I’ve really been enjoying posting more on Substack. I’ve noticed, however, that the Substack timeline is pretty dead. I assume most people are just temporarily commuting from other social media platforms and don’t even think to use Substack in this way, even though most of the functionality is there. It’s also a little bit opaque how to get other peoples’ posts to reliably show up on your feed (I often see posts from months ago).

I’m going to remedy this and further reunite our scattered forces by instituting a Follow Friday. If you’re a paid subscriber, sound off in the comments below. I will be following everyone who replies and I encourage you all to follow each other as well.

It’s pretty easy to follow someone, just open their profile, click the three dots to the right, and select it from the dropdown menu. This is separate from the normal “Subscribe” feature.

I really do enjoy the discussions you guys have in the (paid exclusive) comments section, I’m hoping we can replicate this at a larger scale. Where we grove one, we grove all. See you guys in the comments section below.

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The defining characteristic of these networks, and why they were able to gain so much support from many naive people who had been outspoken Trump supporters in the past, is that they claim to be attacking Trump “from the Right”: They agree with you. They know all the based things to say. They might have even been around for a long time. Their only humble request, their only noble goal, is that they want more of the good things that Trump promised to deliver in 2024 and 2020 and 2016.

Whenever you point out that a criticism is not fair or that what they’re reacting to isn’t even real, these bad faith critics will pretend it is a sign that you just didn’t care about an issue as much as they do. This is usually followed by an oft-repeated but demonstrably untrue claim about something the Trump admin did or didn’t do.

I’m sure every one of you has had an argument like this before by this point, maybe even with someone who used to be fine and who you otherwise generally agree with.

One of the biggest mistakes I see well-meaning people make is treating this kind of argument like an actual debate. When someone comes at you like this, you’re not actually discussing Trump’s immigration policy or whatever anymore, you’re discussing how they feel. You can’t argue someone out of a feeling.

What people are often doing when they lie to your face or act unreasonably is trying to display control over you: “I can make you discuss something that isn’t even real. I choose what we talk about and when.” “I can do bad stuff and I bet you won’t do anything about it. You can’t do anything about it, actually, because I’ve got all these other people on my side who have my back.” Others are just building a case against you to justify their existing feelings, with nothing you say or do affecting their predetermined conclusion.

Again, it’s important to get out of argument or debate mode when you encounter this behavior. If someone lies all the time, you can’t have a real discussion with them. If someone is actually just trying to make you lose and put your enemies in power, it’s unproductive to litigate whatever point they’re making: You already know where they’re always going to end up and some things should never be acceptable to you.

Would you argue with a male-to-female transexual over whether or not they were a woman? Do you think that you’d both make good points and present your evidence and reach a better understanding of the issue together, like you might in a normal argument? No. They’re delusional and have a big network of people to fall back on to support their delusions. There is pretty much nothing that you can say as an individual in a debate to alter that dynamic with them.

Even engaging in this kind of word game, acknowledging the underlying premises as valid and accepting the issue as an open question, is only going to mislead outside observers. Sometimes you’re smarter for the arguments you don’t bother to have. The only way to win is often not to play.

I think what American conservatives want far more than for their leaders to reach a common understanding with the popular figures who constantly accuse them of treason, betrayal, sabotage, whatever, is for them to lead and make it clear that this is not how people are going to act if they want to stay in our circles. Many conservatives will claim that they want you to surrender to their demands when they actually just want you to be strong and win.

What does setting these boundaries mean in practice? Well, you shouldn’t just go around disavowing people because the media asks you to. President Trump perfected the response to this kind of trap: “If you tell me to jump, I’m never going to do it. You can’t make me do anything. I’m in charge, not you.” You also should always be open to well informed and good faith criticism, even if it’s harsh.

At the same time, pretending there’s still a genuine internal political disagreement occurring with the people who act in these ways all the time is contributing to the problems they cause.

A lot of people on the Left were really happy to announce the outbreak of the “MAGA Civil War” and want to draw it out for as long as possible. They’re going to keep asking about it. Every mixed answer, “I disagree about this or that but…” however reasonable and well-crafted it might seem, only raises more questions. At the end of the day you are going to have to admit that there’s not an actual conversation occurring anymore. There are not two sides to these debates.

Vice President JD Vance was recently asked about his relationship with Tucker Carlson at a press conference. Although Vance has been a great Vice President and I’m going to be happy to support him as the Republican nominee in 2028, I think he gave what’s going on now too much credit.

I’ve mentioned the concept of land acknowledgements several times before. It’s an old meme at this point: Libtards would have to begin every meeting by saying they live on stolen land. It sounded ridiculous and undermined whatever followed. It moved attention away from whatever was actually important about these events and towards a ritual that didn’t mean much at the end of the day.

“I refuse to disavow” has become just another land acknowledgement for the Right. You can make reasonable criticism of someone’s behavior without mentioning your personal relationship at all. In fact, you should if it’s necessary.

We have our private lives and our public lives. Vance and Carlson’s private relationship is no one’s business but theirs. One of the best moments of Singapore’s longtime Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was when he coolly shut down a reporter’s questions about his wife. In Western countries we’ve gotten kind of used to invasive throwaway questions and answers like that. We don’t really need to hear about these things. In fact, hearing about them can be a distraction.

The real thing people are concerned about with Carlson is his public behavior: He’s saying things that aren’t true in order to hurt our electoral chances in the upcoming midterms, in effect working to put Democrats in power.

It’s not subtle what someone is trying to accomplish when they claim that immigration enforcement in the United States has shut down at a time when we’ve actually hit all-time highs of immigration arrests for three months in a row.

It’s not subtle what someone is trying to do when they say the Trump administration is barely doing anything about anti-white discrimination when actually it’s done far more to tackle the problem than any of its predecessors since the issue first emerged.

This isn’t a political debate occurring here, with two equally valid sides that you should weigh and carefully evaluate. This isn’t like “I know we disagree about tax policy but we can still be friends.” There’s no disagreement in a traditional sense: The things Tucker is saying are not based in reality and I doubt he believes them in any meaningful way. There are many figures who have been acting in this way for years now and are still bizarrely treated as genuine participants in political discourse.

Some of the biggest names in conservative media did the “I refuse to disavow” dance with Candace Owens for months after Charlie Kirk was murdered. Owens’s behavior only got worse and the attacks on Erika Kirk and Charlie Kirk’s friends at TPUSA escalated into one of the most disgraceful public spectacles in recent memory. Many conservative figures were laughing all the way to the bank as this was going on.

From the very beginning people should have been pushing back hard against these lies instead of talking about Ben Shapiro and cancel culture and “my friend Candace is such a nice person.” I don’t want to hear about any of that stuff when there’s a big immediate problem that’s getting worse. It was a distraction from real issues.

After a certain point you have to rip the Band-Aid off. You don’t have to performatively condemn someone and everything they ever did or write them off forever or endorse people who hate you and might be doing similar things but for the wrong reasons. You should just say, for yourself and everyone who is counting on you, what’s actually important: “This is not real and it’s not OK.” That’s the only thing people should be hearing about this stuff.

I think it’s really important that everyone stop tolerating bad faith attacks and bad faith people. These behaviors and these figures are not really part of our thing. It’s all so vestigial now, like an appendix that burst but hasn’t been removed yet. I think part of the reason “discourse” in “the scene” got so bad is that when some participants made it clear they weren’t trying to achieve good outcomes or working within reality anymore, others kept engaging like there was still a normal conversation occurring. It was like watching a disease spread.

Knock on wood, but I think the tide genuinely is turning against this stuff. What these people have been saying is too obviously fake and the people who have been saying it are too obviously damaged. Not only has President Trump not forgotten his promises to the base, he’s delivering on them in bigger ways than ever before. Everyone who has been predicting that the sky was going to fall for the last two years straight has been proven totally wrong. Lots of unreliable people who were only casually engaging with politics are getting bored and moving on to other stuff, others unable to cope with the constant twists of fate have become very stupid and discredited themselves.

Cultural moments of lies, panic, and paranoia are not sustainable for very long. The trash always ends up taking itself out and the cream always rises back to the top. I am seeing a lot of new clarity and focus as we enter the final sprint to the midterms and I think that’s only going to become more noticable.

Americans need to win and love a winner. Despite the noise online, there is not a huge constituency for the people who are trying to make us lose. We actually outnumber them by a lot. I think it’s well past time to move beyond these discourse cycles and these people. It’s time to step over it all. Trump won, we don’t have to do this anymore.

I decided to make last year’s True Detective Season 2 episode free for a limited time just to give our unfortunate free subscribers a sample of what the “bread and butter” episodes of the podcast are like. I recommend turning the playback speed up to 1.5x or 2x to make things a bit more listenable.

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As always, I strongly recommend upgrading to a paid subscription, we have a lot of cool new paid-exclusive content on the way.

We recently finished half of a group readthrough of Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel and will be kicking off the second half shortly. The book club episodes are some of my favorite content that I’ve done on Substack so far, it really is a lot of fun to go through the book again with the high human capital that has accumulated in our beautiful paid-exclusive comments section.

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 1: Always with Honor Chapters 1-3

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 2: Always with Honor Chapters 4-6

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 3: Always with Honor Chapters 7-9

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As someone who is interested in the Russian Revolution, I’m happy that the DSA threat is being treated with the gravity it deserves. There is no such thing as a moderate socialist. In victory, at best these people will meekly stand aside as all the horrors of historical communism are inflicted on Americans, though they are more likely to join in on these horrors from the get-go. However, as someone who has also been subjected to decades of not very convincing arguments against communism from conservatives, I’m worried that many still fundamentally misunderstand the threat and how to respond to it.

Below you’ll find a few principles for how to make the argument against communism and its avatars in the surging DSA.

1. Avoid theoretical arguments, talk about quality of life

The #1 mistake I see people make is trying to rehash ineffective theoretical arguments against communism from previous decades. People think they have to say these things because that’s how it’s been done for so long. These slogans are played out at this point. The public (and especially young people) has learned to just roll its eyes. It’s correctly perceived as part of a bit.

Conservatives are simply not trusted on issues like inequality or health care or whatever: Commie this, commie that, it doesn’t land anymore. That’s the reason that leftwingers always try to push these issues to the center stage. It doesn’t matter that leftwingers do not offer real solutions to these problems and usually only make them far worse.

If you’re in charge, people expect you to fix their problems. Republicans are nominally in charge, but they have not yet fixed all of Americans’ problems. There’s a lot of fair and unfair criticism to go around about who is truly to blame for this, but the reality at the end of the day is that the people are going to hold you responsible. Rehashing old arguments about free markets and private property and the failures of socialized medicine only serves to antagonize those who feel the system as-is doesn’t work for them. Vice President JD Vance gave a really good statement on this phenomenon:

When you’re engaged in anticommunism in 2026 America, you should resist the urge to get into a big argument about whatever leftwingers are talking about. Republicans are going to have to fix the things that trouble Americans through public policy in the real world, not through debates with leftwingers online. I can’t tell you how stupid it is that anyone, on any faction of the Right, is arguing about the price of burritos. You are dumping gasoline on the fire and making it more likely that we will lose and then be unable to actually solve these problems. Stop talking.

Affordability seems to be getting better in some ways. The systemic dysfunction and decline that the American economy has experienced are slowly being reversed and replaced with something more sustainable. Still, there are a lot of issues remaining that are going to take a long time to fix. That’s why leftwingers are making these things the topic of public discussion: These are not problems that can be solved, at least in meaningful or noticeable ways, in the next 70ish days before the election.

If you make these problems the main topic of discussion, you are implying that you can fix them in that amount of time, and when you inevitably fail or underdeliver voters will come to dislike and distrust you. Worse, when right-wingers talk about these issues, they often begin minimizing them or denying that the problems even exist, making themselves and everyone even tangentially associated with their views widely hated. I know that a lot of my sympathy towards leftism as a younger person was motivated by the obnoxious behavior and pigheadedness of many conservative figures.

There are lots of things that leftwingers don’t want to talk about. You should ONLY talk about these things. Fight where you’re strongest.

The one good development to come out of the Biden administration is that in recent memory everyone got to see what rule by the Far Left actually looked like. No one thought that President Biden was in charge of his government. The adults were not in the room; that was never an option. It was radical young leftwing staffers given free rein. These people have only gotten crazier since losing much of their power.

What did they do with their limited time at the wheel? They let criminals out of jail, they openly discriminated against the majority population, they corrupted the system and used institutions that were designed to make Americans’ lives better to make them worse. I don’t think that we’ve ever experienced more immediate and visible quality of life decline than in the Biden years. Everyone felt it. It was impossible not to notice when you went outside.

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This is not unusual or unprecedented. It is perfectly in line with the historical behavior of communists. The Russian Revolution was followed by the mass release of street criminals and the effective legalization of robbery. The early Soviet Union implemented a system of minority empowerment that was an obvious precursor of modern affirmative action policies: The everyday well-to-do Russian was regarded as the true enemy of society, the criminals and government officials victimizing him were seen as merely correcting social injustice. This is how these people have always conceptualized these things; it’s not a modern quirk of out-of-touch blue haired college students. The City of St. Petersburg, former capital of the Russian Empire, did not have garbage collection for 3 years after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. It was not a priority. Between unlivable conditions, crime, and starvation the city lost nearly 70% of its population after the Bolshevik seizure of power.

The good news is that the Trump administration has made its biggest gains in the areas where leftwingers are weakest. Socialist candidates like Abdul El-Sayed are on video saying that they want to defund the police. Virtually every socialist candidate with a public profile around 2020 is on record supporting this policy. This is not a popular view; people know that it means making their lives worse in immediate and tangible ways. In 2025 “defund the police” only had support from 18% of Americans, that number is probably even lower now.

Reversing “defund the police” has worked: The murder rate in America is at its lowest in recorded history. Violent crime had its biggest annual drop in 90 years. Republicans’ policies have successfully made people’s lives better. Thousands of lives were saved. Democrats are on record saying they want to undo all of this progress.

Hammering this real-world issue is going to be a lot more effective than debating about socialized medicine or whatever. In fact, it’s far easier for Democrats to argue in favor of a theoretically more responsive healthcare system or more fair tax regime that no one in America 2026 has lived under than it is for them to argue in favor of the liberal criminal justice policies which they all support that everyone just experienced and knows they don’t like. Do not let these people escape into theory.

Television star Spencer Pratt attracted national attention with his longshot bid in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. Pratt ran as an Independent and often used overt anti-communist rhetoric because incumbent mayor Karen Bass was a member of a communist youth group. Pratt did a very good job drilling down on communism not as an unjust economic system that goes against humanity’s natural tendencies, but as one that stole public funds in order to make a major quality of life problem, Los Angeles’s out of control homeless population, worse. That’s what people should associate with communism. It’s not an unfair criticism. That’s their economic system in a nutshell: A homeless guy who should be in jail taking a shit in front of your house and then shooting up with drug needles that you overpaid for with your tax dollars, with the police devoting more attention to your Twitter posts than this obvious problem.

It’s easier for normal people to engage with the idea of communism as quality of life decline because the concept seems new. When you approach problems from a novel perspective, people feel like they’re learning something. Although Pratt ultimately wasn’t successful in winning in Los Angeles (likely due to fraud or political machine behavior indistinguishable from fraud), this approach is going to reach a lot more voters across the country than performative rehashes of rhetoric from previous Red Scares.

2. Lean into identity issues

Another positive development of the mass hysteria that America experienced in and around 2020 is that most high-profile liberals are on record saying that they hate America and white people, America’s majority population. This is the consensus position of the people steering the modern communist movement. The official DSA platform today, right now, calls for abolishing the Senate, prisons, and America’s constitutional order. Abdul El-Sayed openly campaigned in his Senate primary with Hasan Piker, a Far-Left streamer who endorsed “impoverishing the white middle class.” Everyone knows that leftwing politics today translate to attacking America and white people.

The Trump administration has made enormous progress towards ending anti-white discrimination in government, schools, and the workplace. This is a winning issue that Republicans should do more to highlight, it makes people’s lives better in a tangible and immediate way. Above all else, Americans want their system to be fair and work well. I strongly suspect that even most non-white Americans would object to anti-white policies if confronted solely with the real-world outcomes of them: Less qualified emergency responders, endemic fraud, general public dysfunction. At the very least, I think a significant factor in widespread anti-white sentiment over the last few years was the belief that white people were weak, declining, and refused to even take their own side. The Trump administration is changing this perception through public policy, which makes it a lot easier for everyone to start being reasonable again.

America is the ultimate meritocratic nation. It still stands for things that people generally admire and think are good. There are reasons that billions of people want to come here: They want to benefit from the American system and to live and work around Americans.

As various failed Far-Right movements have discovered: It is difficult to convince Americans, particularly the Americans who vote the most, to hate America. If you make push come to shove, most white people will choose not to hate themselves. If there are realistic and socially acceptable options to do something different, they’ll pick them. These stances are not viable in normal politics and people who openly hold them have inherently limited shelf-lives.

The DSA is running on an anti-white and anti-American platform. Its figureheads dress up as foreign communist leaders. They talk about how America deserves terrorism and wealth redistribution. Some of their relatives actually directly facilitate terrorism. Pretty much every socialist candidate who we need to beat is on record saying they plan to fuck up your neighborhood, that they hate white people, and that they want to in effect destroy America. If they aren’t on record saying some variation of these things, they are certain to have close ties to people who are.

This is easy to run against if you actually bother to run against it directly rather than try to engage with it in a dialogue. If someone were trying to burn down your house, if they hate you for who you are, would you argue with them about their political views? No. Would you hand it to them whenever they made a good point? No, of course not. DSA candidates have enormous vulnerabilities when you simply refuse to engage in a bad faith debate with someone who ultimately wants to destroy you.

Republicans aren’t trusted on a bunch of important issues. The Trump administration and Republicans are going to have to solve these problems no matter what, but they’re never going to actually solve them by arguing with the DSA. The overtly anti-white and anti-American stance of the DSA offers a convenient excuse to end the debate: Why would you discuss internal problems with someone who should be branded an external enemy? That’s the case that you should be trying to make, and these people have already made it for you.

3. Always, forever, attack from a position of strength and legitimacy

Power is charismatic. I think the claims of hypocrisy that conservatives often level against DSA candidates, many of whom are children of wealth and privilege, are not very effective. If you point out that someone is rich and well-educated, it makes them seem powerful. Everyone wants that life for themselves and their children. Furthermore, if you are showing people an even mildly attractive young woman and say: “Look at this spoiled brat!” Don’t be surprised when her approval doesn’t decline and a bunch of people just end up wanting to have sex with her instead. All that attention will make her seem more important and therefore powerful.

The DSA is achieving relative popularity today, especially among young people, for the same reasons that the Alt Right did in 2015: People keep claiming that it’s very dangerous and taking over, the theoretical arguments against it from establishment types usually aren’t very persuasive, strong personalities and resolute postures naturally dominate discourse no matter what is actually being said, there is a seemingly unending stream of young-ish internet sluts tied to the movement. Although people constantly underestimate how limited the utility of the incentive structures and outcomes that these kinds of movements produce ends up being for real world politics, in short windows these things can be forces to be reckoned with.

As Scott Greer laid out in his recent book Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America many of the good ideas from the Alt Right eventually found their way into mainstream Republican politics while many of the bad ideas and noxious personalities associated with them were flushed.

The relative sophistication of the DSA as an actual political entity when compared to the Alt Right makes the DSA both more dangerous and more vulnerable: They can directly influence real world politics in a way the Alt Right never could have, but this influence also magnifies the problems that made the Alt Right unpopular with the public and easy to snuff out into cataclysmic proportions. They can’t flush.

Conservatives often mishandle this kind of threat/opportunity moment by adopting a victim mindset: The main argument quickly becomes that if the scary and strong communists take power then they will kill us, and that would be bad.

Although if communists took power they would no doubt kill a lot of us and in at least a few cases that would be bad, this is not a compelling argument. For starters, many people are naturally going to sympathize with the strong and important person doing the killing in this kind of hypothetical. Also, telling people that the enemy is all powerful and the world is about to end usually does not motivate them to fight harder, it makes them depressed and passive.

We need to make people enthusiastic and active: The problem has to be big enough to merit attention but not so big that it appears impossible to solve. In fact, this conflict is not a setback or last stand, it’s an opportunity for you to do big things.

For something like the Michigan Senate race, the line should not be that candidates like Abdul El-Sayed are unusually charismatic, uniquely dangerous, represent the opening stages of the 2nd American Civil War or an Islamist takeover or whatever. The line should be that Abdul El-Sayed is an unusually vulnerable candidate: People aren’t buying what he’s selling. He’s a ridiculous figure. He’s like 4’11. He might have killed a bunch of dogs. Many of his family members directly or indirectly support terrorism. He has to issue weak condemnations of people who he just embraced. He still does the trans kid meme.

Radical DSA candidates obtaining remarkable success in primaries is not a sign the Democrat Party is rejuvenating itself after being soundly rejected by Americans in 2024, it’s a sign that the Democrat Party is collapsing and liberals have maybe a decade of internal disputes to (perhaps literally) kill each other over before they can coalesce into something that might win national elections again.

The Michigan Senate race is a chance to pick up a Senate seat in a swing state, which would allow Republicans to better implement policies that voters want to see. A lot of people online complain about “the judges” blocking Trump’s agenda, and the Senate approves new judges. People complain about do-nothing Republicans all the time. Razor-thin legislative margins mean that what they’re usually complaining about is not anything that Trump is or is not doing, but rather two or three holdouts blocking some important measure. Bigger margins for Republicans mean less power for obstructionists.

American politics have been at a deadlock for a long time. Every election is the most important in history. Every defeat seems like it could be permanent. The constant stress is not healthy. The rise of the DSA and collapse of the Democratic Party offers the unique opportunity to create a 60-40 situation, which could easily transform into a larger preference cascade.

Have any of the mainstream Democrat candidates who beat or were beaten by their DSA challengers in the recent brutal primary campaigns felt the need to actually separate themselves from their opponents afterwards? No, they feel like they have to embrace the people who bitterly were attacking them just the day before. Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat far more representative of the average Democrat voter than her primary opponent El-Sayed, was having to cancel events due to DSA hecklers for safety reasons and then comes out in support of the DSA candidate the next day. That crazy Wong woman in Wisconsin who narrowly lost her race? Her mainstream opponent is having a “unity breakfast” with her the very next day.

These guys aren’t willing to get rid of their internal enemies, who are openly running on destroying and replacing them. Maybe they just can’t get rid of them. In other words, Democrats are surrendering to socialism. Is someone who surrenders powerful? Is their party worthy of support in an election? I don’t think so.

You need square-jawed former FBI Agent Mike Rogers to deal with the Abduls of the world, not mainstream Democrats like Haley Stevens who will meekly vote for him after months of bitter attacks. If you can’t represent yourself as the strong horse, don’t expect anyone else to support you.

The ascendency of the DSA in the Democratic Party offers Republicans an opportunity to truly seize the mantle of legitimacy in American politics. There’s this external force, communism, that is openly threatening to radically restructure our society. They want to steal your stuff and kill you. The people behind it often even have foreign names and backgrounds. Only we can stop them. If we play our cards right, we might be able to politically cripple our enemies for decades and give our country time to actually heal itself.

Of course, we have to actually play our cards in order for this to work. Nothing happens unless people make it happen. I strongly recommend Sean McMeekin’s pop-history To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall of Communism. Although the lifespan of modern communism was only a historical flash in the pan, less than 100 years, it caused billions in deaths and radically restructured the world for the worse. It’s remarkable how much of the spread of this cancer was fueled by the passivity of the overwhelming majority who would be harmed by these policies but found an excuse to do nothing instead of fighting back. Jack Posobiec is coming out with a new edition of Unhumans his history of socialist revolutions, with additional chapters on how to actually stop this spread. More people are waking up to the threat than ever before.

There are a lot of dumb ideas circulating rightwing discourse that might have seemed interesting a decade ago that now obviously lead people to harmful conclusions. There is no need or room for more debate. It’s not going to be destroying democracy or the Constitution that gets us out of this mess. We’re not going to save our country by breaking it into a bunch of smaller failed states. Getting angry at your phone, voting for Democrats, or shooting up the grocery store are not going to improve the situation for you or anyone else.

Victory was always going to be a grinding process. Problems decades in the making are going to take years to solve. In my Election Night 2024 essay, I predicted that America would experience a systemic challenge in 2035 with a real chance of overturning our system. I still think that’s the case. The question is, when opportunities present themselves, will our people see them clearly enough, will our people have the resources and infrastructure prepared, and will our people have the wherewithal to actually seize them?

I am, as always, optimistic. I think our victory is necessary and good and that this is something we can and will bring into existence. This necessarily means leaving behind strategies and rhetoric that have run their course for better things. I hope this piece helps you do that in some way.

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According to DataRepublican, she was invited to an influencer outreach event on Cuba issues where she was passed government documents by Rogers. The documents, which related to a previously obscure government program designed to tackle international censorship that was transformed by the Biden administration into a tool to censor American rightwingers on the internet, bore markings that indicated they were not for public consumption.

DataRepublican posted part of her text exchange with Rogers about the documents:

It’s pretty obvious that Rogers was trying to give DataRepublican, an independent journalist who had previously been known as friendly to the Trump admin’s efforts to expose Biden era political censorship, an exclusive story that related to her interests. Declassified documents often still have classification markings. There was no reason to assume that a journalist would be punished for publishing this kind of information, in fact it appears to be a standard practice. If anything improper occurred relating to the documents, it would have been Rogers, rather than DataRepublican, who would have been held criminally responsible.

I am almost certain that DataRepublican reached the conclusion she was being set up because she asked Grok a series of leading questions. Why she felt the need to do this is beyond me: Why would the Trump administration be trying to set up a friendly journalist? Why would Rogers behave in such an underhanded way knowing that the set-up would be immediately traced back to her?

DataRepublican spent the entire night attacking Rogers’ character and spreading accusations that were ridiculous on their face. DataRepublican’s account has been boosted by Musk himself in the past, the false accusations got millions of views. The hysteria was spurred on by a chorus of populist rightwing influencers who spawn out of nowhere with hundreds of thousands of followers on Elon Musk’s Twitter.

In the clear light of day, DataRepublican seems to have backed off her allegations somewhat. However, I decided to write this piece because DataRepublican’s most recent statement on the controversy convinced me that she’s going to do this sort of thing again, and that the attempts to make peace here are ultimately harmful.

Does DataRepublican at any point in the statement above admit that she was wrong? No. Does she at any point apologize to Rogers, who was only trying to help her, for accusing her of conspiring to throw her in jail? No. The non-apology reads like it was written by AI. It’s not going to persuade anyone that the original claims weren’t true, which is what would actually repair the damage this incident caused.

Although DataRepublican claimed she was going to delete her original thread, she seems to have very pointedly failed to delete her false accusations and the defective arguments behind them.

Rogers is behaving graciously after DataRepublican backed off and there are a lot of new calls for unity from other figures. I think this is ultimately the wrong approach.

I think everyone takes the wrong approach to these now-constant blowups from rightwing influencers. DataRepublican was offered a friendly gesture from a friendly government official, fundamentally misinterpreted it, made the worst assumptions about its intent, leaked private messages, blasted out ridiculous allegations for hours, and then after these allegations collapsed failed to directly acknowledge wrongdoing (What does “I do regret making it a public spectacle before it was understood, and pulling people I respect into the swirl” even mean?).

DataRepublican’s account is monetized; she actually made money by creating this problem out of thin air.

It’s time to stop accepting this behavior from these people. You don’t need to be mean, you don’t need to have crazy retaliation, you don’t need to write someone off forever, but when people do things like this you need to stop treating them like they’re still on the team. No, we can’t all just get along: If you act like this, you’re going to have to do it somewhere else.

Have any of the influencers who spread the obviously fake claim that the Trump admin was abandoning efforts to deport Temporary Protective Status recipients admitted that what they said was not true? No, they moved on to the next lie and the next lie after that.

The problem is that when push comes to shove, most people on the Right have learned to just tolerate intolerable behavior. I no longer blame the big figures who do this stuff, I blame the people who should know better but continue to reward these characters with money, access, collaboration, and support. Where do our biggest problems come from? Such people let them in the front door again and again and again. It has to stop. These networks need to not exist.

I’ve probably written too much about the unending demoralization campaign that’s going on in online spaces. There’s big money going in and out of it and no reason for these people to stop. I decided to not reactivate my Twitter account because I didn’t think there was much else to say about it.

The people who need to will either get it or they won’t. Pretending like there’s still meaningful discourse occurring gives what’s happening now way too much credit. We don’t need these figures to fix our problems. In fact, if we want any hope of success, we need everyone to move beyond them and onto something else.

I am extremely happy to present the 3rd entry in our book club episodes on the book Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel. In my humble opinion, the first and second book club episodes are still some of the best in this podcast’s history. You can listen to the previous episodes below:

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 1: Always with Honor Chapters 1-3

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 2: Always with Honor Chapters 4-6

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The paid subscribers did a really good job on their responses to the discussion prompts this time around. I’ve featured some of my favorites below, but I strongly encourage you to go back to the original discussion post to see for yourself. There are tons of great content in the replies, this is probably my favorite project that we’ve done on this Substack so far.

Featured discussion prompt responses below:

1. Talk about Wrangel’s actual description of the retreat (i.e. not his dispute with Denikin). What stands out to you about conditions on the ground?

Nixonsdaydreams:

Wrangel’s descriptions of how the soldiers had begun behaving during the retreat via the railroads stuck out especially. Many regiments that while diminished many had carriages full of war loot the soldiers mainly officers were actively trading, selling, and working to send back. Much of this loot was “requisitioned” from the places they had liberated from the reds during retreat much of it from the populace they were supposed to protect. Their behavior being more akin to bandits counting the spoils before an eventual exit than soldiers fit to retake their home.

Henry:

On #1–on pg. 124, “told me that the evacuation of Odessa had been a veritable nightmare. No measures had been taken to maintain even a semblance of order. In the port the refugees were killing one another and committing suicide in despair.”

This stood out to me because it was a stark reminder of what defeat looks like when political stakes are real. Just bluntly horrible and murderous and total succumbing to darkness. It’s just a very sobering and grim portrayal of (1) what actual defeat looks like—not just losing some vote, and (2) how bad things can get if people are careless with their duties in a political/military struggle.

2. Was Wrangel and Denikin’s big break inevitable? Talk about the actions of people who aren’t Wrangel and Denikin that might have contributed to the mess.

Wesley:

Wrangel and Denikin’s big break seems to me to have not been inevitable at first but would eventually enter a path of no return. In chapter 6 when Wrangel was surrounded after going to the theatre he writes, “Amongst other questions I was asked: ‘What are your relations with General Denikin? Is it true that you have broken completely with the Commander-in-Chief?’

An invisible hand was fostering intrigue behind the scenes and sowing the seeds of doubt and confusion in all minds.”

In any political system those shadowy forces are a fact of life. Ultimately it was up to Denikin to see the situation clearly enough to continue trusting Wrangel. Those seeds of doubt blossomed through the Disaster of chapter 7 as Denikins reputation continued to decline and Denikins close officers (as seen in Wrangels discussion with Romanovsky where Wrangel had his epic go-off moment on him “It means that intrigues are still flourishing—that is all…”) provided no help in seeing the situation clearly.

Aethermacht:

Denikin clearly had some degree of paranoia of Wrangel seizing power from him. The military defeats that led many to openly disavow Denikin while hyping up Wrangel certainly did not help this perception. Perhaps these sorts of personality issues could have been resolved if Denikin was not so feminine in his conflict with Wrangel. If upon receiving Wrangel’s demands Denikin made it clear that the offering of demands under threat of desertion was unacceptable, perhaps an understanding could have been reached. Instead in person Deinkin bent to Wrangel but in private he lashed out.

Also having a rebellious Captain Orlov publish a proclamation that his band would only submit to Wrangel was funny in how ill-timed it was.

3. Wrangel spends what seems to be an usually large amount of time describing the actual legal succession process between him and Denikin as head of White forces at the Council of War. What happened there and why does Wrangel give it so much emphasis?

WDot:

Honestly it was worth Wrangel putting in the effort to have the appearance of being an officially appointed successor to Denikin, rather than a democratically elected one. If the council can vote Wrangel in on a whim, they can vote him out on a whim, which could make an already chaotic situation worse.

“I personally considered it absolutely inadmissible that a new Commander-in-Chief should be elected by his future subordinates” -- I don’t think this came from pride, but from properly considering the source of legitimate authority. When Denikin was in charge, there was no legitimate democratic method to remove Denikin a Commander-in-Chief (and there should not have been!) If Denikin appoints a successor, this governance structure doesn’t change. For a military institution, especially one on the backfoot, that’s important!

What if some of Wrangel’s generals start grumbling about him over a particular order? The idea of voting in a new general would at least cross their mind. Bullying Denikin into issuing an edict that says the words “Wrangel is hereby appointed Commander-in-Chief,” with no reference to a vote, brought stability to that transition.

4. What are Wrangel’s main problems when actually assumes command in Crimea?

variableannuity:

Wrangel details a litany of problems when he assumes command in Crimea: low morale; acute manpower and supply shortages; lack of control over backline cities; lack of legitimacy and public support; flagging international backers. To fuse these issues together, Wrangel inherits an army without a legitimate state.

5. How does Wrangel solve these problems?

variableannuity:

Wrangel’s actions in Chapter 9 are his attempt to turn this weakness to a strength. He changes the goal of the Volunteer/Russian Army from contesting control of the entire Empire to defending a legitimate breakaway government on Russian soil, aiming to outlast the Soviets. His every action in that chapter is taken with the goal of establishing legitimacy.

Briefly, I would say Wrangel takes a three-pronged approach in creating legitimacy in his government. First, he fixes the most urgent and debilitating issues with supply and lawlessness, distinguishing his regime from Deniken’s. I’d note here that he takes time to mention that he ceases public executions as they are no longer effective. He just wants the free subscribers of Crimea totally disappeared, erased from history.

Second, he builds personal relationships with all of the stakeholders in the region, establishing his government as one for all true Russian patriots. I think he realizes that pretty much everyone left alive has panicked and made some mistakes at some point over the past few years, so he implements a campaign of persuasion rather than punishment. In Chapter 9 alone, he personally meets with the insane Cossack leaders, foreign dignitaries, the libtard newspapermen, that treasonous mayor, and even representatives from the bordering peasant soviets. He has boats everywhere trying to pick up refugees. He even writes to the Red Army itself!

Finally, and necessarily after the first two steps, Wrangel begins institution building. Hes built a tribunal system so far, and is about to start with the land reform program. This is incredibly important as the government at the moment is entirely dependent on his reputation and health. When these institutions are established, the hope is that people will start believing in government again, not just his personal leadership.

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I just wanted to remind you that our 3rd book club meeting on Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel, covering the collapse of the White Army and birth of Wrangel’s Russian Army, is exactly 7 days from now.

I strongly encourage you, the person reading this, to get over to the Book Club Meeting 3 Discussion Post to get your answers in on this week’s discussion prompts. You can also check out the first two episodes in this series below.

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 1: Always with Honor Chapters 1-3

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 2: Always with Honor Chapters 4-6

This has probably been the most fun project we’ve done on this Substack so far. I am constantly impressed by how intelligent, perceptive, and conventionally attractive our beloved paid subscribers are.

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See you in the comments!

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 3: Always with Honor Chapters 7-9 Discussion Post

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Hi everyone,

Substack’s analytics suggest that about 4% of you are from the great state of Minnesota.

I just wanted to remind all of you to vote in the Republican primary, which is happening TOMORROW, for Lisa Demuth. Demuth is the Minority Leader of the Minnesota State House’s GOP delegation. I don’t know anything about her beyond her position and the fact that her opponent in the primary is former MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Mike Lindell has been a loyal soldier for President Trump. He seems like a solid guy, but I don’t think he would be a very strong candidate in the gubernatorial election. Minnesota Republicans are facing longshot odds and Demuth has less of a public profile than Lindell. I think a “Generic R” is going to be far more viable in the race than someone with Lindell’s colorful history.

People often write off states like Minnesota, but voter participation is so low that there is substantial chance for an upset. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Minnesota’s state legislature currently has a 50-50 Republican-Democrat split. That’s pretty crazy for a state with that liberal of a reputation. There are lots of people tired of liberal politics who are looking for a realistic alternative. Lindell probably wouldn’t offer one, but Demuth might.

It’s always better to win than to lose. A Republican in the Minnesota governor’s mansion could do a lot of interesting things to totally reshape the political arrangement of the state. Remember: Florida used to be a swing state. The right person in the right place can do a lot of damage to our enemies. It doesn’t take much to dismantle these networks. Often liberals are just one upset away from total defeat.

We owe it to our people in Minnesota to maintain a broad front. You can’t just leave these guys to suffer under permanent liberal tyranny. I encourage you, the person reading this, to vote in the Minnesota primary for Lisa Demuth. If you are a billionaire donor or influential political operative, please don’t ignore Minnesota. It’s races like these where only a bit more money thrown into advertising or a few more professional activists could really prove to be decisive.

Although no one should talk about this during the campaign, most important for me is that if we had a Republican governor of Minnesota, that governor would have the power to free Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who was railroaded and sentenced to decades in prison following the George Floyd incident.

I think the conviction of Derek Chauvin was one of the greatest injustices in American history. If you want to overthrow the myth of the Floyd Era and permanently demoralize our enemies, there is no way better way to do that than to free this innocent man.

If you live in Minnesota, you can find your voting location here. Please vote! It really makes a difference. News just broke today that a Trump-backed candidate in Indiana defeated his establishment Republican opponent who sabotaged the state’s redistricting efforts in a recount. The election came down to just 3 votes in the end. If I can convince just 3 of you who wouldn’t have voted otherwise to support a more electable candidate, I will consider this post a success.

Never let anyone tell you that it doesn’t matter. If we fight, we will win.

A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

- John Steinbeck

My grievances with the online commentariat are well documented at this point.

To sum things up: I believe that online rightwing commentators have, intentionally or unintentionally, been working to undermine our real-world political power in pursuit of their personal objectives. They spread lies, generate confusion, minimize or deny successes, embellish or hallucinate failures, tell our people that resistance is pointless because winning is impossible or they’ve already lost, collaborate with the enemy, and do countless other things that are functionally indistinguishable from what someone who was just trying to make us lose would be doing.

I live in a liberal city with frequent large protests. There is a well-trained and disciplined organizer class that enables liberals to mobilize their people to push policies that are unpopular and make everyone’s lives worse. Rightwing influencers online have essentially become a disorganizer class for conservatives, discouraging collaboration, spreading distrust, encouraging despair and hopelessness, telling conservatives to pursue fantasies rather than tactics that work and have already delivered enormous success for them.

Hell is other posters. I’m sure people have detected that there is little love lost between many figures online. Still, I believe it’s always important to try to keep criticism good faith and constructive. Although I doubt this will happen, I hope people will take what I say here at face value.

It seems like many genuinely don’t understand these criticisms and invent elaborate motives for what are usually pretty basic observations. My intent here is plain: I hope that if I produce enough 40,000-word essays about the grim and declining state of rightwing discourse, I will convince someone, somewhere, to abandon the rhetorical strategies and styles of communication that have done so much damage over the last few years, or, at least and perhaps more importantly, that I will allow outside observers to better recognize these destructive behaviors for what they are and motivate them to fight back as they desperately need to.

Much of the damage has already been done. We’ve got 3 months until the midterms. It’s going to take some doing, but I think there is still a lot to salvage. The Senate is very competitive. The House is a longshot but possible. There are a lot of opportunities in upcoming gubernatorial elections. I think if we fight, we will win.

I want to start with a Twitter post from TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet a few days ago:

The total deportation numbers reported here probably run a bit high, but there is nearly every indication from government sources, friendly and hostile media that today, right now, the US is deporting more illegal immigrants than it has ever deported before. This is not even including self-deportations, totally outside law enforcement, which are speculated to number in the millions since Trump took office.

This is a huge accomplishment on the part of Trump and the Trump administration: The Biden administration opened the border, allowing 10+ million illegal immigrants to flood the country while simultaneously dismantling anything resembling traditional immigration enforcement. These enforcement tools have been rebuilt bigger and better than ever before and are being used aggressively to undo the damage of the previous administration and decades of criminally negligent immigration policy before that.

If you look at the replies to Kolvet’s tweet, this literally historic progress towards solving America’s immigration problems has been greeted with near-universal hostility. The hostility was not coming from people who support immigration, it was coming from people who opposed it, people who have seen their goals realized at a scale that 2 or even 20 years ago would have seemed unimaginable.

A typical exchange in the replies:

It’s a strange thought: What would mass deportations look like if not “More monthly deportations than ever before in American history”? This record is not just impressive on its own, it’s also something that the Trump administration has been able to claim for multiple months in a row: Deportations are not just higher than they’ve ever been before, they’re only accelerating. Certainly, the problem facing America is big and won’t be solved by current deportation rates, but of all times to adopt a critical and dismissive posture I can’t think of one less appropriate than right now, as we’re achieving record highs and Republicans are going to have to run on this progress in the midterms.

There is good news across the board for immigration skeptics: Deportation orders are at a record high, arrests are at a record high, denaturalization cases are at a record high, illegal crossings and naturalization applications and processing are at the lowest they’ve been in decades. Immigration enforcement agencies are larger and better funded than they’ve ever been before. Every day our Trump administration seems to divine new and interesting ways to move people who shouldn’t be in our country out: Massive hearings to handle hundreds of immigration cases in a single day, disused immigration courts reactivated, new collaborations with TSA and state and local law enforcement.

If all this is true, and it’s pretty well-documented that it is, then why all the long faces among anti-immigration activists? Well, I think it traces back to “Always chimp,” a mantra that became a strategy and eventually a worldview for online rightwing influencers.

I want to stress: It doesn’t matter why people do these things. What matters is stopping the damage that it’s doing. People are chimping all the time, about anything and everything, even when it makes no sense at all and it’s actively harmful, and this behavior infects more and more people every day. It is a never-ending and self-reinforcing demoralization campaign.

In this essay (which you are hopefully listening to using the Substack app’s excellent text-to-speech feature) I want to establish that always chimping is a bad strategy, that always chimping actually makes our goals harder to achieve, that always chimping is making our people mentally ill and passive, and that you need to put these chimps back in the zoo if you want to achieve anything, or at least anything good.

First, we need to break down the phrase. When someone says, “Always chimp,” what do they mean? First you have “Always.” Whatever this is, you’re supposed to be doing it all the time, or at least a lot. Then you have “chimp,” a reference to the expression “chimp out.” You’re supposed to have an outsized, even seemingly irrational, response to perceived setbacks or obstacles, basically an adult tantrum.

I’d describe “Always chimp” as a political strategy of hyperbole that goes beyond the normal exaggerations you’d expect in politics. Whenever you perceive that something you don’t like has or even might happen, you have a big public blowup in the hope that someone with control over the situation will try to avoid potentially triggering this outsized response in the future. This strategy is more effective if the reaction is seen as disproportionate and unreasonable: Targets don’t know what’s going to set you off so they avoid anything that might potentially do so, including actions that could otherwise seem reasonable or at least undeserving of such a response.

There’s precedent for this kind of approach. Take the “madman theory.” Wikipedia explains:

The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with the foreign policy of U.S. president Richard Nixon and his administration, who tried to make the leaders of hostile communist bloc countries think Nixon was irrational and volatile so that they would avoid provoking the U.S. in fear of an unpredictable response.

The premise of madman theory is that the appearance of irrationality makes otherwise non-credible threats seem credible. For instance, in an era of mutually assured destruction, threats by a rational leader to escalate a dispute may seem suicidal and thus easily dismissible by adversaries. However, suicidal threats may seem credible if the leader is believed to be irrational.

This all makes sense, at least in the way Nixon was applying it.

For starters, Nixon was not actually a madman and was pursuing a deliberate strategy to force negotiations in Vietnam. He was a smart guy with goals that were more or less clear and realistic. Although Nixon created the appearance that he was willing to trigger nuclear war over seemingly minor slights, this was a false appearance. He wasn’t threatening the apocalypse out of theoretical principle, and it wouldn’t have been an acceptable outcome to him under virtually any circumstances.

Nixon was also applying this strategy to international relations, where he was dealing with external parties. If Nixon had created the appearance that he was irrational in internal or domestic politics, the effect would be very different. His colleagues and employees wouldn’t be able to trust him and wouldn’t want to work for him. He wouldn’t be seen as a reliable partner or good actor by allies and potential allies. Voters probably wouldn’t even vote for someone who was always behaving in crazy ways.

In contrast, other countries had to deal with Nixon’s seemingly irrational behavior: Nixon was President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, with the biggest economy and military. Countries can’t just leave the world stage and usually couldn’t afford to just ignore America. This was even more true back then it is today.

As President, Nixon was also the chief executive of the United States. He had the clear and unambiguous authority to speak on behalf of the entire American government. He could control how rational or irrational US foreign policy would be and had final authority on most matters. There was only one Nixon, and when the madman theory was being applied Nixon could dictate exactly how that strategy would look in practice. It wasn’t like every nuclear missile silo launch technician was encouraged to behave like a madman, forcing everyone to constantly ask “Will he or won’t he press the button?”

Basically, Nixon’s strategy seems all well and good, but it starts to break down quickly when you apply it to other contexts. If someone tried to apply the madman theory to their personal relations, for instance, you probably would just decide to not interact with them. If someone applied the madman theory at their job, they’d probably be fired. It’s pretty easy to understand how this behavior could potentially be very destructive. If people don’t have to deal with you, or reach the conclusion that they can’t deal with you, then the approach becomes a lot less effective.

When applied to mass politics, the flaws of encouraging people to always act in irrational and volatile ways should be obvious. I think for the average person, “Always chimp” becomes a call to catastrophize.

Psychology Today describes catastrophizing or catastrophic thinking as “[A] cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis.”

I think the connection between “Always chimp” and catastrophizing is pretty clear: “Chimping out” translates to having an outsized and hyperbolic reaction to something and, in order to justify that reaction to yourself and/or others, you’re going to need to make whatever problem you’re reacting to seem more severe than it actually is. Given the self-reinforcing nature of algorithmic recommendations (if you engage with certain content you will begin to see more of it) on social media, catastrophizing is a phenomenon that someone online today might encounter or engage in thousands of times per week.

In my most recent article, I outlined a pretty typical exchange on Rightwing twitter: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mullin gave a standard answer to a question about Temporary Protected Status (TPS), one of many “temporary” programs that had been turned into backdoor permanent status for illegal immigrants, that the Trump administration had just fought and won a lengthy legal battle to end.

Rightwing influencers immediately set about twisting Mullin’s words and misrepresenting the Trump administration’s actual policies. They claimed that the Trump administration hadn’t bothered to end TPS at all (it ended this week) and pointedly questioned why anyone should vote for Republicans in the upcoming elections given that they had abandoned key promises about mass deportations. Soon the timeline was filled with attacks on Mullin and DHS. This was the response to a clear success that the Trump administration had spent more than a year fighting for.

Mullin issued a statement clarifying what the government’s policy had always been, that temporary status was only temporary, and the same influencers who created this moment of hysteria with their lies celebrated: “Always chimp.”

I think the political strategy of these influencers is to catastrophize and encourage others to catastrophize constantly as a way to protect and expand their political power.

There is little incentive to tell the truth or accurately represent our situation under this arrangement. In fact, the incentives are to lie and keep lying: If you stop chimping, the logic goes, then you stop having power.

The crisis can never end. In the same way that a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy knows that if her child is no longer sick, then she will no longer receive sympathy and attention for adopting a caregiver role, influencers know that if they do not regularly send their audiences into hysteria or despair by framing new developments in exaggerated negative ways, then their influence will decline.

Beyond the real-world electoral implications of acting in this way, which I’ll expand on later, catastrophizing has powerful and well-established psychological impacts on the people who engage in it.

I’m not a doctor, I’m sure I’m going to be a bit clumsy with some of these terms, but I think what I’m describing should be intuitive to anyone who has observed these behaviors in real life.

Catastrophizing is strongly tied to a variety of serious psychiatric problems: Generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder. Catastrophic thinking is linked to clinical depression as well. One article on the problem stated: “research suggests that catastrophic thinking enhances depressive and anxious symptomatology among adults, teens, and children.”

In other words, catastrophic thinking is tied to mental illness (either causing it or being caused by it, it’s difficult to disentangle these kinds of relationships) and makes the symptoms of mental illness more intense.

Related to catastrophic thinking is repetitive negative thinking, a term for excessive fixation on future worries, past regrets, or unanswerable questions, in other words, the individual thoughts that someone who catastrophizes might indulge.

Repetitive negative thinking is strongly tied to mood and anxiety disorders and also makes it more difficult to deal with them. A recent study suggested that those who engage in repetitive negative thinking are seriously impacted by it: Their brains are less able to cope with stress, they feel pain more deeply, they are emotionally dysregulated, they show less mental acuity and adaptability. Repetitive negative thinking has also been shown to be strongly associated with cognitive impairment in older adults.

I think the “always chimp” political strategy encourages participants to act as though they have mental problems, which seems to me to be generating actual mental problems in these people, or at least making any existing problems that they have worse. I certainly have encountered many people in rightwing politics who, over the last few years, began to engage in these destructive thought processes and then became unable to stop. Usually, their personality begins to disintegrate afterwards. I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen something strange from a longtime associate and thought “Wow, I guess this guy is just going to be a mentally ill compulsive liar forever now,” and then been proven right.

Beyond the risk of making them stupid and crazy, encouraging someone to interpret new developments in the worst light possible is not a good way to motivate them to become more active in order to solve their problems.

There is a famous experiment that illustrated the psychological concept of “learned helplessness”: Dogs were forced to stand on an electric shock pad. Some of them could escape the shock by moving to a different section of the pad. Others were shocked no matter where they stood.

The dogs who were able to escape constantly moved around the pad in the hope of finding an area where they would not be shocked. The dogs who were shocked constantly began to lie down and accept the shock, even after parts of the pad were de-electrified and the dogs could have easily escaped if they had moved a few inches. In essence, the dogs began to over-generalize their lack of control in one situation to all situations.

It’s kind of an intuitive concept; I don’t know why they needed to electrocute those dogs: When people don’t think they can affect the outcome of a situation, they are less inclined to even make an attempt to do so, even if they do actually have the power to affect the outcome.

Learned helplessness is associated with depression: In several tests on humans that were similar to the dog-shock experiment, being exposed to unsolvable problems caused symptoms of depression in subjects. Already depressed subjects also showed passivity and were more likely to give up when they encountered solvable problems.

There was an interesting revision to the “learned helplessness” concept that occurred in 2016. Neuroscientists concluded that passivity was actually the default state in our brains. Human beings naturally learn over time that they have control over their environment: If they do something, they will get some kind of reaction. The brain sends signals that you can control the outcome of an event, which suppress the default passive response. When exposed to repeated uncontrollable events, like the shocks that never stop no matter where you stand, the brain begins to block the control signals, producing the default fear and passivity. What the “learned helplessness” experiments were actually revealing was “unlearned control.” Control, not helplessness, was the main operating mechanism.

I think the main problem of the “always chimp” phenomenon is that by constantly embellishing or inventing problems, you make these problems appear far more difficult to solve than they actually are. You are teaching people that they do not have control of their situation, and this makes them depressed and passive. Often influencers will outright tell their audiences that they have already lost and that nothing they do will alter their predicament.

When I accuse rightwing influencers of running demoralization campaigns, I am usually not complaining about them mentioning any particular issue or problem, unless of course whatever they’re reacting to isn’t even real. My objection is almost always to some kind of unnecessary statement or embellishment, not required at all to get whatever political point they’re trying to make across, that would realistically only encourage someone reading it to just give up. Sometimes you really have to wonder if encouraging people to just give up is the point of this behavior.

Below is a typical post of this genre, featured in my previous article about the influencer TPS debacle. I know that you, the person reading this, have seen similar rhetoric in response to other situations thousands of times. Again, it’s important to remember that this reaction was prompted by a clear win on the part of the Trump administration, which made hundreds of thousands of immigrants newly eligible for deportation:

BlazeTV personality Auron MacIntyre said “The purpose of a system is what it does.” I think the only impact of this rhetoric, which, again, was triggered by a real-world win for immigration restrictionists, would be discouraging people from voting for Republicans in the upcoming elections. This is a problem because Republicans losing elections decreases the real-world political power of immigration restrictionists.

In practice, “always chimp” has produced the unending and ever-expanding proliferation of defeatist rhetoric and sentiment, without regard for real-world improving conditions or the obvious political implications of this behavior. Let’s go back to the first tweet in this article, where Andrew Kolvet announced that the US had achieved the highest deportation rate in history. This was MacIntyre’s reaction:

You can say a lot of things about Trump’s deportation efforts, I don’t think it’s fair to characterize “better numbers than we would have received under any other admin” and “a new all-time high” as a disaster. It’s true, there are many millions of illegals left to deport, but waving illegals into the country with bare-minimum scrutiny was always going to be a lot easier and faster than removing them with government organizations in the face of massive opposition from the Left. This is a problem that was getting worse mostly without interruption for decades and is now getting better.

In MacIntyre’s very generous scenario, the Trump administration would have forced 6 million people out of the country in just 21 months. If that’s not enough to warrant a “good job” I can’t really think of a realistic scenario that would and I have not seen MacIntyre propose one in any detail. There’s no accounting for taste, but I think the problem isn’t with the government’s numbers, but rather with this approach to political issues. It is totally non-productive. How are we going to win if you are framing the Trump administration’s biggest accomplishment as a disaster?

There was another tweet from MacIntyre, responding to yet another controversial quote from Mullin, that really stood out to me.

I can quibble with this or that in the tweet: Mullin never said that we are not doing mass deportations, and that’s not his call anyway. The concerns over naturalization are valid, but naturalization figures were in line with preceding years and now, thanks to recent reforms from the Trump administration, naturalization figures have dropped by 75% since last year. The naturalization rate today is currently at a multi-decade low. How would a potential new DHS director possibly be able to deport enough people in the next 3 months to be able to satisfy whatever goal MacIntyre has set and end this line of criticism (apparently his definition of mass deportations is 30-50 million by the end of Trump’s term, a little over 2 years from now)? Is it even a good idea to swap out DHS leadership when deportations have hit all-time highs several months in a row and the perception of internal instability caused by frequent leadership changes might shake voters’ confidence in the government before the midterms?

I want to focus on “[T]he likelihood of deportations ramping up if Dems win the House is approaching zero.” If this is something that MacIntyre believes, and he wants deportations to ramp up, why on Earth would he not be doing everything he could to help Republicans win the House during the upcoming midterm elections?

With this, the problems of the “always chimp” strategy come into greater focus. There is no way to encourage people to vote for Republicans, which is necessary to achieve your real-world political goals, if you are always chimping out at them. If record-high deportations are “a disaster” and there’s no realistic way for the Trump administration to meet the goals you’ve set, then why should voters bother?

MacIntyre recently posted this:

Think about this post. Senator John Curtis, a longtime enemy of GOP leader President Trump, who Trump did not even support during his primary, has proposed a migrant worker bill with virtually no chance of passage because the GOP and Republicans have never been more hostile to these bills than before. The conclusion that MacIntyre reaches is: The GOP is a disaster.

Here’s another tweet in the same vein:

The person MacIntyre is quote tweeting is Congressman Dan Crenshaw. Earlier this year, Crenshaw lost in the Republican primary to a better, Trump-backed, candidate who is far more aligned with MacIntyre on the issues. Is the GOP dominated by these guys, or are they on their way out?

Every single candidate who we need conservatives to vote for in the upcoming elections is a member of the GOP. The posture of permanent skepticism and hostility that the “always chimp” approach engenders is not just not helpful, it’s actively harmful. Look at this:

Now look at this:

If you read these tweets, I think you’d naturally assume that this person just did not want you to vote for the GOP: The GOP is dominated by traitors. The GOP consists of the biggest cowards on the planet. The true purpose of the GOP is to make us lose.

Would someone reading this genre of tweet feel compelled to support a GOP candidate? Is this rhetorical posture justified given that the Republican Party is the best that it’s been in decades and getting better? How are we going to solve our problems if, at the end of the day, people don’t support the GOP in the upcoming midterm elections? What are these people actually hoping to achieve?

These are questions that people need to start asking about the role influencers play in conservative politics.

MacIntyre recently made veiled criticism of Tucker Carlson’s moronic and destructive proposal to start a 3rd party. It’s unclear why someone wouldn’t support a 3rd party if they actually believed the things MacIntyre says regularly about the GOP.

It’s not clear why MacIntyre would even support Vice President JD Vance if you take what he’s saying at face value: Vance is the current GOP Vice President, a loyal senior member in the government MacIntyre says has betrayed core promises. Vance is going to be the GOP presidential nominee in 2028. Once elected, it seems very unlikely that Vance will achieve 30-50 million deportations in 4 years, or seize the endowments, or destroy democracy and our Constitutional order, or satisfy many of the other demands that MacIntyre regularly blasts out into the ether.

Again, people are going to have different perspectives and different styles, I’m not complaining about that. This perspective is fundamentally warped. This style of communication moves us farther away from our goals. It often seems like pure emotional venting, which does not help anyone and often can be very damaging.

I’m sure that MacIntyre’s private expectations are different and more realistic than his public ones. At the same time, I don’t think you can separate this behavior from a demoralization campaign: You set an unrealistic goal and then complain of betrayal when it is not met. You make criticism that is far broader and longer lasting than whatever narrow and temporary problem you’re complaining about, without regard to changing conditions. It is only natural that conservative voters would become demoralized by this, and if they are demoralized then they are less likely to take real-world action to solve their problems.

In 2023, during the high point of discourse over “national divorce,” an amorphous proposal to peacefully (or not) split America into two or more different countries that was popular on the Right during the Biden years, a rightwing influencer contacted me and asked me what I thought about it. At the time I was known as an outspoken critic of the idea.

He agreed with me that national divorce was a dumb concept and also totally unachievable in practice. However, he argued, talking about it really got conservatives excited, and that excitement might motivate them to turn out to vote.

I responded that if you popularized an unrealistic goal, inevitably potential voters would become frustrated and hostile when you could not achieve it. Worse, they might actually try to achieve it somehow and, in their inevitable failure, damage our position. I asked him why so many big people were talking about such a stupid and unrealistic idea, and he told me that some rich guy was paying influencers to do it (he didn’t say who and I don’t have any evidence that he was telling the truth one way or the other). My theory is that this was part of the failed DeSantis primary effort, the successful “Caudillo” governor was often put forward as the potential leader of Red America.

There are lots of ideas floating around once-fringe rightwing circles that are not particularly realistic if you think about them at all. “Just launch a military coup.” “Unilaterally overturn our legal system when you have narrow legislative and electoral majorities and don’t even have unanimous support from your own side.” People advance these positions without much if any thought as to how these things would look in practice and what the response from the public would be.

Influencers start and end with the theoretical case for these things: If they can make the theoretical argument for it, then it is good, then you should demand it, and if someone doesn’t deliver it then they are bad and must be removed.

Republicans face many challenges in the upcoming elections. One major challenge is that some of the biggest names in conservative media have taken it upon themselves to lie and embellish constantly in order to enlist their audiences in an internal war against their own party and only hope of success, often motivated by ideas that are, charitably, delusional.

People expect discretion and discernment in their personal and professional lives. For some reason, many have gotten it into their heads that politics are different. Allegedly we’re dealing with the fate of the world, our country, our people. In spite of this, actually winning always seems to be someone else’s problem.

One more from MacIntyre:

I think our influencer class has become really high on its own supply. Everyone talks about how much power and influence they have. They certainly do get money and attention to back that up, but apparently they have no corresponding responsibility for our collective success or failure.

We are going to have to solve our problems in the real world. The system that we live under is not fake however convenient that might be. We need our people to participate in it if we want to have any hope of success. We enjoy the highest deportation rate in history today not because some influencer got redpilled a few years ago and began making the theoretical case for deportations at a time when that theoretical case was exploding in popularity, but because GOP voters elected GOP politicians to change government policy.

Law enforcement programs, court cases, administrative memos: Victory is made of tons of nuts and bolts that are not always accessible to normal people. An ideal role for our influencer class would be to demystify these developments, to gather public support and resources for changes that we want to see happen, to push back on bad decisions with good faith and realistic criticism. Instead, many are trying to steer the ship by poking holes in it until it sinks.

The Trump administration’s approach to immigration issues is not subtle. Mass deportations are far more popular in theory than in practice (I think immigration skeptics constantly attacking the Trump admin contribute to this unpopularity by making it appear like there isn’t consensus approval of aggressive deportation measures even among their proponents). The public is scared of chaos. More than half of Americans say that Trump is going too far by allowing immigration enforcement agents to use traffic stops to make arrests. Trump administration officials are adopting a soft line in order to make these policies more palatable to the public, the courts, and various interest groups.

Trump often says one thing while doing another on immigration. His administration has proven itself to be more hostile to illegal and legal immigration than any of its predecessors in the last 70 years, at least. Do you remember the persistent freakout online over Chinese and Indian student visas? Trump made some really bad-sounding statements about the issue. Those visas were cut in half after he made the statements.

It’s not hard to understand this approach. It’s proven itself to be very effective, delivering historic results, but it requires trust from the public. Influencers trade on destroying that trust. After a certain point, when an influencer’s criticism is obviously divorced from reality and only would tend to diminish our ability to solve the very problems they are complaining about, this behavior becomes indistinguishable from what someone who was just trying to sabotage us would be doing.

I do think there are some people who are deliberately trying to sabotage Republicans’ chances in the midterms. The main flavors of this type are those who were, rightly or wrongly, excluded from influence in the Trump administration and hope that engineering defeat will provide an opening to reassert themselves over their internal rivals. There are also those who are simply trying to bring whatever fantasy scenario about a military coup, martial law, suspension of democracy and the legal system, etc. (the fantasy is always ill-formed because these unworkable ideas inevitably collapse under scrutiny) that they have concocted into reality by closing off the path to a victory under our current system. You have to be hostile to both groups, whatever their reasons. You have to be hostile to anyone who thinks engineering a defeat is a way to solve their problems.

I meet smart young people in politics and government all the time. These people are working hard to achieve our goals in the real world. They are incurring serious legal and often physical risks as they work on our behalf. Their jobs have bad pay. The work is often unglamorous and unrewarding. I don’t think there is any value to most of the criticism they receive from the people who should be supporting them as they fight our enemies in and outside of government. The OnlyFans woman who shows her pussy while saying “Democrats are the real racists” has more to add than everyone online who has ever boldly declared “We’re not voting our way out of this.”

I’ve been told that it’s really suspicious that I’ve been making such a stink about all this. The reason I mention MacIntyre so often in this piece is that he accused me of being a neocon after I criticized JD Vance’s decision to give Sohrab Ahmari an exclusive interview (Ahmari was a notorious turncoat in the NYC rightwing scene, seems to have played a role in the doxxing of Twitter user L0m3z/Jonathan Keeperman by leftwing activists, and is currently writing pieces praising Michigan’s radical socialist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed) and I’m still a little butthurt about the accusation. I don’t think MacIntyre is the worst offender or compromised or whatever, just fairly representative of the kind of destructive behavior that has reached epidemic proportions online.

I’ve been around these circles a long time. I watched them decline. I watched clueless people make them decline. The criticism I’ve offered over the last few months and years is consistent with my long-running interests and political ideas.

Here’s a selection from Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative Vol. III that I posted 5 months ago that I thought was really relevant to our situation:

Intent as [Confederate President Jefferson Davis] was on gathering and bracing his scattered and diminished armies for the shock of an eastern Armageddon, Davis had the still harder concomitant task of preparing the nation at large for survival after the defeat made probable by the odds. He too was a military realist, in his way, and as such he knew that, far more important than the loss of any battle—even one on such a promised cataclysmic scale as this—was the possible loss of the will to fight by those behind the lines. There was where wars were ultimately won or lost, and already there were signs that this will, though yet unbroken, was about to crumble. “It is not unwillingness to oppose the enemy,” Governor Magrath informed him from threatened South Carolina, “but a chilling apprehension of the futility of doing so which affects the people.” Just so: and Davis took as his chief responsibility, as the people’s leader, the task of replacing this chill with the warmth of resolution. Whatever the odds, whatever the losses, he believed that so long as they had that, to anything like the degree that he possessed it, their desperate bid for membership in the family of nations could never be annulled.

His need to rally the public behind him had never been more acute, but neither had it ever been more stringently opposed by his political adversaries, who saw in the current dilemma a fulfillment of all the woes they had predicted from the outset if Congress continued to let him have his way on such issues as conscription and the periodic suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, in violation of the rights not only of the states but also of individuals. Under the press of circumstance, Davis by now had gone beyond such preconceptions. “If the Confederacy falls,” he told one congressman in a fruitless effort to bring him over, “there should be written on its tombstone, Died of a Theory.”

That might be; still, the hard-line States Righters could not see it. Desist from such wicked practices, they were saying, and volunteers would flock again to the colors in numbers sufficient to fling the invader back across the Mason-Dixon line.

As President Davis was attempting to organize the Confederacy to resist an impending Union offensive in the real world, he faced endless bad faith criticism and obstruction from those supposedly most committed to the idea of secession. The only way to stop the theoretical criticism, they insisted, was to take steps that would guarantee real-world defeat.

These people claimed to be acting on principle, in reality, they were acting to sabotage the war effort. Many of those who worked diligently to close off victory for the South were among the first to try to make a separate peace with their supposed bitter enemies.

Another quote from The Civil War: A Narrative Vol. II that I posted 10 months ago:

“Away with the idea of getting independence first, and looking after liberty afterwards,” Stephens had said. “Our liberties, once lost, may be lost forever.” “Why sir,” a Georgia congressman exclaimed, “this is a war for the Constitution! It is a constitutional war.” It was also, and first, a war for survival; but the ultra-conservatives, including the fire-eaters who had done so much to bring it on, had been using the weapon of States Rights too long and with too much success, when they were members of the Union, to discard it now that they had seceded. They simply would rather die than drop that cudgel, even when there was no one to use it on except their own people and nothing to strike at except the solidarity that was their one hope for victory over an adversary whose reserves of men and wealth were practically limitless. It was this inflexibility that the bill came due for having launched a conservative revolution, and apparently it was necessarily so, even though their anomalous devotion to an untimely creed amounted to an irresistible death-wish. But that was precisely their pride. They inherited it and they would hand it down, inviolate, to the latest generation; or they would pray God “to sweep from the earth the soil, along with the people.”

You wonder why people are doing stuff that makes it more likely that you’ll lose, and sometimes they’ll come out and admit that they’re not even trying to win a war, they’re trying to win an argument.

In the Russian Civil War, during a critical moment of weakness for the anti-communist Whites, when the entire war effort threatened to topple over and the Bolsheviks were advancing rapidly, a group of Kuban Cossack politicians decided to begin viciously attacking their own side in an attempt to extract concessions over questions of autonomy that would (and did) become meaningless if the Whites lost.

General Wrangel was forced to travel behind the lines to put down the mutiny, which he did easily by hanging the ringleader and restructuring the Kuban government to prevent future outbursts. Despite the quick resolution, the damage this brief internal conflict caused to the morale of Kuban soldiers in the field was devastating and made what was already a bad situation far worse. No one benefitted. Peter Kenez writes in his book Red Attack, White Defeat: Civil War in South Russia 1919–1920 that:

The Kuban federalists showed themselves once more for what they were: Provincial men who played in politics, who had no sense of responsibility, who could not evaluate their forces, who could not distinguish the important from the trivial.

We are still dealing with people who play in politics, who have no sense of responsibility, who cannot evaluate their forces, and have made not distinguishing the important from the trivial a political strategy. These are eternal types and eternal behaviors in difficult situations.

None of these dynamics are new to me. I knew that after Charlie Kirk was murdered a lot of people would begin flailing and looking for ways to help the enemy and attack their own side, though I underestimated the complete cowardice and stupidity that so many figures big and small would display over the months that followed. It’s not interesting to watch people go crazy in the same ways over and over again. I’m a lot less sentimental about it now.

It’s very easy to demand that people tell the truth, keep criticism productive, set achievable goals, work to improve our collective position, and to understand that we do have a collective position which is opposed by people who can and will snuff us out for good if they are allowed to. We’re all jungled up together. If people can’t meet these minimum expectations, especially people who have big audiences and make lots of money and should know better, then they need to go do whatever they’re doing somewhere else.

Once again, I encourage you, the person reading this, to start being hostile to people who engage in these behaviors. You cannot bargain someone out of being crazy, and the people repeating “always chimp” have made acting in unreasonable ways their political strategy. The issue is only very rarely their actual political views; it’s their behavior and temperament; these are not problems that you can solve with political concessions. In fact, if you attempt to solve the problem in this way, you are likely to only reinforce the destructive pathology and spread it to others. In his memoirs General Wrangel observed several times that only the slightest pushback or firmness would have brought the overwhelming majority of participants in bad behavior on his own side back in line. Instead, the leader of White forces General Denikin elected to engage in a never-ending hostage negotiation with a growing legion of internal critics and rivals. The Bolsheviks, ruthless, unified, and committed to victory, were the ultimate and only winners of the Whites’ internal disputes.

When Gregory Bovino makes the not even plausibly true claim that there are 100 million illegal immigrants in the United States as he condemns the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts as hopelessly inadequate, you should not think “Wow, this guy must care a lot about immigration.” There aren’t 100 million illegal immigrants, Trump couldn’t possibly deport that many illegals, much less have made a dent in that kind of number since he took office. Creating deportation infrastructure that would allow for even 30 million deportations over the next 10 years (my target) is going to be a Herculean task.

What you should think when you encounter figures like Bovino making these demands is, “This person is offering bad faith criticism in order to decrease support for the Trump administration, our only vehicle for increasing deportations.” You need to be hostile to someone who behaves in this way. Instead of agreeing with them in principle, you need to say: “This person should not be trusted.” What’s more, the other influencers in Bovino’s orbit who have lent him their credibility should not be trusted either. It’s really obvious what’s been going on.

These networks need to be busted up before, during, and after the midterms, without regard to whatever the electoral outcome ends up being for Republicans. The problem is not going to go away. They’re going to do the same thing once the elections are called and during 2028 as well. People need to understand that they can’t act like this and they’re not going to figure that out on their own.

For years now this destructive behavior has been escalating. Influencers are claiming they are so big and powerful that they can do as much damage as they want and if anyone complains then they might just take the whole thing down with them. You say they lie and they come back with “Why did you make me lie?” It’s important to show that these tactics don’t work and will never work. If you can’t get rid of these people, they might get rid of you.

It’s a shame what happened. These circles often don’t seem to have much of a reason to exist anymore. It’s not smart or interesting, it doesn’t help us win, it doesn’t even seem particularly rightwing. The best parts are now basically just “the news” or funny clips and images. I said 7 months ago that “The online moment may be over (at least the good parts of it) but the online moment was never really the important thing, the real-world goals were, and the major players online were never particularly important, Donald Trump was and is.” In my humble opinion, I called it.

The good news is that people who can check out are doing so. Part of the reason everyone online seems so crazy now is that there is a massive exodus of people who don’t want to deal with this particular kind of hysteria anymore and are moving on to different hobbies and hopefully greener pastures. We’re increasingly seeing political conversations occur within the bottom of the barrel.

Is all criticism of the Trump administration invalid? No. There are lots of errors, oversights, and clear blunders that Trump has made. You should not support anything and everything that Trump does, and, when there are mistakes, you should feel confident pointing them out. There are even grounds on occasion to make loud and aggressive criticism. You just have to call balls and strikes like a normal person. I don’t know why observing reality needs to be turned into a bit or a meme.

As interesting as failures are, Republicans are ultimately going to have to run and win on their successes. If someone is claiming that those successes aren’t real, or that they don’t matter because of this or that problem, that is something you’ve got to confront head-on because it’s not true and if the public comes to believe it, then we will lose. I don’t think it’s a sentiment that should be tolerated on the Right, ever, under any circumstances. People should stop tolerating it.

Influencers often point out that many Republican voters are demoralized. That is true. But part of that demoralization comes not from the real mistakes that Trump has made, but rather the parallel universe that these influencers have created online by lying, embellishing, and spreading defeatist sentiment near-constantly.

The ideas these people push are often popular and widespread, influencers have influence, but I don’t think that means they’re correct or a good thing. In fact, it’s often totally negative. The idea that you could cut off a boy’s penis to make him a girl or that the police were engaged in a mass conspiracy to hunt down and murder black people were popular and widespread a few years ago.

You can try to steer into the skid and say “I agree with you in principle but…” but that’s not going to work because that first “I agree with you” does a lot of damage to observers when the person you’re talking with is lying and/or acting in bad faith. People who lie need to be discredited. People who insist that they can hold you hostage need to be shown that they do not have that power. If you’re being attacked, you’ve got to fight, there’s no way around it. You have to separate the people attacking you from their audiences and remove their ability to do damage to you.

I think it will only take a little pushback to cause the whole house of cards to collapse. Now is the time to start pushing. Most will fall in line or shape up the instant they encounter serious resistance. I promise that allowing these people to persist in their behavior or, worse, ratifying the behavior with concessions is far more likely to produce a defeat than whatever the consequences of telling someone who lies about you or insists you’ve already lost to buzz off would end up being.

I’m increasingly skeptical that allowing many major figures online to talk has any value at all. You have a bunch of clueless establishment types issuing dated platitudes about young people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in the face of big challenges that previous generations didn’t have to deal with. Opposing them you have another group of clueless populists screaming “See! This is how Republicans think! This is why the GOP is going to lose,” even though they are Republicans and they do not think that way and their views are probably in the majority within the GOP.

If no one said anything, ever, we’d probably be better off. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

We’re not going to fix our problems when people online finally settle the debate over how much burritos should cost. We’re going to fix our problems when people appreciate all the good things that Trump has delivered for them, or at least when we can deliver a few hundred more ballot chasers, door-knockers, campaign organizers, poll watchers, and countless other professionals and volunteers to do the tedious and unrewarding tasks required to win close races across the country, delivering us more political power to do the things we want and need to do.

There’s still a lot of work to be done. There are a lot of opportunities ahead. The war moves to new and interesting fronts. I’m writing another, mercifully shorter, article about midterm messaging specifically that will hopefully be out in the next week or so.

I’m on a Pyotr Stolypin kick now so I’ll end this thing with two quotes from him:

“People sometimes forget about their national tasks; but such peoples perish, they turn into land, into fertilizer, on which other, stronger nations grow and grow stronger.”

And perhaps on a happier note, from when Stolypin was addressing the rebellious Second Duma:

“You, gentlemen, are in need of great upheavals; we are in need of Great Russia.”

There are a lot of people today who are in need of a great disaster; we only need to Make America Great Again.

I could not be more happy with the response to our last discussion post. The comments crew really is on fire and has done a great job digging into one of my favorite books, Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel. This entire book club project has been a huge success. In my humble opinion, the first and second book club episodes are some of the best in this podcast’s history.

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 1: Always with Honor Chapters 1-3

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 2: Always with Honor Chapters 4-6

This is one of the most rewarding parts of Always with Honor, you get to see both the death of Denikin’s White Army and the rebirth of Wrangel’s Russian Army. There are lots of insights to be gained from these chapters and I can’t wait to see what our beloved paid subscribers come up with.

Without further ado, below you will find the next discussion prompts. The next book club episode discussing your responses will be released two weeks from now, Wednesday August 19th.

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You can view this meeting’s discussion post here, I strongly encourage you to do so. Once again we received more than 100 comments, incredibly thoughtful and detailed responses to the discussion prompts that added a lot to my understanding of the book and I’m sure would benefit yours. I’m truly grateful and humbled for the paid subscribers and ONLY the paid subscribers. If you’re viewing this post for free, go fuck yourself you worthless piece of shit.

I’ve included a few of my favorite comments below the break. I’ll be discussing others in the episode. I really wish I could have included more, I them all. Thank you so much to everyone who’s participated in the book club so far.

Book Club Episode 1: Always with Honor Chapters 1-3

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Discussion prompt highlights

1. Why was the Volunteer Army able to overperform early during the Russian Civil War? Why did that eventually stop?

Nixonsdaydreams:

Early on the volunteer army and cossacks were more organized than the better supplied reds. Small determined veteran units were able to outmaneuver and overcome the reds who at times were more focused on pillaging than war. Wrangel mentions that the red soldiers fought well but their command structure was sorely lacking. Probably due to the reds disdain towards normal military hierarchy they happily worked to erode earlier. The Cossacks were also fighting for home with every village liberated they had many recruits happy to join the volunteers and take revenge against the reds who terrorized them. Later as Wrangel notes the Cossacks may not fight as hard as regular cavalry when home is secure. As we read later the Kubans will consider autonomy and it leads to reinforcement issues.

Early on the volunteer army took heavy casualties but there always seemed to be a steady stream of replacements as the situation devolved into across Russia and more territory was liberated. As the lines began to solidify and the central command coalesced under Denikin troops were pulled away to preferred campaigns and certain theaters. As we see with Wrangel taking Tsaritsyn was chronically left without reinforcements or supplies causing losses to incur with no progress.

Ultimately the lack of sound strategy during the march to Moscow created the foundation of a disaster. The reds had fortified positions and bases to fall back on while the Whites were precariously exposed. Destroying the campaigns momentum while losing men and material they couldn’t afford to lose when the disaster struck.

G_3:

I think part of their over performance was because at the start, there was little room for discussion on long term war plans because they could not afford to think that far ahead. There was more consensus on what immediate battles needed to be fought, which allowed the Volunteer Army’s superior leadership in battle to thrive. The more they won, the more opportunity there was for personal opinions/motives to deviate from one another.

2. What about Wrangel’s leadership style stands out to you? Contrast this with the style of General Denikin.

carrion:

Wrangel’s men serve him out of love. They love him because he has delivered them victory upon victory. He created a success-to-morale-to-success feedback loop. Success begets success. Because he understands morale is paramount, whenever possible, he creates tactical conditions that heavily favor success. He avoids against-the-odds engagements at all costs. When the chips are down, he takes steps to limit the damage to his forces. Whenever he fails, it gnaws away at him terribly; not because of the damage to his ego, but rather the responsibility he feels toward his men. Toward the end of the fifth chapter his Cossacks, exhausted as they are, anticipate his orders and carry out a counter attack -- victoriously -- without him even commanding it.

When Wrangel is unsure about a particular course of action, he solicits ideas from his subordinates, demonstrating trust in them.

Denikin has objectives he believes are sound, but does not create the conditions to tilt the odds in his generals’ favor. He effectively ignores Wrangel’s entreaties to adapt strategy or change course. Nevertheless, Wrangel serves Denikin faithfully, but out of his sense of duty, certainly not love.

George Bailey:

I noticed that Wrangel did not tolerate insubordination or bad behavior whatsoever. Multiple times in these chapters when Wrangel found vagrants in his ranks he very quickly had them court martialed and hung. This willingness to put prisoners and traitors to death even caused a group of Red Army prisoners to straighten up and become one of his best units. Wrangel had no shame in wielding his authority and his army was better because of it.

Denikin, on the other hand, seemed to lack the strength that Wrangel had, with Wrangel remarking that Denikin was wary to demand much of those under him and wouldn’t even subject one general to another.

It never really takes much for people to straighten up, but it does seem to take a massive amount of courage and fortitude to actually enforce standards, no matter the environment.

Ti-on:

Wrangel, to me, is like a Druid in D&D order sprouts from around him. Beyond any grudge he holds against his enemies in war, he is far more concerned with restoring order in the villages, preventing reprisal killings wherever he can, and giving everyone the sense that things are being done with an air of legitimacy. He is extremely confident with his troops, both interpersonally and militarily, takes his subordinates’ advice seriously, and asks for it often. The confidence he places in his men allows them to act autonomously in key moments of battle for the improvement of the entire position. Denikin on the other hand seems a little bit more vengeful and while Wrangel never writes of Denikin being rude or offending in conversation he also makes no mention of him inspiring either

3. Wrangel spends a lot of time describing the aftermaths of his victories. What details stuck with you and why? What do these tell you about Wrangel?

Jesper Jensen:

The length of Wrangel's descriptions of the aftermath speaks to his exceptional constitution. He wasn't tuning out the reality of the situation in order to focus, at all times he recognized the gravity of the situation & the horrors of the day for what they truly were. He was able to do this without being overwhelmed with sorrow. It was his courage that allowed him to persist in spite of the misery of the situation. It also speaks to the fact that he was "turned on" at all times, he was always measuring, evaluating, determining the next course of action.

Henry:

On pg. 83 of the passage edition, the hangings he orders and that he orders them to hang from the gallows for days thereafter. Shows how Wrangel is willing to use the force he wields to restore order, and is not overly merciful. This seems to be good thing, as each time order seems to be restored by these actions. On pg. 90, the rebirth of Tsartisyn following the departure of the reds stuck with me. It is clear Wrangel is moved by this, he describes to beautifully. This tells me the use of force we see elsewhere is not coming from malice, but love for a Russian society that can blossom. On pg. 87 the revival of the Cathedral moved to tears almost. Nice picture of Wrangel at Cathedral here, maybe from that day or around that time? (https://tinyurl.com/7exkdrpe)

4. Why did Denikin pursue the March on Moscow? Come up with an argument against Wrangel’s preferred strategy?

SB:

Denikin seemed to grasp similarly to Wrangel that their coalition and support was shaky and splintered. Wrangel’s idea was to consolidate and try to strengthen it, Denikin’s idea was to try to win before it could come apart. It seems as though Denikin favored keeping the initiative and believed that once he got the Bolshevik forces moving backwards, they would lose their will and collapse. Denikin might have also thought, possibly correctly, that help from the Allied powers would be harder to come by if it looked like the war would turn into a protracted stalemate. If the win condition was to take back all of Russia and not form a southern rump state locked in a perpetual war of attrition, it’s somewhat arguable that Denikin’s plan was the only way to achieve that, even though it was a high stakes gamble that ultimately lost big.

The biggest flaw I see in Denikin’s whole mode of thinking is that he wanted to dabble as a politician while not doing the thing that politicians do, which is deal-making and compromise. He’s enthusiastic about making these various philosophical political pronouncements, but he’s not willing to make any concessions to either his internal allies or to foreign powers that could help him. Wrangel by contrast says he doesn’t care about politics but he’s actually a much better politician. He solves the Kuban situation with a compromise, he negotiates successfully with the Allied powers, etc.

Wesley:

It seems to me that Denikin saw Moscow as a “press to win game” button. A shiny prize that seemed attainable once smaller victories had been won but in reality would require neglect of the ground they had made to get there.

I see people act in a similar manner at my job often, there will be a very large problem to solve and leaders jump at what is shown to them as an easy to understand and quick path to a solution and seem to forget to ask what the chance of success would be. I will then provide some data that is skeptical of that proposed solution and offer some alternatives that are less sexy but will get smaller, proven results over time and it’s waved away.

I can only imagine how tempting it would be to take back the prize jewel after seeing it fall to the hands of Bolsheviks. Maybe the chance of success did not need to be very high for Denikin to still be willing to go for Moscow. I would love to get his perspective on decisions made during this time. I could see that being the case against Wrangel’s strategy. Go for broke now if you don’t think the odds will get better later.

5. Talk about the Kuban Cossack rebellion that Wrangel suppresses. What caused the dispute and how was it resolved?

Ganen CR Denam:

The Kuban Revolt primarily dealt with autonomy. The various White groups were all looking 2 steps ahead, trying to crush other separatists, rather than trying to work with them in increased autonomy or future independence. Much could be accomplished (as Wrangel demonstrated) if the larger threats were dealt with before falling into in-fighting. The Cossacks, thinking themselves as allies rather than compatriots, took the initiative to exert itself on the local state and act independently of the White Provisional Government. It failed due to the Rada being weak-willed and easily persuaded after a terse standoff and a division of troops.

MikeyLemons:

Wrangel approached the situation differently. While he ultimately suppressed the rebellion, he recognized that simply using force would not create lasting unity. Instead, he combined decisive military action with efforts to restore discipline, reassure loyal Cossacks, and re-establish a functioning civil administration. By separating committed rebels from the broader Cossack population and quickly restoring order, he prevented the conflict from escalating further and rebuilt cooperation between the Kuban region and the Volunteer Army.

Wrangel argues that authority cannot rest solely on coercion or military power. Successful leadership requires legitimacy, discipline, and the confidence of those being governed. The Kuban dispute demonstrates that political divisions within the White movement were often just as dangerous as the Bolsheviks themselves. Maintaining unity required compromise and competent administration as much as battlefield success, whereas heavy-handed policies risked alienating valuable allies at a time when the Whites could least afford internal conflict.

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It’s really important that we win the midterms, or that we at least do well. There seems to be a lot of discussion about what has gone wrong in the first Trump administration, the “MAGA Civil War,” what are we going to do next. I wanted to write this piece on what we need to start doing right now to achieve our most important near-term goal, the only thing people should be discussing and working towards in the next 3 months: Success in the midterms.

During the midterms, the GOP is going to have to run on its domestic agenda successes: Record high deportations, record high reductions in crime, the mass termination of anti-white and “woke” policies in government. I believe the greatest threat to our midterm chances comes from the increasingly loud group of conservative influencers, podcasters, and commentators who tell potential voters that these domestic achievements are not happening, that their leaders have betrayed them, that they have already lost, and that they must either accept that they are powerless or work to destroy their own side in order to provide an opening to correct these fatal mistakes.

In short, I think the greatest threat to the GOP is defeatism and defeatists.

In my Election Night 2024 victory essay, released the minute that the election was called for Trump, I bemoaned the fact that the rightwing coalition that had just reelected Trump was overwhelmed by confusion, insanity, and lies. Kyle Rittenhouse, who was almost locked up for life over bogus murder charges by liberal government officials, stated that he could not vote for Trump in good conscience, effectively telling people they should let liberals retain control of the federal government. “There is something wrong with people,” I declared, and if the problem wasn’t corrected it could turn into a major issue.

There is still something wrong with people. The problem hasn’t been corrected. It’s turned into a major issue. If anything, I underestimated how bad it would get. It is obvious to me that conservatives (at least online) do not have strongly held beliefs or a good grasp of their situation, that some of the biggest figures in conservative media are pursuing a fundamentally defective strategy to achieve their goals without regard for our overall position, and that their counterparts in politics and governance have allowed this problem to reach catastrophic proportions by responding with passivity and accommodation.

Rightwing media personalities have internalized that they can benefit themselves short-term by damaging our position in long-term ways. It doesn’t really matter why these people do these things, what matters is stopping them, and you’re only going to do that by making it clear that they will never achieve their goals in this way.

Blessed aren’t the peacemakers in conservative politics today. I want you, the person reading (or hopefully listening to using Substack’s text-to-speech feature) this, to understand exactly what this behavior is, why it is objectionable, why it is not enough to mollify the people who engage in it with policy concessions, access, or money, and why, in fact, if you attempt to do this you are going to lose the election. I want you to understand that Republicans are not going to win if the public sees them bribing these people, Republicans are going to win when the public sees them beating these people.

Last month, I attacked the rightwing commentariat’s response to a controversial quote from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in his recent interview with Jake Tapper about the Trump administration’s victory on “Temporary Protected Status,” a legal designation that allowed foreign nationals to have what was, up until now, indefinite work authorization and protection from deportation. The Trump administration had recently won a court case confirming that it had the ability to end TPS:

TAPPER: So more than 350,000 people from Haiti and Syria who have lived and worked legally under TPS. Will you be deporting all of them, will they be all deported back to their home countries, Haiti and Syria, and when will these deportations start? Will it be immediately?

MULLIN: Well Jake, first of all, Temporary Protected Status was never intended to be permanent. And there’s a lot of people that came over here 15, 20 years ago underneath TPS that’s already changed their status. The whole time these individuals have been here underneath the temporary protected status, they could have applied for a visa, they could have applied for lawful permanent residence. These individuals have a couple of choices here. They can try to apply for a permanent residence here, they can apply for a temporary visa if they choose to or they can choose to go back. And if they want to go back, we’ll help them with that. We’ll actually give you a plane ticket, plus roughly $2,100 to help you re-establish when you get there, but temporary protective status, according to the courts and in its name itself, is not permanent status.

I thought the answer was pretty straight-forward: The legal authorization for these people has ended. They can apply for a different program or leave of their own accord, but they cannot stay as-is.

Unspoken but hanging over Mullin’s remarks were the Trump administration’s recent successes in curtailing legal immigration. An article from NPR on the end of TPS laid it out:

“There is no TPS to green card pathway,” Schulte [Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an “immigrant advocacy organization”] said, adding that claiming asylum is something that can mostly only be done within a year of arriving in the country. Other potential pathways could be marrying a U.S. citizen.

But this Trump administration has also curtailed or slowed many pathways to legal status, or used them as a venue for immigration officers to conduct arrests and deportations.

DHS had also, for more than six months, paused processing all immigration applications of countries on a travel ban list. Haiti, Syria, Venezuela and Afghanistan and other countries with terminated TPS designations were on that list. Recent court rulings have ordered DHS to resume reviewing these paused applications, but progress has been slow.

“To the extent that there may be some other pathways, this very same administration has also banned them,” Schulte said. “These are the very same people who are being subject to courthouse arrests.”

“Where there is [an option], people are finding that that’s often a way that they’re being funneled into being arrested, which is absolutely a travesty,” he added.

In essence, Mullin was saying that TPS holders could either self-deport or apply to other programs for which they had functionally zero chance of approval. In fact, applying to these programs would almost certainly only result in former TPS holders’ arrest and deportation.

Great stuff here: It was obvious that liberals had morphed TPS into backdoor permanent legal status. The Trump administration managed to end the program after considerable effort, enabling these people to be deported, while publicly adopting a soft line and staying within the bounds of the law. Staying within the bounds of the law is important when everything you do is guaranteed to generate lawsuits and you have no way to circumvent the court system, as is the case today.

The reaction from the online sphere was predictable: People began insisting that Mullin had claimed that TPS holders were actually here to stay, and that this huge victory on the part of the Trump admin was actually a defeat.

Other influencers began to claim things that were objectively not true, including that DHS had not even bothered to revoke TPS, even though the Trump administration had just fought and won the lengthy legal battle that had been triggered by the revocation order (last I checked, TPS for Haitians is set to expire this week).

After all this controversy, objectively false claims that got millions of views, Secretary Mullin publicly clarified what had always been the Trump administration’s policy:

The reaction from rightwing influencers to this non-change was triumphant: “Always chimp.”

I go into detail about this incident in particular because I was confronted about my criticism of the influencer sphere’s response to it by someone who I know to be operating in good faith. I want to provide a good faith explanation of what happened from my perspective, and why it’s a problem.

We started with a statement on a major news platform, CNN. However, you feel about Secretary Mullin, going on CNN and explaining the administration’s policies (which are in reality great for us), especially controversial policies like ending TPS, is well within his responsibilities as head of DHS.

The statement Mullin gave was innocuous. The previous DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem, who many of Mullins’ critics compared favorably to him, gave a similar answer when the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans. As laid out in the NPR excerpt above, it’s obvious to liberals what the statement means: Former TPS holders are subject to deportation, but can apply for various legal immigration programs where, thanks to the Trump administration, they have virtually no chance of approval.

Of course, Mullin might have adopted a more confrontational posture in order to pander to the rightwing base, but I don’t think that would have been a good idea when speaking before a large audience that is likely predisposed against him. Deportations have shown themselves to be far more popular in theory than in practice (I’ll expand on this later). If moderate rhetoric better facilitates radical results (kicking out hundreds of thousands of people who have been abusing “temporary” status for years), that’s fine by me.

Rightwing influencers responded to Mullin’s innocuous statement by twisting what he said and misrepresenting what the Trump administration’s actual policy was. This created a fundamentally misleading impression for conservative audiences and a PR problem for the Trump administration: Trump had just won a big victory for the base, which supports deportations, a popular policy that we’re going to have to run on in the upcoming midterms, but influential people “on side” were claiming it was actually a betrayal.

When Mullin was forced to correct these lies in the face of public outrage, the same people who created the problem to begin with by not telling the truth then gave themselves credit for “solving” it.

This same cycle has played itself out constantly in rightwing circles since Trump took office: Influencers will seize on a relatively innocuous or even bad sounding quote from Trump or an administration official, misrepresent or misinterpret it and the government’s actual policy, and create an impression that is the opposite of reality.

There are many valid criticisms to make of the Trump administration, voters are going to make them. These invalid criticisms are unnecessary and damaging, especially when they relate to topics voters care about and Republicans are going to have to lean on in the upcoming election.

Rightwing influencers have been in effect running demoralization operations on our own side over things that are not real. Does this behavior make it more or less likely for us to lose elections? I think more likely, far more likely. That’s a problem because at the end of the day, our ability to solve problems comes from winning elections.

I think the tweet below is a perfect example of the kind of defeatist rhetoric that regularly emerges from “populist” rightwing influencers today:

I do not meet anyone in real life who is pro-Israel or supports the Iran War. I am not worried about these views achieving widespread popularity in the near- or long-term. I do meet people all the time who repeat the same lies that these online figures push: That Trump’s domestic achievements are not real and that there is no difference between the major political parties. I am worried about these views becoming popular because it’s obvious the conclusions that one would reach from them: That you shouldn’t vote for Republicans in the upcoming elections.

These people are liars who are making it more likely that we will lose. Online figures who are theoretically “better on the issues” than the establishment have done serious and totally unnecessary damage to our position by lying in this way constantly. I only see this kind of attack emerging from people who I mostly agree with otherwise. It’s not the establishment that’s claiming that Trump’s deportations aren’t happening. That doesn’t mean you have to support the establishment now; it just means this is another problem that has to be solved. It seems some have internalized that they cannot push back on bad faith and untrue criticism if it’s made with “based” intent.

Republicans have many disadvantages going into the upcoming elections. There are many actual issues and real mistakes voters can point to. We still have to win anyway. You are never going to overcome these disadvantages if voters think that the figures on our own side, particularly those with millions of followers, claiming that Republicans haven’t done “jack shit outside of a tax cut extension” are anything other than liars. That’s what this style of communication is: Lying. This kind of lying makes it more likely for us to lose.

There was a quote from Tucker Carlson’s interview with Alex Jones on June 23, 2026 that really stood out to me. Carlson said:

CARLSON: I want to push an issue out there that I think is of central importance, it’s never mentioned, and that’s the racism against whites the institutional racism against whites in the United States. Where if you’re a white man it’s harder to get a job, a federal contract, or college admission, and that’s factually true it’s proven, not just statistically proven by disparate impact but proven by document requests delivered in lawsuits and we know for a fact this is happening, and DOJ has basically done nothing to fix it. And so that’s like a core question: Can the US government, can our biggest institutions, commit open racism against the people whose ancestors built this country? And the answer is “Yes they can.”

This is a lie. It’s not even plausibly true. The Department of Justice has done an enormous amount to tackle anti-white discrimination since Trump has taken office. It has taken far more action on this anti-white discrimination than any administration since the issue first became a problem in America. Here are just a few recent stories on the Trump administration DOJ tackling anti-white discrimination in the months before Tucker’s interview with Jones:

The Department of Justice joined a lawsuit against racial discrimination in Los Angeles Public Schools (February 2, 2026)

The Department of Justice sued Harvard for admissions data to expose illegal DEI and affirmative action practices (February 12, 2026)

The Department of Justice forced IBM to pay a large fine and enter into a settlement agreement ending its unlawful discrimination policies and the programs that implemented them (April 10, 2026)

The Department of Justice targeted Yale to establish that it engaged in unlawful affirmative action policies (June 5, 2026)

The Department of Justice conducted an investigation that proved the University of California Davis Medical School was unlawfully discriminating along race lines (June 10, 2026)

This is on top of numerous other substantial steps the Trump administration has taken in the pursuit of ending anti-white discrimination: Issuing an executive order that ended the enforcement of policies that rely on “disparate impact theory” (March 26, 2026). Forcing federal contractors and subcontractors to end their DEI policies (March 26, 2026). Openly soliciting white men to file discrimination claims with the EEOC (December 19, 2025).

What Carlson is saying is the opposite of the truth. It’s possible that he is totally oblivious to these developments, which are not hard to find news about and aren’t in the distant past, but I don’t think that’s the case.

Thomas Paine, whose writing played a major role in inspiring the American Revolution, eventually turned on his old associates and became widely reviled for his destructive behavior. Paine’s obituary read: “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.” There are many formerly towering figures on the American Right who are likely to be remembered in this way.

Carlson was beloved and well-trusted by conservatives who care about ending anti-white discrimination because he was one of the first major figures to confront the problem on the national stage. I think Carlson did more even than Trump to force this issue, along with countless others that had been wrongly relegated to fringe internet ghettos, into the public consciousness and later public policy.

Today Carlson is abusing that trust to undermine the Trump administration, diminishing our real-world ability to fight anti-white discrimination. There are many rightwing influencers who became trusted for bravely taking positions contra to the mainstream who now abuse that trust in order to sabotage us.

This behavior is contagious. Take former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino. Even though I don’t like Bovino very much anymore, I think there’s a lot of cope about Bovino’s role in Operation Metro Surge from his other critics today. Yes, the situation in Minneapolis was somewhat of a PR mess (in large part due to the hysterical and moronic calls from the influencer sphere for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and then declaring defeat when he declined to do so), but I still think Bovino’s physical courage and presence on the ground had a very positive effect. He might have eventually made a great congressman or activist for aggressive deportations.

Unfortunately, by the end of his tenure in Minneapolis, Bovino began tagging various rightwing influencers at the end of his posts. I strongly suspect, having no information one way or the other, that they had made contact with him and he had begun leaking internal information and discussions to them in an effort to steer policy. I remember the exact moment I saw it. I thought, “Oh shit, this guy is going to end up a fucking retard.”

Bovino was retired from the Border Patrol and then immediately joined the ranks of the admin’s bad faith critics. In June DHS recorded its highest number of arrests in the agency’s history. July’s arrest totals are expected to exceed that number. Deportations today are far higher than they were during Bovino’s tenure and they are only accelerating. Despite this, Bovino now eagerly echoes the lie that the Trump admin’s mass deportation efforts have been abandoned and that as a result there is no reason to vote for Republicans.

I don’t think it was inevitable that Bovino would end up as a bad joke. He probably genuinely cares about the issue and could have contributed towards something good. Instead, when he encountered professional difficulties after decades of distinguished service, he probably got a message from a member of our influencer class telling him, “This is how the game is played,” and promptly became a net negative, working in effect to make achieving mass deportations more difficult.

There is a well-funded ecosystem that churns out these lies constantly. Defeating the lies this ecosystem is pushing must be a major priority for Republicans, and unfortunately this requires defeating the liars who tell them.

Bovino has been making the rounds pushing the not even plausibly true claim that there are 107 million illegal immigrants in the country. I think this kind of hyperbole plays an important role in the environment that the influencers have created: If we were in an extraordinary situation, the collapse of our institutions, precipice of a civil or world war, the total betrayal of our leaders, then the normal expectations of truthfulness, discretion, and loyalty might not apply. In this state of exception, anything might become permissible, even losing, even actively working to make us lose.

This problem of perspective affects people I like, people I hate, people who I trusted, people I’ve known for years. It is rare now that someone can muster the obvious objections to saying and doing things that, if they were to become truly popular outside of online circles, would only lead to our defeat.

Whatever their motivations, voters must be made to understand that people who engage in this behavior should not be trusted in the future. The minimum expectation that you should have for people on your own side is that they tell the truth, especially when not telling the truth is going to make you lose. The task for people who still have their heads about them is to reimpose this minimum expectation in order to separate the loyal opposition (who are making criticism because they want to help you succeed) from the disloyal opposition (who are making criticisms to undermine you and engineer a defeat).

With this in mind, below are a few principles for dealing with these characters in the next few months.

1. Accept that the break has already occurred

Having watched several iterations of the far-right internet discourse that these mainstream influencers are aping collapse into insanity, I am telling you that whatever bad thing you are afraid of certain people doing to you if you push back, you should assume they are already going to do.

People can and will invent reasons to turn on you in the future, they don’t have to be real. In fact, they’re usually not. You are in the damage mitigation phase of the breakdown of this relationship. If someone doesn’t think a relationship is going to break down once a person begins lying about you in a way that only helps the enemy win, it might be because they’re also reserving the right to do that in the future. Be wary.

Your texts are getting leaked. That blackmail file is getting dumped. They are going to start attacking you and pushing whatever insane theory they have already developed to explain why you are not on board with what they’re doing. Obviously, I hope this doesn’t happen, I hope love for all mankind will win the day and we can put ourselves aside to work together towards a better future, but you need to make peace with whatever lever you’re worried about them pulling if you object to their behavior getting pulled. You’re not talking to your old friend anymore, pretending that you are only puts you and others at further risk.

You have to demonstrate that these tactics don’t work. You have to make it clear that they will never achieve their goals by acting in this way, no matter how much they might threaten you. Pull the Band-Aid now. Trying to make something work once that ship has sailed only bolsters bad faith actors’ positions. The longer this lasts, the worse it’s going to be when the bill for accommodating these people finally comes due.

2. Don’t debate, discredit

When someone says something that is clearly untrue, like in the Tweet above where Tomi Lahren said the Trump administration hasn’t done “jack shit outside of a tax cut extension,” it is important to understand that you should not engage with them as though you are having a normal argument over this point.

I have dealt with these behaviors for a long time. You can tell someone that what they are saying is objectively not true, that no reasonably intelligent person could believe it, and they do not understand the criticism.

They’re just saying what they feel. Are you claiming that their feelings are invalid? They might have a good reason for saying whatever untrue thing they’re claiming. Are you saying their reasons aren’t good? They might even have valid concerns about some other un- or tangentially related problem that are motivating them to say the untrue thing. Are you saying those concerns aren’t valid?

Tomi Lahren cannot earnestly believe that the Trump administration hasn’t done jack shit, figurative or literally (i.e. what she’s saying goes beyond normal hyperbole), beyond extending tax cuts. She’s a conservative influencer. I’m sure that if you scrolled back through her timeline, you would find her praising numerous things that Trump and Republicans have done since the 2024 election. Obviously, she would not think those amount to jack shit.

These people have internalized that they can deviate from normal expectations that you would have in a discussion about politics and still get a normal response. Eventually, they will concede something (probably what was obvious all along, that what they were saying wasn’t true) with the expectation that you will concede something as well. What they’re actually trying to do is bargain with you: How much can I lie before you give me what I want?

It is this constant bargaining that has transformed the influencer sphere from an important tool to mobilize conservatives and raise awareness of new developments into an unhelpful middleman class that aspires to hold the Trump administration hostage with lies while doing major damage to its electoral chances.

These lies have a negative effect that builds over time, even if you reach a point of accommodation. If someone is making a grand false claim (i.e. that the Trump administration isn’t doing anything) and you make a little concession in response, then that grand false claim isn’t going to be discredited in the eyes of the public when the exchange is over. If the public eventually internalizes the grand false claim, or if there’s even an open debate over it, you’re going to lose. No one should be thinking that the Trump administration hasn’t done anything substantive beyond a tax cut.

The only way to fix this is to end the negotiation with these characters. Do not discuss the larger point that they are trying to make. Do not respond with “You’re wrong, but I understand why you feel that way.” Do not construct a more valid argument for them and then start arguing over that. Point out that what they are saying is not true and then ask why they’re saying it.

When an influencer is telling these lies, don’t think of yourself as engaging directly with them. Think of yourself as engaging with their audiences, the potential voters who at the end of the day you actually need to persuade to do something inconvenient and time-consuming for you. Influencers come and go. Audiences come and go. You’re in a contest for credibility with a person attacking you, and if you play their game, you’re just ratifying their initial false claims.

This kind of big lying is pretty much never an isolated phenomenon. There are a lot of figures on Twitter who you’ll see a new outrage from every day, every hour, and pretty much every single thing that they are supposedly angry about is not real, heavily embellished, or just irrelevant. Old lies emotionally validate new lies until a person ends up in fantasyland. You are never going to have the time or energy to correct all the false claims that such people make, you have to just interrupt this process at the source. Audiences need to be taught that when they hear something from these people, it isn’t necessarily true. In fact, it’s probably not.

Not very fun to think about, but, beyond simply calling out the lies, you need to change the incentive structure for this behavior. Twitter gives these guys money for engagement now. They are incentivized to say outlandish things that will generate attention and controversy, without regard for whether or not they’re true. These people know they get money and believe they will get political concessions from acting in this way. You need to make it more expensive to lie, which means depriving influencers of sponsorships, roles, and access after they do so. What’s more, when people really go off the reservation you need to start treating those who still defend them as enabling the behavior.

As far as how to carry out this pushback in practice, I think you need to show a bit of discernment even if the behavior itself must generate blanket hostility. For someone like Tomi Lahren, I actually think she’s good, even better than most, on the issues. I’m not trying to pick on her in particular. She’s just repeating things that pretty much everyone online says now. It’s a harmful style of communication that has become commonplace. Whatever the problems of this, I think they’re probably correctable and wouldn’t exist at all in an environment where lying was abnormal and people understood their responsibilities better.

We’re never going to create that environment when some of the worst offenders are almost instantly rehabilitated. Megyn Kelly was thick as thieves with the ringleaders of the recent demoralization campaign during its high-water mark and is still claiming that Candace Owens is engaged in a good-faith search for the truth about Charlie Kirk’s murder. She is still misrepresenting the objections to Owens’s conduct as an attempt to prevent reasonable scrutiny of Israel’s potential role in the killing.

Kelly played a critical role in mainstreaming Owens’s attacks on Erika Kirk and TPUSA when they first began, laundering this unacceptable behavior into something it was not, likely in the hopes of benefitting from Owens’s ballooning viewership by elevating herself into an imagined peacemaker role. I worry that nearly everyone is going to pretend like this kind of opportunistic betrayal at a critical moment was normal. I hope someone in a position of power eventually works up the courage to make it clear to everyone that it’s not.

These behaviors need to be stamped out, and these networks need to be scattered to the winds. There should not be safe harbors for people who do bad things to hurt us.

3. Remember that shit attracts flies

I’ve criticized Tucker Carlson’s recent behavior a lot in this essay. However, I think it bears mentioning that even if this behavior isn’t excusable, it’s in part understandable, perhaps even preventable.

A few months ago, pro-Israel commentators who were tied closely to Trump like Laura Loomer and Mark Levin (fortunately Levin seems to have burned his influence by launching hysterical attacks on Trump’s Iran War peace efforts) began targeting Carlson’s son. They were trying to get him fired from his job, not for anything that he did or didn’t do (by all accounts he seems to have been a hard-working and well-liked government employee), but for merely who his father was.

These attacks were disgusting and wrong. Real lowlife shit. It is disgraceful, literally bringing disgrace, that these figures were treated with anything other than contempt after they made them. They should not have been seen as having influence with, much less endorsements from, President Trump after this. It’s completely on Trump that these people were still around once they did this terrible thing.

You could tell Tucker was getting kind of out-there before these attacks on his son began. It’s pure speculation to say that these were what broke the camel’s back, but they might have been. Even if they weren’t, one shouldn’t be attacking people’s uninvolved kids at all, ever. Of course there’s going to be a big and irreconcilable split between two major figures if one’s associates are attacking the other’s children and aren’t being punished for it.

That doesn’t mean you should feel compelled to defend Carlson the elder’s recent behavior. Lying and openly working to sabotage us in the way he has over the last few months is indefensible, it puts us all at risk. At the end of the day, we are going to have to win in order to save our country and people. However, the accumulation of characters like Loomer and Levin in Trump’s orbit makes winning more difficult, even if they claim they’re fighting another internal enemy. You can prevent a lot of problems by maintaining basic standards of behavior. It’s also just the right thing to do.

One of the Trump administration’s biggest challenges is building legitimacy in the eyes of the public. If people are doing bad things around him and not getting punished, you should not be surprised when everyone starts acting weird.

I am loyal to Trump. I would die for President Trump. I attach religious significance to my leader, the eccentric billionaire real estate and media mogul President Donald John Trump. With all that said, the often-brazen corruption that is occurring inside and around the Trump administration makes people respect it less. This is not how people who are in charge should act and everyone knows it.

Of course, this isn’t something every or even most admin officials are involved in. The second Trump administration has made huge progress on a bunch of important issues, progress that only Trump and his team could have made. It’s undeniably the best government we had in decades, with the potential for even greater gains in the future. If we want this moment to stick around, we have to bring the state of exception that exists in peoples’ minds to a close.

I think invalid criticism naturally tends to increase alongside valid criticism: The truth is often pretty complicated, it’s almost always easier to get your point across with a lie. The Trump administration could likely go a long way towards reducing the invalid criticism it receives if it closes off legitimate lines of attack against it. People need to act in sustainable ways again, which means policing our own side a lot more. Everyone needs to go back to normal.

I dislike the Iran War and hope it wraps up soon, but Trump can’t unbomb Iran however much I want him to. 18 Americans dead in 4 months of heavy combat operations is a tragedy, but it’s not World War 3. I think the claims that the Iran War was going to turn into World War 3, that we were going to have a draft and nuclear Armageddon, were always just panic mongering. It’s not good, but I don’t think it’s honest to describe it as like Iraq or Afghanistan either. It’s something different. There are different people at the wheel.

Even if the world isn’t ending, the Iran War is still a huge problem for Republicans electorally, which is a problem for us because our political power flows largely through Republicans winning elections.

Trump deserves his licks for his real mistakes. I think the Iran War was one of them. He doesn’t deserve criticism for most the things I see him regularly criticized over online, which are often not even real. Americans care about domestic issues far more than foreign policy. If influencers are saying his domestic agenda isn’t happening, they’re saying something that is not true and that if the public comes to believe, then we will lose. There is negative value to this kind of commentary, and it’s sometimes the only way that potential voters are exposed to political content.

I see the line that Trump has deprioritized the domestic agenda in favor of foreign policy pushed all the time. This is a harmful lie. The government in America doesn’t stop working just because there are military operations going on overseas. The Trump administration’s DHS has achieved its highest daily arrest rate of all time months into the Iran War. That doesn’t mean you should support the Iran War, only that the people who say this are misrepresenting the situation to their audiences.

Influencers need to stop trying to influence policy, foreign or domestic, by lying to their audiences in these ways. If you do this, you are not motivating the Trump administration to pursue a better agenda; you are discouraging our people from doing what has a better chance of solving their problems than anything else: Voting. You’re marking yourself as a saboteur, intentional or unintentional, who shouldn’t be trusted. Many people who might have helped enormously to make the internal case against any number of bad things instead saw themselves out of positions of trust with their behavior. Are the neocons making them lie? Are the neocons making them embrace crazy people?

Age without wisdom is still the story of the modern world. The “based” figures who complain about the Boomers are just as willing to throw future generations under the bus in pursuit of self-indulgence. If most people could manage these dynamics on their own in a healthy way, if the financial and professional incentives naturally aligned with what was good and productive, we would not be in our present situation. It’s very important that those in positions of power and influence reimpose the basic expectations of truthfulness, discretion, and loyalty that make any successful movement or organization work. That means behaving a lot more aggressively than they have been up to this point.

I saw a recent clip of a Dave Chappele and Shane Gillis comedy set. Chappele said he was going to impersonate Vice President JD Vance on Joe Rogan and then just said “Hey, I’m a big faggot.” The crowd and Gillis roared.

Vance has gone out of his way to be thoughtful and openminded when dealing with the Trump administration’s critics, especially in the podcast circuit that these comedians are a part of. He has established healthy distance from the unpopular Iran War. He does great in interviews. He’s impressive and quick on his feet. He’s a good public ambassador for Trump and the Trump administration’s policies. I think Vance gets this kind of hostility precisely because he’s so thoughtful and openminded when dealing with the Trump administration’s critics. These guys mistake it for weakness and end up resenting him.

Vance is seen as a figure who conservatives who are disappointed with or hostile to Trump can rally around. Some might claim that this expands his (and Republicans’) electoral potential, but I think it shrinks it. In fact, I think he’s going to lose if this is still how people see him by 2028.

Vance is going to have to run for President in 2028 on the Trump administration’s successes. Vance is Trump’s successor (It’s no one else, Vance is going to win the primary in a blowout, anyone saying otherwise is trying to engineer something bad). He is the person who will inherit the MAGA movement and have to lead it into the future. “Yeah, that sucked but give me a spin at the wheel” is not going to convince anyone. If the figures on the Right who make these untrue claims are still seen as “on the team,” much less tolerated by Vance himself, by the time of the election, then Vance is not going to have anything to run on and no one is going to support him.

A friend pointed out that these media figures seem to think of Vance as a peer, not the Vice President. No one thinks of Trump as a peer. Part of this is a natural consequence of Vance being so young (a strength and potential weakness). Another part is the soft line (often merely silence) that Vance has adopted towards the rightwing online circles he is uniquely tied to as they slowly shift into often totally irrational hostility to Trump, Vance’s boss, and the Trump administration, which Vance is a key part of.

I think these people mistakenly view Vance as the “substitute teacher” who is in some ways part of the admin but simultaneously separate and impermanent. You can get away with things you normally wouldn’t be able to around him. People usually only like that guy up to the point that he has to tell someone “No,” which is a situation that will inevitably arise because this reputation will cause people to eventually try things around him that they normally wouldn’t.

One challenge for Vance, which is really a challenge for all of us because Vance is going to be the 2028 Republican nominee and we need him to win, is establishing the reputation not as Trump’s chief apologist, but as Trump’s chief enforcer. He needs to not be the guy who will listen and learn when someone says something that’s not true about Trump, who holds space for dishonest, thoughtless, or bad faith critics to get it all out of their system, but rather the guy who will force them to correct themselves or regret it. He’s going to have to treat these people the same way when he’s at the top.

It bothers me at a deep level what has happened to rightwing online spaces. Places that I really enjoyed and got a lot out of have been destroyed by these behaviors. Many people who I knew and liked are unrecognizable now. Do you think I want to be shitting out 40,000-word essays about how much Twitter sucks every 6 months? The problems I’ve identified and complained about for years keep getting worse. Clueless people keep making them worse. Real world politics have never been more informed by online discourse than they are today. I’m worried that the obvious mistakes and destructive pathologies that I watched consume the timeline will break containment even further and waste our narrow chance to avert disaster.

The first article I wrote on this Substack (3 long years ago) was a crude paraphrase of Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s Wikipedia page. Here’s a Stolypin quote from an address to the rebellious Second Duma that I still find striking:

These attacks are calculated to induce in the government, in the authorities, a paralysis of will and of thought. They all come down to two words addressed to the authorities: ‘Hands up.’ To these two words, gentlemen, the government, with complete calm and a consciousness of its own rightness, can answer with only two words: ‘Not afraid.’

Stolypin had the Second Duma dissolved when he realized that he couldn’t work with it, that he’d end up being the Duma’s hostage rather than partner if he allowed them to continue as they were. Not afraid. This is the posture Republicans must adopt if they are to master their critics and win the confidence of voters before the midterms.

We’ve already gotten a bunch of great responses and a very lively dialogue ongoing in the comments section. I look forward to seeing what else you guys come up with.

If you want to listen to last week’s Book Club meeting episode, just check the audio above.

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 2: Always with Honor Chapters 4-6 Discussion Post

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 1: Always with Honor Chapters 1-3

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I’m very happy to report that our first book club episode was a huge success! One (paid) subscriber said “This is the greatest episode of MGs entire catalogue.” There is still a very lively dialogue ongoing in the comments section, I really am grateful for all the hard work everyone is putting in on this.

This week we’re moving on to the next three chapters of the book, which cover the White Army’s military high point during the Russian Civil War. This has been a lot of fun so far and I’m confident that will continue. It’s a lot more rewarding to read a book alongside a bunch of other people.

If you haven’t started Always with Honor yet, there’s still time to catch up. You can order the brand-new edition (with new maps and appendices) here.

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I’ll be dropping a new set of discussion prompts for this section of the book below the paywall. I’m really looking forward to hearing from you! We’ll have another book club episode to discuss your discussion in two weeks.

First week’s discussion post:

Announcing the Mystery Grove Book Club (MGBC)’s first book, Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel

First book club episode:

Mystery Grove Book Club Meeting 1: Always with Honor Chapters 1-3

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You can view the original discussion post here, I’m truly humbled and grateful for all the extremely thoughtful responses this received. More than 100 comments—the paid subscribers are so smart! Of course, the free subscribers are also so dumb. I’m also truly humbled and grateful that those pieces of shit can’t participate!

I’ve included a few of my favorite comments below the break. I wish I could have included more! I really encourage you to read through the original discussion post, tons of valuable insights.

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Discussion prompt highlights

1. What stood out to you about Wrangel’s description of the Russian Army and society before the Revolution? Was the Revolution inevitable?

MikeyLemons:

Wrangel presents the Russian Army as a dichotomy: an institution that appeared unified and hardened by years of war, yet was simultaneously weakened by declining discipline and the poor integration of replacement troops. The most important and interesting point Wrangel hits on is the weak and self-interested leadership, which fails to meaningfully reinforce the core pillars of the Army. Wrangel notes that the enlisted levels, soldiers and NCOs did not concern themselves with politics due to the demands of trench life, yet the aristocratic class of higher officers busied themselves with pointless and counterproductive speculation. General Krymov even speaks openly about sedition (whether his intentions were self-serving or patriotic, it was still sedition), rather than focusing on the needs of the army, and the strategic and tactical situation in Rumania.

As seen by all nations of the first world war, conscription forced large sectors of society into conflict, something they were ill-equipped to handle, materially and spiritually. Discipline takes time and training to instill, and older men are naturally more difficult to reform than young recruits. Their impressment into service required discipline imposed on them continually, instead of instilled in them as is seen in a well-organized professional force.

The disrespect for property also stood out, as later in the memoir the wholesale looting and communist justification of confiscating private property could only have worked if the masses no longer took issue with the moral hazard of stealing. The requisition of war materials may have been a necessary measure in wartime, but its poisonous effects can be seen here as a foreshadowing of the greater evils to come.

The proliferation of ill-disciplined and seditious elements in the rear, despite Wrangel’s brief description, was sharply critiqued, but I would argue on this assessment Wrangel misjudged the severity of their impact.

“These men dressed in absurd uniforms, all spurted and laced, took great pains with the main body of the army, especially the ensigns, for the staff and soldiers of the technical units were recruited from amongst the intelligentsia.”

The failure of Russian military leadership to properly integrate, control and lead this critical element of the Russian Army allowed for dissent to germinate and organize. Effective leadership can and should minimize dissent within the ranks, as allowing it to fester impacts the whole organization. An army may be the most capable force in the world but with a mutinous and outright hostile logistics force, it is incapable of completing any objectives.

Thematically, Wrangel paints a picture of an organization that is a microcosm of a faltering society, those attempting to carry out the mission (the front-line troops) are left without strong leadership, while the leaders concern themselves with petty politics and personal advancement. The lack of duty and understanding of the significance of the role undermines state and social authority and allows for tradition and social norms to break down. The failure to enforce social structure and rules allowed for the proliferation of anti-social and hostile elements within the society, and undermines the legitimacy of the leadership, the military, and society.

2. In your own words, how did General Wrangel respond to the murder of Rasputin? Why do you think he responded that way?

NorthWest Manny:

Wrangel viewed the murder of Rasputin as very bad, even if he disliked him. Aristocratic conspirators assassinating someone close to the Tsar on nonsense conspiratard justifications severely undermined the monarchy’s authority and public sense of stability.

Henry:

He seems to be not exactly bothered by the fact Rasputin is gone, but bothered by the fact that (i) men he was close to did it in (ii) an extralegal/shadowy manner. In short, he is OK with fact of outcome but made uneasy by it happening that way.

I think he responded that way because he had enormous respect for tsar and tsarina (him admiring them even in their prayer) and worried maybe that the disorderly execution of their advisor (even a bad one like Rasputin) was legitimizing extralegal violence, and that legitimization came from and for parties he was sympathetic to—not the Bolsheviks. It shows even his own friends were willing to massively disrespect the tsar, and were ignorant or indifferent to how badly that impacts the society’s order.

3. What were Wrangel’s biggest issues with how the Czar’s abdication was handled? Why were these a problem?

MikeyLemons:

The Czars abdication of leadership symbolized not only his resignation from office but also an abdication of responsibility throughout the entire imperial system. With all authority centralized in the Czar, if he surrendered to the pressures facing him, why would any loyal monarchist feel a duty to defend that system? For a social contract that relied on the belief in a central leader, abdication regardless of circumstance, indicated that the underlying cause was not worth saving.

Czar Nicholas’s abdication to his brother may have been seen as legitimate, or at least made to appear that way, if the aristocracy and court had wholeheartedly supported and endorsed the action. The absent support from the leadership class, and self interested/disjointed response failed to lend any legitimacy to the transition of power and destroyed any potential foundation for the dynasty successor.

INEPTIRE:

The undercurrent of the abdication was to nullify the concept of authority and justice as they had existed in Russian society up to that point. By unilaterally abdicating and leaving the throne to fall by default to his brother, who had in turn left vacant the throne in favor of the provisional government, the Tsar had (I think inadvertently) demoralized the entire nation. The Army in particular depended on the traditional roles and duties of hierarchy and direct interpersonal honor which had been oil for its machinery. The abdication functioned as the removal of a great plug or seal which had kept that oil in the works. With the oil suddenly drained, the machinery of governance began to sputter and grind to a halt, and military effectiveness was lost.

Spraktoz:

He didn’t like that the high command ‘didn’t do anything to help the soldiers realize their duty’. When the Czar abdicated he didn’t name an heir so the soldiers and officers who had been raised in a monarchy wouldn’t know what to do. This opened the door for chaos by the degradation of authority: “...officers would be forced to respect the soldiers who were men like themselves.” Since people’s roles in the new system weren’t well understood, communists were able to sway soldiers against officers.

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4. Why did the Army come apart after the February Revolution? What methods did the Bolsheviks use and how did they work?

MikeyLemons:

Without a clear mission, weak and ineffectual leadership, and a deteriorating society, soldiers quickly found themselves unwilling to fight and die for a system they recognized had no legitimacy. External pressure from the Germans amplified the crisis, as retreating troops had no structure to look to for guidance. The provisional government could not secure the loyalty of the army, and seemed to distrust it, as evidenced by its belief that Kornilov had attempted a coup. Arming the Reds as a stop gap measure gave the Bolsheviks much needed legitimacy in the eyes of the population, and arms to carry out their intended revolution. The Bolsheviks were able to leverage resentment amongst the disaffected enlisted and conscripted soldiers, as well as general resentment from the populace, and give them a target for retribution. While in Yalta, it was the disaffected servant who turned to the Reds to right his perceived slight and used whatever language he deemed necessary to incriminate Wrangel. Communism is spiritually a resentful and spite driven ideology and enable the worst impulses among the worst people of society.

nopiqweutaa:

The High Command did nothing in the face of the abdication to guide the troops or uphold their morale. This made the troops vulnerable to influence from the revolutionaries, who at least promised *something* to them. The Workmen Soviets could pounce on this passivity and nudge the uncertain government in the direction they desired by demanding officers “respect” the soldiers, which enabled the mass killing of officers. The more the government compromised with their whims the bolder the revolutionaries became. The mass replacement of High Command positions did not help matters, and sowed distrust among the troops. When Krymov expressed favoritism for the Cossacks, he fractured the army further.

BradleyBColeman:

The collapse of the army followed logically from the destruction of the institutional loyalty that had sustained it. Once the monarchy was dissolved, the men lacked any coherent cause for which to continue fighting. Troops grew increasingly defiant, subordinated military duty to political activity, and frequently retreated or mutinied. Prolonged war-weariness, chronic supply failures, and accumulated class resentments all served to accelerate this disintegration.

The Bolsheviks proved adept at exploiting this environment. Their most effective political proposition was an unambiguous promise of peace—a message of extraordinary resonance to a force exhausted by years of catastrophic warfare. Through infiltration of soldiers’ committees, the systematic distribution of defeatist propaganda (Cucker Carlson & the Retard Right fill this Role Today), and the cultivation of political networks within the ranks, they succeeded in converting passive sympathizers into active supporters and neutrals into committed partisans. In this way, they filled the institutional and ideological vacuum left by the Provisional Government’s failures, positioning themselves as the only force capable of offering a credible political alternative. The methods they employed reflect broader patterns of political radicalization, in which a population disillusioned with existing institutions and presented with a compelling alternative narrative gradually shifts its allegiances toward the more resolute faction.

5. What problems does Wrangel identify with organizing a real opposition to the Bolsheviks early on? Why didn’t their relative unpopularity matter?

KC:

While there were issues simply with the disorganization of the government and the army, I think a lot of it comes down to the passivity of the general populace and their refusal to actually take action and/or accountability for the situation. People calling to organize and fight the Bolsheviks, yet failing to do anything at all. I wonder what group of people this sounds like…

As for why popularity didn’t matter for Bolsheviks, I think it’s much the same as any leftist ideology which requires and promotes a class of pseudo-homeless disaffected and dysgenic people who can act as political operatives, footsoldiers etc. without anything to lose. Compare of course to those who oppose the Bolsheviks, who still have jobs, families, etc.— most of them would lack the resolve to even pick up a gun against an enemy, let alone uproot their lives to fight their enemy.

INEPTIRE:

The unpopularity didn’t matter because they just needed to play the other parties off each other. Chaos and disorder were their main weapons, and through the disorder they gained advantage by helping the other parties to stab each other in the back. Cossack, Tartar, Ukranian, and Don pretensions to independence and self-governance all seem to have been underlying strains for a while, which continued to bristle against one another in the face of the Reds, who were more or less governing by default, rather than by a sure fiat. As well, the support of foreigners—mostly German—undercut any attempts to consolidate a proper Russian resistance to Bolshevik government. Individual wealthy and powerful Russians fled, hid, and abdicated any responsibility for organizing a thriving and orderly society. All were the worse for it.

Really good point:

Graham Bradley:

Okay, I’ve skimmed those chapters for a refresher and right away I remembered an impression I had last time, that a staggering number of people in the army only followed rules/maintained appearances/preserved society because they believed in the stability of an authority figure like the Tsar. As soon as he abdicated, those people folded because the chances of them being punished for lack of discipline, uncleanliness, dereliction of duty, etc, all went down the drain.

How much of our society operates like this? Who actively preserves it and who just goes along to avoid immediate repercussions? That feels like more of a key driver to what fed the Bolsheviks after the Provisional Government failed.

REPLY: WDot

I think this kind of stuff can happen anywhere. Ever work at a company where a bunch of your team or some higher ups resign and think “man, what’s the point, I should start passing out resumes?” Or even if there’s a club that has some big drama and suddenly everybody’s motivation is trashed. A leader is oftentimes the only person holding an organization together psychically, even if he’s only doing a small portion of the total labor.

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