'California Sober': Could It Catch On In New Zealand?

‘California Sober’: Could It Catch On In New Zealand?

Many lifestyle trends that originate in California then spread to the rest of the world. This is because California is where the Spear of Destiny is: the focal point of world cultural influence. The West Coast of America has more soft power than anywhere else on Earth. The latest trend that might spread from there to the rest of the world is called California Sober.

Many people say that life is best with no drugs at all. But for many others, this isn’t realistic. Billions of people feel the need to use chemical assistance to take the edge off the intensity of life on this planet. For those living outside the Abrahamic moral paradigm, using recreational drugs is no more immoral than seasoning one’s food.

The term ‘California Sober’ refers to a lifestyle in which one still uses drugs, but in such a manner that one does very little harm. In fact, one does roughly as little harm as a sober person. The main aspect of the lifestyle is to abstain from the typical drugs of destruction, in particular large amounts of alcohol. In this lifestyle, cannabis replaces alcohol as the go-to everyday social lubricant.

In contrast to the puritanical forms of sobriety so common to the West, in which all psychoactive substances are considered from the devil, California Sober usually involves indulgent cannabis use, with the occasional use of alcohol or psychedelics. Alcohol is still used, but sparingly, such as for celebrations. Psychedelics are also used sparingly, but more for spiritual or mental health reasons.

This arrangement is not merely a fashion. It reflects actual psychological and medical science. Professor David Nutt, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on relative drug harms, conducted a study that found alcohol to be the most harmful drug of all. Figure 3 in this paper (link goes to .pdf) suggests that alcohol is twice as harmful to other people as heroin, and about as harmful to the user as heroin, crack cocaine or methamphetamine.

According to Prof. Nutt’s research, cannabis is less harmful than tobacco, and much, much less harmful than alcohol. Magic mushrooms are considered by this research to be the least harmful of all those surveyed.

The logic of the California Sober lifestyle is to take this modern science into account when making recreational drug choices. As such, the use of alcohol is much less common in comparison to wider Western society. The use of cannabis and psychedelics, by contrast, is much more common.

The lifestyle hasn’t been designed by the dispassionate scientific analysis of a few elites, though. It is, for the most part, an organic development.

Many people have found that they like to use alcohol to take the edge off the stress of daily life, but they really don’t like the side-effects of alcohol: the sickness, the bloating, the hangovers, the mental dullness. For them, cannabis does the job of taking the edge off without the physical suffering.

For these people, replacing alcohol with cannabis seems like an obvious idea.

Some Kiwis, your author among them, have been living California Sober for a while already. I worked as a barman for several years to help pay for university, but by the time I graduated I had come to realise that cannabis was a better lifestyle choice than alcohol for many reasons. Foremost among these reasons: cannabis users seemed much less prone to violence and sluttery.

Using more cannabis, I found that I felt a lot better physically than I did using alcohol. So phasing out the alcohol seemed like a natural choice. Occasional psychedelic use, usually to mark a solstice or equinox, also seems like a natural choice. I believe that many people, if given the freedom to do so, would live a lifestyle similar to this.

The main difficulty with leading this lifestyle in New Zealand, of course, is the law.

Cannabis has been fully legal in California since 2016, the year 57% of Californians voted to legalise it at referendum. New Zealand, unfortunately, voted away our chance at cannabis freedom in 2020. As such, we are now eight years behind California, and counting. It’s not likely that the Sixth National Government will change the cannabis laws, and they might not lose power until 2029 (assuming they win three terms, as National governments tend to do). So New Zealand probably won’t get legal cannabis until 15 or 16 years after California.

Despite this, cannabis is easy to get in New Zealand – Kiwis are some of the world’s heaviest users of it. Thus it’s possible to live a California Sober lifestyle here, but not with the same level of acceptance as in North America. Moreover, medicinal cannabis is now very easy to access in New Zealand.

Most of the reasons that caused the California Sober lifestyle to become popular in North America also apply to New Zealand. We also have severe problems with physical, mental and social damage caused by alcohol, and would benefit from a shift to lower-harm substances. It may be that natural adoption of this lifestyle among Kiwis is what eventually forces a change to the cannabis laws.

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

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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!

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!

VJM – New Zealand’s Most Suppressed Author And Thinker!

Not since Arthur Desmond has a New Zealand author created as much controversy as myself. The simple fact that I am an educated, working-class Kiwi man willing to speak the truth has resulted in a devoted horde of haters. The purpose of this photoessay is to chronicle the Establishment’s attempts to destroy me.

The first sign I had that the Establishment wanted to shut me up was in May 2019. For a couple of years before then, I had been selling ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts on TradeMe as a way to wind up Communists. Sales had been slow, until one day I sold three shirts in the space of an hour. A friend rang me up, and told me to check the news.

The Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt, had taken to the mainstream media to declare there was “no place” for my satirical political expression. Calling me “ideologically adjacent” to Brenton Tarrant, Hunt intimated that selling such t-shirts was somehow anti-social in and of itself. The listings were soon taken down by TradeMe after a deluge of lies about how ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ was actually a white supremacist call to action.

The next move was the Establishment sending cops to my house to harass me as part of Operation Whakahumanu. This came in the form of a rap on my front door at about 10am one morning in July 2019. I opened the door to find a couple of uniformed officers, who wanted to ask me some questions about comments I had made on FaceBook. Apparently this was in the belief that I was at risk of shooting up a mosque. They had no warrant, so I asked them to leave immediately.

It was an unmistakable threat. The political establishment clearly saw me as an enemy. I understood directly that this opinion was a result of my VJM Publishing work, wherein I had explained to people for some years how the political system manipulates them against their best interests. My work to explain the psychology of submission and control was giving too much power back to the New Zealand people. I had to be countered.

Learning that the Establishment was targeting me, various sycophants and arselickers, attempting to curry favour with the powerful, followed suit.

The first of these was terrorist fundraiser Byron Clark.

Talia Levin’s book Culture Warlords mentioned an article about globohomo I had published in November 2018. Levin mentioned VJM Publishing as part of an effort to smear the counter-globalist resistance as deranged racists. Clark seized on this opportunity to attempt to have VJM Publishing books cancelled from TradeMe. His harassment campaign mostly involved posting lies about me to his Twitter account.

While this was going on, the Establishment was working behind the scenes with major tech firms to silence wrongthinkers such as myself. This was a consequence of the Christchurch Call.

I discovered that this had been happening when Google slashed traffic to the VJM Publishing company page by 75% overnight. Presumably Ardern had given them a list of New Zealand websites considered wrongthink, and Google had reached into their algorithm and given those websites a massive penalty. VJM Publishing traffic fell from around 200 hits a day to around 50. Over the next few years, before I stopped using Google products, it would fall to around five.

This was especially annoying as VJM Publishing had just released Clown World Chronicles, our best-selling book of all time, and the Google traffic to the Clown World Chronicles main page was the central plank of the marketing effort. This one move, more than any other, crippled my ability to make a living from speaking the truth.

Somehow the Establishment also recruited former Uruwera terrorist Rangi Kemara to do its dirty work harassing, stalking and slandering me. Kemara has clearly been given (or assumed) an agenda to associate me with neo-Nazism by adding this term before my name every time he gives his moronic followers an update on my activity.

As someone who has repeatedly criticised authoritarianism in all its forms – Nazi, Commie, Abrahamic, neoliberal – I can only assume this line of slander is being pursued because I am openly a nationalist. The VJM Publishing company page is full of essays and articles decrying war and authoritarianism, but it also features several arguing for the merits of nationalism and criticising globalism. It is for these latter reasons that I am so heavily targeted.

Almost as annoying as the loss of Google traffic to the VJM Publishing company page was when Byron Clark and friends were rewarded for their ongoing harassment and slander campaign. TradeMe finally caved to the bleating and removed Clown World Chronicles from sale (as well as the 2021 annual compilation of our best essays and articles).

Donna Carson, an “extremism researcher” at the notoriously Marxist-riddled Massey University, joined the pack attack against Clown World Chronicles, taking it upon herself to email TradeMe arguing for the book to be cancelled from sale.

The Police and academia are not the only weapons that the Establishment has been able to wield against me. They also have the mainstream media.

In 2023 I wrote an essay about provincialisation in New Zealand, and how it could potentially be the answer to the lack of human rights here. Tane Webster of Reality Check Radio read the article, was impressed, and arranged for an interview between me and Paul Brennan on RCR. The interview went well, the booking agent suggested I might come on once a month, and for a brief time there was a small amount of social media buzz.

At that point, mainstream media journalists launched their attack on me: a cancel campaign to have the interview taken down. Charlie Mitchell of The Press was the most prominent of these, using an article I wrote about Jewish opposition to hereditarianism as basis for a claim that I was (wait for it) anti-Semitic and therefore have no right to speak.

RCR soon folded, removing the interview from their website and ghosting me from all further email or social media contact.

All this is enough, by itself, to make me New Zealand’s most suppressed author and thinker. But perhaps the most shocking revelation of all came from the Police themselves, who revealed in an Offical Information Act response to Cameron Slater that they monitor the VJM Publishing website for potential wrongthink.

That’s right – the New Zealand Police spends money paying someone to read every essay or article that goes up on the VJM Publishing company page and to make a note of any counter-globalist sentiments that may be expressed. Any anti-immigration or anti-government sentiments are duly recorded (and presumably held on file against my name).

Why would the New Zealand Police take note of the fact that I “allege” that Muslims and Africans commit an enormous amount of violence and sex crimes wherever they go, an assertion that is borne out by law enforcement data from all over the Western World? Simple: noticing things is verboten. Only agreeing with my globalist masters is permissible.

In summary, I am monitored by the New Zealand Police, officers have been sent to my house to harass me, the Government teams up with major social media companies to restrict my reach, globalist activists work in packs to deplatform my books from TradeMe, terrorists on the Government payroll slander me all over the Internet, and mainstream journalists take to Twitter to cancel me from the alternative media.

All this yet I’ve never been arrested for a crime. This is all simply because I speak truth to power.

Never before has New Zealand produced an author or thinker who has attracted so much hate and aggression from the ruling class and their enforcers. I, VJM, your humble servant of truth, am the most dangerous man in New Zealand. This is for no other reason than because I take the side of the New Zealand people against their oppressors.

If you appreciate the risks I am taking to bring you the truth, then read my essays and articles, share my videos and buy my books, because they will kill me sooner or later.

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!