Cardboard Boxes and Designer Lies

How Infantilization, Gangster Chic, and Drake’s Fake Hood Poison Culture

If you believe in the importance of free speech, subscribe to support uncensored, fearless writing—the more people who pay, the more time I can devote to this.

Please subscribe to receive at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $6 per month, less than USD 4. Now the button takes you to a two-week free trial.

Everyone says, "Hey, it’s just a cup of coffee," but please choose my coffee when you come to the Substack counter. Cheers.

I said I wouldn’t write this on eggshells, and I meant it. I am melanin‑deprived, Irish by ancestry, someone who has never had a tan in his life unless it came from a bottle. If being white supposedly disqualifies me from saying what follows, then so be it. If my pallor disqualifies me from speaking, then so be it; but gag rules on truth are the narrowest minds at work.

Of course, there is racism. Do we walk in another’s shoes? Can I deeply understand racism? Yes, no, and no. But the dose is the poison, and the agency‑destroying toxin of white and Black saviours alike is killing people; it’s infantilisation.

Take me—your bog‑standard white conservative male, generally oblivious to social cues even when they come with sirens and flashing lights. Yet even I can spot it when it slaps me across the face.

Once, with a Black friend at Costco, I was dressed (as my wife so delicately observes) “one rung above homeless,” while she looked immaculate and professional. At the exit, the receipt-checker lingered—silent presumption of criminality dripping from her gaze—as though my friend needed me, a shabby white escort, to validate her right to leave.

Even I noticed—and I’m the sort of man who could miss semaphore signals being brandished before my eyes. It was brutish, needless, and absurd.

Racism does exist. Sometimes as petty humiliation, sometimes as institutionalised contempt. Only a fool would deny it.

But here’s the rub: acknowledging racism doesn’t mean we must chug it by the gallon and declare it the origin of every societal ill. That’s what saviours do—white saviours, Black saviours, clipboard-toting social workers with infinite sympathy budgets. They don’t say “join a gang,” but they imply it—because if nothing is your fault, nothing is your responsibility. It’s poison served in a highball glass with a paper umbrella decorated with a gang insignia.

Let’s be honest—this isn’t limited to the pale. Plenty of Black activists, social workers and progressives peddle the same narcotic with an identical pious tone. The subtext reads: everything wrong is someone else’s doing. The result? A generation taught that unless someone else rescues them, they are irredeemable.

That isn’t compassion. It’s poison served as virtue.

We must define infantilization first: treating adults like children, exonerating them from responsibility because they allegedly cannot measure up to normal standards. Sure, with children, you recognise that moral culpability grows with age. You don’t treat a six‑year‑old the same as a sixteen‑year‑old.

But when entire subcultures are encouraged—by insiders and outsiders alike—to behave as if they permanently lack moral agency, that’s infantilization: the poison of “soft bigotry,” draped in pity but functioning as betrayal.

Infantilization is not mercy. It’s contempt masquerading as empathy.

And then there’s agency: the capacity to act, to assume responsibility, to believe in one’s own role in shaping life’s outcome. Strip that away and you strip away hope. When every misfortune is externalised, no ladder exists.

I saw this as a graduate student in Minneapolis. I interviewed a homeless man (or “unhoused,” to use the trendy euphemism) who insisted that not a single thing in his life was his fault. Not one. In that moment, I knew he had no future. Without agency, there is no escape.

And nowhere does the data sing more clearly than in the dismal arithmetic of fatherlessness. In 1960, just 22% of Black children in America were born outside of marriage. Today, that number hovers at 72%, a catastrophic inversion of norms within two generations. And here is the kicker: research from the U.S. Department of Justice shows that children from fatherless homes are five times more likely to live in poverty, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up incarcerated.

The statistical correlation between absent fathers and prison sentences is not speculation — it is as close to cause-and-effect as sociology ever gets. To pretend otherwise is an act of willful blindness.

And then there is the “don’t snitch” code — the cultural gag order that insists protecting killers is more authentic than protecting neighbours.

The FBI’s gang task force estimates that “no-snitching” norms obstruct investigations in over 40% of gang-related homicides in urban areas. The translation? Entire neighbourhoods turned over to the sovereign rule of teenagers with pistols. The excuse of fear — “we are afraid of retaliation” — is repeated like a mantra. But what is the result? A grandmother robbed at gunpoint, a shopkeeper shaken down, a child shot in a crossfire — and nobody testifies. To call that “fear” is to dignify cowardice. It is not fear, it is surrender.

And surrender is exactly what the culture then normalises.

What happens next? Looting justified as reparations. Mobs are told that “insurance will cover it” as stores are stripped bare. Except insurance does not cover it — it raises prices, drives shops into bankruptcy, and forces them to retreat to safer (read: whiter) suburbs. The community bleeds twice: first from crime, then from the exodus of commerce.

And yet this rot is marketed as cultural authenticity. “Don’t snitch” is not authenticity. It is abdication. It is the quiet announcement that criminals, not citizens, own the street. And when anyone dares to say this aloud, they are accused of racism. Nonsense.

Jamaican and Nigerian immigrants in the U.S. prove the point by outperforming the national average in education and income, precisely because they refused to swallow these poisonous myths. Culture, not colour, determines outcomes.

Now, behold the spectacle: the ‘rob mobs’. Chicago has become the stage for grotesque flash-theft theatre. Jean Valjean stole bread to feed his family. Today’s mobs—often fifty-plus teenage thieves—storm a store and strip $150,000 or more of merchandise in minutes. A single Louis Vuitton flash-raid netted $210,000 worth of handbags in just 26 seconds. In another instance, the same mob seized $150,000 worth of designer goods. Nationwide, retail thefts, including these “flash rob mobs”, cost retailers $45 billion in 2024.

Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread. Rob Mobs score six‑figure purse runs in twenty‑six seconds. This isn’t tragedy—it’s farce.

Where are the parents? The 13-year-old arrives home with $1,800 in yoga pants. Do they think retail elves delivered it? No—they shrug, they excuse it, or worse, they applaud their child’s “self-expression.” Good job, parents. Raise feral youth, watch them livestream thievery, then cry “systemic injustice” when the cops arrive.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s clearance rates for such robberies languish at about 10.8 percent—criminals know they’ll walk away scot-free while businesses haemorrhage. And soft-souled journalists label it “trauma,” “expression,” “resistance.” This is not social justice—it is normalised barbarism.

Let’s talk numbers. Black Americans are 13 percent of the population but account for around 40 percent of the prison population. That is often wielded as “proof of systemic racism.” A fair system would ostensibly reflect population parity. But prison is where family breakdown and cultural detachment converge. And as always, poverty.

Look instead to success where culture has ascended. African immigrants in the U.S.—Nigerians, Ghanaians—have higher median earnings and college attainment than most white Americans. Caribbean Canadians graduate from high school at higher rates and earn near the national median. In contrast, native-born Black Americans average around $45K, compared to $65K for Whites and $70K+ for Asians. Culture, not pigmentation, is the simpler variable.

Culture is the differentiator, not melanin.

And lies can collapse neighbourhoods faster than crime ever will. In one Chicago incident, a suspect was shot after refusing to drop a gun. Yet mob mentality, fueled by social media, turned it into a lie: an innocent victim gunned down by Black and white police.

The mother of this gunman was filmed wailing that her boy was innocent even as the weapon lay in evidence, and her son became a minor martyr on the evening news.

Black Lives Matter vultures swooped in, croaking the script: the police are liars, the thug was a saint, the neighbourhood is the victim. The truth — that he had a gun and refused to drop it — dissolves in the acid of grievance theatre. At BLM urging, furious looting followed; entire blocks were depleted, and shops fled to safer suburbs. Meanwhile, the myth outlived the truth.

Tell me, would that happen in a tight-knit Jewish neighbourhood? Realistically? No. Not because Jews haven’t suffered—but because their cultural script rejects grievance as a virtue. Culture, not skin tone, determines durability.

More data: among Hispanics, only 64 percent of Spanish-dominant immigrants save regularly, versus 88 percent for their English-dominant counterparts. Black and Hispanic households spend around 30 percent more on conspicuous goods than White households. Savings? Under $2,000. Whites? Over $8,000.

The watchdogs will howl “systemic racism,” but it may well be a cultural pattern that values flashy living over thrift.

In Appalachia, overdose deaths for 25–54-year-olds are 60 percent above the national average, not merely a byproduct of poverty, but cultural resignation. In Portugal, immigrant neighbourhoods show sharply higher dropout rates. Among some Russian-heritage communities, education is lionised in rhetoric but fatalistically devalued in practice. These are cultural scripts, not genetic destiny.

Add rap culture: glorifying violence, drug dependency, contempt for women—not resistance, but regression, wrapped in beats. It sells billions to suburban white kids cosplaying a form of pain that strips them of discipline.

Then there’s Drake: raised in Toronto’s affluent Forest Hill, selling “hardship” while singing about teenage breakups like it’s prison ballads—a Savvy marketer, not a hood hero.

Drake’s struggle was a Shoppers Drug Mart shift. This isn’t the hood; it’s the food court with Muzak.

Worse: his imitation has become aspirational. Dentist kids, physician kids now wear cardboard-box survivor capes, declaring they are “just like the hood.” Fraud as fashion.

And then there is perhaps the ugliest racism of all—the racism of low expectations, now dignified with a tenured smirk as “white supremacy culture.”

Yes, in the gleaming halls of academia, entire workshops and “equity” manuals insist that virtues like punctuality, clarity of speech, grammatical competence, study habits, and basic human decency are not universal but somehow “white.”

To show up on time, to speak clearly, to write with precision, to work diligently, to avoid impregnating your girlfriend at fifteen—these, we are told, are “white traits.”

The implication drips with condescension: that the “authentic Black experience” is to be perpetually late, inarticulate, impulsive, criminally inclined, oversexed, and incapable of functioning in a modern society. And this grotesque parody is dressed up as empathy. David Duke couldn’t have said it better.

Imagine the smugness required to believe you are advancing racial justice by peddling the same stereotypes once hawked by Jim Crow bigots, only now wrapped in gender-neutral PowerPoint slides. This is not progress—it is regression masquerading as virtue. It doesn’t just insult—it sabotages. For if you tell young Black students that diligence, punctuality, and articulacy are “white,” you are all but shoving them into the arms of gangs and criminals, where “authenticity” means violence, flash, and prison.

What these hubristic professors are really saying is that Black excellence is alien to Blackness.

What an abomination. In truth, these are not “white” virtues—they are human virtues, civilisational virtues, the virtues by which Nigerians, Jamaicans, Indians, Jews, Chinese, and countless others have climbed educational ladders and built thriving communities.

It is a racist caricature dressed up as cultural sensitivity.

It’s peddled in schools and universities, often by lily-white professors ensconced in their gated communities, far from the gritty realities they presume to lecture about, spouting this poisonous drivel from tenured perches funded by the very system they decry.

How destructive it is: it chains young Blacks to underachievement, glorifies victimhood over victory, and ensures that the cycle of poverty and despair spins on, all while these academic charlatans pat themselves on the back for their “allyship.” To call them “white” is to steal from young Blacks the very keys to their own success, and to baptise failure as authenticity. It is not solidarity. It is sabotage, sanctified with academic jargon.

As Hitchens once put it, “Moral equivalence between victim and aggressor is the mask worn by cowardice.” Here we see something even worse: moral inversion dressed as allyship. And pity the students who mistake this poison for empowerment.

Enter BLM: the NGO transformation turning tragedy into rentier capitalism—George Floyd’s death funded real estate purchases for its founders. Despair, not corruption, is its greatest crime. They trumpet police-racist narratives while downplaying Black-on-Black violence: annually, fewer than 15 unarmed Black men are killed by police versus thousands murdered within their own communities.

Hopelessness is their product. It says: You are destined for doom, so why try? And while America wallows in supposed endemic white supremacy, consider this: in Libya, Black Africans are sold openly in slave markets; in Gaza, Black migrants are called “slaves.” Yet we perform endless moral penance in North America. Racism is universal; reducing it to America’s original sin is indulgence.

The rot is universal. Appalachia has its own “don’t snitch” gangster code. Hispanic barrios are stained by MS-13 indoctrination of children. Asian-American gangs exist too—quiet but real. Every culture can decay from within. Every culture has destructive subcultures. The Palestinian culture is fixated on an external locus of control that begins and ends with “all our problems are because of those Jews.”

And the through-line is infantilization. Leaders prefer “It’s not your fault” applause lines. But that strips responsibility— it strips hope.

But not all cultures slump. The Caribbean and Nigerian diasporas outperform in areas such as family stability, education, thrift, and community cohesion. They demonstrate that racism can be resisted through culture. It’s not immunity—it’s agency.

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” —Thomas Sowell.

BLM, Drake, and the infantilizers of every hue tell people what they want to hear. It presses applause buttons, sells clicks, and builds careers. But it ruins lives. A civilisation cannot survive on excuses. It cannot endure infantilization.

Subcultures must confront their own sins—or perish by them. And pity those whose leaders—whether in NGOs, government, or pop culture—choose to profit from despair rather than responsibility.

If you found value in this article and wish to support my ongoing work, please consider leaving a tip. Your support helps me continue producing uncensored content on critical issues.