In 1926, a young Russian woman named Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum moved to the United States. She had just got done with the Bolsheviks confiscating her father's business, crushing his soul in the process, then sending her and her family on a long march with nightly threats of rape and murder. Her parents scrounged up just enough money to send her overseas, and to the day she died in 1982, Alisa had no idea whether her parents had survived or not.

Shortly after her time arriving in the United States, she started to see the exact same ideology and warning signs which preceded the Bolsheviks, happening in America. "I need to warn people", she thought to herself. She picked up a pen and started to write, following in the long Russian tradition of escaping censorship through the plausible deniability of literature. She also adopted a pen name: Ayn Rand.

Bad ideas are almost always wrapped in "feel good" rhetoric, which even allows the proponents of evil ideas to take the moral high ground. Others don't then fall prey to the concepts because they are bad people-- they are just naive: they haven't yet lived through the consequences of these lousy concepts, and they don't read enough history.

I've met a lot of people through the management of the addition project up North, and one of them-- a white male, Republican-voting conservative-- has said a few alarming things to me in the course of conversation. Similar to what Ayn Rand must have felt, "This is how it started in the urban areas", I thought to myself.

The first eyebrow-raising remark was about how "out here, it's almost entirely white, unfortunately." I've said, over and over, repeatedly across both blog posts and videos, that if offered the chance to live in a society full of Ben Carsons, I'd take it in a heartbeat-- when it boils down to individuals, I don't care what race someone is: if they share my values, we're all good.

I'm friends with and have worked with some wonderful black people, a few of whom might even read this blog. Unfortunately, most black people are not Thomas Sowell. If you chart the presence of hispanics and blacks across the United States, there is a very strong correlation between their presence, and murder. You can see the exact same pattern globally. People often try to dismiss statistics like this by saying that it's poverty-related-- but nope.

I also have seen this pattern anecdotally in my life: blacks are like locusts-- they shift from area to area, leaving wreckage behind. Ask anyone in Minnesota over the age of sixty what North Minneapolis used to be like: it was essentially all-white, crime was very low, the area was clean and orderly, and kids could safely roam anywhere. Drive through North Minneapolis today, and tell me what you see.

Ask any Minnesotan over the age of thirty five about a city called Brooklyn Center. When I was a kid, the city was almost all white, it was clean, and the local economy supported a large mall called "Brookdale", at which I spent enormous amounts of time as a kid. At some point in my teenage years, large numbers of blacks migrated from North Minneapolis to Brooklyn Center-- over the span of less than a decade, the city became filled with trash, the mall closed and everything nearby was shuttered, and crime soared. My uncle was actually shot at in that city, as some black gang banger opened fire on the Metro Transit bus he was boarding!

I don't know if it's excessive amounts of testosterone, IQ, some kind of combination of genes, or what: more research is required-- but which won't happen, because it's not politically correct to even mention the topic.

To be clear, cue disclaimer four hundred and sixty five, I would never judge an individual black-- or hispanic, for that matter-- person prematurely, assuming that they are violent just because of their race. That's the definition of the word "racism". But in aggregate, you do not want large numbers of blacks to move into your neighborhood: it's an easily supportable position, grounded in fact. I'd be saying the exact same stuff if it were my racial group having these unfortunate statistics: I'd be trying to figure out why, and how to get away from them, and to people who share my values!

On that note, I don't support racial segregation, but I do support values segregation: if you're a peaceful, smart, respectful black or hispanic person, try to make your way to a rural area-- I'll gladly welcome you as a neighbor. But don't then encourage everyone else in your racial group to do the same-- move, but don't broadcast it, or brag to them about how nice it is once you're there.

It's easy for the aforementioned rural guy to make himself feel good and sound egalitarian, because he's naive and hasn't had to live with the consequences like me and many other people I know. When you've lived literally your entire life in a 95%+ white, low-crime low-violence population where people don't even lock their houses or cars, it's easy for such a person to not understand cause-and-effect: what made and makes that rural area have the attributes it has?

The second troubling thing he dropped in a conversation was support for race and sex-based hiring quotas-- i.e., Cultural Marxism. Again, it makes him feel good to sound egalitarian and well-natured, because he hasn't been personally denied a job because of his race. The answer to "racism" isn't "racism", to "sexism" isn't "sexism", clearly. What he and everyone needs to understand, is that the people pushing this terrible, evil concept also have ulterior motives.

I think the rural area to which I'm moving is fairly "hardened"-- after all, this is just one person from whom I've heard support for bad ideas and foolish notions. But at the same time, if he's thinking these things, then there may be other naive people there with the same beliefs. And we all know what happened to Russia after the Bolsheviks took over...

In any event, enough with this distasteful topic: I had to write the post, but it leaves a bad flavor in my mouth.