Wednesday ORT: The Missing America, Reddickulous, NYT Boomercide, SPLC Pays Racists

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Good afternoon friends. We’re short on automotive stuff today so as is always the case I’ll be pinning interesting topic suggestions. I would also like to offer a Trigger Warning: This post contains political discussion. If it ain’t your thing, come back later this week for a guest review of a Toyota Passo. Thank you! Let’s get to it.

They hate us cause they ain’t us

Jeff H comments, on the Harley Street Glide Ultra review:

I find the overall social ideology impetus at ACF to be confusing and contradicting. On one hand, there is a forceful resentment of all the globalist mechanisms that threaten the average American worker.. we lament foreign inputs that dilute American culture... we yearn for the restoration of domestic industry and howl when gutless corporations sell it overseas and rob the agency of the American citizen...

...yet, at the same time, there is a distinct hatred for the average American and the “unsophisticated” lifestyle choices that define them. Everyone jumps on ol’ Sherman for demeaning the American blue collar class, but seemingly because the commentariat here wants to be the first to hate “boomers”, “rednecks”, and “fake bikers” with their “piece of shit” Harleys...

Here’s a little something to chew on: if there is anything left of the “average American”, blue collar, non-college-indoc-.. er, educated class, it’s some guy with a drywall business or a body shop who buys a Street Glide and a toy hauler and takes it to Daytona or Leesburg or Sturgis one week a year. That’s about as “American” as it gets, and like it or not, Harley-Davidson is forever our brand... so it’s interesting how many here really hate that.

I’m obviously grateful for the entire ACF readership but… you fellows sure know how to call me (and each other) out, don’t you? I’ve been thinking about Jeff’s comment for the better part of a day now. How do we address the seeming contradiction of American men who claim to love this country yet are openly dismissive or, or contemptuous of, Drywall Harley Sturgis Grunt Style Man and his Street Glilde?

Every answer I can possibly contemplate is unpleasant, so let me try to roll them all up into a bullet-point list:

• Group-based rivalry and ill-feeling is almost certainly the oldest human trait that isn’t directly related to bodily consumption or emission. It’s been baked into us by evolution because everyone who really trusted strangers on sight was gang-raped then decapitated by strangers all the way back in the Quest For Fire days. Racism and bigotry are the most authentically human of emotions, sad to say.

• It’s normal for people in different socioeconomic classes to dislike or distrust each other. This is massively exacerbated by proximity, both physical and social. The reason ultra-wealthy people in this country are so fond of immigration is simple: they don’t live anywhere near immigrants. The black people who live in Columbus, Ohio, on the other hand, despise Somalis. Similarly, any time you hear someone really getting into a crash-out rant about “hicks” or “white trash” there is a solid chance they either came directly from that class or the one adjacent to it.¹ Otherwise, they wouldn’t care as much.

• In much that same way that formal clothing starts with the aristocracy and ends with the staff, which is why doormen in NYC during the Eighties dressed like Louis Quatorze, culture in this country starts with the ultra-wealthy then percolates to the poor through the middle class.

• The defining cultural movement of the past hundred years has been contempt for America. It began with the scions of industrial ultra-nouveau-riche types, who distinguished themselves from their embarrassing parents by cleaving to European tastes, and it has filtered as far down as the people who make $100,000 a year. If you watch the Apple TV show “Your Friends and Neighbors”, which has been widely praised for the accuracy of its costuming and set dressing, you will see that the only American products on the screen are luxury homes and full-sized SUVs. Everything else is European-centric, right down to the recent house party scene where half the men are wearing these repugnant side-quest Zegna shawl collar evening jackets in pastel shades like they just finished doing three rails of coke while vaguely absorbing a Tiesto set from a VIP box in Ibiza.

• Therefore, anything American is low culture, and anything European is high culture. But since the average upper-class American primarily experiences Europe as an occasional vacation, this European sensibility degenerates, in daily use, to mere anti-American ennui. When my friend Matt Farah publicly recommends the loathsome White Fragility by Skeletor-ish Robin DiAngelo, he is making an appropriate anti-American signal for his socioeconomic class. (DiAngelo herself was born poor white trash; she rose from that sector into the Illuminati by writing feel-good tracts on how bad white people are, thus standing on the shoulders of her drowning colleagues to survive.)

• If you have any reasonable amount of education in America, you are at least partially anti-American. You view the country as a problem to be solved, rather than a homeland in which to rejoice. To be pro-American and middle-to-upper-class is therefore a contradiction in terms and so it’s a position only held by the sort of difficult, unpleasant, noncompliant men who pay my bills here at ACF. The younger you are, the more that is the case, because as noted before, the culture percolates over time. My father is upper-middle-class and pro-American-culture because he is 81 years old, as are many of his peers, but their children are almost universally anti-American-culture.

• Your humble author loves America and American labor and American culture but I am still a product of my upbringing. I was raised by schools and media and books and professors to despise this country and everything about it. Based on the First Principles meetings and the many discussions I have had with ACFers, I am far from alone in that particular contradiction.

• So it took me a long time to overcome my baked-in distaste for the sort of people who run a drywall crew and ride a Harley Street Glide CVO to Sturgis. That’s not a random example; I’ve been to Sturgis and part of the reason I went was to meet those people so they would be humanized in my experience and opinion.

• It’s easy for me to see how many of us are passionate about America and this country’s greatness while still being the product of a pro-European cultural upbringing. So our reflex reaction to something like a Harley Street Glide or a lifted F-250 or a “Grunt Style” T-shirt might be oh God, that’s awful. We can no more help this than the average Gen Xer can avoid thinking about the “crying Indian” when he considering throwing out some trash on a public road.

• What my cohort eventually wants, although we have trouble articulating it, is a genuine upscale New American art, product, music, and social culture/scene. We want a kind of “Ayn Rand Valley” thing where everyone is a rugged masculine American fellow who wears an RGM watch and chops his own firewood but also can be brought to tears by a Wyeth painting or a George Strait song. We don’t necessarily ride Harleys; we ride something that is just as American as a Harley but far more upscale, the way Oxxford used to exceed Hart Schaffner Marx even though they were both sewn in American cities. We want an upper-class America that rejoices in being American, rather than one that is ashamed of it.

This cohort of pro-American men who were raised anti-American probably includes you. “Oh, that’s stupid,” you reply. “I wasn’t raised anti-American, I was raised progressive. We just wanted a better America, one where people from every part of the world can come here and publicly disrespect our churches and institutions while pointedly refusing to assimilate. We want an America where religious intolerance and insularity is replaced with humanism, a classless society, and abstract art. The real Americans aren’t people whose grandparents were born here; they’re immigrants who come here to do jobs that our natives won’t do.”

Like I said. You were raised to hate America under the guise of hating America as it is now. That’s like hating Lizzo because she has not yet become a 125-pound white country singer. You would totally approve of that Lizzo, once she shows up.

Newsflash: you hate Lizzo.

There used to be a phrase that was used a lot more often in literature about the upper class than in the actual upper class: “NOKD”. It stands for “Not Our Kind, Dear,” and it refers to the revulsion that prissily-educated people feel when they see genetically similar, but culturally different, people doing culturally different stuff. It’s why the average Ivy League kid loves mumble rap but hates pop country; there is no chance that he will ever be mistaken for a mumble rapper, but only the grace of God saved him from being an ignorant pop country consumer and, most likely, the graduate of a “directional” university at best.

A lot of ACFers are profoundly uncomfortable with stuff like “Harley culture”, because we were taught to have contempt for it. That teaching was bigoted and incorrect, but it still stuck. It’s why it took me fifty-two years to buy an American performance car as a daily driver; even so, some part of me can only accept the 300C because it has so many secondary characteristics of an old W211. It is why some of you will buy Porsches until you die, no matter how good the Corvette or Mustang is. You just can’t see yourself in a Corvette. It would be like having your neighbors drive by as you exit the snake-handling church.

Which is fine. To each his own. But in the interest of finding common cause with the men who were not raised to hate America, try engaging in a spot of self-awareness the next time you turn your nose up at a Harley or a Ram truck or a Grunt Style shirt. Don’t let cultural window dressing prevent you from the common cause. We all want a country that makes things, a country that loves itself, a country that protects its own interests. Let’s do it together.

The Jordan rules

This week’s NASCAR thoughts come from Mini Danger Girl; any faults are probably from my editing.

The announcers made a big deal about tire pressures at Kansas, and it was warranted, because teams were right at the edge of blowing the left rear and several drivers reported heavy vibration and sidewall damage. The race centered on the 11, 5, and 45, with Denny Hamlin leading the most laps and winning Stage 1 but struggling on restarts, while Kyle Larson won Stage 2. Late in the race, Tyler Reddick ran into a fuel pickup issue while chasing Hamlin and switched to the secondary pump to stay in it. Then a late caution caused by Noah Gragson, who was six laps down, pushed the race into overtime. On the restart Hamlin lost control of the race and fell to fourth, while Reddick fought off Larson for the win. All four 23XI cars finished in the top 15, and Reddick now has five wins in the first nine races, which hasn’t been done since Dale in 1987.

Secondary fuel pump? What is this, a Boeing Dreamliner? I’m continually surprised by how secretly fancy the current NASCAR cup cars are. The big questions are, of course: “What is 23XI doing better than everyone else” — and, very pertinently for a team that some speculate was meant to coalesce around Bubba Wallace, “Why is Tyler so much better?”

The Times opens the Overton window, and throws “old people” out of it

Hey, I have an idea. Let’s take jobs, homes, and retirement accounts away from the elderly. What defines elderly? We can come back to that. The important part is that we force them into tiny apartments and transfer their assets to young immigrants — as soon as possible.

What I just said to you is a much less extreme version of what the New York Times just published as an op-ed. Here are some of the highlights:

• “Older Americans… do not deserve the stranglehold over it they currently enjoy through overrepresentation in elections, which produces too many regressive policies and too many seniors in the highest offices.”

• “Older Americans… need incentives to give up accumulated housing, jobs and wealth.”

• “Older Americans favor restrictions on immigration most, even when they need immigrant caregivers most. Likewise, there is a correlation between age and resistance to policies to halt the overheating of the planet or raise funds for education and other civic purposes.”

• “Seniors dominate elections, especially local and off-cycle ones, with their comparatively high rates of participation.”

• “It is not ageist, either, to begin to save our democracy from gerontocracy. Proposals range from making it easier to cast a ballot — since current requirements routinely hurt younger voters who move around a lot — to institutionalizing mandatory voting. A bigger fix might lower the voting age.”

• “It is not ageist, finally, to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain… The most obvious is to reinstitute mandatory retirement in those employment sectors (especially white-collar work) where generational renewal has been obstructed for years.”

• “In housing, besides circumventing the disproportionately high elder participation in town meetings where land-use decisions are made, I advocate a progressive tax on older homeowners to incentivize them to downsize rather than retain. The longer you stay, the more you should have to pay. The funds could allow for new construction and other projects of intergenerational justice”

It’s no secret that ACF is not necessarily a pro-Boomer publication, although Boomers make up a big part of the readership. I’ve written at length about the disproportionate cultural and financial influence held by older people. There’s never been so much wealth and power in older hands as there is now. The average home buyer is almost twice as old as he was in 1970. These are not necessarily good situations.

Make no mistake, however, Samuel Moyn, who looks exactly like you think he does…

isn’t talking about making the Boomers quit their jobs (that they doesn’t have) or sell their retirement homes (that no Millennial wants, because they are 400 miles from any actual city.) This fellow is talking about scrubbing 60-year-olds out of the workforce and out of the ranks of home ownership. Because they are insufficiently pro-immigrant and anti-climate-change. Because they have the nerve to disproportionately vote in elections.

Let me tell you something, Mr. Moyn. The way human society has worked since the dawn of time goes something like this: Young people demand absurd changes in society, and old people keep them from doing it. This is similar to the adversarial system in American courts; the opposition of powers is supposed to deliver a balanced and fair result. Young people want to tear down every fence, but only the old people remember why the fences are there in the first place. If the system works, you tear down obsolescent or ill-considered fences while leaving the good ones up.

Which, by the way, is hardly what has happened lately. It takes a real demon in a skinsuit to look at the state of the Western world in 2026 and say yeah, you know what, there hasn’t been enough rapid societal and demographic change in the past fifty years. We need more of it, and faster. Ironically, it was the relatively relaxed Boomer attitudes towards many social issues that brought us to a point where the Times can wink-and-nod advocate a bill of attainder against the Boomers and some of their kids. (Make no mistake, however, the America-eviscerating neutron bomb of Hart-Celler was a product of the “Greatest Generation”, as was LBJ’s “Great Society”.)

I think it was irresponsible of the New York Times, ostensibly America’s newspaper of record, to publish something that de facto calls for the firing, un-housing, and un-franchising of people who are just too stick-in-the-mud old to vote for open borders. My God. This is how we get blood in the streets.

Note, as well, that this shitbird was “Professor of European History” for most of his career. Remember what I said about ten minutes ago about people who hate America and venerate Europe? Of course, he doesn’t like Europe enough to let all the traditional Europeans show up here. That would be climactically unjust, or something like that.

There are times, dear readers, that I’m not sure it’s worth staying alive much longer. After all, Lyle Mays is dead and Famke Janssen is old. What’s the point? Tell you what: I’m gonna stay alive just to continue occupying twelve entire acres, running my diesel tractor while I take naps, and voting against every and any thing Samuel Moyn likes. I encourage you to do the same.

The domestic-terrorist equivalent of the Kodak Black meme

During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.”

“Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on here?”

“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again. “Clearly you didn’t do your research.”

Even the New Yorker had concerns about the Southern Poverty Law Center, a place that I have always viewed as a way for a couple of dudes to get vastly rich while making race relations vastly worse for everyone else in America. In their 2019 article, the writer noted that

The controversy erupted at a moment when the S.P.L.C. had never been more prominent, or more profitable. Donald Trump’s Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in 2017, much of it coming after the violent spectacle that unfolded at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that August. George and Amal Clooney’s justice foundation donated a million, as did Apple, which also added a donation button for the S.P.L.C. to its iTunes store. JPMorgan chipped in five hundred thousand dollars. The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred and fifty million dollars,

We now know, thanks to a late-acting Justice Department, that the “violent spectacle” of “Unite The Right” was… funded by the SPLC. They paid one of the organizers $270,000 to attend a planning meeting, and to bring certain other people who didn’t have a way to get to said meeting otherwise. Another “neo-Nazi” was paid more than a million dollars to… do neo-Nazi stuff.

In total, the SPLC paid over $3 million to fund and empower ostensible “white supremacists”. It was money well invested, leading as it did to an $82 million windfall from donors.

This is worse than the infamous “Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot” that involved twelve paid informants and two undercover FBI agents who repeatedly revived the plot when the actual white supremacists had given up on it, including a point in time where FBI personnel texted the lead informant to remind him how important it was to get everyone to shut up about COVID-19 and get refocused on killing the governor of Michigan.

The Whitmer thing was a drop in the bucket compared to what the FBI, DEA, and ATF are paying informants in general; over one four-year period, the agencies paid a half-billion dollars to thousands of informants who were then “authorized” to commit more than 22,800 crimes. Especially in the case of the DEA, you get the sense that maybe it’s worth it. A lot of drugs are sold in this country, and they do a lot of harm. I am less certain about the ATF, which paid 1,855 informants in a single year. What were they informing on? That’s like 100 people for every major firearm manufacturer, liquor distiller, and tobacco distributor in the country.

The legitimacy of the targets and the method aside, however, the use of paid informants is a known law enforcement tactic. What the SPLC was doing amounted to something else. They were basically “rainmaking”. There wasn’t enough white supremacy out there to get their donors excited, so they… paid people to be white supremacists. Let’s face it. If the SPLC pays you a million dollars to be a neo-Nazi, are you gonna quit that job? Or are you going to do your level best to advance the neo-Nazi cause, whatever it is? (Reportedly it has something to do with Ram trucks.)

The SPLC has long enjoyed a sort of qualified immunity in everything they do, but the second election of Donald Trump appears to have ended that. I don’t think there is much in the way of a position to take on this matter besides the following: when private organizations pay millions of dollars to encourage race-based hatred and violence, they should be prosecuted. It doesn’t matter if you like those people or not. If I made three million bucks from Substack and started paying people to hold white power rallies, I would be prosecuted. The same should be true of the SPLC. And unless the lizards involved can delay the final reckoning until Gavin Newsom takes office in thirty-three months, it is going to be true.

1. See, also, people who like to complain about lower-middle-class Americans “feeling entitled to JERBS”.