After New York

CULTURE

Empire State of Decline

By Librarian of Celaeno · June 26, 2026 · 5 min read

From the Hudson to the sea, the largely imported people have spoken, and with one pidgin-English voice have declared New York City to be the premier favela of the Northern Hemisphere. Faculty-lounge Chavistas have joined hands with coolie brown baristas to send a message to Donald Trump: there is no communist so committed to social devastation and militant tr00nery we won’t vote for if they/them promises us free stuff. It’s Curleyism as Curryism. What does it mean for the rest of the country?

Not much, really. As a Southerner, my experience of New York is the city being shoved in my face my whole life: endless TV shows, movies, magazine articles, all self-important. But New York has never been significant to my world, and its cultural relevance was a second-order effect of the finance class putting artistic gloss on the economic rape of the rest of the country. It’s the world headquarters of guilty rich liberalism, from where the terrible ideas of decadent kakocrats like mass immigration and state-sponsored criminals spread to infect the rest of America, which bows to whatever slop is sent its way.

Which is not to say New York has always been without merit. There is a lot to be grateful for: its incredible drive, its mercantile energy, and its material wealth really did represent America at its best. And New York did, at one time, have a class of parvenus who possessed genuine artistic discernment. The era of the Robber Barons resulted in the greatest cultural patronage since the days of the Medici. Art Deco and old Broadway were real collective achievements that still leave a mark.

The cultural artifacts of more contemporary New York, however, are almost wholly ephemeral, the products of an endless churn of unconnected peoples. The Knickerbockers were once something other than seven-foot-tall black athletic mercenaries whose camp followers gleefully sack the city after victories. The WASP New York of Wharton, Cheever, even Archie Bunker is now completely beyond the social memory of those who succeeded them; The Bonfire of the Vanities is set in a world now irrevocably lost, and it was set in the ’80s. The white ethnics of the city were purged to the suburbs when their betters decided they needed to be enriched by diversity. Jew York, the milieu from which emerged a host of brilliant comedians, novelists, and exploitative landlords, has had perhaps the hardest fall, having voted en masse to flood their city with people who long to pogrom them. Mamdanistan is then their greatest, and last, cultural contribution to the city.

The last gasp of larger relevance New York had was, sadly, the Marvel movies, a fantasy world created by Silent Gen and Boomers for a Gen X readership in which blond American super soldiers and gods from the Western canon could team up to defend an urban society that no longer exists. The heroes, even the ones from outer space, were American cultural types that now lack all verisimilitude. No art produced in New York today could have any relevance for wider heritage America. Captain Bodega just doesn’t land the same way.

Once the last Boomer dies, no one will play Sinatra anymore. The thousand permutations of Law and Order will go off the air once the real-life city has too few rich white people to serve as plausible fictional villains every week. Native son Theodore Roosevelt’s statue was removed from the museum he filled with dead animals for the edification of the masses he foresaw were already too foreign. The whiteness of Friends and Seinfeld is offensive to the mores of contemporary Big Apple tastemakers. New York publishing is already just an incestuous network of women publishing each other’s angry, pornographic MFA sludge. The list goes on, but the point stands. New York is sick of New York.

Of course, one might ask, “Well, if the city keeps replacing itself with foreigners through the mechanism of degenerate Jewish-flavored white self-loathing, who’s to say that the incoming diversity won’t just become America’s new cultural elite?” The answer is that the conditions simply aren’t in place anymore. Rich New Yorkers were once recognizably New Yorkers and Americans, and sought cultural integration and connection with the majority-white country that surrounded them. The ascendant class of New York, on the other hand, is low, resentful, and utterly hostile to the country in which they live.

They’ll certainly produce culture; indeed, one might posit that New York is now at the forefront of a new urban model, the Jhuggiopolis, or perhaps Miseria El Norte, a teeming mass of angry nonwhite clients presided over by a bloated class of still largely white managers, themselves controlled by neoliberal capitalist patrons who demonstrate status by being more fortified against the incursions of the lumpen Third World hordes than their peers. At the exact moment when it might lead the way with its resources and clout, New York has taken the exact opposite path: utter surrender to Globohomo.

It’s, of course, cosmically, ironically hilarious that the avatar of the Weltgeist manifesting against the weltschmerz of our mini Kali Yuga is Donald Trump, by any measure now the most successful New Yorker of all time, and the living embodiment of the spirit of the city at its best. Like Aeneas fleeing the sack of Troy carrying his household gods, Trump has decamped to Florida, bringing with him the dynamism, ruthless acquisitiveness, and gaudy imposition of will that make him the true heir to the Medici. New New York naturally hates him, because he’s everything the city no longer is (and perhaps never was).