Category: Uncategorized

What Men Read

A best-selling author explains.

What Men Read

I was doing an interview a few weeks ago for Women of Bad Assery when I started to wonder if it was actually true that men – and young boys – refuse to read books written by women or starring women.  It wasn’t actually hard to disprove it – JK Rowling may have used her initials to hide her gender, or so I have been told, but I read quite a few other books by women when I was a child.  The gender of the writer alone had no influence on me.  Nor too did I automatically dismiss a book starring a girl.

What did have an influence was school.  The vast majority of the books I was forced to read at school were boring.  Teachers – both male and female – would select books that bored me to tears.  Thankfully, by then I already had the reading bug.  Boys who didn’t, who only knew reading as a chore, didn’t read when they didn’t have to read.  They found it a tedious process – and preferred watching television instead.

So … what did all the books I liked have in common?

Most of them featured adventure.  The characters would be pitted against a remorseless enemy or given a task to do.  It didn’t really matter if the task was large or small, a thinking enemy or a force of nature; all that mattered was the challenge, the urge to overcome and triumph over one’s circumstances.  The characters didn’t simply exist, the characters had something to do.

Harry Potter works, at least for the first five books, because it fits neatly into this pattern.  Harry escapes the mundane world and flies straight into a world of magic, but gets pitted against a string of deadly foes.  All of his books feature Harry being challenged – Goblet of Fire being the most dramatic example – and overcoming his challenges.  Everyone who wants to argue that Dumbledore is a poor headmaster because Harry has to deal with the problem-of-the-book is missing the point.  The series works because Harry is the one who deals with the problem.

This is true for a lot of my childhood favourites.  The Famous Five and The Secret Seven all feature mysteries that have to be solved.  Hood’s Army and The Demon Headmaster all feature battles against deadly enemies.  And all of them are exciting reflections of the way young boys think.  They want adventure.

Good children’s books also avoid gender politics.  Both Danny the Champion of the World and Matilda are popular with children of both genders, even though one features a male hero and the other a female.  Both books work for male readers because they fit into the pattern I detailed above – Matilda is pitted against her family, who try their hardest to drag her down, and her sadistic headmistress.  Danny is pitted against his schoolteacher and the aristocratic moron who owns the nearby woods.  To add to this, Danny and his father are effectively rebelling against unwanted restraints.

Matilda is, in some cases, an interesting example.  Although Matilda herself is very definitely a young girl, women are not portrayed any more or less positively than men.  There is no sense that Matilda is waging war on the patriarchy, but on people who want to crush her soul (her parents) or physically harm her (the headmistress).  Indeed, the first person we are shown to get the better of the headmistress is a young boy.  And, as gross as that scene is to an adult, it is precisely the sort of thing a young boy would find hilarious.

The closest thing Matilda comes to any form of sexism is Matilda’s mother remarking to her that men are rarely as clever as they think they are.  But it’s hard to argue the point when she’s talking about her immensely stupid and crooked husband.

Good children’s books are also free of romance and sex.  You’d think this was obvious, but still … Most young boys are significantly put off by any hint of romance – they don’t understand the facts of life, let alone how they relate to their own life.  They certainly don’t want to consider the differences between males and females.  Romance was never a big part of Harry Potter because young boys don’t want to read about it.

Successful female characters – characters who appeal to young boys – are often very similar to men.  They take on challenges and overcome them; they have problems, but they overcome them on their own.  Even when they are not tomboys – George of The Famous Five, for example – they are rarely completely feminine.  They balance their strengths with weaknesses.  Dinah Glass of The Demon Headmaster is incredibly intelligent, but she’s also the only one of the good guys vulnerable to the Headmaster’s power.  That doesn’t stop her from playing a major role in his defeats.

This leads to another problem.  It is much easier for a young boy to imagine being Harry Potter than it is to imagine being Hermione Granger.

These patterns do not change as young boys turn into men.  The lust for adventure, for a meaningful life, is still there.  Romance – even as readers become more aware of gender and sex – is still a secondary concern.  Successful books always have the main character taking on a challenge and solving it.  If there is a love interest in the book, the romance is still secondary to the overall story.

Books that do feature romance heavily tend to do poorly with young men.  Twilight, for example, isn’t particularly popular with male readers, if only because they find it hard to identify with Bella and loathe Edward.  Books that focus on the main character worrying over stereotypical feminine concerns are rarely interesting to young men.  Indeed, books that concentrate on feminine issues often make men uncomfortable. Marketing them to young men is a waste of time.

Indeed, I’ve noticed a pattern in books written for teenagers and young adults.  The majority of male writers concentrate on adventure, the majority of female writers concentrate on romance.  Obviously, there are exceptions, but I think it’s largely true.

I think the most successful books – at least, the ones that attract young male readers – are the books that speak to our imaginations.  We want to be free and independent, we want to pit ourselves against the world, we want to do great deeds and soar high.  And we want to solve our own problems, to pick ourselves up after getting knocked down and carry on.  In a sense, we all want to be ‘special snowflakes’ – but we want to earn it, not have it handed to us on a plate.

Books that are not successful tend to focus on characters who do not appeal to young male readers.  A main character who is an idle layabout, a bully, a sneak, a coward, a whiner … they rarely appeal.  And even if they do, what lessons are they teaching?  Books that put men down, that make us out to be stupid or animals or just plain obnoxious … they appeal to us about as much as misogynist books appeal to women.

If you happen to be a teacher, or a parent, remember the golden rule.  Reading should never be a chore.  Indeed, reading is a learned skill.  And the more young boys enjoy reading, the more they will read.

Mailvox: so much worse

Castalia House exists because it is needed. Badly needed, it appears. A reader writes:

So I just read two stories from the latest issue of Analog magazine. I must tell you about them.

Story #1 is about a multi-racial research female scientist working for a white male research director. Her role model is a deceased multi-racial scientist who died in an experiment, famous, but whose death led to the current research director getting his job. She recreates the experiment and learns that the current research director rigged it to kill the heroic female multi-racial scientist so he could take her job.

Story #2 is about the CEO of a company who is married to his Chief Science Officer, who is a beautiful dark-skinned girl who beat up his bully in high school. He has IQ 140 but she has IQ 170. They develop brain-and-body augmentation technology and she becomes the first transhuman, better at everything than him in every way but she still loves him. But Christian extremists are outraged and terrorism ensues and they kill her, even though she is wonderful in all ways and a believer in non-violence. He has his own brain implanted in her cyborg body so they won’t know they won, and then goes on a killing spree against the Christian leaders who urged on the violence. Yay for transhuman transgender women ending Christian violence.

All I can say is, it’s so much worse than I thought.

This is exactly why Castalia exists. Consider these excerpts from the five most recent reviews of our latest novel, SWAN KNIGHT’S SON:

  • An excellent medieval fairy tale in the modern age.
  • Outstanding. I’m truly amazed.
  • Coming of age story written by of one of the greatest wordsmiths of our times. It is a story of a young man who doesn’t fit into society because he is too morally upright for the decadence that infests modern society.
  • A masterpiece
  • A true knight battling the forces of evil, while discovering who he is on multiple levels

 Remember culture > politics. What we are fighting here is a cultural war for the soul of the West.

Front National: stop immigration!

Chute du nombre d’expulsions de clandestins : un signal catastrophique


While France is facing an unprecedented influx of migrants, we learned this morning that the number of illegal evictions fell 20% during the first six months of 2016, 2,000 fewer expulsions. While deportation cannot be the only response to illegal immigration, since we must first put all the possible means in place to stop the flow of arrivals upstream, this decline is still catastrophic. It will necessarily be heard by the smugglers and the mafias which carry migrants to France as a terrible signal of laxity, a call to come to France, with incalculable consequences.


The National Front demands the expulsion of all illegal immigrants unlawfully present in France, and the dismantling of mafia networks of illegal immigration. It will not skimp on the means to achieve this objective, which is the only acceptable one in a republic worthy of the name. This policy is effective if it is accompanied by a full and final restoration of our national borders and a clearly stated policy choice: stop immigration.


One can almost hear the tumbrils beginning to roll again in France.

When the lies fail

It appears (((Ben Shapiro))) has given up on his mythical propositional “America”:

We’re watching the end of America in real time.

That doesn’t mean that the country’s on the verge of actual implosion. But the idea of America required a common definition of being American: a love of country on the basis of its founding philosophy. That has now been undermined by the left.

Love of country doesn’t mean that you have to love everything about America, or that you can’t criticize America. But loving America means understanding that the country was founded on a unique basis -a uniquely good basis. That’s what the flag stands for. Not ethnic superiority or racial solidarity or police brutality but the notion of individual liberty and equal rights before God. But with the destruction of that central principle, the ties that bind us together are fraying. And the left loves that.

In fact, the two defining philosophical iterations of the modern left both make war with the ties that bind us together. In President Obama’s landmark second inaugural address, he openly said, “Being true to our founding documents…does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way.” This is the kind of definition worshipped by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has single-handedly redefined the Constitution. He said, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

But this means that liberty has no real definition outside of “stuff I want to do.” And we all want to do different stuff, sometimes at the expense of other people’s liberty. Subjective definitions of liberty, rather than a common definition, means a conflict of all against all, or at least a conflict of a government controlled by some who are targeting everyone else. It means that our flag is no longer a common symbol for our shared definition of liberty. It’s just a rag that means different things to different people based on their subjective experiences and definitions of reality.

And that means we have nothing holding us together.

The only way to restore the ties that bind us is to rededicate ourselves to the notion of liberty for which generations of Americans fought and died. But that won’t happen so long as the left insists that their feelings are more important than your rights.

It’s difficult for a revisionist lie to hold people together in lieu of the genetic, linguistic, religious, and cultural kinship upon which successful nations have historically rested. And if “only way to restore the ties that bind us is to rededicate ourselves to the notion of liberty”, well, to paraphrase Stefan Molyneux, that is not a strategy.

It’s just gaseous cuckservative rhetoric.

It’s also a bit ironic that (((Shapiro))) should complain about President Obama redefining liberty and Justice Kennedy redefining the U.S. Constitution, considering that he and his (((co-religionists))) have shamelessly attempted to redefine both “America” and “Christian values” for over 100 years.

This is why the eventual triumph of the Alt-Right over conservatism and its panoply of ahistorical myths is inevitable. Our beliefs are rooted in well-documented history and are entirely in line with both reality and current events. Theirs are rooted in revisionist lies and romantic bathos, and are hopelessly out of sync with what can be readily observed by anyone.

The Balkanization of SF/F

In the course of his long, deep dive into historical science fiction and fantasy, Castalia’s Jeffro Johnson has noticed a few trends:

We’ve spent a lot of time here delving into the ups and downs of several movements within science fiction and fantasy– the Campbellian Revolution, the New Wave, the tremendous changes that occurred in publishing in the late seventies, etc. We’ve broken stories here uncovering how both fandom and publishing are pretty well divorced from the pulp era today. Most things the casual reader has heard about the pulps are flat out wrong. Even just the news that fans in the seventies would have been familiar with a good seven decade’s worth of fantasy and science fiction classics generally comes as a shock to people.

As we’ve delved into the history of the field, the year 1980 seems to keep coming up as a major turning point. It’s a running theme, really. Just as one example of that: I have repeatedly hammered the point of how ideologically diverse fantasy and science fiction was in the seventies. Orson Scott Card says that all changed in the eighties. Here’s another: people writing negative reviews about books they used to love when they were kids? It’s almost like whole swaths of people have been actively conditioned to despise anything written before 1980!

Now, there really is something to this. It is very difficult to talk about this in mixed company, too. For one thing, there’s always people like Sheila Williams around that are quick to point out that times change. If she has a sufficiently large Greek Chorus on hand, every single observation about what’s happening gets dismissed to the point where nothing ever seems to have happened and there are practically no trends whatsoever. The subtext is always, “nothing to see here.”

I have to say, though, “times change” and “there are no trends” do not add up.

So where does that leave us? It means that something happened and it’s danged hard to talk about it. Let’s say we get all the boring people out of the room, pour a couple of beers, and take a stab at figuring this out. We still won’t get anywhere. Why not? Because the one thing you can’t do in these conversations is indicate that maybe someone somewhere maybe had a hand in bringing this about.

What happens if you veer into that territory? People get very uncomfortable very quickly. You’re not, uh, some kind of conspiracy theorist, are you?! It’s weird, too. The more documented evidence you have to back up your observations, the crazier you look. You might as well not even try. The conversation will not recover from otherwise intelligent people bending over backwards to make sure you know that they want nothing to do with this. Also, they will laugh at you!

Brad Torgersen cites MC Hogarth’s comments on her con experiences, and notes that intolerance has become the chief hallmark of the Tolerant Equalitarian Progressive Inclusive and Diverse SF-SJWs.

I attended a con once where the toastmaster said that they wanted all conservatives to “hurry up and die and leave the planet to the rest of us. No wait, they can stay as long as we can have their money.” And people applauded. That person wasn’t kicked out of the convention. They were feted and congratulated while I sat in the audience, pale and trembling, listening to the people around me cheer my demise. I have never, ever forgotten that moment. Or all the threatening ones after, both generalized or intimate, like the man who leaned into my face and told me the world would be better off without me and people like me. No one stepped in to tell him that he shouldn’t say such things. The people standing around us just nodded or smiled. One of them even said before leaving, “Your time is over. We don’t need you anymore, [expletive here].”

The mandarins of SF/F expend a lot of energy wrapping themselves in the flag of tolerance. But as any conservative can tell you, that tolerance runs pretty much one-way. A tolerance conversation (liberal to conservative) in SF/F often goes like this, “Hello, I am a tolerant caring compassionate liberal, and you’re not. You will sit there and politely listen to all of my ideas and theories, and not say a word. I will sit here and listen to all of your ideas and theories, and then I will explain to you why you’re a dirty bigot and a hater and an evil human being. We will both agree I am right, and you will apologize for being bad.”

That, dear friends, is how “tolerance” works in SF/F at this time.

I’ve discussed this at length with Orson Scott Card — he being well acquainted with the tolerance charade — and he says it didn’t used to be like this before 1980. Oh, to be sure, there were plenty of fans, authors, and editors on the left-wing side of the aisle. But it wasn’t so vindictive, nor so personal. You could sit at a table with conservatives, liberals, anarchists, libertarians, and have a rousing verbal melee of competing ideas, but at the end of it, you’d still be able to shake hands, and walk away comrades in the field. That began to change (perhaps not coincidentally) about the time Ronald Reagan took his seat in the Oval Office. Gradually, in dribs and drabs, the dominant left-wing culture of SF/F has traded in true tolerance, for a kind of totalitarian double-think 1984 version of tolerance — people and ideas labeled ‘intolerant’ don’t have to be tolerated. In 2016, with tender snowflakes floating around in SF/F like it’s a mild blizzard, anyone can be labeled ‘intolerant’ for any reason, logical or not.

It’s a little strange that the SF-SJWs still don’t understand that the trends that once so favored them are increasingly weighted against them. They’ve poisoned at least one-third, and possibly as much as two-thirds of their former audience against them, and while they’re mocking million-selling self-published authors as “vanity authors” and growing publishing houses such as Castalia as “vanity presses”, the gates they’ve been keeping with such vigilance are protecting towers of increasingly negative worth, as mainstream publishers are suing even very successful authors to take their advances back.

Meanwhile, Castalia House is already selling more books than any but the very biggest authors in science fiction. We passed 50 books in our catalog last month, and we are now receiving an increasing number of submissions from familiar names and even SFWA members. We’ve just begun to make foreign rights deals and develop our relationships with traditional foreign publishers, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, in August, 24 percent of our sales were in print.

SF/F has already been balkanized. They stopped reading our stuff in the mid-1980s and we began to stop reading theirs in the mid-2000s. Since our side is bigger than theirs, our authors are already bigger than theirs, they just don’t realize that Vaughn Heppner, BV Larson, and David VanDyke sell millions of books to their hundreds of thousands. Do you know who was the #1 SF author on Amazon in 2011? Castalia House’s own Nick Cole.

And as more moderate readers give up on Pink SF and stop buying from SJW-converged publishers like Tor Books, we’ll continue to grow and they’ll continue to shrink. As evidence, consider this comment from Brad Torgersen’s site:

I feel the call to give my testimony re Balkanization … I’m already gone. I’m a reader and a fan, not a writer. Not a TrueFan, but a fan on my own terms. I cannot remember the last time I bought a SFF novel that was published by any ancien regime publisher other than Baen. I’ve been a voter in the Hugos a couple times – what I read in those packets was largely ho-hum wastes of time. Some of the Sad noms were interesting, but not all. When I saw the title Space Raptor on this year’s list, I turned away for the final time – clearly, VD has taken the field and a little part of me hopes he burns it and salts it for a thousand years, but I have no interest in being part of that movement.

Ah, yes. It’s like hearing angels sing.

Brainstorm: who is next?

It’s about time to do another literary Open Brainstorm session, so with which Castalia House author would you most like to discuss his works? I don’t count, so leave me out of it. We’ll save John C. Wright for after his next two books come out too, so don’t select him either. One thing we’re going to do differently than before is to allow people to submit their questions for the author ahead of time, which should help keep things rolling and allow us to address more topics in more detail.

Go ahead and suggest away, and whoever is most in demand at the moment will be invited first. If they can’t do it for one reason or another, we’ll work our way down the list. Remember, this isn’t about your favorite Castalia author, or who you think is the best Castalia author, only the author for whom you’ve got the most burning questions.

Brainstorm members, the transcript for the Richard Spencer session is being prepared and will be going out to you this weekend. It will not be made generally available.

UPDATE: David the Good it is, assuming he’s not too busy with his new hobby of extreme body-modification.

Just here to pay my respects

Some of you might call him Harambee, you know what I’m saying?
It don’t make no difference, if he was alive, he wouldn’t want us fighting.
Over the pronunciation of his name.
So let’s just, be humble, yeah.

NRx and AltRight

Although a few people have attempted to shoehorn me into the “Dark Enlightenment” or classify me as a “Neoreactionary”, I’ve never considered myself part of NRx like I do the AltRight. That’s mostly because I don’t think NRx exists in the same material manner that the AltRight clearly does, and also because I find its preference for elevated Akademiesprache to be obscurantist faggotry, to put it in AltRight terms. And frankly, Butch Leghorn’s attempt to delineate the essential differences between the two doesn’t appear to be particularly meaningful, as he attempts to do so primarily on the basis of social class.

NRx is Middle Class

According to Curt’s table, NRx is middle class. Some might take offense and argue that it is upper-middle class. Sure, the leaders of NRx are likely upper-middle class, but the average NRxer is solidly middle class. Software engineering is a middle class profession. People who run teams of middle class professionals are upper-middle class (CTOs, CIOs, CEOs, Directors, etc). The middle class is not a salary range: it is an ability range. The middle class are those who have the ability to engage in the system of production. This is why the middle class seeks liberty: because given freedom to choose their means of production, they will choose and perform, because they can. As an aside, this is why working classes are less interested in liberty, because they simply can’t capitalize on it within the system of production to nearly the level of the middle class. And the lower and under classes have zero interest in liberty, because they are completely unable to capitalize within the system of production; they desire security, not liberty (and that’s what self-interested politicians trade them in return for votes).

We can argue about the parameters of classes, and we should. We should define them. We need to understand their roles and to define the behaviors that makes one a ‘good’ member of any class, because these behaviors and actors do exist in every class. We just need to incentivize them properly, which is why we must define and understand them.

The middle class has certain behaviors which make them middle class. They follow norms of propriety. I was right when I wrote that NRx is Right Brahmin Signalling. From the SJW encyclopedia: “Brahmin is a varna (caste) in Hinduism specialising as priests, teachers (acharya) and protectors of sacred learning across generations”. NRx is a group of teachers and priests, solidly middle class and exhibiting middle class mores and norms, such as the prohibition on ridicule, mockery, libel and slander.

AltRight is Working Class

The working classes do not share the middle class values and prohibitions on ridicule, mockery, libel and slander. I have seen very clearly the revulsion of NRx to the coarse meming of the AltRight. The NRx aspersions about ‘populism’ of the AltRight. This is simply the middle class reaction to working class norms.

The thing is: the middle class needs the working class. They will do the jobs that the middle class just won’t do. Say, for example, openly attack with vitriolic hostility the enemies of Western Civilization using Pepe and Le Happy Merchant memes. Or say, engage in ‘high energy’ physical activities which raise the cost of the status quo on the controlling elite. Once the cost of the status quo is high enough, then that controlling elite will accede to the demands of the Right. Who will formulate these demands? Ultimately, the aristocratic class will, with large input from the scholarly classes. Who will implement these demands at the local levels? Obviously, the people who organize all production, the middle class, under the direction of the upper middle class, with the ‘real’ work being done by the working classes at the direction of the middle class.

This strikes me as a failure to grasp the AltRight, much as various attempts by everyone from NPR to NRO have failed, albeit a considerably more friendly failure. Actually, to be fair, it’s considerably better than NPR managed, as NPR somehow managed to get itself so confused that it declared Milo and Allum to be the joint leaders of the AltRight, which was certainly a surprise to both of them as well as everyone else.

While Butch is correct to observe that AltRight is not beholden to conventional middle class concerns about niceness and etiquette and public approval from the authorities and goodthinkers, he fails to observe that the AltRight is, despite its exuberant vulgarity, every bit as intellectually formidable as NRx. Indeed, even the mainstream media has felt the need to warn the unsuspecting and the uninformed not to underestimate us simply because we utilize frog memes and some of the most appallingly crude forms of rhetoric.

I have nothing against NRx, and indeed, consider them to be more or less allies, but the idea that we need them in order to formulate a moral license to defend our nations or Western civilization is simply not the case. Butch himself says that “NRx will become an integral part in granting this moral license or it will fade into irrelevancy”, which is why I expect that the compatible elements of NRx will eventually be subsumed by the AltRight, while the incompatible elements – and I have no idea which elements are compatible and which are not – will become increasingly irrelevant over time.

The AltRight has high energy, it has enthusiasm, it has talent, it has brains, and most importantly, it has courage. It understands that it has very little, if anything, to lose, because if the West fails, the future is favelas as far as the eye can see. We have no need of delicate middle-class intellectuals to do our thinking for us because they daren’t soil their uncalloused hands with the necessary dirty work.

To paraphrase #GamerGate, stop pontificating, shut up, and meme.

Donald Trump’s immigration plan

The 10-point Trump plan for immigration reform:

Number One: We will build a wall along the southern border

On day one, we will begin working on an impenetrable physical wall on the southern border. We will use the best technology, including above-and below-ground sensors, towers, aerial surveillance and manpower to supplement the wall, find and dislocate tunnels, and keep out the criminal cartels, and Mexico will pay for the wall.

Number Two: End ‘catch-and-release’

Anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed out of our country.

Number Three: Zero tolerance for criminal aliens

According to federal data, there are at least 2 million criminal aliens now inside the country. We will begin moving them out day one, in joint operations with local, state and federal law enforcement.

Beyond the 2 million, there are a vast number of additional criminal illegal immigrants who have fled or evaded justice. But their days on the run will soon be over. They go out, and they go out fast. …

We are going to triple the number of ICE deportation officers. Within ICE, I am going to create a new special Deportation Task Force, focused on identifying and removing quickly the most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants in America who have evaded justice. …. We’re also going to hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents, and put more of them on the border, instead of behind desks. We will expand the number of Border Patrol Stations.

Number Four: Block funding for Sanctuary Cities

We will end the Sanctuary Cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths. Cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities will not receive taxpayer dollars, and we will work with Congress to pass legislation to protect those jurisdictions that do assist federal authorities.

Number Five: Cancel unconstitutional executive orders and enforce all immigration laws

We will immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties, in which he defied federal law and the constitution to give amnesty to approximately five million illegal immigrants. … In a Trump administration, all immigration laws will be enforced.

Number Six: We are going to suspend the issuance of visas to any place where adequate screening cannot occur

According to data provided to the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, between 9/11 and the end of 2014, at least 380 foreign-born individuals were convicted in terror cases inside the United States. The number is likely higher, but the Administration refuses to provide this information to Congress.

As soon as I enter office, I am going to ask the Department of State, Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to begin a comprehensive review of these cases in order to develop a list of regions and countries from which immigration must be suspended until proven and effective vetting mechanisms can be put into place.

Countries from which immigration will be suspended would include places like Syria and Libya.

For the price of resettling 1 refugee in the United States, 12 could be resettled in a safe zone in their home region.

Another reform involves new screening tests for all applicants that include an ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values and love our people.

Number Seven: We will ensure that other countries take their people back when we order them deported

There are at least 23 countries that refuse to take their people back after they have been ordered to leave the United States, including large numbers of violent criminals. Due to a Supreme Court decision, if these violent offenders cannot be sent home, our law enforcement officers have to release them into U.S. communities. …. Those released include individuals convicted of killings, sexual assault and some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, who went on to reoffend at a very high rate.

Number Eight: We will finally complete the biometric entry-exit visa tracking system

For years, Congress has required a biometric entry-exit visa tracking system, but it has never been completed.

In my administration, we will ensure that this system is in place at all land, air, and sea ports. …Last year alone, nearly a half a million individuals overstayed their temporary visas. Removing visa overstays will be a top priority of my Administration. If people around the world believe they can just come on a temporary visa and never leave – the Obama-Clinton policy – then we have a completely open border. We must send the message that visa expiration dates will be strongly enforced.


Number Nine: We will turn off the jobs and benefits magnet

We will ensure that E-Verify is used to the fullest extent possible under existing law, and will work with Congress to strengthen and expand its use across the country. …Those who abuse our welfare system will be priorities for removal.

Number 10: We will reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers

…The time has come for a new immigration commission to develop a new set of reforms to our legal immigration system in order to achieve the following goals:

– To keep immigration levels, measured by population share, within historical norms

– To select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society, and their ability to be financially self-sufficient. We need a system that serves our needs – remember, it’s America First.

– To choose immigrants based on merit, skill and proficiency

– And to establish new immigration controls to boost wages and to ensure that open jobs are offered to American workers first.

It falls well short of a complete Muslim ban, aggressive mass repatriations, and a stated goal of the restoration of the pre-1965 demographic balance, that is necessary in the long term, it is a damned good start and certainly much better than any US immigration policy since 1965. Furthermore, it makes it very clear that Donald Trump fully intends to put Americans first and build that big, beautiful wall.

An indescribable moment of pure literary joy

Kukuruyo@kukuruyo
Ok i bought a dance mat for ps2 and only conector it has is this. Someone know dafuq is that? how do i play on ps2?


Supreme Dark Lord‏@voxday
It’s a ProctoPad. You stick it up your ass and dance, Jack.

I have to confess, I never dreamed that one day, I’d be able to whip out THAT particular quote IN CONTEXT. It’s a glorious moment that was more than two decades in the making.

This moment in literature was brought to you by the Original Cyberpunk.