More on the long history of affirmative action/DEI in the US. These excerpts are from Chapter 5 of the 1992 book "Paved With Good Intentions," and cover affirmative action outside of education and employment. The 1978 Community Reinvestment Act forced banks into giving subsidized loans to nonwhites.
When broadcasting licenses change, citizens can challenge the racial bona fides of their hiring policy, allowing black activists to extort money and jobs through threat of lawsuit.
There are tax breaks for selling broadcasting stations to nonwhites, in the tens of millions of dollars.
Special economic zones with tax privileges and other benefits in black neighborhoods, plus affirmative action in the GOP (running nonwhites in safe seats).
Many public and some private pension funds preferentially invest in nonwhite-owned businesses, or require contractors to have racial preferences for their own contractors.
It is the law that real estate ads must show a certain number of black faces. Even newspapers for real estate ads placed by others not having enough blacks,
The Voting Rights Act requires special gerrymandered racial districts for minorities. New York has a local version of the same.
Employers have been sued for asking about employees credit ratings (disparate impact). Louisiana was forced to hire black judges. Michigan threatened to withhold funds in 1989 if the Detroit orchestra did not end blind auditions and hire more blacks.
A New Jersey town had a sensible enough law that only residents could be hired for public positions. Insanely, the NAACP successfully sued them to force them to hire according to the demographics of the surrounding counties because too few blacks lived in the town itself.
Education discourse: to close the gaps, teach blacks first and let the black students teach to everyone else. Surprised this wasn't resurrected for the Floyd era.
California Highway Patrol advertised job vacancies in Mexico to meet race quotas for Hispanics.
Racial shakedowns of moviemaking in NYC and tourism in Miami.
Blacks threatening bloodshed and terrorism if blacks are not hired as police chiefs or given $100M.
The saga of Kansas City, Missouri's magnet school, where a federal judge gave himself the right to impose massive taxes to make the magnet school so luxurious more whites would attend (for integration purposes). Supreme Court ruled judges could levy taxes for racial purposes.
Rule of law, European Court of Human Rights: the ECHR decided in 2024 that Article 8 (right to privacy and family life) implied a right to protection from climate change and Switzerland was violating human rights by not having sufficiently-strong climate policies.
You might recognize Article 8 from all of those stories of MENA or African rapists and murderers being undeportable (it would violate their right to family life).
(This same logic could be applied to almost anything with a potentially-deleterious impact to human health, which is ~everything, so this is the ECHR giving itself unlimited power over domestic politics of member states)
Brazil is Woke Utopia. Racism is illegal (unbailable, worse than homicide), so is transphobia and damaging a woman's feelings. Everyone is mixed and the country is heavily black, but also there's extremely strong (50%+ quotas) affirmative action, and a judge rules by decree.
Extremely strong gun control laws, which are not enforced against actual criminals.
Insanely high pension spending despite being a poor and young (by OECD standards) country.
This is a conceptual error. The whole reason Orban became enemy #1 for European libs was refusing "Syrian refugees" in 2015. It has nothing to do with "vulgarity" or foreign associations (which came later as an attempt to survive EU hostility). Those are just excuses.
You can't actually trick libs into being OK with "no Africans and Middle Easterners" by being polite about it.
The stuff about vulgarity, corruption etc (neither of which were particularly bad in Hungary, though both existed) is PR. And you can't stop libs from running PR campaigns. What was real was Orban mismanaging the economy 2022-2026 (after doing a perfectly solid job until then).
This is even more true in Britain. The non-US Anglosphere is incredibly illiberal (not just in commerce, but also in freedom of speech and group-rights frameworks) even by the standards of an already long-post-liberal West.
My view is that major Western countries transitioned from broadly liberal to broadly socialist/social-democratic around the Great Depression, and then from there to New Left (with more continuity, but still big changes around things like technology) in the 1960s.
In the US, this is obscured because the socialists - the New Dealers - called themselves "liberals" (which, unlike in Europe, was not in common use in the US already) explicitly as a PR strategy. But it's obvious in Britain, where Labour pwned the actual liberal prty.
Thread with excerpts from "The Information State" by Jacob Siegel (2026). Thesis: The Information State is a new form of political regime that "governs by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena, which it uses to engineer the public’s compliance."
Siegel traces what he calls the information state to the GWOT, when the 1990s libertarian ethos and hostility to the state of tech was replaced with a public-private infrastructure for, initially, mass surveillance and debanking of potential terrorists.
However, tech staid away from domestic issues or governing discourse, until Obama, beginning with a strong partnership between the White House and Google.
Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.
YouTube was the most important platform for reaching The Youth and also uniquely compatible with monetization, allowing independent political/intellectual entrepreneurs to make a career. Closed 2015-2019.
Reddit was known for its "anything goes" speech policy in 2015, and was the hub for text-based debate between normal people on opposing sides of issues. Turned into a leftist echo-chamber to spite r/TheDonald.