The Tie Goes to the State

Illinois passed it's first budget in three years today by raising personal and corporate income taxes and by overriding the governor's veto, which was accomplished by several Republican senators going along with the action.

Rep. David Harris of Arlington Heights said he supported the budget plan because it is "immoral" for the state to carry a huge backlog of bills and pay $800 million in late-payment interest.

He compared the standoff to a game of "chicken."

"If it requires some of us to blink to save our state, so be it," Harris said.

If budgetary showdowns are merely a game, then one rule is becoming clear: the tie goes to the state. As governments grow insolvent, they face a dilemma. Either they reduce spending (shrink the state) or they increase taxation (grow the state). When things do come to an impasse, you can safely bet on growth of the state. House Republicans under Paul Ryan wrote Barrack Obama a blank check, and now Illinois Republicans are batting for the left as well.

A Democrat stronghold, Illinois is a high-tax welfare state dominated by Chicago politicians. 90% of the state is effectively a fiefdom held by that city-state in the northeast corner. Much of the financial woes come from the egregious moral hazard of deferred spending in the form of pensions. State pensions are such a scam that they ought to be forbidden by the constitutions in all 50 states. Pensions are a great way for politicians to buy votes and be long-gone before the bill comes due. Well, the bill is coming due. The decision to raise the state income tax from 3.75% to 4.95% is not, in isolation, an extreme measure, but Illinois already has high sales taxes, high excise taxes (on gasoline, alcohol, etc) and very high property taxes. The median household income in Illinois is $60K, which means the median increase in tax burden is $720 per family. That's quite a burden on an income of $60K where they're already paying twice the national real estate taxes and a hell of a lot more for gas and booze than we are just across the Mississippi River.

The bill was the work of Democratic House Speak Michael Madigan, who commented:

The people in this chamber did not do what was easy today. But we did what was right for the future of our state.

What utter nonsense. This was the easiest, most short-term possible solution for the budget crisis. The other two options were (1) to continue to do nothing, which would have exposed themselves to unrelenting pressure as the state's budgetary fiasco was drawing the national spotlight, or (2) to address the spending that had outpaced revenues by over $6 billion a year, and make painful budget cuts that would draw endless rage from aggrieved groups (mostly liberals). Those are both much more difficult options. Throwing money at the problem so it will go away for a while is always the easiest short-term solution, especially when it's other people's money. Perhaps you could argue the tax raise was absolutely necessary to avoid the junk rating that would further degrade the budget condition, but to claim their course was the difficult one, or the best long term answer, is a bold lie.

Now, the sad part of all this, is that this is a terrible outcome for conservatives, because it is a short-term fix whose expense is put onto the citizenry. I mentioned back when RinoCare was in the news that if we can't fix healthcare, we at least want to make sure the burden is put onto the state, not us. Increasing state debt speeds up its inevitable demise. In the meantime, tax payers need to have every possible asset available to become personally prepared for any calamity, which they can't do if they are being sucked dry to prop the state up. Our order of preference should be something like this:

1. Conservative solution (small state)
2. Accelerationism
3. Band-aid fixes
4. Liberal solution (communism, basically)

This budget is somewhere between 3 and 4. It would have been better for the typical downstate Illinois taxpayer if there was no tax increase at all and the state continued to collapse under the weight of its own debt. Instead the state's tentacles have dug even further into the taxpayer wallets. The state in its death throes will always try to suck the people dry to save itself.

Signaling anti-American allegiances on the 4th of July

Most people celebrate the 4th of July is roughly the same fashion: enjoy the day off work, spend time with friends & family, and pretend to care about America more than they probably do. A few on my facebook have taken the opportunity to remind us that it's stupid to have pride in your country when you had no say in being born there; it's not an accomplishment. Assuming these people are liberals (and they are), there's an obvious contradiction to their worldview. Does it jump out at you?

These commenters are not libtards. They were all posts by smart guys, family men, who are talented in multiple facets. They also are paid below their potential because they've chosen to pursue more artistic endeavors.

People tend to be consistent, either logically or emotionally. The way I see it is that people's statements can be understood in one of three contexts. First, you look for intellectual principles. If those are contradictory, then you look for tribal allegiances. If still there is no consistency then you must assume the person is both irrational and antisocial. If you don't believe the subject to be those things, and they aren't being logically consistent, then their motives must be some sort of tribal loyalty.

So in this case, some liberals are saying that it's stupid to be proud of something you were born into. Have you observed a contradiction yet? I can verify what you've likely assumed: these people have never made facebook posts disparaging gay pride. Isn't that the same? They tell us homosexuality is something people are just born with. So why the pride? How is that different from nationality, which we are just born into? There are also ethnic prides. You can be sure that these people support black pride or Asian pride but would call white pride racist or worse. Same with girl power vs boy power, etc. When pushed on the issue they'll say it's different because the gays have had to fight oppression, so it's pride in what they've accomplished. So it's different if there's a victimization narrative, but there was a victimization narrative for the American revolution as well. Most of their grievances with Britain were contrived or exaggerated. Sure Britain was trying to tax Americans, but it was because they were in war debt after the colonists begged the British to come in and clear out the French, which they did. Both these victimization narratives have kernels of truth, but they're largely bullshit.

So clearly there's not logical consistency here. Universality does not apply. They pretend to have a principle (no pride for birth conditions) what they really have is a tribal allegiance (no pride for groups that are not leftist preferred). What's interesting is that they'd come out on 4th of July and say that with clear implications. They are anti-American. It sounds hyperbolic, but it's not. Because the statement is not logically inconsistent with their other beliefs, it is just a pronouncement of tribal allegiance, showing their opposition to America. Had they even thought for just a minute is this logically sound? or, even better, what would be the obvious rebuttal by annoying conservatives? then they should have quickly seen the contradiction and modified their message. But that's the thing about virtue signaling to one's own side. The more irrational and potentially self-harming it is, the more potent.

They just won't stop losing

Trump tweeting a wrestling meme that depicted him taking out CNN was not what most people would consider to be very presidential. While I don't personally disapprove, he should have at least broadcast it on his personal Twitter rather than his work account. The Potus twitter handle should remain professional. Trump opened a huge broadside to make the tweet. He took a political risk. This should have been very easy for CNN to play off of. They could have made Trump look like the small man, and simply stated that the tweet was below their threshold of dignity and they were moving on to more important matters. If they had a sense of humor, they could have riffed off the incident, and issued their own memes in response.

Instead, they delved into another manic "Trump's Tweets" marathon and gave the president another resounding success. Not content to just engage in fanatical coverage that only makes their opponent stronger, they've now actually responded not just unethically, but illegally by blackmailing the creator* of the meme. They've responded to Trump's arguably undignified behavior with behavior that is most certainly unethical and probably illegal. He prodded CNN with a stick, and they responded by shooting themselves in the foot. Game, set, match. This is why I don't condemn Trump's tweets. They're working. They're literally driving his enemies (our enemies) insane. If his tweet's were crude and ineffective it would be one thing. But his tweets are destroying the lying press. As long as it's furthering the right cause, it's good.

It's worth examining why CNN, and the left in general, would be so inept at handling their war with Trump. From a distance we can see they're completely fumbling this, but we've been seeing this for over a year now. Why don't they learn? One of my favorite proverbs comes from Sun Tzu.

Wait by the river long enough and the bodies of your enemies will float by.

Because we are virtuous (or try to be), our most despised enemies tend to lack virtue. Which means they tend to do themselves in, one way or another. The left is dominated by irrationality and hatred, which we complain about endlessly. And yet it's their great weakness. Their tactical playbook has been reduced to feigned outrage and shaming. Those are the only cards they have left. They have other cards at their disposal, such as in the recent CNN incident, but they don't know how to play them. The leftist organizations have tended to promote within their ranks those who specialize in signaling outrage and shaming the enemy. So that is all they really know to do. 

Trump grasps this instinctively, perhaps not in the intellectual sense, but he knows how to push his enemies' buttons. He knows how to get the reactions. I don't believe for a second that he'd stop using his Twitter provocatively if his enemies stopped falling for his bait. No, he's a man who needs enemies to be fighting at all times. He loves fighting and winning. If the enemy wisened up, then he would just change the bait. This isn't dumb luck. But they won't adapt. They can't. And besides, they represent the ideology where victimhood is the highest virtue. They love fighting and losing.

* As it turns out, the guy they threatened to doxx, a Reddit user over at r/the_donald, wasn't even the creator of the meme Trump posted, although he did post a similar one.

Implausible Deniability

If Donald Trump doesn't accomplish anything from his political agenda, if he fails to build the wall, to renegotiate trade deals, etc., he has at least claimed one major success, and he didn't need to leverage the vast power of the US government at his disposal to achieve it. Using just his Twitter account, Trump has denied the mainstream liberal media of plausible deniability, which is absolutely critical to their ability to operate.

Plausible deniability seems to be a topic I discuss routinely on this blog, in many different contexts. It is the state of having some possible -- but unlikely -- alternate narrative for one's nefarious action. It is the difference between highly suspecting someone of guilt and knowing for sure they are guilty. It also gives 3rd parties partial to the guilty subject the excuse they need to pardon the behavior. Mommy asks Billy if he broke the cookie jar. He's always trying to get the cookie jar. Billy says the cat did it. It's surely a fib, but then the cat does always get on the counter. She was going to punish Billy for the incident, but since he might possibly be telling the truth, she decides not to.

The world rotates on plausible deniability. Businesses advertise with plausible deniability. Girls go home with guys after they've secured plausible deniability. Politicians live and die by plausible deniability. George W Bush invaded Iraq and blamed it on CIA intelligence. Bill Clinton escaped impeachment hearings for directly lying to the American public by claiming he didn't realize vaginal penetrations and oral sex with the intern constituted "sexual relations." It's completely absurd, and yet Bush and Clinton have both escaped any formal punishment for their actions.

The mainstream media operates under the assumption that they are a professional, fair, and objective enterprise. Even when we observe something that seems wildly biased, we can't prove that they are deliberately biased, and since the consensus assumption is that they are not, the consensus opinion remains unchanged, no matter the frequency of media bias that is observed. That is their plausible deniability.

What is needed to penetrate the media's plausible deniability bubble are examples of bias so strong that no plausible deniability can possibly exist. When Trump tweeted on Thursday morning that when Mika Brzezinski came to schmooze him at Mar-a-Largo her face was bleeding from a facelift, the media went haywire. It wasn't just the biggest news story of the day, it was practically the only news story of the day. CNN ran 12 hours almost nonstop on the subject. We heard that Trump's words were undignified, were misogynistic, and basically made him unqualified to hold his elected position.

The very next morning Project Veritas released video footage of a CNN producer saying Kellyanne Conway is ugly and looks like she was hit in the face with a shovel. It was a much harsher comment than Trump's, as it referred to her normal appearance and not some self-inflicted temporary state of appearance. Because CNN insists that people outside their organization insulting women's appearances is grossly unacceptable conduct, it must be true that people within their organization must be held to the same standard. And yet their producer has not been fired, and I don't believe they've even acknowledged the incident, let alone apologized for it.

This is what's known as an a fortiori argument, and it is the strongest rhetorical argument one can make.* An a fortiori argument is a logical device that states, roughly, "if the premise holds in the weak case, it certainly must hold in the strong case." Despite the Latin name, the a fortiori principle is quite straightforward and falls within the normal human intuition that we use each day. For instance, in all 50 states it is illegal to murder a person. In no state is it legal to murder two people. The notion strikes us as absurd, and it is because it would violate the a fortiori principle. If murdering one person is bad, then murdering two people certainly is bad. There are countless other such arguments to be found in our legal codes. If accidentally killing someone is punishable, then killing intentionally is certainly punishable.

If the ethics principle holds for non-CNN people, then surely it must hold for CNN's own employees. There really is no plausible deniability for the double standard. They may try to say the president is held to a higher standard, but that isn't even plausible. Are they saying there are ethical standards that CNN holds the president accountable to but ignores itself? Surely they wouldn't make that claim.

Trump did it again recently with a tweet that depicted him WWF-style body-slamming a CNN cartoon. After months of assassination threats and numerous "artistic" representations of the death of Trump and his staff (including the New York Times depicting Stephen Miller's severed head on a pike), the media united under the chorus that Trump's ridiculous tweet was a dangerous appeal to violence. Again the a fortiori argument applies. If appeals to fake, cartoonish violence are unacceptable, then appeals to real, lethal violence are certainly unacceptable as well.

The media no longer have plausible deniability of its prog agenda, and increasingly people are realizing this. A scary number still buy the old consensus, but once you remove the plausibility from plausible deniability, your are left with implausible deniability, which is just denial. Denial is the rejection of objective reality and has become the hallmark of the left. It would be easy to become confounded by all this, and I sometimes do myself. What is the point of trying to win people over through logical debate if they just reject reality as it suits them? Remember, those people are ultimately on the other side in the culture war. There is nothing wrong with having the enemy as delusional as possible. By ripping the illusion of plausible deniability out from the media propaganda channels, Trump is forcing liberals to either admit it is all rubbish or to sink deeply into delusion. Never doubt that we elected the right man to office, whatever his shortcomings. Trump is the champion of the people and is destroying the forces of evil stacked against us.


* Being the strongest rhetorical argument one can make does not imply it is the strongest logical argument one can make. However, we rarely speak in formal logic in normal discourse.

To Save the Alt Right, Punch Right

This is a continuation of the discussion on the Resolution of Ideology.

Brett Stevens asks whether Alt Right people should remain underground. The general idea is that the best potential leaders are probably still keeping a low profile, but perhaps it's time they came out of the closet to energize the movement, especially as it appears to be fracturing. We have this notion of critical mass, that if we can just get enough people out in the open about their beliefs then the movement will snowball its way to success. However, that is not necessarily a winning proposition. A strong, unabashed right-wing/nationalist movement is just what the progs fear most and, since the prog cult is the religion of the land, it's what the nation as a whole fears most. The reaction will be visceral, and the left controls most of the establishment's more potent weapons, especially the national media.

A commenter made reference to the border wall. That's an excellent example. For those on the right, the primary concern of unlimited immigration is the demographics change. America will cease to be America. The alt-righter thinks if we could just get enough people talking about the looming demographics crisis, then the pendulum will swing our way and we'll get that wall built. But that is flawed logic. Talking race realism, or whatever you want to call it, will only prove to the crucial "moderate" segment of our prog society that the wall is racist. (We don't care what the far left thinks, as they will oppose anything we do.) The alt-right should not take a public stance on the wall at all. It's like when David Duke endorses a candidate: it tends to hurt the person he's supporting. This battle needs to be fought by proxy. The message needs to be all about protecting the underclass, keeping drugs out of schools, stopping gang violence, etc. That's the way the left fights it. Their arguments are never of the form we need to have unlimited immigration to destroy western society so we can install global communism. That is their goal, but they never say that, because they know that their ideology will be destroyed by exposure. (For those who really even understand what the ideology is.)

You know it wasn't that long ago that many on the left supported strong border control. They were aligned with the lower class and with labor, both of which are threatened by immigration. The right was more friendly to business and corporatism, thus supported the immigration (while pretending not to). As the right has become more nationalist and anti-immigration, the left has responded with staunch opposition to any border control at all. A year ago I wrote The Left is Unprincipled because it seemed that they just oppose whatever the right does. However, this is starting to make a lot of sense. The stated goal of the leftist intelligentsia is to destroy western society. So how do they do that? They'd have to start with deciding what western society is, a tedious process where there is no certain correct answer. It's much more efficient to use a heuristic: western society is whatever conservatives are fighting for. Thus all they have to do is destroy whatever the right tries to defend, then they can build Utopia! You know, I'm starting to get a bit of respect for how the left operates. These people are dangerous and you should never underestimate your adversary. They certainly are clever and cheeky, like a good movie villain. It's like in Batman, where Jack Nicholson portrayed a delightful rendition of The Joker, but you were still glad to see him fall from that helicopter to his death.

One motto of the alt-right is never punch right. There is reasoning behind it. It is in response to O'Sullivan's first law:

Any institution that is not explicitly right wing will become left wing over time.

If we let people who dilute the ideology (say, the alt lite) start punching at the purists, then the whole movement will be neutered by the leftist religion, like the Buckley conservatives today. It's a valid problem and a reasonable solution, but it doesn't hold up in the context of resolution of ideology. Not punching right implies that the publicly promoted image of the alt right must be the purest full-spectrum ideological signal possible. But that is the road to ruin. Not punching right, but still punching left, destroys the multi-layered, fragmented signal that must be presented to the public. People like Milo and Cernovich are not alt-right purists, but they are doing more to pull people in our direction, and to push forward the conservative front in the culture war, than anyone out there. If the alt-right had an equivalent to George Soros, he would be building and funding the Milos and Cernoviches. Entryism and a recruiting pipeline are important, and fighting our battles through proxy and maintaining plausible deniability is essential.

Even if we agree to all this, some alt-right purists will screw things up. They will, for example, try to make the wall about race realism (which the media will pounce on in a heartbeat), and suddenly the proxy war is a hot war in which we're massively outgunned. The only solution to this problem is to punch right. Even if we don't mean it, to maintain plausible deniability. And especially our allied warriors, like Milo, should be punching right as needed. Don't take it personally. It might not even be sincere, but it is absolutely essential to the preservation of the movement. We must punch right whenever someone risks making an unacceptable public exposure of the full-spectrum signal.

What is important is not that we present a united public front, but that we operate from a united core. The left has an intellectual core and everything stems from that. Most foot soldiers for the left aren't ideological purists and don't even know what the core ideology is. The liberal elites make use of them the best they can. By my own definition, the drive for purity is the fundamental characteristic of a cult. Cults are not political movements, and they are not sustainable. The intellectual core of the alt-right need not have its goal be to convert the world to its ideology. The goal should be to see our objectives mechanized in reality and to help our allies push the front in the culture war. Refusing to punch right for fear of losing the superficial and self-defeating image of unity with the full-spectrum alt-right signal is ultimately not a productive strategy.

Project Veritas: Confessional of the Left

Project Veritas has struck CNN twice and has promised to deliver additional secret-camera footage each day through the end of the week. In the two videos already released, a CNN producer and one of their leading on-air personalities were caught admitting that the Trump-Russia narrative was fictional, with the former also indicating that the network was pursuing the story for ratings, that many of his colleagues share his cynicism, and that the decision to pursue the Trump-Russia story is being driven directly from the top by CEO Jeff Zucker. We can only hope that PV director James O'Keefe is saving the best goods for last.

PV has mastered the art of extracting unintentional confessions from liberals in the Democrat establishment, the media, and activist groups. Usually their agents either pose as eager interns or set a honeypot -- frequently a male flirting with another male. It is without doubt that PV agents are playing off the relevant social situations to get their footage. However I think there is another force at hand putting some wind in the PV sails. It's been surprising to most people that they manage to get such candid confessions from their targets. In some cases it seems like they are playing long game. For instance, the footage of DNC operative Scott Foval (an obvious gay honeypot) takes place over multiple interactions, in various settings. We suspect the PV agent is putting in the leg work to build trust to extract the kind of honesty shared between intimates.

But the recent footage of CNN anchorman Van Jones shows the entirety of the interaction in a single encounter.

Or perhaps it's not the first interaction. The agent approaches and says they met before in Palm Springs. My first impression was that the agent was fibbing, but perhaps they did meet. Van sure seems happy to see the agent, so either they agent has already run some trust-building operations, or Van just liked what he saw, or he loves any public recognition.

Van is happy to see someone

In any case, this is clearly not a highly established relationship. Either they've never met (despite the agent saying they have) or they did indeed meet, but the acquaintanceship is so weak that the agent had to remind Jones of how they know each other. Jones still couldn't help but unleash the truth in a public setting to an almost stranger: that he doesn't really believe the Russia narrative that he's helping to promote. Why would he do that? Why does it seem to be so easy?

The Ricky Gervais Principle is a social philosophy put forth by Venkatesh Rao, who believes that the television series The Office contained a very deep social theory of the modern workplace. In The Gervais Principle VI: Children of an Absent God he describes the force of sin (and the resulting guilt) in crafting human power dynamics. The sociopaths amass amoral power through loss of innocence. The losers and the clueless, still innocent, turn to the sociopaths in hopes that their sins will be absolved. In Rao's view, there is a vacancy in the vital societal function of forgiveness that used to be administered by the church. He believes that sociopaths in business often perform that function to increase their own power.

The modern left serves more like a religion that anything. It is a belief system, requires public displays of piety, and seeks to expose, shame, and punish transgressors of the Holy Narrative. Progressivism is interesting because it is an anti-religious religion. They believe they have transcended religion, rather than re-creating it. As such, they can never admit that they are adherents to a religion, a restriction that puts some limitations on their ability to consciously improve and adapt. If they were aware, they would do what anyone would do if they were building a religion: steal the best parts of other religions. The major religions have all survived and adapted for hundreds and thousands of years. All have reasons for their success. Buddhism puts it followers on the path to serenity. Islam gives license for militant expansionism, and also builds community through activities such as daily group prayer. Christianity's power lies in the notion of afterlife judgment -- a boon for social order -- and in its role in granting forgiveness to its adherents.

The Church has at times been less than virtuous in its role as the arbiter of divine forgiveness. Luther's major complaint with the Roman church was that it had essentially become a big racket; a shakedown of the people, taking their wealth and obedience in exchange for that sweet ticket to heaven. And yet, the societal need for forgiveness remains. The natural response for anyone who feels guilty about a wrong they've committed is to make that negative feeling go away. Many people today try to rationalize their misdeeds away, but even then the nagging guilt often remains. So they tend to confess to their sins, even when it is totally unnecessary. Pay attention in social situations. It really happens all the time. Social media is dominated by people seeking validation or approval, which are so similar to seeking forgiveness that it might for all practical purposes be the same thing. The Church is out, and there is big market potential out there for absolution of sins.

Progressivism doesn't offer forgiveness. It does offer scapegoating. The leftist can be reprieved of his burden to some extent by claiming moral superiority by denouncing others -- you know, the real sinners -- and engaging in crusades for social justice. But still that is ultimately a distraction and doesn't solve profound levels of guilt and regret. That can only be cured by the forgiveness process, which is ultimately a two step process.

1. The guilty confesses his sins to society
2. Society assures the sinner he is still accepted and loved

So when these PV agents come along, broadcasting love and acceptance, and pushing into the areas where the target may feel guilty, the confession almost falls out on its own. The target is desperate to divulge the truth. The CNN producer stated that many of his colleagues share his cynicism. That means they're talking amongst themselves, having little confession pow-wows in secret. But they still have not received forgiveness from broader society, and they will jump at opportunities to do so. For progs to end these confessions they need to offer their own vector for forgiveness. Not only must they grant forgiveness from their own camp, but they must make the case that they speak on behalf of society at large.

Right wingers should take note of all this as well. There is market potential for forgiveness. There is great power to be had in either leveraging people's guilt, or curing it. That may sound shady, but someone is going to grow powerful from the dynamic, one way or another. Also, to be a sound social movement its adherents must be taken care of in that regard. If they languish in moral agony they are likely to be recruited away, or at least end up in a damaging Project Veritas accidental confession video.

Race is More than a Skin Tone

If you don't follow the Audacious Epigone (linked in the sidebar), he is something like the Statistician Emeritus of the alt right. He is quite adept at finding statistics lying in publicly available data that help substantiate various claims. Recently he took Ben Shapiro to task in Silly Shaprio, and followed up in Color matters, contra Shapiro, for Shapiro's public assertion that color does not matter, only ideology. The statistics paint a very different picture. Whites holding certain conservative beliefs tend to vote for the relevant party -- Republicans -- while blacks vote for the Democrats anyway, and Hispanics are in between.

This all echoes the advice of the great founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, who warned us:

In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

The statement has become something of a mantra of the alt right. Shapiro attempts to separate ideology and color while totally ignoring culture and other racial elements. In an ideal world ideology is all that matters, but we don't live in some abstract universe. We live in a human society, which is messy, and however much people like Ben Shapiro might want to ignore it, color (i.e. race) is highly correlated with cultural and social phenomena that exert even greater influence over human behavior than ideology. No one is saying that in a multiracial society you should vote in accordance with race & religion rather than ideology, just that it is the truthful sociological observation, whether that conforms to one's moral sensibilities or not.

At this point, I think it's necessary to build some formal analytical tools around Lee's statement. Let's describe relevant nation types. An ideological nation is one in which ideas reign supreme, such as the vaunted proposition nation that the US is alleged to be. On the contrary, a racialist nation is one in which racial and cultural issues dominate. (Note, this is all a bit abstract. A racialist nation is something of an oxymoron, and a proposition nation may ultimately be a myth). The two nation types are separated by the Lee Inflection Point.

Lee Inflection Point
In an increasingly multiracial society, the Lee Inflection Point is the point where voting behaviors can be better predicted by demographics than ideology.

From Epigone's work, whites in America are still mostly an ideological sub-nation (if "sub-nation" is a valid social construct) and so are Hispanics, to a lesser degree. However, blacks are clearly a racialist sub-nation. The question is to what extent will the trend magnify. The Hispanics actually give some room for optimism, as they are a strong immigrant group that still tend to vote according to ideological concerns. But if Lee is correct, as America becomes increasingly multiracial, we should see the various sub-nations all moving towards racialist status. I intend to follow up soon with a method of providing ideological-racialist scores for the various races using Epigone's data and seeing if we can observe trends in that direction.