John “The Derb” Derbyshire published his article “Unpleasant Truths – a conservative view of the world today” in the National Review on August 2, 2002.

What he wrote nearly twenty years ago might strike you as mild, but so will Steve Sailer’s or the late Lawrence Auster’s writing from that same time. The understanding of the political reality that we now take for granted was just getting worked out in public, when fundamental truths about our social arrangements were obscured by centralized media’s sixty-year monopoly on public discourse. He wrote that article when few understood that the monolithically centrist national consensus was splitting into two camps: the ruling globalist coalition on the Left and nationalist dissent on the Right. See the illustrations of how that split developed over the past three decades. Writing for globalists’ controlled-opposition magazine whose founding mission purported to serve the cause of tradition while subverting any such roadblock to globalism, Derb was the man with integrity (and wit, and intelligence) who asked the right questions.

Discovering his work a year earlier, several months before the 9/11/2001 attacks, helped me find my own footing in making sense of the passing events. If Derbyshire reads this, I hope he forgives the liberty I took with his ancient article, as like the rest of us, he lives in 2018 (for the next three weeks, in any case).

Unpleasant Truths is a classic article that struck a blow against the official optimism of neoliberal doctrine. Derbyshire’s points from that 2002 piece are in blue. Commenting after each point is me, the time-traveler from 2018.

DERB 2002: Most of us will die in poverty. There is no way that systems devised to provide for mid-20th-century retirees will be able to cope in the mid-21st, with imploding demographics and a centenarian on every block. “Defined-contribution” pension plans will have to be baled out by the federal government, if private enterprise is to survive. The dollars we get from them will therefore be massively devalued. Since there is no one to bale out Social Security, benefits will soon be restricted to citizens more than 80 years old. Similarly for Medicare. In fact…

PA 2018: [For most, material luxuries will pass with the Boomers. But that’s still in the future, unless you’re a GenX’er who is already knocked out of the middle class by Bush’s housing bubble or a Millennial with student loan debt. Under the right circumstances (read: when living among your own people and in full ownership of your public space), austerity is salutary and makes communal ties stronger, which is fulfilling of our deepest social needs. This includes old people’s willingness to make personal sacrifices for their grandchildren’s sake. Poverty is not properly understood. The modern flight from poverty is not aspirational; it’s a flight from contact with non-Whites.]

Quality health care for all is not possible. Quality health care is what rich people get. (Actually, according to one of the depressingly tiny number of rich people I know, even they have trouble getting it.) The rest of us must wait on line to be misdiagnosed by ill-trained, paperwork-swamped, litigation-shy doctors, assisted by nurses imported from the less hygienic parts of the Third World, and unionized hospital staff with no-way-you-can-get-me-fired attitudes. This could only change if the U.S.A. devoted her entire Gross National Product to health care; and even then, it probably wouldn’t stay changed for long.

[Derb wrote that before Obamacare. People scramble to pay for health coverage that has local in-network White American doctors, a vanishing breed.]

Pop culture is filth. It is now completely degenerate. Why do you never hear anyone humming a current pop song any more? Because none of them is hummable, or even worth bothering to remember. What is the main topic on TV sitcoms and “dramedies”? You know what. Why do you stand in the aisle in Blockbuster muttering to yourself: “There isn’t a single damn movie in here I want to watch”? Because Hollywood produces nothing but crap, crap, crap.

[LOL what’s Blockbuster? Since 2002, pop culture has gotten even more degenerate, in particular with the heavy-handed promotion of race-mixing. Not just that, but it’s also tailored to retardation-level IQ audiences, its chief purpose being not entertainment or even escapism, but to make its audience stupid. Heard a mainstream Country song lately? Counterpoint: there is also niche entertainment written to our intelligence, albeit filtered through Jewish sensibilities, such as Breaking Bad and Cobra Kai.

There is also an independent art and music scene, if you know where to look. Oppression begets great rebellion art. Let me show you some Murdoch Murdoch videos… a few affected me like no film since Kieślowski’s Dekalog.]

Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. The saddest true thing ever said (by Henri Estienne, 1531-98). Translation: “If youth only knew, if age only could.”

[Such is nature’s balance. Game changer: manosphere emerged in 2007, connecting men across generations. Just like my generation then, young men now lack patriarchal structures of masculine guidance. Unlike us, though, they now have access to the kind of knowledge that we had to stumble toward in painful ignorance.]

The environment is collapsing. The U.S. will get the blame for it, of course, but the main culprit is the Third World. Take a trip to China: The air is a soupy smog, even in quite remote places. Vast dust storms sweep periodically across the north of the country, sometimes continuing right on across the Pacific. (And in one case last year, the Atlantic, too!) The rivers run purple, orange, and turquoise. People tell me India is worse. The inhabitants of Africa are busily stripping their continent of all vegetation, having already pretty much exterminated the fauna, except in a few tourist reservations. The oceans are being fished out, and near-earth orbit is filling up with lethal junk.

Science has stopped. None of the really major scientific advances that you have been reading about since 1970 as “just over the horizon” is ever going to happen. Cheap fusion power; the colonization of Mars; artificial intelligence; supersonic air travel you can afford; contact with extraterrestrial civilizations; the conquest of cancer, tooth decay, or the common cold; fuhgeddaboutit.

[Technological advancements disrupt society until a new equilibrium is found. Since the writing of Derb’s article, smart phones have deformed human relationships but also armed people against their globalist governments. Now, if medical research could develop a cure for paralysis…. we won’t get there as long as medical schools are saddled with Affirmative Action and technological research is done by H1b’s, leaving China with nobody to steal science from.]

Not all groups are equally good at all things. East Asians will continue to win Olympic diving events, and runners of West African ancestry will continue to win the 100-meter dash. Similarly, nobody will ever be able to devise a test of knowledge or understanding on which groups with different population-genetic histories all record identical statistical profiles. You can have meritocracy, or you can have equality of outcomes by ancestry-group, but you can’t have both. Which one do you want? It seems we have already made up our minds. Corollary…..

[Mono-ethnic states with mutual obligations and loyalties among their social classes will make this moot. Nationalism means a home for everyone, and the demand for it has grown worldwide since 2002.

But to address Derb’s point from the 2018 perspective. The bad news is that the Narrative has reached levels of HBD-denial insanity I didn’t think were possible — transgender madness. The good news is that people have more or less stopped pretending to believe in blank-slatism, somewhat neutralizing the “racism” blood-libel against Whites. What’s my evidence that people stopped pretending to believe? — because the black-uplift narrative is dead, replaced by “die whitey!” malice that the system is not even going through the motions of rationalizing.]

Affirmative action is absolutely essential to social order. Think about it.

[Overall, blacks’ K-selected aggression has become visibly pacified over the past decade-and-a-half of gibs. But not their r-selected behavior, which can revert to African cannibalism if indulged.]

Socialism is popular. Practically all of the Socialist Party platform on which Norman Thomas ran in 1928 has been implemented. Thomas himself noticed this as far back as 1962, exulting that: “The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly.” Yet the main negative factors in the national life today, according to spokespersons for this country’s largest political party, are corporate greed, tax cuts for the rich, and poverty-stricken old folk crying out for life-saving medications. Plainly we need still more socialism. Don’t worry, we’ll get it. Conversely…

[American conservatives recognize socialism for the perpetual shoveling of White wealth into a black hole that it is. Neoliberalism, however, ostensibly in the tradition of American self-reliance, had inflicted the worst of all worlds on Whites:

The uprooting of communities and their informal social networks; a National Review author jeered: “Rent a U-Haul if you don’t like it that we cashed-in your factory!”

Unilateral dismantling of protectionist trade policies

Competition with infinity in-sourced and outsourced foreign labor

The burdens placed upon the productive and creative for the sake of the parasites in high and low places.

So absent genuine liberty and self-reliance, there is a growing demand for the power of the state to bend favorably in our favor. This goes beyond economic safety-nets. The setbacks we continue to suffered despite Trump’s efforts point to the obsolescence of Reaganite dream of “less government” because laisse faire private-public partnership hits core Americans the hardest, as they have the most social capital to liquidate into globalists’ portable wealth. Like conservatism, lower-case libertarianism is a losing proposition — there will always be a government, especially now with instant global communication technology. The operative question is, whose government is it going to be.

As of 2002, Americans have yet to fully learn of US government’s treachery to its voters under George W. Bush, its open hostility to them under Obama, and the extent to which its multi-generational bureaucracy is stacked against them now with Trump.]

Conservatism is dead. No genuinely conservative policy will ever be enacted, ever again, by any U.S. government or the government of any important state. Great masses of ordinary Americans believe that “conservative” means “repressed fundamentalist freak.” Why would they not believe this? Every medium of mass entertainment and mass information has been preaching it to them, over and over and over, for twenty years. The Ronald Reagan of 1980, if he were to stride onto the national stage today, would be unelectable. Calvin Coolidge would be laughed out of public life, if by some bizarre accident he were permitted to wander into it. Even when large majorities of Americans favor a conservative policy, nothing will be done to implement it. For example….

[Au contraire! Liberals of 2018 luuuurrrrrv George Bush! (both, the Dead and the Lesser). I will now pause for a moment to let my 2002 readers digest that.

Gentlemen: fourteen years from now, Donald Trump will be elected on Pat Buchanan’s campaign platform. The next candidate who will inspire similar devotion of the White electorate will run on Vlad Tepes’ platform. If you haven’t done so yet, do see my linked illustration in this article’s first full paragraph.

PS: regarding “Americans believe that ‘conservative’ means ‘repressed fundamentalist freak.'” Oh how that’s changed, and I’ll explain the slang later. Let’s just say that while no woman dreams of being ravaged by George Will, zfg shitlords get swiped-right.]

Nothing will be done about immigration. Business leaders and economic decision-makers all believe (perhaps correctly) that mass immigration is the main reason for this country’s continuing economic vitality. The Left sees poor immigrants as clients. Huge numbers of Americans are now “Hispanic,” and believe that anti-immigration activists hate them. The Joint Chiefs have no intention of letting their commands be used to police the southern border, understanding perfectly well that they would never be allowed to open fire on anyone — which is the main thing that trained soldiers are trained to do, and the inability to do which leads to collapsing morale and cratering recruitment. (It is also, of course, the only thing that would have any actual effect.)

[By now, globalists have discarded their economic talking points in support of immigration, openly gloating that its purpose is in fact White replacement. On the other hand, there are signs of life. Immigration is now the top electoral issue. Further — ubiquitous talk of Civil War II, the rise of European nationalism, an indulgence in extermination fantasies on every side, no less so by our side. The slow quiet demographic snuff-out feels less likely now than it did during W’s first term sixteen years ago.]

Only Anglo-Saxon countries can do democracy. The natural state of human society is despotism. If you tally up all the human lives that have ever been lived on this planet under organized systems of government, no more than five per cent were lived under consensual systems. Even to get up to five per cent, you have to include places like ancient Athens and Tudor England, which wouldn’t pass muster as “democratic” by modern standards. In the last couple of centuries, practically all consensual systems have been Anglo-Saxon. Other cultures can fake it for a few decades, as France, Germany, and Japan are currently doing, but their hearts aren’t really in it and they will swoon gratefully into the arms of a fascist dictator when one comes along. As a corollary of this…

[Things that weren’t part of common consciousness in 2002:

Cynicism about the official line on 9/11

Knowledge of the fact that intelligence agencies monitor every aspect of private communication, including passive spying via household electronic devices

The uni-party as unmasked by Trump’s 2015 campaign

Professional hits on dissidents and whistle-blowers

Genocidal levels of immigration

Along with full-blown tyranny in Derb’s native England.

And… the darker rumors about earnest Satanism and crimes against children among elite in-groups, on up through US Presidents. Anglo-Saxon or not, this democracy was always a sham and it will have to end if our people’s existence is to be secured.]

China will get stronger and richer, without moving one inch closer to constitutional government. The Chinese Communist Party has got “over the hump” into a plateau of stability that, barring severe environmental catastrophe (see above), will last for decades. Rich and confident, unrestrained by electoral considerations or Judeo-Christian ethics, or any other kind of ethics, they will do all the things we dare not do: human genetic experimentation, culling of “useless mouths,” militarization of space, minor wars of aggression, etc. In particular…

[Old wisdom: we in the Free World live well because there are codified legislative processes; other places are shitholes because they have authoritarian governments. New wisdom: constitutional governments are a fig-leaf over predatory transnational cabals that strip-mine nations for profit; right wing dictators are the prevention and the remedy.]

Taiwan will be re-united with the Motherland….by some combination of economic carrot and military stick. The U.S. will grumble ineffectually, up to the point where the Chinese ambassador loses his patience and asks the U.S. Secretary of State point-blank: “How many cities are you willing to lose over this? We ourselves are willing to lose three or four.” Then we will stop grumbling.

[Not much in the news about Taiwan in years. Instead, China is colonizing Africa. White Pill: the Dark Continent’s new yellow overlords might take measures to ensure that its endangered megafauna shall not perish. Black Pill: they’ll dump all 1.3 billion Africans into Europe.]

Something inconceivably horrible will happen in the Middle East. Probably the following: The Arabs will commit some huge, gross atrocity against Israel. Surviving Israelis will respond by massacring the Palestinian Arabs, and perhaps erasing a couple of Arab capitals. 100 years of peace in the Middle East will follow.

[The years that followed the Second Intifada showed that Arab treat to Israel is overstated and conversely, the 2006 Lebanon conflict exposed Israel’s limited competence in conventional warfare. Instead, US foreign policy of the Bush and Obama administrations destroyed Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. ISIS terrorists, which John McCain had a hand in organizing, mass-murdered Christians throughout Arab states. Israel enjoys peace and stability today, having built a wall on its own border. Her diaspora pushes open borders for White countries.]

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride. Just to remind you, their names are: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. No. 4 will presumably always be with us, but at least we have got Nos. 1, 2, and 3 pretty much fenced off in sub-Saharan Africa, right? The chance that you or me, or your kids or mine, will die in a genuine mass-mobilization-type, carriers-going-down-with-all-hands-type, flattened-cities-type war, or from starvation, or in some horrid medieval-type, communal-grave-type, 1918-flu-type plague, is actuarially insignificant, right? Well, believe it if you like, but your belief has no foundation more substantial than wishful thinking. History suggests that it is most likely false.

[The male imagination tends toward the epic. That said, sixteen years later we’re closer to that scenario.]

The next version of MicroSoft Windows will be even buggier and more counterintuitive than the last. That one you know perfectly well, of course — I don’t know why I bothered to include it. Further bad news on this front: e-mail will be rendered completely useless by spam, all that wonderful free information on the web will gradually be shut off into fee-paying sites, and NRO will start posting my photograph again.

[I don’t have an opinion about Windows. Free information on the web isn’t locked on pay sites because there is no economic incentive to do so. Since Trump’s victory, however, Big Tech has been hard at work turning the ideological content of the internet into Television 2.0 through platform monopolies.]

Poverty and hardship build character; prosperity and security destroy it. Look around you.

[So it was, so it shall be.]

The U.S. constitution is incompatible with a war on terrorism. It is absurdly easy to commit a terrorist act in the U.S.A. This state of affairs could be changed only by abandoning key constitutional protections. We shall be very reluctant to do this; but if deaths from terrorism reach a certain number, we shall do it anyway. That number has either seven or eight digits.

[Constitutional USA took harsh measures against hostile Indian tribes without abandoning constitutional protections for its citizens.]

Justice is dead. As the last of the generation of judges who actually believe in the law heads into retirement, the administration of justice will be divvied up between avaricious trial lawyers and ideology-addled graduates of lefty law schools. Their morale destroyed by “brutality” and “profiling” hysteria, police forces will sink into corruption and paper-pushing. Ambitious public prosecutors will concentrate on framing up law-abiding citizens with “hate crime,” “corporate corruption,” “dangerous product” (guns, fast food) or “child abuse” charges. Actual crime — murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and assault — will skyrocket, but it will be illegal to talk about it.

[The anarcho-tyranny that your late colleague Sam Francis wrote about… it’s here in 2018. The illegal alien who killed the beautiful White woman Kate Steinle went free. James Fields was convicted of premeditated murder over a fat SJW’s unrelated death of a heart attack.

In 2012, you will be fired by National Review for writing an article that I am certain has actually saved people’s lives.]

We are living in a golden age. The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!

[At the age of 105, the oldest living insurgent of the 1944 general Warsaw Uprising was asked when, from his perspective, was his country most free. To the young interviewer’s surprise, he said: “during the Uprising.” When asked if the current generation of young people would fight just like his did, he said “Yes, they would because dire circumstances bring us together.”]

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Enjoy!