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One of the great ironies of life.
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Today is that over the last century.
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Or so, we've been living through highly mythological events. However, at the same time, the public has had their creative impulses so beaten out of them that people can't see it.
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The world today is a place of.
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Such staggering depth and beauty, but people's eyes have been trained not to see it. For an easy example, think of the enormous sword of Damocles that is the atom bomb.
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The atom bomb brought us into a.
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New era of history, which we've never really been able to recover from. The great paradox of a weapon so powerful, it brought about peace and could power entire nations, and yet could destroy all of civilization in an afternoon. There's also the parable of the Russian.
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Empire, a profoundly promising state which sold.
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Its soul to communism and lost everything that made it great. Or World War I, which killed the.
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Old Europe in an epic conflagration, much.
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Like the wars of Tolkien Silmarillion, which raged across the north, killing the old great kingdoms of Middle Earth. I'd like to posit an entry for the coming mythology of the industrial age, where our descendants will look back on this era to find what does and doesn't work for the industrial world.
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That being the parable of the rise.
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And fall of California. I think it's not impossible that for thousands of years California can be remembered as a cautionary tale.
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At least it should be.
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But humans are only rarely known for their wisdom. We forget that the Bible was written in a Middle east with dozens of distinct civilizations, each with their own histories, stories and gods. Places like Babylon, Sodom, Gomorrah, Ascalon, or Canaan, our names in a book to us. But to the ancient Jews who lived thousands of years ago, they saw a.
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Highly diverse or complex world, which in.
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A lot of cases collapsed due to moral degeneracy. Maybe in thousands of years, California will just be a name like that. Once our descendants are among the stars. Who can say?
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I sure can't.
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The story of California is that of a single variable destroying a society. Carol Quigley, one of my favorite historians, has split a functioning culture into a series of variables, each one of which.
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Has to work for that society to survive.
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And this is why the game of history is so hard. California had a perfect geography, was, by some metrics, the wealthiest place on Earth.
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Had a perfect legal or political structure.
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Was utterly militarily safe, had the greatest accumulation of human capital on Earth, and too many other blessings to name. However, there was one thing that California utterly lacked and they will suffer very dearly.
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For California is the story of a.
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Society being broken by one variable, that being culture, and it's a parable about how you can have everything else except culture, but without that you have nothing.
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One of the reasons the left has dominated the institutions for decades is because the right or the non left doesn't support art and music the same way the left does. You can change this Diamond Day of Elite Fatria has announced the release of the band's second studio album since being blacklisted by leftists seven years ago. Their lead singer is a friend of mine who's had a crazy life. He was born in Germany, trained as a linguist in Marine Corps intelligence, had deep depression for two decades, went on a Tyler Durden arc, was in prison for five years, and has since tried to address men's issues in a variety of ways, mostly by being a musician who has not retracted support for men's issues, which is what he was blacklisted for. He's made an advance copy for their new album available for viewers of my channel. Even if you don't normally download music.
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I want you to head to the.
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Link on the screen elitefitria.com Elliot SVRS and buy it. Get 25% off when you use the code whatifalthist at checkout. If you can't afford the album, give the band some support by buying some stickers. If you can, why not buy both?
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Also, share all of this music with.
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Your based buddies and make memes with it. Peace.
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California Today I've wanted to make this video for years since I've had a strange relationship with California over the course of my life. Although I will say not an entirely negative one, since I do want to give this state justice where it's due. I've spent a few months in both Northern and Southern California and I've gotten a pretty good vibe reading on the culture. I wanted to read a few more.
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Books on the culture, but and since.
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I went back to California for work purposes, I finally dusted off a few histories on the topic to get a good read on the state's history and culture. One of the intellectual points I've really been trying to hammer home over the years is that cultural differences inside America really do matter, and I'm going to.
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Argue even more so than those inside Europe today.
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The current narrative, which goes back to the World wars era, is that America is a single country, stemming from our shared history of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II, in which internal differences are minor, where American is a constitutional identity stemming from our liberal values.
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I disagree.
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I think it's obvious that even if America became a military dictatorship, now throwing away the Constitution, which I'm not condoning, it's it would still be American because it wouldn't be any other culture. That means American is a ethnic and cultural identity, not a political one. This attempt to destroy the old American culture is part of the modernist project to erase any individuality, to turn us all into the same global Homo writ large. Until the time of the U.S. civil War, Americans referred to their nation as a plural or as a series of federated independent countries, that being these United States. It's also why our currency says e pluribus unum or out of many, one. This implies that inside America there are separate nations which have their own right to identify in the same way that a European country would. The genetic differences in British Americans from the north and the south are comparable to those between different European countries. And it is as if there would be a desert or a mountain range on the Mason Dixon Line between the.
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North and the South.
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I have an anthropologist friend who makes objective tests of cultural difference where he says a Pennsylvanian is about as culturally different from a Californian as a German is from a Pole, which sounds reasonable to me. Culture is a complicated thing where on one level a German is clearly very different from a Greek in language or history. My friend Andrew Heaton once said that an educated German and Greek will have a philosophic and political outlook more similar to each other than a Texan will from a Californian. On the global scale, Western Europe has become unified under the bureaucracy, while America is still strongly divided, which ripples across the entire world. The cultural differences inside America are great enough to project across the entire planet. As we can see with the global appeal of the American culture war manifesting in countries like Brazil, Germany or Korea. Due to these reasons, I think studying different regions of America as if they're different countries is totally worthwhile and necessary at the same time. And I apologize if I'm being mean here, but California will be more important to the trajectory of world history than all of Western Europe combined. Now, California is still where tomorrow is being forged and is the cutting edge of Western civilization. Before Europeans start seething, Remember, you guys totally brought this on yourself. After 500 years of global predominance, California is probably the most important place on Earth for its size. Now, inside it you have Silicon Valley, which pulled a historic coup de grace through through gaining global dominance almost overnight in the digital revolution. They're doing it again with AI. Now Silicon Valley controls the internal switchboard of global civilization in that in the new network age. Even if Silicon Valley doesn't control the network forever, it does bear historic responsibility for summoning this historic titan onto the world. Then you have Hollywood, who has done everything it can to destroy its own global predominance, which was staggering before Hollywood. Is modernity's mythology our cultural operating system in which how we see culture, nation, family identity, religion and so many other topics have been indelibly created by Hollywood. Anthropologists like to talk about the Hollywoodification of the world, where you'll see culturally Californian traits manifest even in places like Africa or Indonesia or Eastern Europe, far away from America. It's hard to overestimate the importance of Hollywood to the culture of the last century in every way possible. Finally, this isn't even everything California has to offer. Since it's a truly diverse state in its excellence. Keep in mind that California is larger than Italy or Britain. The state is possibly the most productive land agriculturally for its scale on Earth, with the Central Valley producing gargantuan amounts of vegetables alongside California also producing respectable amounts of oil or manufacturing. And being one of the most important states in the country for military production, California became the state it did. Since America needed to produce its Pacific Fleet to fight the Japanese in World War II. California has a larger economy than than every single nation in Europe besides Germany. I would split California today into three segments based off three dominant industries, the first being SoCal, based around Hollywood in the greater Los Angeles region. It's hard to talk about California's culture since it's so understated than most older societies where cultural differences were broadcasted. But it's still very real. Southern California is plurality Latino now, but is one of the most ethnically diverse places on Earth. There's a singer called Jenny Aiko who's a mix of Spanish, Dominican, Japanese, Native American, African American, German, Jewish and Australian ancestry. I memorized the ethnicities of celebrities as a hobby and I saw that and I knew she could only be from Los Angeles, but which was correct. I remember climbing on top of a mountain in a park in Los Angeles and seeing the enormous ocean of lights in every direction. An area the size of Connecticut filled with endless urbanization. There's something beautiful and disgusting in it at the same time. Los Angeles was built off entertainment and the military, but it has a lot more than that going on. Los Angeles combines glamour with philistinism. When I was in prestigious buildings in Los Angeles, I would always Check the building materials, and they were practically never authentic. At the same time, LA is our age's mythological core, the place where the lives of billions of people dreaming the future unwittingly stemmed from. We have all become, on some level, Angelenos at this point. Then you have Northern California based around San Francisco, where which for non Californians is actually in the middle of the state. California's coastline has a Mediterranean climate like Italy, while the north has temperate forests like Northwest Europe or the American East Coast. Once you go inside the state, you have endless baking, industrial agricultural plains like the Central Valley. On the edges are the godlike Sierra Nevadas, the the Moon like deserts of Death Valley or the Mojave, and the greatest trees on Earth, the redwoods, which are thousands of years old. Nature gave California mythical geography while the humans built ugly cement blocks. San Francisco feels like a natural desecration, where this beautiful bay, which should look like Marseille or Genoa, has been filled with ugly cement dicks descending from the sky. The roads are terrible in San Francisco too. I see Northern California as the extension of the Pacific Northwest culture, which stretches up to Vancouver and Seattle. I would put the border between SoCal and NorCal at around Santa Barbara. Northern California is based off technological wizardry, not myth making. San Francisco was the most important city on the American west coast in the 19th century, emerging from the Gold rush and then becoming the end of the Transcontinental railroad as the regional headquarters. Silicon Valley emerged in the late 20th century due to the region's affable culture, which allowed creatives and cranks to congregate there, stretching from the mystic Alan Watts to the ultra materialists who made the digital revolution. It's interesting to go around San Francisco because you see a place where a highly distinct subculture that would emerge nowhere else, or these tech nerds gained total cultural dominance with enormous wealth. And it feels like a sort of aberration in the simulation. Today, San Francisco is a racial mix of Latino, white and Asian. It's one of the very few places in North America which passes a demographic tipping point for Asians, who only make up about 5% of America's population, which people always overestimate for a frame of reference. There are more Americans of French ancestry than all Asians combined. I think California's uniquely temperate climate affects the character of Californians in several marked ways. Firstly, it provides the region one of the best climates on Earth. The the climate reminds me a lot of the temperate highlands of Latin America, like Mexico City, Bogota or Cusco, which are so high up in the mountains as to be sunny and pleasant all year round. California has practically no seasons, which is in contrast to the rest of North America, which tends to have brutal summers and winters. One of the great reasons for California's rapid rise was its weather. Secondly, on an anthropological basis, a lack of seasonality profoundly affects a culture. Societies with stark seasons, especially hard winters, promote cultures of planning and seriousness, which you can see in colder nations being wealthier than warmer ones around the world. California just doesn't have this pressure, while it also doesn't have the issues the American south did either with horrible heat and disease. However, all good things come at a cost in that Californians aren't tested by their weather. As an example, part of the reason California has such a large homeless population is that the good weather means you can live outside all year round. My best friend and I have a running joke that time moves differently in California due to the lack of seasons. It's like every day is on repeat in California since the weather is so static. I think this does affect how Californians see the world. With no looming time pressure on the horizon. I think California has to overcome the too good to be true nature of.
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Its geography by active force of will.
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Which their culture hasn't been masculine enough to do. I think of the song Hotel California by the Eagles about how people come out to Los Angeles, love its subdued seductiveness, but then get stuck there and realize they're miserable and they can't leave because they've already invested their lives there. I also think of the land of the lotus eaters, which had a quite comparable Mediterranean climate from the Odyssey, where Odysseus found a land in North Africa 3,000 years ago that was pleasant and seductive on the outside, but everyone was constantly high on a substance. There was probably opium. Once people started staying in the land.
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Of the lotus cedars, you just stay.
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Forever and lose all sense of the outside world and time. This is what California feels like sometimes. Where I think the lax stoner culture is at least somewhat a function of the climate. The final California is the interior, which everyone forgets and does not have an equivalently pleasant climate. The two great coastal regions hog all of the external attention, but there exists another California off the coasts. This is the Central Valley, populated predominantly by Latinos and a demographic called desert trash, which since I'm from Pennsylvania, I don't know if it's insulting in their culture since redneck or cracker is okay to say.
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Read this text wall for more on this group.
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They're fairly interesting. This California has islands of wealth, which.
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We forget about, but is in general.
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Fairly dingy and poor.
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The thing with west coast poverty is.
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That they've removed all the variables that ennoble poverty, like religion, community, family, tradition, or culture. Which is why most of your ancestors were peasants who lived for centuries tolerably happy in poverty. California is the single place I've ever been on earth where I've seen the most envy. As much as Californians want to pose as progressive and enlightened, even on the coasts, the state has some of the most staggering inequality I've seen of anywhere in America. California is a society which has cut off all social ties, and their elite has betrayed the rest of the population. As we'll see later on in the video, California has killed any sense of real noblesse oblige or the concept of an organic society. California is not a society. It's a series of atomized individuals trying and mostly failing to reach their dreams before stewing in their own resentment. That was the case for the Americans anyway. The state has done its best to replace the Americans over the last few.
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Decades and has largely succeeded. My best friend and I have a.
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Game when we're in California to try to spot anyone who would appear to be noticeably American in the rest of the country. And it's always practically none. It's something like we'll see one or two couples when we walk around a given city for half an hour. California is mythic, since it's a state which attained everything it could ever want, but in the process lost who it was. California's glory has accrued to a handful of wealthy individuals who don't even have the decency to fund nice public art or churches like previous extractive nobility.
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Steady.
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Whenever I talk to Californians, I hear a sadness in their voice that they have lost their home. The California of the 20th century seemed like a paradise, Truly the best place on earth to be. When you look at baby boomer Californians and deal with them, there's several sort of palpable, strange things. You see. The first is that a lot of them became quite wealthy, and that was.
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Because they were there for the growth of their state.
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However, you can also see that they lost their homes. They never inculcated deep passions or values, and at the same time, they've built a system which actively abuses their ethnic identity, actively removes their ability to have any pride in themselves as individuals, and which created a world that has no place for their own children. It must be such a strange experience for them. What happens to the old California? There's just none of it left. And the memories that there are are mere whispers. Part 2 the many Californias California is potentially the most ethnically replaced place on.
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Earth in recent history.
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I think it's since California is profoundly isolated from the rest of the world or America. If you look at a demographic map of America, there's this huge gap between the 100th parallel in the Great Plains and California, which was even more exacerbated until very recently. On an anthropological basis, I think California is vastly more distinct from the rest.
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Of the country's culture than different sub.
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Regions of the country are from each other. California, on a purely geographic basis, should have been its own country. And it's only a function of a very specific historic context or that it was ever part of America. California has historically been a sort of mythic utopia you would hear about that would beckon you across the great horrors of the desert, mountain and ocean. The place the heroes fight many monsters and survive close chases to ultimately find a peaceful, beautiful land with stunning women in good weather as a reward for the terrors of their journey. This worked until globalization was when California couldn't maintain this status for longer than a single lifetime because it hadn't built up the culture to survive in a globalized planet. California was one of the last places that the Europeans found in the age of Discovery. The Europeans with the Spanish of course being the first in the 16th century, but then later on the English. Sir Francis Drake stopped off in California in his voyage around the world. He said San Francisco was one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen, titling it New Albion. I wonder how he would have felt realizing that it would become part of an anglo Saxon civilization 200 years later. The Spanish finally established a colony in California in the late 18th century, at the time of the American Revolution due to the pressure of the Russians coming down from Alaska. The Russians had a fort outside San Francisco called Fort Ross. In the 18th century, the Spanish conquered the region pretty easily, using the Jesuits to maintain a pretty horrifying serf society on top of the native populations. This is how Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego or Monterrey started. However, California was a backwater of a backwater with only a few thousand people at most, sustained only by its total isolation.
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The natives of California were hunter gatherers until the time of European colonialism, which was pretty rare in North America since California was too isolated to see the rise of agriculture. In a lot of ways, California's history is more like Australia's than the rest of America. And this is one of the ways that's true. However, the natives were also fairly densely populated since the land is so fertile in fruits, seafood and hunting that they.
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Could sustain a lot of people off the land.
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I'm generally very hesitant to call native cultures Edenic, since most were very much not, but this is one of the.
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Very few examples it could be true in.
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California had an insane amount of linguistic diversity, with the greater Los Angeles area having at least hundreds of languages. The white conquest of California, for both the Spanish and later the Anglo Americans, was one of the most brutal of any state in North America. The Spanish practically enslaved the Native Americans, with their fathers being some of the worst in Spanish America. The Spanish, as was their normal MO created enormous, very lightly populated, aristocratic holdings.
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That the size of east coast states like Delaware or Rhode Island.
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The economy, much like a parallel Spanish colony, Argentina, was totally dependent off ranching and cattle herding. Spanish California was a paradise for boring white people in which it was a static, lightly populated area built off quiet agriculture and large intact clan families. After the collapse of Spanish America, California.
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Tried to remain loyal to the crown.
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Briefly declaring independence before integrating into Mexico by the Mexicans, who were a failed state, giving them de facto independence already. However, this trajectory was steamrolled by the Anglo American juggernaut, whose population doubled every 15 years, reaching from Pittsburgh to San Francisco in less than 50 years. The US took half of Mexico's territory and in the Mexican American War, a war which I see practically no one complain about as a colonialist war, since Mexico survived enough as a country to see that the fate of centuries of Mexican governments would not be some pre colonial Russoian Eden like we can't say for native groups that were totally defeated, California was conquered by Fremont with his.
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Group of buddies in a sort of illegal move.
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California briefly declared independence again before being folded into America. In a sort of funny story, Fremont was nearly tried for attacking another country illegally by the American authorities. When they brought him into the new American military administrator, the guy involved did the 19th century equivalent of saying nice bro and fist bumping him for conquering the region illegally.
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The Anglo conquest of California was brutal.
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Even by the standards of the Indian Wars. The white Americans had a policy of.
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Enslaving the native peoples, like the blacks.
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Were in the south, whom almost all of the natives died of disease and overwork. California was one of the very few.
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States which had an active policy of.
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Racial extermination of the natives. And part of me muses that California's recent demographic replacement is karma for how.
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The whites treated the natives.
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The local Latinos didn't have it so bad, but still lost most of their admittedly empty lands to the Anglo Americans. It's a sign of Anglo American ingenuity that within months of conquering the land.
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The Latins had held for nearly a.
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Century, the Americans found gold. This created California as a state almost instantly after American conquest. Especially so for San Francisco, where hundreds of thousands of people immigrated to the Bay Area to mine for gold. Fun. When I was a teenager, I was talking to my dad at the Gold Rush and he said, rudyard, in situations like this, others will try to mine for the gold, but the real way to make money is to be the person who sells the gold miners overpriced food and supplies. I think the Gold Rush has left an indelible mark on California's character as a state ever since.
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As I read through the biographies of.
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Early California settlement, I kept thinking these guys are just degenerate criminals. For example, one of the guys instrumental in first finding gold, Sutter was a Swiss German smuggler who imported American settlers illegally into Mexican territory and used the natives as slave labor for his own colony. For the first generation, there were nine men for every Anglo American woman in San Francisco, and almost all women in California were prostitutes. There was an archetype in 19th century America called the booster or hustler types who would be selling NFTs today, which wandered around America constantly trying to make money through different schemes, sometimes of dubious legality. California was built off boosters. California experienced a large Anglo American migration from different regions of America in the middle of the 19th century. The two largest were from the New England Yankees who sailed the long way around the bottom of South America to settle California's coastline, becoming a new merchant elite.
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Fun fact.
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The New England Yankees as early as the early 19th century dominated trade in the Pacific, ruling Hawaii as a puppet state, hunting whales off the coast of Siberia or Antarctica and selling furs from Canada to China. A lot of California's very left wing culture stems from New England, another left wing area, and I notice a lot of architectural similarities. The Bay Area's culture reminds me a lot of Vermont or hippie left wing areas in New England like western Massachusetts or Connecticut. The second major American migration was over the continent from the greater Appalachian region around the Mississippi basin with states like Kentucky, Tennessee or Missouri. They settled around more so the interior of the state and helped create the fault line between coastal and interior California. Irish migrants were highly disproportionate in the settlement of California earlier on, with lots of the street Names in San Francisco. Being a very obvious Irish origin. As a Celt, I have pretty good Celtic cultural detector and it's strange that I see basically no Celtic cultural influence or on California today. California's largest non white minority, besides the Mexicans, were the Chinese who were imported in from Guangzhou Province to do the cheap labor such as building the railroad or working in the mines. Fun fact. The Chinese Americans in the 19th century were heavily from a single town in Guangzhou province which due to remittances the became the wealthiest place in China. Part of the reason for this was.
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That a local Chinese tycoon who was.
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Involved in the fur trade had made a deal with the Americans to ship over people from his hometown to build the railroad. Much like the Native Americans, the Chinese were treated in a horrifically racist manner in California. They were heavily abused, kicked out of a lot of towns in California violently. There was a moral panic about the Chinese lowering wages for white Americans and destroying the culture. So there was a ban on Chinese migration in the late 19th century. This meant that since there were so few Chinese women, an entire generation of.
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Chinese men died in celibacy.
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This speaks to two themes which rapidly emerged in Chinese history. All the histories of California I've read.
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Speak of the chaos of the 1870s.
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One of the hardest decades in California due to the rise of the railroads built off Chinese and Irish labor which finally connected California to the eastern part of the nation. This indelibly totally changed California's relationship to the world in that it was no longer some hidden paradise on the other side of the world, but somewhere which was quite easily accessible. This became both a blessing and a curse to California. The railroad was deeply controversial in California with enormous protests since the Californians knew that it would radically lower wages and destroy the local culture by allowing enormous amounts of people to flood into the state. This was correct. However, this was needed for California to rise to the behemoth it later became. It did result in the rise of the duality which has powered Californian history. Or that between the degenerate socialists and megacorporations, which we will explain in the next segment. Part 3 California's duality and no Culture in reading the histories of California, I like to jokingly say that 1900 is the year that the author becomes a homosexual. What I mean by that is that before that year the authors can be.
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Critical of all the sides involved, but.
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After then they start glazing the formation of the current leadership class which now leads California. Almost all historians of California have at least some leftist slant which I think is predictable given the state's politics, but it does bleed through into the narrative in their books. The megacorporations of the 19th century were bad and the megacorporations of the 20th century were good. Since the first were right wing and the latter left wing. California has consistently been dependent, like the entire rest of the American west, off megacorporations ever since their integration into the rest of the American system in the mid to late 19th century. If you look at a genetic map of America, you see that the Albion seed groups descending from Europe to the east coast into the middle of the Great Plains uninterrupted. However, the old cultures of the American east couldn't survive in the desert or mountains of the West. The American empire in the west is dependent on enormous infrastructure projects to support an Anglo Saxon civilization not evolved for these dramatic territories. This includes the transcontinental railroad, the enormous aqueducts which bring water hundreds of miles, the irrigation systems pulling from literal underground seas or aquifers or modern militaries to subjugate the region. Rather than militias like back East. This has meant that in order to bridge the scale, the American west has been dependent on megacorporations to operate on this size for its entire history going back to the Spanish. Californian agriculture has been dependent on huge mammoth operations of tens of thousands of acres. The railroads had an absolute throttle on the American West's trade and exploited this to the enormous resentment of the public. Since they had a monopoly on the ability to trade goods with the rest of the country. The exploitive Californian company had been a feature since the 19th century. This has resulted in moral authority in California coming from socialist organizers who resisted corporate power. If you think about the culture Hollywood propounds, it's highly socialist. Since it's intuitive to them that fighting the megacorporations is good. Keep in mind that in the south or the Rust Belt, moral authority still resides in religious authorities. Socialists started to gain power over California in the early 20th century, especially with labor unions. The socialists in California had a strong, rebellious, degenerate edge stemming from the Gold Rush culture. However, there was a third player in this equation, one which ultimately lost that being the society. A society is an organic whole which forms in a certain region, full of the social interactions of everyone involved, which modernists or the left try to confuse with the government, which issues orders from above. California has had multiple attempts to form a society which have ultimately been destroyed.
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By the alliance of the degenerate socialists.
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B
And the megacorporations which became California's ruling Coalition the until the present and then were sprung onto the rest of the world to go through California's demographic replacements. The first were the arrival of the natives, and after them the Spanish. Then came the first wave of Anglo Americans in the mid 19th century. But across the state, and especially so in Southern California, they were swamped by a larger wave of migrants coming through the railroad. And in the late 19th through early 20th centuries. Los Angeles in the year 1880 was considered to be a Mexican cow town, with the entire region barely populated, but mostly with cows. The creation of the Southern railroad connecting Los Angeles to the rest of the country caused a huge wave of migration from the Midwest. My mom's family is from Nebraska, and according to 23andMe, the place in the world where I have the most relatives is Los Angeles. Due to this, although no one in my close family lives in California, these migrants left the stultifying culture of the Midwest and saw California as a near abroad, a mildly exotic place which was still American. They were known for their uprightness, smarminess and gullibility. As Los Angeles became a city of suburban yards and cults, many were pulled away by the enormous droughts of the Dust bowl and economic failure of the Great Plains, which caused the region to today have one third less people than it did a century ago. The California of the World wars was almost entirely unrecognizable to that which exists today. I have a friend who is a former congressional representative of Burbank who was from an old Californian family, and he talks a lot about how the Los Angeles of today is utterly indistinguishable from when he was a child. Los Angeles was a Midwestern conservative, highly Presbyterian, 90% white place. The counterweight of the Midwestern social conservatism, nearly formed a distinct regional society rooted in the earth, but ultimately failed. This society was genuinely pretty racist, with lots of areas of Los Angeles practicing a version of de facto segregation, like what you would see in the South. Part of the reason, in my opinion, was just that the land of California is not suited for that type of culture. Another was that it was near impossible to form authentic culture in the 20th century. Due to modernity and the enormous wealth of that era. California didn't become another Omaha, but rather somewhere else. That's hard to articulate. The reason I made the Modern Civilization video is that when I was staying in California, it didn't feel like it belonged to any given civilization, since there were practically no distinguishing European features that would show it to be part of Western civilization. But it also clearly wasn't Latin or Asian either. California is an experiment in a society founded off 20th century modernist principles. I think a key theme here was Hollywood, which became the largest industry in Los Angeles, creating enough cultural power to change the entire world alongside the city. When I asked my Californian politician friend for the singular variable which changed the old Los Angeles, his reply was Hollywood. Fun fact. Here there are multiple stories for the origins of the name Hollywood. So read the text wall here if you're interested. Hollywood is complex and so I don't want to shove it into an easy moral box. Too many conservatives will just write it off. But it's generated more cultural power, possibly helping beat communism or terrorism more than we know. Our worldview is also based on Hollywood, and some of the greatest artistic masterpieces ever made were produced by Hollywood. However, its core issue is that due to the lack of culture, it can't maintain its quality control longer than the first few generations of auteurs, which is a broader cultural issue in California. Hollywood, due to the way the industry works with its sheer scale, operates like a renaissance court where pleasing key figures determines everything. Breeding a low trust, hyper feminine culture. California is probably the most feminine society in human history. Whenever I visit the state, it strikes me immediately. People in California want to get along on the outside, but beneath it is relentless relational warfare for status. I've been backstabbed by Californians so much more than any other region of the country I've dealt with that I can't ignore this. The thing is, it's a very different type of feminine than most feminine societies anthropologically, like the Longhouse cultures of Southeast Asia or Peru. Those were archaic societies rooted in the earth with Pachamama. Well, California is an artificial society stemming from a hyper masculine larger America which protects them from external threats, thus allowing California to develop artificially as a culture. Where I would say California is, is in competition to be the most artificial society in the world today. Artificial cultures are ones which did not develop out of their own land and history and cannot survive outside of the protection of other cultures. If you forgive me for being more schizo than normal, Venus in the Greco Roman tradition was the goddess of lust, desire, illusion, addiction and beauty. When I think of Los Angeles or California in general, and it's very much Venus energy in that it's built around creating the pleasant illusion that is cinema. An issue for California psychologically is that its major industries don't touch physical reality, including software, Hollywood or government contracts. And California attained wealth so quickly that they're very liable to fall into delusion since their entire state's history has gotten better for as long as anyone can remember. As a person from the Rust Belt, where things have just gotten worse for as long as anyone can remember, this feels very strange to me. I'll talk to Californians and they often have trouble just accepting things can be bad and you sometimes just have to suffer. But that's one of the most true statements of the human condition there are. California is an extension of American society, but in the process kind of grows out of it. I've heard multiple Californians say that the way they're taught in school is that America is a special society, either in a good or bad way. And California is even more special, being a sort of accentuation of the American character, taking the positive elements while leaving behind the negative. California has shed the European elements of American civilization, basing its society off American capitalism and utopianism. However, since America's an innately European society, it's lost a lot of its soul in the process. California is still the cutting edge of Western civilization in that it was able to feed off the West's best people who kept going westward until they hit the ocean. California has been on the cutting edge of all innovation for a century, whether technology, economic, religious or cultural. However, at the same time, the cost of this is an inability to sustain cultural technologies on a generational basis and also complete social atomization. In my opinion, one of California's greatest issues is the lack of socialization or formation. It's a state where things have gone well enough without external threats that it has lots of very good elements inside it, but it hasn't faced the fire to burn out weakness to unify them. Californians are quite conformist in general attitudes as a rule, since it's a society where you'll be okay if you just.
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A
Go with the flow.
- [44:43]
B
I very rarely find hard people who grew up in California. People with deep passions, grit, honor or edge, where it's a very go with the flow culture. Practically all the successful Californians I've ever met grew up elsewhere and migrated in. Parents don't impart strong values on their children, and deep things that you would draw moral strength from are loathed and seen with utter cynicism or contempt. This causes a culture of profound anxiety and decadence. Part 4 Cultural collapse what happened here is that the socialists and megacorporations realized they had a mutual self interest in the destruction of the new society which was forming and said society lacked the inner character to defend itself. Either this new coalition formed into the whole meme of at least the drone pilots killing the Muslims are trans now. Since leftism is the real religion in California, being one of the least authentically religious societies in the world, you saw the normal evolution of the unification of church and state. That being the socialists in the corporations. The corporations found that the socialists shared a lot of their interests since both benefited from from regulating out the free market, making new business difficult so the entrenched interests could maintain power more easily. This is how you see the constant staggering corruption coming out of California. One of my favorite movies ever is the Jack Nicholson movie Chinatown, which is about a corrupt alliance between the state government and private enterprise to steal Los Angeles water supply in the 30s. One element of this shared agenda was demographic replacement. Due to the immigration policies of the post 1960s era, California has already seen wide scale ethnic replacement. One of the most rapid and largest ever in human history. California went from a state that was nearly 90% white to 1 which was only 1/3 non Hispanic white. Today, the lion's share of this migration was from Mexico in that Latinos are now a plurality of California's population at over 40%. But there's also large Asian populations in enormous amounts of diversity from everywhere. In most major Californian cities you struggle to see really any white people. This was a betrayal by California's elites in that you don't see the same demographic trends occur in Arizona or Texas whose elites pushed back against this. It also shows how rapidly demographic replacement can happen if the elites are trying to push it. In California, the socialists benefited from minorities who voted left wing consistently, while the corporations wanted cheap labor. The rise of this mass immigration turned California for being a sort of swing state in a few ways. Electing Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan to one of the bluest states in the countries. Society is an organic culture and what we've seen here is an elite choosing to kill its own organic culture out of self interest. And then they have the audacity to paint it as moral. The elite has the responsibility to pass on the lands they own on a generational basis. And they've betrayed their descendants. The earlier population of California has largely left the state, moving around the American West. They've lost their home already. This furthered social atomization as the enormous demographic transfer killed real ties. Another element of this ruling class was the rise in income inequality and the breakdown of the middle class. For a lot of leftism, their racial agendas are just covers for relentless classism. Part of this were the NIMBY policies which which stopped any houses from being built in a lot of California, thus squeezing out the middle class. It's crazy that so many houses in California or the Bay Area could be working class Catholic homes back in Pennsylvania, but are worth millions of dollars. California's elite hasn't been able to be honest about their wealth, meaning they haven't used it to beautify the state or help the commons. California is a perfect example of the tragedy of commons due to atomization, where you'll see staggering wealth next to enormous poverty. European style walkable towns are unimaginable. Since there's no concept of the commons or the society, they haven't used their wealth to build more beautiful homes where if the Rust Belt was as wealthy as California, you would see beautiful mansions and cobblestone streets everywhere. Roads haven't kept pace with the growth, giving a lot of Los Angeles Third World traffic. If you know enough about societies, you can see that this equation doesn't look good. These are the exact sort of things which kill societies. Societies are held together by shared ties, beliefs and experiences, all of which California has killed on purpose. For just an example of this, I'm shocked by the staggering naivete or of California's elites in de policing the state. I have a friend in the LAPD who tells me that they won't defend property or lives if there's a major riot or revolt. We've already seen with Rodney King, BLM or the no Kings riots recently that this is totally possible. California is one of the most unequal and envious places I've ever seen and the upper classes aren't willing to defend themselves. Which means it's only a matter of time before we start seeing French Revolution style events in California which the regional governments would refuse to stop, while if the national forces moved in, it would create the pretext for a civil war. The worst thing is that if there's a conflict like this, I can't imagine that Californians would have the strength or shared ties to band together and fight back, which would just likely cause a negative spiral of crime and rebellion. This is the state which already refuses to evict the homeless for reasons I don't understand and is publicly pushing civilizational suicide already. The reason I started raising the alarm about Mouse Utopia was when I was part of Los Angeles influencer circles. The psychology of Gen Z Angelenos was so broken that the only way I could explain it anthropologically was Mouse Utopia Hell in San Francisco with Sam Altman, who is fairly openly supporting using AI to replace the human race with superior machines was able to get the funding of the Californian elite like Google or Apple alongside the US government. This shows a staggering naivete which is very worryingly added on top of subconscious civilizational suicide. California wants to die as a state and it's already using all of its power to commit cultural suicide which has been going on for decades. As I go around the Bay Area I find places which are ostensibly the wealthiest places on earth with downtowns totally empty and boarded up which isn't a good sign. It demonstrates a level of very dangerous underlying delusion. And coming from Philadelphia we saw this happen to us where half of Philly is just empty due to similar issues with DE policing and social collapse. And it's crazy that these are places where rent is like $10,000 a month for a mediocre apartment and they look comparable to uninhabitable ghettos in Philadelphia. I don't know how this is going to end but I don't see any timeline where it ends. Well Californians please plan accordingly because I'm trying to help.