Navaho Nation, Monument Valley

Source: Bigstock

Well, so much for last week’s experiment with a race-and-politics-free column about the entertainment industry; it landed with a thud so loud I checked my roof for Eric Clapton’s son (I did that joke years ago and it provoked a furious email from a deeply offended reader. So I’m repeating it…just for him).

From now on I’ll keep the movie ephemera confined to Substack.

Still, if you didn’t want a break from the typical Cole column, I did. I’ve been feeling of late like I’m in a rut. Every week, it’s as if I’m delivering a eulogy in a time loop. A funereal Groundhog Day. “Things are shit,” I write. Then I wake up and again I type “Things are shit.”

One can argue that ruts are unavoidable for weekly columnists. Look at Townhall. If mine’s a loop of pessimism, theirs is the opposite. Week after week of Kolonel Kustardpie Schlichter and Larry “Is my new book cover really a black kid holding my disembodied head? Who the hell thought that looked good?” Elder telling you how we’re totally on the path to VICTORY!

Schlichter: “If we take James Gunn’s SCALP, we’ll end cancel culture! Oh, that didn’t work? Okay, then—if the Tennessee GOP legislators take the SCALPS of the insurrectionist Democrats, that’ll send the left scurrying! Oh, the Dems got their seats back? Uh…well…here’s a flag pin. WE WIN!”

Unz has a rut too: “It’s the Jews!” You’d think Unz readers would get bored with the repetition, but oddly enough the intellectually weakest—those who accept one-sentence answers to all of life’s questions—are also the most voracious blog readers, because without constant recapitulation they risk being alone with their thoughts (“Wait…could Jews really be behind everything? Oh no—creeping doubt! Click on Unz! Ah, sweet validation!”).

And when Unz isn’t blaming Jews, he’s rutting about wacky conspiracies (like taking Covid lab-leak theorizing to the next level by saying the lab was American not Chinese…something I mocked back in 2021).

Gateway Pundit? A fed-blaming rut. Everything’s a fed plot, everyone’s a fed shill.

Ruts, ruts, everywhere.

I was gripped by this existential crisis last week while reading a Substack piece in which the author (no need to name him) regurgitated my themes, almost like a checklist. And it made me realize I have a checklist—an eight-year rotating menu of themes—and I fear that makes me predictable. Others may be repeating me, but I’m repeating myself.

Take my long-running theme regarding black unsalvageables. There’s a percentage of black America that’s by and large unsalvageable (just a percentage, but one too sizable for most people’s liking), and the only remedy is quarantine, via ghettos (the ceding of certain urban areas, much like a reservation system) for those who’ve not yet broken the law and imprisonment for those who have. Now, I’ve repeated this theme time and again; I’ve made no new “discoveries” that alter my views (“holy crap—tricorns and Sowell books do cure thuggery!”).

Blacks are the bullet we caught; Indians are the bullet we dodged. And it’s because we dodged one that we caught the other. As I’ve stated time and again, America got so lucky with Indians, we became blindly, arrogantly full of ourselves, convinced that the total victory and painless aftermath of the Indian wars were somehow due to white skill or divine providence and not sheer luck regarding the genetics and character of the foe. Once the Injuns were broken and pacified, they just went away. A hopeless, finished people. No terrorism, no vengeance-fueled crime sprees. Thankfully, because of the Indian obsession with land and autonomy—their belief that what they’re owed is to be left alone on their holy dirt—America got to tuck them away in a drawer like frayed socks. The higher-functioning ones, the John Herringtons, could freely leave the reservations and join us. The rest could stay drunk and on welfare (sorry, libertarians, but paying a broken people to stay segregated is the best use of taxpayer money imaginable).

After the Civil War, as Indian pacification was going into overdrive, whites cockily thought that dealing with freed blacks would be just as painless. That’s why the original “24 acres” plan was for a series of black-only reservations. But it turned out that what Indians wanted when asked “Okay, what’ll make you happy?” was the complete opposite of what blacks wanted. Whereas Indians desired separation and autonomy, blacks yearn to be part of everything whites do, if not as equals, then superiors. In every profession, in academia, in movies, TV, and advertising, in all aspects of society, they scream, “If you’re there we must be there too. Love us. Include us. We hate you!”

And leftist Jews and whites, who oddly seem content to let 1.1 million Indians rot on reservations (perhaps because Indians are too weak, resigned, and damaged to serve as civilization-disruptors), have done everything in their power to do the opposite with blacks, to make sure there’s nowhere a white in America can go where they don’t see blacks, in person or in the media, and where they aren’t made to feel as though the concerns of blacks outweigh their own.

The “ghetto reservation” idea won’t work, can’t work, because blacks and leftists won’t hear of it. Again, it was sheer good fortune that the Indians’ only demand was “stay off our land, stay away from our people.” That was a blessing. That it happened once in our history was lucky enough. That anyone thought it would happen twice (especially with a physically healthier people) was foolish.

With Injuns, nobody has to worry about fixing them because they said “give us land” and we did, so, problem solved; out of sight, out of mind. Indians are the worst off of every racial/ethnic group in the U.S., but because they got their stupid demand and because generations of whites convinced themselves that somehow this was all that was needed for “justice,” nobody frets. But blacks are the Poochie of the races (Loud! Edgy! Proactive! In your face!), and because they’re always demanding a “fix,” Americans of every political, religious, and ideological stripe have floated cure-alls.

Which means that now everyone has a stake in black failure. The failure of the “black community” (and of course I’m not talking about individual blacks but the rot that persists among the unsalvageables) represents the failure of every presumptive cure. The welfare state, the free market, Christianity (conservative and liberal), Islam, patriotism, communism—no matter what your deal is, blacks have proved it doesn’t help.

That’s why whites will never give up. Giving up means your utopian cure, whatever it may be, has failed, and most people are loath to admit the failure of their most deeply held beliefs.

As “brave” as it seems to publicly talk about black crime stats, and as cool as it is to get a “ohwoweewowow” retweet from Elon Musk on the topic, there’s a risk in that strategy: Publicizing black crime stats only reinforces that there’s a problem that needs fixing. Sure, reading those stats might make a few extra whites more situationally aware on a dark street, but politically, those stats only lead to continued white obsession with “fixes.”

And hard remedies like ghettoization and imprisonment are out of favor, because if the only solution is “lock ’em away” (amputate the limb because it can’t be healed), by logical extension that means all other solutions have failed. The power of America! The power of Christ! Of Muhammad! Of Marx! Whatever you believe in hasn’t worked.

That’s why Soros “reformers” have been so successful; they’ve framed the black criminality problem as “locking them up is abdication, abandonment. We’re smart enough and good enough to find a true resolution!” Americans, even conservative and centrist Americans, respond to that challenge. There’s very little meaning left to being American, and whatever remains, whatever childlike “America is magic!” beliefs still exist in 2023, will be lost for good if we acknowledge that our most historical domestic problem is unfixable.

So yeah, repetition of black crime stats isn’t necessarily the bold move rightists take it to be; you’re just confirming the extent of the problem, thus prodding whites to keep experimenting with fixes.

Remember, Indians are more broken—economically, educationally, medically—than blacks, but nobody tries to fix Indians because nobody talks about Indians. The more you talk about a problem, the more you invite solutions.

Another risk: using blacks (and sentimentality about “foundational Americans”) as an argument against open borders. “Immigrants displace blacks, in neighborhoods and the workforce!” Well, the “great humanitarian” whites who’d never dream of wanting blacks swept out of their city because such a dream would be racist (and, again, would represent the failure of humane solutions) might be open to displacement if doing so made them feel like even greater humanitarians, greater Americans (immigration is our strength!), and greater Christians.

If, in the process of you being so great, the blacks in your city just so happen to slip out of sight and mind and you totally didn’t intend that and oh my God I’d never want such a thing but aw shucks it seems to have occurred anyway, darn it!—well, so be it.

Because what’s another oft-repeated theme of mine? L.A. is better with blacks gone and Mexicans in their place. Does that mean “open the border”? Of course not. I’m just stating a fact. By every metric—especially crime rates—L.A.’s much better now. Crime is still too high, but if you compare the murder stats from 1980s/1990s “black L.A.” to now, the reduction is breathtaking.

There are a thousand good reasons for closing the border, ending asylum, halting illegal and slowing legal immigration. But I’m not sure “It’ll keep blacks in your neighborhood!” is one of them.

Plus, such appeals will never move blacks in significant numbers to vote conservative. Indians have booze, blacks have Democrats. Two suicidal tendencies, but the latter’s more like murder-suicide.

Okay, I’ve cranked out another column. But everything I just wrote is merely a restatement of something I’ve already said over the past eight and a half years. You see my point about a rut? I don’t feel comfortable rewording myself over and over; from now on I’ll leave that to others. I’ll do my best to find something new, and at least semi-original, each week.

Readers have asked me since November to comment on L.A.’s mayoral race, and I haven’t yet. It was only last month, when former mayor Richard Riordan died, that I remembered how he won a majority of the Latino vote in 1997, a feat no L.A. Republican has been able to duplicate since. Indeed, so eager were Mexis to vote for Riordan that, for the first time in modern history, L.A. Latinos voted in greater numbers than blacks, and that wasn’t due to demographic shift—which hadn’t occurred yet—but enthusiasm.

Why’d that happen? Can it be duplicated? Let’s talk about it next week.