(White) population decline since 1950 is the story of nearly every American city.

Since ~1990, most US cities have tried to reverse the decline with a mass influx of Hispanics and to a lesser extent Asians and foreign blacks. This allows them claim they are “growing” while sweeping the effect of substituting net tax liabilities for net tax assets under the rug.

Pittsburgh is unusual only in that it has deferred replacing lost whites with non-whites, which means that they have to endure demoralizing decline statistics like what you showed. OTOH, they avoided the race-driven death-spiral of fellow rust belt cities like Detroit. So there’s that.

Nowadays Pittsburgh is importing non-whites (hence your 2024 figure), but has preferred Asians to Hispanics, so their municipal books will probably be sounder.

It looks like Pittsburgh City is stable in population for the past twenty years. It accumulated substantial numbers of Blacks but somehow never tipped over into an ever-increasing-Black spiral. The ratio of around 275:100 White:Black has been stable for forty years.

The metropolitan area is what matters (city-limits can often be arbitrary) and it seems that outside Pittsburgh City the population is something nearer 100% White in many places.

Mr Anon was one of the few here who was willing challenge Sailer directly on his daft kovid stance, and he took the two loathsome hacks known as Ha and That Would Be Telling to task. For that, he should have any reasonable person’s gratitude.

Yes, this.

Putting Corvanus and Mr. Anon in the same sentence is risible. Mr. Anon and I have disagreed plenty of times, but amazingly, he has never come at me with the pejoratives he has used for others (nor I, him), so maybe it’s not all him? Like it takes two to tango and all that? Perhaps his message does get lost in his delivery, but then again so does yours, with your constant needling and somewhat extensive and arbitrary devil’s advocacy. When it becomes clear that you’re simply amusing yourself to annoy other commenters, that’s when I skip on down. I doubt I’m alone in that regard.

Mr Anon was one of the few here who was willing challenge Sailer directly on his daft kovid stance, and he took the two loathsome hacks known as Ha and That Would Be Telling to task. For that, he should have any reasonable person’s gratitude.

The commenters that disagree with me above all think the planes that flew into the WTC were holograms or something. Which is fine, I don’t really care, but it kinda discredits their authority on the matter.

The closure of the Mexico border to substantial numbers of border-jumpers is a good thing the Trump-II people have (apparently) done.

Unfortunately I see nothing special about the rest. They are wasting time, and burning far too much political capital on stupid things. Trump Distraction Syndrome?

The whole Trump-MAGA phenomenon thrives on constant hype-cycles.

Are deportations substantially above the rate in previous eras? Are out-flows of people (what you call “voluntary departures”) much higher in 2025 than in previous comparable years? What about legal in-flows of people?

Except for the in-flow of illegal border-jumpers, none of these numbers are a big difference with business-as-usual. And an equivalent number of border-jumpers could be admitted legally under one of the proposed Trump Guest-Worker Programs. The absolute moral commitment must be to lowering their numbers, but Trump always instead wants to make a deal (as he likes putting it).

The big difference seems to be more the tone and the imagery on TV and the constant hype-drumbeat on social-media and elsewhere. Not that these things are without meaning, but they aren’t the same as real results.

Pavilion, NY is 97% white

There was a Washington Post article a few days ago about how the best-affordable non-rural place for White Americans to buy homes. It is: Greater Pittsburgh.

—> Alert: Sailer’s AFF (or WAFF): (White) Affordable Family Formation.

Pittsburgh has long been the Whitest major metropolitan area. It had number-one ranking in the list I made pegged to the 2010 census (of 51 one-million-plus-resident metro areas): https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/the-usas-large-metro-areas-by-level-of-whiteness

Here is the Washington Post story on Pittsburgh’s / western Pennsylvania’s White housing affordability:

https://archive.is/emBOa

How this major city became one of America’s most affordable for homebuyers

While there are many yardsticks for calculating housing affordability, the western Pennsylvania city stands out as uniquely livable.

Washington Post
November 10, 2025

Steve Sailer says the Jewish-woman chemist Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) would’ve held what by today’s standards could be problematic views.

Would Rosalind Franklin Have Been Cancelled As a Eugenicist?

How do we know that the woman whose data helped Crick and Watson didn’t share their deplorable views?

by Steve Sailer | Nov 10, 2025

Chemist Rosalind Franklin, who worked with Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling to produce x-ray images that helped Francis Crick and James D. Watson figure out the structure of DNA in 1953, has been famous for not being famous for much of the last half century.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/would-rosalind-franklin-have-been

Rosalind Franklin has been a celebrated (Jewish?-)feminist icon because she didn’t live long enough, says Sailer. The white-male James Watson, did live long enough.

Steve’s theory here fails overlooks the male, Western, and Christian-origin parts of the saga of the villification of James Watson (and many others; and really all white-males). There are several “outs” or someone like Rosalind Franklin.

What does it mean that TVs had become “90% cheaper” by some point in the early 2010s? (And further crept down towards “98% cheaper” by the early 2020s?)

To compare TVs in the year 2000 vs. in the year 2020 is not to compare the same thing. To force it, as if the graph were comparing apples vs. grapes vs. bananas (which can be counted on to be the same over time-spans) is misleading.

The same applies to anything related to computers and phones. These comparisons stop making sense, after a point. Late-1990s cell phones vs. mid-2020 cell phones are separated in time by a mere quarter century or so, but by a pretty big qualitative gap and a cultural gap.

(Most people in the late 1990s didn’t see the need for cell phones, and you can easily find TV shows from the period in which drug dealers and other suspicious characters are shown to be “cell phone people.” Ordinary people aren’t shown using them. There was seen to be something inherently questionable about it. Needless to say that disappeared by some point in the early 2010s. So there is a cultural-technological shift that breaks the continuity of the graph.)

For TVs, I’d guess it’s comparing a certain size TV which was excessively expensive in 2000 but over time the same size got lower in prize. In practice, are people paying “98% less” on the decadal TV budget? No. They may be paying about the same. They’re just getting much larger/flatter screens. Whether this is definitely a good thing or not is not obvious.

The right criticism of Trump is to the effect that he is a buffoon (the jester of his own court) who wastes time, wastes power, creates pointless dramas, is unfocused, creates enemies, and troublingly loves claiming victory a lot more than actual having victory in itself. A lot of what Trump “is,” amounts to a giant distraction machine.

Whatever the number of deportations has been since January 20, 2025, it’s not what people expected. (It’s hard to think at scale in a 340m mega-state.) The correct attitude on the deportations would have to be something like: This is completely insufficient, even if maybe a good small start. We need to doing a lot more. If what we have so far is the full “ball game,” we have failed. Trump is not capable of that, so he is variously an unfocused buffoon and a person manipulated by others all too often.

Trump doesn’t care enough to have the level of sustained, morally-committed view of an issue as the one I sketched out in italics just above. And/or he doesn’t understand things both big and small.

Trump is a showman above all else. He wants a show, and he endeavors to give people a show. It’s possible he’d prefer doing full-time MAGA rallies and never have to bother with governing. (He famously doesn’t read the reports people prepare for him.) Like a lot of charismatic politicians, especially older ones, he seems to be quite a bit of a BS’er who, in a less-stable environment, could drive a country to ruin.

As I say, what Trump really, really wants is “a big show” and to declare victory. The bombing of the Iran nuclear site is a good example of th Trump Philosophy of Doing Anything: Big noises, explosions; claiming something is historic and the best-ever; claiming he solved a problem through his unique genius (such as ending seven wars; just nobody ask pesky questions), while never really interested in follow-through or asking any questions. Some say the site was empty and some among those say that Trump and co. knew it and the entire strike was another Trump-style “performance.”

Cool footage of a few deportations is similar to the illegal-but-cool-looking murders of people in alleged drug-boats, video of which this man can broadcast and pat himself on the back for being a Tough Guy. If he can even remotely-plausibly declare victory through some sort of appearance of something in that direction, it doesn’t matter which way the needle moves on the White share-of-population or the prospects for Whites to be in control of their own destiny in their own country again. That’s not his interest.

I’ve tried to reached out to Steve Sailer to tell him of the news about Germ Theory.

The Germ Theory of Disease was one of Sailer’s best quality commenters (read that as “best-quality” or “best, quality” as you wish). It looks like over 8,000 comments between November 2018 and October 2025, a large number of which are practically suitable to have been blog-posts in their own right.

Terrible news that he is so gravely ill. I will pray for him.

Germ was a gifted storyteller. I’ll miss his contributions.

I have some very unfortunate news to relay to you all: the person whose handle is The Germ Theory of Disease has been transferred to hospice care having suffered at least two strokes last week and is not expected to survive more than a few days. Having known him for a couple of decades and enjoyed his company immensely despite his various craziness, I very much hope that last part isn’t true.

people responded to the election of a new mayor on a strong anti-billionaire platform as if we didn’t see a campaign with these exact same themes win twelve years ago.

New Yorkers may or may not have short memories, but when a plurality of your electorate wasn’t even here twelve years ago, their memories don’t matter.

“For unknown reasons, Steve Sailer has yet to make a general commentary on Mamdani.”

I do not find this surprising. Sailer has said he likes to comment on things where he feels he has some special insight and that he dislikes making factual errors. Living in Southern California he may feel he is not well positioned to offer accurate, insightful commentary on the intricacies of New York City politics.

I thought the substack post by Mathew Yglesias on Mamdani’s election was interesting albeit rather long.

“But the interesting thing about the Great Forgetting of Bill de Blasio is not that he was some embarrassing Johnson-like failure the left wants to memory hole. It’s that the left grew disillusioned with him almost immediately, to the point that four years after he stepped down, people responded to the election of a new mayor on a strong anti-billionaire platform as if we didn’t see a campaign with these exact same themes win twelve years ago.”

“The hard question for the urban left isn’t whether they can win elections in the most left-wing parts of the country. And it’s not even really whether they can do a good job in office. It’s whether they can sustain enthusiasm for their own champion as Mamdani has to wrestle with the actual problems of governance in a world where the prospects for socialism in one city are genuinely unpromising.”

Did anyone predict either of these things:

(1.) Trump calls FDR “a GREAT president”;

(2.) Trump instituting a 50-year mortgage policy ?

Some are saying the Trump 50-year Mortgage Plan “is a giveaway to the banks disguised as populism.”

Many decades ago, I would go mushroom picking with my dad and my two uncles (long since dead) in fall time at a state park 30 minutes from where I had lived. My uncles spoke fluent Polish. I just knew the four types of mushrooms we picked by the names they told me—buttons, grassers, stumpers, banana. I can still pick them out of a mushroom lineup based on their color and size.

Anyways, I recall when I was 8 and we went to our usual spot. The four varieties were everywhere—the mother lode. As I was using my pocket knife to help out my dad and uncles pick them from several stumps, apparently there were other people in the area. Four guys came from nowhere, screaming we should leave as we were “taking their spot”. My uncles just carried on, ignoring their demand. Then the four guys started to swear in Polish. My uncles proceeded in kind. Both groups were just about to get into a knife fight, when my dad was able to calmly talk them out from shanking each other.

I got a Graf/s grape soda and some Crackerjack on the way home. We got two big bushels of mushrooms that morning. My grandma took several pictures of us (those were her two older brothers) cleaning the mushrooms in her basement.

Sailer says he was “shock[ed]” by the Cancellation of James Watson in 2007, by which we can assume he indeed means he was genuinely surprised by it:

Steve Sailer:

The two shocking to me (at the time) harbingers of cancel culture were in 2005-07:

Harvard President Larry Summers for repeating Pinknerian talking points about why there were more male than female Harvard math professors, and

James D. Watson on W-B test score gaps.

To be honest: the fact that director Kathryn Bigelow (b.1951) is a woman may be the key to understanding how House of Dynamite went wrong. What I mean is, the final product seems to show she is not truly interested in the attractions and ‘potential’ of this kind of scenario. There are tell-tale signs of this all throughout, from start to finish.

(See also: Almost Missouri’s comments on the movie.)

NAXALT Disclaimer: Some women may be so-interested. But, in the pool of all people so-interested, it’s male-dominated and only a question of how big the ratio is. The odds are quite against a woman director doing this kind of movie well, I think.

A big-budget, interesting-concept, present-day, nuclear-war movie — ostensibly realistic (almost as if a documentary rather than some zany parallel world) ended muddled dud with nothing to say. As if the whole thing like a long-extended PSA commercial, because some or other people involved in the production really didn’t care about their subject!

If you want this country to head in a Libertarian direction, and Libertarians were too few even 50 years ago, is it wise to invite in people that neither want anything to do with nor have even HEARD OF your Libertarian ideals?

Libertarians seemed to be gaining traction in the 90s and early 2000s with Harry Browne, Ron Paul, and Lew Rockwell types, but their immigration stances and the tendency to attract the tie-died crowds and Randians doomed them, in my opinion. The very early Tea Party demonstrations had potential, but a movement has to stand for more than money, taxes, and ideology. Nobody wanted/wants to represent actual Americans, which really means white Americans, so here we are. We live in a nation where the elites have no attachment to the core population, no accountability to anyone, and a largely inferior and hostile replacement population on the ground.

Unless something is done to restore traditional demographics without exploding the population, the very best that can be hoped for is a steep decline in standards across the board. Who really believes that that is all we’ll face, since we are already there this early in the game?

That whole thirty year period from 1965 to 1995 seemed bad at the time but not so bad now looking back. The next thirty years involving the offshoring of our industrial base and the resulting factory job losses led to even more drug and alcohol use and men being unable to support a wife and children. You also started to see noticeable demographic changes from increasing immigration.

The prosperity of the second half of the nineties was largely illusory. It came from government inflationary policies creating the dotcom bubble and all of the large Boomer generation being in the workforce. Eventually the bubble would burst and the Boomers would start retiring. The Republicans controlled Congress for 12 years from 1994 to 2006 and also had the presidency half that time but did little to reduce the increasing trade deficits or increasing levels of immigration and to prepare for the day when tax revenues started dropping and Social Security and Medicare costs started rising when the Boomers started to retire and leave the workforce.

Look at the people who led the lynch-mob to ‘Cancel’ Watson in 2007 to find who the replacement elites are

Okay, I won’t keep all the good Sailer-comment readers out there in suspense any more. From 2007:

Southern Poverty Law Center: HATEWATCH

ACADEMIC RACISM: INTO THE MUCK

December 9, 2007
by Mark Potok

When Nobel Prize winner James D. Watson suggested in October that Africans are innately less intelligent than others, he was met by an international firestorm of scientific criticism, ultimately resulting in his public apology and later resignation […]

[E]xperts on intelligence challenged the scientific basis for Watson’s comment, and [Francis Collins,] the director of the Human Genome Research Institute, who took up his post after Watson left it, described Watson’s remark as “a racist statement.”

Francis Collins joined in the denunciation of James Watson, but was merely following a mob of Mark Potoks.

Francis Collins is remembered these days for his role as a leading promoter of the Covid Panic of 2020, denouncing and suppressing skeptics and opponents of the Panic, and warp-speeding the vaccines.

Francis Collins’ deputy (number two) at the Human Genome Research Institute was Alan Guttmacher, who took over the Human Genome Research Institute a few months after James Watson’s unpersoning.

But these guys, the Collinses and even the Guttmachers, were not the drivers of the Race Panic and cancellation of James Watson for his (scientifically-irrefutable) racial views. That was the Mark Potoks.

Notice again the exact wording used by racial-political commissar Potok: he frames it as “an international firestorm of scientific criticism,” which makes it seem like Watson had become an a fanatic Flat-Earther. In other worse, total moral-delegitimation of rivals/targets. (That’s not the way the USA used to work.)

To find the names of key, leading anti-Watson agitators, and power-players who signalled their approval of the guillotining of James Watson — the people who made the panic begin and spread, who let the ritual humiliation and unpersoning succeed — a long trip through the Sailer archives in late 2007 might be profitably done by someone.

“the Rufo & Lomez Show”

Listened to it. Empty calories.

“But I think we do need to distinguish between ‘dead ends’ that are bad for the movement.”

So, gate keeping.

DU GAMLA, DU FRIA

YOU ANCIENT, YOU FREE

My apologies to all fans of correctness:

I posted the “Du Gamla, Du Fria” lyrics limited to the widely-known, ‘classic,’ two-verse, version which is pan-Scandinavian (or easily adaptable considerably beyond Scandinavia

The music, though, is from the widened four-verse version.

I’ll post here the four-verse version in Swedish and English, side-by-side.

For those with total unfamiliarity with the languages of Scandinavia, you can confirm their close relation to English/German easily, by a simple exercise in comparing these (simple) lyrics line by line. It’s quite possible, much of the time, to do full–on “word substitution,” and with merely slightly altered words at that.

You’re going to have to do some work, though, by clicking “More”:

I thought it was an exceedingly fine gesture by Alisher Usmanov to buy and give Watson back his Nobel medal after he felt forced to sell it. Western billionaires can fuck right off.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30406322

Charles Murray, today, publishes this reminiscence-tribute to James Watson (1928-2025; terminated from polite society, in 2007, for Racism):

One morning around four or five years ago, I got a phone call from James Watson. I was startled. I had met him only once, at a conference at Cold Spring Harbor in the mid-1990s and we hadn’t been in touch since. I can remember few details, but I do remember that the call lasted for at least twenty minutes and that I soon realized that my job was to listen. James Watson needed a sympathetic ear.

Perhaps he saw me as someone who had experienced on a far smaller scale something similar to what he had experienced. Perhaps he figured (correctly) that I would agree with what pained him the most: He hadn’t done anything wrong. He had spoken candidly about his assessment of the evidence regarding the B/W difference in IQ. His conclusion that genetics were part of the story was shared by the majority of specialists in IQ. And yet his professional career and reputation had been devastated.

He wanted to live long enough for his remarks to be vindicated. I do remember reminding him of some good news. Since the genome had been sequenced, it had been established that evolutionary change had taken place after the dispersal from Africa and that the change had been mostly local, not shared across continents. The genetic evidence from GWAS studies had already found ubiquitous population differences across all the races, including variants associated with cognition. Vindication would come. But I got no sense that I had done anything to ease his anguish.

Now he is dead. In a half century, his reputation as one of history’s great biologists will have been restored. People will know that he had the misfortune to reach old age in an era when the academy was lunatic. I hope he realized that before the end.

_________

James Watson was an “old stock” figure in more than one way. Apparently of 100% NW-European ancestry. Paternal-lines largely trace to colonial era. Dedicated to scientific inquiry, truth over ‘face.’

James Watson, and Charles Murray too, are the kind of White ‘elite,’ tinkerer-inventor, or generally prominent figure you’d have seen all over the map/spectrum, throughout the eras of North American history up through the mid-20th century.

Look at the people who led the lynch-mob to ‘Cancel’ Watson in 2007 to find who the replacement elites are.

The parameters of the Rufo & Lomez Show show have been set and announced (see 54:45 to 56:45):

CHRIS RUFO : Some selection, some curation, some thought, some taste [is necessary or inevitable].

We’re going to have different guests on than another show, because we have different ideas, different preferences, different interests, different curiosity.

But I think we do need to distinguish between ‘dead ends’ that are bad for the movement. ‘Groyperism‘ I would put in that category. We should have platforms for wider debate.

CHRIS RUFO: I’ve had debates with Curtis Yarvin, who I don’t agree with at all on anything. But there is something that you learn from those debates, something that you gain. You strengthen your arguments. You see where your arguments might be weaker. You learn about someone else’s arguments.

And I think that we need to [set] boundaries that permit debate, but are also sophisticated, [to] sort out the ‘real’ from the ‘hyperreal,’ the dead ends from the productive possibilities.

The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, are so bad it defies belief

They gave her an Oscar (March 2010) for Best Picture (!), and another for Best Director, for The Hurt Locker.

That kind of thing might get Sailer’s enduring respect to the extent of leading towards some Anti-Noticing. (I don’t recall if I saw either one.)

_________

2010 “Best Picture” nominees:
– The Hurt Locker (winner)
– Avatar
– The Blind Side
– District 9
– An Education
– Inglourious Basterds
– Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
– A Serious Man
– Up [animated]
– Up in the Air

2010 “Best Director” nominees:
– Kathryn Bigelow – The Hurt Locker (winner)
– James Cameron – Avatar
– Quentin Tarantino – Inglourious Basterds
– Lee Daniels – Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
– Jason Reitman – Up in the Air

(Does “Best Director” always overlap so totally with “Best Picture”?)

“Kathryn Bigelow”

Sailer’s assessment of this director is laughable. The two movies she did that you mention, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, are so bad it defies belief. The Hurt Locker is an absolute mess. It makes zero sense, but of course it has the cookie cutter Killgore inspired character that all of these movies have. Zero Dark Thirty is basically pro “official story” propaganda regarding the “hunt” for OBL, featuring a Mary Sue CIA operative played by the unbearable and insufferable Jessica Chastain. I mean, I don’t even think the actual body of OBL (or whomever they killed) would have even been cold yet when this movie came out.

The only movie she did that was any good, as far as entertainment value goes, was Point Break (which has such a James Cameron feel I’d be shocked if he didn’t actually direct it in reality) and that was because Gary Busey and Patrick Swayze carried Keanu’s dull ass throughout the whole thing.

A House of Dynamite

Saw it. As you say, it was disappointing on every dimension. The military/technical/geopolitical backstories that would interest three-digit IQ men are all completely perfunctory and unexplored. The designated General Ripper-esque character is a silly caricature. The movie stops the moment before impact, so the explosions-and-violence viewer demographic gets blue-balled. (Also a terrible violation of Chekov’s Gun rule.)

Steve describes Kathryn Bigelow as the lady director who will “sympathetically explore the crazy stuff that men do … fascinated by men who like blowing up stuff”, which was on display in the not-so-masculinely-named Hurt Locker, but has completely disappeared from the very-masculinely-named House of Dynamite.

Basically, the film is just a concatenation of brief character sketches of people, up and down the US chain-of-command, facing an imminent nuclear explosion, and they all react the same way: emotional meltdown and unseemly displays of metaphorical menstruation. Except the guy who carries the nuclear football, played with sangfroid by some British actor, who has about half a minute of screentime near the end. And yeah, casting Idris Elba (British, lol) as the new-and-improved Barack Obama sure was irritating. With Rebecca Ferguson and Jared Harris, it is notably peculiar how British-ly director Bigelow has cast this soi-disant character portrait of the US security state. I guess they work cheaper and are better at the rapid stern-to-sad transition that is the main action in this film.

fwiw —- the 1h6m first episode of “Rufo & Lomez on BlazeTV,” featuring Lomez (Sailer publisher and publicity-man) and Chris Rufo (Sailer-influenced and generally mutual well-wisher), is up:

subfields have been taken over by small cliques that referee and cite each other’s papers and reject outside criticism.

Interesting to consider the case of the recently-deceased James Watson in this context.

Steve Sailer says James Watson‘s racial views have been vindicated:

James D. Watson, RIP

The co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who was cancelled for mentioning the existence of the racial IQ gap, has died at 97.

[S]ince 2007, Africa has taken the lead in the development of artificial intelligence, thus disproving Watson’s view.

Oh, wait …

[T]he 2007 cancellation of James D. Watson, America’s most distinguished man of science, for telling the truth about racial cognitive differences was a catastrophic milestone in America’s descent into the anti-science hysteria of the Great Awokening decade (hopefully, now in our rear view mirror).

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/james-d-watson-rip

Mamdani’s proclamation on targeting “white neighborhoods,” exact wording:

“Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods.”

“The property tax system is unbalanced because assessment levels are artificially capped, so homeowners in expensive neighborhoods pay less than their fair share. The Mayor can fix this by pushing class assessment percentages down for everyone and adjusting rates up, effectively lowering tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica and Brownsville while raising the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones.”

The new policy would be designed to favor, quote, “family homes in Black and Latino neighborhoods like Jamaica, Brownsville, and Tremont […].”

Mamdani says “white neighborhoods” should pay higher property taxes

“The” Alex Nowrasteh reached impressive heights of self-parody there.

He had an explosive bout of a “Quiet Part Out Loud” that day. It just came out that way: suddenly, slimily, right there in his chair. The embarrassment at the discharge may have been minimal. Maybe race-and-politics expert Mr Alex Nowratesh had a spare change of clothes around the office and was able to get back to looking like a normal adult, one in reasonable control of his faculties, in no time.

Have any Sailer-commentariat people seen the attention-getting new movie A House of Dynamite?

A House of Dynamite is flat and disappointing in all ways: as art, as political statement, as satire, as realistic documentary-type effort, as anything.

The movie makes nuclear war look boring!

If Sailer were still doing movie reviews

Steve Sailer has returned to movie-reviewing, for (the flat, disappointing, ‘dud’ of a nuclear-apocalypse movie called) A House of Dynamite:

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/a-house-of-dynamite

The Vivek Ramaswmay argument is not about a gap between people with sub-par reading skills and people with good reading skills.

The Vivek Ramaswamy argument is more like:

RAMASWAMY: Americans out there who have good reading skills are LAZY. They need to focus! They need to spend 6 days a week cramming for spelling bees, for gameable standardized tests. Let’s go!

Because then, friends, the glorious future awaits. These shaped-up, ex-lazy Whites can put to use the skills, thus acquired, to scam people at large scale and to the tune of millions on fraudulent medical technologies followed by second careers as Fox News talking-heads that can skillfully recite bullet-pointed lists of anti-Wokeness positions.

The “thing” about Mamdani

For unknown reasons, Steve Sailer has yet to make a general commentary on Mamdani.

A Sailer supporter writes this on Egypt:

Went to the old Egyptian museum in Cairo in 2005 and felt sorry for its scammy decrepit turd world condition right from the ticket booth. Worse yet for visiting the pyramids and the sphinx. Cairo felt like the night of the living dead, worse than Manila or Santo Domingo. Egypt is a sh**hole country.

Isn’t NYC socio-political intelligence overrated?

Yes.

As well as its financial & global cultural stability & influence?

Less than it should be.

It would be perhaps good for the US that NYC enters into a period of real, not just superficial decline.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I entertain this view sometimes, such as in my previous sentence.

The argument, variations of which I myself have advanced here, is that NYC doesn’t genuinely add value, either materially or morally, but it does impose large costs on the US. So deleting it would be a net benefit.

While I recognize that NYC, like any other major institution, is unlikely to change absent real and severe pain, I yet hesitate to prescribe the full Mamdani Pill: the-worse-the-better-type of accelerationist argument, for two reasons:

1) Just because something is a net liability doesn’t mean that it does not have assets within it. While elimination of the many and varied liabilities would be welcome, it would be a shame if that also meant losing the assets. Relatedly,

2) I strongly suspect that in reality the Mamdani Option will simply strengthen the liabilities, while letting the assets drift further into eclipse, so he won’t be The Final Solution to the New Amsterdam Question, but will merely make the problems worse and the Question more acute in every way.

I feel great because I am at least 1/8 Norwegian-Swedish

DU GAMLA, DU FRIA

Du gamla, Du fria, Du fjällhöga Nord!
Du tysta, Du glädjerika sköna…

Jag hälsar Dig, vänaste land uppå jord
Din sol, Din himmel, Dina ängder gröna!
Din sol, Din himmel, Dina ängder gröna!

Du tronar på minnen från fornstora dar–
då ärat Ditt namn flög över jorden…

Jag vet att Du är och förblir vad du var;
Ja, jag vill leva jag vill dö i Norden!
Ja, jag vill leva jag vill dö i Norden!

YOU ANCIENT, YOU FREE

You ancient, you free, you mountainous North!
You quiet, you joyous beauty…

I greet [or “hail”] you, loveliest land upon Earth,
Your sun, your sky, your countryside green! (x2)

You are enthroned upon memories of ancient days,
When, honored, your name flew across the Earth…

I know that you are, and you will be, what you were,
Yes, I want to live, I want to die in the North! (x2)

Steve Sailer endorses work-life balance, including for those doing things like “building the Atom Bomb”:

James Fishback:

We don’t want ANYONE lecturing us about Indian literacy rates or Chinese math rates. Cut the crap now. We’re Americans. We’re talented. We’re smart. And no, we’re not giving up church on Sunday for more math tutoring. We’re not skipping Friday Night Lights because there’s a chemistry test to cram for. The second we stop apologizing for who we are, we will start winning again!

James Blunt [social-media booster of Vivek For Ohio 2026 campaign]:

Americans didn’t build the Atom Bomb by prioritizing “work-life balance.”

Norm Matloff [retired professor of computer science, California; has published works back to 2003 arguing for the elimination of the H1B visa]:

Actually, the people at Los Alamos got weekends off, just like in normal jobs.

Steve Sailer:

My dad told me that at Lockheed during WWII, they did a study of how much work they could get out of people and found that total output declined past 52 hours per week.

Steve Sailer congratulates Egypt on finally opening a big ancient-history museum:

Egypt’s Grand Museum Is Finally Open. Now, ‘We Need Our Stuff Back.’
New York Times | Nov 6, 2025

The museum’s most anticipated exhibit is the full 5,500 items from King Tutankhamen’s tomb. Egyptians say it’s time to experience their most precious antiquities at home.

[…] The new Tutankhamen collection is the centerpiece of the Grand Egyptian Museum, a lavishly designed mega complex, with the Great Pyramids of Giza rising from the desert behind it. Decades in the making, the museum finally opened its doors to the public this week.

Its opening is a “gift from Egypt to the world,” Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, told the audience […]

Steve Sailer:

Egypt wants back its ancient treasures like the bust of Nefertiti and the Rosetta stone from the museums of Europe. To counter the argument that Egypt lacked a suitable museum, they are the opening the magnificent Grand Egyptian Museum.

Good for them.

Murphy Fowles [@FowlesMurphy]:

Ancient Egyptians are more genetically similar to Europeans than modern Egyptians.

Whose heritage is it really?

Also, why didn’t today’s Egyptians discover their own ancient artifacts?

science these days…has divided up into lots of esoteric subfields that only a few people in the world are interested in. And some of these subfields have been taken over by small cliques that referee and cite each other’s papers and reject outside criticism.

This applies beyond just science per se.
It’ss all, or nearly all, of that which is called academia.

How might a culture reverse such a problem?

Does Steve “attack” people?

I don’t think so.

The Blaze’s promo video for the Rufo & Lomez show:

“I think America has, for the first time in modern memory, a right-wing counter-culture.”

That line is from Ross Douthat, shown in the video. He is speaking about Lomez and Christopher Rufo (caveat: the latter has long been an activist for increasing the rate of Asian success in the name of fairness; so “right-wing” is, these days, far from necessarily “pro-White”).

Chances that this well-funded effort will pay for a round-trip Uber to take Steve Sailer to their studio and have him talk about his views on all things on the air, before the year 2025 is out: HIGH.

Abilene is the start of West Texas

ABILENE
nickname:
“The Friendly Frontier”

Metropolitan-area population in 2020: 176,600, with most in Taylor County (143,200) which contains Abilene.

Taylor County, Tx., race population in 2020:
– White: 61%
– Black: 7.5%
– Asian: 2%
– Amerind: 0.5%
– Multiracial: 4.5%
– Hispanic: 24.5%

In voting:

— Thru 1948, Taylor County returned huge D-majorities on the order of 90-10. (Except once: in 1928, when they swung from their baseline of around 90-10 D-R to 32-68 D-R. As many as two-thirds of normal D-voters there flocked to Hoover in 1928, refusing to vote for the Catholic Al Smith. Hoover even narrowly won the state of Texas 52-48, but then lost the state 11-88 in 1932).

— Generally voted 60-40 R-D between the 1950s and 1990s, the R realignment really beginning with Eisenhower and being an early harbinger of the later full-on party-reversal in “the South.”

— Increased to 75-25 R-D in 2000 and after. The 74% vote-share to Trump in 2024 is very high given the White population down to 61% (and far above the Texas statewide result 56-42 Trump-Kamala).

You can tell a lot about a given place by whether its vote-totals for president swung toward or away from Trump (vs the previous R-D voting baseline). Taylor County didn’t really move. Trump may have even lost ground (Bush-00: 74%; Bush-04: 77%; Trump elections: 73%, 72%, 74%), but that could be entirely a product of the race of voters changing.

“One of the good parts of the reviled peer review, by the way: not seldom do you end up being refereed by the author you’re citing, or at least his group. Then you better get it right.”

That’s not actually a good thing if the author and his group are promoting some nonsense and your paper is attempting to point out that they are all wrong.

One of the problems with science these days is that it has divided up into lots of esoteric subfields that only a few people in the world are interested in. And some of these subfields have been taken over by small cliques that referee and cite each other’s papers and reject outside criticism.

Steve Sailer is looking to create a cultural-division line in Texas to demarcate where the South ends and the West begins:

Steve Sailer:

[T]he South probably doesn’t extend quite so far west in Texas. Dallas, like Orlando, is pretty generic Sunbelt rather than Southern.

__________

On the other hand, I’ve seen it argued that The South as a cultural region is growing in the 21st Century to include more of non-urban America than that, say, Garrison Keillor would have recognized as Southern 40 years ago. I don’t travel enough to have an opinion on that.

Rod Dreher:

When I lived in Dallas 20 yrs ago, the locals said the border between the South and the West was halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. Don’t know if that still holds.

Steve Sailer:

Fascinating.

I’ve spent a few days in Fort Worth, but my main exposure to Dallas, rather than its corporate suburbs, was going to a reggae concert there in the 1980s, so that’s probably not representative.

Steve Sailer says demand exceeds supply for female geniuses; and late-20th-/21st-century feminists err in their theory of Western historical suppression of female genius:

The conventional wisdom is that Western culture was hostile to female geniuses and tried to cover up their accomplishments. But, in reality, Western Europeans often went nuts at the time over the kind of interesting but not terribly important women rediscovered by feminists.

For example, back around 1990 during the first political correctness frenzy, feminist English professors were celebrating books like “Frankenstein,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and “Gone With the Wind.”

“Gone With the Wind” got cancelled, but it really was praised in the late 1980s feminist English professors. And not at all unreasonably: on a scatterplot of quality of writing/plot vs. quantity of sales, it’s up in the top right corner.

___________

Artemisia Gentileschi [1593-1653, Italian painter, female] was a pretty big celebrity in her own day.

A lot of feminist humanities scholarship consisted of reviving the fame of formerly famous women. A not unworthy undertaking, but not like discovering wholly ignored geniuses.

There is a bias in favor of history remembering male artists, but it’s not misogyny so much as that men think more about “Who was the greatest of all time?” and women think more about “Who is the next big thing?” (Thus, gay men tend to keep alive the legends of old actresses.)

Do you think Sliwa cost Cuomo the election?

Many are watching to see whether Mamdani gets over 50.00% on final-certified results. It’s very close. But if he does dip below 50.00%, it’s still mathematically not likely all the Sliwa voters would’ve gone for Cuomo, as Not Vote is always also an option. OTOH, if Sliwa had gotten out and teamed up with Cuomo, it’d have changed the dynamic in yet more unpredictable ways.

This three-person-race dilemma is the entire point of “ranked-choice voting.” Why did the Democratic primary (which is generally the “real election”) in 2025 have ranked-choice voting but the general election didn’t?

___________

And, despite all the fanfare and global attention to this NYC mayor race, “consider this”:
– 7 million+ adults may be resident in NYC;
– 5.1 million supposedly are registered to vote.
– 2.08 million votes were cast for mayor in November 2025
– 2.80 million votes were cast in NYC for president in 2024.

On percent of total adult residents, that means under 30% voted for mayor in 2025. In such conditions, even small waves of momentum can carry someone far.

A lot of the “non-registered to vote” adults are foreigners ineligible to vote. That distorts the denominator in the calculation that yields <30% (who voted in this supposed "surge" election). That's part of the point: NYC is a place with a high opinion of itself (and the prices to match). But it is, in many ways, low on public-spiritedness. That's Diversity. NB: socialism cannot work absent public-spiritedness.

Previous mayoral elections were down nearer the 1-million-votes-cast mark for a few decades running. The last time the total was near 2 million were 1989 and 1993, Giuliani vs Dinkins both times, both close; won by Giuliani the second time.

[Steve Sailer’s] latest Takimag column: What’s the Matter With Economists?.

Here is my own general comment on what Sailer was driving at, or alluding to, with that column-commentary:

Thinking more about Steve’s critique of this study, I think the lesson can be summarized as:

We have accumulated something of a broad, deep, and implicit bias today against Whites and against the the NW-European population-stock in particular.

This creates a mix of blindspots, taboos, and doublethink which can powerfully self-perpetuate while nevertheless being off-base. This force will lead to decline and can easily lead to anti-white manias (see: peak moments in Wokeness), and it goes without saying that it will lead towards implicit historical negationism of White NW-European achievement, virtues, strengths.

Still no word from Germ Theory since 10/29

The matter of Germ’s brother’s decline, cited by MEH 0910, is the most likely reason for his one week’s absence.

We wonder, What is his view on the Mamdani election?

I seem to recall him saying his brother was gravely ill…

https://www.unz.com/isteve/isteve-open-thread-10/#comment-7281651 (#1392)

The Germ Theory of Disease says:
August 31, 2025 at 11:24 pm GMT • 2.2 months ago
[…]
I have to apologize for being a bit of a bit, lately: there are some dreadful things going on in the local, my older brother is kinda-sorta dying of a rare neurological disorder, and that’s not even the worst of it. But it sort of is for me, because he was my mentor in all sorts of ways, we made hilarious weird tape-deck sketch comedy together when we weren’t even ten yet, we made a “Billy Jack” parody on Super 8 before even the latest real “Billy Jack” parody of itself had even been released. Watching him slip away is kind of tearing me apart. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. But thankfully we do have a really strong family, so there’s always that.

The “thing” about Mamdani is:

He is a South Asian, of (something like) transnational-diasporic-elite origin, with extremely shallow ties to the United States.

The Mamdani family, afacit, has no meaningful ties to the US before the 2000s (!). (Although with transnational-diasporic elites like that, in the post-1970s USA, there are always some sort of distant cousins doing something, of which somehow the more clannish among us in the human race always seem to know well about.)

How can you be a true ideologue in a country where you are a foreigner? Maybe it’s occasionally possible, in theory. But more likely it’s the typical m.o. of South Asians in politics, and similar fields, all over the world: It is some degree of cover for their skill at “talking their way into” things. Slogans don’t mean that much, sort of done to “rile up” people to himself as he games a system and talks his way into power. (See also: Vivek Ramaswamy; and actually a long list of others.)

It’s not some amazing cosmic coincidence that these people happen to pop up as cool-outsider politicians who somehow walk into success all over the English-speaking world.

In other words, it would mean something a lot more profound if he had around sixteen U.S.-born great-great-grandparents and was pushing “Socialism.” A figure like the French communist Jean-Luc Melenchon.

The way Mamdani actually is — a non-American who does left-wing happy-talk people cheer over like some political equivalent of a sports team — I think people don’t take him very seriously as an ideologue per se. And that’s one way he came to embraced by the system and around 50% of NYC voters (far less, though, if counting actual Americans).

A lot of solidly blue places went blue, the spook who should be prevented from seeking office as a spook won in the CIA’s home state, big surprise.
—–
Principleless, inside baseball point: Hugh Hewitt will be rightly crowing that if the mass murderer could’ve had the vigilante’s splinter, he would have routed the communist.
—–
We’re in the boring muddy times where we have to trudge through the process and trust the law talkers (and endure the screaming and lying of idiots). This wasn’t that big of a deal. Mamdani’s reliance on non-American voters also totally validates everything we have been saying.
—–
The GOP will have to acknowledge that young people have legitimate property greivances no matter how much it hurts their millionaire feelings or the Democrats will drive a truck through that hole.

Lomez (Steve Sailer’s publisher and now publicity-man) and alleged pro-White activist Chris Rufo are “starting a weekly show with the Blaze this Friday.”

[Polling two weeks before the election]

New York mayor 2025:
— Men: Mamdani +5
— Women: Mamdani +15

— Native-born: Cuomo +9
— Foreign-born: Mamdani +38

— Jews: Cuomo +33

— Steve Sailer: Cuomo +100 (n=1) (inferred)

The CNN exit poll has this, similar to the finding on Mamdani’s decisive “foreign-born” support:

__________

[Exit Poll Q.] How long have you lived in NYC?

Less than 5 years (7% of voters)
— 85% Mamdani

5-10 years (8% of voters)
— 79% Mamdani

More than 10 years but not native (37% of voters)
— 54% Mamdani

Born in NYC (45% of voters)
— 38% Mamdani

[3% of voters, No response]
___________

If only those who’d lived in New York at least ten years (including those born in New York) had voted, Cuomo would probably have narrowly won. The exit poll’s numbers have it at 46-46-8 for just the 10-year-or-more resident set. In such a close-heat, maybe even more Sliwa voters would’ve gone to Cuomo.

Of course, if only Whites resident at least ten years had voted, it’d have been no contest and the non-American Sleek Smiley Muslim Candidate would’ve lost decisively.

___________

Jews, according to the exit poll, went 63% for Cuomo against 33% for Mamdani.
___________

A surprising (?) finding of the exit poll is that both Black males and Hispanic males went for Mamdani at a higher rate than the women of their same race. This is against the usual trend of females being more “Left”-voting. But the trend flips to the usual-expected pattern with Whites:

% voting for Mamdani
— White males: 43%
— White females: 48% [+5]

— Black males: 60%
— Black females: 52% [-8]

— Latino males: 52%
— Latin females: 48% [-4]

Still, these are not large gaps and may not even be real given sampling errors.
___________

The biggest gap, besides length-of-residence and ties to the USA (previously mentioned), is: Age.

White and Black support for Mamdani falls off a cliff above age 40 or 45. There is something like a 35-point gap between under-30s and over-45s.

On the numbers, it wouldn’t quite have been enough to defeat Mamdani if the voting-age were pegged to merely 25 rather than 18. But in practice it might have been enough as a good portion of the momentum would have disappeared.

A stricter naturalization policy, needless to say, would’ve also kept Mamdani out. (Read that two ways if you wish.)

Saying “it was just a letter a few people wrote” completely misses the point, of course.

The most charitable thing to say about person who’d say that: He doesn’t understand ideology generally, how “movements” work, influence-networks, political theory, international-relations theory, the foreign-policy elite, and the Israel Lobby and Jewish power generally, and the “intersections” of those things with the Republican Party in/by the 1990s, and with the Dubya Bush people.

There is a great superabundance of “McKays” out there. What’s interesting here is late-2010s Steve Sailer was saying “Hey, McKay, you’re wrong or you’re lying!”