What El Salvador Could Teach New Zealand About Solving The Gang Problem

Nayib Bukele is the President of El Salvador, having won re-election earlier this year with almost 85% of the popular vote. Most of his popularity is a result of his security strategy, which has transformed El Salvador from an extremely dangerous country to a safe one. On X, Bukele describes himself as a “philosopher king”. His security philosophy might be applicable to other places plagued by gangs.

Bukele’s approval rating today is some 89%, making him arguably the most popular leader of any country. Understanding why he is so popular requires understanding the difference between the El Salvador before Bukele took power, and the El Salvador now.

El Salvador used to be the most violent country in the Western hemisphere. The MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs had reduced the country to a battleground. With everyday life under gang control, El Salvador was in danger in collapsing into Haiti-style anarchy. The homicide rate in 2015 was over 100 per 100,000 people.

Bukele came to power in 2019. The homicide rate had fallen from its peak since then, but was still extremely high. In March 2022 there was a spike in homicides due to MS-13, wherein 87 people were randomly murdered by the gang over a three-day period. This was apparently an attempt by MS-13 to intimidate the people of El Salvador into submission.

The response was a ‘War Against the Gangs‘, launched by Bukele that same month. He had described gangs as the metastases of a cancer that is killing Salvadorean society.

The crackdown saw the arrest of around 2% of the Salvadoran population and the construction of a 40,000-person maximum security prison, known as the “Terrorism Confinement Centre”. Since these measures were taken, El Salvador’s homicide rate has plummeted. In 2023 it was a mere 2.4 per 100,000 (c.f. Canada at 2.3).

Could a similar strategy work here?

For one thing, New Zealand gangs don’t cause as much damage as the gangs in El Salvador. The homicide rate in New Zealand is lower than even the 2023 rate there. New Zealand gangs might be feral by New Zealand standards, but by Latin American standards they’re standard-bearers of civilisation.

However, the general cancer metaphor is apt. As family members of gang members can tell you, the damage caused by gang members is not limited to crime. Immeasurable quality of life damage is caused by the constant threats, intimidation and antisocial behaviour that comes with the presence of gang culture.

Moreover, existing gangs could cause extreme damage in the future. The example of El Salvador shows that the homicide rate can increase manyfold in a short period if the economic and social environment permits. Given the ongoing economic collapse of the Anglosphere, anyone could confidently predict a rise in both volume and intensity of gang activity in coming years.

Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Centre has room for 40,000 people. New Zealand was known to have 8,300 gang members nationwide near the end of 2022. We could, therefore, build a much smaller prison – one that fit 10,000 people – and still have enough room to put every single gang member in it for life.

Other anti-gang measures could readily be adopted from El Salvador.

One of these is the reduction of the age of criminal responsibility, from 16 to 12. Having the age at 16 makes sense in a high-trust, high-social capital environment where most people want to do good. In a low-trust environment, however, tolerance and kindness just gets taken advantage of. Gangs exploit that tolerance and kindness by getting younger teenagers – too young to be charged – to commit crimes. This phenomenon also exists in the New Zealand gang scene, so we might benefit from a similar reduction in the age of criminal responsibility.

Of note is that one element of Bukele’s crackdown was banning media from expressing pro-gang sentiments. If implemented in New Zealand, this would prevent The New Zealand Herald offering a column to former Black Power pack rapist Denis O’Reilly. It would also prevent the numerous hagiographies about gang leaders doing community work.

Unfortunately, no measures will be taken to protect the New Zealand people from the gang menace as long as globalists are in power.

What New Zealand needs is a leader that cares about the New Zealand nation first and foremost.

Also of note is that the political philosophy of Bukele’s movement is explicitly anti-democratic. Bukele’s Vice-President, Felix Ulloa, has said “The democratic system that existed for years in El Salvador only benefited crooked politicians.” The system that exists in New Zealand also only benefits crooked politicians. That suggests that solving our leadership problems might require also solving the democracy problem.

All this might be too much for New Zealand for now – we are yet to see the Mongrel Mob, the Headhunters, Black Power or the Hell’s Angels murder random civilians in New Zealand to intimidate the Government. But the worse our gang problem becomes, the more we will need to consider the need for a Nayib Bukele-style crackdown.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2022
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

An Open Letter To The Minister Of Justice Regarding Psychedelic Use For Spiritual Purposes

Dear Minister of Justice,

I am writing to seek clarification on New Zealand’s current stance regarding psychedelic substances, particularly in the context where these substances are considered spiritual sacraments.

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act states in Section 13 that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief”. Section 15 states that “Every person has the right to manifest that person’s religion or belief in worship, observance, practice, or teaching, either individually or in community with others, and either in public or in private”.

A fair reading of these sections suggests that New Zealanders have the right to use spiritual sacraments.

Indeed, this is already true with regards to the religious use of wine in the Christian Eucharist. New Zealand Anglicans use wine as a spiritual sacrament, the psychoactive ingredient being, of course, alcohol. But there are many other substances that serve as spiritual sacraments in the religious and spiritual traditions of the world.

The use of psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca and other entheogens has been deeply rooted in various spiritual and religious practices around the world for millennia. These practices often regard these substances not merely as drugs but as sacraments crucial for spiritual exploration, healing and connection with the divine or the deeper self.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most famous of the mystery schools that characterised pre-Christian European spirituality, running for 2,000 years and attracting anyone who was anyone in ancient Greece or Rome: Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius and the Emperor Julian were all known or believed to have participated.

Cicero wrote of them that “Though Athens brought forth numerous divine things, yet she never created anything nobler than those sublime Mysteries through which we became gentler and have advanced from a barbarous and rustic life to a more civilised one, so that we not only live more joyfully but also die with a better hope.”

Initiation into these mysteries involved the consumption of a drink known as kykeon. The mycologist R Gordon Wasson, the chemist Albert Hoffmann and the historian Carl Ruck have argued that the kykeon contained an entheogenic substance. Their book Road to Eleusis made a compelling argument that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played an integral role in the creation of Western Civilisation.

Robert Graves believed that linguistic evidence revealed the kykeon to include some kind of mushroom. Terence McKenna supported this assertion, pointing out that psilocybin-containing mushrooms had both the capacity to cause extreme psychospiritual change and the safety profile that would have allowed thousands to use them every year without getting a reputation for being dangerous.

The claimed benefits of the Eleusinian Mysteries included losing one’s fear of death, gaining a belief in the afterlife, learning to understand the will of the divine and improvement of moral rectitude. These benefits are very similar to those claimed by modern psychedelic users – Erowid.org lists hundreds of mystical experiences of people who have taken psilocybin.

It’s apparent from these arguments that the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments played a role in the moral and civil development of Western peoples during our greatest ages. But the potential of psychedelics to induce spiritual insight is not limited to the ancient age or to the West.

The Marsh Chapel Experiment conducted by Walter Pahnke in 1962 discovered that psilocybin is capable of inducing powerful spiritual experiences in modern people. A long-term follow-up questionnaire found “experimental subjects wrote that the experience helped them to recognise the arbitrariness of ego boundaries, increase their depth of faith, increase their appreciation of eternal life [etc.]”

One of the participants in the Marsh Chapel Experiment noted in the long-term follow-up, regarding death, “I’ve been there. Been there and come back. And it’s not terrifying, it doesn’t hurt.” Such an insight is profoundly spiritual. Many of the other participants made similar observations. One remembered their experience as “one of the high points of their spiritual life”.

This experiment demonstrated that the link between psilocybin and spirituality can be established within a modern, scientific paradigm. More recent research has supported this, with a 2024 paper in Current Psychology finding that “psychedelic use is linked with a variety of subjective indicators of spiritual growth, including stronger perceived connections with the divine, a greater sense of meaning, increased spiritual faith, increased engagement in religious and spiritual practices, an increase in feelings of unity and self-transcendence, positive changes in worldview, increased connectedness with others, and reduced fear of death”.

Albert Hofmann described how the teonanacatl of the Aztecs was a psilocybin-containing mushroom. This teonanacatl, or “flesh of the gods”, was used as a spiritual sacrament to commune with the divine. Indigenous North Americans have used psilocybin-containing mushrooms as entheogens for thousands of years. The Aztec use of entheogens, including both mushrooms and others, is extensive.

R Gordon Wasson believed that the soma referenced in the Rig Veda was the fly agaric amanita muscaria. Supporting his contention was the fact that Siberian shamans were still using this mushroom for spiritual purposes. More recently, Russian researchers have found evidence suggesting the active ingredient in soma was psilocybe cubensis. In either case, psychoactive mushrooms have a history of religious and spiritual use in India as well.

Although the record of historical psychedelic use is not as strong in Europe as it is in the Americas and Asia, there is still evidence of magic mushroom use in Spain from some 6,000 years ago.

In New Age spirituality, psychedelics are used extensively. In Nelson, where I am from, it’s common to use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments outside the purview of any institutional authority. “Mushroom Season” describes the time of the year beginning in early winter and ending around midwinter when psilocybin-containing mushrooms are foraged, dried and consumed as spiritual sacraments.

In light of all this, significant questions arise concerning the human rights implications of New Zealand’s drug laws as they pertain to psychedelic substances. Once it is understood that psychedelics are spiritual sacraments, there’s a compelling argument to be made that restrictions on their use infringe upon the freedom of religion and belief, a fundamental human right protected under various international treaties to which New Zealand is a signatory.

Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to freedom of religion” and “to manifest his belief in practice”. Given the widespread use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments throughout time and space, this right must surely encompass the right to use psychedelics to manifest spiritual belief in practice.

An appropriate reading of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act suggests that the right to use psychedelics for spiritual purposes is guaranteed. In reality, however, a hierophant who wanted to conduct a sacramental ritual akin to the Eleusinian Mysteries could potentially face life imprisonment for the supply of Class A drugs.

This letter seeks to understand how current New Zealand drug laws reconcile with the rights of individuals to practice their spirituality freely, especially when such practices involve substances that are currently classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

The laws against the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes reflect, to a major extent, the historical Christian dogma against pharmakeia. This is the same dogma that led the Christian fanatics under Alaric to destroy the Eleusinian Mysteries in 396 by killing its priests, that led the inquisitors of medieval Europe to burn witches at the stake for using spiritual sacraments, and which inspired the Catholic invaders of the Americas to eliminate the sacramental use of teonanacatl by murdering the shamans who specialised in it.

It has also been suggested that much of the modern opposition to the use of psychedelics as spiritual sacraments comes from organised religious groups who want to position themselves as ticket-clipping intermediaries between the people and divinity. However, as can be seen from reading the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, Kiwis have the right to commune with divinity without the need of an intermediary. This necessarily means the right to use spiritual sacraments.

As other laws based on Christian prejudices – such as those regarding marital rape, homosexuality, prostitution and abortion – have been discarded in favour of greater freedom, the laws prohibiting the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes ought to be discarded. Indeed, many countries and territories have reformed their psychedelic drug laws, based on arguments such as the ones made in this letter, plus others.

In closing, I respectfully request a detailed clarification or review of how New Zealand’s drug policies align with the principles of religious and spiritual freedom and human rights. Understanding the government’s perspective on this matter would not only inform those within New Zealand who use psychedelics as spiritual sacraments but would also contribute to broader discussions on drug policy reform that respects cultural and spiritual diversity.

Thank you for considering this important issue. I look forward to your insights and hope for a dialogue that can potentially lead to policies that honour both the law and the deeply held spiritual convictions of many New Zealanders.

Yours sincerely,

Vince McLeod

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Deep Implications Of The Recent Thuringen Election

The Free State of Thuringia is one of the sixteen states in the German federal republic, with a population just over 2.1 million. Normally, little of importance would come from Thuringen – but the state elections earlier this month have upset that. The much-feared Alternative fuer Deutschland party – regularly dismissed as neo-Nazis by the opinion-shapers in the mainstream media – won 33% of the total vote, taking first place.

Mainstream commentators were aghast at the AfD’s success, labelling it a return of Nazism. But in the hysteria over the AfD result, other results with deep implications have been missed.

One of the most striking of these was the Buendnis Sahra Wagenknecht winning 15.7%.

The BSW is also nationalist and also opposes Germany getting sucked into the war in Ukraine. Hence, they are as anti-Establishment as the AfD. But, unlike the AfD, they are a leftist movement that wants to empower the negotiating position of workers, and which has no interest in the Christian dogma so common to alternative right movements (the BSW also lists ‘reason’ as one of its two core values).

Sahra Wagenknecht is a former top-ranking Die Linke (The Left) candidate, which means that she’s coming from a very leftist perspective. If the AfD had done well and the BSW not, it might be possible to blame everything on TikTok. But because the BSW also did so well, it’s impossible to speak of a “right-wing wave”. The BSW winning over 15% shows that support for nationalism, not just support for the AfD, is what’s rising.

Perhaps the most striking change from the previous election was the collapse of Die Linke. They were the biggest party in 2019, with 31% of the total vote. Their 2024 vote was a much humbler 13%. The vast bulk of this fall can be attributed to the rise of the BSW, which didn’t exist in 2019.

In total, the nationalist bloc of AfD and BSW won 48.7% of the Thuringen vote, more than the 47% for the globalist bloc of CDU (23.6%), Die Linke (13%), SPD (6.1%), Gruene (3.2%) and FDP (1.1%). Nationalists outpolling globalists in a Western European region the size of Thuringen is something unprecedented since World War II. Since that war, nationalists have been reduced to small minorities. For them to become the majority again, anywhere, came as a shock to many.

Even more shocking was the voting breakdown.

The first result of note here was that some 49% of working-class voters in Thuringen voted AfD, and a further 16% voted BSW. This means that 65% of working-class voters went for a nationalist party, as opposed to a mere 30% for the five major globalists.

This is a remarkable result because it speaks to the extent to which working-class people feel themselves betrayed by the globalist establishment, in particular the leftist globalist establishment.

One of the issues that forced Sahra Wagenknecht out of Die Linke (along with COVID-19 measures and Ukraine/Russia policy) was German refugee policy. Die Linke supported the globalist approach of constantly and permanently increasing the refugee quota. Wagenknecht abandoned Die Linke in the belief that many left-wing voters would prefer a nationalist option to a globalist one, and she has been vindicated by this month’s polling.

Of even more import is the fact that this process has just begun. The AfD has been around for a while but the BSW is new. If they can already poll this high in a regional election, they can dream of doing so at a federal level. Then the possibility arises of an AfD-BSW coalition ruling Germany.

The second result of note here relates to age. If one looks only at voters aged 18-24, who are traditionally globalist left voters, we can see a radical seachange towards nationalism. 55% of men and 46% of women in this age group voted for one of the two nationalist parties.

The only real supporters of the establishment now are the Boomers whose rental property portfolios and stock portfolios are the prime beneficiaries of mass immigration. The Western ruling classes have denied for 80 years that mass immigration leads to higher rents and lower wages, but the people of West widely understand now, and the working-class understands well. Many of those people are now desperate for an anti-establishment alternative.

As the Boomers continue to die off over the next decade, globalist sentiments in the West will continue to weaken further. Those who believe that nationalists are only rising because of social media may succeed in banning that social media to a major extent. But they won’t stop what’s coming, because it’s not a social media phenomenon. It’s the inevitable end consequence of many tens of millions of unpleasant encounters with the diversity that the globalists have imported.

These results of note, taken together, suggest that the vast majority of young, working-class men in Thuringen are now nationalist. Perhaps then, a smaller majority of young, working-class men in the West in general might be nationalist. This means that the nationalist forces now control the loyalties of the precise demographics needed to control the streets – or overthrow the government.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Inevitability Of The Maori Party, And Of Race Politics

This month’s Roy Morgan poll didn’t appear to contain any major news. There were no significant shifts since last time. But, buried two-thirds of the way down the page, some highly interesting facts lurked: evidence of a remorseless trend towards social discord in New Zealand. This trend is the rise of racial consciousness, and its replacement of class consciousness.

It can be seen from the above image that, among Kiwis younger than 50, the Maori Party has close to 10% support. This is an astonishing level of support for an ethnonationalist party, especially considering that Maoris make up less than 20% of the population. Even if one allows for 25% of the population aged between 18 and 49 being Maori, and one assumes that almost no non-Maoris vote Maori Party, 10% total support means some 40% Maori Party support among Maoris aged 18-49.

Dedicated Roy Morgan poll watchers might have already noticed the trend towards Maori Party support increasing among the young over recent years. It has not only increased, but is unstoppable.

All over the Western World, class consciousness is dying, and getting replaced by race consciousness. VJM Publishing has written about this phenomenon before, noting that it’s the result of a deliberate effort by the ruling class to shatter any potential bonds of solidarity among the lower classes.

Applying the Orwellian maxim War is Peace, the ruling classes have deliberately set the lower classes of New Zealand against each other by encouraging them to divide themselves among racial lines. They have done this by suggesting that the average Maori is the victim of the order of society and the average white is the beneficiary. The resentment thus created has seen some Maoris and whites turn on each other, ignoring the hand of the ruling class behind all the discord.

This schedule of suggestion is mostly applied through the education system and popular culture. As a result, the younger a resident of the Western World, the more likely that they see the world through the lens of race, and not class. Young people have been conditioned to think in terms of race, and that’s why so many of them support the Maori Party.

40% support within a major demographic for an ethnonationalist party is something that few Kiwis would have anticipated, had they been asked 25 years ago. Few Kiwis will have anticipated what’s next: the inevitable rise of white racial consciousness.

It’s very bad news for those who wish for unity and stability among the New Zealand populace.

The New Zealand political establishment has done everything it can to pre-empt the rise of white racial consciousness. Their intent to do this was made clear when they sent the Police to my house to intimidate me after I sold ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts on TradeMe.

But if working-class white people see the Maori Party getting 10%, they will start asking “Why not us?”.

Working-class white people will not remain slavishly supporting the ruling class if they see Maori people coming together as a Maori race, and getting concessions from the Government on the basis of that racial identity. There are already great numbers of working-class whites who resent that the ruling class helps Maoris more than them, and who would vote for a white identitarian party if one ever stood up.

Already we can see from the table above that the Labour Party – one of the two major parties – polls a mere 18% among the under 50s. Their support base is Boomer women. Among women under 50, Labour gets less support than the Greens. This suggests that support for Labour will continue to decline as the Boomers die off and get replaced by more alternative young people.

If the Maori contingent among those alternative young people vote for an ethnonationalist party that represents them on identitarian lines, the white contingent will also want that. After all, young working-class whites are getting representation as working-class whites all over Europe.

VJM Publishing has been following the rise of the Sweden Democrats for a long time, and the frustration and sense of injustice that impels young working-class whites in Europe to vote for identitarian parties is shared by young working-class whites in New Zealand. They just don’t have a good option yet.

It’s possible that wealthy whites (along with wealthy Asians, Jews and others) keep supporting National and ACT, which collectively develop into a broad ruling class movement. The Maori Party might keep growing, Labour might keep declining into a Pacific Islander party, and then a new, working-class white party will rise to fill the gap.

Whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing cannot be known in advance.

The real solution to all the problems mentioned here: Kiwi nationalism. A fresh formulation of nationalism which saw young Maoris and young white Kiwis as the yin and the yang of a glorious new civilisation whose best time was yet to come. This would allow young Kiwis to come together in support of a common goal, with a understanding of common heritage, free of the petty bickering that has characterised recent decades in New Zealand.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!