Sam Melia is a 34-year-old (actual) Briton who was just sentenced to two years in prison because the political demand for racism wasn’t matching the supply.
Oh, don’t get this wrong. There is plenty of racism in the world. Have you ever listened to East Asians talk about each other? And I’m unlikely to forget Israelis salivating over levelling Gaza (neither can I forget the “river to the seas” chant).
But “the world” isn’t important to politics in places like the UK or New Zealand. Helping Koreans think better about the Japanese is worthwhile, but it doesn’t generate a power dividend in Whitehall or Wellington. Any elite worth their salt wants an ROI.
When it comes to investments, racism is a safe bet for gaining extra power. If racism were a stock, it would be “trading sideways,” as investors say, since it never seems to drop in value to zero or fly to the moon, but instead rises and falls with different product releases. If you can manipulate those waves to your advantage, there’s plenty of political capital to be minted.
The thing about racism, though, is that not all racism is equal. Some racism is more valuable. Indeed, the difference between a competent and an incompetent politician is whether they can tell if the shiny lump of racism lying on the ground is fool’s gold or real gold.
Sam Melia is real gold. He had everything you’d want from an entirely impotent political enemy. According to the judge, Melia was jailed for “intending” to incite racial hatred by spreading printable stickers on a social network (Telegram). His stickers said things like “It’s OK to be white,” “Reject white guilt” and “Stop Asian Anti-White Rape Gangs.” He even had a few about Jews, just to cover the bases.
It’s almost like Sam Melia was a caricature invented by scheming interest groups to help boost a narrative that “white” racists are everywhere (someone should check that he wasn’t a plant). A savvy politician can use Melia like a butcher uses a chicken: every part has a value. His story can feed lobbying efforts, raise more funds, funnel advertising spending and even provide fresh data for university ‘ethnic studies’.
On the other hand, the racism showed by the “Asian” rape gangs mentioned by Melia (“Asian” in Britain is a codeword for people from India or Pakistan) is fool’s gold for politicians. Although the rapists said they targeted “white” British girls in assaults that went on for a decade, destroying the lives of thousands of these girls, there was no political capital in that racism.
The political maths just didn’t make sense for the power-hungry. Solving the racism of Pakistani men towards British girls would generate no power dividend, so it wasn’t worth the investment. In fact, even mentioning those rapes risked a politician being labelled as the “bad” kind of racist – the one that hurts a career.
What you need as a politician is the “good” kind of racism. The sweet spot is when you get to be racist while also appearing to fix racism. Turning a blind eye to Pakistani rape gangs while throwing the book at a “white” Briton who mentions those gangs is exactly that sweet spot.
Think about it. Taking this angle means a politician gets to say that Pakistanis can’t be held to high standards of behaviour because, well, not much more is expected of them other than rape. Meanwhile, that same politician can claim that Melia should be held to higher standards because “white” Britons are better than Pakistanis.
Yup, that’s how the racism maths works out. Everyone who decries Melia but ignores systemic “Asian” rape gangs is being deeply, deeply racist. That’s how double standards work. It blows my mind how racist some people can be and still get invited to the cool parties.
But this kind of racism is allowed today because the political winds are blowing in one direction: against Melia and people who look like him. If you’re a politician, you’d be smart to get on board with this. If you’re a normal person who thinks all racism should be treated with contempt, you’re probably not cut out for political success. Sorry.
Fighting “racism” and supporting “minorities” has been a surefire path to power in every society across history. In Ancient Rome, only members of the patrician class could hold power. A patrician was someone who could trace their lineage to the founders of Rome. Over time, the gates of power opened to people outside the patrician class and the patricians blamed the fall of Rome on the dilution of their racial leadership qualities.
Even in the British Raj (India), the system for power was that an Englishman would always occupy the executive position, but the bureaucracy could be full of Indians. To this day, the British still claim that the Raj fell apart once Indians took on more executive authority and English officials lost confidence in themselves.
Getting on the right side of racism is crucial. But you don’t need to become non-racist. The trick is to be anti-racist, which requires that your racism focuses on the approved target of the day.
For example, Americans used to hate Polish people. Everyone joked about how stupid they were. But does anyone remember why they were supposed to hate the Polacks? Why were the Poles the accepted target of racism at that time? Cui bono, maybe?
Different people groups are always used by elites as sticks to bludgeon other elites in the never-ending game of politics. This follows the logic that the basis of all power is relationships, not money or even swords. And the ultimate form of relationship is that between patron and client.
Ethnic minorities make for ideal clients, for the same reason that the Ottoman Janissaries selected and reared mainly Christian boys. Children of the powerless classes have no reason to defect from the regime. They will be your most loyal warriors. This is why, if you’re young, smart and “Asian” in the UK today, your ticket in life is written. For people like Sam Melia? Not so much.
The patron/client phenomenon is most visible in universities that offer “ethnic studies”, which are the heart of the university power system. Universities are no longer institutions of scholarship. They are revolutionary seminaries. Their product is cadre. Of course, you can still get a good education in science or engineering, but it is nearly impossible to escape indoctrination. Racial “struggle sessions”, for example, are just part of the freshman experience.
The best thing about racism is that it doesn’t even have to exist for it to be politically useful. Indeed, grabbing Sam Melia and tweaking the studio lights to make him look like a scary old Bigfoot works much better if no one has seen a giant cryptid in the wild. They hear about racist monsters all the time, and while posting stickers on lampposts doesn’t sound all that scary, they must be lurking out there…somewhere. And politicians are here to save you!
This chicanery is obvious once you know what to look for. Racism is like the phlogiston theory of chemical science. The theory said that all materials were phlogisticated and that upon ignition, a process of dephlogistication occurred which released all the stored phlogiston. When all the phlogiston was gone, the material stopped burning. The theory was perfectly circular but it made zero predictions and couldn’t be falsified.
Racism is also perfectly circular, makes no predictions and can only be identified after the fact. No one ever offers an exact mechanism for racism. All they can muster is vague abstractions. A human brain has receptors for serotonin and dopamine, but no one can show where the racism is stored, or how it accumulates over centuries and prevents you from performing well in school.
We’re told there are no racial differences between people, so if some groups don’t perform like others, no matter how many policies are created, then that only proves how subtle and pervasive racism is. “Where there is disparity, there is racism” is an inversion of scientific epistemology. It is a tautology. Where a substance is burning, there is phlogiston. Where a black person gets a bad score on an IQ test, there is racism.
But racism is so insidious that it demands rectification. Someone should fix it!
Only the power caste would say such idiotic things. A simple definition of this caste can be seen in the Russell Rule (originally noted by Freda Utley about Bertrand Russell): the ruling caste are the people who say “we” when they mean “the government”. The ruled castes always say “they”.
The power caste loves to talk about fixing problems like racism because, like all two-legged apes, they like power. Power is inseparable from responsibility: you gain power by demonstrating to others that you are sincerely concerned about solving problems. No problems, no power. Patrons are always deeply sincere about their clients, but don’t let their empathy trick you.
Natural selection tends to favour solutions which not only are ineffective but actually iatrogenic. In other words, the solution causes the problem. A good example is packing multiple people groups with wildly different cultures into small areas and then offering some of them money while blocking the others from complaining. What looks like a solution to racism only ever increases the racism, which was always the goal.
Sam Melia’s big mistake was to think the British Government represented him because he is British. He thought he didn’t need a network of powerful friends and advocacy groups. But the 1990s are never coming back. It’s all client-patron politics from now on, for at least the next two hundred years. Get used to it.
And yes, this applies to New Zealand as well. Don’t be like Sam Melia. Prepare for the future by knowing how things really work and your family might survive until the racism pendulum swings in your direction again. As it must, and as it will.