Christopher Brunet is wrong about Romania: here's why that's a problem
Don't hate me Chris! I'm a free subscriber!
This poast is a premature diversion from the speculative, ethological/evo-psych oriented brief I set myself here. Yet I thought it worth responding now, while it’s still fairly fresh, to Christopher Brunet’s article in The American Conservative, titled ‘Romania Is Quietly Doing Great’.
My primary aim here is to explain why Mr Brunet is wrong and whY ThAt’s A PRoBLeM. I also intend to use this (I hope measured and constructive) critique as a scene-setter to give readers some background on the Material Conditions of Life in Romania.
Before going any further I want to point out that Mr Brunet does capital work exposing fraud in the American academy. His activities dwarf in reach and significance the petty intra-European ethnic animosity I attempt hatefully to propagate in this little known substack.
Even so, there is something to be said for sticking to one’s metier. Mr Brunet spent a month in Bucharest and on this basis concluded that Romania is in rude economic and social health, though he is evidently less sanguine about the latter than the former.
He is mistaken—but how?
Expressed briefly, I see three main errors in Mr Brunet’s article (I will just call him Chris from now on, because calling him ‘Mr Brunet’ reeks of New York Times-y, red-diaper baby, Shtetl-to-Ellis Island-to-Garment District-to-Upper East Side politeness overcorrection; pliz read John Murray Cuddihy).
The first error derives from his tacitly materialist-progressive priors; he leans heavily on the line-goes-up school of thought. The second, related to the first, lies in the inherent limitations of the material he presents to support his impression of Romania’s alleged prosperity. The third error probably results from confirmation bias: his desire, rather at odds with his materialist premises, to see Romania as ‘based’. I will deal with all of these errors in slightly scattered fashion and in due course.
There is a yearning among right-leaning Americans (Chris is Canadian but what’s the difference) for illiberal Eastern Europe: It’s backward! They’re Orthodox! Putin 5-D chess! Orban’s Hungary (not Orthodox)! All hope lies in the (also not Orthodox) Poles!
Case in point:
[Bucharest’s] hedonistic façade coexists bizarrely with an abundance of witches, tarot card readers, and fortune tellers.
…
While 96.5 percent of Romanians believe in God and 84.4 percent believe in saints, an astonishing 60 percent also read their horoscope, even though canon law of the Orthodox Church forbids astrology. In 2011, lawmakers backed down from legislation to tax witches out of fears that they would be cursed.
Dracula walks the streets at night, luring delectable mystery-meat camgirls to occult trysts in vibrant nightspots where cocktails made of human blood are served for a dollar a piece.
(No no I made that last sentence up)
But anyway…
I have never once seen witches, tarot card readers or fortune tellers in Bucharest. All the same, I don’t mean to suggest that, apart from these harmless misapprehensions, Chris has his facts wrong…exactly. He rightly acknowledges realities that would have been obvious during a month-long visit to Bucharest in the company of the informants at his disposal: Line Is Going Up; Romania has received huge amounts of EU funding; there is an abundance of new construction in the city; the downtown area is still overwhelmingly white.
The problem with the facts Chris invokes is that they are severely limited in their geographical and temporal range. He does not recognise longitudinal patterns that are only fully apparent away from the very centre of the national capital. Facts of this kind are crucial to a proper consideration even of Romania’s quantitatively measurable material prosperity—and still more to the quality of life Romanians enjoy. Even when he acknowledges longer-term trends, he doesn’t show how they are connected to present realities. Had he done so, he might have seen that many longer-term trends have had deleterious social consequences for Romania, for Western Europe or for both.
So what, specifically, does Chris get wrong?
The first type of error lies in the narrow geographical range of his experience in Romania and his sources of information. Notwithstanding the (tempting!) proximity of his Air BnB to a brothel, Chris seems to have spent much of his time with lower-tier members of the elite—a doctor and an economist are mentioned—in the centre of Bucharest. These people appear to have been his main informants.
But why is this a PROOOOOOBLEM? Put it this way: if you were to read the same sort of article based on information from the equivalent social layer resident in London or Washington, would you be convinced that everything is great among the rubes in Britain or America?
There is much more I could say on this score (Gypsy anarcho-tyranny in the provinces! Depopulation of the countryside! Chinese-Israeli agribusiness buying out the peasantry!) but I will leave it until another time. Suffice it to say for now that the impressions one gets from hanging out with the professional classes in downtown Bucharest are liable to limit one’s perspective a bit.
The second locus erroris is evident as early in the piece as its title, ‘Romania Is Quietly Doing Great’, which wouldn’t be out of place in the mainstream digital broadsheets and travel magazines/blogs read globally by those who belong to, or who wish to emulate, the EU-positive midwit striver class.1 In fact, you can easily find very similar material at Reuters.
The drippy title—which I dare say Chris didn’t come up with—is nothing really major in itself. Still, it encodes and panders to implicitly progressive assumptions that are an ill fit with a (paleo)conservative publication. In the body of the article, though, we encounter a full-on preoccupation with progress and quantity:
The passage of time (and billions of dollars from the EU) has ushered in a renaissance of regeneration, energy, and progress, reshaping [Bucharest] into a destination of dark allure and electric modernity.
You might say: Big deal—what’s wrong with this? I would say: To illustrate what is wrong, let us pick out of this sentence the issue of the massive quantity of long-term EU funding and its consequences.
In the 16 years since its accession to the union Romania has received 62 billion euro in funding from the EU. Between 2021 and 2030 it is eligible for c. 80 billion euro more.
What Chris does not mention (though I am sure he knows it) is that the release of EU funds is conditional on the recipient government’s compliance with EU directives. Yet again you ask, hatchling-like: Why is this a PROOOOOBLEM? Well, it’s a proooooblem for the pretty obvious reason that, as you yourself no doubt know, the EU can essentially determine the running—most urgently, the migration policies—of its poorer southern and eastern member states by threatening to withhold funding if EU standards are not met.
Successive Romanian governments have been so anxious to adhere to these standards that—irony upon irony upon irony—in 2022 Romania was excluded, by an Austrian veto, from the Schengen free movement zone2 because of the insecurity of its borders. Romania, far from being B A S E D, contends closely with other frontier states, such as Greece and Meloni’s Italy, for the dubious title of Most Supine Mendicant State in the Union, especially but not only on the question of migration. It is much less a strong-jawed Athleta Christi than a one-armed Gypsy beggar on the Rue Neuve. It is nothing like Hungary under Fidesz or Poland under the Law and Justice Party.
But don’t take it from me; take it from Reuters.
Romania's prospects are underpinned by its EU membership and good relations with Brussels.
While Budapest and Warsaw are haggling with the bloc over rule-of-law strings attached to billions worth of pandemic recovery funds, Romania has already drawn down over 6 billion euros in grants and cheap loans.
NS Lyons has more (much more) on the ‘rule of law’ in Poland and its relationship to EU ‘pandemic recovery funds’. Parenthetically (but without resorting to parentheses) it’s worth mentioning that EU peons in the Romanian state already have form in matters concerning teH rULe oF LaW. In 2019 they managed to keep EU funding on tap by mobilising both PeoplePowerGrassrootsYouthProtest and the ‘independent judiciary’—in the form of the strictly non-corrupt anti-corruption commission—to hound, prosecute and imprison a leading non-compliant political figure.
I know that Romanian readers (hi guyz!) would probably furiously object to any attempt to canonise the unjustly reviled Liviu Dragnea, Romania’s secret Trump and its One True King, but I don’t care and am presently building an Independent Non-Partisan Tax-Exempt Grassroots Movement with precisely this end in mind.
But let us return to the emerging consequences of the Romanian state’s slavish (over-)compliance—just ask Austria—with EU migration policy and its effects on quality of life in the longer term.
Contra Chris, immigrants in Romania are not particularly scarce—but again, this fact is only apparent if you make apposite temporal and geographical comparisons. I allow that it must have seemed to him that, compared to Canada or the USA, there were very few non-white people in Bucharest, and if this is the comparison he had in mind he was perfectly correct. But if you were to compare Romania in 2024 to Romania in 2020—it was after the ‘pandemic’ and around the beginning of the Ukrainian catastrophe that things began to really change—you would observe that there are now vastly more non-whites than there were then, even in villages and small towns.
Why are these immigrants in Romania? There is no social security to speak of, so they are not here for that. Most of them seem to work. I don’t know—maybe they are all Bangladeshi and Afghan PassportBros—but I think it’s likely that they are on their way to Western Europe, where wages are higher and social security payments much richer (thus the Austrian veto). Beggar states like Romania are a pest not only to their own people but also to their neighbours, and their neighbours’ neighbours…and so on until the Altantic crashes heedlessly on the cliffs of Inishmore below Dún Aonghasa.
Nevertheless, it’s plain that not all immigrants are in transit to Western Europe. In outer parts of Bucharest, Turkish (from Turkey) money is being deployed to buy up considerable quantities of commercial real estate. The result is that Turkish restaurants and barber’s shops are now everywhere (Alö yes YööKay I löve ü!).
The point I am making here is that, when you start from near-zero, a small (in North American terms) quantitative change in immigration can seem enormous. It can be disorientating and alienating. It can, in sum, seriously undermine your quality of life.
To reinforce this point I offer you an anecdote…
Near the centre of Bucharest there are many huge and well-frequented parks, one of which I visited a couple of weeks ago. In the midst of it is a small amusement park (dodgem cars, a little rollercoaster and so on). The staff of both this facility and the surrounding snack bars was entirely composed of…people—I cannot say from where. They looked like full-blooded indios of the Andean variety; they might have been Nepalis; certainly they were not Muslims. But here’s the thing: none of them spoke a word of Romanian. I think in America a businessman would at least do his customers the courtesy of only employing English-speaking illegal immigrants to do work of this type—but not so here (in fact they were English speakers, but I think you catch my drift: they didn’t speak Romanian).
Now, if we were to consider this little tale in purely quantitative terms, we might think, ‘Well, there’s only a few of them.’ But we would be missing the point: these people insult the locals by working in customer-facing jobs while not even speaking the local language. Their negative effect on Romanians’ quality of life is disproportionate to their number. Sheer quantity is not everything.
In London, you’ll see more Pakistanis than British; Rome is teeming with hordes of selfie-stick-toting tourists. In Bucharest, I didn’t see a single African, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese person the entire month. Ethnic Romanians are 97 percent of the city’s population; 2 percent are Gypsy, Jewish, Turkish, German, or Hungarian; the remaining 1 percent belong to the rest of the world.
Leaving aside my mystification at how he managed to miss all the foreigners in downtown Bucharest (they are there, believe me), I think the main problem with Chris’s article is distilled in this more or less factual paragraph3. He writes as though quantitative snapshot-statistics tell the whole story. In truth they tell you very little about quality of life. This is in large measure determined by the pace and type of change, which is desirable only to the extent that people maintain a realistic sense of their country as their birthright—and theirs alone. Chris says that ‘Romania belongs to Romanians’, but it is obvious to me that changes are afoot which if unopposed are likely to deprive them of their birthright. Romania, as Chris’s informants seem certain, is catching up with the West. Thank G_d for PROGRESS!
It’s not that Chris never puts the numbers in longitudinal perspective. Yet, where he does so, they tell only part of the story. One of his informants assures him:
“First and foremost, the economy has been growing. In the last ten years, the average net income has tripled,” …
The principal problem here—the absence of a comparison between Romania and other countries in the present—is a different sort of error than I have been moaning about for the last 164 paragraphs. So let me make these numbers meaningful. The average monthly salary in Romania at the time of writing is 4,850 Romanian Lei (c. $1,055). In the USA, it is more than four times higher (c. $4,500). But surely stuff is cheaper in Romania, right? No!
Romanian inflation is among the highest in Europe; a mundane but indicative example is the price of a 1.5 litre bottle of milk (Yes MILKS!), admittedly of the ‘organic’ variety, which now costs more than four dollars. HOW ZIS MAKE YOU FEEL AMERIKA BOY?
The same informant:
“And check out the fertility rates around Europe since 2000: Romania has gone from 1.3 to 1.8, which is the opposite trend of the rest of the EU, it doesn’t even seem close to others.”
.png){kind=link}
Again with the quantity…
Apart from the fact that a fertility rate of 1.8 is still well below replacement level, the difficulty here is that Romania is in the ‘top’ three countries in the world for dysgenic fertility: national IQ is predicted to fall by 0.65 points per decade—almost double the expected global mean decline of 0.35 points. This is of especial importance to Romania, since the current best estimate of the average national IQ is 97, four points lower than that of Germany.
In wondering whether the Romanian sample was appropriately stratified to control for the presence of the notoriously low-IQ Gypsies—of which Romania has the second-largest population in Europe, despite the fact that in recent times it has also ‘contributed’ more of them to the rest of the world than any other country—it becomes apparent what is probably going on with the Romanian birthrate. The notably fecund Gypsies are the ones having most of the children. Quantity ≠ quality.
Why does all this matter to YOU? Because I think maybe u r PassportBro! Are you PassportBro??!!
I would guess that a decent part of Chris’s audience fits the PassportBro profile. These young men tend to be successful, at least implicitly right-leaning, to have above-midwit IQ and to suffer from underrated sexual marketplace value at home. Frozen out of a proper stake in the current elite by DIE, many of these PassportBros are classic (potential) rival elites. But they are not yet fully formed.
The kind of PassportBro who reads The American Conservative probably shares both Chris’s progressive-materialistic priors and his preconceptions of a ‘based’ Eastern Europe. It is for these vital young men that countries like Romania are especially ripe targets. While they think that more and bigger is better, they hunger to live in a stable, homogeneous society where they might develop their talents accompanied by a devoted and feminine waifu. In short, they seek a life of quality but are psychologically in thrall to the hegemony of quantity.
In order to take their place in active opposition to the global hydra, these elites-in-waiting require an education, not only in the pragmatics of taking and maintaining power but also in metaphysics. This means, among other things, a thorough grounding in the superiority of quality over quantity. A practical example: a small but tightly organised and highly competent rival elite can supplant an incumbent elite, immensely well-funded and ostensibly invincible though the latter may be; moreover, once victorious, the new elite is likewise capable of replacing the current elite's ennervating metaphysic of quantity with a reassertion of health, strength and excellence.
It is my submission that in his (unduly) favourable representation of Romania—founded on his erroneous identification of quality with quantity—Chris inadvertently reinforces the metaphysical disorientation of this precious layer (NO HOMO) of Western manhood. The PassportBros need guidance away from, not confirmation in, the longhouse cult of undifferentiated quantity. This is why, consistent with the mission outlined at the end of my previous poast, I wanted gently to counter-signal Chris’s mistaken characterisation of Romanian prosperity and basedness.
PassportBros! The West needs you! Be not seduced by the temptress of quantity! Chase not the Eastern chimera! RETVRN TO QUALITY!
I am not implying that Chris himself is secretly one of these people; manifestly, he is not.
Romania was granted Schengen membership on 31 March 2024, a few days after I published this poast! Coinidence? I think not. Now based Romania can issue visas to infinity Syrian child migrants from Africa to do the jobs the locals don’t want to do in Italy!
All the same, I wonder about the accuracy of these statistics; when were they last updated—1990?
It's a classic "grass is greener" phenomenon. I suffer from it too. Though I'm not the passportbro demographic, I'll sometimes dream about leaving the west. If I ever do, though, it needs to be sans rose colored glassed, so I appreciate your perspective.
Absolutely brilliant writing voice; you had me hooked the whole way through and somehow conveyed a sense of body language and intonation that is difficult to do when not in person.
Also an interesting topic to me since I am planning my escape from the US and am attempting to do the same type of in depth research into different cultures and how they actually operate vs how the seem to operate from the outside. Currently I am tentatively pointed in the direction of eastern or southern Europe. This is mostly due to the fact that chaos breeds opportunity, and corrupt, lazy governments have a harder time enforcing deeply esoteric punishments which are disguised as laws, and are more interested in the banal things such as money.