The Founding Gentlemen: The American Gentry and the Founding of the Nation

A more interesting aspect of America's founding is that many of those integral to getting the country started weren't normal people

Rather, they were gentlemen - the gentry of the New World

🧵👇 This is clearest in the case of the Tidewater gentry - the planters of the cavalier Old Dominion

They saw it as their duty to serve their fledgling country. They foxhunted, drank copious amounts of port and claret, ran landed estates like those in England, and were often familiar with military service on horseback.

This contingent included:

James Monroe: an officer, diplomat, and president

James Madison: Congressman, creator of the Constitution, Federalist Papers writer, Secretary of State, President

"Light Horse Harry" Lee (Henry Lee III): An Anglo-Norman cavalry officer in the Revolution, he went on to aid in ratifying the Constitution and served as Governor of Virginia

George Mason IV: A descendant of a cavalier who fled to Virginia, Mason organized a pre-Revolution militia that proved crucial when the war began, served as a leading member of the Continental Congress, and is considered the Father of the Bill of Rights because of the Virginia Declaration of Rights he crafted

Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence writer, wartime Governor of Virginia, diplomat, President, solver of the Barbary Pirate problem

George Washington: Commander of the Continental Army, president-general of the Constitutional Convention, first president

What happened?

A little something called democracy, which makes society both uncomfortable with being exceptional and forced to take a utilitarian look at building construction, eschewing beauty in the name of cost-cutting

I’ll explain in the 🧵👇 First, there is the material argument about this issue. Critics of the socio-political argument about democracy contend that, rather, the problem is the Industrial Revolution

Because industrial life means many more people can make a great deal more wages for themselves and profit for society doing some rote task, generally in a factory, than in learning masonry, woodcraft, or the other skills relegated to beauty rather than function

So, there’s not a great mass of semi-skilled labor for beautification of structures, making non-utilitarian buildings using purely industrial supplies much more expensive to construct than in the past. The labor is too expensive, and not really present on a grand scale for any price, proponents of this view contend

Incredible how it's been 9 years and the leftoids still refuse to understand Trump and his appeal

Yes, people like Trump more than Walz because his power suit and tie are a subtle rejection of radical egalitarianism, of the idea that all non-equal outcomes must be destroyed🧵👇 That's why no one liked Walz

He's an odd guy who wears plebe apparel for no reason other than desperately desiring faux relatability...and his very being, from his connections to Red China to male feminist in a previously unworn flannel or hoodie vibe, are anti-American to the core

Trump, meanwhile, is a caricature of America's aspirational identity

So, the social contract question has finally been broached: When will those who pay the taxes and have ancestral ties to the land be represented?

Or is the government implacably opposed to them?

What's surprising isn't that it's finally been asked, but that it took so long🧵👇 Of course, the sentiment has been long simmering

The social contract memes @kunley_drukpa has been posting are quite funny because they're true: why are young people losing effectively half their income to welfare programs for migrants, foreign aid, and retirement programs?

The situation is worse in England, given its even higher taxes and utterly insane internal anarcho-tyranny problem, along with the long history of destructive death taxes over there.

But it is awful everywhere across the West. Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Canadians and so on see income that should be theirs to be saved and used to build a life instead taxed away at punitive rates to pay for varying forms of leeches and moochers

This is what Zimbabweification means for landowners, and really anyone who is normal and has assets

As leftism is built on envy and grievance, like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the jackals are coming for wealth in the name of equity, as has happened before in England

🧵👇 Mugabe is far from the only communist to do this, of course. All such regimes, from the Bolsheviks to Mao, confiscated land in the name of leveling society

But Mugabe is particularly apt, as his land confiscation wasn't so much for economic reasons as for spite and envy

To some extent, that was true of all communist regimes. But some of the Soviets at least appeared to think farm collectivization would lead to some prosperity for at least some of the USSR. Similarly, Mao's collectivization and bird killing had a drop of (quite poor) economic reasoning behind it. It was all ridiculous and foolish, of course, but not motivated purely by spite

Mugabe's land expropriation was. No one thought that taking land out of the hands of intelligent farmers and putting it in the hands of various regime cronies and ex-guerrillas would lead to more prosperity. They just hated that the whites owned it, and so they wanted to steal it while citing racial "equity" as their reasoning

Anarchotyranny in Albion

England used to be the land of ordered liberty, surpassed in individual freedom only by America...now it's less free than Russia

Here are five recent examples of bureaucratic anarcho-tyranny in formerly free, now-perfidious Albion 🧵👇 These are by no means the worst examples of anarcho-tyranny in the land

That dubious award would probably go to the "Grooming Gangs" situation, in which woke police let Pakis r*pe young English girls for "cultural sensitivity" reasons. But they are some of the recent ones that have stunned me, and show the problem remains one for formerly merry England

England's Labour regime is taxing away the land of farmers: "My family's been on this land for 375 years. I want to pass this down to my boys...you're taking that"

Who's to blame? Winston Churchill, who the Duke of Beaufort thought should be fed to the foxhounds for it

🧵👇 First, the policy

Because farming is essentially non-remunerative in this free trade world (at least for ag. products), something @JeremyClarkson has shown on Clarkson's farm, and farmland has skyrocketed in price due to inflation, family farmland wasn't taxed upon death in England

That was important because, with few exceptions otherwise, it would be near-impossible for families to pass land from one generation to the next and keep farming it. It would have to be sold to pay the tax, given how little is made from farming now and how valuable farmland is (£30k an acre in some areas)

But Labour wants more money with which it can pay for wind farms and migrant benefits...and regime cronies want to be able to buy up land to put solar farms on and get the subsidies handed out for those. So, now Labour will tax farmland over £1 million in value at a 20% rate, which will destroy family farming and be the death knell of English agriculture

Questions I frequently get when I write about Rhodesia are 1) if I'm from there and 2) why I find it interesting

I'm not from there

But I find it interesting because of the promise it held and because it was the one proud, vital civilization, not decaying, Western country 🧵👇 The promise part I have written about before, such as in the thread below

Generally, I see it as a place that showed how both liberal, mass democracy and communism could be rejected in the name of Old World-style prosperity and stability

https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1856733277119263135

The problem with monarchy is the "what about a bad king?" question, a major problem with "democracy," the proponents of which mean mass, liberal democracy, is that it allows a mob of ignoramuses to rule

The solution isn't technocracy, it's Rhodesian-style propertied voting🧵👇 The general problem is that one-man rule has pitfalls related to the judgment of that individual, though it does at least ensure that there's responsibility and at least a reason to care about stewardship of the country

Mass democracy, on the other hand, means reliance on the mob's (almost always poor) judgment. Even if the mob eventually wakes up, as has happened across the West as of late, the problems created by mass democracy are often quite far along because there wasn't much of an impulse for sober judgment until things got quite bad

An example of that is the case in England, for example, where the Reform and Parliament Bill-enabled mob voted for prosperity-destroying Labourites, namely Attlee and Wilson, for years, and then only recently realized how poorly things are going. Now it might be too late for the country

The problem with technocracy, meanwhile, can be seen in American tariff policy. Industry-protecting tariffs were long tossed aside in favor of the "free trade"-style policies the technocrats wanted. Those, in a result that the technocrats cared not a bit about, resulted in a hollowing out of the American industrial base and the men who made it work. Now America can't produce naval vessels, is outproduced in simple military equipment like artillery shells by the Russians, and is seeing itself outdone by the Chinese in terms of not only ships, but also everything from drones to steel. Tariffs would have avoided a lot of that, but "the experts" were focused on short-term spreadsheet profit maximization rather than the long term

One of the saddest aspects of Rhodesia's intentional destruction by the West and commies is the immense lost opportunity that its destruction represents

This is true both materially and spiritually: its destruction benefitted only civilization-haters

I'll explain in the 🧵👇 The material case is quite obvious:

As Ian Smith noted in The Great Betrayal, Rhodesia was like the Congo, also intentionally destroyed, in that it was full of natural resources the West could have had access to had it done anything other than subvert the bastion against communism

Particularly, Rhodesia had access to the world's second-largest platinum deposit and immense chromium reserves. Chrome is critical for military uses, particularly for armor plating and protection against erosion. Platinum is only found in southern Africa and Australia and is needed for modern automobiles

So, had Rhodesia been supported, those two critical minerals that are found almost nowhere else could have been fully exploited in a stable environment with rule of law. Instead, companies have to trust the Zimbabwean, Congolese, and South African governments not to expropriate them through outright means or taxation, or just let the minerals go unexploited

"We" have financialized every aspect of life in an effort to squeeze financial return from everything

Private equity is particularly notorious for this, buying everything from Little League sports teams to medical practices

The medical aspect is particularly worrisome🧵👇 Take the above example, a report conducted by CBS. Dentistry IQ, summarizing the Private Equity problem and what the report found, noted:

"Private equity firms are also buying large dental chains, many of which are owned by individual dentists and specialists who offer implant procedures. According to PitchBook, Aspen Dental bought ClearChoice for an estimated $1.1 billion in 2020, Affordable Care (whose largest clinic brand is Affordable Dentures & Implants) was purchased for an estimated $2.7 billion in 2021, and the private equity wing of the Abu Dhabi government bought Dental Care Alliance for an estimated $1.1 billion in 2022.

"The American Dental Association (ADA) reported that private equity deals with dental practices increased ninefold from 2011 to 2021. There is also an additional interest in oral surgery, possibly due to how expensive implants can be.

...

"Lawsuits have been filed nationwide alleging that dentists at implant clinics have extracted patients' teeth unnecessarily, leaving patients with misaligned implants, or even unable to chew. Dentists who are heavily pushing for implants may be striving for lucrative income instead of the health of their patients.2

"Edwin Zinman, a San Francisco dental malpractice attorney and former periodontist, said: "They've sold a lot of [implants], and some of it unnecessarily, and too often done negligently, without having the dentists who are doing it have the necessary training and experience," Zinman said. "It's for five simple letters: M-O-N-E-Y."

When was the last time that England and her glorious Empire could have been saved from becoming a decaying, socialist hell?

Many say, incorrectly, either WWI, when the empire was exhausted, or WWII when it was bankrupted

The real answer is 1911, with the Parliament Bill🧵👇 The fight that led to the Parliament Bill began in 1909, with Winston Churchill's so-called People's Budget

By that point, Churchill had shifted to the Liberals from the Conservatives and was allied with Lloyd George to tax the landed elite into oblivion, despite his family being part of that elite.

The bill sparked a huge fight that culminated in England declaring war on its traditions and history in the name of socialism

It's the 59th anniversary of Rhodesia's Independence from the British who were demanding their self-destruction in the name of mass democracy

But why did Rhodesia declare independence on the 11th of November, 1965?

Few actually seem to know, so it's time to explain in the 🧵👇
By 1965, Rhodesia had been independent from the British South Africa Company and self-governing for about 42 years

Over those four decades, it went from being unsettled, landlocked veldt into a hugely successful country, the country with the highest standard of living for blacks in the continent

This made me laugh because it's so true, but it also made me think, what would a modern equivalent be?

There's the Somali pirate ship stock market, but I have a different idea:

A militarized REIT that resettles abandoned, anarchic cities like Detroit

A 🧵on how it'd work👇 First, just think of the wasted capital in cities like Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, etc.

The reason for the abandonment makes sense: de-industrialization, the crack crisis, and lax policing make them about as dangerous and poor as Johannesburg

But it also means that whole swathes of essentially valueless neighborhoods exist in which the houses are still livable - there aren't trees growing through the living rooms or deer bedding in the bedrooms yet - but no one lives in them because crime, primarily, and the lack of jobs, to a lesser extent, made whole neighborhoods uninhabitable

Adding to the problem is that the cops are either corrupt, as in Chicago, or simply don't exist because they quit the force

Trump won, which is fabulous

But the problem for America is that its full of people who praise the Soviets, a regime that murdered 10 million Christians 9the reason for the praise)

You can't have a country with that cancer in it, but America has solved this problem before🧵👇 This is, I think, one of America's big problems

About a quarter of the country (half of Dems) supported not just locking you in a concentration camp for refusing to be part of a science experiment, but also wanted to take your children from you for not making them part of it, and imprison you for criticizing it

What is that but a modern variation of Stalin starving millions of Ukrainian and Russian Christians to death and sending millions more to the gulags?

I suspect the responses would be similar if you asked about "racism"

If Trump's to do anything, he'll have to actually take on the Deep State and Drain the Swamp

Could he do so?

It will certainly be a fight, but if Andrew Jackson could defeat Biddle and the Second Bank of the US, Trump can defeat the Deep State

Here's 5 ways how he could🧵👇 First, the Jackson and the Second Bank of the US comparison is, I think, important and worth remembering as a guide to action

Nicholas Biddle, who directed the bank, retracted loans and crashed the economy in an attempt to get Americans to look at Jackson as the reason for their economic woes and demand protection of the bank

It didn't work. Jackson, known for his populist bent, kept the American people on his side. His successor, Van Buren, did the same, using infrastructure projects and deregulation to gradually overcome Biddle's economic crash. This policy of Van Buren's eventually turned into massive railroad expansion, economic expansion, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution via increased production of things like pig iron and general American prosperity.

In short, the spat and Biddle-caused crash was long-lasting, spanning multiple administrations, and it was overcome with policies that built on Jacksonian strengths; empowering the people through deregulation and creating, through infrastructure, and environment in which success was more possible despite banking shenanigans

By the end, the bank was defeated and American prosperity intact

It's great Trump has won, and better that it was a large enough margin to give him a mandate

But if this admin is going to be more successful than the first, he needs quick wins

I think the best avenue is dealing with illegal immigration, a relatively easy problem to solve🧵👇
Why illegal immigration? Well, the other big problems would be a political minefield and slog

The budget is a mess...mainly because of entitlement programs like Social Security that can't be touched

Fixing the national debt requires fixing the budget

Inflation, interest rates, and so on are related to both

The Ukraine and Israel situations are a mess and we lack the leverage, particularly in Ukraine, that makes a good peace deal unlikely

As the election arrives, one thing that must be understood

The accelerationists are wrong. A Kamala victory wouldn't lead America to collapse or crack-up in which "civil war" solves our problems

Rather, it'd just make things far, far worse. South Africa is a prime example🧵👇 First off, I think Trump will win, so this is mostly about mindset rather than what will happen.

Regardless, the accelerationist sentiment is a common one on here, and goes something like this:

"If Kamala, an obvious communist wins, things will get so bad, through everything from her unearned capital gains tax to her anti-white racism, that America can't help but crack-up and 'collapse' into some sort of 'civil war.' The right will win that and then everything get better."

That's probably not how it would turn out . . . Peasant Rebellions nearly never in anything approaching success for the kulaks, but, regardless, it's what a certain type of person pretends is the case.

"They were teaching us about prophet muhammed.. I don't want to learn about that... I want to learn about my culture... I GOT SUSPENDED FOR IT"

The way rotten Western regimes have most overstepped, and the reason for their coming downfalls, is how they've treated young men🧵👇 This is something that most older "conservatives," however well-meaning, almost always miss

Things aren't like they were in 1950 or 60, or even 80s and 90s, when the government was run by commies and pinkos but the average people with whom one interacted were mostly normal

Even universities, always regarded as leftist, have gotten far worse, going from being humorously if annoyingly left-leaning to bastions of race communism

Why has the Peanut the Squirrel thing exploded on here?

Because it's the perfect anarchotyranny tale. The system that refuses to lock up murderers will send a SWAT team to kill your pet for lack of a permit

As the anarchotyranny situation is about to explode, this did too 🧵👇 The anarchotyranny is probably the best example of how America is becoming South Africa

There, employers must follow BEE (affirmative action) legislation to the letter or face government wrath, all while 95% of farm murders go unsolved and entire cities decay

Here, murderers are rarely even given a slap on the wrist if the races are "right" (black murderer, white victim), but the smallest details of tyrannical licensure, permits, and similar sorts of bureaucracy wholly foreign to America until FDR created it and Obama dramatically expanded it.

So, on one side, you get attempted murder suspects and admitted murderers let off the hook because of "mental issues," but the state will seize your children to trans them under the "child protection" framework and ignore anything approaching justice or law while doing so

What America must solve to restore its greatness is the outright anti-white hatred spewed by the near entirety of the left

Below, e.g., a Black Women For Harris leader spews hate that would sound radical coming from Mugabe

This Zimbabweification is ubiquitous and must end
🧵👇 In case you think the Mugabe comparison is overblown, below are examples of the sort of thing he said

Is that any different than Yale proudly inviting a black psychiatrist on campus to tell students she “had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any White person"?

I think not. Nor is it much different than the constant articles published in regime media about how awful white people are