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America's home for home loans, 866.569.4711. It's 866.569.4711. Or visit americanfinancing.net slash walsh. Now that we live in a wonderful world of ubiquitous statistics where virtually everything is tracked from the real-time biometrics of NFL players to the precise amount of time you spent listening to Spotify while you were on the toilet last year, it's easy to fall into the trap of worshiping data and raw information. At no point in American history have we been able to quantify so many different aspects of day-to-day life, which is probably not a healthy thing. Prediction markets, draft kings, AI assistants, they all contribute to the quantification of everything. And one inevitable side effect of this development is that we've all developed a real blind spot for massive signs of civilizational decay that are very difficult, if not impossible, to measure in a scientific way. I'm talking about ways in which our life is clearly getting worse and everybody knows it, even though there's no widely recognized peer-reviewed metric to prove it exactly. We've talked in the past about various manifestations of this decline, including the quality of restaurant food and the quality of children's entertainment all going down. But maybe the best example of what I'm talking about is the death of neighborliness and fun neighborhoods. It's a very real issue that's almost never talked about. Winded neighborhoods, even suburban neighborhoods in nice areas, become such cold, uninviting, antisocial places. Why is it that if you're a typical American living in a suburb, you probably don't have a great place to take your kids to hang out. You don't have good friends on the block. You don't spend a lot of time at local events. You might not even know your, you might have never even spoken to your neighbors. Now, it's more than 25 years ago that a political scientist named Robert Putnam wrote the book Bowling Alone about the decline of social capital and meaningful relationships in America. And to this day, that's still the book that's always brought up and people try to have this conversation. University professors are still citing Putnam's findings about how Americans aren't joining civic groups and bowling leagues and so on. But the decline has only gotten much, much worse over the past 25 years. And remember, he wrote this before things like social media, before our life, before our lives had migrated fully to the internet. He had already spotted this problem. So think about how much worse it's gotten. And although you won't find the evidence in any sociology textbook, it's all over the internet that this has gotten a lot worse. Consider the very sad but increasingly popular TikTok genre of lonely Halloween's. And this is something I noticed in my own neighborhood as well over the past few years. Chick-a-treating in a lot of places is all but dead. A lot of people have stopped putting up decorations or hosting gatherings entirely. But even households that do want to participate in Halloween are coming to the realization that kids aren't nearly as interested anymore. Watch. My mom finally can afford to hand out candy to trick or treaters, but no one comes that phase still. Another year with no trick or treat. Oh no. Are you so sad? No trick or treaters again this year? So even the cat is depressed by the state of Halloween. Can't take it anymore, right? You know that this is a common issue because some of the most popular videos on TikTok and YouTube are about the fact that kids don't trick or treat anymore. This video has more than 10 million views, for example. Watch. Instead of parting on Halloween, we give out candy every year. Trick or treaters. We haven't lived in this house long enough, so we don't know if anyone's coming tonight. I just bought a lot in case. I even got healthy options. What are you doing? I'm setting up lights. Why? So they know where to come. It's been an hour and there's still no one. We have all our candy still. Can I have a piece of candy? No. Why? Kids need candy. I don't think anyone's coming to our house in cover of stress baking. I'm making snacks. Okay. It looks really good. Whatever happened in Halloween spirit. This very simple and straightforward 30-second video is half the viewership of the finale of Game of Thrones, and that's because it resonates. It's an experience everybody relates to. Everyone knows this kind of thing is happening at scale. We can all detect it, even if there are no studies that bear it out. We can all see it, but we don't really know why. Now for Halloween specifically, there are a lot of theories as to why young people aren't interested, interested in trick or treating anymore. Maybe they're more interested in spending time on their cell phones, than interacting with anybody in the real world. The COVID lockdowns, which forced children to become anti-social, obviously didn't help in that regard. There's also the fact that our culture has been trending heavily towards irony and cynicism. And therefore, insecurity is an all-time high. Goofy traditions, traditions like where you go out in public in a ridiculous costume and interact with strangers, have fallen out of favor because they're considered embarrassing or uncool. So kids would rather stay inside, play video games, watch TikTok and YouTube videos, or they can watch an infinite number of other people being torn down and judged and ridiculed for one reason or another. Now if you don't spend a lot of time in the world of TikTok, then you really have no idea how bad things have gotten. There's a whole genre of video called Pop the Balloon and Find Love, for example. It's like speed dating mixed with a game show. And in one incarnation of this concept, a preppy looking host interviews a student, usually a guy, outside of his dorm room. And there's a bunch of girls lined up against the wall watching the interview with balloons, which they pop as soon as they hear something they don't like. The idea is that if any girl is holding a balloon by the end of it, then the guy gets the chance to go out with her. But invariably, the guy says something extremely inconsequential that his audience doesn't approve of. And the girls pop the balloons and make some judgmental comments and walk away. That's the entire concept. Every one of these videos gets millions of views, if not tens of millions. The audience is predominantly children. And here's just one of the videos. Welcome to Pop the Balloon. Can I have you sitting right here? We're here with Zach. All right. All right, we're all good so far. What's your job? My job? Yeah. Do you have one? I'm unemployed. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Okay, okay. Why'd you pop? Because we need an employed man. Okay, why'd you pop? Because we have to be employed. Can we have the final three come right here? What's your dream date? You know, we go to downtown. Oh, okay. A little early. Yeah. We get something to eat. Oh. And then after, we go to Sunset Cliffs. Oh. Watch the sunset. Okay, why'd you pop? It's just so cliche, romantic, boring. Okay, well, you're cliche. You need something more unique than that. Okay, you can get it here too. All right, we have our winners. No kiss, no kiss. Oh, yeah. Any culture in which trashy videos like this get 10 million views or more, which this one did, is not going to have many kids dressing up in silly little costumes and going out with their parents and knocking on doors for candy. Videos like this are a sign of a culture that's preoccupied with being judgmental and sarcastic at every opportunity. And it used to be that if you wanted to watch garbage like this, it meant that you were unemployed and sitting on your couch at 10 a.m., watching Jerry Springer or something like that. Now, children and young adults are watching this kind of stuff all the time in huge numbers. And when you zoom out beyond the context of Halloween, that's a very bad omen for neighborhoods in general. Overly judgmental and sarcastic people usually aren't good friends. They don't want to spend time with you and you don't want to spend time with them. But these organizations still don't answer the fundamental question of why our culture has transformed like this and why neighborhoods have become so antisocial. Why is it more common than ever for everyone, especially young people, to hunker down and watch dumb videos on the internet rather than engage with their communities? Recently, I came across this video from a man returning to his hometown in Pomona, California, and he identifies the problem immediately. Watch. So this is the home that I spent most of my childhood in. When I lived here, none of these fences were here. My neighborhood now is not like it used to be. All these fences and palm trees were here. You could run from yard to yard through each another's yard. All my friends, we just run right through each neighborhood. As you can tell, this is what immigrant progress is. This is where, this is totally Hispanic now. It's not even close to being when I grew up. When I grew up, this is where it is. You see the screen doors with iron? That's how they're living in my old neighborhood. They're locked in. They're caged in. They're living in a prison. This is where my grandmother lived. And all of this, there was bushes in between each house, but none of these gates, none of the dogs. This is a totally Latino neighborhood now. You don't see a neighborhood that's welcoming now. Certainly not like it was in the 70s and 80s. It's changed quite a bit. Now, his firsthand observation that higher immigrant populations have made his community more insular and more anti-social is actually something we do have data to support. This is data that's fallen out of favor in modern academia, but 20 years ago was the consensus. Earlier, I mentioned Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, but separate from that book, Putnam also published findings that clearly demonstrate the effect of diversity on community engagement. And the New York Times of all places promoted his work. Here's what they wrote. Quote, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. Now, Putnam conducted his research by sending surveys to 41 different U.S. communities, and he asked residents about how much they trusted their neighbors. He found that people living in more diverse communities, quote, tend to distrust their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity, and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily front of the television. You ever feel too busy to make healthy choices? Do you find yourself too tired at the end of the day to cook a healthy meal and find yourself frequenting your favorite drive-thru more than you would like? Well, you're not alone. Life can make it hard to make healthy choices sometimes, but there is one option that even the busiest person can make time for, and that is balance of nature. 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As Putnam worded it, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to hunker down, that is, to pull in like a turtle. And it wasn't just Putnam who came to this conclusion, quote, Conimus Matthew-Con of UCLA and Dora Costa of MIT reviewed 15 recent studies on 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Other research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace. Now again, all these studies are from 2003 or so. It's become extremely unfashionable to make this kind of point in public. But recently, as you may have seen, JD Vance went ahead and did it anyway. Watch. Let's say a family of five that you've known for five years, 10 years, moves out of a house, is actually evicted from the house because there are people who are going to pay more for rent. And then what happens is 20 people move into a three-bedroom house, 20 people from a totally different culture, totally different ways of interacting. Again, we can respect their dignity while also being angry at the Biden administration for letting that situation happen and recognizing that their next-door neighbors are going to say, well, wait a second, what is going on here? I don't know these people. They don't speak the same language that I do. And because there are 20 in the house next door, it's a little bit routier than it was when there was just a family of four or a family of five. It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don't want to live next to four families of strangers. There's a reason that pretty much every population, whether they're in the suburbs, in prison, on a battlefield or anywhere, tends to self-segregate along the lines of race, national origin, and all of that. It's not because they have some irrational hatred of anyone else, it's because they have a rational preference to be around people who speak their language, share a common history and culture, and behave in ways that they expect people to act. But for most Americans, it's impossible to find a community like that at the moment. And it's especially hard for children. Only around 20% of the students in California public schools are white. Only around 30% of the children in Texas are white. Not too long ago, those numbers were north of 90%. So it's harder for kids to make friends due to demographic change, and it's harder for their parents to connect with other parents as well. So advanced said should be completely uncontroversial, but it wasn't. It sparked a week-long outrage cycle, which included this response from Zoran Mamdani, the Muslim socialist who has now taken over the city of New York. This language from the vice president of this country, it betrays so much of the promise that we have as a nation. And I stand here in Diversity Plaza proud to be an immigrant New Yorker, proud to call this borough my home, a borough where there are more languages spoken than most cities in the world, and proud to be on the precipice of becoming the first immigrant mayor of the city in generations. And the fact that the vice president would view someone speaking a different language in this country as something that should be avoided is something that could be pushed out of our reality. It is so emblematic of the politics that we are trying to show a contrast to, a politics that has room for each and every person who calls the city. What Mamdani doesn't want to say, although he clearly believes it, is that he's also a proponent of homogenous neighborhoods. He just wants homogenous neighborhoods without white people, which is why he plans to raise taxes on white people to force as many of them out of the city as possible. We went on your website and realized there's a policy proposal that says your plan, and I'm going to quote it for folks, is to shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners and the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods. Explain why you are bringing race into your tax proposal. That is just a description of what we see right now. It's not driven by race, it's more of an assessment of what neighborhoods are being undertaxed versus overtaxed. So no plans to change that language on your website? The focus here is to actually ensure a fair property tax system, and the use of that language is just an assessment of the neighborhood. All right. This is how Mamdani is planning to sell the large-scaler placement of whites in New York, which has already been well underway for the better part of a century. According to data from the mayor's office, one in five New Yorkers can't speak the English language. 40% weren't born in this country. If you encounter a random New Yorker on the street, there's a good chance he can't understand a word you're saying, hates everything you stand for, and survives off your tax dollars. And yet in New York, 40% of people living in rent-controlled housing are foreign-borns, and so Americans are paying for these people who despise us, can't relate to us in any meaningful way. Yeah, we're paying for them to take our property from us. If you're an American who wants to rent a tiny one-bedroom apartment in New York, you'll easily spend more than $2,000 a month, and many tenants in rent-controlled units pay less than half of that. This phenomenon is not just playing out in New York, we've talked at length about communities like Dearborn and Minneapolis, but it's far more widespread than that. Patients and Somalis have seized control of entire communities in Ohio and Washington State, for example, and in southern states, including Tennessee, Kentucky, North and South Dakota, Maryland, and so on. The population of Hispanics has grown drastically, often by more than 200%, just the last two decades. The trajectory is bad and it's getting worse. You know, whites are no longer the majority of births in many states. Leave it to me, Ver, is basically a foreign concept for a foreign country now. Who voted for that, by the way? Well, we all know the answer to that question. More than any other single factor, this is the reason that neighborliness has died. This is the reason that communities have decayed and neighborhoods have become insular. We have much less in common with one another than ever before. And it's not simply that we're importing more immigrants, it's that the foreigners we're importing are nothing like the Irish or the Germans or the Brits. They're people who harbor a deep and abiding disdain for this country and come from cultures that are completely alien to our own, that have nothing in common with ours. And therefore, more Americans, including children, are turning to the internet and social media for a faint proxy of real social interaction and community. 25 years ago, Robert Putnam sounded the alarm about this. He predicted exactly what would happen. And rather than address what he said, his more controversial conclusions were memory hold. As a result, everyone in this country, particularly people who wish they lived in a better neighborhood, are now suffering the inevitable consequences.
