I recently came across an article by Andrew Torba entitled "The End Of Conservatism and Our Nationalist Vision For The Future" discussing the failures of Conservatives, including the following:
They conserved their donor portfolios. They conserved their own jobs. They conserved their respectability among the very elites who hate you and want you destroyed.
But what did they not conserve?
Your small town Main Street that was gutted by Wal-Mart and Amazon while they preached about “free markets.”
Your children’s innocence, shredded by drag queen story hour and pornographic school curricula while they mumbled about “local control.”
Your sons’ futures, shipped overseas to die in desert wars for democracy while they saluted the flag and called it patriotism.
Your daughters’ safety, sacrificed at the altar of open borders and “legal immigration” while they collected campaign checks from the Chamber of Commerce.
Your faith, mocked and marginalized while they assured you that “Judeo-Christian values” were the real bedrock (whatever that means).
Your nation, which doesn’t even exist anymore in any meaningful sense, having been reduced to a GDP and a flag they wrap themselves in while auctioning off the remains.
Conservatives lost every single battle that mattered. Every. Single. One. After the complete and total failure of their entire project, they have the audacity—the unmitigated gall—to tell the rising generation of right-wing youth that we’re the problem. That we’re too extreme. That our vision is “un-American.”
Let's talk about just one of his points: open borders and immigration. While Torba casts it as an issue of public safety, it is broader than that. The societal erosion--corrosion might be the better word--of mass migration has impacted jobs, self-worth, crime, even religiosity. Jamie K. Wilson describes the societal corrosion caused by mass migration in his piece "'Jobs Americans Won't Do': The Lie That Broke a Nation and the Economic and Social Devastation It Hid." He
describes growing up in a "one-stoplight town held together by tobacco,
construction, and the kinds of gritty jobs that built the region’s
character," 40 miles north of Louisville, Kentucky. "My dad ran a small
construction contracting business and held a small tobacco base, which
gives you the legal right to grow a certain weight of tobacco," he
explains. "My brothers and I worked tobacco as teenagers, starting at 12
or 13, and my brothers did construction with Dad as soon as we were old
enough to hold a hammer."
The
tobacco work was hard, but it paid well back in the mid-1980s. "Every
kid I knew in high school worked tobacco, along with a good share of the
adults. It was the backbone of the community." But then the illegals
started showing up.
Farmers
who had paid teenagers and local laborers fair wages realized they
could hire adults from Mexico and Central America for far less and house
them in the kinds of conditions Americans would never tolerate: eight
men to a sagging, leaking trailer with no electricity, no running water,
no insulation. They were paid in cash, they didn’t complain, they
worked year-round, and they had no leverage because they knew their
employers could always get them deported. Within a few seasons, American
teenagers were no longer hired. Within a few more, the full-time local
farmhands, many of whom had been in the area for generations, were gone,
too. My parents saw exactly what was happening when one neighbor
proudly moved an entire illegal crew into a run-down trailer on their
property on a hillside, right in the center of a dairy cow pasture. They
thought they had found a clever solution to their labor costs. My
parents were disgusted, because they understood what it meant: the
beginning of the end for the community’s economic life.
Then
the illegals started moving into the construction business. Those
hiring Americans couldn't compete against the low-ball bids from those
using illegal labor. "Small local contractors began collapsing one after
another, and with them went the trades that had once provided steady
work for generations." After that, it was the meat packing plants.
"Locals stopped applying because they couldn’t survive on what those
jobs now paid. The companies didn’t care. Illegal crews would fill the
shifts at half the cost."
The
fourth wave was quieter but devastating: the wives and older kids of
the new arrivals began filling fast-food, restaurant, and service jobs.
Those jobs disappeared for American citizens as quickly as the farm and
construction work had. Suddenly, teenagers couldn’t get any jobs at all.
The ambitious ones left for the cities; the rest were stranded with no
path into adulthood. That drained the cultural lifeblood from the town.
When you lose your youth, you lose your future.
The
social collapse followed the economic one. Welfare, once nearly
nonexistent, became a survival mechanism. A government housing complex
went up, something unimaginable a decade earlier. Property crime
increased as people stole scrap metal, tools, and anything they could
sell.
The
illegals also brought with them meth and harder drugs, which further
eroded civilized society. "Families began to fracture. Kids were raised
by grandparents. Churches thinned. Schools struggled. The town didn’t
implode all at once. It simply withered, season by season, job by job,
until it became a pale version of what it had been." He concludes:
Illegal
labor isn’t a solution. It’s a dependency — one that corrodes wages,
destroys skill pipelines, hollows out communities, and leaves entire
sectors vulnerable to collapse. If we want a strong and resilient
country, we must confront that reality now. The alternative is more
Charlottes, more hollowed-out towns, and more lost generations, all
sacrificed on the altar of a system that was never sustainable in the
first place.
What
happened to low skilled labor jobs in the 1980s is now happening--has been happening--to
skilled labor and white collar positions. Do you think the end result
will be any different?
But what is the response from the elites that brought this about? How about this piece from Liel Leibovitz in the New York Post: "America is no longer left vs. right: It’s the resentful vs. the resilient." His position is if you didn't make it, you must be stupid and lazy. He lumps Zohran Mamdani with Fuentes (he can't even bother to provide his first name), stating: "Both believe America is rotten and unfair, and that the only way to fix it is to burn it all down first and worry about the rest later."
On the other side of this divide are resilient folks who have very little time and patience for the language and logic of victimhood.
They know we have problems, but they also understand that this is America, and the one key feature of this great and godly country is that it gives everyone a fair shot.
Don’t like the way your employer is practicing partisan politics rather than journalism? Quit, start your own publication, and if you’re good enough (hey there, Bari Weiss!), you’ll soon have a much more valuable media company on your hands.
Have a decent idea and the skill to pull it off? Build something worthwhile (here’s looking at you, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum!) and, who knows, you might just sell it for tens of billions of dollars one day.
If you think these are just exceptions to the rule, fairy tales that have little to teach us about real life in real America, take a quick look at the stats: Adjusting for both inflation and changes in household size, the median income in America has soared by 40% since 1970, reaching a historical peak of $83,730 in 2023.
Which, put bluntly, means that, all yowling about affordability aside, things in America are looking kind of rosy.
But here is Weiss's "fair shot": "Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro and Dan Senor tell Jewish Leadership Conference how they benefited from Jewish ethnic networking in their personal lives and discuss how Jews should best use their significant 'capital' to advance the interests of their 'community.'" Telling the younger generations that "fat, drunk, and gentile is no way to go through life, son," is awful messaging.
Oh, and about that median income of $83,730, Michael Green explains:
The official poverty line for a family of four in 2024 is $31,200. The median household income is roughly $80,000. We have been told, implicitly, that a family earning $80,000 is doing fine—safely above poverty, solidly middle class, perhaps comfortable.
But if Orshansky’s crisis threshold were calculated today using her own methodology, that $80,000 family would be living in deep poverty.
I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a Basic Needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the “Participation Tickets” required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024.
Using conservative, national-average data:
Childcare: $32,773
Housing: $23,267
Food: $14,717
Transportation: $14,828
Healthcare: $10,567
Other essentials: $21,857
Required net income: $118,009
Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500.
This is Orshansky’s “too little” threshold, updated honestly. This is the floor.
It's no wonder that having children is the best predictor of bankruptcy (and almost guaranteed if you have a special needs child) and the birth rates are plummeting.
And about the growing division between "the resentful" and "the resilient", Green states:
Economists and politicians look at this anger and call it racism, or lack of empathy. They are missing the mechanism.
Altruism is a function of surplus. It is easy to be charitable when you have excess capacity. It is impossible to be charitable when you are fighting for the last bruised banana.
The family earning $65,000—the family that just lost their subsidies and is paying $32,000 for daycare and $12,000 for healthcare deductibles—is hyper-aware of the family earning $30,000 and getting subsidized food, rent, childcare, and healthcare.
They see the neighbor at the grocery store using an EBT card while they put items back on the shelf. They see the immigrant family receiving emergency housing support while they face eviction.
They are not seeing “poverty.” They are seeing people getting for free the exact things that they are working 60 hours a week to barely afford. And even worse, even if THEY don’t see these things first hand… they are being shown them:
[snip]
The anger isn’t about the goods. It’s about the breach of contract. The American Deal was that Effort ~ Security. Effort brought your Hope strike closer. But because the real poverty line is $140,000, effort no longer yields security or progress; it brings risk, exhaustion, and debt.
When you are drowning, and you see the lifeguard throw a life vest to the person treading water next to you—a person who isn’t swimming as hard as you are—you don’t feel happiness for them. You feel a homicidal rage at the lifeguard.
We have created a system where the only way to survive is to be destitute enough to qualify for aid, or rich enough to ignore the cost. Everyone in the middle is being cannibalized. The rich know this… and they are increasingly opting out of the shared spaces:
What is being described here is popular immiseration, as Peter Turchin termed it, and he discovered through his research that it is one of the key developments necessary for revolution and civil war.
The U.S. has come to the edge of Civil War due to popular immiseration before, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but the monied interests eventually blinked: immigration was severely restricted in the 1920s and various labor reforms and a basic social safety net introduced during the Depression. But I see no sign of the elites backing down this time around. The result of the revolution will be, according to Spengler, a new "Caesar": "The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon, democracy. After a long triumph of world-city economy and its interests over political creative force, the political side of life manifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will." As you read of the continuous obstructions thrown up against even the very modest reforms that Trump has sought to enact you can understand why this coming Caesar will have to operate outside of Constitutional boundaries. I'm not saying I support such measures or hope for a revolution or civil war, only that it will happen. Whether a unified country emerges from the other side is anyone's guess.
