ourselves in this shameful drama. For our youngest voters, such has been nearly half their lives.
But who is Your H.R. kidding? DJT did not win because of “normalization”. November 5th was a massacre. Worse in many ways than the more devastating Electoral College defeats of Mondale and Dukakis, as Harris’ principle shortcoming was not with any individual demographic she failed to sufficiently woo, nor whom switched votes, but with the well-over ten-million Americans who voted in 2020, and stayed home in ’24. Both candidates received lower vote totals than their parties performances four year ago. But even if neither candidate managed to convince anyone from 2020 to change tickets, and even if every voter from 2020 was still voting in 2024; then for every one absent Trump voter, there were over ten Harris voters who did the same. An eight-figure loss in voters. Nearly a sixth of the prior cycle’s coalition.
When John McCain lost to Barack Obama in ’08, the Republicans were short only a twentieth of the prior cycle’s numbers. Hillary wasn’t even a hundredth short of Obama 2012; losing only due to the quirk of the Electoral College. Romney, Kerry, Dole, and even Dukakis all improved their popular numbers on their party’s prior presidential performance. The last and only time the Dems — or any other American political party, including the ones that no longer exist — have seen an eight-figure loss in voters was 1968, and that was with one of their own candidates running a poison-pill independent campaign as revenge for the passage of the ’64 Civil Rights Act. Even without a George Wallace, the Democrats have lost in Humphreyesque fashion.Subscribe
But at least this loss was convincing. There will be no coup attempt this January at least. Nor will there be any way to frame this loss as a matter of tactics. It’s not possible to lose a real election this decisively because of merely picking the wrong V.P., or not visiting the right states. This was a strategic defeat. Woke is not dead, but the American public, having the agenda forced upon us by the majority of our intelligentsia and our institutions, with a general trend of increasing intensity since the Civil Rights Movement, reject the theory with each degree it forces itself to be practice. To the point where we will actively choose the dumber and more criminal option if it means keeping the saddle of racial and sexual bolshevism off our backs. Though I myself personally think this was still the worse of the two options, Your H.R. is only one man. Millions of others, who only four years earlier gave the Democrats a chance to show they could be our return to normalcy, felt betrayed enough by their about face to either switch teams or not care.
A major shakeup is in order. One which may well not be for the better. Plenty already are calling the Harris candidacy a failure due to being too centrist. A preposterous argument, but one which might well win out anyway if a sufficiently charismatic, ideologic, and demagogic figure can capture the ’28 nomination. But such a deep commitment to recapturing the dumb-people vote would be a tremendous negative step for the nation, as we already have one party so skilled at the art as to be futile to challenge. The far better option would be for the Party of Elite Human Capital to finally realize that the longstanding liberal rejection of human biodiversity, or even the very concept of innate ideas and capabilities, will always fail upon contact with reality. And any attempts to undo this condition of mankind via social engineering will be doomed to failure, disappointment, and the needless infliction of cruelty on endless generations of fresh victims. Genetic engineering, IVF, or even a rise in public awareness of the importance of genetics for human intelligence: all could well bring the meaningful gains that generations of social policy have failed to provide. But policy must be made for the real world. Not imaginary ones. And even if and when we do bring about these meaningful gains, they still won’t mean we won’t have general intelligence gaps between both individuals and groups, as well as gaps in all other talents and abilities. Far better to accept the world as is and restore and recommit to our historic Anglo commitment to individual liberty, rather than foolish Franco commitment to group equality.
Unlikely? Yes. But it’s still an option.
Far more pressing is that the Republicans have now elected an honest-Injun2 HBD-pilled presidential ticket. This offers tremendous opportunity to undo decades of bad policies. The Hananian reform agenda, lain out in The Origins of Woke, may well see enactment, and the retard brigade selfishly promised jobs by our grovering chief executive may well prove only as lasting as Scaramucci. Much can be done by the Republicans to persuade smart people to vote for them again, in particular the breaking of disparate impact standards at the wheel, and the further securement of the Supreme Court to ensure the expungement of as much Warren and Burger awfulness as possible.
But Your H.R. won’t get his hopes up too much. Rightoid brainlessness and bigotry was a pressing enough concern to lose my vote even after the Biden administration proved even more of a failure than the first Trump administration. Those who willingly seek the exploitation of such forces are to be trusted even less than those sincerely stupid enough to be true believers, but the chance to avoid dealing with these people entirely was tossed aside long ago. Shameful toadying, sadly, will be the best option for many, including most of all those that deserve better. If Zelensky has to rename the Crimean Peninsula into Donaldea, or offer daughter Oleksandra’s hand in marriage to Barron,3 if such indignity be the price which need save Eastern Europe from Ruskie belligerence and restore the sovereignty of the post-Soviet era, so be it. The world as is must be the measure of our options, and many cruel choices await us, but though our short-term hopes be shattered again and again, the hope of long-term victory only grows more promising. The generation-past wish of America being more like Europe now appears hopelessly foolish even to the same leftoids who once supported it. The threats of Russia and China, though real and growing, have been again and again exposed for their extreme crookery and hollowness, masturbating themselves and their populations with chauvinism until they’ve comfortably covered up the memory of their extensive corruption and tremendous poverty relative to the Free World. History has not ended, but there is still no conceivable rival to the United States of America as the World’s supreme power, and even our worst presidents can’t ruin things enough to change that course in the foreseeable future.
We are still, by far, the country to bet on. That covers up a lot of heartache. Even for those suffering so large a defeat as November 5th.
Thanks for reading H.R.’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 