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Will Tanner

@Will_Tanner_1

Jan 2

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Remember, it was foreign labor displacing Romans that infuriated Tiberius Gracchus and sparked his political career. As Plutarch records:

“[W]hen Tiberius went through Tuscany to Numantia, and found the country almost depopulated, there being hardly any free husbandmen or shepherds, but for the most part only barbarian, imported slaves, he then first conceived the course of policy which in the sequel proved so fatal to his family. Though it is also most certain that the people themselves chiefly excited his zeal and determination in the prosecution of it, by setting up writings upon the porches, walls, and monuments, calling upon him to reinstate the poor citizens in their former possessions.”

And it is not to be forgotten that it is that foreign labor that hollowed out the Republic from within, replacing sturdy yeomen with foreign slaves, and driving the former footsoldiers of the Republic into the inner city slums:

"the rich men of the neighbourhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people's names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor, who were thus deprived of their farms, were no longer either ready, as they had formerly been, to serve in war or careful in the education of their children; insomuch that in a short time there were comparatively few freemen remaining in all Italy, which swarmed with workhouses full of foreign-born slaves. These the rich men employed in cultivating their ground of which they dispossessed the citizens.”

Tiberius Gracchus, describing the extent to which the rapacious Roman plutocrats had disenfranchised the beating heart of the Republic, said:

“The wild beasts that roam over Italy... have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else; houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their [commanders] exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy; for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of all these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.”

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Will Tanner

@Will_Tanner_1

Dec 30, 2024

He just died so we're supposed to pretend he's a saint, but Carter was instrumental in killing the free, prosperous state of Rhodesia and aiding Mugabe in his takeover of it, then transforming it into hellish Zimbabwe

In fact, after Harold Wilson, Carter's the key villain🧵👇

I've written much about this before, but a quick summary to set the scene:

Carter was elected in '76 and acceded to power in '77. This coincided with the Bush War taking its final, much more intense form, with Soviet and CCP-backed rebels infiltrating from Zambia and Mozambique, which the Portuguese had lost in '75 after the '74 Carnation Revolution

The Rhodesian Front government, still generally supported by most blacks and whites within the country, was fighting for its life against those communist rebels and in desperate need of Western aid to survive. Its survival would have mean a bulwark against the communists in one of the world's key regions.

It needed that aid because the South Africans had generally stopped helping, as they sensed which way the wind was blowing and sought detente in their region with the black communist governments, and thought throwing Rhodesia to the wolves would buy them some time. Meanwhile, the whole world other than South Africa and Israel had gone along with UN sanctions of Rhodesia, cutting it off from needed trade and access to supplies

So, with the South Africans betraying them, the British unhelpful, and the communists surrounding them, the Rhodesians desperately needed American aid

In a sane world, it would have been given. Rhodesia was free, with personal and property rights generally protected and respected for white and black alike. It was willing to fight communism and, at the point of Carter's election, had already done so for a decade. It could feed Africa and had vast mineral reserves. So, it was just the sort of state you would think America would want to aid in the Cold War, and help defend from communism

That aid was given by some Americans personally, such as Soldier of Fortune's Robert Brown, and some Americans arrived to fight as volunteers...but it was left to see if Carter would let Rhodesia fall to the communists, or provide the little bit of aid and sanctions relief it needed to keep fighting

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Will Tanner

@Will_Tanner_1

Dec 28, 2024

https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507

It's incredible how little reflection went into this "America needs a billion Tiger Moms" post, as it totally misunderstands what sort of spirit made the West great, and is just an attempt to replace what remains of that unique spirit with a slavish one

A short 🧵👇

https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507

What made the West great, and indeed what made the Occident different from everywhere else, was a very different attitude: individual excellence paired with social charm and grace, and caring deeply about that social aspect of life

So, adventurers, officers, country squires, and all the rest who took over the world on behalf of the Occident over the 18th and 19th century were expected to be well-read, be brave, and be charming; except in rare cases of eccentricity, it wouldn't do to just have one of those virtues

George Washington is a great example of this. His plantation thrived as he switched it to grain and developed mutually beneficial businesses that thrived along the plantation, such as a fishing fleet and grain mill

He was brave in combat, a fearless adventurer, well-read and knowledgeable of the ancient world (as shown by his modeling of himself on the greatest of Plutarch's biographies), and devoted to social grace, with one of his earliest writing being a book of manners and his clothing always being in perfect order

Read 16 tweets

Will Tanner

@Will_Tanner_1

Dec 27, 2024

"They do the jobs Americans can't and won't"

The current argument for H-1b expansion is just the illegal immigration argument applied to office work, and is what happened during the Gilded Age, to America's great misfortune

A short 🧵👇

That is incorrect in white-collar work and in the blue-collar work ravaged by decades of mass migration into America.

What is undoubtedly true is that Third World imports can and will work for far less than Americans, and often in far worse conditions...

Well, that and, as @loganclarkhall pointed out, the groups prioritized for H-1b economic migration tend to vote blue (Indians, for example, went for Kamala 70-30)

That's why they're wanted. It's not that Americans won't do the jobs

We have a ton of very talented software engineers, computer scientists, and so on...many of them can't get jobs, even coming from some of the top technical schools

But, those talented Americans are generally white men. Not only do they expect and deserve higher salaries and reasonable hours, but companies are effectively punished for hiring them because of DEI and affirmative action rules

At the point where the best Americans aren't getting jobs in a field...you don't need more immigrants to replace them, which is what the

Read 15 tweets

Will Tanner

@Will_Tanner_1

Dec 20, 2024

Why is it that leftists are always so opposed to pedos facing any sort of justice for their abuse of kids? It's not that they're all pedos, which is the usual answer

No, it's Bioleninism, the idea that nature's worst should rule, the dominating ideology of the present 🧵👇

That's not to say many of them aren't pedos, that's certainly the case. But it's not the whole situation, not why it's allowed

Take the case below: some transgender weirdo buying a child through surrogacy so that he can play mom.

Why would the regime allow this shocking, dangerous behavior to happen? It's because they want a loyal class of followers - an army of jannissaries - who will be ruthlessly loyal to this regime because it's the only one that'll allow them to act out their worst and most degenerate impulses.

No other regime would allow this. It's too sick, too weird, too morally wrong. But that's not really the point. Ours doesn't care about morality. It does care about having soldiers in its war on nature.

So, the allowance of anti-social behavior, and indeed the glorification of awful impulses, is how the regime builds its follower base

By waging a war on nature, or at least creating a legal framework allowing others to do so, it creates a class of people whose only shred of legitimacy in their behavior, behavior to which they're quite committed because it is their "identity."

Thus, they're loyal to it, and will be till the end, because they and their existence is wrapped up in the continuation of a war on nature that, given its inherent instability, requires ever more effort and manpower to keep going

Read 10 tweets

Will Tanner

@Will_Tanner_1

Dec 19, 2024

This is undoubtedly accurate, but I don't see much recognition of why it's the case

Democracy, by its nature, empowers bureaucracy

This is the opposite of rule by gentlemen, and it's what has led us quite quickly to the hell of bureaucratic tyranny

I'll explain in the 🧵👇

It all comes down to incentives, and the fact that there are two basic types of on-the-ground governance, whatever the highest form of government is:

One is local lords, or gentry. This is when the big landowner(s) in a given area, generally a town or county, handles the administration of it. This is generally the traditional form of government, hence the title "count" and unit "county," though barons also filled this role.

The other is bureaucracy of one sort another. This is when appointed government officials have a grant of power to rule over a certain aspect of life in the aforementioned administrative unit. This is the Parks and Rec form of government, where various forms of petty individuals are put in charge to regulate some aspect of life in that area

Importantly, most forms of national government can use either form of local administration

Kings are best known for having nobles under them, this is the count-->duke--->king form of county and region administration that is famous. But the Byzantines were known for their bureaucracy, at certain points (they also had a dux form of administration), as were the Chinese emperors. Similarly, the Prussians had their junkers, but those were gradually replaced by the famous Prussian bureaucracy

And while Republics like the French and American Republics are best known for their bureaucracies, the pre-Lincoln American Republic was long largely ruled and administered at the local level by the large landowners. The Virginia gentry, Southern plantation owners, and New York baronial estate owners were long in charge of state government, state representation in the national government, and county administration. It is of the "county" that all the characters in Gone with the Wind speak at the beginning, for example, and it is they at the barbeque who ruled that county

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