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You can find my Orban vs Lee Kuan Yew article here if you haven’t read it,

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Here is a recent example of an ongoing debate among liberals and conservatives over the meaning of populism, Victor Orban, Lee Kuan Yew, and government form:

At center of this debate ultimately is the meaning and direction of whatever it is you want to call the Trump Moment of 2015-6. What will come, if anything, from the changes he effected within the American right and possibly in American government? I think both Fukuyama and his populist-nationalist critics (or call them whatever they want to be called, “nationalist-conservative” I don’t care) are wrong on the meaning of Orban versus Lee Kuan Yew. But Fukuyama’s mistake is ultimately less damaging, because it’s merely defensive for his rather moribund faction…and less consequential. The more I’m reading about Orban and his government in Hungary for the last sixteen years, the more I see it’s been a bad thing for that nation and I suspect an even worse thing for the international right…it has consolidated and encouraged the very worst tendencies of the Western conservatives. Orban has unfortunately been very successful in effecting his policies. But so his tenure is a good example of what an ideal-case 2010’s Populist Success looks like. It’s a distortion and betrayal of the potential of the Trump moment in 2015. The misinterpretation of this turn encouraged by Orban and the operational and intellectual biome that has developed around him will result in decline and failure in the medium-term for critics of international liberalism.

Orban versus Lee Kuan Yew, Fake

Fukuyama and a few others like Fareed Zakaria and Max Boot have repeatedly praised Lee Kuan Yew while condemning Orban in ways that open them up to accusations of hypocrisy. In fact Lee Kuan Yew is the far superior statesman to Orban, and a good model for governance, whereas Orban is a bad one. But these men can’t make the real case for why, because they’re ideologically cornered, subservient to convention, and compromised maybe in front of those who are their friends and allies. They have to contrive continuous and invidious revisions of the meaning of “liberalism” and “liberal order,” to define who is or isn’t part of the “liberal order,” or who is a threat to it.

On one hand “you are praising one dictator as liberal while damning another as opposed to liberalism” isn’t such a good gotcha at all…and Fukuyama himself superficially has counterarguments to this. In the books and articles that made his name around the time of The End of History, Fukuyama presented actually Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore as a plausible alternative model and challenger to Western liberal democracy. He referred to it at the time as a kind of “soft authoritarianism.” Fukuyama but also now Zakaria make the case that in places like Singapore or Malaysia limitations of democracy in the name of liberalism are at the very least a positive transitional stage that is helping these nations. Progress in these nations could possibly be harmed by more vigorous expressions of democratic or popular will. I believe they also include late 19th Century Germany in this model—the National Liberal Party of that time led both to German unification and also promoted a model of rapid economic and technological development with considerable advancements in economic liberties assured by a soft-authoritarian dictatorship. (It happens also to be an excellent counterexample, along with Cavour in Italy, to the usual populist-intellectual piledriving about the “essential opposition between liberalism and national sovereignty” and think-pieces about how the evils of Locke are causing porous borders, or somehow leading by whatever genealogy to the present-day use of migrants by various political and economic entrepreneurs. In fact 19th Century Liberalism is in many cases synonymous with Nationalist projects, in the case of Germany and Italy actually uniting those nations.)

There’s a long tradition here of legitimate argument that a monarch, a semi-dictator, a “CEO” or some other type of strong executive is a better guarantor of liberal and individual rights than a democracy or even a republic is. Curtis Yarvin in our day, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in a different form before, and many others say things like this. Friedrich von Hayek apparently tried for this reason also to influence dictator Salazar of Portugal by sending him The Constitution of Liberty; Raymond Aron praised his salutary depoliticization of Portuguese masses (Fukuyama’s own intellectual grandfather Leo Strauss praised Salazar as a dictator in a letter, for different reasons…Salazar was in practice considerably more authoritarian than Orban ever was). Jouvenel made a similar argument in his main work regarding the opposition between medieval liberties and modernist absolutism regardless of democratic or dictatorial mere form. Carl Schmitt very clearly referred to this idea also in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and elsewhere…that “liberal democracy” only developed circumstantially as a unity, in response to absolute monarchy of 17th-18th Century Europe—and yet the liberals were opposed only to the “absolute” part while the democrats only to the “monarchy” part. As such Fukuyama would be on firm ground here to reject any charges that he’s being a hypocrite.

But consider the “liberal world order” NGO’s that score things regarding freedom, liberalism, democracy and government types: these certainly don’t agree with Fukuyama’s, Zakaria’s or Max Boot’s judgments on Orban versus Singapore. Freedom House’s 2024 scores both Hungary and Singapore as “partly free”…around 65/100 for Hungary and Singapore around 47–48/100; Hungary is thus rated freer than today’s Singapore, which is itself far freer than LKY’s. RSF’s 2024 press-freedom index has Hungary on rank 67, Singapore 126 of 180 (i.e., Singapore far more restrictive press freedom compared to Hungary). V-Dem rates both regimes as “electoral autocracies.” The claim “Hungary is a free society by the standards applied to Singapore” comes from the NGO’s dedicated to the study of such things. Here of course Fukuyama et al would do a bait-and-switch typical of the conservative establishment and try to present these NGO’s as crypto-Marxist and themselves as the true champions of freedom. But in their public criticisms of Orban and praise of Lee Kuan Yew they themselves invoke or hint at similar standards as used by mainline liberals…and not to the actual differences between LKY and Orban, which I will address below.

The problem then is that Fukuyama’s definition of liberalism, liberal democracy, and “illiberal democracy” is only defensible superficially…but ultimately incoherent and based on patent falsehoods and bait-and-switch. He attacks Orban especially as an example of illiberal democracy on grounds that apply entirely, on the terms that he himself uses, to Lee Kuan Yew as well. I think Fukuyama knows this because he has changed the kinds of words he uses for this government type: in the early 1990’s he referred to Lee Kuan Yew as a form of soft authoritarianism and a possible challenge or revision of the Western liberal order, but now both he and Fareed Zakaria refer to it as a kind of liberal authoritarianism and talk about Lee Kuan Yew as part of the liberal order, which they’re obviously doing because they want to rhetorically stick it to the Populists. It’s not just a question of semantics though: Fukuyama criticizes Orban primarily for his suppression of judicial independence and for the capture of the press and media by the state, or semi-coerced ownership by those close to it. The suppression of the courts and supposed or implied use of lawfare against opponents in particular is almost interchangeable with Fukuyama’s definition of “illiberal democracy.” In recent times he also has attacked Orban for his supposed ethnic “understanding” of democracy (without pointing to any specific policies or actions by Orban in this direction). Otherwise, to his credit Fukuyama realizes open borders and Merkel’s disastrous 2015 incitement of refugees into Europe contributed to the weakness and ills of liberalism; but he appears to see Orban and those like him as a pathological overreaction to this.

Here are examples of Lee Kuan Yew suppressing the independence of the judiciary and using the courts and lawfare against his opponents. In 1984 the opposition leader J.B. Jeyaretnam was accused of fraud and tried. He was later convicted in 1986. He appealed this to London, where the Privy Council acted as Singapore’s highest court of appeal: this court ruled in his favor in 1988 saying that he had suffered a serious injustice and had been punished for things of which he was obviously not guilty. The response in Singapore was to ignore this ruling and change the law eventually to eliminate the possibility of appeal to this final court. Jury trials were also abolished early in LKY’s tenure. Detentions under the Internal Security Act (ISA…a holdover from the 1948 British Emergency regulations, then held over in 1960 by Malaya; which Malaysia got rid of in the last twenty years but is still in force in Singapore) were deemed reviewable by Court of Appeal in December 1988 but Parliament amended both the constitution and the ISA within weeks to restore non-reviewable detentions by ministerial discretion, with retroactive force. Multiple opposition leaders were furthermore disenfranchised through a process of defamation lawsuits (that LKY never lost), followed by bankruptcy, which removed the right to sit in parliament.

With these various tools of lawfare, the following major opposition heads, among many others, were imprisoned and disenfranchised: Lim Chin Siong, LKY’s early chief rival, imprisoned some months before the 1963 election in Operation Coldstore along with other activists and held for six years without trial, then exiled. Chia Thye Poh, imprisoned for 23 years without trial, then house arrest on Sentosa Island for many years, longer than Mandela (Sentosa though is currently a haven for rich Singaporeans and site of nice hotels, most of all the amazing Capella Singapore, which is located in former British military barracks and exceeds the Raffles in my opinion in British tropical colonial charm and luxury). The above-mentioned J.B. Jeyaretnam who was main opposition leader in the 1980’s was first acquitted in Singapore, after which the case was reassigned to a more regime-dependable judge who convicted him. Francis Seow, head of the Law Society, which was itself stripped of right to comment on legislation after it criticized media censorship in 1986, interned for 72 days under the Internal Security Act, was prosecuted on trumped-up tax offenses, then exiled. This is just some of the main opposition leaders by the way, but there were many others—and there’s nothing comparable under Orban. For all of Fukuyama et al’s dark intoning about the tyrannical measures of Orban and his “control of the courts” for unspecified “illiberal” nefarious activity, he did none of this at all. Not one name like this can be mentioned because there isn’t.

LKY’s not-very-liberal-named “People’s Action Party” (PAP—arguably a “populist” name) had 100% of parliament from 1968-81, Singapore’s biggest decade of growth. Like Orban and Putin, LKY had very much a pretense to elections and democracy, and didn’t present himself, as Fukuyama et al are claiming now, as an enlightened monarch who avoided democratic and popular-will legitimacy. He was a firebrand and charismatic speaker who repeatedly rallied the people of Singapore to his side during crises, with theatrical Big Man posturing at public rallies. The logo of PAP, a lightning bolt on top of circle, was identical in design to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, which was noted upon its unveiling in 1955…and LKY’s answer for why, when asked about it, was an obvious Trump-like troll (“What else can a right-handed man produce?”)

The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act (1990) allowed restraining orders on politically active clergy…a sensible old-style Ghibelline measure to ensure secular control and shut the lying mouths of demagogues in black robes of various types. Also in 1987 in Operation Spectrum, Lee Kuan Yew wisely used the ISA to crush, discipline and imprison some two dozen liberation-theology “Catholic social justice activists” and Marxist busybodies in a Patriotic self-defense action of meritocracy that Fukuyama, Zakaria and Max Boot would no doubt denounce as vicious and insensitive Fascism had anyone else done it. But when you’re LKY they let you do it.

Lee Kuan Yew’s control over the media and free speech was also far beyond anything enacted by Orban. Multiple newspapers were closed in 1971 and in 1974 The Newspaper and Printing Presses Act placed most of written press under ownership schemes that guaranteed only approved regime hands would be in charge, with basically state monopoly by 1984 and foreign press severely restricted after 1986. TV broadcasting was entirely a state monopoly in Singapore always, with no private or free opposition TV presence at all. None of these things were remotely true in Orban’s Hungary, which had a robust opposition media including on TV, and which continued after Orban took rather mild measures against foreign NGO’s.

Fukuyama has criticized Orban for his supposed “ethnic” overtures to national identity and democracy, but aside from being friendly to Hungarian expats and letting them vote, I’m unaware of a single policy Orban enacted that could remotely be classified as ethnic politics. By contrast, Lee Kuan Yew certainly did pay lip service to a multi-ethnic society; but he enacted multiple ethnic-politics measures that were both highly illiberal by any definition, and also served to buttress and maintain the Chinese culture and supermajority of Singapore. Singapore was 76% various Chinese citizens in the 1970’s and remains roughly that percentage today. The ethnic ratios in general citizenry composition and in housing were preserved by state policy, and it’s a policy to which Lee Kuan Yew repeatedly referred openly, claiming that the ethnic-racial ratios need to be preserved to ensure Singapore’s economic development. A Chinese supermajority in the citizenry continues now in part because, e.g., in 1989 a residency offer with pathway to citizenship was made to 25,000 Hong Kong families to top up the Chinese share of the citizenry of Singapore, given falling fertility rates even at that time in East Asia. The analogy here would be if, in response to a contracting white population Trump were to offer green cards to 2 million Afrikaaner, Finnish, Dutch and Lithuanian families to preserve the white share of the American electorate. I imagine Fukuyama and other “liberal world order” advocates are salivating at Lee Kuan Yew’s tough (and in my opinion also totally justified) measures against various ethnic chauvinists and ethnonationalists—including Chinese by the way, in the same way that Putin persecutes Russian ethnonationalists; but in practice as opposed to speech, LKY very much was willing to use immigration policy to preserve the racial Chinese supermajority in his city state. Malays were also kept out of sensitive military or security roles, which both Singapore state officials and LKY himself later explicitly defended. Mandarin language was pushed as a matter of state policy.

Finally there is the matter of Lee Kuan Yew’s unabashed and explicit use of eugenics, including explicit language in favor of eugenic policies, and including negative eugenics. In 1967 LKY openly stated that those eminent physically and mentally constitute no more than 5% of a society and that slender state resources must see to their benefit for the sake of national prosperity and advancement (C.K. Chan, “Eugenics on the Rise: A Report from Singapore,” International Journal of Health Services, 1985).

Lee Kuan Yew, June 19 1967 Adelphi hotel speech RE Convocation of University of Singapore, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19670619.pdf

In 1969 during the Abortion Bill debate speech he claimed that subsidized housing and free education was allowing the less-gifted and less-economically-productive to outreproduce the rest, and that strong disincentives to their natality were necessary. The same year the Voluntary Sterilization Act was passed. This was followed in the 1970’s by multiple voluntary sterilization inducements directed at the poor, with preferential school access for the one or two children of poorer parents who decided thereafter to sterilize, as an incentive. At the 1983 National Day Rally LKY talked about graduate women under-reproducing, that these being left out of the “breeding pool” will produce a “more stupid society,” and complained about the less-educated women over-reproducing; saying furthermore that 80% of ability is inborn or heritable. This speech cost him and the PAP in the ensuing election—they won anyway but did much worse than expected—but LKY would not budge on such things. In 1984 children of degree-holding mothers were then given school priority access (this had to be walked back in 1985 under mass public outrage). In the same year there was a sterilization cash grant incentive: a S$10,000 housing subsidy for low-income parents without secondary qualifications who sterilized after one or two children. Also the same year, the government enacted a matchmaking program: the Social Development Unit (1984) like a Tinder for graduate singles…but there was also a separate lesser “App” for nongraduate singles, and the bifurcation of these populations, or herding into separate matchmaking spheres was the ingenuous design. In 1987 these efforts continued: “Have Three or More, If You Can Afford It,” and it included tax relief, but only for educated mothers’ third children. (And by the way it is without a doubt that primarily the Chinese-descended citizens, not the Malays or Indians, would have been the main beneficiaries of these measures). These are the kinds of things that contemporary ““““fascist”””” states like Trump’s America, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia are always accused of but have never remotely entertained, let alone enacted (nor, unfortunately, would want to enact).

This compilation of Lee Kuan Yew best moments makes for good watching, but hardly covers his statements on such things as eugenics, which to modern ears of all the things he’s done and opinions he’s held comes off as the most outrageous.

Orban versus Lee Kuan Yew, For Real

In less than one generation a swampy southeast Asian Conradian seedy port with a people who didn’t know how to use toilets transformed into a gleaming skyscraper wealthy garden city….and also happened to be the Chinese civilizational sphere’s only clean urban area that didn’t stink like a seafood restaurant garbage dumpster. This wild success story is well-known and explains why Lee Kuan Yew continues to receive good press in our time despite his open embrace of Fascist Aesthetics and Eugenics: winning is sexy. Deng Xiaoping was famously also influenced by LKY’s example (which in private LKY explained with show-and-tell eugenic reasoning: look at us and at Hong Kong to see what the Chinese race can do in commercial society once freed from Marxist orthodoxy). His success is all the more impressive given that the innate human capital of that region isn’t necessarily so impressive; it isn’t as such “high trust” at all—the Hokkien merchant of the straits was an unexpected human type for a city built on perfect mastery of logistics and guarantees against corruption. There was no history of intellectual or artistic eminence and I doubt that the city will produce anything impressive on that path for the near future. Lee Kuan Yew himself repeatedly recognized this and referred to the parvenu and peasant-migrant background of Singapore’s population, implying he had limited material to work with. It was divided by ethnic, language and confessional diversity that always carries the potential for instability, war, and interference by outside powers; it’s surrounded by bigger hostile states; it began in a crisis that involved the potential for Communist revolution. Even so, Lee Kuan Yew’s city-state averaged 8.5-9% growth for the duration of his premiership 1959-1990. It was actually double digits in the 1970’s but the average was lower because of the oil shock in that decade made it dip to 4-6% in 1974-5. From 1965 to 1990 Singapore’s economy expanded about 8x.

By contrast Orban’s Hungary averaged about 2% growth per year, with the top years 2014-2019 rising to a high of 4%, though it appears to have hit 5% maximum in 2018; the Hungarian economy expanded 40% for the duration of Orban’s rule since 2010.

You can say I’m not comparing like-to-like. Singapore started from a condition of great poverty, whereas the East European states in 1989 weren’t anywhere near as backward even after Communism (and in fact were well ahead of much of the Third World). Arguably no modern state with an advanced economy can do 9% average growth per year. But Lee Kuan Yew had significant governance challenges and foreign threats that Orban didn’t, and many other obstacles and crises besides. And in the end Orban didn’t perform as well as his neighbors, despite the fact that Hungary was especially well-placed to prosper at the end of the Cold War. Poland averaged about 3.5% for the duration of Orban’s tenure, and is a much more prosperous place than Hungary now. Hungary’s economy is one of the poorest-performing places in Europe since 2022, and inflation, maybe the worst inflation in Europe, as well as lack of investment in that country for the last few years is part of the story of why Orban lost so badly in the last election. Romania pushed ahead of Hungary in 2023. By contrast Singapore of course far outpaced its bigger, stronger neighbors for the whole of LKY’s rule.

“GDP” and “economic growth” are seen with suspicion on much of the right because these were pre-Trump GOP talking points. It felt hypocritical and stupid to see Paul Ryan types invoke this and Jack-Kemp-style language while living standards declined or stagnated and they funneled benefits to their cronies and chosen industries. Life expectancy itself was declining in America for the 2010’s, a signature metric of a nation circling the drain. So it’s worth it when you talk about economic growth and GDP in a healthy rising nation to see what it actually can mean… to look at the living standards of the people of Singapore for the 1970’s and compare it to Orban’s Hungary in the 2010’s.

If you were born in Singapore in 1965 your experience for the next 15-18 years would have been one only of constantly improving material conditions. Your family would have moved into a bigger and nicer apartment when you were 6 and probably a bigger one when you were 11 or 12. Your clothes, food, schooling, leisure activities would all have been getting nicer, with constantly improving streets, technology, and an accurate feeling that many opportunities for personal growth and wealth awaited you if you were smart and worked hard in this rising society.

This last matter of the feeling of growth and future is supremely important especially for the well-being and outlook of the intelligent and ambitious young, who themselves in turn are the group that sets the tone and character and culture of a society. Material privation in particular is pretty easy to take, and even the “relative privation” that so presses emotional triggers; but what is painful and even intolerable to the relevant cohort I’m talking about is the feeling that there is no future, that there’s no opportunity, that all prospects look like dead ends or bleak, that you’re trapped.

I’ve had friends in startups who in their first year worked 80-100 hours per week in shared apartments eating cheap Chinese takeout…but it paid off, and they had a good expectation during that period of heavy work and difficulty that it would pay off so they rather enjoyed themselves. Many employers today know this and try to hijack the startup-feel for jobs that don’t carry the same promise or rewards: I’ve seen call-center sales companies presume to have “showers” in their workplace, implying a similar workload for a very small salary with no real future potential. I consider these scams. And the GOP itself or other politicians, not to speak of the left albeit in a different way, seeing the example of places like early Singapore, or being told of this feature of human psychology, most prominent in those who are intelligent, capable and ambitious, would seek not actually to provide them with real opportunities for growth, prosperity, and freedom, but rather to hijack and scam them into hard work with no genuine expectation of rewards. I’ve had conservative older men in my limited employment experience react with outrage and wonder that I wouldn’t accept extra duties without extra pay or promise of concrete rewards. But where they miscalculate is this, that the gap between their own cunning and the intelligence of their presumed victims isn’t as big as they imagine it to be, and often doesn’t go in the direction they think; so these schemes never really work at scale.

This is part of why demands for dedication, labor and sacrifice feel like hollow shuck-and-jive in an anti-meritocratic country like the United States. If you were an intelligent and ambitious youth in 1970’s Singapore by contrast, Lee Kuan Yew’s state offered multiple paths for genuinely meritocratic advancement. From 1960 Singapore made an honest and thorough effort to rate and sort students by ability through their national examination system (the PSLE). A real cognitive-sorting exam is the best method plausibly available to modern states to advance individuals of genuine intellect, which is why the United States refuses to use such, and every day moves farther away from genuine examination (the current-day college exams are highly gamed and subject to multiple levels of corruption, which I leave for others to document). Separate tracks were implemented at ages 9 and 12 in 1979, with the further intention to identify and groom the top students. Later the state implemented an even more aggressive IQ sorting mechanism: the top 0.25-0.5% of each cohort was pulled into a separate enriched-accelerated curriculum. Lee Kuan Yew created in 1971 a modernized version of Chinese imperial mandarinate, consisting of the SAF Overseas Scholarship, added to the President’s Scholarship that had already been in force: top students of each year’s A-level results were sent to Oxbridge and the Ivies at state expense. They were then entered into the Singaporean government and fast-tracked to permanent secretary or general by their thirties. Under the “you get the government you pay for” doctrine, ministers and other high officials also had pay pegged to the top private-sector incomes (I’ve known more than one case of individuals of high ability foregoing employment in the American government because of the pay cut they’d have to take). Singapore also tried to act as Asia’s modern Athens, welcoming schoolchildren of high achievement from other states into its own pipelines, although this meant principally other Chinese from places like Hong Kong.

Speech by Lee Kuan Yew, July 7 1979 at opening of Singapore Polytechnic new campus on Dover Road

The above is just a brief introduction to Lee Kuan Yew’s structuring of Singapore as a “talent pyramid” and cognitive escalator: the Singapore military structure, the polytechnic and vocational school structure, all had separate selection mechanisms including IQ tests, from the 1960’s onwards. This method was refined over time to where by the mid-1980’s reproductive and pronatalist measures were directed specifically at the talented top 1%. And so an intelligent, ambitious youth of whatever socioeconomic background, who could prove himself in examinations, would experience life from 1965 onward as a series of continual improvements in his family’s station, the city’s looks and infrastructure and services, and reasonably large horizons of opportunity and advancement and wealth for himself, including state-supported scholarships at the best universities in the world (some would say this hurt Singapore in the long run because cadets brought back bad attitudes from academia in America and England, but that’s another story). Those not fast-tracked into the top layers nevertheless had less cause for bad feelings…their lives too were improving, as was their country.

The year 1979 was crucial in this respect for the whole of Singapore: in that year Lee Kuan Yew simultaneously erected several new educational-cognitive meritocratic programs and also enacted a momentous “wage correction” that lasted until 1981. The purpose of this wage correction was to kill the low-value industry and assembly economy…to eliminate most cheap-labor-dependent low-value production and force the entire economy upmarket. The entire “Chinese model” that Deng Xiaoping copied and that China itself is now shifting to depends on actually moving the economy away from producing, e.g., steel pipes, and toward high-value products and services as well as automation. Both national power and the lives of average workers are greatly improved if this is successful, as it was in Singapore. The people as a whole, and especially the top cognitive layers, experience life as a series of increasing opportunities for wealth and advancement.

The story behind Orban’s economy from 2010-26 is very different and makes the 2% per-year average growth and final years of inflation appear something much worse than mere stagnation. Orban’s legacy will have been one of brain drain, where the most intelligent and ambitious Hungarians had to leave the country; corruption, where sectors of the economy were redirected to himself and cronies for purposes of shoring up political power; and finally, the gradual transformation of the territory into a corporate slave realm. On the matter of corruption I’m not moralistic and expect that some corruption will take place in any state…but it’s one thing if you have Themistocles embezzling during a condition of bustling development and civilizational peaks, and something else if it’s a symptom of a sclerotic Cold War holdover who’s immiserating his labor force and causing the best to emigrate.

Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore looked to the future and the development of the youth, Orban’s economy was a stagnant scheme that looked to the past and to rewarding the based factions that really stuck it to the urbanites: subsidies to rural sectors through chosen party bosses, subsidies and pandering to pensioners, contracts to chosen cronies erecting a false “national bourgeoisie” based on clientelism and patronage. Then there were the cynical media manipulation schemes at enormous expense where under a program called Megafon, “web Influencers” were herded into state social-media campaigns for Facebook boomers…outspending every political party in the EU on Meta on this astroturfed meme mess. And most of all, special tax rates and benefits to attract foreign firms, especially the German car industry and provide them with a dependable labor force.

There’s nothing wrong with attracting foreign investment and getting industry to offshore to your country. You endlessly hear now that industrialization is a great thing and deindustrialization very bad, which as such is usually true; but look at what Orban actually did to Hungary to achieve this. There was first of all the 2018 “slave law” that allowed companies to force 400 overtime hours, supposedly “voluntary” but of course very much not so when these were the sole employers in entire regions of the country…this passed with over 80% of the country opposing it. The scheme not only expanded Hungary’s long-hours-for-low pay “package” for foreign firms, but also allowed these employers to pay for these overtime hours on a three-year delay (which could also be paid back in “time off” rather than cash).

Orban presented his vision of the good life regarding such schemes in 2014, where he introduced simultaneously a concept of “illiberal democracy” (possibly cribbed from Fareed Zakaria, but with the valuation reversed, and seen holding Fukuyama’s book—he really stuck it to them!) and a “work-based society.” The “work-based society” was buttressed by a 2011 change that dropped the age of compulsory schooling from 18 to 16…in principle this is a great thing, if it means that capable and intelligent youth are groomed and selected at age 16 and accelerated into leadership and scientific-apprenticeship or technologically advanced positions. Roman patricians were certainly given international responsibilities sometimes at that age. But that’s very much not the intention of this law: it was to herd and fast-track Hungary’s youth into cheap assembly factory work for German auto firms. The vocational track of Hungarian schooling was stripped of all non-practical content and then moved from the educational ministry to the “industry and innovation ministry,” with the curriculum under direction by the Chamber of Commerce in response to employer demands. This included a dual-training track with employers themselves in the form of apprenticeships. This last wouldn’t be entirely a bad idea on its own, but all these innovative efforts went only into transforming Hungary’s less-capable youth into a dependable corporate cheap labor pool. There were no corresponding efforts for other kinds of youth, nor any upward path of hopeful development plausible for the nation as a whole. Even before 2020 I was hearing from right wing young Hungarian friends that Orban had turned Budapest into a place for corporate slaves and that they and their friends had lost all faith in him as a leader of vision or future.

The rest of the educational system was gutted, and research and development funding in general minimized to well below the levels of even neighboring East European nations. The chamber of commerce leader, given control over Hungarian education, said in the 2010’s something to the effect that the nation needed welders, not philosophers; complained about too few young skilled laborers and too many “school loafers.” Of course that in itself is an invidious and contrived polarity that says more about the intentions of the Orban regime than the potentials of a modern nation.

This is the very opposite direction of where Lee Kuan Yew took Singapore. In 1979 he raised wages to kill off low-value assembly work and move his country up the production and technological ladder. He enacted, at great difficulty to Singapore and in many ways against the nature of the place, an educational and cognitive pyramid-escalator to identify and quickly promote high innate talent. Orban did everything to turn his naturally gifted people into a cheap slave labor force. When they didn’t meet these demands, and when much of the youth chose instead to emigrate, the hero of European Immigration Restriction and Medici patron host of Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Rod Dreher, and CPAC started in 2023 a guest-laborer program that flooded the country with Filipino, Indian and Vietnamese workers. “Work-based-society” be as it do.

Throughout his tenure Orban did next to nothing to cultivate or give a path or prospects to Hungary’s own intelligent young. He inherited a national talent program from the previous government that he apparently continued, which at least is something…but had zero new offers or ideas of his own to improve the opportunities, careers or path in life of Hungary’s considerably large talented youth population. There were no programs of cognitive selection and advancement similar to what Lee Kuan Yew erected in Singapore. There was no separate track to catapult Hungary’s economy into something genuinely advanced, only an intensification of its new identity as a place of cheap labor, a labor-rentier economy.

Orban gutted Hungarian higher education, universities and severed them from the European Union’s own universities and funding. Neighboring “illiberal” Poland did no such thing, and neither did Czechia. The Hungarian state is per capita one of the last countries in Europe in research funding, behind Malta and ahead only of Bulgaria and next-door Romania—which may well have a Cold War holdover security state elite even more backwards, venal and wretched than what Orban represented. It’s one thing to say academia is corrupted and captured by leftists, and that it often engages in bad scholarship or pointless research. It’s something else to eviscerate it entirely and replace this with nothing of your own, when you control the entire state and have plenty of opportunities over many years to do so.

Orban’s only offer here was a single boutique institution, the Mathias Corvinus College, which acted as a loyalist and party cadre school. One assumes this place also occasionally catered some nice porkolt and lobster risotto for Dreher & co. and other visiting Platos and luminaries from the American Conservative Movement. I don’t know if it was these luminaries who encouraged Orban to give tax incentives and very favorable loan terms to tax-paying married families that remained in Hungary as a pro-natalist move. But this didn’t work. I suppose the “tax-paying” component of this offer is at least a minimal attempt at a proxy for quality, and should be praised. But absent other opportunities to advance in life, and actually in an atmosphere that’s hostile to talent and merit, these terms just aren’t attractive to anyone smart and capable. So they left, and the ones who stayed either didn’t deliver the desired fertility either, or….

A defender of Orban might respond that Singapore’s average age during the 1960’s and 70’s was maybe in the early 20’s. Hungary now and since Communism is unfortunately an aging society with poor fertility and not enough young people. But this isn’t a legitimate excuse for Orban’s failure. In fact this alone condemns him so much more because it means he should have fought desperately to preserve, cultivate, buttress Hungary’s most precious resource, its human capital and future. And unlike other Populists, he had managed to take the state’s institutions to an extent where he could at least have tried something. But that’s the whole failure, that he never tried. He never showed any interest whatsoever in this. His interests were to serve his preferred political factions, again, the pensioners, the rural voters in locations where the sole employers were party bosses. Others who benefited were his cronies and their clients who were to be the core of a “national bourgeoisie” through closeness to government grants, and then the foreign firms to which he lent Hungary’s youth as a cheap labor force until he decided to replace them with Cambodians.

This shameful decision to abandon Hungary’s future should be contrasted again to Lee Kuan Yew then who, by his own admission, had considerable human capital problems with a largely unintellectual and frankly illiterate “peasant population” base. Internal reports from the late 1970’s show anxiety and even desperation from Singapore’s ministers that there simply wasn’t the human material available in their nation to climb the very sound cognitive pyramid LKY had erected. (I know this goes against “HBD” orthodoxy of recent times, but most of the Chinese population groups just aren’t that bright by nature, and it shows when good-faith efforts at testing are made, let alone the civilizational scientific record of that sphere or its “achievements” over the last few decades since it’s embraced Western science.) This isn’t true for Hungary. Hungarians are very proud of the large number of eminent minds their nation has engendered, and have a right to be. Orban chose his nation as just a grim cheap-labor territory with European Union funds funneled to preferred individuals. He could have also tried to provide a well-funded and vigorous upward path for its own sizeable cohort of bright youth, proportionally bigger than what LKY had available…whether in technology, finance, high-value robotics, bioengineering, or whatever. It’s often said that big continental nations like America, India or China don’t have the luxury that Singapore does: to abandon low-value manufacturing entirely and move “upmarket” into high-value production, services and such. Maybe that’s true or maybe not, but Hungary’s population is only about 10 million, around the same size as Israel’s, which has made considerable efforts to promote science and technology startups on its territory. For example, Israel’s R&D investments are 6.3% of GDP, the highest in the world, compared to Hungary’s 1.4%. Israel promotes, buttresses, and sells its brains at world-level prices, Hungary’s offer was manual labor on the cheap. I leave for someone else a full comparison of Israel and Hungary and their trajectory 2010-26 as it would be supremely informative on its own. There are in any case many other examples of small nations who can do this. Iceland was a nation of poor fishermen until they decided to use their considerable natural endowments to become, in very recent times, rich financiers, and when that failed in 2008, extremely rich with various biotech and other innovative industries (including state of the art fishery and agriculture specialties). There’s no reason why such things wouldn’t have been possible in Hungary with vigorous and creative state incentives, which Orban was empowered to achieve.

The only plausible escalator of talent the Orban regime created was something called “TAO” and which consisted of allowances to corporations to convert otherwise taxes to donate to sports programs and sports stadium construction instead of to the national treasury. The Orban government expenditure ratio when it came to funding sports and stadiums and funding R&D and tech research was basically one-to-one. My audience maybe knows I love to post photos of athletes and that I admire physical achievement. But a regime of “jocks” is actually stupid and this ended up being mostly a way to enrich Orban’s friends. They built stadiums rather than promote national physical health or eminent physical achievement. Hungary continues to top the charts in obesity in Europe…fattest country in Europe and fourth actual country in the world behind only the United States, Mexico, and Chile (not counting the unfortunate cases of Pacific islands which contain naturally eminent specimens crushed by modern depression). 30% of Hungarians are obese, and 25% of children. The life expectancy for men is low at 72-73, a decade less than Singapore at about 81-2...it doesn’t seem like the “work-based society” is great for health or reversing life expectancy decline. Orban did try to enact a fast food tax, but this did nothing. There have been a few eminent Magyar sportsmen emerging in the last decade primarily in fencing and swimming, but disproportionate high achievement in various sports has always been the case for East Bloc sports programs generally…I’m not sure it was due to these lavish spending programs from Orban. I don’t know how this money was spent, again aside from enriching those close to his administration under the excuse of “big sports.”

Here was a man who, in the language of the post-Trump “Based” certainly “knew what time it was” and was ready to fully “exercise power.” But control and power and defeating your enemies isn’t actually a substitute for good ideas and an inspiring vision for the future. Your enemies are never quite as defeated as you think anyway. Lee Kuan Yew was a dictator but he did genuinely win majorities for many subsequent elections because the vast majority of Singaporeans benefited from his rule, had only improved lives with him, and saw only good prospects going forward. It is because of his petty vision, ideological imprisonment and reactionary resentments that Orban ended with the youth going 60%+ for his opponent in the last election, after a culturally and economically moribund 16 years—almost a generation—of his misrule.

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Orban and American Conservatism and Populism

As regards this ideology of Orban’s I see certain very troubling parallels to the direction American conservatism has taken over the last ten to twenty years. In my article on Milei and Argentina I pointed out that nationalists should beware of Peronism, a form of “Bannonism” on steroids. It always ends one way: if the common biggest enemy is the oligarchic capitalist Fat Cat and the spoiled university brat who doesn’t want to work with his hands, why wouldn’t your allies be the salt-of-the-earth illiterate Peruvian and Bolivian working-and-believing-folk who will put their rough shoulders into hard labor and also give you demographic weight against the effete upper classes? Thus Peronist-Kirchnerist Argentina, despite its rhetoric of economic nationalism, ended up busting open its borders to Third World mass migration. So goes the policy and desire of every similar “ethnic socialist” party in Europe. In particular I remarked on the bullying, arrogant attitude that a “workers’ society” can take toward the “avocado-toast-eating college students who want to write screenplays, not work with their hands, and are possibly gay.” Always again with the added realization at some point that the Paraguayan migrant day laborer could therefore be, will inevitably be your ally against such local do-nothings, loafers and reprobates.

There’s a right-wing version of this same attitude, that’s maybe more noxious and annoying…Orban seems to have been its recent champion. If the leftist universities and the urban young are the social base of your opposition, why not get rid of them? Why not funnel youth into “the trades” and get rid of that hipster gay high-falutin cosmopolitan education stuff? If industrialization is the highest good why not turn your nation into a cheap labor rent pool, devalue your currency to become “competitive” in wage labor costs, give employers unprecedented powers over your workers (to the point where they get free loans through free labor), and cut schooling short to provide an earlier entry into this virtuous “work-based-society”? The bullying language about “welders and philosophers,” the gay loafer university crowd, the virtues of “the trades”…all of this sounds very familiar. Then finally also the Bible-banging and Pharisaic public religiosity to make up for the fact that you’re constructing a bleak work-camp society…why not also the empty tax credit “pronatalist” policies that result in nothing…very beautiful historical reenactment buildings remaking Budapest into a historical theme park (forget that the Habsburg fin de siecle style was new when the originals were built in 1870-1914 and not merely a historical reenactment but included substantial innovations at the time)…jerkoff conferences about civilizational identity…higher prices for everything and maybe a lecture from Misters Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher on how if you complain about the price of mangoes you could possibly be a degenerate selfish modernist for liking luscious tropical fruit….oh how brunch!

Did you salute your obese wife today and pray together at the community center on the way back from your job at the coal mines, anon?

Those interested in the connections between Orban’s public messaging and the American conservative movement should study the Megafon program that the Hungarian state started (with plausible deniability as an independent foundation with unclear sourcing) in 2020. It was a massively funded media push, with, again, more money spent on ads than any other party in the EU did on social media. It contrived to mimic organic online excitement through the recruitment of influencers who pandered in premade ad-agency memes to boomers and spiritual oldtroons on Facebook and such. This push precisely matches in time the changes on the American “online right” since 2022 with Elon’s X and the like promoting in my opinion similarly contrived polarities that coincide with the ossified interests of the Daily Wire and other Cable News legacy conservative fixations. I can’t speak to any operational links and I find “follow the money” analysis tedious and overdone lately, but the similarity in content is very striking…it reminds me in many vivid particulars of the conservative co-opting of the online sphere in the United States, including promotion of fake and buffoonish opposition. Regarding the Orban side, it’s instructive that once the patron and funding disappeared recently, within weeks so did this entire “online” media ecosystem of influencing in Hungary…as it wasn’t after all really akin to online organic citizen engagement, but, like much of the new online right in the United States as well, contrived Cable News 2.0

For the intellectually and morally bankrupt character of present-day debates on the right, see, e.g., this:

American conservatives haven’t been able to protect even the bare minimum of a liberal society, equality under the law, meritocracy and non-discrimination. Faced with a generation of intelligent and capable men who are with few exceptions shut out of advancement in life, these conservatives haven’t shown interest in fighting for the drastic changes, de facto and de jure, that would be necessary to reestablish some form of meritocracy in the United States. This is unforgivable because it’s entirely within the sphere of mainstream American feeling and ideas, both center left and right, that discrimination is unfair and merit, intelligence and hard work should be rewarded. But since the Reagan administration, whenever the right has had power, it’s made only the most anemic efforts in this direction and gave up at the sign of first resistance. You are then left by America’s 250th anniversary with absurd statements from conservatives about the “American dream” thirty or forty years out of date, and practical life suggestions to “stretch your meat with refried beans” and “work at Panda Express” as instances of the Good Life.

I’m attacking a certain kind of establishment conservative here but I suppose I’m trying to hint, through the example of Orban, that their main media opponents aren’t actually that different. The “postliberals” and similar are in a productive media engagement with the pre-Trump GOP, but offer the same hopeless future, with a different ornamentation. I’m not aware of any serious efforts on the part of Populists and Populist-Conservatives and National-Conservatives or whatever to provide a genuinely inspiring vision of the future or of good life. More concretely they don’t fight to take on America’s wretched anti-meritocratic laws, regulations, and general corporate culture, nor do they appear to have any intention of doing so. (The changes Trump would have to make here, which would include taking on Female Privilege, would cause an outcry far bigger than his opposition to migration.) As far as I can see both Ben Shapiro and Tucker, and those “in between” offer varieties of humiliation-as-success.

I don’t think the meaning of the Trump moment is fully decided. What it is, what it could be, we will see in the next few years. There are many good people in this administration or adjacent, who could inherit the leadership of the American right and take it in a progressive, technologically and economically powerful direction. In particular, the economy could be reformed with vigor and severe measures to where some of the freedoms that existed in the dynamic America of 1890-1930 would be reestablished for individuals of ambition and intelligence. The virtue of Trump was never that he’d be a savior but a disruptor and dissolver of an ossified and bleak duopoly. The Orban reinterpretation of the 2010’s is penitential aesthetics to consecrate the closure of horizons appropriate to a boomer Cold War holdover regime whose principle is the taming of youth, the sealing of life, and taxidermy: pray, weld, stay, reproduce, don’t complain about prices. It’s important I think that the example of Orban, a conservative of low vision who sacrificed the future in the name of a contrived past, be rejected. Certain measures that Lee Kuan Yew introduced could be adapted, without coercion, to the American case: versions of the honest exam, forceful action against antimeritocratic discrimination in universities and corporations de facto and not just de jure; the bonded scholarship pyramid and talent selection measures; wage and employment inducements that kill scam-work; a return as far as is possible to the laboratory of states. Pathways and opportunity for real merit could be opened up again.

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Chris Nolan’s Odyssey is a pedantic movie undeserving of a serious intellectual, ideological or aesthetic review. But most of its right wing critics who try to claim it is simply a “woke” film are wrong and misguided. It’s woke in the same way mainstream conservatism in America and England became woke under Bush and the Tories. This doesn’t make it any better than if it were the far leftist agitprop its critics imagine it to be. It fails primarily as art for deficiencies of plot, character, and aesthetics, but in this clumsiness is included the great error of all didactic art, that it’s a forced homily-allegory for its own time. It speaks to Nolan’s narrowness as tedious commentary of the type that might be at home now in the social spheres that supported George Bush II and Karl Rove, or at least Christopher Hitchens. As the movie is unworthy of detailed reflection itself, I’m writing this to address various other tangents that interest me and also the controversy it generated.

Nolan’s Odyssey is a failure on multiple levels that have nothing to do with politics and that make it a liability to any views it supposedly “supports”: worst of all is the leaden artificial dialogue that is almost surely written by LLM. I was astounded to see for this director uncharacteristically here very much a “tell, don’t show” exposition style where characters basically face the camera to transmit their awareness on their own “historical age” as explained in academic books written thousands of years later, and which Nolan wants the viewer to see he dutifully read. He’s beating a probably ignorant audience over the head with very explicit Baby’s First Ancient History Educational hour. I generally like Nolan and think he’s a lot like Hitchcock in the sense he has an appreciation for narrative as mere visual excitement; he also has a similar attraction to dark mystery feel. In North by Northwest Hitchcock takes this tendency to an absurd limit, where the plot is rather ridiculous and the mystery is as usual a let-down and a nothing…but it doesn’t matter because the whole movie is an occasion for visually thrilling vignettes that have remained iconic decades later. I thought Nolan was very enjoyable in similar way in the Batman films, especially the first, and in Inception, which in moments carries some of the rush you get talking to real schizophrenics; his first American movie Memento is also good and manages to sustain an immersive mood of mystery and obsession. He hasn’t followed up here, although the story invites it and he could have made something very successful merely by showing the adventure stories of the Odyssey in greater detail.

Nolan’s concerns about justice and morality in his previous movies were artist’s vices incidental to his films, easy to ignore, and unnecessary to enjoy them…but he seems to have indulged these faults in his latest movie at the expense of what he’s actually good at. It’s possible he and Ridley Scott, maker of two recent execrable and actually-more-aggressively-woke movies, are co-students in the arts of chastity at the prodding of their wives (or whoever). There are just a few scenes on Odysseus’ exotic travels where Nolan is obviously truly enjoying himself, but he cuts it short just as it gets good. The Cyclops scene is almost perfect and the best of any on film so far. That’s what’s frustrating, because this could have been a great movie…all he had to do is just more of that. On two occasions, in the run-up to the events in the Cyclops cave, and in the ascent to Circe’s house, Nolan shows his special taste for Mediterranean biome and mystery feel, which he’s obviously relishing as something new for him on film…he should have just gone with this. Unfortunately instead of continuing to do what he likes and what he’s good at, Nolan kills these instincts in himself, doesn’t linger on such scenes…he denies himself and the audience this pleasure in order to inform you that he’s Really Concerned about Certain Serious and Political things in our world, and also that he’s very sensitive to the dignities of his wife and daughter. You can see him on several occasions caught up in his own orgasm-denial.

The other visual and “literary” aspects of the movie are very mixed. I found the many complaints from others about the coloring to be wrong: some scenes are vivid, colorful and beautiful, especially at sea. But the framing for IMAX doesn’t work if you see it in a normal cinema. The ending battle scene is unoriginal and a failure…as friend put it: “The ending is Kill Bill by torchlight, you never see a blow connect, just a blur, all of it closeup and medium. Also the editing is bad, hyperactive. It cuts from face to face every half second — this is how it is in every film now.” In visuals and dialogues this movie often trips on itself.

Self-conscious clunkiness and stumbling were also the problems with many recent historical epics, like Troy of 2004 and Oliver Stone’s Alexander. In Troy they got rid of the gods altogether and replaced Homer’s dreamy and alien world with a coarse and very-contemporary Realpolitik discourse. They took out all the poetic enchantment and adventure and plopped in the facile cynicism of college student “Geopolitics” piledriving sessions. Nolan does this too, having Odysseus intone darkly about Agamemnon’s wish to “control trade routes.” It’s Rand Corp briefs-policy-wonk-language of a man who has a bad conscience he doesn’t work in an office, instead of the sustained spell that this extremely romantic epic could always cast over someone who really loved the tales themselves.

On the other hand, the common complaints about Odysseus being wrongly portrayed by Nolan as inner-conflicted and brooding are also way off. Homer describes him many times as weeping, many-troubled and he’s at times treated as an outcast by others when they realize the gods hate him. He describes himself as comparably the unluckiest man. Gods also joke or pun about him in this same way, and he was seen in the ancient world also as a man of high troubles who must endure many evils. In Homer Odysseus doesn’t seem to have a lot of joyful amor fati about it either…he refers often to his own travails and misery, although he’s arguably not pestered by anything like modern guilt.

Most repulsive is the conservative commentary complaining about the literary “nonlinear” narrative of Nolan’s movie. What I hate most is this absolute ignorance of Walsh and others who think the film is some kind of dazzling experiment in newfangled hifalutin art gallery 3deep5you, and not good plain honest story tellin’. Homer was just a plain dealing folksy campfire story teller. What is “in medias res?” Why do I need to be “disoriented”? That’s unamerican. Joseph Conrad was also a woke hipster bullshit artist for telling highly irregular nested storylines that “jump around” too much, you see…

The controversy around this movie will be remembered more than the movie itself. The right broadly speaking, and for example Elon Musk and Matt Walsh, reject the movie instinctively because they believe the casting is motivated by the Woke desire to besmirch Western civilization, and to replace its historical heroes with those of different races. They feel this is done in order maybe to promote a kind of literary “DEI”-affirmative-action retroactively, or maybe to justify mass migration. I say instinctively because it can’t be based on having watched the movie; if you see it, this is obviously not Nolan’s intention. I myself went in expecting to be lectured at on those lines, but there’s nothing of this. Nolan obviously cares about and loves his source material, unlike Ridley Scott whose recent Napoleon and The Last Duel were both composed entirely in the spirit of butthurt and bitter opposition toward his subjects. The casting doesn’t feel motivated by what people are suspecting, isn’t emphasized on political lines at all, and I didn’t even get the sense he was trying to retcon the ancient Mediterranean as diverse (more on the actual history of this in a moment).

Ellen “Elliott Rodgers” Page’s casting as a literal male ghost devoid of life-force without the sipping of sacrificial blood is appropriate; when Odysseus speaks to her in the underworld she actually does come off as uncanny ghostlike wraith male shade, mouth smeared with blood and a raspy delivery that would have been too frightening on a biological male. I don’t understand what the complaint is here, and maybe I’d expect the complaint to come from the trannie-world instead, as typecasting them.

I laughed out loud when Menelaus, who plays Black Helen’s chud husband stand-in apparently for Andrew Tate-Donald Trump hybrid, says in a coarse New York-tinged accent tough guy growl “Look at dat! Da face dat lawunched a tousand chips!”…following this, the audience sees “a ghastly pitch-black witch doctor rolling her eyes around like Stepin Fetchit.” Helen has scarification of the Omo Ethiopians. I don’t know what the intention here was—I suspect it was Nolan cleverly trying to solve the problem of how you could ever cast one of the most beautiful women in history, and resolving at least to choose a face that would have been so out-of-place and distinctive in that world that it could have left a mark in myth (the very bad Troy of 2004 casts a conventionally attractive but unremarkable lady you could have found in the mid-2000’s at any bar or restaurant in Santa Monica waiting tables). But the effect on the viewer is that Lupita is being trolled and black women are being trolled. I think Nyongy’o was the wrong choice for this role anyway. She is Kenyan and maybe Bantu and has a rather plain American-black-woman face…and at least in this movie a clumsy and goatlike bearing. If Nolan wanted to do what I said in this paragraph regarding casting, he could have chosen a genuine alien-looking Nilotic beauty like Anok Yai. (I think his failure to do so isn’t incidental but again a result of deliberate moralistic self-denial.)

The most obvious and cynical interpretation of Nolan’s casting choices is that he knew it would make Elon and his website get triggered, generate media controversy, and increase sales. The right then yet again acts as guerrilla marketing for the left, and in this exchange loses entirely. I’d bet that pretty much any viewer who goes into this film won’t feel he was lectured on race and ethnic identity in ways claimed by the right (you do certainly get lectured, and in very clumsy ways, but not on this). Very few people in any case identify with the heroes of Homer today as the origin of their civilization, let alone their ethnic identity or peoplehood. Far more often you hear from the religious that the mean and masculinist pagan godless heroes of the Greco-Roman world were given a stern and effective moral talking-to by the Books and Wisdom of Israel. The “online right” then appears in its complaints out of touch, oversensitive and paranoid.

An example is my otherwise friend Steve Sailer who I feel has made several mistakes in his messaging on this. Here are some of his tweets, a couple of which I retweeted before seeing the movie myself:

Here Sailer sounds plausibly right but is just wrong, for reasons I will now list. Let me say first that I do in the end think the casting by Nolan is stupid, ahistorical, and politically-motivated (although not in typical campus left “woke” way or for the same reasons an actually woke academic like Emily Wilson would cast the movie the same ways). Nevertheless, it’s just not true that Bronze Age royal courts would have been ethnically homogenous. They would also not have been representatives ethnically or racially of the people they ruled; it’s also not true at all that they would have had no guests or employees of other and possibly weird races. The fact that the Odyssey is partly a story about the dangers of sea travel is true, but another big part of the story Sailer leaves out is that Odysseus is uniquely hated by Poseidon. I posted recently a series of sayings from classical Greece—admittedly many centuries later with maybe better naval technology (although naval travel times stayed remarkably stable in the Mediterranean from antiquity to semi-modern times) comparing the failure rate of sea voyages to failure rate of marriages; from Athenaeus:

That’s a one-in-ten failure rate and maybe at the high end: there are speeches by Demosthenes also where naval voyage insurance contracts are described, and some have tried to reason back from that…and voyages were dangerous but not as dangerous as Sailer implies basing his claim on the unique examples of Odysseus’ troubles. Obviously Greeks built colonies all around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and many were around people who probably didn’t look like them.

Indeed sea travel was very dangerous always…but on the very stormy Pacific, the Austronesians managed to colonize vast areas with stone age technology. These areas were populated by their descendants as mixed with racially-very-different Melanesians, and in the other directions, in Madagascar, with Africans; and in southeast Asia with all kinds of others. This was achieved by stone age peoples. In a recent episode of my show “Caribbean Rhythms,” I repeated Robert Drews’ very interesting idea that the Aryans arrived in India by sea, from roughly present-day Basra, after a sojourn in Mesopotamia. Whether that’s true or not, if that event did take place—not too long before the events shown in the Odyssey—it would have been a resuscitation of an indisputably real, then-dormant, but much older sea-path…some think the Harappan Indus Valley civilization may have been founded by Sumerians or such. They at least had heavy influence from a transplanted elite that had arrived by sea from Mesopotamia, and that sea route was known and indisputably active very long before the events shown in the Odyssey. It’s becoming ever more clear that sea, river and ocean travel always was by far the preferred mode for ancient humans. Despite the dangers, it’s much easier, safer and faster than overland travel, though it does require a certain intrepid character and some special intelligence. (A “computer AI” should really map out all the “easy” sea currents from likely launching posts in all coastlines, and likely plausible landing places, as I think this way we might discover previously unknown “connections.”).

When it comes to the Bronze Age Greeks themselves, I hold again to Drews’ theory that they arrived on the Greek mainland by sea from the Caucasus in the Middle Bronze Age, as an introgressive small military elite. Prior to this during the Minoan Thalassocracy of the early Bronze Age, centuries before the events depicted in the Odyssey, the regime at Knossos certainly did enlist mercenaries from the Caucasus to police their holdings and mines and vassal populations on the Greek mainland: the new “suite” of military technology including unique types of rapiers and especially the chariot warfare that was to be the foundation of the power of Bronze Age monarchies was a specialty of these mercenaries who came from very far away. These mercs in employ of the Minoan kings would have been very likely a quite different race from the locals as they hailed from the Trialeti cultural area, which was itself related to Catacombs Culture, and in turn both related to Yamnaya. The “basketball theory” of Aryan dispersals is funny in this regard, in that tombs in that area of the Caucasus around that time have yielded individuals of heights at 6’7 and 6’9; the earliest known Greek skeletons at Mycenae Grave Circle B are big…larger and different-built than the surrounding contemporary population, and present phenotypic differentiation consistent with genetic difference (the Greek government is so far forbidding detailed genetic testing of these Shaft Grave remains for obviously petty political reasons, and no one seems to care). In their tombs they have unique “wave-pattern” (swastika) designs that were only found otherwise in that same style very, very far away in the middle of the great steppe way north of the Caucasus (farther away and more remote from Greece than e.g., Nilotic Nubia). For a connoisseur of Indo-European dispersals, Sailer’s et al claims that racial heterogeneity was unusual to the Bronze Age courts (and before) is bizarre. And even if you were to dismiss my admittedly minority claims about Greek origins here by the way, the presence of southern-Caucasus mercenaries in the employ of the earlier Minoans is much more certain…and again, they would have sailed in from much farther away and on a much more hostile body of water than Odysseus experiences—the Black Sea is frightfully stormy and dangerous. Regardless, such voyages were routinely made with full certainty in historical times with similar naval technology.

Part of the material basis of the Bronze Age itself was tin mining, a specialty of the Phoenicians, who in order to mine this relatively hard-to-find metal had trading outposts as far away as north Europe and northern England, Spain and beyond…and who knows where else including most probably way down the coast of west Africa. At the height of Bronze Age monarchies in the Near East and among the Mycenaeans, there most probably would have been Nordic mercenaries, steppe mercenaries, and yes, subsaharan African mercenaries present in numbers substantial enough to leave a pictorial and other record and to enter in lore.

I would guess there would have been also occasional intermarriage with such “guests,” especially if they had elite status. Bronze Age society didn’t have a concept of nationhood in the modern sense of the nation-state—that’s arguably an Iron Age defensive development in response to the mass breakdown the beginnings of which you see clumsily depicted in Nolan’s Odyssey. Often as among the Hittites, the ruling class was certainly racially heterogenous from those they ruled and had no common concept of peoplehood with them…in the Hittite case they called themselves the Neshites and their language Neshili; and ruled “the people of Hatti,” which were a heterogenous patchwork named after the land, not their tribal identities. They had separate gods, traditions, and identities from the patchwork they ruled. Bronze Age monarchs regularly sought alliances and spouses from their counterparts in kingdoms very far away, with whom “they kept a lively correspondence,” as apparent in the Amarna letters. Nolan isn’t inventing the fact that it’s the first (known) interconnected, international civilization. Their inclusivity wasn’t based on modern ideas of tolerance. But to believe, e.g., that a Mycenaean or Mitanni king would have had “racial loyalty” to the people or peoples he was ruling, or saw himself as racially or ethnically related to them, is a bizarre and ahistorical conceit, as is in my opinion to insist that his court would have looked “ethnonationalist” (the later Jews themselves were in my opinion very much a heterogenous, even wildly heterogenous patchwork, and the Bible falsified only in post-Hellenistic post-Maccabean times a common national story). The Sea Peoples got their start precisely as mercenaries at the great Bronze Age courts. They were auxiliaries to the chariot tanks—the Sherden (or Sardinians?) at the court of the Pharaoh, who later attacked him. They didn’t look like the Egyptians.

Those complaining about a black queen may be forgetting that the wisest man in the Bible and supposedly the wisest in the world—though a thorough comparison of his wisdom with the sages of the Greeks has only been hinted at by some—Solomon, had a wife or consort or such that probably looked not very different from Lupita Nyong’yo. I know Sheba was “Ethiopian” but that meant sometimes something different in the ancient world: when Herodotus extols “Ethiopians” at Histories in Book 3 as the tallest, physically beautiful men and spiritual kindred of the Greeks in their opposition to Persian imperialism, these were obviously Nuba- or Dinka-similar Nilotics of some type. (It’s funny that, like Odysseus, the Nilotic/ “Ethiopian” king Herodotus describes presents a bow that only he and his men have the strength to string as a challenge to the Persian envoys to take back to their king.)

This is something else many miss in the “race incorrect” criticism of Nolan’s Odyssey. The Greeks uniquely had a wild taste for the foreign and the exotic, and the Odyssey is one of their earliest and strongest statements for this bent. Odysseus is admired in the opening lines as a man who saw the lands, cities, customs and hearts of many different peoples (this is largely in my opinion why Emily Wilson wanted to translate polytropon as touched with the meaning of “problematic,” according to a recent interview of hers, because in the modern leftist/“woke” understanding, it is the colonial and exploratory aspect of European or white man that is the greatest sin, and that must be provincialized; it is his observation, exploration and classification of others that is intolerable to them, for it makes him a historical center of progress. And wokeness is fundamentally a reactionary movement against freedom and progress). It is actually remarkable that the equivalent of the Bible for the Greeks would look with relish and admiration on such adventures. It’s a taste for exploration, for the foreign and unusual and away-from-home that’s transmitted to Herodotus and others later and arguably bequeathed, by twists and turns, to the European west as a whole.

I was so in war; but work was never loved by me,

nor care of the household, which rears gleaming children,

but to me always loved were oared ships,

and wars, and well-polished spears and arrows:…

(Odyssey 14.222…)

This is part of what made both the Greeks and the Europeans who shared this sensibility truly unique and I claim it is one of the emotive roots for freedom of thought and for philosophy and science also. In book Occidentalism you see instead the total lack of curiosity that other civilizations had about foreign customs and peoples. Gobineau emphasizes that ethnic parochialism is one of the main distinguishing marks of non-European peoples (and one of the markers of their spiritual and intellectual inferiority according to his criteria). This doesn’t mean that integration and equality as per modern models was practiced in the ancient world, or that such things inevitably result from outward-looking, exploratory attitudes, or that Nolan’s casting is legitimate or not politically motivated. It does mean that the premise of the online “right wing” attack on Nolan, that he errs for showing “diversity” in the context of Bronze Age courts because obviously they all practiced ethnic nationalism or because sea travel made different human types-transfer impossible before the age of planes…that these things are not just factually wrong, but misunderstandings both of Bronze Age monarchies and of what makes the spirit of the Odyssey itself unique.

(Genetic studies certainly do tell a story about the mass of ancient populations, which in general never really moved places. Most of the stories we have now from remote antiquity about migrations—the story of Exodus, for example, bear no relationship to the local archaeological record, which shows continuous settlement by the same populations, but were the charter myths of introgressive or symbiotic-dominant elites. These certainly could be captured in genetic studies if the fortuitous finds are approached: interesting would be mid-Bronze Age Levantine kinglets with obvious Aryan names analogous to what’s found in the Vedas…not Vedic, but preserving Proto-Indo-Aryan archaisms…e.g., Indaruta ruler of Achshaph, among quite a few others…but no bones found yet, etc., and this doesn’t show up at all in the mass population of the time and place.)

Helen herself probably shouldn’t have been cast as a subsaharan black, but in principle there’s nothing wrong with Nolan having a “diverse” cast in this movie…the problem isn’t this, but why and how he did it. He should have relished in the exoticism and somehow visually explained the presence of foreigners at these courts. He could have really dwelled on it actually, and explored the way these people would have been appreciated as exotic imports and specimens with their own separate rituals. In historical times in classical Athens there were according to Herodotus still prominent families of Phoenician descent with their own private home cults…there are film-makers who glory in displaying such things, e.g., Werner Herzog in Cobra Verde, where ethnographic and cultic oddities are visually enjoyed…python dances, or what. Film is the perfect form to enjoy this kind of “diversity.” That love for weirdness would have been a lot more interesting, and he could have indulged his taste for the uncanny and horrific: what he did instead actually comes off as defensive and boring. He plops in some foreigners with no context and gives the impression he is pandering to an American audience, to “make his cast look like the country” (a grimy terminal at DFW airport…with actors from Los Angeles, who act like white Angeleno actors of the 2020’s).

Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde 1987

In Emily Wilson’s recent review this is actually the aspect of the casting that she complains about: she feels that Nolan was too fetishistic and tokenist in his casting, that is, that he besmirched the actual principles of wokeness she holds to. As the “online right” is now largely senile and unable to read beyond 500 words, and has no knowledge of how the Woke and the New Left see themselves and what they believe, they celebrated Wilson for her “slamming” of the Nolan, who has been declared the week’s public Bad Guy #1. That they are willing to admire and celebrate a review that attacks him for not being woke enough is more evidence this “sphere,” whatever it may have been, has completely lost the plot and sunk into the irrelevance of an incoherent seal-clap gallery. This is an inner dispute among different liberal-left factions that could be exploited by “the right,” but is being mishandled.

Which brings me to Nolan’s actual political program in the Odyssey. Strange there should be at all a debate about this when he has characters look at the camera and explicitly verbalize it on multiple occasions. Nolan’s view is that the Bronze Age was analogous to ours in that it was a relatively international, relatively racially inclusive prosperous time based on global commerce. He also believes there was a moral-legal element as the basis for all this: he thinks the guest-host relationship was a rough precursor of the “postwar international order” and its own ethos of human rights or international law. He believes transgressions of this reciprocal ethical system in the forms primarily of warfare, covetousness, and abuse of hospitality led to the collapse of this civilization and the start of a new dark age. He openly references this new dark age at the end of the movie.

Over one third of screen time consists of the depredations of caricaturish-evil suitors. This is a lurid revenge-redemption story against their many offenses. This certainly isn’t the movie I myself would have made… I find the adventure aspects a lot more interesting and relevant. It’s a lot “closer” to the attention Homer’s Odyssey itself bestows on the suitors and revenge subplot, though much Greek-political intrigue finery is lost in Nolan’s retelling. But if he had wanted to make a “woke” film he might have underemphasized the revenge storyline. A classically “woke” movie would have been easy to make: Nolan could have shown Odysseus and his white explorer-colonizer men at length get “schooled” by “indigenous peoples” superior in hospitality, kindness, intelligence, and so on. The colonial, explorer, and settler aspects of the White Man are the prime targets of the “woke” understanding, and Nolan doesn’t at all take shots at these. As it is, he almost rushes past the travel parts, where foreigners are shown as mostly half mentally ill and half brutal, to dwell on the humiliations inflicted by the suitors on the household that welcomes them. Nolan’s apparent insensitivity to “indigenous peoples” is part of the reason Emily Wilson criticizes this movie.

This is an antiwar and also an anti-mass-migration propaganda movie: war and the abuses of the suitors are shown as destroying the basis of a proto-liberal international order. This isn’t some “esoteric” or “Straussian” device or message—a stupid, overused concept by the way (it’s almost never explained what the purpose of such “secret messages” in books or especially movies might be; such literary devices can certainly be employed, but I’m saying the references to these in commentary now is almost always imbecile). It’s the plain overt meaning that the average viewer walks away with, and he’s beaten over the head with it. Nolan is showing the story of a white nuclear family whose generosity and courtly kindness is abused by weak, selfish intruders of mixed origin. One of the worst suitors is a very-out-of-place and cruel as well as cowardly “diverse” African. They are there to take food, take welfare, harass the female waitstaff, and abuse the household pets.

Minus a couple of questions of casting or phrasing, this is also the movie Elon Musk and Matt Walsh would make. I don’t think Mel Gibson or Eggers would do much better either. It’s in the end a very plain Hollywood thriller with a ham-handed “moral” message compatible broadly with the desires of the conservative right. The casting choices everyone is complaining about aren’t motivated by anti-Greek or anti-white “woke” revisionism. They’re overtly a reimagining to buttress an aspiration common to the Anglosphere, present also in Starship Troopers, an imagining of virtuous Anglo liberal men leading a diverse tolerant union in struggle against global fascism. This was e.g., present in the work of Andrew Roberts on British colonialism in India and also existed in Victor Davis Hanson’s work, and was in this way the animating ethos of the Bush years. Left-liberals like Emily Wilson dislike this movie because in part they sense this is the thrust of Nolan’s intention. (While this isn’t my ideal, I don’t present this view merely to mock it myself: I think it could be a redemptive and aspirational view for America and its mission, and present already in Melville’s books as well as Calvinist sea-pirate self-conception. It requires more confidence, honesty and clarity than handwringers like Nolan can provide, though.)

The absurd and obsessive feminism of this film is not inconsistent with a broadly liberal-conservative political message. Much of the GOP world, whether the educated college Republicans in e.g. the Atlanta suburbs like Buckhead, or the social biomes especially of Evangelical and “trad” Catholic worlds out of which Erika Kirk or her Catholic analogues operate, are entirely run by bossy women who enforce a very strict feminism. I will not stop repeating that most men “on our side” who I personally know and whose careers have been destroyed or hurt, that this has all happened at the hands of such conservative women, and the social networks they control. One word from them, and careers, programs, etc., are blown up. Modern reactionary religious conservatism isn’t only compatible with feminism but largely dependent on a female-led world.

Nolan is obviously somehow in communion with his fellow Englishman “Sir” Ridley Scott, whose last two movies were conceived entirely as propaganda against “toxic masculinity.” I’ve never seen the kind of deranged effort Scott put into these productions entirely driven by resentment at the male presumption to want to be more than mere biology. (Some of this may not just be pure feminism, but a certain kind of literary and intellectual male’s impotent spite at the man of action.) Most scenes in Scott’s Napoleon and The Last Duel are about stupid male vanity…it was bizarre to see complicated historical sets that obviously took a lot of effort to make, then shown for mere seconds as the casual setting for Scott’s contempt and even bitterness at his main characters.

Every woman in Nolan’s Odyssey is complaining about her lot. “Circe scolds, Penelope scolds and feels slighted because she takes care of everything and is sickofitall, Athena condescends, Calypso is a behavioral psychologist. It’s a movie about women schooling those crazy brawling men” as my friend Yama Pain put it. The root of the breakdown of the International Order is shown by Nolan to be male desire, male vanity, male violence. Here as in the comically self-conscious dialogue and the clumsy references to historical and psychological texts (chiefly Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which Nolan possibly had an LLM summarize for his prep work), it’s a production where all the seams and springs are still showing.

It’s interesting to consider the immense effort that parts of the artistic-literary-media establishment are recently pushing into the controversy on all Greco-Roman things as well as their modern analogues. They hate Napoleon also as a representative of classical spirit and as example of a Classical Man…hence the bizarre fixation on him. But it is Napoleon who represented the higher hopes of so many of the great literary and artistic men of genius of the 19th Century. Napoleon as a man out of time who stands not even opposed to, but far beyond and above, the petty concerns and small-souled struggle between the bourgeois and the socialist, the traditionalist reactionary and the other reactionary going by the name of the leftist. Lurking in the background is this immense fear of the plain reading of Nietzsche, which was forbidden in media, press and academia for some decades—banning him was impossible, but a total distortion of him was promoted at every public-reaching level. The dispute here isn’t about the academic interpretation of one German philosopher though: the stakes are regarding a genuine secular, that is, real and objective, and intellectually energetic competitor to the liberals’ and left’s own system of values at its core. Something in particular that shows through image and example an entirely different and unusual mode of life.

A big part of the engagement and overturning of the values of liberalism and the left depends on the resuscitation of pre-Biblical Greek and Roman antiquity and lines of interpretation of these from the late 19th Century and 20th Century Europe that had been, again, for decades suppressed in both media and academia. I’ve had my own special contribution to this debate. I never tried to address a mass audience and am not known to most Americans...though also, I never tried to be. This was not especially out of elitism or snobbery, but because I started as a very small account and had no idea my book would be read by anyone but friends when I wrote it. And I never since tried to change my language or ideas or style to appeal to a mass audience. But I claim that the things I’ve written and concepts I’ve unintentionally injected into popular language are far more capable of seducing the types of intelligent people the liberal world depends on for its own self-replication than anything else now presented as an alternative. What is at issue is not temporary political-electoral overturnings, but what the next generation of writers of movies, books, music, etc., believe to be good. Both in revealing the prison-like character of our life and the limited ability of all other factions to address this, as well as in making again vivid an alternative that had been relentlessly smothered and distorted for at least 70 or 80 years or so, I think my book represents a potential for the seduction of their “children” because it goes, like the thinkers I admire, to the emotive and intellectual roots of the very meaning of the desire for freedom. It is for this and similar reasons that movies like Nolan’s and Scott’s and efforts like Mark Zuckerberg’s sister’s or Emily Wilson’s will continue to mount: a feeling among the various liberal and leftist establishments that they have lost the cosmic mandate to promise freedom and that in a revival of Greco-Roman antiquity lies spiritual mortal danger for them if left uncontained and undomesticated.

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I delay actual reviews for another week to give further thoughts on the corruption of hotel, restaurant and travel systems… and the new mass-luxury economy that is its own type of sheep-shearing.

This is a follow up to the introduction to this series you can read here,

On top of the general scam-call-center nature of the everyday economy in America since at least the 1990’s, there’s also the parallel phenomenon of a glut of new rich, flush with cash but not sense, who live to get rinsed by whores and whore-a-likes in the supposed luxury-purveyor sectors.

Since at least the year 2000 marketing to “the rich” has been a scam. Why is it possible in most of the world to rip off those who want to spend money or on occasion splurge? Tokyo is the world’s largest luxuries market. For a people with relatively good taste sharpened by centuries of obsessive attention to high crafts, good food since birth, and decades-long prosperity, frauding someone on a luxury-price-tier carries real costs there. Bad restaurants go out of business fast. Selling a false luxury product at premium-tier price makes Japanese outraged. At the least you’ll get flooded with bad reviews. And you might get a brutish old short-haired Japanese matron chimp at you…the Japanese can also act out in public. But anyway, you go out of business fast: the restaurant and hotel market there is brutally Darwinian for sorting price-quality relationship. This can be confirmed by various blind taste-test experiments. A friend took his visiting American parents to a charcoal-skewers robata-yaki-style restaurant and accidentally ordered a premium fish, the ayu. This is a much-prized seasonal river sweetfish, slightly bitter innards. And then while eating it he was surprised to find it was one of the best and most distinctive fish he’d ever had. Then he saw the bill…$40 for one small grilled fish. He had ordered it by mistake, but it paid off; similarly you can buy one of the $100-$200 melons or mangoes in the Shinjuku Isetan department store, sneak it in on guests without saying anything, and be assured they will appreciate as a perfect and distinctive fruit. In Japan even if a higher price will be a product that sometimes lets you down per personal tastes, it will always in some way be justified objectively. This is why Tokyo and very few other places in the world with similar traditions of good taste—Paris, still—is somewhere you can reliably splurge and not feel cheated. But in the rest of the world this isn’t usually true.

About the Gypsoid-rich for who the spending of money is the psychological ritual or display final aim, nothing can be done. I’ve known a few Balkanoid greasers and boasters who have very brutish manners and tastes indistinguishable from various Third World slum dwellers; such types are still found in civilized post-Europe. This is the type who married a neurologist wife and so came in to what he thought was “money”; then he brag about spending $3000 for a hotel room per night. There’s no helping such people. Andrew Tate caters to a large sector of mostly mystery-meat males who need to spend a lot of money on e.g., bottle service for $1000 vodka at the club out of insecurity or, at best, the practical but false belief it will get them puccy. Above these there are newly rich tech and cryptocurrency lottery winners and such who are truly wealthy, decamillionaires and up. Many of these may feel this same way or they may just not pay attention to price anymore at all…either way they then get grievously taken advantage of by variety of “luxury” product and service peddlers…they too finish by paying exhorbitant sums for Lady Gaga-edition gold-leaf cappuccino pudding in a Dubai mall cafe and feeling they’re now “ballers,” in the language of their people.

I don’t write to reach such people but the problem is that there are so many of them now and they’ve thrown around so much money that their creeping anti-taste, their stupidity and naivete have greatly distorted the rest of the economy, and now spills over to others. Entirely normal people who now want to splurge for a rare special occasion are at risk of getting caught up in the tow of one or the other of these fraudulent economic biomes. I am greatly disturbed by the possibility of a young couple going on their honeymoon, a husband or wife wishing to celebrate a special occasion for their spouse, a son wanting to treat his parents to a special vacation getting defrauded and ending up with bad memories.

Ideological manias cause other types of review distortions. In the United States the racial hysteria that’s been simmering for decades and had a recent outburst in the “woke” moments of 2020 has made booking a “five star” hotel especially risky. I’ve never tried staying at nice hotels in America myself but I’m told that most of the independent “grande dame” signature hotels like the Palmer in Chicago are entirely staffed now by aggressive and contemptuous sheboons who will make your stay miserable. I heard stories of incompetence from the Mandarin Oriental in Miami as well: bags lost and gangbanger-affect maitre’d doing the obsequious shuck-n-jive, “Imma do you good you hear, Imma find it for you, Imma offer you credits for afternoon drink in the bar knowmsayin, bottle service Chandon” and such. Google and other ratings sites are ideologically distorted here too: they will simply not allow negative reviews of “properties in underprivileged areas,” or hide them. I assume Conde Nast and similar travel and lifestyle magazines are also regularly lying now for ideological and sensitivity-ethics reasons, and that LLM’s are probably trained to do the same as well.

And again this all takes place at the same time that social media and influencers constantly promote images of enticing luxury, and while the big-brand luxury houses have become democratized and mass-produced. In the recent decade has been introduced the absurd idea of the big-brand as requirement of feeling a citizen: many girls are trained to think if you don’t have one of the big fashion names for clothes or sunglasses, that you must be a piker. The idea that a reader’s hard-earned vacation is ruined because they’re expected to stay and splurge at a five-star hotel, or their bitch girlfriend demands it…and they don’t know what they’re getting into…again, this upsets me…

Pedestrian corruption is the most frequent reason reviews are false. In some cities Google maps reviews of restaurants are relatively accurate in the sense that something with many votes of long-standing 4.6 and above will be quite good. But if you rely on these in, say, Paris you could have a bad meal every day of a brief stay there. There are many ways Google and other “crowdsourced” reviews can be frauded, but it’s without a doubt a big problem in Paris and also often in parts of Spain. These could be farmed out to a social media sweatshop in Manila, for example; it could also be the Sri Lankan owners or staff of many of these places getting their 300 cousins in Colombo to updoot, but I’ve had terrible meals especially in Paris when I went to restaurants with Google maps ratings even of 4.8 and 4.9. In Paris and most European cities, the Michelin guide is a requirement for good eating consistently, and they have a pretty good app now with locator and such. The problem is that outside of Europe Michelin is famously inaccurate and possibly corrupt (and this may be the case also in the periphery of Europe like in Athens). In a place like Rio de Janeiro there will be some good restaurants listed but also many bad ones that clearly paid the reviewer or are his friends (I will give reviews of restaurants in future posts). There was an old article or blog post from the 2000’s that made clear how much of a scam the Michelin guide is in Tokyo:

There are some very good restaurants listed on Michelin Tokyo, but also many others that are well below the quality of any average mom-and-pop izakaya drinking-snacks casual bar there.

In Tokyo Google maps reviews are also frequently wrong in both directions. I often use instead Tabelog, the local reviews site, which is much more accurate. I tried an old ramen restaurant that appeared well below a 4.0 on Google Maps but had a high rating on Tabelog. The Google maps number was obviously wrong…this place served excellent intense-flavor classic Tokyo ramen. I supposed the owners nuked their own ratings on the foreigner-preferred site to keep out non-Japanese. Regardless, the new casino rip-off internet extends the fake-ratings problem also in this other negative direction on matters far beyond hotels and restaurants: very recently for example the Oasis app specializes in apparently entirely fraudulent negative reviews of sometimes good brands, damaging the legitimate businesses of many probably hardworking and decent people:

In this case this is done for attention agitation. It’s also a way of gaming apps rankings on app stores through contrived controversy. This tactic is an extension of the broader “exposure” style of accusation that’s also at the bottom of conspirashit posting psychology. People get a pornographic rise out of slander of others and the feeling that they’ve been betrayed. The same psychology is behind the style common both to establishment “high human capital” media outlets and the new “dissident” media biome: both focus entirely on accusation, insinuations about their target’s personal life or associations, historical genealogies of words in question…a calm discussion of ideas and facts almost never enters into it. See the threads just linked regarding the “Oasis” app: it appears to be the same PR-style of sophistic and intemperate accusation, taken to product reviews…

The many corrupt financial and psychological incentives for bad reviews from both directions, and the subsequent worthlessness of all modern review systems—crowdsourced or professional—calls for a new publication. There is needed a genuine high quality review magazine with a few intrepid writers of developed good taste and a record of impeccable honesty. Until then I will try to provide in my own way this same kind of information in this travel & leisure series of the Magenta Notebooks.

“Rising world wealth” and the social-media aspiration environment that possibly also contributed to global falling birth rates are distorting luxury prices and opportunities from another direction. The big luxury houses have mostly themselves to blame for the present democratization and I think future collapse of their brands. The Hilfiger and Courvoisier phenomena will now be replayed globally as new Global South rich chase status allure and smear good things with airport terminal feels…but the big fashion names didn’t have to ramp up production to meet this demand. Even in cases where that’s not possible though, like for certain cigars and wines, I take this opportunity to wring my hands on a dystopian side effect of “rising global living standards.” In 2021 you could get certain Cohiba cigars for $20-$30 or so, but now because they’ve become a mandatory Chinese Instagram status statement, the minimum price is $70. Cohiba is still very good but in my opinion only a fool pays this much for a cigar. The Chinese have genuinely no taste for it and buy it only for social media display…they buy it by the caseload and have also bought out the Cohiba company itself from the Spanish (it’s now based in Hong Kong). They’ve similarly distorted the wine market. Burgundy can be great, but because of Chinese trend-seeking attention, all the winemakers in Burgundy are now insanely wealthy with production for the next 20 years already bought up at astronomical prices. I’m not a wine connoisseur myself, but those I know who are say the current price of a good Burgundy bottle is completely unreasonable and you can get a comparable product from e.g., Piedmont for much less. My favorite wines lately are Spanish dry sherries—oloroso, amontillado and palo cortado styles. You can find an ultra-aged bottle at $90-120 that is maybe equal in quality to certain French wines five or more times that value. My fear is the Chinese will “discover” these at some point. It’s a fear that now accompanies any good luxury product (I’m concerned about the price inflation, not the associations, although I imagine that for people who care about clothes that’s an important consideration). A friend told me an anecdote about a French billionaire who met a Chinese counterpart and talked to him about wines. The Chinese billionaire told him that he owned 4000 bottles of Cheval Blanc Bordeaux wine: this is by our time very much a “finance bro” bottle used at steakhouses to celebrate closing deals and such. The French billionaire asked, “Well that’s wonderful. That’s a great selection…you must have an amazing cellar…what other bottles do you have,” and the answer from the Chinese tycoon was that he had no other bottles, that he’s only ever drank Cheval Blanc. Nothing else but the best will cross his lips! I know that many nations that just come into wealth have newly rich who go through a “growth process” and refinement over a generation or two. I fear something else…something bad with no end is happening here. I fear that for the foreseeable future this is the fate of “luxury.”

Europe and Japan as the remaining ancient taste-developing and taste-making regions of the whole world are I think in a special danger if indeed the Chinese and Global South “upper middle classes” continue to grow. The dystopian effects of this are displayed in the Houellebecq book The Map and the Territory. The financial incentives to rest on these “ancient strengths” will only intensify. Europe then risks becoming an organic-biodynamic theme park for rich Arab, Russian, Chinese and other “high class” tourists who come to sample the cheeses of the various local terroirs, the aged hams and artisanal pates. European man can then be reduced to a high-class restaurateur and sommelier lovingly developing authentic traditional crafts and goods to connoisseur standards. Small-producing wine, champagne and even beer makers could regularly become multi-millionaires as a global “mass luxury” producing class. Europe itself will be an “authentic” open-air museum and wildlife preserve. Many cities would be reduced to modern Dubrovniks, museum-exhibition of “classical architecture” with armies of cruise ship olds flooding the streets at all times of the year; other smaller pristine, preserved “walkable cities” and state-of-the-art $40K-per-head truffle-hunting safari and the like will cater to higher-tier customers. In some ways Europe is such already, but there will be temptations to move further in this direction. This would be a terrible fate for that continent even if all permanent migrants were to leave. White nationalists, the new right, the American right, the left, and the religious could all easily come to agree on the reduction of Europe to such a reservation-province in the not too remote future.

The particular fixations of “dissident intellectuals” with their taste for tradition and classical beauty will I think have contributed to all this in a bad way. As my friend Mr. Star remarks, this all smells of late-Qing-dynasty pretensions to superiority over barbarians and the uncultured on account of your supposedly superior taste and attention to the fine differences between past ceramics, sensitivity to special seasonings, and aesthetic enjoyment of old lacquer designs or what. This kind of antiquarian affectation in a time of technological and cultural stagnation, where nothing new, exciting or great can be believed to take place, must be combatted in good old Futurist form, with a vitalist and confident barbarism. I’d rather all museums burned than live this way.

Coming next week, if I am in mood I will review some of the worst scam places I’ve been to recently, to show you in vivid image this problem of fake reviews and corrupt travel magazines.

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The United States is a sheep-shearing operation and one of the easiest ways to see the giant fraud is to look at hotel prices in other countries. This includes countries developed or not…or even just compare to the expectations of common sense. In 2015 or so you could get a very basic but decent room in central Madrid, a few blocks from the opera house, for about $30 per night. This was your own proper hotel room, with private bathroom, daily cleaning and so on, not a hostel, in one of Europe’s most pleasant cities. I’ve paid in the past even less for a room with private bathroom in a “pension” outside the central plazas of Lisbon. Around 2000-2005, you could get such a room for $5 a night. They had at the time a freaklike beggar with elephantiasis outside the Praca Figueira in the center, besides African idlers by the subway stations selling posters with a map of Angola. Prices are a bit higher now in the gentrified and happy Lisbon that’s a refuge for American tech and crypto professionals.

To be conservative you can say getting a room for under $100 a night in most of the world’s major top tier cities still is possible. You hear horror stories about Hong Kong, sometimes literally: a very successful Hong Kong movie, Dream Home of 2010, is a slasher tale about people literally killing for overpriced and rare private apartment space. You’d expect hotels to be insanely priced, but first time in Hong Kong I stayed in a big beautiful room in Wanchai, right in middle of a Blade Runner-hyperurban setting, with a great view of the mountains and skyline behind, for less than $90. And now on Hong Kong island itself, not Kowloon, you can still find Best Western or ibis genuine hotel rooms with private bathroom for less than $80 in very central locations as of spring 2026, decent size and with views. In Tokyo, supposedly the highest-price-per-square-foot city in the world, the first time I stayed in a central business district and paid about $65 for a small but perfectly reasonable, clean and modern room with good breakfast of various rice balls pickles roast fish soup and such. The Japanese-ultranationalist-owned APA chain is something I can high recommend for beginner travelers: clean, modern rooms in central locations, at times available for under $100 (for example in the decent Ueno neighborhood), and for only somewhat above $100 in very central areas like Roppongi. By contrast in 2015, which was the last time I spent any serious time in the United States, it was basically impossible to find anything for less than $100 on a January or February iced Tuesday night off the highways outside lovely New Haven, Connecticut. New Haven and Hartford are some of the premier “garden cities” of America, by which I mean it will give you autoimmune disease to live there from the stress of horrid Soviet post-industrial, “postracial” ugliness of the place. Any suggestion of finding a decent hotel to spend the night in a major city like New York for less than $100 registers as absurd to the average American because he’s a sucker used to being financially abused.

You are sometimes told that the reason medical expenses in the United States cost many times the same procedures in even highly developed foreign countries, for example in Japan or Spain, is because these latter are free-riding on American innovation in the pharmaceutical and medical industries. Thus supposedly the American has to pay a premium on MRI’s or blood tests because this extra money goes to careful Research & Development costs that are located in America solely and benefit the whole ungrateful world for free. Whether this explains why for example at-home nurse visits to draw blood for a routine exam are available to the upper middle classes in Europe and South America and Asia, but not at all in America, I don’t know. Maybe you can make that case. But I don’t understand the amazing American innovation expenses regarding everyday car rentals, which cost many times more in the United States over Europe; or the research-and-development angle on roadside possibly-bedbug-haunted motels run by the Patel family, that cost as much as a 4-star resort in parts of Japan…that justify fleecing the American consumer and making everyone there from the working class trucker to the recent-crypto-decamillionaire all into freiers. (Maybe it is the extra kilotonnage and horselike charm of the average American female today, average weight 170 lbs and BMI 29 including at ages below 30, that plays to male desires for more stuff and triggers in ambience such elevated cross-industry premium prices.)

A hotel as a mere place to spend the night is to me unreasonable over $40 or $50…even that seems somewhat too much if you think about it. I’ve often felt cheated on road trips where I had to blow $50 for a stay in beige-feel hotels when I had to pull in nondescript rustbelt-style South American or East European town only because night was coming. As a long time traveler I have contempt for the Neo-hippie types who spend their money in hostels smelling each other. At times I’ve visited hostels myself especially if I lived a long time on my own in a new city. Sometimes it gets lonely not speaking English in person…and I would just go to a hostel to get a drink and talk to people, tell them stories about hidden messages in phonebooks and so on, and then be asked to leave under suspicion of schizophrenia. But aside from this use, hostels are to be avoided as a scam of their own. Above all I can’t take the stink of other disgusting ape huemans…and to be made to share a room where sleeping you have to smell their dirty socks or hear them snoring; I’d rather take my chances sleeping on a park bench or the beach. At times driven by a righteous fury, I’ve composed, in ornate and official Spanish, letters to the Mexican and Colombian heads of the federal and civil police forces, begging them to shut down the hostels as affronts to taste, public hygiene, and political security.

But consider the cost of it; you can rarely get a hostel for anything less than $15 per day or usually $25 per day almost anywhere you go now, and it’s been like this for some time. For almost this price per day you can rent a cheap car, or in certain countries you can buy a used but working old car for mere hundreds of dollars. There’s also the cost of gas of course, but you can use such cheap car to drive around the hinterlands and countryside, and reach towns where tourists don’t normally go…this is by far the superior way to see a country. In Brazil in the early 2000’s you could drive to the interior where they had never seen an American; as a 22-year-old a carnal bonanza and celebration awaited you wherever you entered, besides enjoyable talks and parties with locals. You can also sleep in this car at times and avoid spending any money on “hotels.” With a cheap mosquito net in the summer or temperate weather, you hang that by the open window and can use the car to rest. I’ve had friends who did this even in dangerous countries like Zimbabwe…he slept in the parking lot of a casino in Harare. Sometimes you pay a bribe to the guard or a roadside cop. But hostels now are often filled with mystery meats and not always hot young Americans or Europeans. Then, outraged by the costs of hotels in the United States and unwilling to pay $100 for a night at a Gujarati-owned dump motel in apocalyptic Connecticut, I did this over there too, at times I slept in my car in gas station rest stops. But I had bad nightmares and was afraid.

You must realize in all that follows in this review series that unless you’re talking about taking measures like sleeping in your car or on the beach or such, if you do enter the normalfag “hotel market,” you can get cheated at $150-200 per night more than at $800-1000/night. There are, as I will show in time, certain hotels especially in Asia where you won’t feel cheated at $500-800 per night…and if you appreciate location as a theatrical display, you’ll maybe have a signature experience you’ll always remember…

My first times at really nice hotels in Asia finally changed my mind on this: a week at the Ritz in Nikko, ten days in the Upper House and a week in the original Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong made me realize these are not just places to sleep a night…they’re without exaggeration immersive crafts and architecture experiences. For something like the Upper House in particular, or anything by the designer Andre Fu, there’s something in the actual physical energy of the place that doesn’t fully come out in photos. Upper House looks very nice in pictures, but it comes off somewhat generic, even “corporate”;

Upper House HK bathroom harbor view; my own photo

I stayed there on the very high recommendation of a friend I trusted and I wasn’t let down. In person it’s something else, it does feel magical, and it’s worth the $500-$1000 per night you’ll spend on the room. I’ll give a much more detailed review of these places later.

As a “Ghana-rich” idler with a show that makes me a lot of cash, no responsibilities, and a life of constant travel, I get to enjoy luxury airlines, restaurants, and hotels at will and so nothing much is lost if I stay gamble on a bad place once in a while. But even for a very wealthy man with a demanding job who takes his family maybe once or twice a year and wants a memorable time, a fraudulent review can turn into a wretched and dark thing, a missed opportunity, a spoiled year and time that’s forever gone—there should be grounds for lawsuits for such fraud.

This series of my Magenta Notebooks will cover hotels, restaurants and airlines as they occur to me from my past and present travels, with no specific order but only what I feel about writing on that day. The select audience I have, I got and kept from always telling the truth as I see it. In a time of proliferating fake luxury and fake and corrupt review sites, I hope to do a service for my readers and also those who are just searching properties or restaurants on Google or LLM and find these notes…let this be an aide to save you from bad decisions, or better, to help make good ones.

For me this means a location or hotel that excites you in a physical and direct way and makes your chest pound. I’m talking about places that, absent any freak accidents, will consistently deliver not just a good time but a near-magical experience that will linger for the year—such places are found almost only in Asia for a few reasons. Consider the famous hotel featured in Lost in Translation, where it plays as big a role in the setting of that movie as the city Tokyo itself, and for good reason. The recent renovation of the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku, Tokyo was undertaken as per Asian standards, where a five star is expected to go through a renewal at least once every twenty years. In this case the renovation was completed I think in December of 2025. Almost all the hotels I’ll recommend in this series are going to be in Asia. I haven’t tried hotels of this type in the United States, and I hear mostly bad things, but in Europe and South America it’s mostly not worth it. (There are notable exceptions, and in time I’ll review all that I’ve found). But even Europe’s “signature historical hotels” like the Hassler in Rome, where Prince Charles stays, or the Hotel Kamp in Helsinki…the most one could say about such places is “it’s a nice hotel,” but nearly all lack the absorbing magic of the new Asian palaces. In the case of the Kamp, which is legendary among Finns worldwide, it barely compares to a decent four-star hotel in Tokyo. There’s almost no relationship between a stay at the Aman in Tokyo or Kyoto and the extremely famous and overhyped Hotel George V in Paris…you stay at the latter only to say you stay there or to show on Instagram as a Chinese-style “status” luxury consumption marker. In Europe you will pay at least twice as much as in any Asian city, for a smaller room, annoying “official” and insincere displays of hospitality, and more important…for no feeling of enchantment. Again, from what I hear it’s even worse in the United States.

The basis for this feeling of genuine enchantment with a building isn’t necessarily so otherworldly—it starts, for example, with the use of very high-quality materials. Consistency on this changes the feel entirely. Hotels like the Capella in Singapore, the Raffles in Bali, the Kyoto and Tokyo Aman, etc., the Upper House and Mandarin Orientals in Hong Kong, have paid attention to the details of everything from the guardrails, the lamp fixtures, the curtains: everything is meticulously obsessed over to be (or at least to appear to be) only of the highest quality…the kinds of tropical wood that are used, the way these woods are treated and cured before use, and so on. Big-name and especially “historical” hotels in cities around the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Rome, Paris, Madrid, Simferopol, or wherever will coast on their reputation and their supposed sense of grandness, and try to impress with scale, but you will be very let down…something will irritate you, slowly, unconsciously and build up; then you look closer and you see why…they used cheap, light materials for the metals, aluminum even… the upholstery on the furniture looks like it’s from a government social security office, the carpets are bleak, sanatorium-feel and worn out in some places, and so on. This is true both for new modern-looking hotels and for “classical” design places that try to appeal to traditional tastes. A lot of the reason people have bad associations with “modern” architecture is merely that “recent construction” uses cheap materials whereas older buildings that have lasted were built with the best available at the time. But it’s very possible to build “classical” traditional buildings with second-rate ingredients, and then the fraud feels even more painful. A lot of the best “modern” architecture is in any case merely slight variation on Japanese aesthetics or principles…but this style only does well with the use of the highest quality matter. I will have occasion to comment in detail in the future on distinctions between hotels on this point.

A huge problem of all review sites and established magazines is the unjust lack of consistency that leads them to award equal praise to hotels vastly different in quality only because they think they have to find the supposedly good places in every location. So a once-in-a-lifetime memorable stay like at the Upper House in Hong Kong (at least as of a few years ago) gets the same types of words as a merely passable comfortable business hotel in Lisbon or a mediocre outworn wreck in e.g., Argentina falsely presented as an “art hotel.” The vast majority of “nice” hotels are just not worth it, but magazines like Fodor’s, Conde Nast and many other similar will obfuscate on this, whether out of democratic ideological convictions or just the need to serve perceived customer demand for “information”; or maybe basic corruption. The same is true for their restaurant ratings. Michelin was supposed to avoid this by simply refusing to rate cities that aren’t up to a consistent standard, but that time is long gone…a Michelin plate, or star or smiley face or whatever will just not mean the same thing in Paris as in Tokyo or Buenos Aires. The uselessness of these ratings systems has then called me to step in and assume responsibility!

My favorite hotels are the following: Capella and Raffles in Singapore, the Ritz in Nikko, Japan, the Mandarin Oriental and Upper House in Hong Kong, Raffles in Bali, Waldorf Astoria in Osaka, the now-closed Sinner Hotel in Paris; Casa di Langa in Piedmont gets a special mention for now. In time I will review all of these and more, but I can recommend them without any hesitations and almost promise that you’ll have a special time at any of them. In Tokyo, though I haven’t stayed there myself, I’ve visited friends staying and I can highly recommend also the Aman and Park Hyatt Shinjuku. A stay or even a visit for afternoon tea (famous at the Aman among elite Japanese ladies) to one of these palaces equals or exceeds a visit to a major well-known temple in Tokyo; at their best, the modern top hotels are immersive aesthetic experiences minus the “cultural outing” pretense and the obnoxious tourists on their enrichment hour.

Reviews to follow shortly…

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