Questions for Our Time

I’ll have more of these, and there is some tangential discussion below, but these are the first few that come to mind. With the possible exception of the final one, they aren’t likely to be pursued by either the legacy media or red/blue partisans.

I. Did Illegals Elect Trump?

To be clear, I mean Latin American ones, especially the men. As I’ve had occasion to note before, the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world puts essentially the entire Western Hemisphere in the self-expression/traditional values quadrant. Attitudinally, Mexico is closer to the US than Denmark.

Actual statistics are necessarily difficult to gather, to put it mildly. The official Hispanic population is somewhere north (heh) of 60 million. I’m going to treat this as a Fermi problem and extrapolate a very rough number for illegals in the US from everywhere in the world as 20 million. Plenty of people think it’s more than that. The popular vote margin last November was 2.3 million, so my idea looks pretty feasible.

Our Byzantine immigration system—with apologies to the shades of hard-working Byzantine bureaucrats who did the jobs untutored barbarians wouldn’t do—massively incentivizes, or rather creates selection pressures on, immigrants to fall into two categories: box-checkers and gamblers. The box-checkers spend 7–15 years and tens of thousands of dollars plowing through the legal process (which means they’re a lot more likely to be socialists, but I digress). The gamblers … don’t. They spend their energies networking and, where needed, staying out of sight (and are likely to be far more entrepreneurial). We are, after all, talking about people willing to walk through the Darien Gap.

I’d say that extrapolating the voting patterns of each group is left as an exercise to the reader, but it’s not much of an exercise. Alert readers will also perceive my implicit assumption that voter IDs are being faked in sufficient numbers. But speaking of incentives, the fake ID industry has plenty, and it’s an easy guess that if all else fails, the cárteles can provide the necessary services.

By the way, there are probably close to a million illegals from the British Isles in the US, mostly in the Northeast; the estimate in the mid-’80s was half a million, our total population has risen by nearly 50% since then, and reasons to flee the UK have multiplied. They might be less reliable Trump voters, but a few years—or decades—of lying low could correlate with a certain friendliness toward the man.

Not to overlook the obvious, very few of these people, whether they’re from London, Lima, Lucknow, or Lanzhou, are actually going to be deported, and they know it. My Bayesian prior is a few hundred thousand; one or two percent. The gamblers will get their payoff.

More generally, red/blue attempts at categorizing either Trump or his supporters are pathetic nonsense. Trump appointed, or in some cases attempted to appoint, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Matt Gaetz, RFK Jr, David Weldon, and Paula White-Cain. Then there are the tariffs, although admittedly those seem to be mostly bombast. His supporters (in Missouri; check your own state for local results) have, within the past six and a half years, voted to increase in the minimum wage—twice—repealed right to work, and re-legalized abortion. Net-net, a solid one-third of them are neither fiscally nor socially conservative, enough to throw any referendum on such issues to the left. And make no mistake: these are people who wouldn’t have bothered to vote if Trump weren’t on the scene; they’re energized by him. A big tent, indeed.

As with many things in American life, the relevant distinction isn’t silly Democratic vs Republican categories, it’s Arnade’s front-row/back-row—and illegals are as back-row as it gets. Back-row voters don’t bat an eye at voting themselves a slice of other people’s money, have no particular sympathy for the managerial class, and are much more likely to have known—or been—women with unplanned pregnancies. I knew Trump was going to win in ’16 in June of that year when I saw a man who looked like he could have stepped out of a Snuffy Smith cartoon putting a hand-lettered Trump sign in front of his house in a marginal neighborhood in KCK. I knew Trump was going to win in ’24 when an IBEW lineman looking at the power line in my back yard showed up wearing a hardhat with a FUCK JOE BIDEN sticker. That was in August … of ’23.

II. Are Hispanics Anti-Vax?

KDHE: 10 Kansas residents – all under age 18 – confirmed positive for measles screams the headline, with the inevitable helpful sub-hed All cases involved unvaccinated individuals.

Grazing (Midwesterners don’t surf) over to city-data dot com, I find that the relevant locales, Grant, Morton, and Stevens counties in the southwestern corner of the state, have a combined population of 15,100 … and are collectively 44% Hispanic; compare the statewide average of 13%. The inference is obvious, and the legacy media won’t draw it.

This is where I remind everyone that the incubation period of measles is less than two weeks, and the official version of reality under the new Administration is that the borders are closed and illegal immigration screeched to a halt two months ago (the numbers being bragged about actually purport to show a 50% drop last year and the other 50% happening in January). This rather strongly suggests some combination of official lying—it’s a lot easier to just declare victory and withdraw, after all—and, I hypothesize, “vaccine hesitancy” in a population that is neither crazy liberal New Agers nor supposedly ultraconservative science deniers.

Welcome to 2025. Opposition to vaccines is contemptible nonsense. Mainstream attempts to categorize illegals’ political attitudes are, as noted above, wretched failures. It is entirely likely that general back-row-ness and disinclination to interact with the authorities combines to produce, incidentally but quite effectively, low rates of vaccine take-up in certain populations. No one should be surprised, much less offended, by this. Which means that the usual suspects will be in high dudgeon, that is, OMG ILLEGALS vs OMG SCIENCE DENIERS.

Fortunately, I don’t care. What matters is, believe it or not, the real-world consequences. The R₀ value for measles is ~15 and may be as high as 18, meaning that herd immunity requires 95% vaccination rates (1 – 1/R₀). Assume 20% of the population of southwest Kansas, which I’ll define as literally the southwestern quarter of the state, isn’t immune; that works out to 40,000 potential cases. If the caseload grew by 4x every two weeks, we could go from the existing 10 to something that would swamp the medical system in that part of the state in a couple of months. That would mean lots of second-order deaths of people who couldn’t get treatment for completely unrelated ailments and injuries.

I don’t think this is going to happen, though, because there are obvious mitigating factors. Public-health messaging will induce some of the vulnerable population to get immunized. And the number of sunshine hours in that area will increase from ~200 in March to ~300 in May. UV-B is a good antiviral, and people’s natural vitamin D production, and thereby their immune system function, will go up along with it.

I also don’t think the legacy media is going to report on anything I just said, with the possible exception of a worst-case projection as part of their usual quest to keep eyeballs on screens, and in particular will say nothing about grappling with the very real problem of influencing people who don’t want to be noticed … and are good at not getting caught.

III. Will 2025 Have a “Long Hot Summer”?

This may be what markets are predicting; after a phenomenal runup from late October of ’23 to early December of last year, the Wilshire 5000 has been flat or down for three and a half months. As I write this, it is off 8% in nominal dollars, and 9% in constant dollars.

Financial “journalism” invariably reports markets as being reactive, when they are far more predictive, much like a barometer. Probably the greatest wet-streets-cause-rain journalistic/historical malpractice of the 20th century was the meme, relentlessly propagated in the public schools during the Boomers’ childhood, that the stock market crash of 1929 did not signal, but actually started, the Great Depression.

So what’s this wobble predicting? The much-hyped tariffs seem to be mostly threats—possibly negotiation tactics, but with Trump, who knows. I again have a hypothesis, that social-media-enabled flash mobs may become a serious problem as the weather warms up.

Many people want there to be trouble. I’ve noted before that resentment is the strongest force in American politics, and we have an abundance of sore losers. We now have the technology for the sore losers to organize and throw collective temper tantrums on very short notice. There has already been an arson attack on a very political target less than two miles from my house (no prizes for guessing what it was).

We’re also living in a world where at least one ongoing conflict has used hundreds of thousands of drones in destructive and often lethal attacks. The overlap between 1) people with the technical ability to modify a drone in some exceedingly unpleasant way and 2) people who imagine themselves to be fighting Nazis 80 years after the Nazi defeat, and on a different continent, is probably at least a million.

Here I reiterate my earlier prediction that civic holidays will be massively politicized: how, and even whether, someone observes Memorial Day, Flag Day, and Independence Day will be a very public marker of their allegiances. And the Semiquincentennial (wow, what a clunky term) in ’26 may be a doozy.

What I’m really predicting, though, is adaptation. What does a defense against a drone carrying (say) a Roman candle aimed at dry vegetation or wood siding look like? We’re going to find out … and how does finding the drone pilot, or more likely the drone launcher given the availability of AI terminal guidance, work? Interesting opportunities lie ahead.