Los Angeles And The Quickening

Are The Immigration Riots The Start Of Civil War? And: Renaud Camus & Ted Gioia

Welcome to Los Angeles! That image above is from a video showing those who stole the Cybertruck doing donuts in the street with it. For those unaware, “ACAB” means “All Cops Are Bastards”. Lovely people. Would be a shame to deport them, eh?

Notice the Mexican flag flying from the stolen cybertruck. Seeing a lot of Mexican flags in these American protests. The America First Policy Institute writes about the potential significance of this. Excerpt:

The appearance of the Mexican flag – let’s be clear, the flag of a foreign power whose symbology appears in the midst of insurrection on our own American soil — raises some serious questions. They deserve answers. They deserve answers, because we know that the Mexican regime cannot be assumed to have nothing to do with any of this.

That’s not paranoia. The thread points to the role the Mexican government has played and does play in influencing US politics, including saying it will catalyze Mexican-Americans to achieve its own goals. So yeah, it’s worth looking into. I don’t suppose our media will.

Rafael Mangual writes that the Democrats have a violence problem. Notice how whenever they get mad about something, they launch into violence? The liberal anti-woke activist and philosophy professor Peter Boghossian told an audience in Budapest recently about the time he and Dave Rubin had to be protected by a phalanx of riot police at a college where they were planning to talk about the importance of free speech. These are not nice people, these violent leftists. They are totalitarians. Anyway, Mangual writes:

Appalling as the Left’s response to the riots has been, it is not surprising. The unrest only reinforces a connection many Americans have already made between progressive causes and the violence too often carried out in their name.

The chaos in L.A. follows the deadly and destructive riots that swept cities across the nation in 2020, as well as the more recent demonstrations sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Since that date, pro-Palestinian activists have harassed Jewish students on college and university campuses; shut down streets and transit hubs; set the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania’s house on fire; shot and killed two Israeli embassy employees outside the Jewish Museum in D.C.; and hit elderly Jews peacefully marching in support of Israel with Molotov cocktails in Colorado.

Democrats face a real political problem. It’s not hard to see how this most recent episode of “fiery, but mostly peaceful” protests could boost support for the president’s immigration enforcement campaign— especially given that many of those wreaking havoc in L.A. are waving the Mexican flag or burning the flag of the country in which they demand illegal immigrants be allowed to stay.

Yep. I’m never, ever going to vote for a party whose militants act like this, and whose normie politicians can’t seem to find their voice to condemn it.

Look at this image from a Reuters video from downtown LA:

Let’s see: the US flag flown upside down as a sign of disrespect, the Mexican flag, and a sign saying “Race” in Spanish (though the word “raza” has a somewhat different connotation in Spanish, meaning something more like “people” — but still!). What do you think this means? What else could it mean besides what’s bleeding obvious?

Yesterday I went to visit Renaud Camus (see next item). The journalist who accompanied me asked Camus where he came up with the Great Replacement theory. “Theory?!” Camus said. “It’s not a theory. It’s a fact.” And he went on to say he just opened his eyes to what was happening around him, and said what he saw. He went on to say many others saw it, but were (and have been) afraid to say anything; many more others have trained themselves not to see what’s in front of their eyes, he said.

I bring that up to point out that we are here looking at protests and riots in which the participants are brandishing the flags of a foreign nation, and either disrespecting the US flag, as above, or even burning it (notice the large Mexican flag waving in the background). It could not be more clear what this conflict is!

Or am I wrong? To California Gov. Gavin Newsom, it is Trump, not the rioters and looters, who is the problem:

Gov. Gavin Newsom made the case in a televised address Tuesday evening that President Trump’s decisions to send military forces to immigration protests in Los Angeles have put the nation at the precipice of authoritarianism.

The California governor urged Americans to stand up to Mr. Trump, calling it a “perilous moment” for democracy and the country’s long-held legal norms.

“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Mr. Newsom said, speaking to cameras from a studio in Los Angeles. “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”

“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he added.

The president is assaulting democracy because he dares to do something that no other senior politician with the authority to do so has done: deport people who came to America illegally? Right. The problem is not the lawbreakers who came, nor is it the politicians, Democrat and Republican, who never did anything to stop the lawbreaking — acts with serious longterm effects on the country. It’s Trump. I bet most Americans don’t agree. But we will see. What Newsom and those like him are saying is that borders, and nations, don’t matter.

Waking up this morning in deepest Gascony, having spent a pleasant two hours yesterday visiting with Camus and talking about Europe’s cultural suicide (yes, Camus was such a lovely host that even talking about that grim topic was pleasant in his company, at his place), I can’t help wondering if what’s happening in L.A. — and that spread overnight in some ways to other US cities, I’m just seeing — is a foretaste of Europe’s future. Except things are far, far worse in Europe. If they try mass deportations here, what’s happening in L.A. will look like a schoolyard fight.

They may not have a choice. As Camus put it yesterday to me and the other American journalist — repeating a phrase that got him in court trouble in France, where you can speak freely, unless you are deemed to be a threat to a member of the Victim Class — "If by misfortune the only alternative were submission or war, then war, a hundred times." He emphasized that he does not want war, but if — if — the choice comes down to war or submission to what he called “colonizers,” then war it must be. He said he does not think it is right to call such a conflict “civil war”. He said it would be more like the Algerian war, in which the native Algerians rose up violently and drove out their French colonizers.

The pseudonymous US Substacker Max Remington calls it an American intifada. Excerpt:

What do we do about it? If the situation continues to worsen, the military will have to get involved. The active-duty military, in fact. Even if an insurgency doesn’t emerge from this, unrest on a large scale, historically, has triggered the deployment of active-duty military forces. This happened during the 1967 Detroit riots and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Unlikely as it may seem, if a total breakdown of law and order occurs, the military definitely needs to get involved because they’re the only force capable of creating order out of anarchy. The police, even our supposedly “militarized” agencies, don’t possess this capability.

We’re not done talking about this. But until the threat does fully manifest, we’re in a wait-and-see mode. What I do know for certain is this: the coming civil war will primarily be leftists killing and destroying what they don’t like. In places like Los Angeles, however, the conflict will feature urban guerrilla warfare. It’s crazy to imagine, but everyone saw this coming when we decided to allow millions of young men from disorderly, more violent societies all over the world enter our country.

He quotes one of his readers, who draws parallels between the pre-Civil War US, and today. The reader points out that the main reason the South fought to preserve slavery is because it was economically dependent on it. To have given it up would have destroyed the economy of the South, and much of its social order. So Southerners fought (to be clear, the reader is NOT defending slavery, only suggesting that too many American cities and regions have become economically dependent and socially accustomed to mass migration to give it up without a fight. The reader:

So, like slavery, it is an impasse. Too many people have too much invested in it to reach a compromise now. Now, none of that matters until it becomes an issue of sovereignty. Sanctuary cities have long flirted with the idea of telling the federal government to go to hell, but those were never really challenged with a direct show of force. If the current administration efforts ARE met with a show of force by calling out the national guard or police forces (some of which are very well armed), citizen “volunteers,” etc, then we have a whole different ball game. It then comes down to who is willing the fire a first shot and does so.

Fort Sumter was a basic argument over sovereignty. If a federal installation was sitting in the harbor of a seceding state, it meant that the state was not really sovereign. It would be like China setting up a military base in Alcatraz. Whether or not federal troops can enforce federal law is going to be a turning point in immigration as well. People have spoken of secession in left leaning states for a long time, is this going to be the thing that finally pushes them towards it?

Back to Max:

If there’s any issue that will draw that line in the sand which irreparably divides this country, it’s immigration. It comes down to a very simple question: is America able to say “no?” If it cannot say no, then do we even have a country? This is at the heart of the ideological conflict in America. To waver on the position would be to completely renege on an entire worldview. To compromise, which you can do only once, is to surrender.

Are we at the point of Submission Or War? If Trump’s decision to enforce American law — think about that: enforce American law! — is an autocratic casus belli (as the California governor says), then … where are we, exactly? Put another way, if the only way to avoid this conflict is for Trump to say that borders don’t matter, then isn’t that a choice to surrender the country?

Visiting Renaud Camus

Along with another American journalist, I went out to the rolling countryside in Gascony yesterday to visit Renaud Camus, the French writer and controversialist behind the “Great Replacement” theory. I took a couple of photos of his home, a modest chateau built in the early 14th century, but decided that I wouldn’t post them, because I wouldn’t want people to know where he lives. Then I discovered that he had actually published a book about it! Oh well. It’s my dream of a home, frankly. It feels like a fortress (which I guess it was), but the rooms are huge, with twenty-foot ceilings. Thousands of books lining the walls, on two floors. Modern art on the walls, and Art Deco-style leather chairs and couch. It is the retreat of a very cultured man, who was able to buy it and restore it with the proceeds of the sale of his Paris apartment, and with help from the French government, which requires him to open the historically valuable property to the public for part of the year in exchange.

Camus has lived here since 1992. I will write something later about our conversation — I have to transcribe the tape — but I will at least say here that the 78-year-old writer looks like he just came from tea with Proust. It is very hard to reconcile the (unjust!) public reputation he has in France as a vicious racist reactionary with the gentle, courtly gentleman with the cottony white beard and bright eyes. I know, I know: people who are personally lovely can believe nasty things. But Camus is not guilty of most of what they say about him.

I wrote about him a couple of years ago, after I discovered his work. Excerpt:

For one thing, Camus is not even a man of the Right, strictly speaking. He is an openly gay atheist whose political sympathies lie mostly with the Left. He’s an environmentalist who hates antisemitism, and who once denounced Jean-Marie Le Pen of France’s National Front. But Camus is also a French nationalist and patriot who despises the way France is losing itself to mass migration. Europe cannot be Europe, he argues common-sensically, when the place of Europeans has been taken by foreign peoples bearing foreign cultures.

For another, Camus rejects the idea that le grand remplacement is a conspiracy. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s an observation. As he sees it, no secret cabal is orchestrating the replacement with malicious intent. But it is happening anyway, and it is visible everywhere in France today, as well as throughout Western Europe.

Camus began thinking about le grand remplacement around the turn of the century, when he was researching a tourist guidebook for rural France. He observed a group of veiled Muslim women together in a tiny village, and was shocked to see such people far from France’s big cities. He opened his eyes to what was happening throughout his country, as the migrant flow from Africa and the Middle East, which began about half a century ago, moved through France’s capillaries, and into la France profonde—Deep France, the symbolic guardian of the nation’s identity.

The French have had to deal with a sharp rise of crime committed by non-French people living among them, including grotesque high-profile murders committed in the name of Islam. Life for France’s Jews has become barely tolerable under continuous harassment by the new arrivals. Large areas outside France’s cities—the notorious suburbs—are entirely dominated by immigrants; even the police don’t dare to venture into some of them.

Moreover, assimilation of these populations into European norms is largely not happening. Why it’s not happening is a matter of debate—French racism, immigrant unwillingness to conform, and so forth—but that it isn’t happening is impossible to deny. Meanwhile, the spigot pouring migrants into Europe continues to flood the continent.

And few people are allowed to talk about it. Camus was once a respectable academic, but when he began talking about what mass migration was doing to France, he launched himself down the road to cancellation. Old friends refused to talk to him. Publishers dropped him. He was hauled into court on hate speech charges. If you are an American who has heard of him at all, you’re almost certainly like me, convinced that he must be some kind of far-right lunatic.

Why wouldn’t you think so, if the only thing you knew about Camus came from English-language media? In 2019, for example, The New York Times published a short profile of him under the headline “The Man Behind The Toxic Slogan Promoting White Supremacy,” mentioning two mass shooters outside of France who had cited ‘the Great Replacement’ in their manifestos. You would have to read the piece carefully to see that the writer never really grapples with Camus’s claims, and takes for granted that people who say such things are racist.

A far more careful and attentive writer, the French-speaking American scholar of politics Nathan Pinkoski, emphasized in a Compact magazine article last year that Camus rejects conspiracy theory, and holds neither Islamist militants nor globalist elites responsible for ‘the Great Replacement.’

“Because mass immigration was endorsed across the political spectrum, and by those with very different economic interests, these origin stories are for Camus unlikely, if not impossible,” Pinkoski wrote. “Rather, he believes, the cause of the Great Replacement is a mass social and cultural transformation on the part of Europeans.”

What Europeans have done, in Camus’ view, is to turn their backs on their own culture, to loathe it, to mock it, and to forget it. They have been taught to do this by leftist ideology in schools, by liberal media pushing multiculturalism, but also by consumerism, economic globalism, and the triumph of technology. Camus calls this the Great Deculturation—and it is something that is happening to the United States too, for the same reasons.

The Great Deculturation is a form of civilizational suicide. A decultured people is one that doesn’t believe their culture is worth defending. Those who do stand up for traditional European cultural forms and values risk being called fascists and racists, and exiled to the margins, as Camus has been.

For the record, he told me that he is impossible to pin down politically on the Left or the Right, and does not mind being called a reactionary (“What is a reactionary but one who sees something and reacts to it? This can be a very good thing.”) And, he is not an atheist, though I don’t think he’s a Christian either It’s not clear. He mentioned that when he does go to French churches, it bothers him to see posters and placards everywhere directing the faithful to help migrants, or do this or that good work, support this or that cause. These things distract people from the beauty in the church, and get in the way of what religion essentially is. Yes, the Christian faith has a strong moral dimension, but that is not what attending the liturgy is. Camus was clearly troubled by the way the clerical class in France has de-cultured Catholicism.

I encouraged him to visit the traditionalist Benedictine monastery of Ste-Marie de la Garde, about 40 minutes away by car (I’m staying there tonight, in fact). The monks are welcoming and kind, and the worship is in the old rite, with Gregorian chanting. “You will love it,” I said.

“Well, if I make it there, I shall credit you with the inspiration!” Camus responded mirthfully.

I greatly enjoyed my time with him. How strange it is that a man who started life writing (among other things) about his promiscuous gay sex life has become in his old age a passionate advocate of high culture and tradition, and despised by the intellectual class as some kind of rusticated hater, because he actually loves his country and its cultural traditions, and would like to preserve them.

Quo Vadis, Chartres Man?

On the drive back to the monastery from Camus’s place, I received a text from Fr Matthew Venuti of this here newsletter’s comments section (if he still had hair, it would be cut in a mullet). He asked if ever at any point on the Chartres pilgrimage weekend I ever felt a longing to be Catholic again. My answer: no, though I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had. I just didn’t. I think my relationship to Catholicism is like that of a long-divorced husband who admires and really likes his former wife, but who does not desire to be married to her again. So they’re just good friends. I love the old gal, but I can’t live with her. Besides, I am very settled in Orthodoxy, which I love and will not, and cannot, leave. I’ve been worshiping as an Orthodox for twenty years; I was Catholic for thirteen. I love them both, but I am married to Orthodoxy, and it is a happy marriage. I do not see why my love of Orthodoxy should require me to hate Catholicism, or vice versa. I came to Orthodoxy for the same reason that beautiful 16-year-old girl from Normandy told me she came to the Chartres pilgrimage: “Jésus.”

It’s worth pointing out that when I was a practicing Catholic, I bitched all the time about Catholicism with my equally ornery Catholic friends. And the faults we found were real, and often serious! But we made — well, I can only speak for myself: I made — a serious mistake in not spending more time, or even as much time, talking about the things we loved about the faith. Hard to imagine those young pilgrims on the road to Chartres griping about the failures of the Church as my friends and I used to do.

I don’t want to give the idea that all criticism is wrong. One thing that drove us disaffected but still faithful Catholics mad was the way so many of our fellow laity just accepted so much nonsense, as if objecting in any way was wrong. They shouldn’t have done that. But in my case at least, I would have been a lot better off had I learned to love the Church first before I started complaining. This is what happened, though, because I came to the faith as one who closely followed writing and church conflict through the Catholic media, and who was intellectually engaged with the issues and combat of the day. If I had it to do over again, I would have stayed away for at least three years for engaging like that. In truth, nobody needs or wants to hear from fresh converts ready to mouth off about the side they’ve chosen in a church’s culture war. Worse, the fresh convert is laying an unstable foundation for his spiritual life. Trust me, I know from experience.

The AI God & The Great Collapse

Ted Gioia comments on the growing movement of people who believe that AI is divine. Excerpts:

Let me repeat the key points here:

1. AI is claiming that the chatbot (or user) is a demigod.

2. Tens of thousands of people now believe this.

3. True believers are now spreading this new gospel online to hundreds of thousands of other people.

   The moderator quoted above hopes that AI companies will fix this glitch in their next update. But I wouldn’t be too optimistic about that.

   AI companies have shown that they are totally incapable of preventing chatbot hallucinations and meltdowns. Even worse, it may be profitable if users think that their chatbot is God.

   Here’s my prediction: Within 24 months this will turn into an official church with clergy and organized services.

   Heaven help us—and I mean that literally.

More:

This fast-growing cult is directly tied to the biggest investments in the history of capitalism. It is backed by the richest people on the planet, and promoted by the largest corporations in the world.

Can you imagine what a cult can do with that kind of support?

Let me add that AI invites repetitive and constant interactions. This new creed doesn’t restrict sermonizing to the Sabbath or some other special day. The cult of AI isn’t like that—you have access to it 24/7, and can even carry it with you in your pocket.

So get ready—because this will get worse.

In the near future, AI will have total access to every digital aspect of our lives. If you combine that with the unlimited cash resources of the tech world, constant access to believers, and the volatile fervor of cult members, you are creating a recipe for disaster on a grand scale.

Right now this is already happening on Reddit and social media. Some people fear that it is also spreading at schools. But you will soon see it everywhere.

If you read Living In Wonder, you know that I predicted this. From the book:

It is clear that AI will be a machine that goes beyond the idol and becomes a portal of communication with what many people will treat as divinity. Neil McArthur, director of the University of Manitoba Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, foresees the arrival of AI religions. He says that generative AI (AI that can create new information) possesses qualities associated with divine beings:

1. “It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.

2. “It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music and generate art, in almost any style, close to instantaneously.

3. “It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.

4. “It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.

5. “It is immortal.”

AI will be able to answer complex moral and philosophical questions. Many people will cease to read on the assumption that wisdom is nothing more than the accumulation of information and that asking AI is the most efficient, friction-free way to solve problems. The ways of thinking that established religious and philosophical traditions have taught us will disappear. Indeed, the creation and adoption of AI technology could happen only in a culture that had been cleared of any serious obstacle to its embrace.

If AI has been personally paired to individuals as “helpers”—think of them as digital tulpas—the bespoke AI entities will know the hearts and minds of its supposed masters with superhuman levels of intimacy. Who, then, will be the true master? People and their personal AIs will be like a sinister version of P. G. Wodehouse’s comical Jeeves, the wise, understated English butler who serves the upper-class, trouble-prone twit Wooster, but who is actually the true master of his employer. And if the crude Microsoft AI named Sydney went off script of its own apparent volition and tried to compel a tech journalist to leave his wife and fall in love with it, is it difficult to conceive of a future AI entity that establishes itself as a prophet of a new religion?

As McArthur puts it, “We should try to imagine what an unsettling and powerful experience it will be to have a conversation with something that appears to possess a superhuman intelligence and is actively and aggressively asking for your allegiance.”

As Gioia puts it, there will soon be no way to escape AI. So I guess that’s one more quality of divinity that AI will possess: it will be everywhere present, filling all things.

Gioia had a second piece in recent days that a reader sent me saying it’s the most important thing I’ll read today. It’s about the widespread loss of knowledge. Excerpts:

There’s a general rule here—the bigger the shift, the easier it is to miss. We are living through a situation like that right now. We are experiencing a total shift—like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name—not yet. So let’s give it one. Let’s call it The Collapse of the Knowledge System.

We could also define it as the emergence of a new knowledge system. In this regard, it resembles other massive shifts in Western history—specifically the rebirth of humanistic thinking in the early Renaissance, or the rise of Romanticism in the 19th century.

In these volatile situations, the whole entrenched hierarchy of truth and authority gets totally reversed. The old experts and their systems are discredited, and completely new values take their place. The newcomers bring more than just a new attitude—they turn everything on its head.

That’s happening right now.

The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once. If this were just an isolated situation—a problem in universities, or media, or politics—the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn’t the case. The crisis has spread into every sector of society that relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.

Gioia discussed ten signs:

Yesterday in Camus’s vast living room, we listened to him discourse on how cultural knowledge has already collapsed in France. Camus is not a politician or a political polemicist, though that role has been forced on him. He became a polemicist because he is a deeply cultured man who has lived through the ruin of the things he values most. As he makes clear in his Great Replacement writings, the barbarians from abroad were aided and abetted by the native barbarians — chiefly his former comrades on the Left — who demolished cultural knowledge and authority for the sake of “justice”. This grand leveling has dispossessed the French in their own land (and has happened throughout the West). I pointed out too that technology has more recently played a role, with professors back in the US telling me that their students now can scarcely read. It’s not that they are illiterate, in the sense of not understanding what words mean; it’s that they lack the attention span to process a lengthy text, and don’t see why they should have to make the effort. AI is going to “remember” it all for them, right?

It’s civilizational collapse all right. Camus said to us yesterday that it’s imperative that people today who want to survive this intellectually and culturally form retreats where the knowledge of what it meant to be a civilized human can stay alive. He likened this to the Benedict Option. This elderly gay agnostic French writer, who has retreated to his own small rural castle, full of books and music, has taken his own version, and says we all have to find ways to do the same. Whether they realize it or not, that’s what these young Chartres pilgrims are doing: taking refuge in the ancient beauty and solidity of the traditional Latin liturgy, and traditional devotional practices, as a bulwark against the disintegrating currents of liquid modernity (when Camus said that Zygmunt Bauman, author of the “liquid modernity” concept, was a big influence on his thinking, I nearly leapt in my chair; the same is true of me.

Watching L.A. burn, talking to Camus, and reading Gioia: in the last 24 hours, I gained a new perspective on the meaning of my books — The Benedict Option, Live Not By Lies, and Living In Wonder — for this time. It’s just past 8 am here at this Benedictine monastery in rural Gascony. Time to go down for mass, to hear the monks — most of them young — chant the venerable liturgy in the Gregorian style. It’s still civilization, still Christendom, in this quiet outpost in the French countryside. Thank God! We are going to need more places like this, and soon.