In 2015 and ’16, I embedded with Syrian and Afghan migrants who weee pouring into Europe at the time. I even lived in a smuggler’s safe house in Istanbul.

There was no vetting and no way to vet, majority weren’t refugees, and some openly told me they saw migration as “jihad.” My account of life in that safe house, where I pretended to be a would-be asylum-seeker, is in my memoir, “From Fire, by Water.”

It probably makes for uncomfortable reading for Western liberals because I didn’t shy away from saying: These aren’t aspirational migrants.

I read through much of Project 2025, so you don't have to.

Looking beyond liberal hysteria, what struck me about the document is that it's mostly the same old donor-class preferences---libertarianism plus neocon hawkism---dressed up as """Trumpism."""

Join me on a tour? 🧵 Heritage boss Kevin Roberts sets the tone with a foreword heavily focused on woke, but with much less to say about core Trumpian concerns like wages, job security, etc.

In a couple of pages in “Birth of Biopolitics,” Foucault demolishes the idea of liberal socialism (of socialism as the means by which liberalism’s promises are truly and finally fulfilled).

Liberalism has a governmental rationality (whether you like it or not). Socialism doesn’t Socialism, he notes, certainly has a historical rationality. It also has an economic rationality.

But it lacks an independent governmental rationality or “governmentality.”

Socialism, he says, derives its governmental rationality from other systems. Typically liberalism.

I read that WHITE RURAL RAGE book, so you don't have to (and in the hope that it might shorten my stint in purgatory).

The book's thesis is that rural whites bigoted, undemocratic, violent--just awful.

But it's based on shoddy statistics. Join me for a takedown thread? 🧵 The authors insist they have "receipts" (ugh) showing that rural whites are as terrible as they say.

What they actually have is a terrible methodology.

Basically, if rural whites disagree with progressive opinions in polling, then that means they're bigoted/violent/etc.

If blue-city denizens insist on maintaining lifestyles premised on a cheap hyper-exploitable migrant underclass, then they should bear all the externalities---not least sheer, system-breaking numbers---that come with inviting ever more.

This is the theory of red-state busing. If your city or state up north can't tolerate the pressures imposed by millions of newcomers, then why do you think it's fair for front-line states to have to bear those pressures?

Capital is the most revolutionary force in human history, destabilizing all that was settled.

Plenty of pre-Reagan/Thatcher conservative figures recognized this bare reality. Which is why they made peace with the New Deal (and similar movements in Europe). What was the New Deal about? For that matter, what was the Jacksonian uprising---which prefigured the New Deal in complicated ways---all about?

At root, these movements are about asserting the primacy of politics over the destabilizing market.

So @Nigel_Farage had his bank closed based on his political views, and because he did things like retweet a @rickygervais comedy sketch (yes!).

It's a glaring case of what I call *private tyranny*. It's a concept we have to wrap our minds around to understand our world today.🧵 One of the bedrock certainties of the modern Anglo-American Right is that coercion and tyranny are what states do to us, whereas the private sector is where choice and consent reign.

It's a myth. And Farage is only the latest free-marketeer to learn the lesson the hard way.

I’m beginning to despair of the whole right, but especially the anti-woke formation (much as I loathe woke-ism). There’s no positive vision to it. It’s unserious. It seems designed to stave off real populism at the level of political economy. The Biden WH has put forward a serious vision for a post-neoliberal order and an industrial policy. You may debate its parameters, but it’s a vision.

Meanwhile, the right is like “get your hands off my Bud Lite.” The two candidates boast about which of them was MOARRR anti-vax.

Today @compactmag_ is one year old! Since our launch, we've seen tremendous growth in paid subscriptions---and published some incredible, agenda-setting journalism that's been featured in NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Vanity Fair, NYMag, Fox News, etc. etc.

Four of my personal favorites here: There are too many people to thank at this milestone. But for me personally, the list begins, of course, with my business partner, friend, and comrade, @matthewschmitz. Our debt to our team---senior editor @Nina_Compact and managing editor @g_shullenberger---is immeasurable.

RECAP:

This weekend, I organized the largest academic conference ever held at @FranciscanU. We brought together 250 scholars, journalists, activists, and students to discuss how to restore our wounded political community. 🧵 Speakers included @PatrickDeneen, @gjpappin, @ccpecknold, @Vermeullarmine, @darelmass, @MaryCImparato, Michael Lind, @matthewschmitz, @josh_hammer, @rachelbovard, @DrScottHahn, @JDVance1, and more.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that this Pinkoski essay on why Zemmour flopped has implications for the broader, global right. It's a crucial piece for the American "New Right."

/THREAD/

compactmag.com/article/why-le… In case you haven't read the essay, Pinkoski argues that Zemmour went against his own insight from 2019. Back then, he insisted that the right's chances hinge on the fate of the working class. As a campaigner in 2021-22, however, he tried to cobble together a bourgeois base.

Friends: Last year, I left my job as op-ed editor of the NYPost.

I'm now delighted to reveal why: It was to launch @compactmag_, your new home for independent journalism that challenges our ruling class.

Please read and become a member today. compactmag.com 🧵 Our columnists and contributing editors form the backbone of this work.

Columnists include @LeeSmithDC, Christopher Caldwell, Sam Kriss, Adam Lehrer (@SafetyPropagan1), Nina Power, Geoff Shullenberger (@daily_barbarian), and Malcom Kyeyune.

If you feel yourself getting swept by the tide of military interventionism, just remember: This is the same ruling class and the same ideologues who plunged the West into multiple bloody, wasteful and pointless wars over the last 20 years.

Honor your own skepticism. 🧵 Don't be cowed by the apparent unanimity of prominent personalities banging war drums. That happened in the last two decades, as well. It wasn't just Bush or "the neocons" who pushed the regime-change wars. It was The Atlantic and The Economist and The New Yorker, too.

It’s frustrating to watch people, not least journalists, fall into the same structural information traps we saw play out in:

Iraq
The Arab Spring
The 2015 migrant crisis
And COVID

In each of these cases, there was reassessment and regret afterward. But the lessons don’t stick. Patterns:

1. Emotional images overwhelm reason in Western regimes that prize “public reason.”

In the Arab Spring, it was images of young, cellphone-wielding “secular” democrats; the body of a dead child lying on the shore during the migrant crisis; Italy’s COVID wards.

In 12 hours since re-posting my May 2021 WSJ essay calling for the restoration of blue laws, I've received a good dozen replies from ostensible liberals urging me to go the fuck back to Iran.

Thread 1/x The ethnic animus aside, this reveals something amusing about "classical" liberalism: namely, that it rests on an ahistorical fantasy of what America was at its founding and for most of its history.

Sabbatarianism was very much an American tradition going back to colonial times

Robert Tracinski — one of the minor libertarians who obsessively covers me — has a piece out in @Quillette, his 1,375th attempted takedown of me and of post-liberals more generally.

(Look, you know we’re bad guys, because when shot from a low angle we look sinister.) THREAD Like many of the bewigged classical liberals whom he claims as intellectual ancestors, Tracinski relies heavily on hysteria — and rank dishonesty.

Consider what he has to say about the chapter in my book THE UNBROKEN THREAD that concerns conscience and authority.

If I have one piece of advice for younger journalists, it's this: Don't spend your early career hawking opinions/takes. No one cares about your takes.

Rather, REPORT. Pick up the phone. Go somewhere and take notes. Write profiles. Get interviews. Dig up buried truths. Especially on the right, we have way too many would-be Ben Shapiros and George Wills, and not nearly enough would-be Janet Malcolms, Glenn Greenwalds, David Remnicks (yes, in his day, he did some great reporting), etc.

Even in the age of yeoman farmers on the frontier, this mythology did harm. The American frontier farmer speculated on land, which he hastily planted. The speculation left him vulnerable to creditors. His methods damaged the soil.

See Ch. 1 of Hofstadter’s “Age of Reform.”

https://twitter.com/CapstoneReport/status/1453918121778155529

The American frontier farmer’s methods shocked European observers in the 19th century. Back in the Old World, they used soil very methodically, expanding slowly, etc. Of course, American land was so vast and rich that the resulting crises were mostly crises of individual farms.

I have to say, like @gjpappin, having engaged them intensively since 2017-18, I now find the liberalism/integralism debates downright tedious.

Those of us who fought these battles have now taken them in other, more concrete dimensions. 1/x Roughly speaking the upshot is this:

Do you still believe the state can at best only enshrine disagreement, “free speech” and neutrality as the highest goods? If yes, go back to Square One — you’re still a liberal.

Do you still believe politics is downstream from culture? Ditto

I got the vaccine in May and in theory support vaccine mandates. But what matters is that at least some share of the American working class — the size of the movement is as yet unclear — has *had it* with the medico-corporate regime. theamericanconservative.com/articles/take-… This is the same medico-corporate regime that shut down houses of worship and strictly proscribed anti-lockdown protests—only to turn around and treat the 2020 race riots as perfectly salutary from a public-health standpoint. theamericanconservative.com/articles/take-…

Sigh. Another half-baked, underdeveloped critique of the "postliberals," including yours truly.

Why do people give themselves permission to weigh in on things without having done the reading? Or even thought things through?

1/x

hedgehogreview.com/web-features/t… The big tell is the absence, for the most part, of any quotations from any of the postliberals. He chides us for failing to attend to various 19th- and 20th-century critics (Lasch, Marx, Matthew Arnold, Tocqueville). Excuse me, but do the f--ing read.