Gangsters and Goodthinkers: Musings on Mafia Malfeasance and the Locked-In Left

Genes for suicide. That seems like a ridiculous notion. But the evolutionary mathematics can work perfectly. In The Selfish Gene (1976), his magisterial introduction to evolutionary theory, Richard Dawkins considers a nest of baby birds that all carry hypothetical suicide-genes. If one of the babies is a runt and going to die anyway, it’s harming its siblings by taking food that would benefit them but that doesn’t, in the end, benefit itself. If the suicide-genes are triggered by struggle and the runt simply gives up and dies, then one copy of the genes is lost but more copies will survive in the siblings. Without the extra food, some of them might have died too or reproduced less well as adults. If more suicide-genes survive on average than are lost, then that ridiculous notion turns out to be disturbingly sensible. You can have genes for suicide.

Killed by cancellation

And what about worker-bees that die as they sting in defence of the queen-bee? It’s only the queen that reproduces, not the workers, so no suicide-genes are lost at all when a worker sacrifices herself for the good of the hive. Now, these suicide-genes will obviously be active in the brain. In the brains of birds and bees, that is. But what about human brains? Could we have suicide-genes too? In a general sense, we must have. Rates of suicide vary widely by race and must be under some genetic influence. Whites commit suicide more often than Blacks, for example, which is interesting when you consider that Whites evolved in a harsher environment than Blacks. When resources are scarcer, suicide can benefit siblings more. Perhaps that’s part of why Whites are more prone to suicide. But triggers for suicide will obviously be different in humans than in birds and bees. A nestling runt doesn’t give up and starve to death out of shame or despair.

But shame and despair certainly explain why a young human jumped off a bridge and drowned himself in January 2024. As widely reported in the mainstream media, he was a 20-year-old White called Alexander Rogers and a popular student at Oxford University. But his popularity disappeared after a sexual encounter went wrong and his female partner began complaining that she’d felt “uncomfortable.” Having been shamed and ostracized by his circle of friends, Rogers saw no way out but suicide. The right-wing side of the mainstream are condemning his death as an egregious example of “cancel culture.” And rightly so. But they aren’t discussing the possible evolutionary aspects of the case or pointing out that cancel culture is egregious in more ways than one. After all, the word egregious literally means “out-of-the-herd” and cancellation entails being ejected from the herd.

Alexander Rogers

The Mafia is for life

Alexander Rogers was ejected from his herd and killed himself as a result. But will a tragedy like that make leftists re-think cancel culture? On the contrary, it may make them think that cancel culture is working just as intended. By killing himself, Alexander Rogers has provided a grim memento mori for possible dissidents and badthinkers: “Stay in line or else.” His transgression was sexual, but cancel culture is mainly designed to police thoughts and opinions. And the goodthinkers who cancelled Alexander Rogers remind me of the gangsters who executed Paulie Gatto.

Two kinds of gangsterism: Das Kapital by Karl Marx and The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Gatto is a character in The Godfather, the book of 1969 and film of 1972 about the Sicilian Mafia in America. He betrays Vito Corleone, the titular Godfather, so he’s shot in the head by another gangster. Before that, Gatto’s immediate boss Peter Clemenza ponders how best to carry out the execution. It has to be done just right, although Clemenza knows that Gatto “was locked in, he could not run away” (chapter 6). That’s what happens to members of the Mafia: they’re enmeshed in the organization, supported by fellow gangsters but also under constant surveillance by them. When Paulie Gatto transgresses, he can’t run away. Nor could Alexander Rogers when he transgressed at Oxford, which is why I think that leftists are also “locked in.” When you’re surrounded by leftists, you’re under constant surveillance and under constant threat of cancellation. I don’t like the sleazy Semitic sex-pest Nick Cohen, a prominent journalist on the British left, but he provided an excellent summary of leftist thought-policing — and self-policing — in one of his books:

Outsiders don’t understand the enfeebling self-consciousness of political debate on the middle-class liberal-left: they can’t imagine the thoughts strangled and tongues bitten to avoid giving the smallest offence to audiences overanxious to find it. The director of a prison reform charity once told me that he struck all metaphors and similes from his speeches. Even if it was a bland cliché of “the government is like a rabbit caught in the headlights” type, he knew half his listeners would stop listening to him for thirty seconds while they double-checked that he had not unintentionally insulted a disadvantaged or ill-favoured group. (What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, Nick Cohen, Fourth Estate, London, ch. 12, pg. 337)

And that’s just about inadvertent error. What about deliberate badthink? As Kevin MacDonald has described, Whites are unique in the way they form moral communities based on abstract notions of right and wrong, rather than the concrete notions of “What’s best for the Tribe?” that apply among Jews and other races. In the moral community of leftists, you have to be a goodthinker, someone who holds exactly the right opinions and says exactly the right things. Suppose that the Oxford student Alexander Rogers had expressed a liking for Donald Trump or asked whether Muslim immigration had been wholly beneficial for White working-class girls in Rotherham (and lots of other places).

Helping Joe, harming Kamala

If he’d said things like that, he would have been ejected from the herd just as surely as he was for making his sexual partner “uncomfortable.” Leftism is a kind of ideological mafia, “locking in” millions of minds and ensuring that there is no free speech and no free enquiry in leftist bastions like university and government bureaucracy. Leftists also do their best to shame and coerce their non-leftist friends and relatives into compliance with leftism. Would evil, fascist, racist, White Trump have beaten beautiful, intelligence, super-accomplished Black Kamala if the ballot hadn’t been secret? And would Trump have beaten Kamala without the support of X and other internet media? Leftism doesn’t just lock its adherents in: it also tries to lock down dissent. And it did so with great success when it censored the toxic tale of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.

Sleazy Joe might well have lost that election if Elon Musk had owned X back then. But it looks as though all that leftist censorship was for the best. If Trump had begun his second term in 2021, he wouldn’t have followed an agenda as radical as the one he seems about to follow in 2025. After all, he wasn’t promising mass deportations in 2020. He wouldn’t have had Elon Musk as his consigliere either. By helping Biden back then, the left may have hamstrung itself now. If birds and bees have genes for suicide, then leftism has a genius for self-owning. As King Théoden says in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “Oft evil will shall evil mar.”