I’m asking you to please donate to HowlingMutant’s GiveSendGo right now. It’s very important that we support good people when they’re under fire. Leftists stop using these tactics when they stop working. Mutant set a very reasonable goal, he’s not just cashing in, I’d really like to see him hit it within the first 24 hours. The effects of doxxing can last for years, the more he can get up front when the story is still fresh in everyone’s’ minds, the better he can respond to challenges and plan for the future.

Please donate to HowlingMutant’s GiveSendGo right now. Don’t leave it for later. Just do it right now. Every little bit really does help.

Leftists have already begun posting pictures outside of HowlingMutant’s house, Mutant seems to have lost his job, they’re putting him through the ringer.

It’s very important that we support our people when they’re under attack. I am asking you, personally, you the person reading this, to donate to HowlingMutant’s GiveSendGo right now. The disruptive effects of doxxing can last for years. It’s critical to support our people early. Every single bit helps. It looks like Mutant is still about $8k away from his target. Given how often he’s made us laugh, he deserves to at least hit his initial goal in the first 24 hours.

Please, donate to Mutant’s GiveSendGo right now. Don’t think about it, just do it while it’s still fresh in everyones’ minds.

A few days ago beloved Twitter comedian HowlingMutant was doxxed by leftwing activists. The dox was obviously a parallel construction working off of data breaches. Unsurprisingly, HowlingMutant ended up being just a nice normal guy, which anyone who has interacted with him before could have told you. There’s no actual value to doxxing HowlingMutant, he didn’t do anything to anyone. I suspect this was motivated solely by some leftwing donor guy directing the dox group to go after JD Vance’s RW twitter mutuals.

Whatever the method and motive, HowlingMutant is still doxxed. I’m not sure what consequences this will have for him, leftwingers have already begun showing up at his house. Even if “nothing happens,” creating uncertainty and fear in targets’ lives is one of the main goals of doxxers.

I strongly encourage you to donate to the GoFundMe HowlingMutant just set up right now. Do it now and don’t think about it.

https://www.givesendgo.com/howlingmutant

You should do this right now, while the story is fresh in everyone’s minds. Even though the dox will likely leave the headlines in the next few days, the effects of doxxing can last for years. This can mean a lot of life disruptions that are going to be tough for anyone to deal with. The more money he can get now, the better he can respond to anything that comes up and plan for the future.

There used to be no support for people who got doxxed. I was around back then, it was horrible. People would look for reasons to abandon the targets or even join the pile on (this still happens in certain corners of the Right). One of the most positive developments in recent years is today that actually a lot of people want to help.

Aside from just doing a good deed, donating to the target of doxxing campaigns has an overall positive impact for our side: Leftist activists are less likely to do these dox campaigns if they see that these tactics aren’t effective, that they can’t force the Right to disavow, and that they can’t force the target into undesirable situations.

Please, any little bit helps. This really does make a difference. Give this disgusting freak your money right now.

Striking how it was written a little over a year ago (April 5, 2025) but much could easily apply to today, perhaps more so than when I originally wrote it. Several people who motivated me to write the article to begin with in the hopes that they’d read it and not go crazy, have instead fallen into the trap outlined within and become unsalvageable. It’s fine. It’s just very frustrating to watch all this unfold when it was predictable. As bad as things have gotten, I still think the advice offered towards the end applies. People need to start acting now, though. If you haven’t read the essay, maybe you’ll get something out of it. Who knows?

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We are in the middle of a vibe shift.

I’m told this again and again. The vibes, they’re shifting. The unthinkable is becoming thought. Red lines are being crossed every day with alarming frequency. The annoying girl at your office? Her ability to get you fired over nothing seems greatly diminished.

These are all real and good things. I said in my (very brilliant) previous essay Navigating the era of High Trumpism, it is now officially OK to like Trump at a scale that was previously unimaginable. The total resistance from the system that you saw at the start of the first Trump administration has not been repeated. The enemy is in retreat across the board. What does all that actually mean at the end of the day, though?

Nothing. Not necessarily anything, at least.

No one should ever forget just how close we came to disaster. The Biden years were some of the worst in our country’s history. Our dementia-addled former President handed the government over to radical activists who opened the border, turned every important institution into a petri dish for disastrous social engineering, and left the country humiliated on the world stage.

This decline, accompanied by visible and pronounced decline in Americans’ quality of life, was not marked by widespread civil unrest. None of the violent pushback so confidently predicted by accelerationists and regionalists and all the other worthless -ists who came and went over the last 4 years ever materialized. Rather, until Trump’s miraculous political comeback, the Right was confused and passive. Democrats dumped tens of millions of illegals into the country, looted the treasury, and generally ran the board without any substantive institutional opposition.

The American Right was incredibly fortunate. Democrats very visibly broke the country AND put forward two of the weakest and most abrasive national candidates of all time, sloppy drunk Kamala Harris and spiteful eunuch Tim Walz. Donald Trump, already a world-historical figure, assembled a team of loyalists with far greater discipline and professionalism than you saw in either 2016 or 2020. Many of Trump’s former enemies showed remarkable grace and endorsed him rather than see the country (and the world) decline to nothing. Then, after all this happened, Donald Trump’s life was saved by a public act of God that would be seen by billions of people, with an assassin’s bullet missing his brain by less than a quarter of an inch.

With all of these many blessings bestowed on the American Right, Republicans still managed to secure just a hair under 50% of the popular vote. Republicans lost the very important Governor’s race in North Carolina, part of a larger trend of solid Red states falling under “moderate” Democratic executive control that isn’t moderate at all, along with many Congressional seats in states that Trump won handily. Republicans once again lost college-educated whites, a demographic that is critical towards achieving their long-term goals.

People like Trump. He’s difficult not to like. It remains to be seen whether or not people like Trumpism. What is clear, however, is that people don’t necessarily like Trump supporters. The flareup between the “Tech Right” and the “Trump Right” over the Christmas holiday should have been very sobering for everyone.

Trump supporters who were skeptical of America’s “high skilled” immigration system, which at this point has obviously been gamed to allow for massive amounts of immigrants who no one would consider high skilled from India and few other countries, were dismissed as retards, racists, and Russian bots. The Tech Right’s attacks on Trump’s supporters over the core issue of immigration were identical to those that had been deployed against them in 2016 by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

It is not a coincidence that many of these same “Tech Right” figures in fact supported the 2016 Clinton campaign, and the 2020 Biden campaign for that matter. That’s OK, I am not dwelling on it (at least not too much), I think it merely illustrates that large numbers of people “came around” to Trump not out of some substantive ideological shift, but rather out of necessity.

Biden had pushed our country to the very brink and Kamala was threatening to destroy it. For lots of those who eventually found themselves in the Trump camp, Kamala winning would have meant the government taking their money and throwing them in jail. These people still don’t like us very much, or at least would be happy to get rid of us if the opportunity arose.

The Trump movement itself is grappling with the problem of big tent politics. Trump’s moment is already being twisted to mean anything by people who want to pretend it’s their moment. Rightwing circles are seeing a resurgence of the incoherent libertarian platitudes, meme theocratism, and regional chauvinism that were directly repudiated by the Trump phenomenon. Countless failures who were dragged kicking and screaming over the finish line now demand recognition of their genius. People do not know why they were right, which can lead you to places just as harmful as being wrong.

One great advantage held by the Left for many decades at this point is control of intellectual life. If you are an educated person in America, you have been exposed to decades of liberal propaganda. Obviously, being “well-educated” today isn’t some sign of innate superiority or any degree of knowledge or wisdom, but a formalized education offers huge benefits to the recipients that it’s easy to lose sight of after decades of liberal domination have turned that system into a joke. It was because liberals turned the systems that benefitted them so greatly into a joke that they have so rapidly and ignobly lost power, however temporary that could prove to be.

Liberals gain a more thorough understanding of their views than conservatives typically do with the help of the education system and media. Conservatives may scoff at this claim because liberals have so many noticeably stupid beliefs now and they are very bad at defending them, but liberals usually hold onto their views more dearly and more consistently than conservatives do.

Liberals have multiple overlapping institutions, schools, entertainment media, etc. that reinforce their ideas and encourage them to explore those ideas in a more comprehensive way than conservatives, often guided by professional liberals. They are provided with many spaces to flex their intellectual muscles, allowing them to cultivate talent (not easy) and eventually accumulate a large body of relatively stable and professional people to draw from to fill administrative and bureaucratic roles.

I often see conservatives “running out of road” when it comes to their beliefs. They will often know the correct position to arrive at (opposing liberals, who want to harm them) but do not know how to get there as the background knowledge used to frame their thinking, and even the process of how to think that they deploy, was provided by liberals. The common conservative refrain “Democrats are the real racists” is roundly and rightly mocked, but should be expected in a society in which the average person will be exposed to hundreds, even thousands, of hours worth of propaganda lessons that convey the idea that being “racist” is the worst thing in the world. Often conservatives’ inability to form a coherent logic for their beliefs and apply that logic in a productive way can lead them back to supporting liberals directly and indirectly.

This dysfunction traces back in large part to our understanding of history. Nearly all of today’s mainstream history is framed through anti-racism. In schools American history is often taught as a series of outrages towards or triumphs of black people. American children regularly list Harriett Tubman as one of the most important figures of our history (she’s even represented as the leader of the United States in the new Civilization franchise game), even though her exploits were likely almost entirely fictionalized and she realistically had no bearing on American history. That America was also racist against women and gay people are other core modern narratives. For a while America being racist against transgender people was a key national concern, though given the widespread unpopularity of that last effort it’s likely that the powers who push these myths will put it on ice for a while.

This destructive metanarrative has thoroughly infected Americans’ thinking, and it centers on World War II. For decades, Americans were taught that World War II, the biggest and most destructive conflict in the planet’s recorded history, was in fact a moral parable about the Nazis (standing in for all Germans) being racist towards Jewish people. The false lesson was deployed extensively to justify the post-War order and lots of very bad things that accompanied it.

For a long time the shadow of World War II crippled the American Right, leaving it disarmed in the face of a full-on assault against everything good. People literally did not have the right words to oppose what was happening to them. The Civil Rights revolution, decades of judicial tyranny, mass censorship, mass immigration, and lots of real-world violence, were all justified using the idea that racism was the ultimate evil in our world, our national sin to reckon with and overcome, as exemplified by the titanic global struggle against the arch-wizard of racism Adolf Hitler.

The mainstream World War II narrative has collapsed catastrophically in recent years. People know the story was fake and missing important context. What’s more, people know that this fake story about history was used to justify bad things happening to them in the present. However, people still don’t have the right words. The primary revisionist narrative that has taken hold in the place of the failed mainstream message is that World War II actually followed from Jews being racist against non-Jews.

It is understandable how someone might reach this conclusion. The various communist and anticommunist Interwar drama that set the world up for disaster in World War II stemmed from the heavily Jewish Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew the Russian Provisional government after the earlier February Revolution (a much less Jewish phenomenon) had toppled the Czar. The Bolshevik Party was led by Vladimir Lenin, a quarter Jewish, and Leon Trotsky, full-blooded. Numerous other major and minor figures throughout Bolshevik leadership were Jewish. These Jewish people did lots of bad things to a lot of people during and after the October Revolution. Millions of people were killed directly by Bolsheviks or through related famines.

But, knowing that Bolshevism was a heavily Jewish phenomenon often leaves people in dumber places than if they were merely oblivious to this fact. The causes of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ by-no-means-certain victory in the years-long Russian Civil War that followed are often reduced to “the Jews willed it.” This ignores the February Revolution that actually ended the monarchy (which the Bolsheviks played virtually no part in), decades of prior political and ethnic struggle in the Russian Empire, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars the Bolsheviks received from Germany (which was then at war with Russia during WWI), lots of chaos in and out of the battlezone (I’ve written a pretty comprehensive overview of the year that followed the Revolution), among many other factors. There was a lot going on, and most of the useful lessons that can be drawn from the period suddenly vanish if you adopt a myopic focus on the Jews.

Even looking only at the Jews during this period reveals a more nuanced narrative than “the Bolsheviks were Jewish.” Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin was Jewish, but so was the woman who shot him 3 times and almost killed him, Fanny Kaplan, a Socialist Revolutionary angry about Lenin’s power grab following the abolition of the Constituent Assembly. The Jews leading the Bolshevik Party were primarily urban cosmopolitans, often militant atheists as well, who were hostile and unsympathetic to the more religious village and rural Jews in the primary combat areas of the Russian Civil War. Anti-Jewish pogroms were carried out by the Bolshevik Red Army and Jewish merchants frequently had their goods seized in the name of the Revolution. Lenin was militantly anti-Zionist, saying Zionism was "entirely false and reactionary in its essence." Zionists were heavily suppressed in the early Soviet Union, to the point where the ethnically Polish head of the NKVD Felix Dzerzhinsky (who had a Jewish wife and learned Yiddish after he began his political activism¹) expressed bewilderment at the policy. Trotsky shared Lenin’s anti-Zionism, though he changed his tune on that and other Jewish issues after being exiled in 1929 following Stalin’s seizure of power. Although the Bolshevik Party was dominated by Jews, it was only popular with a small proportion of the Jewish population within the Russian Empire (you can find a very good summary of this phenomenon in this article).

It’s true that many Jews were hostile towards the anti-Bolshevik White Army, but they were also barred from joining it² in many places. Furthermore, high-ranking leaders of the White Army often threatened to kill or rob Jews in the territory they controlled, blaming them for the conduct of the Bolsheviks, and their men frequently carried out those threats. It’s also unsurprising that many Jews were not particularly loyal to Czar Nicholas II before the Revolution when the Russian government placed numerous legal restrictions on them. The Russian military had also expelled tens of thousands of Jews from their homes near the Empire’s border at the outbreak of World War I, sending lots of angry and dissatisfied Jews into Russia’s major cities right before Russian liberals (many of them freemasons, but a unique Russian variant of freemasonry, again, it’s complicated) collapsed the monarchy.

Of course, it’s not surprising either that Czar Nicholas II (among many other Russian officials) did not have particularly warm feelings towards Jewish people. After all, Jewish people were significantly overrepresented within the radical groups, including violent ones like the Bolsheviks, that had posed a threat to his Empire for decades. Jewish diaspora overseas accounted for some of his fiercest critics, and often made false or at least unfair claims about Russia’s policies. His most trusted and successful advisor, Pyotr Stolypin, who had advocated for an end to Russia’s legal restrictions on Jews, was himself assassinated by a Jewish radical in 1911. Czar Nicholas II personally witnessed the brazen public murder. There’s a lot going on here. There are many important aspects of the story and boiling it down to a single sentence or a few bits of trivia is guaranteed to be worse than useless.

Ultimately the Bolsheviks were a coalition of the fringes. They certainly had heavy Jewish overrepresentation (particularly in important roles), but they also drew in disproportionate numbers of Latvians, Caucasians (people from the Caucus mountains, like Stalin), Chinese, and other minority groups. I recently read that the Bolsheviks employed a black American executioner named Johnson during their occupation of Odessa, infamous for skinning victims alive. Does this phenomenon seem relevant today?

The Bolsheviks also attracted enormous numbers of ethnic Russians who either agreed with their agenda (the Bolsheviks were the only major political party that promised to exit Russia from WWI, their most popular policy), saw the Revolution (which had upended of all social and economic relations) as a chance to rapidly advance their status, wanted to settle old political grievances (Aleksei Busilov, one of the Russian Empire’s most successful WWI generals, was disgusted with the conservative military officers who had helped force the Czar’s abdication in the February Revolution and, lacking confidence in these officers’ later efforts with the White movement after the October Revolution, threw his support behind the Bolsheviks for somewhat dubious nationalist reasons) or, as Bolshevik successes mounted, thought it was a good idea to back the winning horse. Most soldiers in the 5+ million strong Red Army, who were essential to securing the Bolsheviks’ eventual victory, were ethnic Russians. How and why members of a majority population came to support a coalition of the fringes is an interesting question that’s very relevant to our problems today, and it’s one that you will never be able to answer if your only interaction with these events is collecting frequently-untrue trivia about Jews.

Going back to the start of this tangent, how the mainstream narrative of World War II is that it revolved around Germans being too racist towards Jews while the revisionist narrative has become that actually Jews were too racist towards non-Jews as illustrated by the sequence of events that followed from the Bolshevik Revolution etc., this all ignores the fact that World War II was not even about Jews. Very few people at the time actually believed that the conflict was about the plight or offenses of the Jews.

The centrality of the Jewish experience in the popular understanding of World War II, and particularly the mainstream Holocaust narrative, only began years after the conflict had ended thanks to the accelerating overrepresentation of Jewish people in Western media, government, education, and many other critical sectors (often tied to progressive causes or the Civil Rights regime). You could write a book about that phenomenon (I’ve heard The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine and The Ordeal of Civility by John Murray Cuddihy are both good, but have not actually read either), but that book would have relatively little bearing on the causes of World War II.

The overwhelming majority of participants in World War II were not Jewish, the leaders of the states involved were not Jewish. Although Jews certainly wielded great influence before, during, and after the conflict, so did many other groups and subgroups that all had their own distinct interests and goals. Although huge numbers of Jewish civilians were killed during the conflict, huge numbers of civilians from many other ethnic groups were killed as well. It’s not a competition. No one has a monopoly on this. Historical events that occur at this scale are not reducible in this way.

I encourage everyone to read Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War for a thorough survey of the lead-up to and course of World War II. I promise you will learn something that you didn’t know before from this book. The people driving the biggest conflict in human history were not evil or good wizards, they were ruthless statesmen who were as (if not more) concerned about the flow of oil and aluminum as they were with the moralism you see crudely stapled onto the conflict today. They wanted to achieve strategic depth and rid their borders of the influence of rival powers. That’s why conflicts usually happen, though this is rarely taught in schools or media today.

Hitler was not an anti-communist crusader. In fact, he was an eager collaborator with Stalin for years. Stalin was hardly a fanatical anti-fascist, Germany was a major trading partner before the war broke out. The conflict could have easily developed in different ways. In 1938, Italy and Germany might have gone to war over the fate of Austria. In 1939, Great Britain was in the final stages of preparations for a massive air raid on the Baku oil fields (built by Americans) to cripple the Soviet Union and prevent further oil exports to Germany, then dependent on Soviet gas. Britain and France declared war on Germany after its invasion of Poland pursuant to a security agreement, but failed to enforce that same agreement against the Soviet Union, which had also invaded Poland at roughly the same time. Stalin was furious in 1943 when Roosevelt unilaterally announced the Allied doctrine of unconditional surrender, which led to countless needless civilian deaths towards the end of the war, because Stalin’s diplomats had just begun secret preliminary negotiations for a separate peace with Germany. For decades people have been arguing over a fake Marvel movie story, often using factoids that aren’t even true. Today, these fake stories form the superstructure of the public’s moral universe.

Even this discussion is largely irrelevant because even if World War II was about Jews, it’s ridiculous that a conflict that’s approaching 100 years old could be used to justify a world order, a legal regime, contemporary political analysis, someone losing their job, a kid getting kicked out of school, or any of the other things that WWII is regularly invoked to justify. World War II is more distant from us today than the Franco-Prussian War was to those at the time of World War II. The world has changed. The myth of World War II is used to pretend it has not, often in the pursuit of very bad things that those invoking it would not be able to justify on their own.

If you want to break the power that the post-World War II order and the Holocaust narrative that animates it holds over our society, you cannot do that by talking about World War II and the Holocaust all the time. The miraculous election of Trump, opposed by all the people who built and maintained that previous world order, means that we don’t have to talk about these things constantly anymore, or at least that we can talk about them like adults again. Hitler wasn’t an evil wizard or a good wizard, he was the leader of Germany from 1934 to 1945. World War II was not a moral parable, it was a global conflict that involved billions of people and ended 80 years ago. This was a historical event. This was a real thing that happened in the world.

I will say, I think it’s obvious at this point that people are not actually interested in World War II, but rather in contributing to larger contemporary narratives. In the mainstream, the fixation on World War II is designed to justify blocking rightwingers from obtaining power ever again, even when rightwingers’ claims and objectives were totally reasonable and they had broad public support. In the revisionists strain, people are only engaging with the history to make points about Israel or Jews and their role in society today. One imagines in the near future a Palestine-flag bio’ed Zoomer who has only a faint idea what Pearl Harbor was (if he remembers whatever brief mention of it there was in his school lessons at all), much less important events like the Yalta or Postdam conferences, but could eagerly recite talking points from TikTok about wooden doors at Auschwitz.

Going back to the book segment I posted earlier in this article. It was posted on Twitter and this was the response.

There were a lot of Jewish Bolsheviks, but the section of text that people are supposedly responding to describes the crimes of Chinese people, a black American, and a Georgian woman, all of whom were serving in the Cheka (the Bolsheviks’ secret police). Did any of these people actually read or understand the text? Do they know what the Cheka was? It’s kind of crazy. Who were the Bolsheviks? The Jews? Sort of, but not really. The text itself illustrates that. There’s a lot more to the story that’s important and even critical to understanding what actually happened, but that people will never get to because ultimately they don’t care what actually happened, they only want to talk about Jews.

Lots of trivia that conspiratorial people deploy when engaging with taboo topics amounts to a disappointing “Sort of, but not really.” Most of these people don’t even know basic details of the narratives they’re supposedly interested in. It’s ultimately just normie in-group signaling. They aren’t talking about anything other than themselves. When these people engage with these topics most often they are not trying to do anything other than say “I know that Jews exist” or “I don’t like Jews” in the hope that someone else will receive their signal and indicate that they too are part of the club.

Of course this dynamic traces back in large part to the damaging way that the idea of WW2 is deployed by mainstream institutions and the decades of disaster that followed the start of this order, the many (but not exclusively) Jewish architects of that process have created their own golem, but ultimately revisionism is not equipping people with the knowledge they need to understand the world (or the events they’re supposedly interested in) any more than the mainstream narrative did. In fact, usually the narrative that revisionists have is even more incoherent than the fake mainstream story because it’s invariably hyper-focused on only a few narrow topics. The participants in this discourse also usually lack background information that would allow them to filter out untrue claims or frame what they’re learning in a way that renders it useful. We already have one fake WW2 narrative, we don’t need a second.

More often than not revisionism (of all kinds) seems to drive adherents insane: They stop caring whether or not what they’re saying is true anymore.

As “conspiracy culture” (I use conspiracy in a non-derisive way, many of the conspiracies that people are interested in these days are true, it’s culture that is the problem) has entered mainstream thought, it has adopted the vices of mainstream thought. People say things not because they genuinely believe them in any meaningful sense, but rather because it signals something separate from whatever is being said.

For me this is most clearly illustrated when dealing with Moon landing denial. I think the Moon landing is the most amazing thing that anyone’s ever done and demonstrates the triumph of Americans and the American system: The most excellent people the world has ever produced accomplished a seemingly impossible task with technology that seems primitive today thanks to superhuman coordination, precision, and nerve.

When I talk about the Moon landing with people who deny that it happened, it quickly becomes obvious that they don’t even have a basic narrative of what the Moon landing program supposedly was, and how the Moon landing itself was supposedly achieved. If they did, the idea of fabricating such an extensively documented years-long sequence of events, involving tens of thousands of trustworthy people and monitored by independent and hostile powers, would quickly fall apart. Concealing such a fraud over the course of several decades would have been more difficult and complicated than going to the Moon.

Usually these people have a few pieces of trivia that cast doubt on the Moon landing that they’ve worked their way back from. These are often intuitive, but collapse under scrutiny or, if they are true, have other reasonable explanations beyond “the Moon landing was fake.” More than anything else, I notice that such people are trying to provoke a reaction from their audience. They’re trying to shock or surprise you by saying something strange or taboo. They want to argue with you about it, and enjoy the process of arguing. They want to make a larger point about the prevalence of other conspiracies in our society, or indicate that they are part of the growing section of the population that does not accept (increasingly discredited today) mainstream narratives. When something they say is revealed to be not true or at least poorly-supported, it doesn’t give them pause at all. They “know they’re right” about whatever different point they’re actually trying to make.

In other words, they don’t give a shit about what they’re saying. No one gives a shit anymore. After decades of living under the most invasive and oppressive propaganda regime to ever exist, Americans have been socialized to communicate by saying one thing when they actually mean another. When someone makes a claim or responds to a claim of yours, they might not be trying to make a specific point that’s relevant to the discussion or to convey information that they genuinely believe. Rather, they could be trying to merely signal group affiliation, make a tangentially related but different point, or simply engage in an emotional or moral performance.

It’s impossible to overstate how prevalent lies have become in everyday life in America, and how unique a risk this poses to conservatives as the grand lies that have defined our lives and our thinking for decades begin to come apart. People have their totems and a few anecdotes but are increasingly unable to navigate reality because they still don’t actually know anything or even know how to know something. After a certain point, people cease to be able to understand historical events as events. They cease to be able to understand their present experience as present experience.

There is a general emotional incontinence that you see everywhere online these days. When times are good, someone will think they are the smartest person in the world for holding far right views. When times are bad, they are plunged into the depths of despair. Often they ratify these emotions by saying things that are not true and that they don’t believe. These untrue claims are used by others to validate their own incoherent feelings, perpetuating the cycle of hysteria.

Interrupting such a cycle presents a serious challenge: How do you reason or, worse, argue someone out of a view that they don’t actually hold and don’t really care about? You can’t. In fact, your trying to do so will be seen as an attack on their ego, and only serve to validate any fears they might have. They want to get into an argument. They want you to say, “this is not true,” so they can respond “but what about [the next topic]?” which they might also not care about at all either.

In these situations, you are not arguing with a person. You are really arguing against a generalized self-reinforcing feeling, often tied to a person’s ego or group identity. It’s just how people talk now, which is to say that meaningful communication is effectively impossible under current conditions. To circle back to conspiracy culture, people who become involved in these discourses frequently become immune to knowledge because they are socialized to think of controversial topics as signifiers rather than real things that happened, things that you can (and should want to) understand.

When I talk about the Russian Revolution, it seems like people often are just waiting for me to mention the Jews. They might act surprised when I say that World War I was going on at the same time. They might not know that the February Revolution had happened a few months beforehand and actually removed the Czar. They won’t have any frame of reference for the disintegration of the Russian Empire into multiple different nation states (backed by multiple different foreign powers) and the role that that played in the years-long conflict that followed the revolutions of 1917. When I inevitably say something about Jews (essential to understanding the period), their eyes light up: “Ah,” they say eruditely, “the Jews. I think there might be something there.” However, it becomes obvious that they’re not listening afterwards.

Once Jews are mentioned, these people are no longer in Russia 1917, they’re in a constellation of 2015 /pol/ infographics and half-remembered tweets about Stalin era atrocities, the dramatic overrepresentation of Jews in important positions today, or the harmful role Israel plays in American politics. All of these things may be true (though I will say the infographics people deploy are often ridiculous if you actually dig into them) but they have very little to do with what those specific Jewish Bolsheviks were doing during that specific time period, much less the Russian Revolution, which we are supposedly talking about.

Introducing any degree of nuance into these discussions more often than not generates confusion (as I said before, there are almost always huge gaps in the basic “narratives” that these people have for these events) and hostility. “Why are you taking so long to talk about the Jews?” or “Why are you disagreeing with me when my actual point (objections to Jewish overrepresentation in critical sectors, the Israel lobby, the USS Liberty attack, etc.) is correct?” or “I have given you the sign, where is a countersign that I can recognize?”

I think this recurring disconnect boils down to the role that ego and identity play in discourse today. As previously stated, after decades of dysfunction people have come to view their beliefs not as beliefs but rather as signifiers of their personal status or membership in a broader subculture. As such, to them, when you challenge their beliefs, you are not challenging a claim or piece of information, but rather their self-identity. You are not in discourse about this or that topic, but rather leveling a personal attack. These topics do not exist for themselves (as all things in reality do), but rather merely in service of the people talking about them.

At this point, if someone brings up any controversial or taboo topic to me, even if they are saying something I agree with, I assume they’re just a clueless normie who is going to go insane shortly afterwards, if they aren’t insane already. Today, someone might have only a 6 month gap between attacking Trump for being an immigration hardliner and attacking Trump for being a slave to the Jews. Does a person like this have anything resembling a coherent worldview or ideology? Not really. He is merely indulging himself.

It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything anymore. If you’re Jewish, don’t worry, these people aren’t actually antisemitic. They do not know what Jews are in any meaningful sense. Many have Jewish friends or close associates but do not conceive of Jews as an ethno-religious group and cannot recognize characteristically Jewish features. They think of Jews as a race of evil wizards who exist on their phones. I mean this completely seriously: If someone today says “I hate Jews. Kill all Jews.” they are probably just lonely and trying to make friends or fit into their new online social circle. If they are ever forced to engage with Jewish subjects beyond repeating memes, they will crumple like accordions and assure you that they’re really just concerned about justice and peace and love. Nearly all major maximalist anti-Semite personalities retain social and professional relationships with Jewish people. Some of them are Jewish themselves.

Although I won’t belabor this point too much, the impact of demographic changes online is impossible to ignore. Like Western countries, fringe internet spaces have become awash with 3rd worlders and with them social dynamics commonly associated with the 3rd world (casual dishonesty, clannishness, magical thinking, etc.). These new entrants bring with them new priorities and new ways of interacting with each other. When coupled with the total and accelerating ignorance of the public and Americans’ already damaged relationship with the truth, many online rightwingers are all too happy to assimilate into the growing digital favela. This kind of “audience capture” when coupled with these new audiences often proves fatal to mental health.

You also have many recently radicalized older or (for lack of a better word) normal people who are encountering fringe internet topics without any kind of background experience in fringe internet spaces. Dynamics that are very familiar to longtime denizens of these online circles—the presence of extremely large numbers of compulsive liars and clinically mentally ill people, the pervasive influence of blackmail rings, astroturf campaigns, and pathological bad faith actors, the recurring “alliances” proposed between antagonistic groups that inevitably implode after a few months, the cyclical nature of various ideological fads—are totally foreign to them. They do not believe you when you tell them where their brilliant arguments and new friends will lead them. One is left to watch these people make the same mistakes and dig themselves into the same holes and go crazy in the same ways over and over again, all while they act as though they are unlocking the secrets of the universe.

Although for years rightwing online spaces have advanced discourse and real world politics in a positive direction, today they operate as a brain scorcher. At their best, they offer dumb people the added confidence that comes from knowing that you are part of a group. At their worst, they render smart people who might have otherwise played a positive role useless or insane. Large corners of Rightwing Twitter have transformed into glorified support groups, crying circles, and circlejerks for excitable people who want to feel heard and understood. Others have transformed into Discord channels, with the accompanying social dynamics. The casual dishonesty that defines modern discourse is easily deployed in personality feuds, which, as the internet has become more diverse and streaming content has taken off, have become the primary way in which nominally rightwing people engage with politics.

Self-proclaimed insiders make dubious claims about their rivals or what’s going on behind-the-scenes when really they just personally don’t like someone or have another unrelated grievance. The public, looking in from outside, is eager to accept this sort of “secret knowledge,” which might not have any bearing on reality, because it offers them the feeling of being an insider, too. Taking a side in a personality feud is a way to feel as though you are part of a group and contributing to a larger goal, feelings that seem increasingly hard to come by these days in real life. These feelings are the ammunition in many professional or social rivalries that are increasingly divorced from anyone’s real world opinion about this or that issue, much less the attempt to achieve any real world positive outcome.

I have engaged in many destructive feuds with people who I probably should have worked something out with. I’ve tried to be honest, but I’ve certainly been mean and very uncharitable and claimed things that I later learned were untrue. I really do regret how I’ve treated a lot of people and have tried to change, but I don’t expect and won’t receive any mercy. Even still, personality feuds as they exist today have trapped rightwingers in discourse cycles where whatever thought they’re responding to is not real and no one actually believes what they’re saying. It’s unsustainable and getting worse. I often see people trying to “debunk” things that the person they’re debunking never said or rebuke a person for views that the person being rebuked does not hold. Oftentimes people will repeat someone’s own views back to them, but frame it as a disagreement for an audience. They are merely saying “I don’t like you” or “I am better than you” when they participate in this kind of fake debate.

Irving Kristol said that a neoconservative was “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” I think the average rightwinger (at least the ones I see online, Trump’s real life approval rating has actually never been higher) is a normie who has been mugged by Twitter. “Democrats are the real racists” has transformed into “Jews are the real Nazis.” People still have lots of liberal platitudes and propaganda and (worst of all) thought processes that they’ve hung onto even though they eventually decided to take the jump and leave the old order behind. Some have jettisoned all these things but still gone off the deep end in other ways. The well-earned collapse of credibility of mainstream knowledge granting institutions has not led to a new Enlightenment, but rather broad ignorance and nihilism.

The anti-establishment “consensus” that exists today is not robust in any meaningful sense. It is already spiraling into delusion and stupidity. When the major players in this dialogue inevitably burn themselves (and their followers) out, it will likely be replaced by something cooked up by the Left, which still has an enormous pool of professionals and decades of cultural inertia on its side, that’s even worse than the fake liberal consensus that caused so much damage for so long.

Modern conditions have created generations of Americans who are incapable of dealing with substantive issues substantively. Thanks to schools and media and all the other institutions that liberals control, liberals know what they believe, what they believe is just stupid and harmful to themselves and the world. That doesn’t really matter for them, though, because they all believe roughly the same thing and their beliefs don’t (or at least used to not) substantively interfere with them achieving their real-world goals. What they believe covers a lot of different situations and can get them to the right place for their purposes. Conservatives often have much more patchwork worldviews with far more limited utility. In a battle of coherence versus incoherence, it is obvious which side will eventually win.

Having identified what I think the problem is, below you will find a few suggestions for solving it.

1. Kill Your Self

America’s culture of narcissism is pervasive and all consuming. When someone says something, it sometimes only relates back to themselves in some way. When someone says something that isn’t true to another person, it is often because they are really just trying to define themselves.

I observed this often in (circular) online debates over illegal political violence. Many rightwingers seemed to think that their endorsement of this theoretical future violence or their ambiguous proclamations of its inevitability reflected some kind of harder edge on their part: That they were tougher or more worldly or more dedicated than people like me (I think we can only achieve our goals by keeping the current system relatively intact, denying liberals chaos that would allow them to capitalize on their superior numbers and organization, which means maintaining stability and the rule of law should be high priorities) because they were willing to support behavior that is taboo and dangerous. They often had lots of guns and training to back this support up.

My usual response to this was that, without addressing the merits of their arguments, illegal rightwing political violence effectively does not exist in America. There are no signs of that dynamic changing, or that that dynamic changing would be good. The people who are talking about it online all the time do not actually do it. If they had any realistic plans to commit illegal violence in the future, in other words, if they believed what they were saying, they would certainly not discuss it in public with strangers on the internet. The entire debate was mere signaling, we were really just talking about how the proponents of illegal rightwing political violence would like to be perceived.

In the same way, online discourse today merely illustrates that Ruralites want to be perceived as Ruralites, dissidents want to be perceived as dissidents, and conspiracy theorists want to be perceived as conspiracy theorists. “I think therefore I am” has become “I speak therefore I am.” As more people learn to communicate by saying things that are not true and that they don’t believe, this has naturally devolved into a general state of retardation separate from any realistic objective beyond ego preservation. Aside from the problem of truth, that is, people saying things that are untrue or that they are indifferent to the truth value of for social purposes, such self-obsession can end up divorcing people from their supposed goals.

I can’t be the only one who has noticed that the “solution” that rightwingers who have been overtaken by these various ego trips inevitably arrive at is to oppose Trump. Trump, whatever you may say of his personal history or record, has delivered our present success. It was only Trump who could have beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was only Trump who could have beaten Kamala Harris in 2024. It is only through Trump’s literally miraculous victory that we enjoy our present opportunities. It is only through Trump that we have been spared any number of terrible fates. If you are any kind of rightwinger in America today, Trump’s success is essential to your future prospects. If you want to achieve a real world political goal, the best way to achieve it is by tying it to the Trump movement.

Lots of rightwingers were born on third and think they personally hit a triple. Rather than understanding and appreciating why Trump was successful in improving the situation in the United States, their first thought is to get Trump out of the way for perceived and sometimes totally imagined failures so they can “get to the good part” and pursue whatever other interests, separate from victory, they might have.

What “the good part” is varies from person to person, but online it normally comes down to feelings of vindication or satisfaction. I think this traces back to self-obsession. Someone wants to identify as “being right” or, worse, as “being better” than some online rival (this was very noticeable in the Ruralite discourse, which was obviously driven by the inferiority complexes of many of the participants). The pervasive dishonesty we see online today stems from people valuing the feeling of being right more than they actually value being right. The pervasive catastrophizing, whataboutism, and concern trolling, responses that accomplish nothing but helping our enemies, we see online today stem from people valuing that feeling over achieving anything in the real world.

Today’s dishonest online culture serves as a convenient personal escape from the tedious, complex, and unpleasant tasks required to fix our country. What if instead of having to worry about bills and elections and nominations and rulings and court cases and political coalitions and treaties and all the other things that people who wield power have to worry about, we only had to worry about ourselves? What if we only had to worry about our social standing or our arguments or our internet debate clubs? What if we only had to worry about our feelings about Israel or the Jews? What if we only had to worry about our consequence-free intellectual playtime with UFOs or nanobots or lizard people? This would all be very nice, but unfortunately we do not live in such a world.

Why are we all here? What is this all about? Where should we direct our energy? Is the goal of rightwing politics to redpill the normies? Is it to show others how smart or transgressive or correct you are? Is it to predict defeat and then wait to be proven right? Is it to commune with demons in the Noosphere to manipulate crypto markets? Do we need to go back ten years, or a hundred years, or ten thousand years?

No. The goal in politics is to win and then make the world a better place. The promise of Trump is that victory will be prioritized over the ideological ghettos conservatives have spent decades carving out for themselves, and that real world gains will be prioritized over thought experiments. You might argue that it is necessary to talk constantly about all of the topics that people are so preoccupied with these days in order to win and then make the world a better place, but I would respond that Trump did not do this and he was elected President (saving the country) twice, while the people who make these topics core components of their online brands have no real world political accomplishments to their names and frequently try to sabotage productive efforts.

Trump is “the good part.” He has allowed rightwingers to access the real world levers of power in a way they normally would not have been able to, and has done real world damage to the forces arrayed against us at a magnitude that all of his critics combined could not hope to match. Our horizon of possibility has been expanded rather than closed forever. No one who criticizes Trump has accomplished more than him, or even a tiny fraction of what he has accomplished. That means something big, whatever quibbles you might have about Trump’s policies or their implementation. The promise of Trump is not that you will get whatever you want automatically, but rather that you have a fighting chance where none existed before.

I said in my previous essay that there is no anti-Trump Right, only Trump and the enemy. I sincerely believe that, even when Trump is unambiguously wrong and his rightwing critics are unambiguously correct. Trump’s continued success means that we continue to have the opportunity to improve the situation. There is no real world alternative in existence. None. Trump is the only game in town when it comes to achieving things in reality. Trump failing to achieve his goals would not provide an opening for X, Y, or Z new rightwing system. Rather, it would allow liberals to reassert their control and complete the nearly-finished destruction of our country. This is obvious unless you are divorced from reality (due to self-obsession or otherwise), which, as I have laid out earlier, a large and growing portion of rightwing circles are.

I have to say, if you’ve fallen for the latest round of “principled” opposition to Trump over any topic, you lack the emotional stability and discernment required for meaningful discourse. You are probably just a normie who changed the channel. You still do not understand anything.

Take the new rightwing hero of the hour, Thomas Massie. Massie is a libertarian congressman from Kentucky who has received widespread (and deserved) acclaim for his principled opposition to Israeli influence in American politics.

Thomas Massie also opposed President Trump during the 2024 primary and “joked” about writing in Governor Ron DeSantis on Election Day. There’s clearly very little love lost between Trump and Massie. People attribute this solely to the Israel issue, but that’s only because the Israel issue is all they have been socialized online to think or care about. Massie also opposes the important E-Verify program and sponsored a bill to expand the H1B visa program (which fortunately wasn’t signed into law). I don’t think he’s an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist, his biggest donor is a Jewish billionaire and his biggest political ally, DeSantis, is devoted to Israel, even attacking Trump for not being slavish enough, and pushes unconstitutional legislation to fight antisemitism. Massie is basically a normal disagreeable libertarian, one of many who existed before Trump and totally failed to move the needle.

There are lots of other reasons why someone who has acted in the ways that Massie has should be removed from their position of authority, especially since Republicans are operating on razor-thin margins where a single congressman going rogue can derail critical legislation. Most of Massie’s fans only like him because they hear about him online about every six months and he allows them to socially signal their opposition to Israel or their antisemitism or their hatred of Trump.

Look at Trump’s recent air strikes on the Houthis in the Gulf. The Houthis are a rebel group that has been firing missiles at civilian ships in waterways under protection of the US Navy for years. They even fired at US military ships. It was humiliating that Biden was unable to respond to these provocations. Today Trump is attacked as a neocon and a warmonger for doing basic tasks required of any President. Foreign groups get to shut down international shipping if they don’t like what Israel is doing? We need to have a debate over whether or not we should retaliate against people shooting missiles at our ships? Is that how the world works? Is that sustainable?

This sort of unreasoned and reflexive criticism always seems to emerge from the same people who happened to have attacked Trump for years for other dubious reasons. There is no argument occurring, they are just trying to damage Trump. The goal isn’t a good real world outcome, it is to undermine Trump. It is merely to say “I don’t like Trump.”

Such characters engage in unending circular discourse to illustrate that they do not like Trump. Trump’s accomplishments go ignored or even denied (this is often tied to the Israel issue, which such people falsely claim is the only thing Trump acts on because it is all they pay attention to), while every failure is embellished and attributed to indifference or betrayal. There is no attempt to achieve anything good. In fact, the only effect is to try to block others from potentially achieving anything good.

British journalist John Ernst Hodgson wrote of the persistent attempts to undermine General Denikin’s efforts to fight the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War:

If ever a rumour adverse to his cause gained currency, if ever a lie began to creep round South Russia which would have the effect of sapping public confidence, if a harmful or fabricated cablegram from Europe got into circulation, the Rostov Jews were responsible. They appeared to me to be contemptible people, and, quite unlike the majority of our own Jews, apparently owed patriotic allegiance to no country. They were quite incapable of serving any cause but the most debased type of commercialism.

The behavior of the Rostov Jews towards Denikin in 1918 seems to perfectly mirror the behavior of many rightwing personalities towards Trump today.

In 2024, numerous rightwing figures began actively pushing for Kamala Harris to become President because Trump was going to start WW3, open the border to India, and numerous other claims that flew in the face of Trump’s record as the most consistently anti-war and anti-immigration President in decades. These attacks on Trump in particular reflected a total divorce from reality and an inability to discern relative importance. Whatever Trump’s objectionable election rhetoric may have been, his record was clear and so was the record of the alternative, the incumbent Kamala Harris, who actually had opened the border and left the world in conflict and turmoil immediately beforehand.

The people who engage in this kind of political hemorrhaging, that is, those who are not merely adopting these incoherent and harmful positions to benefit themselves for financial or professional reasons, are genuinely stupid and weak-willed. They are easily led around by bad actors. They exist in a state of total disorientation and should be counted on to try to make bad situations worse.

Many today claim that they want a new rightwing culture to accompany the present “vibe shift” when really they just want someone to repeat their own views back to them. They want their identities affirmed. They don’t want anything resembling organic cultural development, which produces new things for the sake of the thing itself, they want a new waifish e-girl to parasocially attach themselves to or a new gamerchair retard to read Wikipedia to them. They want to watch an 8 hour stream of a 14-year-old owning an OnlyFans girl in a debate with facts and logic so they can imagine themselves as the 14-year-old, oblivious to the fact that the stream itself is paid promotion for the OnlyFan girl’s fuckvids. They want someone to write a GQ article about how they are cool or relevant or important that no one will bother to read. They want to repeat a canned argument they saw someone else make years ago, badly.

It must stop. Your journey of self-discovery is not interesting. Your political awakening is not interesting. You argument is not interesting. Your insights are not interesting. Your problems are not interesting. I’m not impressed. No one wants to hear about your faggot life. Abolish yourself. Abolish discourse. People need to become human again, which is to say they need to become instincts, duties, and roles rather than egos and memes.

I have really enjoyed my personal research on the Russian Revolution and Civil War. This began as a hobby, and I guess it still kind of is, though I’m trying to do more serious writing and preservation work (albeit with the limitations of someone who does not speak Russian and has no advanced education of any kind).

What I enjoy most about it is that I constantly get to genuinely learn something new. I am not Russian or Jewish or a member of any of the other ethnic groups that were tied into the conflict at an existential level. I have no meaningful connection to these events beyond living in a world that is affected by the Russian Revolution. Because these events are so sparsely covered by the media and academia, I have very little preconception of what I’m going to find or what I should be looking for before I start looking. I am not just working my way backwards to justify my beliefs, and couldn’t even if I wanted to.

Obviously I have noticed the parallels between what happened in Russia in 1917 and the dysfunction that you see in America today. However, the situations are dissimilar enough that something that occurred in the Russian Revolution could never be cited to justify any kind of specific policy. Although there are many useful lessons and principles to mine from the period, our methods will always be different. Pyotr Stolypin’s emergency courts martial were very effective in bringing the 1905 Revolution to a close. Could we implement something similar? Probably not. America 2025 has a totally different people, legal code, and civilizational mindset than Russia 1905. I firmly believe that there will be a communist revolution within the decade, but it’s very unlikely the participants will describe themselves as communists, and most of them will likely have no strong political beliefs at all beyond those temporarily granted by the mob (this is one great lesson from the Russian Revolution).

What I most frequently learn is how little I know. I’m probably among the most well-read Americans on the Russian Revolution at this point, like top 1%. That might sound arrogant to say, I don’t think it means I’m in the top 1% of intelligence or anything like that, but most people just genuinely have no clue about these topics, if they even know that these topics exist. Reading one book about the Russian Revolution probably puts you far ahead of the average person.

Despite this, I am still wrong all the time. I frequently make bad assumptions and embarrass myself when talking with people who know more than me. There are huge gaps in my knowledge of this topic that I know pretty well. Learning more only makes me more conscious of my deficiencies.

I am constantly reminded of this quote from a lecture given by sci-fi author Michael Crichton describing Gell-Mann Amnesia, a term he coined after a conversation with Nobel-prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

We live in a society with amnesia. We forget how little we know. Nearly everything important has been forgotten or overwritten. As the grand lies that defined our lives for so long come apart, people are trying to fill the gaps left behind with themselves.

I am conscious of the fact that my understanding is even more limited of topics that I have not read dozens of books and articles on, which is pretty much everything but the Russian Revolution. Remember the start of the Ukraine War? I literally could not have been more wrong about how that conflict would proceed. I often don’t have much to add to discourse unless we’re talking about movies or something. I don’t know, and I’m fine with that now. That’s how most people are with most topics. It’s usually not a problem. The problems come from thinking you know far more than you do, causing you to react (or not react) in inappropriate ways. It seems like many issues in fringe spaces today trace back to an inability to admit “I don’t know.” Instead of admitting they don’t know something, people begin talking about themselves.

Take the response to Trump’s mass deportations or, rather, the lack of them. In my (very pessimistic, I predicted that everyone would start losing their minds) election night victory essay, I said that mass deportations should be a top priority for the incoming Trump administration. Although it appears the Trump administration made some attempt to carry out large-scale deportations early on, whatever they were doing seems to be on pause for whatever reason. They might be being blocked by the courts, they might be out of money, they might not have the real world capacity to carry out these deportations right now (I have heard one issue is that DHS has maxed out its existing capacity for detaining illegals awaiting deportation). I don’t know.

What is probably not true is that mass deportations aren’t happening because the people in the Trump administration just don’t want to do them. Every single person who Trump has appointed to an immigration role is an immigration hardliner. Trump’s top adviser, Stephen Miller, has made immigration restriction of the focus of his entire career, and Trump himself has made immigration issues the centerpiece of his platform since his initial primary run.

And yet, that Trump is somehow hopelessly compromised on immigration is the only conclusion that people online seem to be able to reach from this sequence of events. The major positive steps that Trump has made on immigration, suspending millions of work permits for illegal immigrants, cancelling billions of dollars in grants directed to groups that facilitate illegal immigration, effectively ending illegal border crossings, and deporting dangerous gang members in a highly visible way to Guantanamo Bay or the El Salvador supermax prison, are ignored or even attacked as distractions. They just keep making the theoretical argument for mass deportations over and over again when the problem is practical, as though you can argue someone around an obstacle. They don’t really care about immigration, they care about making the argument.

There are many people who can make the theoretical case for mass deportations, but only a few people who could make mass deportations happen. Trump is the only reason we can even have this conversation. He was the only Republican candidate who could have won the election and also deliver the House and the Senate, allowing executive action to be carried out with the help of Congress. Trump’s officials are right now engaged in a variety of conflicts with the judicial system and administrative state in order to implement Trump’s agenda, including mass deportations. The solution that Trump’s critics always arrive at, jettisoning the only people who can actually do things for them, illustrates that they do not value achieving their supposed goals in any meaningful way. They are just here to talk. They are just here to talk about themselves.

What alternatives have such people proposed? I have seen many of them suggest replacing Trump/Vance with Massie/Paul, libertarians who not only could not win nationally but also oppose many of Trump’s restrictive immigration measures, because they just heard about Massie online recently and think (incorrectly) that he hates Jews. There is also the recurring smattering of accelerationist fantasies which, as I laid out earlier, simply are never acted on and are more about reinforcing one’s online identity than achieving anything in the real world. Finally, there are the people who don’t even pretend to offer an alternative to Trump (beyond the fantastical arrival of a huge rightwing revolution or new Hitler), but claim that Trump’s tardy mass deportations prove that he was an unsuitable candidate and that rightwingers should not have participated in the system at all, which would have accomplished nothing beyond ensuring victory for Kamala Harris, who promised open borders and amnesty and permanent defeat for the American Right. All of these suggestions move you farther away from mass deportations than blindly supporting Trump does.

The whole thing is retarded. All of these people are retarded. We cannot work with this material, at least not towards anything good. This is a problem because the narrow (and shrinking) range of individuals who are smart and energetic enough to be capable of productive action, who you want to be engaged with rightwing thought, are increasingly funneled into a schizophrenic conspiracy culture where people are socialized to lie incessantly and talk only about themselves, rather than encountering a well developed pedagogy for an emerging rightwing capable of pursuing realistic objectives over of the long term. Talent is wasted and eventually lost forever, and, worst of all, it is all for nothing. No one gains anything from this arrangement.

The Right’s mental health has died of neglect. Indecision and lack of discernment are the rule rather than the exception. Although before there were too many gatekeepers and they were gatekeeping for the wrong reasons, today all manner of unacceptable behavior is tolerated forever. There is a huge effort in the conservative media space to create new magazines, but no corresponding effort to create new magazine readers, or any kind of reader for that matter. Cultivating a conservative culture and intellectual climate that produces people who are capable of encountering new information and doing something useful with it is difficult and complex. Money and attention flow to the lowest common denominator and worst impulses, or, perhaps even worse, to crude clones of the pre-Trump gatekeepers who tried and failed to contain the truth.

To make a tangentially-related extended aside, if you are a very rich person reading this and are concerned about the deterioration of rightwing cultural spaces into nothing but meme antisemitism, I encourage you to stop funding efforts to combat antisemitism. There is no more patience or trust for the people who are hired to do this work. They have proven themselves to be uniformly stupid and dishonest. Brain-drain among the shill class has left only a crude remnant who cannot make their arguments without invoking Jewish chauvinism, clear hypocrisy, or obvious lies. These people create such a bad impression that they have become one of the primary generators of antisemitism today. You would be better off burning the money in your front yard than giving it to these people and their organizations.

The present dynamic reminds me of the controversy surrounding the 1937 bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. In essence, German military “advisors” (Germany provided support to Franco during the conflict, but it was primarily to provide their own forces with combat experience and to test new tactics and technology) bombed the town of Guernica, which was then in the hands of the Soviet-backed Republicans. The bombing caused many civilian casualties and a firestorm that devastated the city, leaving behind only a skeletal husk of what had been.

Franco immediately knew what had happened: The German advisors were targeting a strategically important bridge near the town in order to cut off the retreat of the Republicans, who were using the town as a regional headquarters. The bombers had missed their target. It was all a tragic mistake. The Germans hadn’t notified Nationalist command in advance of the air raid. Although the Germans did provide substantial aid to Franco, they maintained a separate military command (the diplomatic relationship between Franco’s Nationalists and Nazi Germany was much more distant than that of the Republicans and the Soviet Union, which controlled nearly all aspects of Republican policy). Franco hadn’t ordered the bombing and wasn’t culpable for it.

The reaction to the bombing at Guernica was immediate: The public proclaimed that it was an atrocity deliberately inflicted by Franco on his own people. The media of the time, which was nearly all pro-Republican, set the death toll at 1,600 and theorized that it was a terror bombing rather than a mistake that had occurred in pursuit of a legitimate military target. The Guernica myth gained widespread public buy-in and became a major tool for the Republicans in gathering international support. A tapestry copy of a painting about the tragedy by Pablo Picasso still stands in the United Nations building, a monument to the horrors of war and the fascist Franco regime in particular.

The myth gained buy-in even from Franco, who banned investigation of the event for most of his reign over fears that new discoveries might embarrass the government. It was not until a full survey of the victims of the bombing at the cemeteries surrounding Guernica was done by local historians in the 1980s that it was discovered that the actual death total was around 160, a mere 10% of what the media narrative had been for nearly half a century. Activist journalists in the 1930s had simply fabricated the original death total that sealed the event into the public memory.

Certainly the death of all those people was a tragedy, as was the loss of so many homes, but inadvertent civilian casualties during air raids were sadly commonplace during this time period. Far worse events occurred regularly during WW2, perpetuated by both sides of the war, that no one raises an eyebrow at. Franco’s stifling of inquiry into the historical facts surrounding Guernica ended up allowing that arrangement to continue. Furthermore, his suppression of the truth only further convinced outside observers that there was “something there.”

It is unsurprising that so many normal people have been going crazy when they talk about World War II (which usually leads them into going crazy about a bunch of other things) when American schools and media have been presenting this historical event as a touchstone moral parable for decades. The alleged special significance of World War II along with the climate of dishonesty and censorship and emotional performance that has come to surround it has damaged the way that people think about it and ultimately all history.

Discussing the Jewish role in many events has been considered taboo for quite a while. I actually now understand where this impulse comes from for certain Jews having interacted with the history of the Russian Revolution and the discourse around that history for long enough, even though I strongly disagree with this approach. It was incredible to read the book With Denikin’s Armies by John Ernst Hodgson and discover that many of the dysfunctional dynamics you see associated with antisemitism discourse today were present even back then.

Hodgson doesn’t pull any punches: the local Jews in White Army-controlled Rostov in 1918 were extremely hostile to the Whites and hindered them whenever possible. Hodgson mentions that many Bolshevik officials he knew of were Jewish. However, antisemitism also seemed to act as a mind virus for Russians he met. They would insist that American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George were Jewish. They would invent conspiracies that had little bearing to reality and then act on those fantasies. Symon Petliura, leader of the Ukrainian nationalists during this time period, recruited men for his army by claiming that the Whites (the force that had the best chance of beating the Bolsheviks) were mere tools of the Jews while simultaneously allowing the (heavily Jewish-led) Bolshevik Red Army to travel through his territory unharmed to attack the Whites. The discourse concerning Jews had a degree of truth but was also frequently fake or cynical and often rendered people just deranged.

Jewish activist groups, too, Hodgson reports, bore partial responsibility for this impossible situation and the disaster that ensued. He describes how Denikin (who had many views that would likely be characterized as anti-Semitic today) would receive protests from these groups over atrocities against Jews that never happened. Their frequent demands for express condemnations of anti-Semitism or prohibitions on anti-Semitic violence separate from normal military discipline (demands that were often presented as requirements for the continuation of Allied military aid) ended up only confirming in the eyes of Denikin’s men that Jews were receiving special treatment, increasing resentment of Jews and undermining Denikin’s authority.

I find the above dynamics a lot more interesting and revealing of our current predicament than the various truthnukes that people usually try to drop on me regarding the Russian Revolution. Rasputin’s wizard powers (he was just a weird folk healer who was the target of a rumor campaign from British-backed aristocratic circles because he was anti-war and his eccentricities could be used to embarrass the Czar)? The Imperial family murdered in a Jewish religious ritual (I’ve never seen any evidence of this and it flies in the face of what we actually know about the murders)? Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (Real but no one bothered to actually read this book, it wasn’t just Jews and it was more about breaking open the Russian economy than anything else)? It’s all not as exciting as people pretend it is.

The taboo nature of these discussions is what generates the excitement. Lots of perfectly serious and academic books were dubbed antisemitic for daring to explore the Jewish role in the Russian Revolution (such critics were very unkind to Robert Service’s excellent biographies of Lenin and Trotsky). Again, I actually kind of get it now having seen many people discover that Jews exist and then developing a socialized myopia (they only look for Jews, which then are unsurprisingly all they find) that drives them insane, but here the solution of unfairness, dishonesty, and censorship is obviously generating the problem it nominally exists to solve (among a bunch of other far-less sympathetic motives that various groups have to manipulate history).

You will never “make a good point” by lying. I cannot tell you how maddening it was to see Elon Musk force the leader of German rightwing party AfD, Alice Weidel, to agree with the idea that the Nazis were leftwing shortly before Germany’s parliamentary election. Weidel clearly does not think this, no one actually thinks this. Weidel’s private views about German history are likely much more radical than she can publicly say. She doesn’t need to say them. No one needs to say anything about these topics to make their case today. Oftentimes it seems like discourse itself is what is causing the problem. People would likely reach better places if they simply did not make these topics the center of attention and didn’t feel the need to lie about them. This is not how adults should talk to each other.

It’s degrading to be lied to. It’s degrading to lie. We live in a shithole because everyone lies all the time. In order to correct this problem, you must create a nucleus of culture around truth and very carefully manage it so it can grow and flourish.

Rightwing online cultural dominance as we know it today (in a greatly vulgarized form) was produced by eclectic far right forum culture briefly breaking into relatively unrestricted mainstream channels at exactly the right moment for it to be attached to a real world metapolitical sea change. Forbidden or at least very obscure lines of thought entered the open intellectual frontier that flowed from Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party and subsequent toppling of all politics as normal. This radically reshaped the way that Americans think about government, social relations, and their health for the better.

All of the cloistered far right forums that people used to go to are gone now. The cultural climate that produced the 2016 crossover moment no longer exists. The major figures have largely disappeared or burnt out. The degraded scene that you see today has totally different demographics, preferences, and priorities. There are a lot more people and a lot more money is floating around, but simultaneously far fewer opportunities for quality to emerge. We are in uncharted territory and that’s fine, but you can’t expect things to get better on their own.

Recapturing that lightning in a bottle will take years and it will be even longer before you see any visible returns. Still, this is very necessary work. As bad as things are now in rightwing spaces, they are only going to get worse. Conservatives already suffer from an extreme shortage of competent and stable people, and this shortage will only accelerate as the social pressure to conform to the various dead-end behaviors that have come to define rightwing online spaces increases by orders of magnitude in the real world.

About a year ago I recorded a (very good) podcast episode on the post-apocalyptic role playing game Fallout: New Vegas. In the episode, I argued that the game was the closest thing that Zoomers and Millennials had to a Great American Novel.

The game’s enduring appeal stems from presenting a relatively fleshed-out (power plants, agriculture, water systems, trade networks, factions with histories that stretch back hundreds of years) but still comprehensible world, a world that posed substantive questions to players about the nature of society, and then forced players to engage with those questions substantively (i.e. you have to make choices based on the game’s lore to advance). There’s a lot to talk about and disagree on here, but little need for it to get personal. There are boundaries to the game, media is inherently limited, so there is only a limited amount of information that players will have to base their decisions on. People who finish Fallout: New Vegas will all be conversant in roughly the same substantive thing.

Being conversant in something is important because it means you can actually have a conversation. It’s a prerequisite if you don’t want to just talk with or about yourself. Everyone is entering into discussions of Fallout: New Vegas with roughly the same background knowledge and they are talking about roughly the same thing. That is not the case for the overwhelming majority of discussions occurring right now. There is very little to be gained from such discourse, it usually only serves to confuse rather than clarify. People do not understand the things they are talking about and often do not want to understand. However, with a cultural object like Fallout: New Vegas, you can talk about the thing itself, instead of a person, with others.

Talking about the thing itself is a socially and personally rewarding process. A relatively large number people in the same age cohort have played Fallout: New Vegas. Not only is the thing substantive, but you have the opportunity to actually discuss it with your peers. I think something that young people crave is to participate in something that they take seriously, and to believe that they are worth being taken seriously by other people. Such feelings don’t always stem from self-obsession. People genuinely can reach a better understanding of things they like or tangentially related topics or each other or even themselves through discourse. If you want to understand anything well, you have to go through an iterative process, refining your views with different pieces of new information and different perspectives to view that information through.

There is little incentive to lie about Fallout: New Vegas or to misrepresent your true opinions regarding it. If you engage in any of the performances or self identification rituals that define modern discourse, it is immediately noticeable and regarded as obnoxious. It’s a video game, why bother? People are more defensive of things that are fun and apolitical than they are of things where it’s kind of accepted that there’s some degree of hamming it up like politics.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the various hallmarks of modern rightwing online culture did not come from people who spent all their time talking about politics. These forums and the broader social media circles they spawned were full of hobbyists who often had very eclectic interests that ranged from books, to movies, to videogames, to anime, to fitness, to love and romance (It would be very interesting to see a formal study of the influence of early 2010s PUA blogs on far right thought). It was a small self-selected group that was truly fringe: They were interested in things that were out of the ordinary.

People may mock all of these topics as trivial, but the broader fringe internet subculture (which was also far more demographically homogenous than its equivalent today) trained participants to explore a variety of niches thoroughly. There was little incentive to lie or misrepresent your views (at least about whatever was being discussed). It was all very low stakes and you were interacting with people who you could understand and could understand you. Furthermore, this level of fluency between group members allowed various disingenuous or destructive behaviors (commonplace online now) to be instantly recognized and dismissed.

When the political moment arrived in the form of events like GamerGate and the early Trump campaign such people were far better equipped to flow with the giant energies at work than anyone who reads the newspaper or political blogs every day. I should add that I don’t think this fringe online cohort caused the Trump moment. I think that they merely were able to capitalize on it in a way others were not, and we still see that positive influence (however degraded) today.

Of course, everything is different now. It is important not to lionize all of these people too much, their moment is over and not coming back. You can’t recreate what happened. It is possible, however, to cultivate a new fringe that is capable of producing new and good things again.

There must be a real effort to build and maintain a non-political fringe conservative culture. This means building places where smart young people can go to be free of politicized thought, and then policing those places to keep out bad influences and/or liberals. It also means bringing focus to a limited number of cultural objects at a time. You need to have common ground to work from, a new canon for you new audience.

Conservatives should place far more attention on nominally apolitical media, movies, television shows, videogames, etc. There need to be more conservatives spaces where it’d kind of be weird for you to talk about politics. As philosopher Jonathan Bowden said, “If you look at mass and popular culture, the heroic is still alive. It’s still alive in junk films, in comic books, in forms that culturally elitist society and intellectuals deprivilege.” Genre media is huge. Hobbyist communities are huge. People should be provided with implicitly rightwing platforms where they can build fluency with actual things rather than spouting off memes all the time. People should be able to communicate with each other about things they like or enjoy without the shadow of World War II or any other stage for contemporary performance looming over them.

You must do the opposite of what conservatives are doing now. You must be implicit. Did liberals go around saying “I am liberal. No conservatives allowed.” as they dominated culture for decades? No. In fact, it was only when they had to say those things that their cultural power began to wane. Ideally, people should be being exposed to conservative thought without even understanding it as conservative thought. It should just be art. It should just be knowledge. It should just be fun. Liberals used to do that really well. They had cultural professionals and overlapping “lessons” and creative spaces that allowed people to gain a thorough understanding of their views. When someone arrived at a conclusion liberals wanted them to arrive at, it felt natural to them rather than a performance for a crowd.

Of course, eventually it became just a performance for a crowd. Liberals were delusional and malicious for quite some time before their ignoble implosion but gradually lost any ability to defend their indefensible policy choices. There was no logic or real principle left after they shed their camouflage to wage total war against Trump, only naked force and group identity. Conservatives beginning to identify as “based” represents the same degraded thinking of modern liberals. All of the good rightwing ideas of the last 10 years have become identity signifiers rather than ideas. You must return attention to the thing itself to prevent rightwing audiences from going insane.

Take the rightwing response to the film Anora (2025), which sold lots of tickets and won many awards. It’s a good movie that actually represents a change in the public consciousness (I have a podcast episode on Anora talking about why I liked it and what I think it had to say). This movie could not have been made a few years ago, and contains many messages that rightwingers would be sympathetic to (and that liberals are very hostile to) even if you find the film’s nudity and sexual content objectionable. The fact that it did so well with the public demonstrates that people (especially young people) are open to thinking about these topics in a way that is far more friendly to us. There is nothing wrong with not liking Anora, but it’s something that rightwingers should at least be able to speak about intelligently if they’re going to talk about it.

How did rightwingers respond to this genuine cultural victory? With absolute stupidity. Rightwing figures just began talking about themselves rather than the movie. They complained about “degeneracy” even though the film already has a message that’s fairly contemptuous of degenerated modern social conditions. Essentially, the movie lays out how a prostitute has ruined her own life and destroyed her ability to form meaningful connections with other people through her behavior. Rightwingers invented flimsy nonsense criticisms solely to provide themselves with the opportunity to launch into diatribes that really didn’t mean anything other than “I am based.” Their audiences, who probably hadn’t seen the movie, were happy to cheer this behavior on. This is the perverse incentive structure created by such signalling.

If you were a young person who liked Anora, you must have thought that all of these people were retarded. Not only did they not understand the movie, which was not particularly subtle or complex, they didn’t seem to want to. One imagines them watching the movie waiting for something to get angry at. It was astounding to watch this dynamic unfold. People who frequently say that we need new rightwing film studios and festivals and culture revealed that they can’t even manage to watch a movie without making it all about themselves. Anora was just a romantic comedy that a lot of people liked and rightwingers couldn’t handle that on its own terms.

There are many people who just don’t get it in rightwing spaces and can’t get it because they’re too self-obsessed, stupid, or mentally ill. The surging popularity of online personality feuds and empty signalling signals the influx of huge numbers of people into rightwing online spaces who can only understand personality feuds or only understand empty signals. The ideas and arguments are nonsensical because the ideas and arguments no longer matter, only defining yourself. Keeping out these destructive audiences is as important as keeping out the figures and trends they enable.

Conservatives must create a little world that can fulfill the intellectual and creative needs of capable people, where they will not be subjected to the various brain scorchers of modern discourse and be in dialogue only with each other rather than a public mind that is rapidly in decline. I praise the comments section of my podcast all the time. It’s not a bit, the guys in the comments section really are very bright. They have a lot to add to conversations and I learn new things from them or get good recommendations and insights constantly. It’s very reassuring to see them interact with each other. They have the right attitude, I’ve never had to ban anyone.

This is a small self-selected group that is directed at things rather than people, and a lot of different things too—movies, tv shows, books. People know a lot and are open to new things. I use the expression “wallpaper in your mind” to describe this kind of effect. You never know how depoliticized trivia (even if it’s just riffing on a videogame you’ll never play) might help you. It might allow you to make a connection you wouldn’t have made before, or stumble onto something else you wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. I’m sure everyone in the comments section is conservative or otherwise rightwing, but they don’t feel compelled to prove it constantly. It would be kind of weird if they did. There are a lot of very nice and rewarding things to talk about other than politics. Because everyone lies constantly about politics, implicitly political communities are usually a lot more productive than explicitly political ones.

Recreating this effect at scale means a lot more than a new podcast or a new movie or a new book or a new magazine. It means a constellation of apolitical cultural spaces, organizations, workshops, affinity groups, think tanks, historical institutes, events, roundtables, retreats, camps, schools and all of the things that liberals maintained to cultivate talent and ruthlessly drove our people from. These things should be in communication with each other with overlapping messages and casts of characters.

Of course, if you build it they won’t necessarily come. It is also extremely important for conservatives to put more effort not just into creating a community of cultural professionals, but also elite consumers of their products and services.

It’s tough to do this in the wilderness of modern conditions. Things are not good anywhere. The internet means that the worst social trends can be beamed to the most remote locations on the planet. Furthermore, there is so much noise that it is genuinely difficult for good people to find each other. You can build the perfect system and there’s no guarantee that the people you want to attract will even hear about it, much less feel compelled to participate.

I think the best model is something like the Apollo program: You must select for and concentrate the best of the best. Administer an IQ-adjacent test to a very large number of young people and select only from the best performers. Put them in environments where they’re given background knowledge and training that will help them make the most of their natural talents, and kick out anyone who can’t handle the social component of this kind of circle. Most importantly, pay them to do all of this.

For the same amount of money deployed by conservative media outlets to hire and support a single gamerchair retard who might seem to be slightly better on the issues, you could fund stipends ($1000 extra a month goes a long way) or jobs (someone has to staff the constellation of apolitical cultural organizations) to support 1000 young people who are not interested in hearing what gamerchair retards have to say. These are people who can actually generate new culture and participate in constructive projects.

Money talks. It is depressing to see how many institutional resources go towards propping up more or less useful fandoms and cults and vanity projects that ultimately produce nothing while many smart and capable young people, who could change the world for the better if they were given resources and opportunity to pursue their own interests, are left to wither on the vine.

These unsupported young people either drop out, focusing on their careers and families and all the other nice things separate from the dishonest performances of modern politics, or, worse, burn out. These burnouts are the bleakest aspect of modern online spaces.

Watching young people who could have contributed towards something good get involved with drugs, deviant behavior, or a fandom that will cause them to turn on all of their old friends has become just another part of being online. As these people close doors for themselves, they flail and lash out rather than admit their mistakes. Someone who goes crazy and embittered usually only gets crazier and more embittered. The worst part is knowing that, if they had been given the opportunity to be part of something better, this crazy person likely would have risen to the occasion and avoided all of this.

George Soros terraformed the minds of Eastern Europeans by building a centrally-coordinated network of nominally apolitical cultural outposts. He fundamentally transformed the American justice system (flatlining quality of life in major cities) by pouring money into critical local elections that most conservatives don’t bother to participate in. There are lots of crowns in the gutter waiting for someone who can look a few steps ahead to pick them up. Please, really rich conservative guy reading this, stop investing in a one-off object that’s flashy or thoughtful and start investing in building a core population that is capable of sustaining your goals over the long term.

As I said before, liberals should be excluded for anything good to stay good, as should the liars, troublemakers, and bad actors who have plunged rightwing spaces into their current sorry state. The best organizing principle and hard line for such a new scene, I think, is support for Trump.

Yes, it all comes back to this. I am a Trump sycophant. I am loyal to my leader Donald Trump. My cards are all on the table. This is not a bit. I’m not exaggerating. I’m like this in real life and really nasty about it. I think anything other than enthusiastic support for Donald Trump and his agenda is at best useless or masturbatory and at worst actively harmful. I have yet to see anyone who criticizes Trump who offers even a tiny fraction of what Trump offers to America, the world, and you personally. Trump could shoot me on 5th Avenue and I’d still support him in my dying moments. In fact, I hope that this happens so I am spared the indignity of watching countless ungrateful, ignorant, and self-obsessed rightwingers lash out at their only hope of success.

Support for Trump means support for doing things in the real world. You cannot think your way around doing things in the real world. Anyone who believes they can merely establishes themselves as a liability who should be ruthlessly excluded from rightwing thought and public discourse. Such people, and those who would throw them lifelines by engaging with them, must be excluded. The broken clock should never get any credit for being right twice a day or even 90% of the day. No traitors.

It’s better to set a one strike policy for such saboteurs than the current arrangement of allowing them to circulate forever. Great Britain’s medieval treatment of felons produced centuries of relative stability and success for the British people. Figuratively comparable harsh treatment of those who view politics as a mere stage for self-aggrandizement would likely pay dividends for the American Right. The most unbreakable policy must be that you cannot betray. You can never be allowed to help the enemy for any reason. As Trump is essential to our success in the near and long terms, attacking him in non-productive ways (the only ways these people seem to be capable of) only weakens us and helps the enemy.

People are taught to think of themselves as consumers. They consume rightwing content. They have opinions about whether various developments are good or bad, and those opinions (tied to ego and group membership) eventually become the most important things in the world to them. They do not see themselves as participants in all of this drama, something that they might have a real effect on and which certainly has a very real effect on them. Rather, they are in a constant negotiation with reality. What will it take for them to agree to survive? Eventually the world itself stops mattering, and such people become consumed with their little selves and other petty issues as the salvageable real world situation is allowed to decline into nothing.

This is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, it might be an eternal one. John Ernst Hodgson described his arguments with White Army officers during the time of the Russian Revolution:

One emerged from these talks with the impression that the average Russian loved a debate for its own sake, that he started from a fixed point and always managed to get back to that point, and that he was able to think deep down into himself but seldom along extraneous lines. This may be why his thinking has seldom been progressive and constructive. He reminded me of the classic story of the Byzantine theologians who went on discussing metaphysics while the Turks thundered at the gates of their city.

The Turks are here and all of these retards are still arguing about metaphysics. We’re not going to have an argument about whether or not it’s appropriate to fight and live. We’re not going to have an argument about whether or not we should throw out our only hope of success in favor of a theoretical more pure leader in the future. A.W. Smith put it more simply in his memoirs A Captain Departed “In the end [the White Army] cracked because of that fungoid growth that seems to attack all Russian enterprise. Talk, graft, and lassitude combined to its downfall.”

Efforts must be made to inoculate the rightwing public mind against the fungoid growth of talk, graft, and lassitude, but this is impossible in the open sewer of rightwing online spaces as they exist today. You must construct the little world, a little place where people can be human again, which can eventually grow and supersede the various big places and modes of communication that have by now far outlived their usefulness.

This essay was written over the course of a little over a month. It is regrettably about ten times as long as I had originally planned. I’d be ready to put a bow on it, then something new to talk about would arrive. Realistically it should have been several different essays but I couldn’t think of an elegant way to break it apart into chunks. I don’t want to ever write anything this long again and I’m skeptical that such a winding and disorganized document will be of much use to anyone other than myself but, frankly, the content drip on this Substack has been pretty slow lately so I might as well publish it. I am conscious of the fact that the therapeutic aspect of writing these things down might exhibit the exact same self-indulgence that I rail against. Still, I am comforted by the thought that such a lengthy and confused document will likely frustrate people who were hoping to mine damaging quotes from the piece, if they bother to read very far down at all.

As bad as things are now, and they are really bad, they are only going to get worse. Internalize that reality. Human capital decline in America 2025 is steep and accelerating. They’re not making new Oldheads. People are losing it now, while the real world situation is actually pretty good. There are things so bad we haven’t even considered them yet on the horizon. You need to get mentally in the right place, and find other people who are in the right place as well, while you still can. Everyone who is going to fall apart or begin helping the enemy at the next twist of fate needs to be jettisoned before they are in a position to do real damage.

Nothing has to happen. We could easily pull out of this present moment like it was nothing and everyone will forget all about it. People forget very quickly now. We could also easily toss aside all the gifts and opportunities we’ve been given and fall very far from these heights. We get to choose what we do.

I’m optimistic, all things considered. If there’s one thing that reading about the Russian Revolution teaches you, it’s that people usually run out of will far sooner than they run out of chances to improve their situations. Read my introduction to the Russian Revolution: Lenin’s regime suffered disaster after disaster. The Bolsheviks were constantly one second away from oblivion. Both sides of World War I started gobbling up their territory. Their soldiers wouldn’t fight and when they did would lose against forces that they outnumbered 10-to-1. Lenin gets shot 3 times in the chest. And yet, the Bolsheviks cartwheeled forward into history in spite of their numerous fatal wounds. They simply refused to die. They believed that their victory was necessary and good, despite neither of these things being true. The Whites, on the other hand, lacked a similar clarity that might have allowed them to achieve a comparable unity of force and purpose.

I really do believe in this stuff. I think we are telling the truth and are going to make the world a better place. I believe that our victory is necessary and good, and that this is something we can will into reality. As I said in my election night essay: Everyone is so unhappy. Everyone is so stupid and angry and ungrateful and insane. It has to stop. It will stop. We will stop it.

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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.

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Ep77: Thoughts on Black Christmas (1974), Christmas movies, the Retard Right, and what makes the holidays so special (Paid)

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If you’re reading this, Trump has won.

This is cause for celebration. Few could have foreseen with confidence in January 2021 that President Trump, totally stripped of power following the violent full-scale insurrection of the George Floyd Riots, a dubious election, and an unprecedented conspiracy to remove or criminalize lawful powers of the President, would not only survive the titanic forces arrayed against him but return to office with perhaps the strongest democratic mandate in American history.

It was only through the enormous personal sacrifices and determination of President Trump, along with the selfless work of the men and women who contributed to his campaign, that our country has been spared a terrible fate.

Although Trump has provided America with an unprecedented opportunity, I believe the risk of disaster has never been higher than it is right now. As one Russian official said of attempts by the Czar to modernize Imperial Russia shortly before the Revolution: “The most dangerous thing you can do to a bad system is try to reform it.”

Americans want change. No one is happy with the current system or their opposites in it. Political divisions have never been more pronounced. Democrats ran on the most radical platform of all time: Abolishing the electoral college, destroying the Supreme Court, mass gun confiscation, censorship of so-called “misinformation,” and citizenship for the tens of millions of illegal immigrants imported into the country by the government itself, which would have provided liberals with a permanent electoral majority to rubber stamp their agenda.

The fact that this election was even close (and it was, never lose sight of that whatever the final results may be) reveals that America is already in a deep state of crisis. As I articulated in my earlier essay Political and cultural transformation in an era of massive psychic damage, the issue isn’t this or that candidate or policy, but that at a systemic level America has tens or maybe hundreds of millions of people who are either totally malignant or (more common) simply unable to navigate reality after decades of living under the most invasive propaganda regime to every exist.

Although I have long dismissed any suggestion that widespread rightwing political violence is imminent, I do believe that a violent leftwing revolution with a serious chance of overthrowing America’s Constitutional order and replacing it with a new system will arrive within the next 10 years. This presents an enormous challenge for the incoming Trump administration and whatever is to follow. The conservative movement of today is in a bad place to meet this challenge.

I have decided to write this essay (hopefully my last on contemporary politics) to explain what I think the problem is and propose solutions.

Although it seems like a distant memory now, the 2024 Republican Primary revealed that a significant minority of Republicans do not understand the peril we are in today. Trump’s victory in the primary process was always inevitable, and yet he managed to acquire a very serious challenger in the form of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis gathered millions of supporters and an enormous war chest from those who believed that such an insurgent candidacy would produce a good outcome.

This candidacy did not produce a good outcome, or anything good, really. DeSantis, one of the most objectively successful conservative governors in the country, who has done an enormous amount of good for his state, burnt through his credibility as a national figure and more than 160 million dollars badly needed elsewhere before dropping out and endorsing Trump. Even though DeSantis (to his credit) eventually put himself out as a Trump campaign surrogate, large parts of his network of supporters continued to try to engineer a Trump defeat until the very end.

Many mainstream Republican influencers seemed committed to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory during this election cycle. From the professional pro-life movement to gun rights activists, attacks on Trump by rightwingers poured in from all sides. It was not just nobodies and obvious bad actors.

These attacks served no purpose: However dissatisfied these issue groups may have been with Trump’s policy (or at least his rhetoric), with the alternative they faced total annihilation. Kamala Harris had, without exaggeration, the most radical positions on abortion and guns of any Presidential candidate in American history. What these attacks did do was demonstrate that many professional conservative “activists” are largely unconcerned with the topics that they are paid to be interested in.

Perhaps even more disingenuous criticism emerged from the “far right,” which, though it has seen its ideas enjoy broader adoption than at any time in the last half century, began a series of shifting attacks on Trump on his two strongest issues: Immigration and foreign policy. These attacks were designed solely to damage Trump, though for some months many critics pretended as though they were trying to “help” the Trump campaign. As Trump’s lead became more and more pronounced these people began openly advocating for total defeat in the present to allow for the theoretical future victory of a “more pure” candidate.

Although there certainly was a degree of coordination and institutional funding behind the various attacks on Trump from the Right (interestingly, one major node of anti-Trump activity was indicted for taking large amounts of cash from Russian agents), I believe that the overwhelming majority of participants earnestly held these objectively stupid and harmful beliefs. They could be convinced to allow the enemy to win. They could be convinced to help the enemy to win. As I said to myself after Kyle Rittenhouse inexplicably declared on video that he could not vote for Trump in good conscience: “There is something wrong with people.”

There is something wrong with people. I have watched online rightwing spaces (which for nearly a decade have shifted discourse in a positive direction) gradually transform into a complete sewer, with this process greatly accelerating over the last year or so.

As dissatisfaction with the current system has expanded, online rightwing spaces became much larger and more diverse. With this diversity came new priorities and new ways of interacting with each other. The greatly expanded audience for rightwing-coded content also attracted an endless blight of grifters, self-promoters, and rejects from the old system.

Virtually every mainstream institution has shredded its credibility to oppose Trump over the tumultuous last few years. The massive (and long-running) failures of the education system, medical establishment, news media, and other pillars of our society have never been more visible. Although this presents opportunities for dissidents and revisionists of all kinds, it is obvious now that the total unreliability of mainstream institutions has led to broad ignorance and nihilism among the general public.

You can see this on the Left with the massive embrace of obviously harmful and pseudoscientific social fads like childhood transgenderism. Although these things were roundly mocked by leftists just a few years ago, they now enjoy near-universal acceptance on the mainstream Left in response to conservative opposition. Leftists get their marching orders and run with them, no matter how absurd.

The Right faces a neat inversion of this absurdity: In response to total dishonesty from the mainstream, rightwingers have begun to question nearly everything. This is good in many ways, leading to the replacement of long-held maxims that were clearly not true and directing attention towards critical issues, but it has also fostered many destructive habits among modern conservatives.

The first is credulity. Although rightwingers now correctly question mainstream narratives, they often reflexively accept dubious “revisionist” narratives without any scrutiny at all. I see people latch on to claims that aren’t even plausibly true all the time now, and not dumb people, either (though there certainly are a lot of those, too). Lies have become so commonplace in our society that smart people often don’t even know what the truth might look like, or how one might arrive at it.

This goes double when dealing with “forbidden” topics of which mainstream treatments are clearly inadequate. Alternate perspectives on these topics are often instantly accepted merely because they are alternate perspectives. Widespread motivated reasoning and lack of discernment have created a situation where “redpilled” people frequently develop views of topics that are even more distorted and inaccurate than those they held when they were merely clueless.

Contributing to this problem is the total (and accelerating) ignorance of the public. No one knows anything. The education system has failed. The media lies. People lack basic background knowledge through which they can frame their thinking. In its place, they are left with a smattering of trivia, moral parables, and atrocity narratives.

Without adequate mental models of how the world operates, the American Right has become fixated on conspiracy theories yet often seems clueless as to what a conspiracy looks like: How one would be carried out and what the participants might hope to achieve.

The lack of these models generates enormous amounts of magical thinking, which in turn cause shortsighted or counterproductive behavior. Even those with mostly good views who are otherwise intelligent don’t seem to know much and aren’t interested in learning more. People will get two or three bits of trivia, which are often just corrections of mainstream errors, and think they have a good understanding of a topic. This sometimes leads them to totally incorrect conclusions even if what little they “know” about a given subject is kind of true. You can never predict when this might become a problem, but it always will. Bad programming. Bad reflexes.

The second major problem we face is argumentativeness. I don’t mean that arguments are bad or anything like that, but rather that people today have become addicted to arguing. Because modern American life involves disputing clearly fake claims on all manner of topics emerging from mainstream institutions, arguments have become almost reflexive among rightwingers to the point where many behave as though arguments are the point of discourse.

In the case of recent opposition to Trump, some criticisms launched at him were actually valid (though many more were not and were in total bad faith), these criticisms were always just irrelevant because whatever the case may have been, we would still need Trump to win over the disastrous alternative. Again, there is a values crisis, and I don’t mean that in a moralizing way: Rightwingers are very often disoriented and unable to assess relative importance/unimportance.

Internet culture encourages a constant state of excitability. People are always being exposed to a new narrative or new development to react to. This harmful phenomenon has financial incentives through the popularity of streaming and the now direct association between engagement and cash payments.

It seems like people react and overreact all the time now. It was surreal to see so many rightwingers get sent into complete hysteria by the obviously astroturfed enthusiasm for Kamala Harris that followed her initial announcement.

Panic is contagious. Despair is contagious. People could not understand that what they were seeing was fake, and that, even if it hadn’t been fake, it would still have been harmful to publicly respond in that way. After all: They’re just thinking out loud. They’re just engaging in “the discourse.” These pisspants conservatives make minor problems worse and turn fake issues into real ones.

Exacerbating this confusion, pettiness and personality feuds often lead rightwingers to adopt nonsensical or counterproductive positions solely to “own” their online opponents. I will always remember seeing rightwingers defend the L.A. Times Bombing, an incident in 1910 during which leftist terrorists blew up a conservative newspaper and killed dozens of people, because they objected to me personally. It soon became clear that they had no idea what the L.A. Times Bombing even was, they just supported it because I opposed it. I don’t know who those people were or why they might have disliked me (there are many valid possibilities), but that kind of dishonest thinking is commonplace now.

It is a kind of nihilism. People no longer discuss the truth or even their earnestly-held but untrue beliefs, but rather try to engineer situations where they can signal their affiliation with or opposition to this or that personality, or “win” an argument that is not important or maybe not even real. There are many people in rightwing spaces now who are simply pathologically disagreeable and want a sense of vindication or validation more than they want to achieve any positive real-world objective.

This leads us to the final aspect of the problem: A general apathy towards dishonesty and other bad behavior. If a real-life acquaintance lied all the time or constantly behaved in self-serving or counterproductive ways, you would probably not talk to them any more. Despite this, I see the continued indulgence of malignant or extremely stupid figures merely because they are in opposition to the current system or engage in taboo behavior. People will know that a person is being dishonest, and is constantly dishonest, and yet go along with whatever canned discourse of the day is being pushed as though they were watching a television show.

Recently a far right streamer (@Black_Pilled) made a post pointing out that I had blocked him on Twitter. I have no idea when or why I blocked him, I’ve never interacted with him before. Soon after, he made another post claiming that I was Jewish. Later, on a stream, he said that the block was part of a Jewish conspiracy. There was no real reason to think that I was Jewish, and, in fact, I’m not Jewish. This person just felt personally slighted because I blocked him and began insisting I was Jewish because he knew that it would cause others to attack me.

Dozens, then hundreds, more soon joined in calling me Jewish. I was asked to disavow the Talmud. People falsely claimed that my series on the Russian Revolution didn’t discuss Jews at all as part of a larger plot to obscure the truth. Others argued that I was a Zionist and dismissed demographic issues in the United States. I was repeatedly told that I had blocked this person because he was too “pro-white.” None of these things were true or motivated by anything other than me blocking someone on Twitter. It was obvious that the people making these attacks didn’t have even a casual familiarity with me or my views.

This kind of group dishonesty is commonplace today (I assume it was being coordinated on Discord), but the strangest response came from people who were nominally “on my side” in the feud and disapproved of what was going on.

Multiple people told me what a “good guy” this person was because they had enjoyed his previous streams. Others described the event as just another pointless intra-rightwing slap fight and wondered why we all couldn’t just get along. All this, even though the attacks were coming from a person who openly advocated for a Trump defeat, which would have meant our total destruction, and was lying about me for the most petty reasons. I often find myself wondering “What is it going to take?” to get people to simply dismiss these characters for good.

I am sure the annoyance I felt during those few days will pass, but still I am constantly taken aback by the behavior people will tolerate as a mere quirk. I see stuff all the time now that would have made someone radioactive just a few years ago: Casual dishonesty, leaking, blackmail, betraying confidences, collaborating with self-admitted federal informants, proposing that we should lose and doing everything in their power to make that happen. People will adopt ridiculous positions and attack anyone who disagrees, then suddenly drop those positions and begin advocating for the exact opposite view. It seems like everyone just goes along with this. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s all content. They will know that someone is a liar or bad actor and continue engaging with them and what they’re saying as though nothing has happened.

In short, this is not material that can be worked with, at least not towards anything good. The modern Right is not unified by any larger ideology or disciplined structure, but rather generalized, often incoherent, opposition to the threat posed by liberals.

I think the victory we enjoy today is not due to the strength of the conservative movement, but rather due to conservatives being gifted a world-historic figure, President Trump, who was then saved from assassination by what I can only describe as divine intervention. More significantly, perhaps, Democrats put forward very bad candidates this year. I genuinely can’t think of national politicians who are less impressive or charismatic than Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

None of these gifts can be counted on in the future, which is an issue because large sections of the rightwing coalition that has just re-elected Trump would be useless in any time of crisis, or worse than useless: They could be counted on to directly or indirectly help the enemy. Standards are collapsing across the board. Petty crime and deaths of despair are commonplace. The population is ignorant, excitable, and primed for great change.

President Trump will eventually grow old and die. His replacement as frontrunner, likely J.D. Vance, will not have the same superhuman charisma that once seduced a nation out of seemingly endless decline. As the United States enters its next existential crisis, which I believe will begin within the next 10 years (before 2035, hence the title of this essay), the challenge facing conservatives today is to transform the Trump movement into a professional force capable of working in concert towards realistic objectives over the course of years and decades to come.

With this in mind, I believe the best steps for the Trump movement are (in no particular order, ideally these would occur simultaneously) as follows.

1. Consensus Group

Trump has come a long way from the early days of total war against the GOP establishment. Trump has won the war. His family members now control the RNC. His critics (still numerous) must hold their silence if they want to keep their jobs.

And yet, this is not enough. Populism as a political strategy has limitations in a time of great dissatisfaction with the system. Liberals will always be able to promise more handouts, they will always be able to promise more change, they will always be able to promise more revenge. Radical leftist candidates like John Fetterman will likely easily be able to gather a large number of crossover Trump supporters in 2028 by simply “saying the right words” and playing into the public’s existing resentments.

Now that the GOP is effectively the Trump Party, Trump should create a separate formal “Inner Party” loyal to himself alone. Trump is a true believer in America. Running for President was a real sacrifice for him. It was only his great devotion that saved our country. This great devotion needs to be harnessed, organized, and put into practice at a wide scale.

The goal of this Inner Party should be as simple as possible: Preserve America in roughly its current form. We have a system, we want to protect the system. This simplicity is critical. Everyone must have the same clear and achievable goal that they can work towards in concert. As the Russian Civil War illustrated, it is impossible to stop a revolution when the counterrevolutionaries can’t even agree on what they are fighting for. Everyone on the Right today is full of whizkid ideas about “what to do next” if our system collapses but, given the Left’s great advantage in numbers and organization, any fundamental change to the Constitutional order or prolonged civil conflict will certainly end with a decisive leftwing victory.

The good news is that positive change is possible within our system. Florida was once a swing state. However, under the energetic administration of Gov. DeSantis (whatever his mistakes during 2024 may have been) the state has a perpetually expanding Republican majority and skyrocketing quality of life. Even something as miraculous as Donald Trump’s political comeback in the face of a coup and an avalanche of bogus charges from federal and state prosecutors didn’t happen with a violent revolution or civil unrest. Rather, Trump simply refused to quit and engaged in smart politics even as the situation looked grim. His determination paid off, ours can too.

The Inner Party must cultivate a small core of the most capable Trump loyalists and provide them with organization and training. In 1940, the NYPD was faced with a huge surplus of applicants and a shortage of positions. It was decided that they would filter candidates simply by only hiring those who had scored at the top of the Civil Service Examination. This gamble paid off, the 1940 recruit “Superclass” produced a greatly disproportionate number of officers who would go on to become Chief of Police or achieve other high rank. A Trump organization should mirror this approach, making a test (with real world subject-matter and generalized IQ-adjacent questions) available to the public and recruiting only among the highest achievers. Think the Manhattan Project or Apollo Program: The best of the best. Membership should be limited to just a few thousand total, maybe less than a hundred at first.

There are many benefits to using a private Trump-led organization to concentrate such people. The first is the maintenance of discipline and standards. Once you have an organization, you can kick people out of the organization if they do bad things or fail to maintain the party line. Organizations have norms and rules and hierarchy, things that are essential to achieving goals in the real world. Organizations have expectations of discretion and privacy, and ways to resolve disputes internally. Forcing people together in a real-life organization also has the tendency to moderate their personal behavior, as the individuals they’re interacting with are no longer abstractions on the internet, but rather people who they know well or at least will be forced to work with in the future over a long time horizon.

Public jockeying for power and attention coupled with the harmful incentives of streaming culture has had a decisive negative impact on rightwing politics. Everyone online is always one mental breakdown or personality feud away from publicly burning their longtime associates to the applause of countless spectators.

This phenomenon is antithetical to movements that actually change the world, which are inevitably powered by institutional knowledge, longstanding relationships, and, most importantly, trust. The goal of this Inner Party should be to take disputes private, allowing for the development of a single plan under a single leader, the presentation of a unified public front, and the pursuit of objectives over the long term.

Another problem that a formal Trump Inner Party could solve concerns education. People know nothing now. History is fake. The media presents a distorted view of the world. On the internet, where people “learn” the most today, it’s the blind leading the blind. This phenomenon is just as present in people with good views who are otherwise intelligent as it is in the most wretched and braindead liberal.

An Inner Party could create a planned curriculum to equip members with the critical information they need to navigate reality and improve their lives, and require completion in order to achieve membership. Most people today, even conservatives, are unconsciously drawn towards liberal politics because they have been indoctrinated with a liberal worldview since birth. Although it’s difficult to argue with messages that people have received for decades, a “crash course” in history, politics, and practical matters could at least provide building blocks for future growth. This curriculum could be delivered in a single setting over the course of a few months, like a finishing school, and even be expanded into a mandatory “continuing education” program like doctors and lawyers have.

Bringing people together in a demanding environment for an extended period would help form the bonds of loyalty that enable successful systems. It would also orient people away from the frequent dead-ends found in rightwing politics.

Although it is good in many respects that the public taboos around religious faith are disappearing today, the injection of religious language into mass politics has allowed for many charlatans and/or morons to insert themselves into discourse and engage in some of the worst behavior imaginable.

It seems like everyone who attacked Trump and advocated for defeat in the last election cloaked their attacks in dubious moral language. To outside observers, when you dismiss or respond to these people, it can often incorrectly seem as though you are attacking their religion. This false perception is always cynically exploited. I’ve found that moving political discourse away from purely secular matters derails discussions far more often than it enlightens them. Advocacy for things like a Kamala victory would be even more immediately and obviously harmful without phony moralism.

A rejection of phony moralism is important. The goal in politics is to win and make the world a better place. The carnage isn’t going to stop when people come up with the right arguments, but rather when they master working within the world as it exists today in order to achieve their goals. This kind of fluency, the ability to accomplish the impossible while leaving the system intact, is extremely difficult to cultivate but absolutely critical to resolving our current predicament. It is savvy and ruthless figures like Nixon fixer G. Gordon Liddy or Trump mentor Roy Cohn whom modern conservatives should be taking their cues from rather than an endless stream of interchangeable talking heads seated in gamerchairs.

The Inner Party should instead be oriented around the most important (and popular) pillars of Trump’s platform: Immigration, crime, and the end of foreign wars. It seems as though professional advocacy around these issues is still relatively primitive, uncoordinated, and underfunded compared to more prominent mainstays of “Conservatism Inc.” This can change and must change, and members of the new Trump Inner Party are the perfect people staff these organizations.

Japan’s highly-successful modern nationalist movement was spearheaded by a semi-secret society known as the Nippon Kaigi, created in 1997. This group didn’t embark on a terrorist campaign or guerilla movement, but rather engaged in smart politics while creating a constellation of advocacy groups, charities, and friendly outposts. These are all things that are achievable without breaking the law or killing anyone or going off into fantasy land. We need to start doing them if we want to make it through the enormous struggles ahead.

I doubt I’m the first person to have this thought. I ended up cutting a bunch of my proposals for instilling a sense of tradition and permanence into this group’s members (rituals, ceremonial uniforms, a Trump Boy Scout-successor youth organization, a golden 40-page book of Trump Hadiths that must be memorized by all, etc.) because they would be mocked as too LARPy. Rest assured, I still think all these are very brilliant and good ideas but will keep it to myself. Perhaps such an organization already exists and I’m simply not invited (I get it), but there really needs to be a formalized core of elite loyalists to carry the Trump movement into the future. You must construct a little world that can continue humming along no matter what happens in the real one.

2. Total Mobilization

As much as leftwing movements are driven by the whims of a small group of professional activists, these movements have also always relied on a significant advantage in number of active supporters during any social shakeup.

The word “active” is important here. Most people can be counted on to do nothing. Doing nothing is usually a pretty safe bet during political turmoil, or at least it’s easy to do. There are millions of reasons to do nothing while usually working up the will to do something, much less something difficult and dangerous, requires years of motivation or heavy incentives.

Leftwingers have a much easier time activating large numbers of people because they have enjoyed nearly uncontested control of mass media and the education system for decades. People are taught to care about liberal causes and receive social and financial benefits for doing so. Indeed, leftists have developed an extremely large class of professionals both in and outside of government whose sole job is leftist activism. They’re going to show up because their livelihood and self-worth depends on it, and they are experienced at getting others to show up as well.

Complementing this professional organizer class is the total confusion of the public. People want to be part of *something*, and leftists can always offer a socially approved *something* to be a part of. Leftist politics are a way to make friends and feel as though you are making a difference in a world that often seems totally beyond your control. This can draw many otherwise apolitical people into political conflicts.

Finally, there is the massive number of violent criminals and mentally ill-types who have managed to find their way into every popular leftist movement in history. For a formal academic treatment of this phenomenon, I strongly recommend Anna Giefman’s book Thou Shalt Kill, which studies participants of the Russian Revolution of 1905 (many of whom will seem familiar today). To summarize: The reason that leftists commit far more political violence is that leftist groups inevitably attract people who have pathological antisocial tendencies, which can be laundered as passionate political views. People willing to break some taboos are often willing to break others, including those against violence. The barriers that normal people have do not exist for them. The feeling of being right can be used by leftists to justify any kind of behavior against those who are “wrong.”

The leftwing activist army that shut down the country and inflicted billions in damages, thousands of injuries, and dozens of deaths during the 2020 George Floyd Riots is still dangerous and still intact. Conservatives will never be able to match it in numbers. However, it is possible to meet this threat with organization, discipline, and training.

Every Red state must dramatically expand its police manpower. Leftist street violence depends on one simple fact: It is impossible for outnumbered police to control very large crowds without using lethal force. Lethal force should be avoided at nearly all costs (more on this later), which means the numbers disparity must be diminished.

An elegant solution would be the creation of state emergency forces whose members could be deputized as auxiliary state police when needed. Even if these men were only used to block escape from or access to certain areas, freeing up full-time police to engage in more dangerous activities, such forces would have an enormous positive impact during rioting. I’m sure thousands of new trained and organized personnel would make a big difference with natural disaster relief as well.

The commitment could be similar to the National Guard: Training once a month, with mandatory mobilization in times of crisis. Members of these new non-federalizable state forces, outside of a small full-time staff to handle command, transportation, and logistics, could be “paid” for their service with tax benefits/waivers and compensated for any time spent away from their jobs. I am certain that every state has tens of thousands of veterans and other reliable well-meaning people who would be happy to directly stand against leftist rioting if they were given a clear and legal path to do so.

The events of the Boston Police Strike of 1919 illustrate the necessity of numbers, training, and organization (especially with the legal authority and will to use force) when faced with widespread civil unrest. These problems only get worse. Every state should begin building a large body of trained, disciplined, and pre-vetted men (read: more than 30,000 auxiliaries per state, even in small states) immediately.

Prevention is I think the most important aspect of all of this. Leftist pressure campaigns work by making normal life impossible by illegal means until society is forced to either kill them (this doesn’t happen in civilized countries) or surrender. In essence, they try to overwhelm systems until they collapse. The only way to short-circuit this process is to take away the ability of leftists to collapse society. State governments must be prepared to detain, prosecute, convict, and jail with long sentences extremely large numbers of criminals in relatively short periods of time.

This will require an overhaul of state laws and courts. Another challenge of leftist rioting is that controlling it involves arresting and prosecuting so many people that it becomes effectively impossible to punish even a small fraction of participants under the normal criminal system. Usually rioting occurs in areas where local authorities are simply unwilling to prosecute liberal rioters to begin with or local juries are unwilling to convict, even in cases where the accused is unambiguously guilty.

To counter this, state legislatures must pass extremely clear riot laws that pose simple yes/no questions to jurors, taking into account the increasingly sophisticated tactics employed by professional leftist rioters on the ground. Merely being part of a street blockade should carry a lengthy sentence. Planning an armed one should get you a terrorism conviction. Leftists are very experienced at creating ambiguity where none exists and providing fake evidence and witnesses to help their militants escape justice. They have professional legal teams that exist solely to ensure their members are not punished, often acting as parts of the conspiracy themselves. Normal criminal codes were not written with this behavior in mind, which means new laws must be drafted.

Furthermore, states must move riot trials to areas not affected by support for criminality. Most riots take place in areas already controlled by liberal elected officials and populated by large numbers of liberals. Any trial should happen far away, in more stable parts of a state. If someone is guilty, they need to go to jail even if they live in a locality that broadly supports their behavior. Political violence cannot be allowed to become a part of everyday life anywhere or it will grow and fester into something uncontrollable.

To process these riot cases quickly, special courts, supervised directly by a state’s Supreme Court, should be created solely to handle cases involving civil unrest. Additional prosecutors should be hired solely to handle these cases. Motions and appeals should be decided in a matter of days, not years. This is not incompatible with due process or fair trials, it simply ensures that the normal criminal justice system can’t be overwhelmed by organized political violence. If someone is on video participating in an armed street blockade, it should be just a monthlong process to have them locked up for a decade. Our society must be willing to make clear that: “You will never extract concessions in this way.”

I’m sure this will be controversial, but I think openly carrying firearms should simply be banned during demonstrations. Too many American cities looked like 3rd world countries during the George Floyd Riots. The presence of leftist (and occasionally moronic rightwing) gunmen was used to constantly menace police, slowing and even preventing the response to organized rioting. If someone is breaking the law, riot police should be able to arrest him without concern that they might be killed if the gunman looming nearby thinks for a split-second that he could get away with it.

The only people carrying around rifles during a riot should be police. I’m sure states can create legal carveouts for people defending their homes or businesses (like the group that Kyle Rittenhouse was a part of in Kenosha), but this is America, not Beirut. Groups of unknown armed militants wandering the streets during civil unrest should not be tolerated. I think it harms people mentally to see the places they live or travel through every day transformed into warzones. Carrying a gun as part of a riot should get you arrested, brandishing one against police should get you killed.

I genuinely dislike violence. I think it’s important that controlling riots be kept as non-lethal as possible because that absence keeps the stakes low even when “casualties” are very high. Deaths have a very different effect on the public mind than arrests or injuries. As I said before, seeing widespread violence harms people mentally. This is a process that accelerates over time. The carnage opens a Pandora’s Box in their heads and the unacceptable soon becomes accepted. That said, it’s important that police use far more force against rioters resisting arrest. It is essential that when people engage in rioting, they suffer immediate and severe consequences for it.

It seems like in every video of a riot I see today, police will try to make an arrest and then a mob of rioters will try to drag the arrestee away. Unless the police already have overwhelming numbers, oftentimes someone who was just caught in the act of committing a crime will be able to escape.

Police should be authorized to use greater force, including lethal force, to prevent criminals from escaping. Shooting to kill in these situations should be explicitly allowed in state criminal codes, and the identities of police officers should be protected to prevent reprisal. Officers should be fired for letting these matters be resolved in a tug-of-war. The mob, and professional activists leading it, should never be the ones to decide who gets arrested on any given day. Someone willing to use force against a police officer to achieve their political objectives would certainly be willing to do the same against a normal person. You can’t have those people running around, especially when they have become accustomed to getting away with political violence. It is behavior that only escalates into something terrible.

Furthermore, there should be explicit criminal laws written to target the passive participants in leftwing rioting. Most rioters just stand around doing nothing. It is only a very small group that is actually willing to burn things or attack police. A larger minority, however, are those willing to act as human shields during these riots. Again, I’m sure everyone has seen videos of a wall of “protestors” confronting police, with one or two members emerging from the wall to throw things or engage in direct violence. Usually the wall is full of women or old people, those who, if police used force against them, might arouse sympathy from a television audience.

It is important for state legal codes to recognize that these people are facilitating the violence just as much as if they were throwing the bricks or punches themselves. Police should be authorized (and even required) to arrest these people as well. Once a protest becomes a riot, anyone obstructing police needs to go to jail. Although the optics of this might seem bad at first, securing convictions for even a small number of these people (who are usually not hardened criminals), accompanied by life-disrupting jailtime would cause the behavior, and the violence it enables, to disappear entirely.

The big lesson of the Russian Revolution of 1905 is that revolutions only end when the revolutionaries are all dead or in jail. It’s just a relatively small number of people who are actually willing to go out and commit antisocial political violence. Once those people are gone everyone else can live their lives in peace. Every single Red state must have a streamlined process for throwing these people in jail in very large numbers, removing them from society for lengthy periods. You must take them off the board.

It’s only through planning and organization that states will be able to achieve this. The Floyd Riots showed that nearly every major city has thousands of potential leftist militants. You know they’re there. The overwhelming majority who participated in the Floyd terror were not punished and those who were received slaps on the wrist. They’re all just waiting to be activated again, and they will be eventually. You’re not going to be able to recruit, train, and equip tens of thousands of auxiliary policemen after the crisis has already begun. You’re not going to be able to build a new low-security jail to handle overflow when there are hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. You’re not going to be able to set up a functional riot court system that can withstand Constitutional challenges when the nation is embroiled in political turmoil.

All of these things will need to happen well in advance, but the good news is that they all can under our current system, and all of this can happen with very limited upfront investment by state governments.

3. Massive Damage

The last few years have shown that the people killing our country cannot be reasoned or bargained with, there are no norms you can appeal to, they just have to be stopped. They must no longer be in a position to do damage. As such, victory is going to be measured in real-world removals: Terminations, deportations, and imprisonments.

The goal in these first few months should be to disorient and disrupt liberal networks as much as possible, to strain their resources and their attention until those break and they are unable to respond, or become so desensitized that they no longer feel the need to respond. Hit them everywhere, at once. Force them to move (often literally).

First, the traitors. Trump must deal with the internal threat presented by the many conservatives who opposed him until the very end. There can be no quarter for those people, they simply have to leave politics after putting everyone at risk. Organizations unwilling to dump these people should be considered complicit. Anyone still willing to associate with them should be cut out as well. Betrayal must have consequences.

This need is doubled for politicians like those in Nebraska, who refused to reform their electoral college system in order to give Trump a better chance of winning. It was only a few GOP legislators holding the process up. That kind of failure of judgment at a critical moment cannot be tolerated. Everyone involved needs to go. These people need to face primaries, with no golden parachute for them after defeat.

After this, conservatives must take advantage of what institutional high ground they have while they have it. Trump has proposed making Elon Musk the head of a Department of Government Efficiency with the mandate to reduce waste of all kinds. My hope is that Musk will do something to the federal government akin to what he did with Twitter: Trim the fat until the organization operates more or less the same, albeit with 90% of the employees gone.

Federal bureaucrats have proved to be a persistent obstacle to the implementation of Trump’s lawful policies. Removing people who are unable or unwilling to perform their duties should be priority number one. It is likely that entire departments can be shuttered and hundreds of billions of dollars can be saved. Tens of thousands of federal employees can be fired without affecting the lives of normal citizens.

I am skeptical that the courts will be an adequate avenue to deal with the corruption problem beyond a few targeted prosecutions. Juries are unreliable. Judges are compromised. The best path forward is removing as many of these people from their positions of responsibility as possible and locking the door behind them.

Turning off the money spigot will go a long way towards reducing bad behavior. Not only could unreliable federal and state employees be fired, seriously disrupting their lives, but the end of dubious federal grants would force many liberal organizations to shave staff and reduce services, if not shut down entirely. Millions of liberals need to lose their government-supported activism jobs and move into the real economy.

Particularly alarming is the clear decrease in professionalism within the military. Dramatically reducing the size of non-combat sections of the military, including mass terminations of politicized officers, should happen fast. It’s likely that removing these people would increase the American military’s strength even as its size shrinks. A compact and disciplined force will be far more valuable in times of crisis than a large unruly one. It will always be easier to scale up something small and good in an emergency than “reform” something large and bad when everything is coming apart.

There is one high-level prosecution that I would like to see: That of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. During the tumultuous events that followed the January 6 Riot, Milley made the inexplicable decision to contact his counterpart in the Chinese military and tell him that the US was not about to launch a nuclear strike. This bizarre message was intended to convey that President Trump was no longer in command of the military. In essence, Milley shared extremely damaging information (internal disputes had caused the normal chain-of-command to break down) with a rival foreign power during a time of huge political turmoil.

This was a clear breach of America’s vital tradition of civilian control of the Armed Forces. Such a breach cannot be tolerated, especially from someone at a high level. By sending such a strange message (there was zero risk of Trump starting a war at the time), particularly one invoking nuclear weapons, Milley put American security at grave risk and could have triggered a sequence of events that threatened our allies or even destroyed the world. I can only guess that Milley thought that, by signaling to China that Trump did not have the support of the military, it might benefit Milley’s preferred political faction somehow. Whatever his reasons, his actions constitute treason and he deserves the highest penalty.

Coupled with this removal of bad actors from government and government support must come mass deportations. J.D. Vance has stated the (very reasonable) initial goal of 1 million deportations in the next year, with criminals and gang members targeted first. After dangerous criminals, illegals granted Temporary Protected Status or who participated in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals should be deported swiftly. The fact that these people have spent so much time here and “legalized” their status in some way, yet were still deported, will send a message: “No matter how long you’ve been here, you’re still going home.” Illegal immigrants must learn not to trust the government in order to discourage future arrivals.

Aggressive deportation measures and the elimination of government subsidies for private organizations that fund and facilitate illegal immigration can be coupled with new laws criminalizing employing or providing services to illegals. This combined front will cause a very large number of illegal immigrants to voluntarily self deport.

Although the number of direct deportations will likely just be a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of illegal immigrants in the country, I think skeptics underestimate the impact that 1+ million high visibility deportations in a relatively short amount of time would have on all illegal immigrants. This impact would be far more pronounced if the illegals were deported in good order, which would demonstrate that the process is repeatable.

Finally, Trump should launch a massive War on Crime, redeploying federal law enforcement to combat street criminals and gangs. By imprisoning tens or, preferably, hundreds of thousands of “low level” criminals, Trump can not only dramatically (and visibly) improve quality of life for normal people, but also greatly diminish the pool of violent individuals who might pose a systemic risk during future periods of unrest. This roundup should be conducted like a military campaign, with thousands of federal agents descending on high-crime cities one at a time to clear them of criminals, illegals, and anyone who might interfere with normal life.

This is I think the most important aspect of any future moves: The perception that the Trump-led government is always in total control. Overwhelming professional force should be used for everything, not to punish people, but to ensure that no resistance occurs. Preventing a fight and any widespread public disruption is vital. This requires enormous discipline and pre-planning, but, again, it’s possible.

By hitting liberal activists everywhere at once, Trump will be able to delay or blunt the counterattack that will surely follow as people forget the horrible 4 years we have experienced under Biden. This retaliation campaign will restore certainty to American life: If you fail to obey Trump’s orders, you will be fired. If you break the law, you will be arrested. If you illegally immigrate into our country, you will be deported. These should be facts of life as certain as gravity.

I think the last few years have warped perceptions of what living in America should be like quite a bit. The challenge of Trump in his first term (more specifically, in the first year and a half before the midterms) is convincing the average person that we don’t have to live this way, that decline was always a deliberate choice. Hopefully people can be helped to make the right choices after Trump has left office.

I’m hoping this will be my last effortpost. I really don’t like contemporary politics. I don’t think I will be a part of any of the things I’m describing. I don’t think anything good is going to happen to me. I just want things to get better here.

It was depressing to write this. I hope I have done a good job conveying to you that, for the American Right, this is the eye of the storm. We could go into a new Golden Age and reach higher than anyone else has done before (Americans are good at that), or we could collapse into despair and passivity in just a few years. It really is up to us. We get to choose whether we win or die. That’s the only choice.

I am deeply moved by Trump, particularly his journey over the last few months following the first assassination attempt. I don’t talk about religion often and have contempt for those who do but I feel genuinely spiritually affected by all this. There’s something very evil going on in our world right now, and hopefully after today it’s coming to an end.

Trump will preside over America’s 250th anniversary celebration. This is a significant milestone for our country because of the (false) pop history maxim that states most empires only last for 250 years. Even though the proverb is fake, many want it to be real. They want it to all go away. Everyone is so unhappy. Everyone is so stupid and angry and ungrateful and insane. It has to stop. It will stop. We will stop it.

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And yet, the grim tides are still here. Things are better than I could have hoped and worse than I could have possibly imagined. In this essay I will try to evaluate the failures and triumphs of our Trump administration, and the conservative movement more generally, after being handed what is perhaps the largest mandate in American political history, as well as offer suggestions on where to go next.

Before we get into the slog (I highly recommend listening to this essay using Substack’s text-to-speech program), you might want to check out my previous essays on politics. My views have been mostly consistent over the last 12 months, and, although certainly there have been many developments that I could have never anticipated, my predictions for the future remain pretty much the same.

Project 2035: Building a Trump Movement to Last - Election Night 2024
Navigating the era of High Trumpism - February 2025
Vibelash: Reflecting on the present disintegration of the rightwing public mind - April 2025
Wake in Fright: Evaluating President Trump’s remarkable first 6 months - July 2025

I hate writing these things. They’re all way too long and often repetitive. It usually takes me a month to put these together, so new developments often force me to rewrite or restructure things and really mess up the flow. That said, I do think I have a pretty good track record as far as these things go. I predicted a bunch of people would go crazy and they did. I also think I’ve correctly diagnosed what’s causing this phenomenon as well, though sadly it’s only gotten much worse. However, I still don’t think it matters that much, and that we’re going to win anyway.

I’ll start with the big failures of Trump 2, of which there are many.

My first and primary complaint is a lack of deportations. In my last essay, I pointed out that before the election JD Vance had set a target of 1 million deportations in the first year, and that failing to hit that target would constitute a massive failure for the Trump admin.

According to the latest data I’ve seen, actual deportation numbers are around 650,000. This is a massive failure. I can put that failure in context with the many major successes that the Trump administration has had on immigration (namely, the 2.2 million estimated self-deportations and first net decline in foreign-born population in more than 50 years), but it’s still a failure that the Trump administration must address.

There can be no backing down on the policy of mass deportation. No compromise solution is going to be acceptable. The only way to save our country is by moving tens of millions of people who shouldn’t be here, out. This is something that can and must accelerate. There is no substitute for results on this issue.

Another major problem emerging from the Trump administration is the normalization or proliferation of great (and federally regulated) public harms like gambling, drugs, and even pornography. The Trump administration has backed down from the Biden administration’s legal challenges to various “prediction market” apps, which have fully embraced sports betting, rescheduled marijuana in federal law (opening up tens of billions of dollars for the businesses that push these drugs), and even ordered banks to stop discriminating against “adult entertainment” businesses like OnlyFans.

I wrote a long piece about the problems caused by the normalization of tattoos: Chronic health problems, close association with all manner of antisocial behavior, a general societal laxing that has millions of little negative effects on Americans’ quality of life. The harm is all optional. This stuff used to be taboo and is well within the government’s regulatory powers. We do not need more tattoos. We do not need more gambling, we do not need more drugs, we do not need more pornography. My objections are first and foremost practical: These things harm the public when they become mainstream and widespread. If you have a shithole public, you will eventually have a shithole society. It is easy to not feel strong connections towards people who don’t seem to care about themselves or places that others don’t seem to care about.

The extent to which this laxity towards vice is a concerted effort on the part of the Trump administration as opposed to isolated decisions made by various actors in the federal government remains unclear (Trump certainly was closely involved in the marijuana rescheduling decision). Whatever the case may be, President Trump is ultimately responsible for these failures. The fact that there was almost certainly a lot of lobbyist money changing hands before, during, and after many of these decisions were made makes the failures that much more severe.

Tangentially related: President Trump’s pardon program has turned into a huge embarrassment, granting pardons or clemency to a rogue’s gallery of white-collar criminals, the guilt of whom doesn’t seem to really be in dispute and who also happen to have close ties to major Trump donors. It is impossible for the public to believe that this kind of behavior represents legitimate authority. It seems way too similar to the arbitrary injustice that defined America under liberal tyranny. There have been many very good pardons granted by Trump, the best of which were the blanket pardons issued to free the January 6 prisoners on day of Trump’s inauguration, but these bad pardons undermine the entire system.

My final big complaint is the perception of instability that often creeps into some of Trump’s more extravagant plays. The initial tariff rollout, for instance, was a huge failure not because tariffs weren’t a good policy, in fact they seem to be working out very well now, but because the rollout seemed poorly planned and messaging was incoherent and sometimes contradictory. You saw the same thing looking at Trump’s Greenland negotiations, where the messaging didn’t seem particularly well thought out and was often needlessly alienating. I strongly support the policy (acquiring new territory would be the crown jewel of Trump’s 2nd term, the one thing everyone would remember), I have total loyalty to my leader Donald Trump, but it often gets a little difficult to believe that there is 5D chess occurring here. Trump knows deals far better than I do, and seems to have already achieved good results, but I think making the sausage in public is not the best approach if you want to create the perception of durability. I recently read an article that describes the objections to this phenomenon in the Trump administration better than I ever could, you should read it now.

The most important thing that the Trump administration can do in the coming year is demonstrate that it is the new normal. Trump has a legitimate claim to power and a public mandate to execute on his agenda. He is in charge. This is not a state of exception. This is not a prelude to dictatorship or civil war. What is happening now, the destruction of progressive consensus in government and broader realignment of the American state, is going to be happening for a long time. The people you are talking to today are probably going to be mostly the same people who you are talking to in 10 years. If you want to succeed at anything, you’d better make peace with it.

How can Trump best achieve this? By delivering on what voters actually care about: Economy, jobs, affordability, crime, immigration. These issues (immigration often fluctuates in the rankings but is one of those existential things where the public’s preferences should just be ignored) are what pretty consistently dominate voters’ priorities, not the stuff you see online constantly. People did not elect Trump to be based, they elected him to solve their problems and improve their quality of life.

I’m not an economist, I can’t provide recommendations on how to fix the economy or raise wages or make housing more affordable beyond arresting more criminals, deporting more illegal immigrants, and forcing legal immigrants to leave however possible. These are probably pretty good suggestions, though, all things considered.

I’ve heard firsthand reports about Trump’s Memphis Safe Taskforce, the Trump admin’s surge deployment of National Guard troops and hundreds of federal agents to Memphis, TN, which was once the US’s most dangerous city. The results of this surge after only a few weeks have been wonderful: A huge drop in violent crime, nearly 5,000 arrests of known criminals and fugitives, with ICE agents on site to process any of the arrestees with pending deportations or, significantly, any unrelated illegal immigrants who law enforcement happens to come across during their investigations.

You can feel this on the ground. There are neighborhoods in Memphis where you used to not be able to go without worrying about getting robbed, maybe killed, or at least having your car window popped out, that you can now live in and travel through like you would in a normal country. There are lots of areas in major cities that should offer desirable housing and a nice place to live but for decades have been rendered uninhabitable, often by problems that were subsidized by the government itself. That’s starting to change in a big way.

I think the best thing Trump admin 2 can do this year is hire as many young people as possible to help with this change. There is a huge jobs crisis right now and the youth is most affected by it. They don’t have the wealth that would allow them to take the hits or the experience and connections that would soften the blow of a career disruption. Young people did nothing to deserve any of this. Young white men in particular have been subjected to decades of illegal discrimination from government and private employers and have been forced out of many critical sectors. The Trump administration can and must do more to step in. Bring more of our people inside the system and set them on a path that they can follow for the rest of their lives.

I came up with the very brilliant plan to reactivate the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Great Depression era program that hired unemployed young people first and found jobs for them later. CCC enrollees built national parks, backwoods roads, things that generally aren’t that economical to build unless you have a huge surplus of manpower. It ended up being FDR’s most popular New Deal program. People associated it with good things in their lives.

Don’t just use the revived CCC’s enrollees for manual labor (though there is an enormous need for more wilderness firefighters and new infrastructure), give them education and training so that they can go on to do much-needed work for the government. To fix our country we are going to need thousands of new bureaucrats, administrators, police officers, prison guards, prosecutors, auditors, and countless other jobs that don’t seem particularly glamorous but make society work. I promise that the pre-selected and pre-trained pool of candidates that would be consolidated in a revived CCC will provide government hiring professionals with all the material they need to fill these positions.

Get unemployed and underemployed young people paid immediately and then provide them with a pipeline into long-term government service. Even if such a flashy program would be too politically expensive to create, the government should still be stepping in to hire as many young people as possible for federal service and make a big show of these efforts: The Trump administration always has your back.

The best way to get young people to feel invested in society’s success or failure is to give them good jobs that they will want to keep and real property that they will want to protect. They need to have a real stake in society’s future, and to feel that they are responsible for something good. You need to give them a world that is worth living in. These are all very reasonable asks, and I think Trump can deliver on them.

There’s one seemingly minor policy change that the Trump administration has made that I think represents an underexamined core appeal of Trump: You no longer have to take your shoes off at the airport.

The shoe thing was always really annoying. It caused huge delays in security lines and seemed to be motivated by an extremely small threat. You just don’t have to do it anymore now. You can get to most airports an hour before your flight and probably be fine. Trump took something that people used to have to worry about and made it disappear. He gave Americans their time and attention back.

Little changes like this are happening all over America. In real life I see bathroom door codes disappearing and toiletries being moved out of locked cases. Bidencore decline is not happening anymore. The National Park Service just announced that it was going to be spending millions to restore and reactivate Washington, D.C.’s historic fountains. We live in a nice country. Water comes out of our fountains. Washington, D.C. is a world class city, the capital of a superpower. If liberal-captured local government is unable to maintain basic security and quality of life for residents and visitors, the wily and determined Trump admin 2 is going to do everything it can to step in. If Trump does a good enough job, he could probably get away with just dissolving local government (totally possible and legal under our system).

Trump admin 2, and whatever elected rightwing government is to follow, is going to have to color outside the lines a lot in coming years. Liberals have destroyed the court system. Judges twist and ignore the law. Juries refuse to convict even in the most outrageous situations. Our problems are decades in the making and will take years to solve. Tens of millions of people have dangerous delusions that they will try to kill you over if (and when) push comes to shove. If Trump and his agents are viewed by the public as anything other than the representatives of legitimate authority, and their goals are seen as anything other than delivering the tangible real-world gains that people actually care about, all attempts to deviate from the current unsatisfactory status quo are going to fall flat on their face. This is the new normal. Say that 1000 times and don’t say anything else.

I was going to spend a few more paragraphs here talking about other things I like about the second Trump administration, but I don’t really feel the need to. There’s a long list of achievements towards the bottom of this essay but that was only included for dramatic effect. Everyone knows about this stuff. I know you know. Illegal crossings lowest since 1970s. Foreign born population declining for the first time since the 1970s. Legal immigration projected to be cut in half in 4 years. Minneapolis under goon squad occupation. Don Lemon arrested by federal agents.

People who say “Trump isn’t doing anything” or who claim that there would have been little difference between Trump and Kamala are simply lying. Sometimes these people are too dumb or self-absorbed to even know they’re lying, it’s just a style of communication that they’ve come to adopt, but I think most of the time they are aware that things are getting much better. It’s kind of impossible not to be.

If you believe, or at least claim, that Trump’s second term is anything other than a massive step forward, you are not worth talking to or arguing with. You are either a liar or a moron. People should laugh at you and exclude you from discussions. No one should tolerate or indulge you. Interacting with you without hostility is always a net negative.

What I really want to spend the rest of this essay talking about is the death of online rightwing discourse and the need to retire the “Influencer Right” (or at least most of it), that eclectic scene of commentators and independent journalists who, in close concert with real-world politicians and activists, changed the world for the better by popularizing once taboo ideas and helping to fuel Donald Trump’s electoral victories with grassroots online enthusiasm. These are the figures who turned politics into culture, to great success.

For most of these people my objections are not personal. I actually think a few influencers have not disgraced themselves and are still essential to our current success (I won’t include their names in this to avoid tying them to the criticism that follows). However, it’s still clear that something has been going terribly wrong with the scene for a while, and the last few months have demonstrated that the entire arrangement as it stands is unsalvageable. People need to start tuning out.

To make the case for this, we first need to go back to early 2025: Around this time last year, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, granted a prominent role in the Trump administration, decided to Roman salute at the end of his speech during Trump’s inauguration.

I don’t think that Elon Musk is a Nazi. He definitely meant it as a joke and probably saw it as a nod to the Roman Empire memes that are sometimes popular in online rightwing circles. In his head, the salute was likely intended to be far more subtle than it appeared on camera. Perhaps he hoped that it would create a viral moment of ambiguity: The libs would be triggered, normies would be bewildered by the outrage over such an innocuous gesture, and the broader online rightwing subculture whose approval Elon Musk obviously craves would wink back. “Based!”

Whatever Musk’s intent may have been, the natural reaction of observers (I received several texts to this effect when it happened) was that Elon Musk had intentionally thrown up a Roman salute at Trump’s inauguration. When I saw the footage, I thought the same thing. I think it’s the only conclusion that a remotely honest person could come to upon seeing what happened. That day, I made a post saying that Elon Musk had terrible judgment, and the response I received only confirmed my reaction, recorded in my election night 2024 essay, to Kyle Rittenhouse announcing that he couldn’t vote for Trump in good conscience: “There is something wrong with people.”

Many insisted that I was participating in cancel culture or denied that the salute had even occurred. Others defended Musk’s behavior, arguing that doing a Roman salute, a centuries old (I read that it was actually first popularized during the French Revolution) gesture that has become inexorably linked with Nazi Germany, at Trump’s inauguration was “shifting the Overton Window” by de-stigmatizing the aesthetics of the 20th century far right or something to that effect. Some even pointed to the “Bellamy salute” that accompanied the Pledge of Allegiance in American schools from 1892 to 1942, a very funny piece of trivia that I’m confident Musk was not thinking about at all when he lifted his palm up towards the invincible sun of victory.

The most revealing pushback I received for criticizing Musk was someone replying (roughly, I forgot to screencap it) that “Americans can salute however they want to.”

This is very true: It’s a free country, man. There is no law (at least that would stand up to Constitutional scrutiny) against Roman saluting. The stigma around Roman saluting in America has been extremely harmful for decades. Countless college students and high schoolers have had their lives upended by a moral panic over what amounts to edgy jokes. It was horrible. Attitudes are changing, the hysteria that existed around these topics is subsiding, and that’s definitely for the best. It’s obvious that the American Right is increasingly comfortable with questions over whether or not you can do something. However, it has become increasingly clumsy in dealing with questions over whether or not you should do something.

Very few people responding to me seemed to be grappling with the obvious: It is stupid to do something that’s bound to be controversial at someone else’s solemn event. It is selfish and disruptive and disrespectful. When that someone else is the President of the United States and that solemn event is accepting the sacred mantle of leadership over our country after four years of turmoil and decline, occurring before an audience of tens of millions, the move seems all the more stupid.

Even using the most charitable interpretation of Musk’s actions, that he merely accidentally did something that looked exactly like intentionally throwing up a Roman salute at Trump’s inauguration, Musk still should have tried to guard against creating this kind of appearance however he could and, having somehow failed to do this, really let everyone down.

Whatever happened, Elon Musk served up a shit sandwich for his political coalition partners. The fact that there was a national dialogue over whether or not Musk had Roman saluted, intentionally or otherwise, the roots of the Roman salute, and the gesture’s role in our society today in response to Trump’s inauguration, which has nothing to do with Roman saluting, represented a massive embarrassment and failure in of itself.

Rightwing influencers responded to this embarrassment and failure the only way they knew how: By lying. The consensus became that it didn’t happen but that it was great. Musk became emotional in his denials and threatened lawsuits against journalists who pointed out the obvious. Several prominent conservative figures gave very unsubtle Roman salutes of their own during speeches in the following days to, I guess, show how easy it was to “accidentally” create this kind of gesture even though they were obviously doing it intentionally.

If you were on the outside looking in at this behavior, I don’t think you would have been offended by the Roman salute, I think you would have thought that all these people were retarded. They looked stupid and dishonest, not like people who should be “in charge.”

Musk decided to Roman salute at the Inauguration for the same reason he later attacked Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent in the West Wing: He is unstable, likely on drugs, and has slotted himself into the broader culture of meme-brained delusion that has overtaken online rightwing spaces.

All the talk of principles and history and cultural change after the salute was pure shuck and jive: The objections to Musk’s behavior were and are obvious. You would make the same objections to someone Roman saluting at your niece’s birthday party or a business meeting: Sure, you can, but is it a good idea?

I think it would be pretty understandable to not trust someone who behaved in this way. You would not throw them in jail and might not even mention it to them, but you probably wouldn’t invite them to the next thing or the thing after that. If they were to behave in obnoxious or counterproductive ways forever, it might interfere with the actual important parts of your events or push away anyone who doesn’t want to deal with a clown show. Tolerating this sort of thing could even end up attracting more clowns whose bad behavior you’ll also end up having to manage.

Do I think the Roman salute was a big deal? Despite the many minutes of my life I have expended writing about the topic, no. I have Roman saluted before, just like Musk. I assume tens of millions of people in America have done the same. I am not squeamish or offended or outraged. I strongly suspect that most of you reading this had forgotten that the controversy had even occurred. What I do think was a big deal, though, was the inability of rightwing circles to confront reality and say “this was not very helpful” or “you should not act like this” that the incident revealed.

Musk did not calm down or learn anything after everyone swept up for him on Inauguration Day. Instead, his behavior only escalated and spiraled until he was getting into fistfights in the White House (and losing), implying Trump was a pedophile, and threatening to create a 3rd party to split the vote before the midterms, all before backing down and giving Trump tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

If a bunch of people who don’t have tens of millions of dollars worth of apologies to throw around acted like this constantly, it would be impossible to get anything done. Americans face many problems that are far more important than dealing with Elon Musk’s faggot psychodrama. It’s still not clear exactly how much damage Musk did and whether or not it has been repaired. Certainly, behavior like Musk’s has only become more commonplace since his big public outbursts.

Rightwingers have developed far too high a tolerance for stupid and counterproductive behavior. The influencer class has popularized several thought-terminating clichés that not only discourage people from pointing it out, but also create a false moral obligation to defend it. The result has been a really horrible climate, where the worst actors are indulged and the real-world gains that Americans actually want to see are treated as an afterthought compared to circular (and increasingly dishonest) online arguments.

In attempting to craft a new rightwing discourse around everyone playing dumb, the Influencer Right has only succeeded in creating a new rightwing discourse around everyone being dumb. People can’t keep acting like this if we want to succeed.

One of the most shameful things I witnessed in recent months (which is saying a lot) was Tucker Carlson’s defense of Candace Owens on the Theo Von show. At the time of Carlson’s appearance on Von’s show, Owens was waging a campaign of innuendo and harassment against Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, and the senior staff of TPUSA, who were Charlie Kirk’s close friends.

Under the guise of “investigating” Kirk’s murder, Owens was throwing out an unending torrent of unsupported or easily disprovable (and sometimes contradictory) accusations, insinuating and then outright stating that Kirk had actually been murdered with the help, or at least foreknowledge, of those closest to him.

The impact of this genuinely demented behavior, beyond the personal strain I’m sure it put on the people who she was targeting at what must have been the worst and most confusing time of their lives, was totally negative: I saw a poll that found only a minority of Americans today believe that Charlie Kirk was murdered by a leftist, even though the radical leftist assassin was captured alive, turned in by his own parents, and confessed. More people say they believe that Kirk was murdered by a Republican than by a Democrat (I don’t think they actually believe this, I just think the apparent lack of consensus on the Right caused by endless conspiracy theorizing makes liberals and moderates feel they have license to be tactically dishonest). Owens was contributing to noise that gave cover to horrible people and might even end up interfering with the killer’s trial and conviction. The whole thing is sick.

When Carlson was asked about Owens’s accusations by Von, Carlson admitted that she wasn’t always right but defended her intent as an honest truthseeker. Carlson then said that one of Owens’s more extravagant claims, that Egyptian aircraft had been following Erika Kirk for years for reasons unknown, was “factually true.” Carlson, of course, couldn’t and wouldn’t speculate about what this piece of information meant. However, he implied, all right-thinking people had to admit there was something there to what Owens was saying.

There was nothing there. The spreadsheet of Egyptian plane flight times that Owens used to make her claim was soon revealed to be riddled with errors. More than 60% of entries involved flights that didn’t even happen on the same continent where Owens had claimed they had. There also doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to establish where Erika Kirk was at the time of these flights, either. This claim could not stand up to even basic scrutiny, and yet it was blasted out to millions of people in an earnest tone by a beloved figure in order to defend someone engaged in indefensible behavior.

To be clear, my issue isn’t that Carlson was wrong. People are wrong all the time. I certainly am. The issue was that Candace Owens was doing something truly terrible, she still is (last I checked she was claiming that Kirk was a time traveler, I go back and forth on whether or not she’s intentionally acting crazy to try to duck the massive defamation suit that’s coming her way), and Tucker Carlson’s instinct was to defend her and insist that her lies were true. It was really crazy to cosign this stuff as Charlie Kirk’s widow was being targeted, and, what’s more, to send the message to a massive audience that this is acceptable behavior. If a bunch of people behaved like this, it would be impossible to get anything done.

If you act this way, you are no longer merely commenting on the bad behavior, you are participating in it. Any political movement or even social scene where this sort of thing is tolerated and excused, much less is as commonplace as it has become today in rightwing circles, is not going to last for very long.

Megyn Kelly, once a respected journalist, similarly disgraced herself during this ordeal. She denied that Owens had ever claimed that Erika Kirk was involved in her own husband’s assassination, even though the implications of what Owens was saying were obvious, and defended Owens’s character against attacks from Ben Shapiro who, whatever you may think about his other views, was delivering completely accurate criticism of Owens and her enablers at the time.

Weeks later, Kelly patted herself on the back because her shameful conduct allowed her to broker a détente meeting between Owens and Erika Kirk, as though she were acting like Henry Kissinger rather than running cover for a schizophrenic Youtuber who lies constantly and makes millions of dollars doing so. Unsurprisingly, Owens resumed her attacks on Erika Kirk and TPUSA soon after the meeting.

I was struck by Megyn Kelly’s response to the criticism she received. “Fuck you,” she said with incredible poise and indignation (she really is beautiful). It was a perfect encapsulation of rightwing discourse today: Everyone is very self-righteous, but also a moron and a liar. If you mention that their behavior is distasteful or, God forbid, not very helpful, then they will conflate this with censorship or cancellation or the other mechanisms of control that obviously are not as powerful as they once were.

Weeks after all this unfolded, Carlson and Kelly chuckled about how Owens really drives certain people crazy and mischaracterized her smear and harassment campaign as just “asking questions” about Israel’s potential involvement in Kirk’s murder (I have still not seen literally any actual evidence to suggest that Israel was involved in the murder). Their forced laughter was a perfect final punctuation mark to one of the most shameful sagas in recent memory: No one actually gives a shit. It’s not going to stop. Everyone’s going to pretend like this is normal.

If someone is behaving badly in rightwing spaces, I now assume that the influencer class is not only going to fail to offer the obvious objections to the bad behavior, but also that they will go out of their way to ignore it, help them, and even actively defend them from criticism. They really have to hand it to them, and in the interest of fairness will expound about how talented they are and how much they love them while the worst stuff continues unchecked and often even unacknowledged. They’ll cite some kind of principled stand they’re taking and congratulate themselves on their many virtues when really everything can be reduced to cynical rhetorical games, delusions, or a general lack of standards. The present environment offers a neat parallel to the time in recent memory when liberals tried to restructure all society in order to accommodate homeless black guys who shove people in front of the subway.

The result of mainstreamed apathy towards the fringe behaviors that often accompany fringe politics has not been an expansion of rightwing discourse, people have been talking in circles about all manner of controversial topics for more than a decade now, but rather the death of it. It is impossible for the trust and respect and discipline and unity of purpose necessary for any successful collaborative effort or even productive dialogue to develop under these conditions. It’s obvious that these people don’t really care about achieving things in the real world anymore, discourse exists solely in service of more discourse.

It brings me no pleasure to write any of this. I genuinely think it’s sad. Every time this sort of thing happens, and it happens a lot now, it really takes the wind out of my sails. I had high hopes for Carlson, and Kelly, and many other people who have ultimately succumbed and come to contribute to the current horrible climate in different ways. I defended them longer than I should have, though I like to think that at any point in this process they could have simply stopped and gone in a better direction. They still might, I’ve made too many mistakes to condemn anyone forever, and I sincerely hope every day that that becomes the case.

At this point any good ideas, and there are quite a few of them still floated by these characters, that manage to slip in are harmed by association with objectional behavior and a total lack of discernment and discretion. If the displacement of white people in their own countries is treated as a topic in the same league as chemtrails, if some guy who began a grotesque discussion about whether or not Charlie Kirk has been buried is consulted for his expertise on the Las Vegas massacre, then the public is going to begin to think of important stuff as just more of the woo-woo shit that drives their annoying coworkers or distant relatives crazy.

Even for those who haven’t been overcome by conspiritardism (or merely tactically embraced it as it hits its fever pitch), there’s obviously something that has just gone haywire among rightwing influencers. I had been pretty dismissive of discourse for a long time, but the January 3 raid on Venezuela seemed to start a chain reaction that revealed that the whole influencer scene doesn’t serve much of a purpose anymore.

First the peanut gallery began DEMANDING that Trump not accept any Venezuelan refugees, as if Trump hadn’t already set the 2026 refugee limit at 7,500, with virtually all of the slots in the refugee program already reserved for white South Africans. Trump has also already effectively ended illegal border crossings, so there was not much chance of Venezuelans getting in any other way. All that seems beside the point, however, because, if anything, the kidnapping of unpopular dictator Maduro seems far more likely to reduce the outflow of Venezuelans from Venezuela than to increase it. Venezuelans in the US are poised to return to their home country in large numbers. What the fuck were these people talking about?

After the Influencer Right’s bold ultimatums over imaginary Venezuelan refugees went nowhere, they soon settled on a new line: Pointing out the incongruity that the American President could use the military to arrest a foreign country’s leader but couldn’t do that to a rogue federal judge or Democrat politician. No shit! The President has more unambiguous powers in dealing with foreign policy than he does with domestic policy. This is Civics 101.

I don’t know what these people really hoped to achieve with this line of criticism beyond generating vague hostility to Trump for not overthrowing the system of government that he is at the head of. In fact, I think that’s all most of these influencers hope to achieve now: Generating vague hostility towards the Trump administration, our only hope of real-world political success.

Would a military coup even work? I don’t think so. Trump has saved America twice and yet won the most recent Presidential election by only a few million votes and retains very narrow legislative majorities. State representatives in deep Red states cannot be persuaded (or coerced) into not handing Democrats free Congressional seats. The institutional or population power that might support such dramatic moves does not exist, however strong the theoretical case for them might be (the theoretical case these people make usually isn’t very strong). We’re also winning, as frustratingly slow as that process sometimes seems, so I’m not sure why dramatic moves would even be necessary. What are people talking about when they pretend like there is any public appetite to destroy democracy and our system of government? I suspect they are just talking about themselves and their personal brands and their memes.

This kind of nonsensical hostility toward Trump was being generated in response to him doing what is probably the coolest thing ever: Kidnapping the leader of a large hostile foreign country using overwhelming military force without a single American death. Even if you have some kind of objection to that, you should at least understand that normies are going to love it. If people don’t approve politically for whatever reason they’re still going to think it’s cool. I genuinely struggle to come up with a reason why an American shouldn’t celebrate this kind of limited engagement if it works, which it seems to have for now. The perception of American prestige and power lost during the years of decline under the Biden administration returned in an instant.

A lot of influencers claim that Trump lost touch with his base when it’s obviously more the case that whatever the influencer class is talking about is increasingly far removed from the base’s actual concerns. The influencers were previously useful because they made complex developments legible to normal people and oriented their audiences towards real world political victory. Today they obscure far more than clarify and teach their audiences that losing is winning.

Bigger humiliations were in store for the Influencer Right in January 2026. Operation Metro Surge represented the centerpiece of Trump’s revamped immigration efforts. In response to revelations of massive immigrant-led fraud from a citizen journalist, the Trump administration deployed upwards of 3,500 federal agents to Minneapolis. It is the biggest DHS operation in history, and is still ongoing as I’m writing this.

At literally every stage of Operation Metro Surge, large portions of the Influencer Right demonstrated that their instincts are terrible and that they are totally unsuited for the imaginary leadership/advisory role that they have assumed for themselves. Not everyone got everything wrong at all times, but it was obvious that these idiots generally had no idea what they were talking about.

From Day 1, the influencer sphere was near-united in demanding that Trump send the military in to handle the situation, either by invoking the Insurrection Act (last used during the 1992 Rodney King Riots, which saw 2000+ injuries, 62 deaths, and more than a billion dollars of property damage) or by some kind of vague extralegal means that involved fantasies like having the Marines mow down crowds of liberal activists or sending in Delta Force to arrest federal judges.

Although opposition to the Feds was intense, there was no indication that the situation on the ground was a military problem. In fact, sending in the military would probably have only intensified resistance because it would have signaled that federal law enforcement had lost control of the situation. The agents in Minneapolis were doing great work despite the truly massive and well-organized activist groups they faced. I think they’ve made more than 3,500 high-risk arrests in a few weeks. That’s pretty good when local opposition necessitates that even minor encounters involve more than a dozen agents at a time. There was nothing that liberals would have liked more than to shift conversation away from popular policies like mass deportations or squashing fraud and towards existential issues like civil war, our democracy, fascism, etc.

Basically, what the Influencer class did was make an unreasonable demand, totally divorced from the real-world situation, and then used failure to satisfy that demand as a cudgel to attack the Trump administration with. This was in response to the Trump administration doing something good that would have seemed fantastical a few years ago. We could have the biggest DHS operation in history and still influencers would be repeating memes that amount to “The Trump administration isn’t doing anything.”

During the controversial but justified law enforcement shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, large portions of the Influencer sphere further proved their uselessness. Either these influencers waffled at the first sight of blood or, perhaps more insidiously, the various unreliable figures who these rightwing influencers had introduced to their audiences did so in major ways.

For more than a year now, rightwing influencers have been opening the Gates of Toledo, injecting figures who are not even plausibly rightwing, who try to secure real world political victory for liberals, and who in every ambiguous situation will always take the side of the Left, into the highest levels of rightwing discourse. Virtually every phony centrist or podcast retard elevated by rightwing influencers, usually over the Israel issue, began repeating leftist lies as soon as the going actually got tough.

I don’t think any of these figures publicly walked back their condemnations after video inevitably emerged to vindicate the law enforcement officers who fired in self-defense. It’s not clear exactly how much damage this arrangement has caused, but it’s certainly not good that for years people “on side” have been encouraging their audiences to trust these obviously untrustworthy people. Some of the lies are bound to stick eventually.

Fortunately for everyone, the Trump administration stayed the course and ignored the rightwing commentariat. Liberals quickly bit off more than they could chew with a disastrous BLM raid, led by former CNN host Don Lemon, on a local church whose pastor was suspected of working for ICE. It seems very unlikely that liberals would have chosen to escalate in this way if Trump had decided to trigger a standoff between local leftists and the military. The Trump administration immediately promised criminal charges for the raiders, even sending high level officials like Attorney General Pam Bondi and DOJ Civil Rights division head Harmeet Dhillon to directly oversee the case.

In this golden opportunity, possible only because the Trump administration had ignored the advice of rightwing influencers, when the public was united in disgust at the behavior of the Left, the influencer class once again demonstrated that it had no value to add.

Attacks on the Trump administration for failing to file charges began before the local federal courthouse was even open. There was an unending series of ultimatums: The Trump administration MUST do something before some arbitrary time limit in order to prove it was “serious.” It became increasingly obvious that people didn’t know or care about any aspect of what it actually took to file federal criminal charges, much less to win a complicated criminal case involving Constitutional issues. Yet again, the influencers decided to take a positive development that would have seemed impossible a few years ago—Don Lemon facing imminent federal charges for his role in a BLM takeover—and spin it into an opportunity to turn their audiences against the institutions and people that were actually achieving real-world success for them.

After weeks of turmoil, the Trump administration prevailed in Minneapolis: Although the initial stance of state and local officials was to refuse all cooperation with the Feds, basically allowing liberal activists to break the law with impunity as part of their obstruction efforts, gradually Democrat politicians reversed course. Local police began to control crowds out front of the federal building and even make rough arrests. At one decisive moment, state police completely cracked a leftist mob that had formed outside a hotel where ICE agents were staying, while the ICE agents looked on drinking beer from the windows above. The fight had gone out of the enemy.

Liberal officials understood that the situation was a complete disaster for them and backed down. Protests disintegrated into embarrassing noisemaking exercises. State officials even signaled that they would allow federal agents to access their jails to deport illegal immigrant criminals on release, ending one of the most odious parts of “sanctuary city” policy. There was a decisive confrontation and we won.

The rightwing influencer class by in large started doing cartwheels to spin this victory into a failure. Every little ambiguous quote or shift in rhetoric was latched onto and interpreted in the worst light possible. Relatively minor issues like the status of heroic Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who was apparently just reassigned to his normal duties in Los Angeles, became the main topics of discussion. While bigtime rightwing influencers were rushing to declare defeat, leftwing activists on the ground were complaining that federal operations were continuing as normal, even escalating, with far more support from state and local law enforcement than before.

There is a massive fifth column that has formed in rightwing spaces, and the influencers are at the center of it. I hope that everyone realizes that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the influencer class has become committed to engineering defeat. The people who constantly predict victory for Democrats in the upcoming midterms over XYZ failure are simply trying to make that outcome happen.

It’s probably not obvious from a distance, but many of the loudest and most aggressive critics of the administration are likely only lashing out because they’ve already alienated their contacts with any actual authority. Their texts probably aren’t getting returned or receive the dreaded thumbs-up emoji. The bridges are burnt and not getting rebuilt. We’re getting nonstop claims that the administration isn’t serious from people who issue dozens of ignored public ultimatums every week.

Today the Influencer Right has eagerly assumed the role of both arsonist and fireman, bemoaning that rightwingers online are demoralized while simultaneously doing everything in its power to demoralize them: Embellishing failures, minimizing successes, redirecting attention to side issues, setting unrealistic expectations and catastrophizing when they are not met, elevating obvious bad actors, indulging in and spreading despair, excusing the worst behavior, uncritically accepting enemy propaganda and then spreading it as though these influencers were simply another part of the machinery built to destroy our country—which they have in effect become, through no one’s fault but their own.

As it stands, the whole arrangement is worse than useless. The great and only talent of the Influencer Right appears to be taking low propensity voters and turning them into lower propensity voters. There are exceptions to this, of course, but it’s a grim scene. This dynamic cannot be allowed to continue because whenever there is a crisis, these people can only be counted upon to try to make bad situations worse.

Oftentimes the problems that these people are reacting to are very real, but they certainly won’t be the ones to solve them. The issue is no longer what these influencers are saying at any given moment, but that our peculiar rightwing influencer class even exists. Good things happen only in spite of them now.

What’s to be done? Having dealt with difficult characters in fringe spaces for a long time, my advice is to simply cut them off, or at least start being more confrontational when they lie or behave badly. You can’t debate someone out of being crazy or argue someone out of a view that they don’t sincerely hold. Any attempt to mollify these people with concessions will force the admin to adopt positions that are unlikely to succeed or at least guarantee that these people come back with even more unreasonable demands and bad behavior in the future. The only message the Trump administration can send is: “You will never achieve your goals in this way. If you are going to act like this, you are going to have to do it outside the thing we built.”

It’s not going to be easy to decouple from the influencer sphere. The audiences that these influencers command seem massive, at least at first. I don’t think anyone should play the denunciation game, but we are well past the time when these people should start getting real consequences for their stupid and counterproductive behavior. The big figures are not going to stop doing it no matter what happens. Their audiences, however, need to start seeing that this is not an acceptable way to behave, and that these people actually don’t know what they’re talking about. I think that’s a fight the Trump admin can win.

One of the best moments of the Minneapolis operation was when DOJ Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon simply started replying directly to various influencers, asking why they wouldn’t just ask her to explain what was going on before they started lobbing ridiculous criticisms of the handling of the case against the BLM raiders. What were these people even talking about? The stuff they were saying was divorced from reality. They were obviously criticizing just to criticize.

Panic is like a disease. I cannot tell you how many former friends and longtime associates I have watched fall victim to various mass psychogenic illnesses and become malignant or hopelessly insane. I watched this same process occur in 2017 and 2021, and it hasn’t gotten any easier.

Normally it’s bad associations that cause this sort of collapse: These people will see a bad actor who they should know they shouldn’t trust, who lies constantly or has done really terrible stuff, and, instead of just ignoring what they have to say (without regard to whether they agree with it), they will tolerate and indulge them. It might not happen immediately, but eventually they will encounter a lie or obviously self-defeating sentiment pushed by this bad actor, and they won’t be able to tune it out like they should. They lose the ability to filter between good and bad, to discriminate. This little failure will eventually suck them into a universe of bullshit that they never escape from.

When someone says, “If Trump doesn’t do X, then MAGA is dead,” the response needs to be “OK, then go be a Democrat.” When someone decides to go out of their way to defend someone who is pushing to hand our country over to liberals, the response needs to be “Go with your friend, get out of here and don’t come back.” It’s obvious that a lot of these people are trying to commit figurative suicide by cop and force a messy political break. The Trump administration can only continue tolerating constant sabotage and bad faith criticism or send them on their way.

When you get to the point where you to have to try and argue someone out of being retarded or helping the enemy, you’ve already lost. I promise you that these people are going to do whatever bad thing you think they’re going to do with or without your input. You can either tell them to buzz off or ignore them, but don’t pretend like they're still on the team once they cross certain lines that were crossed a long time ago. And, what’s more, stop tolerating the people with less egregious behavior who can’t stop treating these people as though they’re still on the team. They are still going to be throwing these guys lifelines in any worst-case scenario.

The Trump administration should be more confident when dealing with its rightwing critics. It will win any big confrontation with the influencers because ultimately the public isn’t actually that interested in the “based” rhetoric influencers provide, the public is most interested in real world success. Only the Trump administration can deliver that to them. There is no real-world political constituency for the dysfunctional stuff you see online. Zero. 5,000 likes is not a lot. 50,000 likes is not a lot. 500,000 likes might be something, but probably not. The online rightwing subculture has faceplanted its jump into actual culture. Most of this stuff is not real or wafer thin.

People want to win. Conservatives need to win. They don’t want to hear about how they’ve already lost, especially if that’s not even true. I suspect the public is already a little tired of the influencers as the situation in America stabilizes after years of chaos, in the same way the gun industry is collapsing now. The market has fundamentally changed. These guys are not going to regain the prestige or mystique they once held. It’s not always obvious to older people especially, but a large portion of the political streamer audience is only watching these guys as lolcows or engaging with short form video in the most casual and superficial ways. When these influencers stumble onto the correct position, usually for purely cynical or deeply incoherent reasons, it only makes the truth matter less. None of these figures could survive Trump saying, “This guy is kind of a retard now.” It’s time for the admin to start acting like it.

In the conclusion of Richard Luckett’s The White Generals, the best overview of the Russian Civil War that I’ve come across, Luckett’s identifies why the counterrevolutionary White Army failed to defeat the widely unpopular Bolsheviks, despite the Whites’ initially massive military advantage:

[The White Army’s] failure is, to an extent, understandable: The business of revolutionaries is revolution, but the business of counter-revolutionaries is seldom counter-revolution. Revolutionaries are born into their condition. Counter-revolutionaries have it thrust upon them.

It does not follow from this that counter-revolution is doomed, or that the Russian counter-revolution, in particular, was doomed. To accept this is to accept a deterministic view of history for which there can be no warrant in any account of the events. The Whites failed as much as a result of their military mistakes as anything else, and these military mistakes were frequently the product of stupidity and carelessness. The Reds made mistakes also: in exclusively military matters they made far more than the Whites. Their greater degree of political organization permitted them more latitude in this respect; in contrast, the Whites sacrificed political consolidation for the lure of immediate military gains, and then proceeded to throw away the advantages won in the field.

In Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, the best book on the American Civil War, Foote identified a similar lack of political consolidation as contributing to the Confederacy’s defeat and the South’s ensuing devastation:

“Away with the idea of getting independence first, and looking after liberty afterwards,” [Confederate Vice President] 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’ve just got to nuke the wreckers from orbit the moment they show up. Truly eternal type. Get them out of here before they find the right moment to do serious damage with a knife in the back. Everyone needs to be on the same page about how pushing these people out is necessary and good.

The stakes to this stuff are real. It’s possible to lose our country forever, we almost have several times. Anyone who indulges defeat, who is working towards anything other than victory, needs to be ejected as quickly as possible. It’s crazy to me that anyone tolerates the figures who were discouraging people from voting for Trump before the 2024 election. I don’t have much respect for you if you do. If you don’t have the mental barriers up to keep this sentiment and anyone who pushes it away, you are worse than useless. You’re going to crack at some point and it might hurt a lot of people.

There is an alternative to the current influencer sphere: One of the nicest moments for me during the 2024 campaign season was listening to Elon Musk’s Twitter space with Trump. The pair had a very funny and charming conversation. I was walking into a convenience store in some light rain listening to it on my phone and noticed that the Zoomer clerk had his phone on the counter, listening to it as well. This direct and unfiltered conversation made Trump seem “real” in a way that Kamala Harris never could have. He is real in a way that Kamala Harris never was.

There are many other figures in the admin who I’m sure could capitalize on this effect. The public is interested in them and they have interesting things to say. I don’t see people reflect nearly enough on the fact that JD Vance has already become a meme. It’s endearing. The public is laughing with him, not at him. Americans want their country to get better. They want to have normal lives. They want their time and attention back. FDR’s fireside chats charmed a generation of Americans by connecting them directly with their government. There’s little need for a middleman class when you have these dynamic people available.

The Trump administration should hire influencers who have not disgraced themselves and bring them inside in official roles. Help make this stuff legible to the public. Introduce them to the characters who are going to improve their lives. One of the main reasons our influencer class is so harmful is that these people don’t feel any responsibility for our collective success or failure. They already made their money and their place in the attention economy might actually improve if the situation were to start declining again. They are not thinking about putting wins on the board, they are thinking about their redpill journey or getting more eyeballs or winning an internet debate that doesn’t matter and might not even be real. A real job for influencers would create real responsibility, and responsibility changes people for the better.

You should only tolerate people working towards victory. That was another aspect of the Candace Owens-TPUSA debacle that was very frustrating: Aside from the fact that the behavior itself was extremely objectionable, TPUSA is also vital to our political future whereas Owens is a complete net negative. TPUSA does voter registration drives, rapid response, direct activism, organizing and training and all of the tedious real-world stuff that is way more important to winning elections and changing the political situation than a network of washed Youtubers will ever be. Charlie Kirk’s legacy will be felt for decades thanks to TPUSA, his winning machine. Candace Owens drives people crazy and actively tries to help liberals win. The choice between the two was very easy, and people still messed it up.

Whatever the Trump administration does, I hope that it remembers that it doesn’t have to put up with this internet circus stuff or the people who push it anymore. These guys are going to be indulging in freakshow behavior, repeating memes from 2017, or running through their greatest hits about the Rubicon forever. Tolerating this is not just the cost of doing business in rightwing circles, and in fact it can’t be if the Trump administration is to maintain the perception of legitimate and durable government it needs to survive the coming death struggle.

There’s a great moment in the 2010 film The Way Back, about the escape of Soviet gulag prisoners across hundreds of miles of inhospitable terrain, when the surviving characters are sitting safe at last in Tibet: Although the men have finally made it out of the Soviet Union, they still have thousands of miles to go to return to their respective countries. One of the characters, an American, reveals that he’s made plans to separate from the group so that he can continue home through an airbase in China.

There’s a nasty atmosphere in the room after this revelation. These men had been through the ringer. They only survived because they stuck together. Many of their companions died on the road. One of the remaining men chides the American: “Looking out for number 1, huh?” The American replies simply “We escaped.” That part of their lives was over now. There’s still a long way to go, but the state of crisis had ended. They’re going to have to do different things and act in different ways. It’s a great moment in the movie. You can see the tension melt away in the characters’ faces once they realize just how far they’ve come.

We escaped. Different things are happening. Online rightwing circles are populated by totally different people with totally different demographics and interests and priorities and relationships with the truth than they once were. Our culture has become their costume, and that’s actually fine. Who cares? We’re doing something else now.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on my fantasy where I am a terrorist.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on comedians who don’t tell jokes.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on this thing I just learned about and obviously don’t understand.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on voting Democrat.

We need a new rightwing discourse centered on single moms saying nigger.

I don’t think people actually care about this stuff even if they talk about it all the time. The online scene as we once knew it just seems kind of dead. We’re seeing retreads of retreads, dimly repeated by unfortunates with no pasts or futures. People are waiting around to be convinced to go crazy in the exact same ways, over and over and over again, forever. It’s spent.

There are times for spergs and times for normies, and we’re obviously entering a time for normies. Woe to the Twitter tyrants! As far right internet discourse’s wildly successful suicide assault on the highest levels of American politics and culture nears its grisly climax, one can only hope that there’ll be someone left to hit the lights by the time it’s all said and done.

What does all this actually mean? Not a lot, honestly. It’s certainly sad in many ways. I’ve probably spent thousands of hours of my life in these places, they were very entertaining and improved my life substantially and now they’re mostly gone, but my cohort of the online far right still got pretty much everything it wanted, at least that was realistic. We won, congratulations everybody. It was really touch-and-go there for a bit.

If you went back in time to 2017, during the early chaos of the first Trump Administration, and told people on rightwing Twitter that illegal immigration through the Southern border had dropped to its lowest level since 1970, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division had been gutted, disparate impact liability was no longer government policy, ICE was conducting what amounted to terror raids on sanctuary cities, the EEOC was aggressively soliciting complaints about anti-white discrimination in the workplace, refugee admissions had been paused except for white South Africans, the foreign born population was declining for the first time since 1970, training of new border patrol agents had increased to all time highs, several American cities were being patrolled by federal anti-crime taskforces that were arresting thousands of criminals, the State Department had formal plans to create an Office of Remigration, the US had experienced the largest single-year drop in murder rate in recorded history, new Indian student enrollment was down 75% in just a year, the Treasury Department was targeting the funding of Antifa, which had been designated a terror network and was cut off from its traditional funding mechanisms, DHS was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on football field-sized detention centers in multiple states, legal immigration was on track to decline by as much as 1/2 by the end of Trump’s term, along with countless other developments that would have seemed like fantasies back then, they would probably think that Richard Spencer had become President. You’d have to explain that most big personalities from that period actually hate all the progress that’s occurring today and are pushing to hand political control back to liberals. Three more years of this, we’re in a different country. Eleven more years of this, we’re in a different world.

You’d have to be a complete moron to think that we shouldn’t continue down this path, as narrow and perilous as it often seems. You’d have to be a piece of shit to try to prevent us from doing so. No matter what new obstacles we face, whatever terror lies ahead, rest assured, when I stop needing to reactivate my account to drive new podcast subs and the @ finally expires, the bright disk of the sun will soar up behind my eyelids and explode, lighting the sky for an instant. We won so hard it’s crazy to think about. This entire thing was a huge success.

It was very nice that I got the opportunity to help republish and popularize those books (Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel is the most special to me), but other people can and are doing everything I did better. I will forever be grateful for all the kindness and generosity that was shown to me, and all the friends I’ve made who helped me expecting nothing in return. It’s that impulse, I think, faith, charity, loyalty, selfless devotion to your country and people, that will define our future success.

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. Presumably there is something cool and smart and interesting that’s going on somewhere else and we all just don’t know about it yet. I can’t wait to see.

I think that we are leaving a transitional period in our country’s history. Things are getting better for the first time in a long time, and in non-trivial ways. We’re not going back to the bad old days unless we choose to. If the American Right decides to focus on winning elections and producing tangible quality of life improvements for Americans, we’re going to win. If we decide to focus on relitigating WW2 while working to elect Democrats to own our intra-factional rivals, we’re going to lose. I strongly suspect that most conservatives are going to choose to win even if that means dropping a lot of figures who used to be part of the solution and are now undeniably part of the problem.

As bad as things may seem for us, the situation today is far more grim for Democrats. Hatred of white people is pretty much the only thing holding their coalition together. They are running on destroying the country at this point, and have created a political situation where it’s impossible for them to moderate away from the most objectionable parts of their platform.

Shortly after Democrats achieved a political trifecta in the recent Virginia state elections, they immediately proposed bills to discriminate against white people in government contract bidding and lower mandatory minimums for crimes like rape, murder, and assaulting a police officer, while also introducing all manner of sure to be unpopular taxes. Outside a possible leftwing victory during the systemic crisis that I predicted would arrive before 2035 (which will hopefully instead be ruthlessly suppressed by federal security services), I don’t think the Democrat Party has very good odds of even existing 10 years from now, at least in its present form.

The only question that remains is whether or not we have the human capital required to maintain this moment over the long term. I think we do. The cream always rises back to the top. I meet smart young people all the time who are eager to help improve our situation or are already doing so.

I can’t overstate how much confidence I have in these young people. Much of the enormous contempt I feel for the Panicians or blackpillers or opportunists or whatever taking constant shots at the Trump admin while all this crazy stuff is going on comes from me seeing them, people who aren’t risking or adding very much, as stabbing young people who are risking a lot to help us in the back. They deserve better.

Traitors deserve each other. I promise that if you surround yourself with scum, you will live to regret it. We are watching thousands of Scorpion and the Frog stories play themselves out in real time right now. These guys are going to burn through each other and then the public is going to move on to another trainwreck to gawk at. Pretend like it’s real or substantive or something to engage with without hostility at your own peril, and the peril of everyone who’s counting on you.

Our Trump administration isn’t perfect, but it’s ours. We have never been better represented in government or had more opportunities to improve our situation. I think the path ahead is pretty clear, and that any deviation will end in disaster. The Trump administration must tune out the noise and stay the course even if it has to navigate by dead reckoning alone. The public will love this stuff when it comes out the other side. All-in. Fight!

It’s sometimes overwhelming to consider how bad it’s gotten in America. I go to get coffee and see a woman in her early 20s who cut off her breasts because of a social fad that might have been pushed on her by her own parents, kids who never stood a chance, a bazaar’s worth of people from across the world who should never have been allowed here and are probably going to cause problems for years, druggies destroying themselves and the neighborhood along with them strewn across the sidewalk, pure zombie zone. Everyone walks around like this is normal. I kind of understand why so many people on our side go nuts and become useless when they realize it’s not. The momentum of the perverse systems maintaining this world often seems unstoppable.

We are stopping it, though. Slowly but surely the terrible machine is grinding to a halt. You can see it in peoples’ faces now. We’re going to go back to the Moon. Although there are new disasters ahead, although there will be more betrayals, more insanity, more carnage, although there are things so bad we can’t even conceive of them yet approaching rapidly, none of it really matters. We’re going to win anyway, whether you like it or not. For the Trump administration and whatever is to come next, the only imperative can be to keep this thing hurtling across the tightrope, towards the final victory.

1/18/2026 - Reposting this again in light of the invasion of church services in Minneapolis in response to Trump’s federal surge to combat illegal immigration and fraud

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Note, this is the second article in an ongoing series covering the first Red Scare. You can find the first article, on the infamous Sacco and Vanzetti case, here. If you enjoy the free content on this Substack, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work.

As this series on the first Red Scare progresses, you’ll see a lot of mention of the socialist International Workers of the World (IWW) labor union and its members, nicknamed the “Wobblies.” Oftentimes, people were pretty nasty to the Wobblies. They were beaten up. Their meeting halls were ransacked and raided. In small cities across the country, IWW members were regularly run out of town by police and vigilantes. Some were even tarred and feathered.

When you look at the IWW’s stated goals: an end to war, food for the poor, better working conditions, and fair pay, it can seem hard to understand the hostility they received. As is the case today with liberal activist groups, the IWW was a lot more than their stated goals.

This article will detail a short and forgotten series of “protests” conducted by the IWW in New York City that illustrates why exactly Americans of the time period hated IWW members so much and didn’t want to live around them. The main reason was that the IWW used constant low-level violence, threats, and intentionally obnoxious behavior to make life generally unlivable for everyone else in order to get whatever it was they wanted, whether that was higher pay or letting murderers out of jail.

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Frank Tannenbaum had a background common among IWW organizers of the period. He was born in Austria in 1893 to poor Jewish parents. At a young age he and his family had immigrated to the United States, where they started a small farm. He never finished high school and ran away from home at 15 to work a series of menial jobs. He ended up in New York City, which had a large transient immigrant population, and became involved in radical politics through a waiters’ union. By the age of 21, he was a popular and successful organizer for the IWW.

Tannenbaum was one of many IWW organizers active around the period. In 1913, the United States entered into a protracted recession. Unemployment was rampant, which made conditions in the enormous recent immigrant community (over 15 million would come to the US between 1900 to 1915) that much more desperate.

These new immigrants also had greater difficulty assimilating than previous waves. Not only were they more numerous, but many of them came from Eastern and Southern Europe as opposed to the Central and Northern Europeans typical of previous generations of immigrants. Few spoke English and there was an enormous culture clash with the WASP core population that had shaped American history and norms since the country’s inception. Immigrant communities became so large, concentrated, and insular that in many places there was no need to assimilate, further contributing to antisocial political radicalization.

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Around this period, communists were still developing the confrontational tactics that they would successfully employ later in American history. For instance, on March 3, 1914, the IWW launched an “Unemployed Army” of veterans1 to march on Washington DC demanding economic relief from the recession. Although this effort ended in failure, eventually the communists would perfect the model with the 1932 Bonus Army March.

During the Bonus March, communists facilitated the arrival of more than 20,000 veterans and 20,000 other followers in Washington, DC to demand the early payment of bonuses awarded for WWI service. They created huge homeless encampments on government property and public land across the city. When Congress refused to hand out money under duress, the communists organized large illegal marches that shut down the city. This crisis lasted for months, until the government attempted a limited eviction from a Treasury Department building occupied by the marchers. When thousands of marchers attacked the police officers carrying out the eviction, troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur cleared all the encampments.

Although only two marchers had been shot by police in self defense during the start of the riot, and no one had been killed by the troops, communists and their sympathizers in the media claimed the US military had attacked peacefully protesting veterans unprovoked.

The ensuing controversy led to the victory of NY Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt over President Herbert Hoover, who was known to take a hard line against radicals, in the 1932 Presidential Election. FDR was greatly favored by the communists, and during his administration communists and other far leftists enjoyed unprecedented government influence and support.

Tannenbaum’s protests, although more primitive, employed the same basic model. Tannenbaum gathered hundreds of unemployed people and IWW members and would have them storm churches around the New York City area. He called them the “Army of the Unemployed.” Once they all arrived inside a church, often at odd hours, the priests and church employees were confronted with demands for food, money, and shelter.

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Although Tannenbaum and the other organizers claimed they were appealing to the priests’ Christian charity, it was a transparent shakedown. The IWW would either be given what it wanted or it would create a scene. There was always the implied threat that the men would simply destroy the churches they occupied.

Indeed, Tannenbaum regularly advocated for violence as during this terror campaign. He said2 to a large crowd of IWW members before one church was stormed:

Everything in this city was created by our hands or the hands of our brothers and sisters. We have a right to share in every house and in every man’s loaf of bread. What’s more, we are going to make the city give it to us or give it to us by force.

What we are getting here tonight is not charity. And, men, do not beg for what you want; take it. It is ours; it belongs to us; if the city won’t give it to us we will take it. We are only getting back a share of what is ours. Everything in this world belongs to us, and we’re going to take it.

The mob hit Labor Temple (Presbyterian) on February 28, First Presbyterian Church on March 1, and St. Mark’s Church on March 2. Large crowds of unemployed also appeared at Plymouth Church that same day.

One of the priests offered to hire some of the unemployed men to shovel snow. Once separated from the main group, the unemployed men complained to the priest that they had been forced to pay the IWW organizers in order to get these jobs, and were required to pay a large percentage of their wages even afterwards. The workmen, the priest claimed, said they had no idea what the Tannenbaum’s demands even were before they joined the mob. They had simply been told by IWW organizers that they were being given a free place to stay.3 Although some of the priests eventually acquiesced to the mob’s demands, they requested that police arrest the organizers or at the very least follow the mob around to ensure the public’s safety.

On March 3, a mob of 200 men led by Tannenbaum marched on St. Alphonsus Catholic Church. They shut down all traffic along their route. However, police were shadowing them by they time they arrived at their destination. Undercover detectives infiltrated the crowd to make sure no more violence occurred. A smaller group entered the church led by Tannenbaum, who demanded to speak to the head priest.

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The priest, concerned for the many worshipers in his church, confronted the group. Tannenbaum announced that his men were going to be spending the night there. When the priest said that they couldn’t do that, Tannenbaum replied “Do you call this living up to the teachings of Jesus Christ?” and then demanded money. The priest again refused.

Jane Est, an outspoken women’s suffrage activist accompanying the mob, began screaming at the priest. She said “So this is what you call living up to your principles? This wouldn’t be the first time a church was invaded. They have been entered this way in France, England, and Italy, and now they’re being entered in New York. You’ve got to take us in.”4

At a later trial, her remarks were clarified. An undercover detective who had infiltrated a rally preceding the church invasion stated that, during the rally, Est had shouted that blood was shed during the French Revolution when churches were entered. Tannenbaum had replied “Yes, that is what will happen here.”5

The priest held firm, and Tannenbaum turned to leave. However, as soon as he got outside, he gave the signal to the rest of the group to storm into the church. The two hundred men broke down a locked door to gain quicker entry and shoved down two women who got in their way.6 Priests begged the invaders to leave, but they refused. They wanted to send a message that if their demands weren’t complied with, they were perfectly happy to use force.

As this was happening, the church was quietly surrounded by more than 100 police officers, including auxiliary police from 6 different precincts. They blocked the exits to the church, and then swooped in to arrest Tannenbaum. Everyone who entered the church illegally was also arrested. As the socialists were led out, they were jeered at by a growing crowd of locals angry that a church in their neighborhood had been mobbed in this way. The crowd had to be held back by police to prevent them from attacking the prisoners as they were ferried off to nearby jails.

Police discovered numerous concealed knives and billy clubs among Tannenbaum’s Army. One of the men, apparently an organizer, was found carrying $751 in cash.7 It was the equivalent of $22,319 in 2023 dollars. This was not some organic protest of unemployed people, it was an organized and armed mob shaking churches down with the threat of violence.

Tannenbaum was charged with inciting a riot and unlawful entry. Most charges against the other members of the mob were dropped immediately. Tannenbaum was soon bailed out of jail despite the extremely high bond set and provided with free lawyers by the IWW. The day after his arrest, anarchists, socialists, and liberals from all over the country raised more than $30,000 (over $900,000 in today’s dollars) for his defense.8 Prominent IWW officials would attend every day of his trial.9

Large meetings were held by IWW members where they claimed that the arrest was over a free speech issue. This was echoed by prominent intellectuals and journalists. Leading “muckraker” Lincoln Steffans, who would later become famous for visiting Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and claiming “I have seen the future, and it works,”10 stated that the storming of churches invoked a core constitutional right:

We have feelings we’d like to express which would incite a riot. The problem of the unemployed is at the foundation of our economic system. If you can make the American people consider the problem of poverty through this movement you’ll be solving one of the greatest problems in the history of man. Free speech is guaranteed to every citizen by the Constitution, and it is a healthy sign to see you men who have come here from foreign countries fighting for the preservation of that right.11

Steffans eventually married Ella Winter, a socialist activist for migrant farm workers who wrote a book praising the Soviet system under Stalin in 1933. Steffans would later be funded directly through the California Writer’s Project, a New Deal program. Winter would serve as a secretary to US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

The judge handling Tannenbaum and the rioters’ case received a bomb threat, but was unmoved. A few years later, anarchists would plant a bomb in his courtroom. The judge narrowly escaped death. Although Tannenbaum was eventually convicted of both charges, the maximum sentence the judge could hand down was just 1 year in jail and a $500 fine. Tannenbaum was reportedly excited to receive this punishment.12 He gave speech before the court where he bitterly criticized the judge and the jury.

In jail Tannenbaum continued his activism. He organized a strike of prisoners who worked in a factory attached to the jail. The machinery was sabotaged.13 Although he was briefly thrown in solitary confinement, he was not otherwise punished. The light sentence had only emboldened him and other radicals.

Tannenbaum persisted with his support for the labor movement after his release. However, he didn’t stay an organizer. His behavior was eventually legitimized by the government itself. Wealthy backers funded Tannenbaum’s education at Columbia University. His stint in prison for terrorizing small churches led to him starting a career as a criminologist.

He taught a course on the subject at Cornell University and was given a job at the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor. He eventually developed a theory called the “Dramatization of Evil,” a precursor to the very influential “labeling” concept in criminology, which claimed that labeling someone as a criminal (by stigmatizing their behavior) in turn pushes them towards crime. This theory was used to justify lighter sentences and non-jail interventions for convicted criminals.

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Tannenbaum’s interests drifted to Latin America. He became an influential historian of regional trade unions and dissident communist political parties. After FDR took power, Tannenbaum was tapped to help created the short-lived Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA ran a small but successful propaganda program that produced enormous numbers of photographs of blighted farms. Critics claimed the agency also encouraged farm collectivization.

FDR’s policy at the time was to decrease agricultural production in an effort to raise food prices. Eventually a conservative Congress totally rewrote the legislation Tannenbaum assisted with to force the FSA and successor programs to provide low interest loans so that farmers could own their own land.

There are a few things to take away from the church incidents. The first is that they illustrate why the public hated the IWW so much. It wasn’t mere bigotry. These guys were terrorists. If you lived near them, you risked being forced into a hostage negotiation through their bizarre and antisocial behavior. This behavior was made more obnoxious by the fact that organizers targeting American churches for a supposed failure to live up to their principles were foreigners who weren’t even Christian. They resented American norms and hated the American general public.

Also notable is just how shameless everyone involved in this process was. It was obvious that this was not just a group of hungry men peacefully protesting, as IWW supporters loudly and indignantly claimed afterwards. In fact, it was a well-funded intimidation campaign, in which many of the participants were armed. That’s what Bolshevism is: the lowest elements of society intimidate peaceful law-abiding people into acquiescing to a series of increasingly unreasonable demands.

While liberal lawyers and journalists were talking about American democracy when they referenced the case, in reality what they were defending was mob violence. The goal was humiliation and dominance, to get the victim to discredit himself by accepting unacceptable behavior. They all supported and covered for the mob. When you read about the IWW being persecuted by local officials or vigilantes, assume that actions similar to Tannenbaum’s preceded this.

It’s important to note that, as is the case today, there is functionally no difference between leftists groups. Suffragists, communists, socialists, anarchists, labor organizers, civil rights activists, and mainstream liberals: they are all working towards the same ultimate goal. I sometimes use the terms interchangeably because they are interchangeable. They would support each other in any situation no matter how obnoxious the behavior at hand was. Tannenbaum did something indefensible and immediately had a massive media and legal machine backing him up.

Finally, the incidents show why it’s critical for conservative prosecutors and judges to (figuratively) shoot to kill when they bring radicals to justice. Getting arrested and being sent to jail did not bother Tannenbaum. Why would it? He was one of the only people charged and his sentence was light. It benefited his career substantially. His radical activism led to him shaping public policy for decades to come.

If you fail to produce immediate and severe consequences for activists who terrorize the public without compunction, you will be seeing them again and again. Everyone in that crowd should have gone to jail for a long time. There are too many Tannenbaums out there and they need to be stopped before they can do real damage.

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Thoughts on The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941: The Forgotten Story of How America Forged a Powerful Army Before Pearl Harbor by Paul Dickson, Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy, and the modern crisis on infinite groupchats.

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The promise of the second Trump administration was to end America’s decline. Dramatic increases in the rate of drug use are part of that decline. I don’t think anyone who has gone in a public space during the last few years can honestly claim that they have not experienced this increase in drug use rates firsthand. No one honestly thinks that their life would be improved by a weed shop opening up in their neighborhood or by a friend or family member beginning to smoke weed regularly.

The advocacy group Smart Approaches to Marijuana has several one pagers that lay out the negative impacts of marijuana use: Daily users of marijuana commit crime at substantially higher rates than the general public. Areas that legalize marijuana experience substantial increases in violent crimes. Regular marijuana use reduces IQ, impairs memory and learning, and is associated with greatly increased rates of mental illness and use of other, more harmful, drugs. The impact of widespread drug use on young people, including children in the womb, is devastating. You are setting them up for failure by creating a society where there is no legal or illegal stigma against marijuana use. Everyone knows someone who has fucked up their life with this stuff.

America’s experiment with marijuana decriminalization has failed disastrously. Abdicating responsibility doesn’t work. Although the marijuana lobby has hundreds of millions of dollars to throw around for lobbying (this is a failure in of itself) and many rightwingers’ brains have been poisoned by libertarianism, Trump can and should show leadership on this issue. President Trump personally abstains from drug and alcohol because of his brother’s struggle with addiction. Rescheduling marijuana is guaranteed to push hundreds of thousands more people down that terrible path.

Reject the rescheduling of marijuana. Even keeping the very flawed status quo would be far preferable to dumping billions of dollars into businesses that make Americans sick. This is one of those things that everyone knows on some level is bad but that society seems to have collectively lost the language to oppose. It’s time to say “Stop.” It’s not worth the money. We don’t need more drugs. We don’t need more shithole places. We don’t need more people wandering through life in an altered state.

I encourage everyone reading this to contact the White House using this link and leave a short comment explaining that you oppose rescheduling marijuana. Marijuana industry lobbyists have a lot of polling to point to that says the public has largely surrendered on this issue. People who oppose this terrible change need to show that they care. We don’t have to live like this.

The young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will. War suits them, and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense. They care not a sou [a very small amount of money] for niggers, land, or any thing. They hate Yankees per se, and don’t bother their brains about the past, present, or future. As long as they have good horses, plenty of forage, and an open country, they are happy. This is a larger class than most men suppose, and they are the most dangerous set of men that this war has turned loose upon the world. They are splendid riders, first-rate shots, and utterly reckless. Stewart, John Morgan, Forrest, and Jackson, are the types and leaders of this class. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace. They have no property or futures, and therefore cannot be influenced by any thing, except personal considerations.

- Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, discussing the future occupation of the South as the American Civil War drew to a close

The #1 thing that smart young people who are interested in politics tell me they want is a job, which sadly I am always unable to provide. I think the enormous and endless frustration you see online stems from people understanding there’s still a lot that needs to be done, but they feel that realistically they have no path to contribute beyond offering commentary (which has a tendency to spiral). If they were just in a position to help, they reason correctly, they would be happy to do so and would probably contribute a lot.

You can only recommend applying for a job on join.ice.gov or USAjobs.gov so many times. It’s not very helpful to tell someone who wants to help now that they should work on a Republican political campaign and then when/if their candidate gets elected he can secure them a political appointment in DC, or that they should go to law school and then 3 years later become a government bureaucrat.

The federal hiring process is in chaos. Biden spent years dismantling important institutions and flooding the government with permanently hostile activists. Trump’s first year has been marked by a simultaneous decline and expansion of the federal workforce. I’ve heard that federal law enforcement training is running 6 days a week and fully booked for the next half-year, at least. Although Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill provided funding for 10,000 new ICE agents (and more), there doesn’t seem to have been any corresponding increase in capacity to process applications or otherwise handle these personnel changes, a problem made worse by the persistent shortage of competent, stable, and ideologically reliable people in conservative politics.

Young people who want to help their country, which everyone is telling them to do, are throwing themselves out into a potentially years-long onboarding process where they will hear confused and contradictory information, or perhaps, most frustrating, nothing at all. This “hurry up and wait” effect is made worse by the fact that the situation in the US is probably going to continue to get a lot worse before it gets better (please see my pessimistic Election Night 2024 victory essay for more). People know that they could help prevent some of the problems we face and blame the Trump administration for not providing them the chance to do so. It is understandable that when you remind young people that our situation is actually the best it’s been in decades, and there are opportunities for even greater victories ahead, their first reaction is often telling you to go fuck yourself.

It’s just not enough. We need more bodies, faster. Everyone can and needs to do more. To that end, I’ve become very interested in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

The CCC was a Great Depression Era program created to simply employ as many young men as possible, with the idea that projects could always be found for them once they were “in the system.” Throughout the program’s nearly decade-long lifespan, CCC enrollees built bridges, roads, and trails, planted billions of trees, fought forest fires, contributed to erosion and flooding control efforts, and in general laid the groundwork for future economic growth in areas of the country that were often overlooked.

On top of jobs, CCC enrollees received free food, housing, medical care, and clothing, as well as pay that was competitive for the time (controversially, CCC pay was higher than privates in the military received). As the program was designed as an emergency effort to relieve terrible economic conditions, only 1/6 of enrollees’ pay was available immediately to them in cash. The remaining 5/6 was sent home to their families. This unusual pay arrangement was only manageable because all the essentials of life were provided by the program. Additional education, including high school equivalency and college courses, was also made available to enrollees. Enlistment terms were for 6 months, renewable for a maximum of 2 years.

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Work duties were assigned between a number of different government agencies, all of which had projects that might benefit from a surge in available manpower, and the program itself was managed and administered by military officers, who, in a time of massive downsizing for the military, were not only able to keep their positions but get valuable leadership experience and greater familiarity with the general public.

Despite this military connection, enrollees were not held to military discipline and were free to leave whenever they wanted to. To assuage the concerns of pro-peace activists, skeptical of any possible American military buildup as the diplomatic situation in Europe worsened in the years before WW2, for most of the CCC’s lifespan enrollees were nominally forbidden from receiving any military training beyond basic physical fitness.

The CCC quickly became the most popular of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. The projects the CCC worked on usually had an immediately noticeable positive effect on Americans’ lives. You could drive on the road they built. You could visit the park they maintained. You might stay in a shelter constructed by them. Unemployed young people, thrown into an apocalyptic economic and social situation through no fault of their own, were given a clear path to reintegrate themselves into society, along with savings (they had few expenses not covered by the program), experience that could be used in their future careers, and a general sense of purpose that is often missing in places experiencing periods of prolonged decline.

Although enrollment in the CCC was initially confined to young men between the ages of 18 and 25, soon parallel programs were set up for women and veterans of World War I. At the CCC’s largest it served 300,000 enrollees, with a total of 3 million people eventually passing through the program.

The CCC was, by all metrics, a resounding success. According to a 1937 PhD thesis, despite its considerable upfront costs the program ended up largely paying for itself in the form of increased productivity and new development enabled by newly built infrastructure, along with new economic activity that came from cash infusions to the families of enrollees severely affected by the Great Depression.

One of the more difficult to measure benefits of the program was what one American military officer referred to as “human reconstruction.” The Great Depression was not just an economic collapse, it was a social and spiritual collapse. Virtually every kind of antisocial behavior increased dramatically. Hundreds of thousands of homeless teenagers roamed the country looking for seasonal work or just adventure. People did not have good jobs, real property, or future prospects, traditional attachment points to society, and as a result did not feel a lot of responsibility for society’s improvement or decline. The CCC offered a path out of this arrangement: It gave enrollees structures to fit into, goals to work towards, and a general light at the end of the tunnel. The difference between CCC alumni and the general public was so significant that when conscription began in the United States, the military adopted a policy of selecting Corporals and Sergeants from among CCC alumni.

Towards the end of the 1930s, improving economic conditions made enrolling in the CCC less desirable than regular employment. When conscription expanded before the US entered WW2, the number of young men available for CCC work declined dramatically. After the Pearl Harbor Attacks in 1941, nearly all remaining CCC work was shifted to military projects. The entire program was quietly retired in 1942.

Obviously, the parallels between our current moment and the Great Depression aren’t perfect: The economy is totally different, the population is totally different, society structured in a totally different way. That said, I do think the CCC could be adapted to our times and solve several different problems at once.

Americans, particularly young people, suffer from catastrophic levels of unemployment and, perhaps more insidious, underemployment. The disastrous immigration policies of the last few decades, enormous changes to the education system (one entertaining/horrifying example: Mississippi’s recent dramatic increase in 4th grade reading test scores after a return to phonics-based curriculum demonstrated that the “whole language theory” of literacy instruction, widely adopted in Anglophone countries during the 1980s and 1990s, was leaving many children borderline illiterate. Also interesting, the increase in reading test scores after the program was implemented was accompanied by a substantial increase in math test scores, despite a lack of similar reforms targeting math education.), and other sweeping shifts in social and economic relations have created a job market that is unlikely to stabilize absent dramatic action.

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The CCC (or a similar successor program) can provide that dramatic action. Hire as many young people as possible and then provide them with employment, housing necessities, training, and wages in a structured and centrally administered way.

Certainly, the environmental conservation-related aspects of the CCC are still very relevant today. At the time of writing there are 20 very large uncontained wildfires in the United States. A dramatic increase in the number of wilderness firefighters could make this problem, which has devastated countless communities over the last few years, a thing of the past. The wildfire crisis itself is a product of decades of criminally negligent forest management policy at the state and federal level, a problem that could likely be remedied with the introduction of huge numbers of new workers to clear underbrush and dead wood, build firebreaks, plant new trees, and stage controlled burns.

There are also areas outside America’s wilderness that need conservation as well. Many of America’s once great cities suffer from infrastructure that’s decades out of date and/or are beset by crime and decay that leave many neighborhoods unsafe or uninhabitable if you have any other options. The impact of this (totally optional) dynamic on the real estate market cannot be overstated.

CCC enrollees could be used to repair streets and sidewalks, remove graffiti, clear overgrowth in public land, install and service trash receptacles, and tear down vacant structures. It is easy for individuals to not care about a place that is ugly or poorly maintained, which society seems to not care about either. The introduction of an enormous number of laborers to perform this kind of restorative work would likely produce massive downstream positive effects in any city.

Certainly, there are many “unskilled” (I realize this is a misnomer) public service roles that would benefit from a sudden flood of manpower, but I think the best update that could be made to a new CCC would be creating a pipeline to the more “skilled” positions that are in increasingly short supply today.

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One of the Trump Administration’s best moves was the deployment of the National Guard to cities plagued by crime. Although I haven’t seen it get much coverage (unsurprising given the general climate of hysteria and pessimism), Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Memphis, once America’s most dangerous city, has been an enormous success. National Guard coordination with state and federal law enforcement has led to more than 3,100 arrests, 501 firearms seizures, and the locations of 121 children reported as missing. The city’s murder rate has been cut in half since the start of the joint task force, with similarly dramatic declines in nearly all other crimes as well.

I don’t think that you need actual soldiers to provide all the benefits that the Guardsmen in Memphis offer. It is likely that most of the preventative role that Guardsmen play in law enforcement could be performed by a group of young men, armed only with walkie talkies and a few weeks of training, supervised by a single traditional law enforcement officer. If someone did want to become a policeman eventually, it’s likely they would greatly benefit from even a modicum of exposure to this kind of “on the job experience,” which it would be impossible for a member of the general public to acquire in any kind of normal situation.

There are many other roles that would benefit from having a pool of young men who were far more likely to be physically fit, drug free, and capable of working in an organized manner than the general public. There are lots of jobs that require a 4-year college degree which could likely be filled by candidates who have only completed 6-month training courses in controlled conditions.

There is a perpetual shortage of air traffic controllers, what if you had a body of qualified men who you could funnel directly into these roles as needed? There are many positions in the government bureaucracy that the average unemployed person wouldn’t even know to apply for. What if you could engineer a situation where government hiring experts were guaranteed to encounter qualified candidates for these roles? Need more prison guards or federal, state, or local police anywhere in particular? Here’s an ideal recruitment pool to draw from.

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Ultimately, I think the role of a renewed CCC would be to act as a “strategic manpower reserve,” allowing various government agencies to respond more quickly to whatever issues they encounter in the decades-long process of fixing our country that lies ahead. CCC enrollees, by mere virtue of their experience under basic discipline and organization, and freedom from the vices that have afflicted the general public, can be used to fill critical roles and solve critical problems.

There isn’t really an easy path in life set out for young people today. The advice I see from half-redpilled older people: “Don’t go to college,” “Move out to the sticks and buy a house for $40k,” is frankly terrible. Lots of people are not cut out for dead-end service or retail jobs. What young people really need is an entry point to careers, and a renewed CCC could provide that to them. You can create a pipeline for young men into government service without going into fantasy land.

Would someone who was successful in a wilderness firefighter crew be better fit for a job in the Department of the Interior than a member of the general public? Yeah, probably, especially if he has a way to get relevant college-level training on his days off. This person would probably be better prepared for any kind of job in the private sector as well. If H1B-starved companies want more or better job candidates, they could perhaps fund their own training initiatives targeting enrollees.

Regarding the exact structure of this sort of program, I really can’t say. I don’t know enough. I realize that this entire piece is kind of sophomoric but I don’t see anyone else talking about this. The most important aspect of this sort of effort is that pay is adequate so that enrollees can start building wealth. I’d just have CCC pay match standard government pay grades. Enrollees could be paid out mostly in government bonds (after all, enrollees should have few living expenses) to encourage savings and full completion of their program terms. Perhaps as a way to incentivize people who have gone through the process to seek out jobs in government, you could allow their time in the CCC to count towards their federal retirement or tie it to salary increases.

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You might get complaints from longtime federal employees about the leg-up that these young people will have (not having to pay for food or housing) but given the rigid structure and lack of freedom inherent to the program I think these could be dismissed pretty easily. Previous generations created a horrible situation for young people, the world they grew up in and benefitted from was destroyed. We’ve got to build something new for them if we expect them to stay invested in society’s success.

This all sounds very ambitious, maybe too ambitious, but remember the original CCC program was thrown together in a matter of months in the 1930s with technology and structures that were relatively primitive. The program paid for itself. Several states still maintain smaller conservation corps programs that could be built off of. It’s possible, we just need to find the will to do it today.

The most critical task facing Trump next 3 years is bringing more people into the system. I grimace every time that I hear a Trump admin official brag about cutting the number of government jobs. It’s not that I don’t understand that many of the jobs being cut were unnecessary or that the people occupying them couldn’t be trusted, but rather because we have an enormous youth unemployment problem that is not going away on its own due to decades of compounding dysfunction. The free market hasn’t existed for a long time and what we have now is in turmoil due to geopolitical and technological changes. Government needs to, and can, act here.

At the end of the day, we need to pull young people out of the wilderness and put them on a path where they find good jobs that they will want to keep and real property they will want to protect, on top of a society worth living in. If the President can’t help them with this, why should they give a shit about anything?

I’ve already reproduced the first chapter of The Administration of the Civilian Conservation Corps by Charles Price Harper, the PhD thesis I referred to above. I’ll be reproducing the rest of the document in coming weeks. I hope someone who actually knows what they’re doing puts some thought into this. That terrible 50-year mortgage proposal slide showed that Trump is interested in leaving an FDR-style legacy behind, and the Civilian Conservation Corps was the most popular thing that FDR ever did. Hire first, ask questions later. I promise there is lots of work to be done.

Update: One of my beloved paid subscribers left a comment about his time in a wilderness firefighting crew that was so good I feel compelled to repost it here for the unwashed free subscriber masses. I think these firefighting programs could be incorporated into the CCC very easily. Pay participants properly, recruit 30,000+ new firefighters/forest managers, and have the military help out with the administration/logistics. This would be a great launching point for young people.

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Millions of young men were unemployed during the Depression. At its peak, there were more than 250,000 homeless teenagers “riding the rail” looking for seasonal employment or adventure, which caused enormous problems for any area in which they concentrated. These big upheavals aren’t usually reducible to a single event, but rather a series of cascading failures and stressors. One of my favorite books about this period is Charles Willeford’s memoir “I Was Looking for a Street,” which describes the author’s (who later became a WW2 tank commander and renowned weird crime fiction author) childhood as a hobo crisscrossing the country, having run away from home to avoid burdening his family.

Crime, drug use, prostitution, and other anti-social behavior all skyrocketed. One high-ranking military described the CCC as engaging in a process of “human reconstruction” for those who had become “poor candidates for citizenship.” You had all these young people who had been thrown into hard times by economic forces far beyond their control and reintegrated them back into normal life by giving them respectable jobs, professional training, decent wages (CCC enrollees were paid more than Army privates, which caused considerable controversy), free room and board, and ultimately a sense of responsibility for society.

One of the things I’ve complained most about is that conservatives today don’t really have a good sense of how things work: How ideas form, how they become realized in systems, and how those systems change the world. It seems like the modern Right is constantly stuck in the “idea” phase. Whenever they approach the “systems” phase, suddenly a lot of people are out of their depth and become very anxious to get back to the drawing board for this pretext or another. Unfortunately for us, since Trump won and we are nominally in control of the government, we are not going to be able to improve our situation with a new debate club.

I think the CCC was a good program, and one that I think could be used (if updated properly) to great effect today. To that end, I’d like to reproduce a 1937 PhD thesis on how the Civilian Conservation Corps was actually run. There’s quite a bit of coverage of the CCC, it was one of the most popular government programs during the Depression Era, but the actual mechanics of the organization are usually left unexamined.

What follows below is one of the few thorough surveys of the program: The Administration of the Civilian Conservation Corps by Charles Price Harper. Although the work was originally submitted as Harper’s PhD thesis at Johns Hopkins University, it was later published in book form in 1939. One of my beloved subscribers (paid) was nice enough to check this out from a rare books library (it’s not available even on online sources like archive.org) and scan it for me. I haven’t recreated the footnotes, which would have taken an enormous amount of time and only been of interest to a few readers, though I left the numbers in just to illustrate that this was a very lovingly researched book. You should view historical pieces without this detail (including my own) very skeptically!

I find this stuff really interesting. It’s my hope that this will encourage renewed interest in the CCC or at least make this very rare text available online in some form. Always remember that it’s not enough to just “have the idea.” There is a surplus of good ideas right now and an extreme shortage of the skills, personnel, and (perhaps most importantly) will to bring them into being. This is our challenge going forward.

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[Begin selection]

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE EMERGENCY CONSERVATION WORK PROGRAM

The first of the numerous projects initiated by the New Deal was the Emergency Conservation Work program. The purpose of this program is threefold: the relief of acute distress caused by unemployment, the building of health and morale among thousands of young men, and the restoration of the depleted resources of the United States. This emergency conservation project is being carried on by the Civilian Conservation Corps and a few similar agencies. They are engaged in the protection and improvement of forests, parks, watersheds and other natural resources. The work is under the supervision of the Emergency Conservation Work organization, the departments of Agriculture, the Interior, Labor and War, and several bureaus of service. Some knowledge of the origin and development of the Civilian Conservation Corps and its allied agencies is essential to the understanding of their organization, functions and administration.

Development of the Idea.

Secretary of War, Dern, ·has rightly called President Roosevelt the °”: “father of the Civilian Conservation Corps” because the idea was solely and wholly the President’s.1 One cannot be certain how long the idea was in the mind of the President, but his interest in conservation dates from his boyhood. His mother has stated that, while yet in his “teens,” he was interested in forest conservation on their Hyde Park estate.2

Like Washington at Mt. Vernon, Roosevelt recognized that every’ homestead, like each member of a family, should have its own individuality and saw that this could be developed by forest conservation. Professor Raymond Moley, former Assistant Secretary of State, thinks the President got the idea at Harvard, when he heard William James discuss the moral equivalent of war. In his essay on this subject James said in part:

If now . . . there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. . . . To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, to road building and tunnel making, to foundries and stoke holes, and to the frames of. skyscrapers would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.

While, in his own words, “a youngster in the State Legislature,” Roosevelt, “for no known reason,” was made chairman of the committee on forests, fish and game. He thought this position was given him because nobody else wanted it, but he soon took deep interest, in his assignment, though he knew very little about it. He invited Gifford Pinchot, the Chief Forester of the United States, to Albany to advise him and the Legislature, and Mr. Pinchot, whom the President has called one of the first of the “brain trusters,” delivered a professional lecture on the subject of conservation. In speaking of this lecture and the work of his committee, the President said: “We passed our legislation and that was the first step toward practical government supervised forestry as far as I know in the eastern part of the country. It started me on the conservation road.”5

Through his long practice of forestry as a private citizen and his interest in conservation as Governor of New York, the President has rightly been called “forestry minded.” His conservation work on the twelve hundred acre Hyde Park estate, especially since 1915, is comparable on a miniature scale with what he is attempting to do in the national forests. Over five hundred acres are given over to forests, and worn-out land is reforested. Besides reforesting with many different species, the conservation work includes the cutting and selling of mature timber, and the protection of the land along the Hudson against soil erosion.

The President is familiar with even the details of his carefully tended and constantly improved five hundred acre forest tract. He has reserved over one hundred acres for ecological, esthetic and experimental purposes, and the remainder is devoted to timber producing areas, divided into seven working groups, each managed somewhat differently. A new phase of reforestation was introduced when he demonstrated the practicability of growing Christmas trees commercially.8 Perhaps this experimentation in reforestation and conservation influenced the President’s idea of using the experimental method in government.

Mr. Roosevelt’s reforestation work was not confined to his northern estate. During Southern vacations he acquired sundry abandoned farms in the South, reforested them, and then organized local protective associations to further the cause of conservation. Speaking on one occasion of conservation he said: “There must be replacement and a policy of administration that will guarantee a maximum of beneficial use with a minimum of waste. Our forests and waters and the wild life that they support are essential to the health and economic welfare of the people.”10

As Governor of New York, Mr. Roosevelt undertook a program of reforestation in a broad way. He tackled the subject as though nothing else of any importance had been suggested by his administration and the program initiated by him soon caught the imagination of the entire country.11 a very definite program was worked out with regard to submarginal land and its possible use for “the growing of crops of trees.”12 A law was passed “providing for the purchase and reforestation of these lands in a manner approved by the State, part of the cost being borne by the county and part by the State.13 In 1931 the people voted the “Reforestation Amendment,” which called for large scale reforestation of marginal land then put to no productive use. This amendment has a definite schedule providing for the appropriation of twenty million dollars to be expended over an eleven year period in the purchase and reforestation of over one million acres of land. This schedule of appropriations for the purchase, planting and conservation of abandoned, idle and useless farming land was suggested by Roosevelt to guide future legislatures in their reforestation legislation.14 Reforestation has also made its contribution to the relief of unemployment in the State. During the last year of Mr. Roosevelt’s governorship, ten thousand extra persons from community unemployed lists were used in the tree nurseries and for the planting crews.15 It was this, no doubt, which suggested the wider use of the unemployed on reforestation projects in the nation.

With President Roosevelt’s New York experience in reforestation in mind, one can readily appreciate the significance of that part of his speech of acceptance which many thought fantastic, but in which he said:

We know that a very hopeful and immediate means of relief, both for the unemployed and for agriculture will come from a wider plan of the converting of many millions of acres of marginal and unused land into timberland through reforestation. There are tens of millions of acres east of the Mississippi River alone in abandoned farms, in cut over land, now growing up in worthless brush. Why, every European nation has a definite land policy, and has had one for generations. We have none. Having none,’ we face a future of soil erosion and timber famine. It is clear that economic foresight and immediate employment march hand in hand, in the call for the reforestation of these vast areas.

In so doing, employment can be given to a million men.17 That is the kind of public work that is self-sustaining, and therefore capable of being financed by the issuance of bonds which are made secure by the fact that, the growth of tremendous crops will provide adequate security for the investment.

Yes, I have a very definite program for providing employment by that means. I have done it, and am doing it today in the State of New York. I know that the Democratic Party can do it successfully in the nation. That will put men to work, that is an example of the action we are going to have.18

The public proposal of such a far reaching conservation and unemployment program evoked derision from friend and foe alike. The candidate’s friends explained the suggestion as one of his “brain storms,” and his opponents spoke of it with ridicule. Secretary of Agriculture, Arthur M. Hyde, whose department had charge of the Forest Service, interpreting reforestation in the narrow sense, explained that only a few thousand men could be put to work planting trees. He spoke of the proposal as being of an “utterly visionary and chimerical character.”19

But the Roosevelt proposal was not a mere campaign promise, to be forgotten with the passing of the summer heat. It was an essential part of an emergency program for the immediate relief of that increasing army of unemployed which was looking to him for relief. It was to be the first experiment of the New Deal. If there was any doubt as to the purpose and scope of the candidate’s proposal, it was cleared away as the campaign progressed. At Atlanta, in speaking of why he believed just as much in country planning as in city planning, Mr. Roosevelt said:

Everyone knows that we are using up our American timber supply much faster than the annual growth of new timber. Therefore, unless we are willing to face a day not so far distant when we shall become a nation dependent on importing the greater part of our lumber from other nations, we must take immediate steps greatly to increase our home supply.

It is common sense and not fantasy to invest our money in tree crops, just as much as to grow annual agricultural crops. The return on the investment ^ just as certain in the case of growing trees as it is in the case of growing cotton, or wheat, or corn. ...

Because we are a young nation, because apparently limitless forests have stood at our door, we have declined up to now to think of the future. Other nations whose primeval forests were cut off a thousand years ago, have been growing tree crops for many hundred years.20

At Boston, a few days later, he stressed the relief feature of his reforestation program when he said, in part:

The first principle is that the nation owes a positive duty that no one shall be permitted to starve. Second, in addition to providing emergency relief, the Federal Government should provide temporary work wherever possible. In the national forests, on flood prevention and on the development of waterway projects already authorized and planned, thousands at least can be given temporary employment.21

These campaign statements, coupled with his conservation program as Governor of New York, gave the American electorate a clear-cut idea of the definite emergency relief and conservation program of the new President. As unemployment grew worse and the economic situation more tense during the winter months, everyone was wondering what the new leader’s first line of action would be, and when it would begin. When Roosevelt was inaugurated there was no time to speculate upon the causes of unemployment. “It was a fact. It was contributing to an unprecedented increase of crime. It was the principal factor behind the increasing appearances of social unrest indicating a serious threat to the social structure, even as licks of flame in a smoky building portend a condition menacing the very existence of the edifice.”22 In his inaugural address the new President said:

Restoration calls, however, not for change in ethics alone. This nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.23

In that paragraph one can visualize the Civilian Conservation Corps as the “vanguard” of “The New Spirit of American Future,” as the President called it in his first radio address to the “forestry army.”24

Proposal of the Program

Although the banking crisis of “the first twelve days” may have delayed President Roosevelt’s breaking away from the old order and the beginning of his “new order,” yet it was evident that he would lose little time in launching his emergency conservation work program. On the very day Congress met in extraordinary session, the secretaries of Agriculture, the Interior, and War, the Director of the Budget, the Judge Advocate General of the Army, and the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior met with the President to hear him outline his program for the conservation of men and forests. His hearers agreed that the idea was good, that it could be set in motion immediately, and that there was need for such labor in the forests. The Judge Advocate General, Colonel Rucker, assured the President that he could put the program into necessary and legal form for presentation to Congress by nine o’clock that night. At that hour the group reassembled, discussed the plan, expressed their views, and made several changes; and at ten-thirty the President placed “this new child of government” before a delegation of congressional leaders who awaited him.25

The original bill, introduced in Congress March 13, by Senator Costigan,26 evoked much criticism.27 It was redrafted in more general terms and passed upon by the President at a White House conference two days later. He informed the congressional leaders that he desired to have his unemployment relief measure enacted before the proposed two or three weeks recess was taken, and to have it financed by unexpended balances in the Treasury and not by bond issue. He also expressed his desire to have the conservation workers placed on reforestation projects in the national preserves near the large centers of population. The Forestry Service estimated that $150,000,000 could be wisely expended in the national forests annually.28

It was evident from the President’s message to Congress on the “Relief of Unemployment” that the Civilian Conservation Corps was to be the first immediate step to meet the unprecedented conditions brought about by the depression. In this message he said:

It is essential to our recovery program that measures immediately be enacted aimed at unemployment relief. A direct attack on this problem suggests three types of legislation.

The first is the enrollment of workers now by the Federal Government for such public employment as can be quickly started and will not interfere with the demand for or the proper standards of normal employment.29

After explaining the second and third types of relief, namely, the grants to States for relief work, and the extension of “a broad public works labor-creating program,” the President continued:

The first of these measures which I have enumerated, however, can and should be immediately enacted. I purpose to create a Civilian Conservation Corps to be used in simple work, not interfering with normal employment, and confining itself to forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control and similar projects.30

He then called attention to the definite and practical value of such work as a means of creating future national wealth as well as “through the prevention of great personal financial loss,” stating that the work could be carried on by existing governmental machinery. He continued: “I estimate that 250,000 31 men can be given temporary employment by early summer if you will give me authority to proceed within the next two weeks.”32

Next to the call for quick action was the unusual statement that he would ask for no new funds at that time, but would use unobligated funds, appropriated for public works.33 The statement that “this enterprise is an established part of our national policy”34 referred to the conservation of “previous natural resources,” rather than to the permanency of the enterprise. Yet such a broad statement of policy leaves room for speculation as to the permanency of this or a similar program for the unemployed youth of the nation. One of the aims, and to the President the most important, was stated in his message as follows:

More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work. The overwhelming majority of unemployed Americans, who are now walking the streets and receiving private or public relief, would infinitely prefer to work. We can take a vast army of these unemployed out into healthful surroundings. We can eliminate to some extent at least the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability. It is not a panacea for all the unemployment, but it is an essential step in this emergency.35

Immediately after the reading of the President’s message on March 21, a bill coming down from him and prepared under his direction,36 to carry out the principles of relief and conservation as given in the message, was introduced jointly in the Senate by Senators Robinson, of Arkansas, and Wagner of New York, and was referred to the Committee on Education and Labor.37 An identical bill was introduced simultaneously in the House of Representatives by majority leader Byrnes, of Tennessee, and was referred to the Committee on Labor.38 The bill, in its brevity, a characteristic of legislative proposals of the Administration, omitted many of the stipulations evolved during the study of the plan by Secretary Perkins and Senators Wagner, Costigan, and LaFollette.39

Fearing that the Administration bill might be changed in Committee unless those dealing with it had more definite ideas as to its purpose, scope and effects, a conference was held with the President, at the request of Senator Walsh, presiding chairman of the Joint Hearings of the Senate and House committees on the measure.40 This conference, held the night before the Joint Committee hearings began, included the Committee members and Secretaries Perkins, Dern, Ickes, and Wallace. Suggestions were made as to the rate of pay, use of unobligated public works funds for financing, placing the Army in charge of mobilization and operation of the camps, and enlarging the scope of the work to include the wiping out of the gypsy moth.41

Public Reaction to the Bill

Before the hearings of the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House had proceeded far, it was evident that the proposed bill would be radically changed. Opposition to its provisions as written came from friend and foe of the whole emergency relief program. As soon as the bill was presented Labor voiced its opposition through the President of the American Federation of Labor. President Green’s chief concern was the military feature of the plan. He thought it would mean the “regimentation of labor” with a form of compulsory service under military control and army rates of wages. Such a plan, he feared, would awaken feelings of “grave apprehension in the hearts and minds of labor.”42 A. F. Whitney, President of the Brotherhood of Trainmen, in a letter to Donald Richberg, termed the program inadequate, vicious and weak. He said that it “would place government’s endorsement upon poverty at a bare subsistence level.”43 It was evident from these and other criticisms that the critics had not followed the President in his development of the idea, and had formed hasty and unwarranted conclusions in regard to some of the proposals.

The late Major R. Y. Stuart, Chief of the United States Forest Service was the first witness to give his views to the Committee. He stated that there are 161,000,000 acres of national forest lands, the great hulk being in the Far West, and only 7,000,000 acres of national forest lands and some 15,000,000 acres of state owned and controlled lands lying east of the Mississippi River. He proposed an amendment to extend the scope of the work to private lands adjoining or near any public domain, because tree pests and fire hazards on such lands are unusually detrimental to the public forests. Only fifty-four per cent of the forest lands in the United States, he said, were under forest protection, and there was already in operation, although inadequately financed, a cooperative arrangement between the Federal Government and the various States in conservation work.44 To this proposal Senator Walsh replied that the White House conferees had felt that such a plan might involve competition with private labor, a consequence which the Administration wished to avoid.45

Major Stuart then spoke of the relief feature of the proposed bill and compared it with the cooperative arrangements which the Forest Service had made with some of the States and counties.46 in California the Service had operated some subsistence camps, the State or county furnishing the money to feed and clothe the men, and the Forest Service furnishing them shelter in the woods for the preservation of which they were working. The stipened paid in the camps both of California and of some of the Lake States was not really considered compensation, as the men would receive it anyway under the relief provisions. According to Mr. Stuart, both the workers and those in charge of these subsistence camp programs felt that it was more helpful to furnish the men with something to do rather than to have them receive this relief in idleness 37

The Chief Forester suggested further that the mobilization and conditioning of the men could be more expeditiously and economically carried on by the Army, as the Forest Service had no facilities, especially in the East, for such service.48 This suggestion brought up the question of where the men from the East would be sent, some members of the Committee fearing that the men would be sent from their home states to some distant section.49 This query was answered by showing the possibilities of employment in the East on state forests, although approximately ninety-five per cent of the public domain, the national parks and forests, lies between the Rocky Mountain region and the Pacific Coast. Major Stuart stated that, if the bill were confined to work in the national forests alone, many would have to be transported to the West, and he would not advise this.50 He wished rather to see the bill broadened to include privately owned lands where a public benefit is to be served in line with the policy followed in forest protection.51

In conclusion Major Stuart pointed out the possibilities of work in the national parks, the public domain, and other Federal and State owned property which would come within the plan. He showed the need for conservation work in the national forests, and stated that only $9,000,000 had been allowed for the 1933 improvement work, and $5,000,000 for that of 1934. He said that for the previous twelve months the Forest Service had had approximately 2,700 men in its employment, and that it had been necessary for them to move along at a very slow pace in their protective and administrative work. This statement brought up the question of trained supervisors for the proposed conservation corps, and the witness said that his Service had a considerable number of foresters, woodsmen, and others, skilled in the work, who could be used. Finally, he indicated to the Congressmen that those men already employed in the national forests would not be displaced as a result of the proposed plan.52

Secretary of Labor, Perkins, in her first appearance before a congressional committee, defended the proposed plan as a relief measure, saying: “The purpose of this legislation is to provide a practical form of work relief for about 200,000 or 250,000 men, aiming to give a form of \ work relief which can be accepted by self respecting citizens without any impairment of their personal dignity.”53

The Secretary stated that there was a large group of unemployed men who had experienced great difficulty in securing adequate relief or in being able to shift for themselves. These young and unmarried men had been left out of the aid of most relief agencies, because it had been felt that those with families should be taken care of first. Many of these people “who have been picking up a bit here and a bit there,” had been forced “to a standard of living and type of behavior which they as good, sound Americans could not and did not endorse.” It was from this group that most of the Civilian Conservation Corps would be recruited.54

When one of the Committee members intimated that the program was a “sweatshop” project, Secretary Perkins said: “I do not think any one should regard this project as in any way approaching that kind of work.” Her reasons were: that the men would be those dependent upon relief and unemployed; that they would be covered by the Workmen’s Compensation Act; that all necessary transportation would be furnished; that the men would get $30.00 per month whether they worked or not, which was not true of either skilled or unskilled laborers; that it was inconceivable that these men would work eight hours per day; and that recreational and educational activities would be carried on for their benefit.55 The Secretary was then asked what she thought would be the effect upon private industry of a bill providing for a wage of a dollar a day, and if she did not think that every private industry would immediately say that it should be the prevailing rate throughout the United States. She replied tersely: “I do not think so, sir, because it does not make sense. ... I think that ordinary self-protection would lead industrialists to recognize the need of paying a wage which will produce more purchasing power.”56

Secretary Perkins thought it would be foolish to limit the plan to unmarried men, as the enrollment would be voluntary. She did not think the effect of the husband’s absence on the family life would be very marked, as “family life in America on the whole is very sound.” Instead she feared more danger from the unemployed man’s becoming detached from his family by desertion, since he has to make his rounds to the relief agencies for his basket. Finally, she defended the physical examination of the enrollees on the ground that crippled or disabled men and those with heart disease could not endure the hardship. She did not think that the knowledge that a person was defective would make it impossible for him to get a job elsewhere, since certain kinds of defects might prevent him from doing forestry work, yet would not be a handicap in other occupations.57

There was serious objection in the Committee to that part of the bill which authorized the expenditure of such unobligated moneys in the Treasury, heretofore appropriated for public works, as might be necessary and available to finance the program.58 Consequently, Director of the Budget Douglas, was called the second day of the hearings, and devoted most of his time to answering queries regarding this provision. The answer to the finance question, the Director said, had to do with the immediate future and with the next year or thereafter. The use of remaining unobligated public works funds for immediate financing was more advisable than asking Congress for an additional appropriation. In the meantime the Administration was working on the method by which coordinated relief and unemployment program could be financed. Mr. Douglas estimated the cost of the Emergency Conservation Work program at $250,000,000 for the first year, or about $20,000,-000 per month. He assured the apprehensive Congressmen that it was contemplated to carry into the completed and coordinated unemployment and relief program public buildings and other public works projects, although the obligation of funds for such authorized and new projects was temporarily suspended.59

Another major public criticism centered around the Army’s part in the conservation program, and General Douglas McArthur, Chief of Staff, was called to present its views. He said in part:

The history of the uniformed service will show it [the Army] has not only the war-time mission of protection of law and order, but that it is a great emergency relief organization. It is upon that general basis and background that the Army, as I understand it, is to be utilized in the furtherance of the plan. . . . The various agencies scattered throughout the country will select those individuals who are to be enrolled. The Army will then collect these men in the various centers for the purpose of rehabilitation, for the purpose of fitting them with shelter, food, clothing, equipment, preparatory to being checked out to the various labor projects. The time . . . involved . . . will probably be not more than a month.60

Later he estimated that the cost of processing these men for a month would be about $35.00 each, including the necessary expenditure for their shelter, food, equipment and for the implements they would use in the forests, but not transportation or any cash allowance they might receive.61

When asked about physical or military training for the men, the General replied: “No military training whatsoever,” and the only physical training would be “that which any well ordered community would go through in order to keep men in physical condition, so they will be prepared physically for the tasks which they are to undergo.” The General, when asked if the bill was not similar to the original selective draft act of the World War, said: “As far as the Army is concerned, it is not similar.”62 Senator Black came to the defense of this phase of the bill, stating that he did “not think it would be possible to draw a constitutional bill in peace time where men would be conscripted for peace service.’’63 General McArthur clarified the controversial question of discipline to which the enrollees would be subjected when he said, “when we have them, there will be such ordinary and decent requirements as any civilized community would have.”64

Perhaps the most opposition to the bill came from President Green of the American Federation of Labor, who publicly criticized it as soon as it was offered in Congress. Before setting forth Labor’s feelings in regard to it he expressed, first, his desire to approach the discussion, “in the broadest possible spirit,” and secondly, his appreciation of the sincere and humane consideration of its sponsors, who had “a desire to do something to relieve unemployment.” He continued that he was in thorough accord with the aim of the bill, and the need to find employment for idle persons, where they can earn a decent living, saying: “But I do not believe . . . that it is necessary to regiment labor, to enlist it in an army, to place it under at least a form of military control, of military domination, in order to accomplish that purpose.” Commenting upon the Army’s part in the proposed plan, as given by General McArthur, Mr. Green said: ‘‘This is military control in itself. There is your regimentation, the very principles against which labor has always vigorously contended. It smacks as I see it, of fascism, of Hitlerism, of a form of sovietism.”65

Mr. Green’s second objection to the bill, which he considered as important as that of regimentation^ was in regard to the rate of pay.67 He contended that the bill was not a relief measure in the full and complete sense of the term, because it set the amount of compensation that was to be paid for a day’s work.” 68 Later he pointed out that the relief feature was in the hospitalization, the food, the shelter, and the one dollar per day provisions.69 The compensation rate, however, he feared, would be accepted as a standard rate of wages, and labor was opposed to such compensation, “not only because of the wage itself, but because of the depressing effect upon the wage standards established by labor in private industry.”70 Previously he had made it clear that he was not opposed to the reforestation project but to the rate of pay and the method proposed.71

Other objections voiced by the labor leader were: the use of unobligated funds, if it would delay public works construction, and the involuntary allotment of part of the enrollee’s pay to his dependents.72 Yet unlike most critics, Mr. Green gave the Committee his own idea of such a program. His recommendation was as follows:

That a plan of employment of idle workers in reforestation and reclamation and other items covered by the bill be formulated providing for the payment of standard rates of pay under voluntary conditions of employment and that the element of ‘forced labor* and military service be completely eliminated and stricken from the plan of employment to be followed.73

Other witnesses against the measure claimed that it discriminated against the negro;74 that it was a camouflaged relief measurer;75 that it provided for the establishment of “forced labor,” starvation wages and “the destruction of the families of American workers.”76 One witness even went so far as to object to placing men in camps other than those of their own selection. He contended that they would be forced to stay in the camps, and pay for them with their labor until discharged.77 The hearing closed with Senator Walsh’s reading a letter from a Philadelphian, who voiced his objection to the project by saying that “this plan for putting gangs of helots to work in the national forests is objectionable in many ways . . . it . . . will mean the wholesale ruination of the beauty of the forests.”78 After protesting against “the artificializing of what natural beauty this country still has,” the writer ended his plea by saying: “It is very sad when the juggernaut of bureaucracy is allowed to stamp it [the beauty of the forests] out, as will be done systematically and ruthlessly in the event that this ‘unemployment relief bill’ is passed.”79

Further criticism of the proposed conservation measure came from the Joint Committee on Unemployment, of which Dr. John Dewey was Chairman. In a letter sent to President Roosevelt, while the bill was still in Committee, Dr. Dewey’s Committee objected to associating the Army in any way with the project; the one dollar per day rate of pay; and the type of work proposed.80 in place of the proposal, the Committee recommended a $5,000,000,000 slum clearance program, with the workers paid adequate wages.81 The newspapers were, on the whole sympathetic to the proposal, as they were to most of the other New Deal projects. The New York Times, in an editorial crediting the President with the plan and praising his sincerity and enthusiasm for it, doubted if it would receive the zealous approval of Congresses President Charles Lathrop Pack, of the American Tree Association, voiced the views of his association in a letter to President Green, of the American Federation of Labor. He said that he was astonished at opposition to a relief measure that would pay “a good American dollar” to thousands of jobless.83 Dr. Charles Herty, a New York and Georgia scientist, hailed the program as one in which the President would find the machinery ready for the development of a reforestation program in the eleven Southern Pine Belt states. In these states there were 181,500,000 acres of cut over lands and forests on which one million men could be set to work at once cleaning underbrush, plowing fire strips and resetting pine seedlings.84

Congressional Reaction to the Bill

The many suggestions and objections to the Administration’s unemployment reforestation bill, brought out in the Joint Committee Hearings and expressed by the public at large, showed that it would have to be radically changed to meet public approval. In order to expedite their reports the Senate Committee was called to meet in executive session the next day after the hearings, and the House Committee two days later.85 Both Committees reported the bill favorably to their respective chambers on the latter date, the Senate report constituting an amendment in the nature of a substitute bill.86 Chairman Walsh, when asked whether or not any written report on the measure had been submitted, replied that he did not think one necessary, since the bill itself was so simple and direct.87

In presenting the substitute bill to the Senate, Senator Walsh stated that the Committee, having heard commendation and objections, had agreed that the non-controversial features of the plan were “the opportunity to engage in forestation work as a means of relieving unemployment, and secondly, the use of unobligated funds.” He continued that the substitute bill did nothing more than authorize the President to employ citizens from the ranks of the unemployed to go into the public domain and carry on reforestation. This was to be done under such rules and regulations as the President might prescribe, without restriction, except that the employment be given to unemployed citizens. The Senator called attention to the fact that the bill, like most emergency legislation, gave the President permissive blanket authority.88 The Committee agreed unanimously that this was the only proper way to deal with the problem, because Congress could not well work out the details arising with regard to transportation, conditions of employment, wage schedules, and the location of camps and hospitals.89

Senator Walsh asked the Senators, in considering the bill, to keep in mind three things, namely: emergency, relief work and unemployment.90 In concluding his presentation he pointed out that the substitute bill was illustrative of the temporary emergency policy; that it would enable the President, who was of necessity given wide discretion both as to policy and administration, to act decisively, helpfully and speedily with unemployment relief; that the extent of the benefits of the project could not be estimated; that it should be an important aid in stimulating the resumption of trade and production; and that the Committee felt the President should be left free to determine how to handle the many difficult details in the light of circumstances as they might develop.91

The two days discussion of the Committee bill brought forth practically the same objections and suggestions as those given in the hearings. Judging from the discussion and amendments proposed and adopted, the main objection was the blanket authority given the President.92 Yet Senator Borah, in speaking of granting this extraordinary power, said:

This is the mildest form of delegation of power I have seen in the Senate since this session of Congress opened. I do not think there is anything in the pending bill that is unconstitutional. It may be that there is a question of policy involved, but we have been for a long time granting lump sums and telling the President to do so and so according to his judgment, and if I construe this bill correctly, that is what it does.93

Most of the dozen amendments proposed and adopted by the Senate were of a clarifying or permissive nature.94 Those limiting the authority or discretion of the President were as follows: (a) By Senator Walcott, extending the work to “lands in private ownership,” but only for the purpose of controlling forest fires and disease.95 it will be remembered that such an amen6ment was suggested in the Committee Hearings by Chief Forester Stuart.9G (b) By Senator Couzens, limiting the purchase of private lands to those which were contiguous to the property already in the ownership of the federal government.97 There was perhaps more objection to this amendment than to any other proposed, especially from states which had no federal lands. Senator Connally, for example, feared that Texas would not get the benefits it was entitled to under the proposed relief measure since it had no federal lands.98 (c) By Senator Hebert, limiting the Act to two years. This amendment was agreed to without debate. The Senator desired that the limit be one year, but at the suggestion of Senator Walsh it was made two years.99

The House Committee on Labor accepted the Senate Committee’s bill and filed majority and minority reports.100 The former consisted of the President’s message asking for the bill; statements as to why the substitute bill was reported; and a letter from the President of the American Federation of Labor, expressing his approval of the substitute measure. It stated, furthermore, that President Roosevelt had given his approval of the reported bill and that it was entirely satisfactory. Chairman Connery gave three reasons why the minority could not recommend the adoption of the relief bill. They were: “That these workers will be regimented and physically examined; that under the guise of utilizing unskilled . . . labor, the cash allowance will not exceed $1 per day; that the American public will know that . . . Congress . . . fully realized that these men would be regimented in some manner and that they were to receive for their labor not more than $1 per day.”101

The minority report likewise quoted objections to the original bill as brought out in the hearings, especially in connection with the testimonies of Director Douglas, General McArthur and President Green. Finally, the report gave the Connery amendment to the bill providing for no regimentation of labor; voluntary enrollment for periods of two months; cash allowances of $80.00 for married men or those with dependents and $50.00 per month for single men; the work to be strictly reforestation; and the continuance of all public works authorized and appropriated for.102

Since Chairman Connery was against the reported bill Mr. Ramspeck, of the Committee, presented the amended Senate bill, which had passed that body the day before.103 The House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole, House on the State of the Union, and majority leader Byrnes, author of the original House Bill 3905, led the argument for the defense.104 The arguments for and against the measure were similar to those given in the Hearings and in the Senate debate as noted above.105 Only three106 of the eighteen107 amendments proposed in the House were adopted. One by Mr. DePriest prevented discrimination against the Negro.108 This amendment, as noted elsewhere, was proposed in the Committee hearings,109 but was not included in the substitute bill. Representative Blanton, of Texas, objected to the DePriest amendment on the ground that it was out of order. The chair overruled the objection and the amendment was agreed to by a vote of one hundred and seventy-nine to seventy-one.110 The second amendment was offered by Mr. Byrnes111 at the request of the President. It changed the wording regarding the purchase, donation, etc., of real property in section two of the Senate bill. The third amendment proposed by Mr. Ramspeck112 merely restored section four, which had been thrown out on a point of order.

After the Committee of the Whole House had risen and reported the bill back to the House with the three amendments, and these had been agreed to, Mr. Connery made a motion to recommit the bill to the Committee on Labor with instructions to report it back to the House with his bill inserted after the enacting clause as an amendment.113 His motion was rejected and the amended Senate substitute bill was passed with the yeas and nays refused.114

The next day the Senate accepted the House amendments, 115 and after the House had authorized the Speaker to sign the bill notwithstanding the adjournment or recess of that body116 it was signed by Speaker Rainey and Vice President Garner117 and presented to President Roosevelt the following day.118 The President signed his emergency conservation work measure immediately in the presence of Senator Walsh and Representative Ramspeck, who had piloted it through Congress, and representatives of the American Forestry Association. In signing, he said: “This law will not only relieve unemployment but will also promote a needed activity in this country.”119

Summary of the Statute

An analysis of the Emergency Conservation Work statute shows that the whole theory of the plan is, as so ably expressed by Senator Walsh, “that we need speed, we need some one with direct authority to act quickly, and we need some one who will try to apply the authority delegated in a helpful way in reducing unemployment.”120 in spite of the sundry amendments added by Congress the statute is more of a permissive act than the original draft. It is based on the principle that the great public domain of the nation provides vast opportunities for employment. The President is given blanket authority to go into that domain and use it at his discretion to partially relieve the unemployment situation, and thereby improve the economic and social conditions of the nation.

Section one of the statute clearly states its purpose: to relieve unemployment, provide for the restoration of the nation’s depleted natural resources, and to advance an orderly program of public works. In order to do this the President is authorized, “under such rules and regulations as he may prescribe,” to provide for employing unemployed citizens, regardless of “race, color or creed,” in the carrying on of work of a public nature in connection with forestation on national and state lands “suitable for timber production;” prevention of forest fires, floods and soil erosion; plant pests and disease control; the construction, maintenance, or repair of paths, trails and fire lanes, in the national forests and park; and such other work on the public domain and Government reservations as the President deems desirable. He may, in his discretion, extend the provisions of the statute to lands of counties, municipalities, and private owners, but only for the purpose of preventing and controlling of floods, forest fires, and tree diseases and pests. The President is further authorized to provide subsistence, clothing, housing, medical care, hospitalization, and cash allowances for the enrollees. He may also provide them with transportation to and from the place of enrollment121 The Forest Products Laboratory is aided in its investigations and research by the allocation of funds from the Emergency Conservation Work program.122

Section two of the statute authorized the President to enter into such agreements with the states as may be necessary for utilizing existing state administrative agencies to carry out the provisions of the act. He may acquire real property by condemnation, donation, purchase, or otherwise, without the consent of the states so concerned. Section three merely makes the Federal employees’ compensation laws applicable to the enrollees. Section four gives authority to use unobligated moneys from appropriations already made for public works (except for projects already or about to be constructed, or already allocated), to carry on the work. Section five is a “rider” to the Committee bill and applies to an Act approved July 21, 1932, entitled “An Act to relieve destitution,” and so forth, and does not concern the emergency conservation work project. Section six, as mentioned before, is the amendment of Senator Hebert limiting the Act to two years from date of passage and no longer.123

A comparison of the enacted emergency conservation work measure with the original bill shows that it gives broader discretionary power and is more in line with the trend of emergency legislation. The original bill restricted the selection of the men “as nearly as possible in proportion to the unemployment existing in the several states,” limited the enrollment to one year, set the rate of pay “not to exceed $30.00 per month,” and provided for the giving of an involuntary allotment to the enrollees’ dependents.124 On the other hand the statute placed no restrictions upon the President except that the employment must be given to unemployed citizens regardless of race, creed or color. The statute also leaves out such other controversial questions as limiting the work to single men; fixing of wages of technical workers according to locality; the kind of camps and form of discipline; and the matter of pensions. Instead, it gives the President the responsibility in the making of regulations concerning the conditions of employment, the selection of the enrollees; the public domain upon which they will work, and the nature and character of the work to be done.125

Organization of the Program

The emergency conservation work statute clothed the President with blanket authority to arrange for the establishment of a nation-wide chain of forest camps, its immediate objective being the relief of distress among the jobless and their dependents; the accomplishment of useful worthwhile work in the public forests, parks and reservations; the rehabilitation of men whose health and morale had reached a low ebb during the depression; and the reduction of overtaxed relief agencies through the allotment of part of the cash allowances of the men to their dependents. Contrary to previous legislation which designated the departments or agencies to be used in carrying out its mandate, Congress authorized the President to utilize such existing departments or agencies as he might designate to carry out his “pet project.”126

The President lost no time in setting up the overhead administrative machinery of the Civilian Conservation Corps. On the 5th of April he created127 the Emergency Conservation Work organization, with Robert Fechner, a former lecturer on labor questions at Harvard and Dartmouth colleges,128 as Director. Although the terms of his appointment made the Director responsible for carrying out the provisions of the Conservation Act his work is that of general supervisory control.129 Upon appointment, Director Fechner laid down the general policies guiding the establishment and operation of the camps.130

An advisory council, including representatives from each of the four executive departments designated to aid in carrying out the program, was set up to cooperate with the Director in the establishment and operation of the conservation camps.131 The Secretary of Agriculture appointed Major R. Y. Stuart, Chief of the Forest Service; the Secretary of the Interior, Horace M. Albright, Director of National Parks, Buildings and Reservations; the Secretary of Labor, W. Frank Persons, Director of the United States Employment Service; and the Secretary of War, Colonel Duncan K. Major, Jr., of the General Staff.132

The Department of Labor, acting through designated State Directors of Selection was chosen to select the experienced woodsmen and the enrollees from eighteen to twenty-five years of age, or Juniors, exclusive of Indians and Veterans. The Indians and some non-Indians on the reservations are selected and enrolled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, while the Veterans are selected by the regional managers of the Veterans’ Administration.133 The conservation workers in Alaska and Puerto Rico are selected through the Forest Service and those in Hawaii by the National Park Service.134

The War Department, functioning through the Corps Area Commanders and the liaison officers at Corps Area headquarters, enrolls, assigns, replaces, and conditions all the enrollees of the Civilian Conservation Corps proper. It also has charge of camp operations, recreational and welfare activities, and the disbursing and accounting work in these camps, while the educational training is under the general supervision of the Department of the Interior.135 The work projects are under the direction of the Agriculture, the Interior and War departments. The Department of Agriculture, operating through the Forest Service, plans and supervises the conservation work on national forests, including Alaska, Puerto Rico, Oregon and California railroad land grant; executes camp projects for the Navy on naval reservations and for the Tennessee Valley Authority; and supervises the planning and execution of forestry and erosion control work projects on state and private lands. The Department also carries on several projects through the Bureau of Animal Industry and the Bureau of Biological Survey. The Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, the Office of Indian Affairs, the General Land Office, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Soil Erosion Services is responsible for the technical administrative supervision of conservation work on lands under its control. It also supervises the work in state, county, and metropolitan parks; and erosion control work on private lands under the Soil Erosion Service. The War Department, acting through the Office of Chief of Engineers, operates the war veterans’ camps engaged in flood control work. The Department also supervises the work projects on military reservations.136

The selection of the camp sites was naturally given to these three Departments since they had to be located near suitable conservation projects. It has been the policy of the camp selecting agencies to locate as many of the men as possible on work projects within their home states137 This, however, could not be done during the first and second camp periods when site selection depended largely upon the supply of work of the type authorized by the reforestation act.138 The states with large forested areas, especially California, were allotted more camps than they normally would have had,139 in as much as most of the densely populated states were unable to furnish projects for their quotas.

Mobilization of the C. C. C.

In order to carry out the President’s wish to have 250,000 men at work in the nation’s forests by early summer,140 the various agencies selected to administer the program did not wait until the Emergency Conservation Work legislation was passed before going to work. The Forest Service in cooperation with other agencies, in response to Senate Resolution 175, dated March 10, 1932; had just completed an intensive study of the forest situation in the United States,141 and, therefore, was ready to begin work on its part of the program. The project supervising agencies had until the middle of July to complete their plans and get their administrative machinery in full working order, since the Civilian Conservation Corps would have to be selected and conditioned before the project work could begin. On the other hand, the Labor and War departments had to make arrangements to select, enroll and condition the men at once.

On the 3rd of April the President announced that he wanted the first men enrolled by the sixth of that month. This assignment called for immediate action on the part of the Department of Labor. Its representative on the Advisory Council, W. Frank Persons, realized that he had no time to set up a nationwide organization of his own for the selection of 250,000 men from among all who might apply. 142 Moreover, he had no desire to form such an organization but preferred to use organizations already familiar with the unemployed youth in the particular localities and well qualified to choose the type of men desired. With only three days in which to organize these selecting agencies so they could begin the enrollment of the first 25,000 on April 6, Mr. Persons invited the representatives of the various relief agencies of the seventeen largest cities in the country to meet with him in Washington.143

Representatives of the Agriculture, the Interior and War departments and from the Director’s Office also participated in this meeting. Detailed discussion of the Civilian Conservation Corps program was held and visiting representatives were asked to take over the job of selecting the initial group of enrollees. Instructions were immediately wired to the local welfare agencies of the representatives’ twelve states, and selection of the men began.144 The selecting organization was perfected by the designation of a State director of selection to act as the representative of the Department of Labor in each State.145 The entire quota of 250,000 men was selected within thirty days, and from that time on additional men were furnished for replacements as fast as the Army Corps Area commanders notified the selecting agencies that additional workers were needed.146

The biggest job of the whole Emergency Conservation Work program was given to the Army. To establish thirteen hundred and thirty forest camps on a three thousand mile front from the Atlantic to the Pacific, distributed in depth from Canada to Mexico, and occupying every state in the Union except Delaware, and to move 55,000 of the men a distance of over 2,000 miles from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rockies and the Sierras, would take careful planning and enormous effort, even though there should be no administrative or legislative delay.147 It was not necessary to wait until the legislation was passed before going to work. In fact, the Army had made plans for a similar program before the New Deal came into being.148

As early as January 10, 1933, Senator Couzens introduced a bill in Congress to provide for the sheltering and feeding of indigent, transient youths by the Army.149 Later it took definite form as an amendment to the Army Appropriation Bill and called for the caring for some 88,000 young men as a charity measure, but it failed to become a law.150 Nevertheless, the War Department, aware of the Couzens scheme, immediately made plans to carry out the proposal in case it became a law. With the failure of its adoption the Army merely laid its plans away against possible future use.151 The occasion came when the President proposed his Civilian Conservation Corps idea at the White House Conference on the 9th of March.152 Under orders from the Commander-in-chief, the Chief of Staff on the same date requested the preparation of regulations for the reception, organization and care of the enrollees.153

By the 24th of March, while the Joint Committee of Congress was still holding hearings on the Emergency Conservation Work bill, “the General Staff had prepared in draft form, complete regulations governing the administration and supply of the . . . Corps ready for issue in the field.” They defined the Army’s task, its relation to the other cooperating agencies in the program, and set up probable quotas for the various Army Corps Areas, estimating unit costs covering clothing, medical attention, shelter, subsistence, supervision, welfare, equipment for project work, and transportation to and from camp. The following day secret radio messages outlining the field work of the Army in the new program were sent to the Corps Area Commanders.154 In this manner, except for last minute modifications, the Army was prepared for its work before the discussion of its authority began in Congress.

It has already been pointed out that the conservation bill as finally passed left most of the details to the discretion of the President. Especially did this apply to the relationships that would obtain between the various departments in charge of the program. The executive order establishing these relationships was drafted while the bill was still in Committee, but was, of course, modified, as were the Army regulations, to coordinate them with the plans of the other departments concerned, before final passage of the measure. The Director’s approval of the War Department’s regulations governing its part in the administration of the emergency conservation program and agreement with the Department of Labor in the matter of selection and enrollment of the men was secured by the 5th of April On that date all Corps Area Commanders again received orders assigning their duties and directing them to enroll the first contingents the next day.155 The Third Corps Area selected the first man in the so called “peace time army” on the anniversary of the Nation’s entrance into the World War.156 Two days later, the actual enrollment, consisting of Juniors and the local experienced woodsmen, was 1,366.157

A month later there was an actual enrollment of only 50,347 men.158 This delay called for quick action if the President’s objective was to be reached. On May 12, after enabling legislation had been enacted, the President approved a program that authorized an enrollment of 274,375 and would place 250,000 men at work in the forests by the first of July. To accomplish this it was necessary that the full number of men be on hand by the seventh of June; that two weeks must be allowed for their reception and conditioning, and one week for transportation and establishment in camp; that some additional 222,000 men, at an average daily rate of 8,540 had to be enrolled and organized; that around 1,200 more company units had to be organized and equipped at the rate of twenty-seven per day; that approximately 1,300 work camps had to be set up at the rate of twenty-six per day; and that 55,000 of the men had to be transported a distance of 2,000 miles.159

The four cooperating agencies worked at top speed in order to carry out to the letter the President’s instructions. The Forest Service and the National Park Service rushed to completion a two year forest work program which normally would have been spread over a ten year periodic Their immediate work in order to get the program under way was to select from a thousand to fifteen hundred of these previously planned work projects, scattered throughout the most inaccessible portions of the country, suitable in character and location for the program. This done, the next step was the selection of suitable camp locations for the company units of inexperienced youths who were to work these forestry projects. After the sites are selected they are given a number, the letter symbols indicating the type of camp and the numbers the rank in point of selection. Thus S-51, stands for a project on a State Forest; F, or NF-4, on National Forest; P-68, on Private Land; E-5, Erosion Camp; NP-6, National Park; and SP-17, State Park.161 These Services, furthermore, had the task of selecting, procuring and distributing tools, machines, trucks, for each project Finally, it was necessary to select, assign, and instruct suitable supervisory men with highly specialized knowledge of the work as well as the ability to lead.

The first camp was established in the George Washington National Forest, at Edinburg, Virginia, April 17, 1933.162 it received the Federal Civilian Conservation Corps number of F-1, and was appropriately named Camp Roosevelt. The Company, Number 322, was organized at Fort Washington, Maryland. Practically one-third of its members were from Virginia and the rest from the District of Columbia. The men, all white, were from the eighteen to twenty-five year old group.103 By April 19, one hundred and seven camps located in regions Seven and Nine of the national Forest Service had been approved.164 A month later one thousand camps had been selected, although only fifty-two had actually been established. The selected camps, dotting every section of the United States, included sixteen at military posts; six hundred and fifty-five in national forests, sixty-three in National Parks, one hundred and twenty-four in State Parks and one hundred and forty-two on private lands. One-half of the established camps were in the Third Corps Area, twelve in the Sixth, six in the Eighth, five in the Ninth, two in the Seventh, and one in the First. There were none in the Second, Fourth or Fifth Corps Areas.165

By June 20, thirteen hundred and thirty forest camps had been established. 166 At the end of the first camp period there were fifteen hundred and twenty camps in operation. Twelve hundred and sixty eight of these, including five in Puerto Rico and one in Alaska, were established by the various Services of the Department of Agriculture; two hundred and forty-three by the Department of the Interior; and nine by the War Department.167

During the second period the total number of camps was increased to fifteen hundred and twenty-eight by the addition of eight Indian camps, increasing their number to seventy-five. The number in Alaska was increased to three and that of Puerto Rico to six. The total number of camps given does not include those established by the Department of the Interior in Hawaii in this period. Here the work was distributed over four of the Hawaiian Islands, and counted on the company quota basis the number of camps would be six, bringing the total number of work camps for the second period up to fifteen hundred and thirty-four.168 Counting each company of approximately two hundred men as a camp, the grand total of camps for the second period was 1,548 instead of 1,534. The authorized quota of 1,468 for the Civilian Conservation Corps proper was retained by the establishment of new camps for those abandoned on account of climatic conditions.169

The fifteen hundred and thirty-four camps were divided as follows: Forest Service, 1,140, a decrease of one hundred and twenty-five under the first camp period; Biological Survey, two, a decrease of one; Bureau of Animal Industry, one; National Parks, sixty-seven, a decrease of three; State Parks, two hundred and thirty-nine, an increase of one hundred and thirty-seven; Bureau of Indian Affairs, seventy-five, an increase of eight; and the War Department, ten, an increase of one. With the establishment of two camps in Delaware every State in the Union, the District of Columbia, and each of the principal outlying possessions had one or more camps. There was also a marked decrease of camps in the Ninth Corps Area and an increase in the number east of the Rocky Mountains.170 This shift from West to East was made possible to a large extent by the acquiring of nearly half a million acres of land through gift and purchase by the states for state parks and forests171 and the acquisition of some half million acres of forest-land, situated in twenty-three of the states east of the Great Plains, by the federal government,172 and the establishment of camps thereon.173 During the first camp period only twenty-six states had state park camps while in the second period this number was thirty-two.174

In the third period the total number of camps jumped from 1,534 to 1,731. They were divided as follows: Forest Service, 1,143, an increase of three over the previous period; Biological Survey, three, an increase of one; Bureau of Animal Industry, one; National Parks and Monuments, one hundred and nine, an increase of forty-two; State Parks, three hundred and twenty-five, an increase of eighty-six; Office of Indian Affairs, seventy-seven, an increase of two; General Land Office, one; Bureau of Reclamations, seven; Soil Erosion Service, thirty-four; Office of Chief of Engineers, twenty-two, a decrease of six; War Department’s other project work, nine, an increase of two. The large increase in the total number of camps for the third period was due primarily to the establishment of one hundred and seventy-one drought relief camps. Ninety of these camps were established by the Forest Service, fifty-two by the State Park Work organization and the remainder by the other project administration agencies of the Interior and War depart-ments.175

The total number of camps in operation during the fourth and final period of the initial program was 1,740.176 They were divided as follows: Civilian Conservation Corps camps, 1,640; Indian group camps, eighty-five; and territorial possession camps, fifteen.177 Several hundred were transferred to new locations or relocated on old sites. The distribution of the camps among the various project supervising services was practically the same as in the previous period. Every State, the District of Columbia, and the principal territorial possessions had one or more camps. The conservation work in the Virgin Islands was authorized during this period. It is under the supervision of the National Park Service.178

After receiving the President’s program calling for quick action in the establishment of the conservation work, the Department of Labor completed the selection of its quota of 274,375 men practically ahead of schedule.179 It also selected replacements for each camp and mid-camp period as they were needed.180 The record of the selection of the Indians by the Office of Indian Affairs was equally as good, even, though actual enrollment was deferred from the 14th of April to about June 23, 1933.181 The selection of the war veterans for the first period continued without interruption from June 12, until its completion July 31, when the enrollment reached 26,838, including 2,042 Bonus Marchers enrolled at Fort Hunt.182

The State quotas of all men selected for the first camp period, exclusive of those assigned to territorial possessions, were 314,236. Of this number 239,125 were Juniors, 35,250 experienced woodsmen, 25,000 veterans, and 14, 861 Indians.183 The quotas for the second camp period remained the same as the first, except that of the Veterans, which was increased to 28,225. This increase added to the 2,377 quotas of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico provided for the selection of 319,838 men for conservation work during the second six months of the program.184 During the third camp period the authorized number was increased to 369,838 by the additional 45,000 Juniors and 5,000 Veterans allotted to twenty-two drought stricken states.185 The authorized strength for the fourth and final period of the initial program was 371,922. This number was divided as follows: 290,000 Juniors, 33,225 Veterans, 30,000 local experienced woodsmen, 14,400 Indians, and 4,297 residents of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.186

In order to keep the enrollment of camps near their authorized strength, a system of replacements, which provides for the filling of all vacancies every three months, was inaugurated.187 Replacements since the close of the first camp period have been as follows: October and November, 1933, 125,000 to take the places of the summer camp enrollees who were discharged at or prior to the end of the first camp period;188 January, 1934, 25,000 authorized to bring the strength of each camp to two hundred men;189 April and May 1934, 100,000 to replace j the men voluntarily discharged prior to the opening of the third camp period on the 1st of April;190 July, 1934, 110,000 replacements for approximately 70,000 “full service” men automatically discharged because of the one-year service limit, and 40,000 who had dropped out to accept employment or for other reasons;191 October, 1934, approximately 100,000 to bring the forest camps to their authorized strength of 369,838;192 and January, 1935, 68,000 to fill vacancies which occurred during the first part of the fourth period.193

The War Department broke all American mobilization records in the first three months of the reforestation program. During that time the Army enrolled, conditioned, and transported to camps more men than it mobilized during the first three months of America’s participation in the World War.194 By May 27, 1933, with the addition of the first contingent of Veterans, the enrollment had exceeded 154,000 men, and by the first of July it had surpassed the objective of 250,000 by approximately 29,500. The peak of the enrollment for the first camp period was reached on July 22, when it stood at 301,230. Of this number 269,339 were Juniors and experienced Woodsmen; 26,371 Veterans, and 5,520 Indians.195 The latter group, of course, was enrolled by the Office of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior.196 The total does not include about 10,000 in the Army administrative personnel,197 and approximately 15,000 of the project personnel.198

By the last month of the first camp period the enrollment had dropped, from its high point in July, to 248,740. The workers were divided as follows: Forest Service, 201,806; National Park Service, 28,717; Office of Indian Affairs, 13,069; Office of Chief of Engineers, 3,554; Bureau of Biological Survey, 489; General Land Office, 193; and territorial possessions, 912. Those enrolled in the territorial possessions, of course, were under the supervision of the Forest Service or the National Park Service. The average daily numbers employed on field work was 182,946 and for camp duties 62,964.199

The enrolled men were permitted to re-enroll for the second six month period and 175,000 took advantage of this privilege. Replacements were added from time to time, and a slight increase in the Veterans’ quota and enrollment in Hawaii was authorized. The peak enrollment for this period was reached on January 15, 1934, when it stood at 305,857.200 By the end of the period there was a considerable drop in the enrollment, especially in the Civilian Conservation Corps proper, which dropped from 289,184 in January to 211,747.201

The highest enrollment for the third period was on August 14, 1934, when it reached 359,070. This large increase over the second period was due primarily to the 50,000 drought relief enrollment.202 The peak enrollment for the fourth camp period was reached on October 30, 1934, it totaled 361,786 men.203 This number included 282,273 Juniors, 34,628 experienced woodsmen, 32,802 Veterans, and 12,083 Indians. In addition to the enrolled men there were 24,212, including approximately 18,000 superintendents and foremen, members of the project supervisory personnel; 5,939 Army reserve officers assigned to camp administration; and 1,109 educational advisors employed in camp and project administration.204

Conclusion

The history of the development of the Emergency Conservation Work program shows that the Civilian Conservation Corps idea was not proposed without careful thought; that due consideration was given to the consequences of such a program; and the project was launched after careful planning by the several cooperating agencies; and that its mobilizations progressed in record-breaking fashion. It also shows that the selection of the project and camp sites, and the selection, enrollment and conditioning of the large forest army, although important and indispensable, were only preliminary to “the advancement of an orderly program of useful public works.” The chief problems were the transportation of this vast army of raw recruits to the camp sites, many of which were anything but desirable in their natural condition; the laying out of small villages and pitching tents or building barracks thereon; the administration of the camps, and the supervision of the work projects. These problems come within the administrative rather than the historical field and will be considered in detail in the next two chapters, as will the problems of selection of work projects and camp sites, and the selection, enrollment and conditioning of the men.

[End selection]

I hope you enjoyed this. I’ll be posting Chapter 2, which goes into more granular detail about how the camps were administered, within the next week or two.

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I strongly recommend checking out of the debate club for the next half a year or so. People are tuned up in an unsustainable way. A lot of figures big and small are going to burn themselves out permanently or do and say things that will be anchors around their necks for years. However, most people are not going to remember this at all and will move on to something new just as easily as they fell into the current hysteria and cowardice.

A lot of people aren’t ready for the deep trip. Not everyone is going to make it and that’s ok. We’re still going to have to win all the same.

We are in the middle of a vibe shift.

I’m told this again and again. The vibes, they’re shifting. The unthinkable is becoming thought. Red lines are being crossed every day with alarming frequency. The annoying girl at your office? Her ability to get you fired over nothing seems greatly diminished.

These are all real and good things. I said in my (very brilliant) previous essay Navigating the era of High Trumpism, it is now officially OK to like Trump at a scale that was previously unimaginable. The total resistance from the system that you saw at the start of the first Trump administration has not been repeated. The enemy is in retreat across the board. What does all that actually mean at the end of the day, though?

Nothing. Not necessarily anything, at least.

No one should ever forget just how close we came to disaster. The Biden years were some of the worst in our country’s history. Our dementia-addled former President handed the government over to radical activists who opened the border, turned every important institution into a petri dish for disastrous social engineering, and left the country humiliated on the world stage.

This decline, accompanied by visible and pronounced decline in Americans’ quality of life, was not marked by widespread civil unrest. None of the violent pushback so confidently predicted by accelerationists and regionalists and all the other worthless -ists who came and went over the last 4 years ever materialized. Rather, until Trump’s miraculous political comeback, the Right was confused and passive. Democrats dumped tens of millions of illegals into the country, looted the treasury, and generally ran the board without any substantive institutional opposition.

The American Right was incredibly fortunate. Democrats very visibly broke the country AND put forward two of the weakest and most abrasive national candidates of all time, sloppy drunk Kamala Harris and spiteful eunuch Tim Walz. Donald Trump, already a world-historical figure, assembled a team of loyalists with far greater discipline and professionalism than you saw in either 2016 or 2020. Many of Trump’s former enemies showed remarkable grace and endorsed him rather than see the country (and the world) decline to nothing. Then, after all this happened, Donald Trump’s life was saved by a public act of God that would be seen by billions of people, with an assassin’s bullet missing his brain by less than a quarter of an inch.

With all of these many blessings bestowed on the American Right, Republicans still managed to secure just a hair under 50% of the popular vote. Republicans lost the very important Governor’s race in North Carolina, part of a larger trend of solid Red states falling under “moderate” Democratic executive control that isn’t moderate at all, along with many Congressional seats in states that Trump won handily. Republicans once again lost college-educated whites, a demographic that is critical towards achieving their long-term goals.

People like Trump. He’s difficult not to like. It remains to be seen whether or not people like Trumpism. What is clear, however, is that people don’t necessarily like Trump supporters. The flareup between the “Tech Right” and the “Trump Right” over the Christmas holiday should have been very sobering for everyone.

Trump supporters who were skeptical of America’s “high skilled” immigration system, which at this point has obviously been gamed to allow for massive amounts of immigrants who no one would consider high skilled from India and few other countries, were dismissed as retards, racists, and Russian bots. The Tech Right’s attacks on Trump’s supporters over the core issue of immigration were identical to those that had been deployed against them in 2016 by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

It is not a coincidence that many of these same “Tech Right” figures in fact supported the 2016 Clinton campaign, and the 2020 Biden campaign for that matter. That’s OK, I am not dwelling on it (at least not too much), I think it merely illustrates that large numbers of people “came around” to Trump not out of some substantive ideological shift, but rather out of necessity.

Biden had pushed our country to the very brink and Kamala was threatening to destroy it. For lots of those who eventually found themselves in the Trump camp, Kamala winning would have meant the government taking their money and throwing them in jail. These people still don’t like us very much, or at least would be happy to get rid of us if the opportunity arose.

The Trump movement itself is grappling with the problem of big tent politics. Trump’s moment is already being twisted to mean anything by people who want to pretend it’s their moment. Rightwing circles are seeing a resurgence of the incoherent libertarian platitudes, meme theocratism, and regional chauvinism that were directly repudiated by the Trump phenomenon. Countless failures who were dragged kicking and screaming over the finish line now demand recognition of their genius. People do not know why they were right, which can lead you to places just as harmful as being wrong.

One great advantage held by the Left for many decades at this point is control of intellectual life. If you are an educated person in America, you have been exposed to decades of liberal propaganda. Obviously, being “well-educated” today isn’t some sign of innate superiority or any degree of knowledge or wisdom, but a formalized education offers huge benefits to the recipients that it’s easy to lose sight of after decades of liberal domination have turned that system into a joke. It was because liberals turned the systems that benefitted them so greatly into a joke that they have so rapidly and ignobly lost power, however temporary that could prove to be.

Liberals gain a more thorough understanding of their views than conservatives typically do with the help of the education system and media. Conservatives may scoff at this claim because liberals have so many noticeably stupid beliefs now and they are very bad at defending them, but liberals usually hold onto their views more dearly and more consistently than conservatives do.

Liberals have multiple overlapping institutions, schools, entertainment media, etc. that reinforce their ideas and encourage them to explore those ideas in a more comprehensive way than conservatives, often guided by professional liberals. They are provided with many spaces to flex their intellectual muscles, allowing them to cultivate talent (not easy) and eventually accumulate a large body of relatively stable and professional people to draw from to fill administrative and bureaucratic roles.

I often see conservatives “running out of road” when it comes to their beliefs. They will often know the correct position to arrive at (opposing liberals, who want to harm them) but do not know how to get there as the background knowledge used to frame their thinking, and even the process of how to think that they deploy, was provided by liberals. The common conservative refrain “Democrats are the real racists” is roundly and rightly mocked, but should be expected in a society in which the average person will be exposed to hundreds, even thousands, of hours worth of propaganda lessons that convey the idea that being “racist” is the worst thing in the world. Often conservatives’ inability to form a coherent logic for their beliefs and apply that logic in a productive way can lead them back to supporting liberals directly and indirectly.

This dysfunction traces back in large part to our understanding of history. Nearly all of today’s mainstream history is framed through anti-racism. In schools American history is often taught as a series of outrages towards or triumphs of black people. American children regularly list Harriett Tubman as one of the most important figures of our history (she’s even represented as the leader of the United States in the new Civilization franchise game), even though her exploits were likely almost entirely fictionalized and she realistically had no bearing on American history. That America was also racist against women and gay people are other core modern narratives. For a while America being racist against transgender people was a key national concern, though given the widespread unpopularity of that last effort it’s likely that the powers who push these myths will put it on ice for a while.

This destructive metanarrative has thoroughly infected Americans’ thinking, and it centers on World War II. For decades, Americans were taught that World War II, the biggest and most destructive conflict in the planet’s recorded history, was in fact a moral parable about the Nazis (standing in for all Germans) being racist towards Jewish people. The false lesson was deployed extensively to justify the post-War order and lots of very bad things that accompanied it.

For a long time the shadow of World War II crippled the American Right, leaving it disarmed in the face of a full-on assault against everything good. People literally did not have the right words to oppose what was happening to them. The Civil Rights revolution, decades of judicial tyranny, mass censorship, mass immigration, and lots of real-world violence, were all justified using the idea that racism was the ultimate evil in our world, our national sin to reckon with and overcome, as exemplified by the titanic global struggle against the arch-wizard of racism Adolf Hitler.

The mainstream World War II narrative has collapsed catastrophically in recent years. People know the story was fake and missing important context. What’s more, people know that this fake story about history was used to justify bad things happening to them in the present. However, people still don’t have the right words. The primary revisionist narrative that has taken hold in the place of the failed mainstream message is that World War II actually followed from Jews being racist against non-Jews.

It is understandable how someone might reach this conclusion. The various communist and anticommunist Interwar drama that set the world up for disaster in World War II stemmed from the heavily Jewish Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew the Russian Provisional government after the earlier February Revolution (a much less Jewish phenomenon) had toppled the Czar. The Bolshevik Party was led by Vladimir Lenin, a quarter Jewish, and Leon Trotsky, full-blooded. Numerous other major and minor figures throughout Bolshevik leadership were Jewish. These Jewish people did lots of bad things to a lot of people during and after the October Revolution. Millions of people were killed directly by Bolsheviks or through related famines.

But, knowing that Bolshevism was a heavily Jewish phenomenon often leaves people in dumber places than if they were merely oblivious to this fact. The causes of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ by-no-means-certain victory in the years-long Russian Civil War that followed are often reduced to “the Jews willed it.” This ignores the February Revolution that actually ended the monarchy (which the Bolsheviks played virtually no part in), decades of prior political and ethnic struggle in the Russian Empire, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars the Bolsheviks received from Germany (which was then at war with Russia during WWI), lots of chaos in and out of the battlezone (I’ve written a pretty comprehensive overview of the year that followed the Revolution), among many other factors. There was a lot going on, and most of the useful lessons that can be drawn from the period suddenly vanish if you adopt a myopic focus on the Jews.

Even looking only at the Jews during this period reveals a more nuanced narrative than “the Bolsheviks were Jewish.” Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin was Jewish, but so was the woman who shot him 3 times and almost killed him, Fanny Kaplan, a Socialist Revolutionary angry about Lenin’s power grab following the abolition of the Constituent Assembly. The Jews leading the Bolshevik Party were primarily urban cosmopolitans, often militant atheists as well, who were hostile and unsympathetic to the more religious village and rural Jews in the primary combat areas of the Russian Civil War. Anti-Jewish pogroms were carried out by the Bolshevik Red Army and Jewish merchants frequently had their goods seized in the name of the Revolution. Lenin was militantly anti-Zionist, saying Zionism was "entirely false and reactionary in its essence." Zionists were heavily suppressed in the early Soviet Union, to the point where the ethnically Polish head of the NKVD Felix Dzerzhinsky (who had a Jewish wife and learned Yiddish after he began his political activism¹) expressed bewilderment at the policy. Trotsky shared Lenin’s anti-Zionism, though he changed his tune on that and other Jewish issues after being exiled in 1929 following Stalin’s seizure of power. Although the Bolshevik Party was dominated by Jews, it was only popular with a small proportion of the Jewish population within the Russian Empire (you can find a very good summary of this phenomenon in this article).

It’s true that many Jews were hostile towards the anti-Bolshevik White Army, but they were also barred from joining it² in many places. Furthermore, high-ranking leaders of the White Army often threatened to kill or rob Jews in the territory they controlled, blaming them for the conduct of the Bolsheviks, and their men frequently carried out those threats. It’s also unsurprising that many Jews were not particularly loyal to Czar Nicholas II before the Revolution when the Russian government placed numerous legal restrictions on them. The Russian military had also expelled tens of thousands of Jews from their homes near the Empire’s border at the outbreak of World War I, sending lots of angry and dissatisfied Jews into Russia’s major cities right before Russian liberals (many of them freemasons, but a unique Russian variant of freemasonry, again, it’s complicated) collapsed the monarchy.

Of course, it’s not surprising either that Czar Nicholas II (among many other Russian officials) did not have particularly warm feelings towards Jewish people. After all, Jewish people were significantly overrepresented within the radical groups, including violent ones like the Bolsheviks, that had posed a threat to his Empire for decades. Jewish diaspora overseas accounted for some of his fiercest critics, and often made false or at least unfair claims about Russia’s policies. His most trusted and successful advisor, Pyotr Stolypin, who had advocated for an end to Russia’s legal restrictions on Jews, was himself assassinated by a Jewish radical in 1911. Czar Nicholas II personally witnessed the brazen public murder. There’s a lot going on here. There are many important aspects of the story and boiling it down to a single sentence or a few bits of trivia is guaranteed to be worse than useless.

Ultimately the Bolsheviks were a coalition of the fringes. They certainly had heavy Jewish overrepresentation (particularly in important roles), but they also drew in disproportionate numbers of Latvians, Caucasians (people from the Caucus mountains, like Stalin), Chinese, and other minority groups. I recently read that the Bolsheviks employed a black American executioner named Johnson during their occupation of Odessa, infamous for skinning victims alive. Does this phenomenon seem relevant today?

The Bolsheviks also attracted enormous numbers of ethnic Russians who either agreed with their agenda (the Bolsheviks were the only major political party that promised to exit Russia from WWI, their most popular policy), saw the Revolution (which had upended of all social and economic relations) as a chance to rapidly advance their status, wanted to settle old political grievances (Aleksei Busilov, one of the Russian Empire’s most successful WWI generals, was disgusted with the conservative military officers who had helped force the Czar’s abdication in the February Revolution and, lacking confidence in these officers’ later efforts with the White movement after the October Revolution, threw his support behind the Bolsheviks for somewhat dubious nationalist reasons) or, as Bolshevik successes mounted, thought it was a good idea to back the winning horse. Most soldiers in the 5+ million strong Red Army, who were essential to securing the Bolsheviks’ eventual victory, were ethnic Russians. How and why members of a majority population came to support a coalition of the fringes is an interesting question that’s very relevant to our problems today, and it’s one that you will never be able to answer if your only interaction with these events is collecting frequently-untrue trivia about Jews.

Going back to the start of this tangent, how the mainstream narrative of World War II is that it revolved around Germans being too racist towards Jews while the revisionist narrative has become that actually Jews were too racist towards non-Jews as illustrated by the sequence of events that followed from the Bolshevik Revolution etc., this all ignores the fact that World War II was not even about Jews. Very few people at the time actually believed that the conflict was about the plight or offenses of the Jews.

The centrality of the Jewish experience in the popular understanding of World War II, and particularly the mainstream Holocaust narrative, only began years after the conflict had ended thanks to the accelerating overrepresentation of Jewish people in Western media, government, education, and many other critical sectors (often tied to progressive causes or the Civil Rights regime). You could write a book about that phenomenon (I’ve heard The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine and The Ordeal of Civility by John Murray Cuddihy are both good, but have not actually read either), but that book would have relatively little bearing on the causes of World War II.

The overwhelming majority of participants in World War II were not Jewish, the leaders of the states involved were not Jewish. Although Jews certainly wielded great influence before, during, and after the conflict, so did many other groups and subgroups that all had their own distinct interests and goals. Although huge numbers of Jewish civilians were killed during the conflict, huge numbers of civilians from many other ethnic groups were killed as well. It’s not a competition. No one has a monopoly on this. Historical events that occur at this scale are not reducible in this way.

I encourage everyone to read Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War for a thorough survey of the lead-up to and course of World War II. I promise you will learn something that you didn’t know before from this book. The people driving the biggest conflict in human history were not evil or good wizards, they were ruthless statesmen who were as (if not more) concerned about the flow of oil and aluminum as they were with the moralism you see crudely stapled onto the conflict today. They wanted to achieve strategic depth and rid their borders of the influence of rival powers. That’s why conflicts usually happen, though this is rarely taught in schools or media today.

Hitler was not an anti-communist crusader. In fact, he was an eager collaborator with Stalin for years. Stalin was hardly a fanatical anti-fascist, Germany was a major trading partner before the war broke out. The conflict could have easily developed in different ways. In 1938, Italy and Germany might have gone to war over the fate of Austria. In 1939, Great Britain was in the final stages of preparations for a massive air raid on the Baku oil fields (built by Americans) to cripple the Soviet Union and prevent further oil exports to Germany, then dependent on Soviet gas. Britain and France declared war on Germany after its invasion of Poland pursuant to a security agreement, but failed to enforce that same agreement against the Soviet Union, which had also invaded Poland at roughly the same time. Stalin was furious in 1943 when Roosevelt unilaterally announced the Allied doctrine of unconditional surrender, which led to countless needless civilian deaths towards the end of the war, because Stalin’s diplomats had just begun secret preliminary negotiations for a separate peace with Germany. For decades people have been arguing over a fake Marvel movie story, often using factoids that aren’t even true. Today, these fake stories form the superstructure of the public’s moral universe.

Even this discussion is largely irrelevant because even if World War II was about Jews, it’s ridiculous that a conflict that’s approaching 100 years old could be used to justify a world order, a legal regime, contemporary political analysis, someone losing their job, a kid getting kicked out of school, or any of the other things that WWII is regularly invoked to justify. World War II is more distant from us today than the Franco-Prussian War was to those at the time of World War II. The world has changed. The myth of World War II is used to pretend it has not, often in the pursuit of very bad things that those invoking it would not be able to justify on their own.

If you want to break the power that the post-World War II order and the Holocaust narrative that animates it holds over our society, you cannot do that by talking about World War II and the Holocaust all the time. The miraculous election of Trump, opposed by all the people who built and maintained that previous world order, means that we don’t have to talk about these things constantly anymore, or at least that we can talk about them like adults again. Hitler wasn’t an evil wizard or a good wizard, he was the leader of Germany from 1934 to 1945. World War II was not a moral parable, it was a global conflict that involved billions of people and ended 80 years ago. This was a historical event. This was a real thing that happened in the world.

I will say, I think it’s obvious at this point that people are not actually interested in World War II, but rather in contributing to larger contemporary narratives. In the mainstream, the fixation on World War II is designed to justify blocking rightwingers from obtaining power ever again, even when rightwingers’ claims and objectives were totally reasonable and they had broad public support. In the revisionists strain, people are only engaging with the history to make points about Israel or Jews and their role in society today. One imagines in the near future a Palestine-flag bio’ed Zoomer who has only a faint idea what Pearl Harbor was (if he remembers whatever brief mention of it there was in his school lessons at all), much less important events like the Yalta or Postdam conferences, but could eagerly recite talking points from TikTok about wooden doors at Auschwitz.

Going back to the book segment I posted earlier in this article. It was posted on Twitter and this was the response.

There were a lot of Jewish Bolsheviks, but the section of text that people are supposedly responding to describes the crimes of Chinese people, a black American, and a Georgian woman, all of whom were serving in the Cheka (the Bolsheviks’ secret police). Did any of these people actually read or understand the text? Do they know what the Cheka was? It’s kind of crazy. Who were the Bolsheviks? The Jews? Sort of, but not really. The text itself illustrates that. There’s a lot more to the story that’s important and even critical to understanding what actually happened, but that people will never get to because ultimately they don’t care what actually happened, they only want to talk about Jews.

Lots of trivia that conspiratorial people deploy when engaging with taboo topics amounts to a disappointing “Sort of, but not really.” Most of these people don’t even know basic details of the narratives they’re supposedly interested in. It’s ultimately just normie in-group signaling. They aren’t talking about anything other than themselves. When these people engage with these topics most often they are not trying to do anything other than say “I know that Jews exist” or “I don’t like Jews” in the hope that someone else will receive their signal and indicate that they too are part of the club.

Of course this dynamic traces back in large part to the damaging way that the idea of WW2 is deployed by mainstream institutions and the decades of disaster that followed the start of this order, the many (but not exclusively) Jewish architects of that process have created their own golem, but ultimately revisionism is not equipping people with the knowledge they need to understand the world (or the events they’re supposedly interested in) any more than the mainstream narrative did. In fact, usually the narrative that revisionists have is even more incoherent than the fake mainstream story because it’s invariably hyper-focused on only a few narrow topics. The participants in this discourse also usually lack background information that would allow them to filter out untrue claims or frame what they’re learning in a way that renders it useful. We already have one fake WW2 narrative, we don’t need a second.

More often than not revisionism (of all kinds) seems to drive adherents insane: They stop caring whether or not what they’re saying is true anymore.

As “conspiracy culture” (I use conspiracy in a non-derisive way, many of the conspiracies that people are interested in these days are true, it’s culture that is the problem) has entered mainstream thought, it has adopted the vices of mainstream thought. People say things not because they genuinely believe them in any meaningful sense, but rather because it signals something separate from whatever is being said.

For me this is most clearly illustrated when dealing with Moon landing denial. I think the Moon landing is the most amazing thing that anyone’s ever done and demonstrates the triumph of Americans and the American system: The most excellent people the world has ever produced accomplished a seemingly impossible task with technology that seems primitive today thanks to superhuman coordination, precision, and nerve.

When I talk about the Moon landing with people who deny that it happened, it quickly becomes obvious that they don’t even have a basic narrative of what the Moon landing program supposedly was, and how the Moon landing itself was supposedly achieved. If they did, the idea of fabricating such an extensively documented years-long sequence of events, involving tens of thousands of trustworthy people and monitored by independent and hostile powers, would quickly fall apart. Concealing such a fraud over the course of several decades would have been more difficult and complicated than going to the Moon.

Usually these people have a few pieces of trivia that cast doubt on the Moon landing that they’ve worked their way back from. These are often intuitive, but collapse under scrutiny or, if they are true, have other reasonable explanations beyond “the Moon landing was fake.” More than anything else, I notice that such people are trying to provoke a reaction from their audience. They’re trying to shock or surprise you by saying something strange or taboo. They want to argue with you about it, and enjoy the process of arguing. They want to make a larger point about the prevalence of other conspiracies in our society, or indicate that they are part of the growing section of the population that does not accept (increasingly discredited today) mainstream narratives. When something they say is revealed to be not true or at least poorly-supported, it doesn’t give them pause at all. They “know they’re right” about whatever different point they’re actually trying to make.

In other words, they don’t give a shit about what they’re saying. No one gives a shit anymore. After decades of living under the most invasive and oppressive propaganda regime to ever exist, Americans have been socialized to communicate by saying one thing when they actually mean another. When someone makes a claim or responds to a claim of yours, they might not be trying to make a specific point that’s relevant to the discussion or to convey information that they genuinely believe. Rather, they could be trying to merely signal group affiliation, make a tangentially related but different point, or simply engage in an emotional or moral performance.

It’s impossible to overstate how prevalent lies have become in everyday life in America, and how unique a risk this poses to conservatives as the grand lies that have defined our lives and our thinking for decades begin to come apart. People have their totems and a few anecdotes but are increasingly unable to navigate reality because they still don’t actually know anything or even know how to know something. After a certain point, people cease to be able to understand historical events as events. They cease to be able to understand their present experience as present experience.

There is a general emotional incontinence that you see everywhere online these days. When times are good, someone will think they are the smartest person in the world for holding far right views. When times are bad, they are plunged into the depths of despair. Often they ratify these emotions by saying things that are not true and that they don’t believe. These untrue claims are used by others to validate their own incoherent feelings, perpetuating the cycle of hysteria.

Interrupting such a cycle presents a serious challenge: How do you reason or, worse, argue someone out of a view that they don’t actually hold and don’t really care about? You can’t. In fact, your trying to do so will be seen as an attack on their ego, and only serve to validate any fears they might have. They want to get into an argument. They want you to say, “this is not true,” so they can respond “but what about [the next topic]?” which they might also not care about at all either.

In these situations, you are not arguing with a person. You are really arguing against a generalized self-reinforcing feeling, often tied to a person’s ego or group identity. It’s just how people talk now, which is to say that meaningful communication is effectively impossible under current conditions. To circle back to conspiracy culture, people who become involved in these discourses frequently become immune to knowledge because they are socialized to think of controversial topics as signifiers rather than real things that happened, things that you can (and should want to) understand.

When I talk about the Russian Revolution, it seems like people often are just waiting for me to mention the Jews. They might act surprised when I say that World War I was going on at the same time. They might not know that the February Revolution had happened a few months beforehand and actually removed the Czar. They won’t have any frame of reference for the disintegration of the Russian Empire into multiple different nation states (backed by multiple different foreign powers) and the role that that played in the years-long conflict that followed the revolutions of 1917. When I inevitably say something about Jews (essential to understanding the period), their eyes light up: “Ah,” they say eruditely, “the Jews. I think there might be something there.” However, it becomes obvious that they’re not listening afterwards.

Once Jews are mentioned, these people are no longer in Russia 1917, they’re in a constellation of 2015 /pol/ infographics and half-remembered tweets about Stalin era atrocities, the dramatic overrepresentation of Jews in important positions today, or the harmful role Israel plays in American politics. All of these things may be true (though I will say the infographics people deploy are often ridiculous if you actually dig into them) but they have very little to do with what those specific Jewish Bolsheviks were doing during that specific time period, much less the Russian Revolution, which we are supposedly talking about.

Introducing any degree of nuance into these discussions more often than not generates confusion (as I said before, there are almost always huge gaps in the basic “narratives” that these people have for these events) and hostility. “Why are you taking so long to talk about the Jews?” or “Why are you disagreeing with me when my actual point (objections to Jewish overrepresentation in critical sectors, the Israel lobby, the USS Liberty attack, etc.) is correct?” or “I have given you the sign, where is a countersign that I can recognize?”

I think this recurring disconnect boils down to the role that ego and identity play in discourse today. As previously stated, after decades of dysfunction people have come to view their beliefs not as beliefs but rather as signifiers of their personal status or membership in a broader subculture. As such, to them, when you challenge their beliefs, you are not challenging a claim or piece of information, but rather their self-identity. You are not in discourse about this or that topic, but rather leveling a personal attack. These topics do not exist for themselves (as all things in reality do), but rather merely in service of the people talking about them.

At this point, if someone brings up any controversial or taboo topic to me, even if they are saying something I agree with, I assume they’re just a clueless normie who is going to go insane shortly afterwards, if they aren’t insane already. Today, someone might have only a 6 month gap between attacking Trump for being an immigration hardliner and attacking Trump for being a slave to the Jews. Does a person like this have anything resembling a coherent worldview or ideology? Not really. He is merely indulging himself.

It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything anymore. If you’re Jewish, don’t worry, these people aren’t actually antisemitic. They do not know what Jews are in any meaningful sense. Many have Jewish friends or close associates but do not conceive of Jews as an ethno-religious group and cannot recognize characteristically Jewish features. They think of Jews as a race of evil wizards who exist on their phones. I mean this completely seriously: If someone today says “I hate Jews. Kill all Jews.” they are probably just lonely and trying to make friends or fit into their new online social circle. If they are ever forced to engage with Jewish subjects beyond repeating memes, they will crumple like accordions and assure you that they’re really just concerned about justice and peace and love. Nearly all major maximalist anti-Semite personalities retain social and professional relationships with Jewish people. Some of them are Jewish themselves.

Although I won’t belabor this point too much, the impact of demographic changes online is impossible to ignore. Like Western countries, fringe internet spaces have become awash with 3rd worlders and with them social dynamics commonly associated with the 3rd world (casual dishonesty, clannishness, magical thinking, etc.). These new entrants bring with them new priorities and new ways of interacting with each other. When coupled with the total and accelerating ignorance of the public and Americans’ already damaged relationship with the truth, many online rightwingers are all too happy to assimilate into the growing digital favela. This kind of “audience capture” when coupled with these new audiences often proves fatal to mental health.

You also have many recently radicalized older or (for lack of a better word) normal people who are encountering fringe internet topics without any kind of background experience in fringe internet spaces. Dynamics that are very familiar to longtime denizens of these online circles—the presence of extremely large numbers of compulsive liars and clinically mentally ill people, the pervasive influence of blackmail rings, astroturf campaigns, and pathological bad faith actors, the recurring “alliances” proposed between antagonistic groups that inevitably implode after a few months, the cyclical nature of various ideological fads—are totally foreign to them. They do not believe you when you tell them where their brilliant arguments and new friends will lead them. One is left to watch these people make the same mistakes and dig themselves into the same holes and go crazy in the same ways over and over again, all while they act as though they are unlocking the secrets of the universe.

Although for years rightwing online spaces have advanced discourse and real world politics in a positive direction, today they operate as a brain scorcher. At their best, they offer dumb people the added confidence that comes from knowing that you are part of a group. At their worst, they render smart people who might have otherwise played a positive role useless or insane. Large corners of Rightwing Twitter have transformed into glorified support groups, crying circles, and circlejerks for excitable people who want to feel heard and understood. Others have transformed into Discord channels, with the accompanying social dynamics. The casual dishonesty that defines modern discourse is easily deployed in personality feuds, which, as the internet has become more diverse and streaming content has taken off, have become the primary way in which nominally rightwing people engage with politics.

Self-proclaimed insiders make dubious claims about their rivals or what’s going on behind-the-scenes when really they just personally don’t like someone or have another unrelated grievance. The public, looking in from outside, is eager to accept this sort of “secret knowledge,” which might not have any bearing on reality, because it offers them the feeling of being an insider, too. Taking a side in a personality feud is a way to feel as though you are part of a group and contributing to a larger goal, feelings that seem increasingly hard to come by these days in real life. These feelings are the ammunition in many professional or social rivalries that are increasingly divorced from anyone’s real world opinion about this or that issue, much less the attempt to achieve any real world positive outcome.

I have engaged in many destructive feuds with people who I probably should have worked something out with. I’ve tried to be honest, but I’ve certainly been mean and very uncharitable and claimed things that I later learned were untrue. I really do regret how I’ve treated a lot of people and have tried to change, but I don’t expect and won’t receive any mercy. Even still, personality feuds as they exist today have trapped rightwingers in discourse cycles where whatever thought they’re responding to is not real and no one actually believes what they’re saying. It’s unsustainable and getting worse. I often see people trying to “debunk” things that the person they’re debunking never said or rebuke a person for views that the person being rebuked does not hold. Oftentimes people will repeat someone’s own views back to them, but frame it as a disagreement for an audience. They are merely saying “I don’t like you” or “I am better than you” when they participate in this kind of fake debate.

Irving Kristol said that a neoconservative was “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” I think the average rightwinger (at least the ones I see online, Trump’s real life approval rating has actually never been higher) is a normie who has been mugged by Twitter. “Democrats are the real racists” has transformed into “Jews are the real Nazis.” People still have lots of liberal platitudes and propaganda and (worst of all) thought processes that they’ve hung onto even though they eventually decided to take the jump and leave the old order behind. Some have jettisoned all these things but still gone off the deep end in other ways. The well-earned collapse of credibility of mainstream knowledge granting institutions has not led to a new Enlightenment, but rather broad ignorance and nihilism.

The anti-establishment “consensus” that exists today is not robust in any meaningful sense. It is already spiraling into delusion and stupidity. When the major players in this dialogue inevitably burn themselves (and their followers) out, it will likely be replaced by something cooked up by the Left, which still has an enormous pool of professionals and decades of cultural inertia on its side, that’s even worse than the fake liberal consensus that caused so much damage for so long.

Modern conditions have created generations of Americans who are incapable of dealing with substantive issues substantively. Thanks to schools and media and all the other institutions that liberals control, liberals know what they believe, what they believe is just stupid and harmful to themselves and the world. That doesn’t really matter for them, though, because they all believe roughly the same thing and their beliefs don’t (or at least used to not) substantively interfere with them achieving their real-world goals. What they believe covers a lot of different situations and can get them to the right place for their purposes. Conservatives often have much more patchwork worldviews with far more limited utility. In a battle of coherence versus incoherence, it is obvious which side will eventually win.

Having identified what I think the problem is, below you will find a few suggestions for solving it.

1. Kill Your Self

America’s culture of narcissism is pervasive and all consuming. When someone says something, it sometimes only relates back to themselves in some way. When someone says something that isn’t true to another person, it is often because they are really just trying to define themselves.

I observed this often in (circular) online debates over illegal political violence. Many rightwingers seemed to think that their endorsement of this theoretical future violence or their ambiguous proclamations of its inevitability reflected some kind of harder edge on their part: That they were tougher or more worldly or more dedicated than people like me (I think we can only achieve our goals by keeping the current system relatively intact, denying liberals chaos that would allow them to capitalize on their superior numbers and organization, which means maintaining stability and the rule of law should be high priorities) because they were willing to support behavior that is taboo and dangerous. They often had lots of guns and training to back this support up.

My usual response to this was that, without addressing the merits of their arguments, illegal rightwing political violence effectively does not exist in America. There are no signs of that dynamic changing, or that that dynamic changing would be good. The people who are talking about it online all the time do not actually do it. If they had any realistic plans to commit illegal violence in the future, in other words, if they believed what they were saying, they would certainly not discuss it in public with strangers on the internet. The entire debate was mere signaling, we were really just talking about how the proponents of illegal rightwing political violence would like to be perceived.

In the same way, online discourse today merely illustrates that Ruralites want to be perceived as Ruralites, dissidents want to be perceived as dissidents, and conspiracy theorists want to be perceived as conspiracy theorists. “I think therefore I am” has become “I speak therefore I am.” As more people learn to communicate by saying things that are not true and that they don’t believe, this has naturally devolved into a general state of retardation separate from any realistic objective beyond ego preservation. Aside from the problem of truth, that is, people saying things that are untrue or that they are indifferent to the truth value of for social purposes, such self-obsession can end up divorcing people from their supposed goals.

I can’t be the only one who has noticed that the “solution” that rightwingers who have been overtaken by these various ego trips inevitably arrive at is to oppose Trump. Trump, whatever you may say of his personal history or record, has delivered our present success. It was only Trump who could have beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was only Trump who could have beaten Kamala Harris in 2024. It is only through Trump’s literally miraculous victory that we enjoy our present opportunities. It is only through Trump that we have been spared any number of terrible fates. If you are any kind of rightwinger in America today, Trump’s success is essential to your future prospects. If you want to achieve a real world political goal, the best way to achieve it is by tying it to the Trump movement.

Lots of rightwingers were born on third and think they personally hit a triple. Rather than understanding and appreciating why Trump was successful in improving the situation in the United States, their first thought is to get Trump out of the way for perceived and sometimes totally imagined failures so they can “get to the good part” and pursue whatever other interests, separate from victory, they might have.

What “the good part” is varies from person to person, but online it normally comes down to feelings of vindication or satisfaction. I think this traces back to self-obsession. Someone wants to identify as “being right” or, worse, as “being better” than some online rival (this was very noticeable in the Ruralite discourse, which was obviously driven by the inferiority complexes of many of the participants). The pervasive dishonesty we see online today stems from people valuing the feeling of being right more than they actually value being right. The pervasive catastrophizing, whataboutism, and concern trolling, responses that accomplish nothing but helping our enemies, we see online today stem from people valuing that feeling over achieving anything in the real world.

Today’s dishonest online culture serves as a convenient personal escape from the tedious, complex, and unpleasant tasks required to fix our country. What if instead of having to worry about bills and elections and nominations and rulings and court cases and political coalitions and treaties and all the other things that people who wield power have to worry about, we only had to worry about ourselves? What if we only had to worry about our social standing or our arguments or our internet debate clubs? What if we only had to worry about our feelings about Israel or the Jews? What if we only had to worry about our consequence-free intellectual playtime with UFOs or nanobots or lizard people? This would all be very nice, but unfortunately we do not live in such a world.

Why are we all here? What is this all about? Where should we direct our energy? Is the goal of rightwing politics to redpill the normies? Is it to show others how smart or transgressive or correct you are? Is it to predict defeat and then wait to be proven right? Is it to commune with demons in the Noosphere to manipulate crypto markets? Do we need to go back ten years, or a hundred years, or ten thousand years?

No. The goal in politics is to win and then make the world a better place. The promise of Trump is that victory will be prioritized over the ideological ghettos conservatives have spent decades carving out for themselves, and that real world gains will be prioritized over thought experiments. You might argue that it is necessary to talk constantly about all of the topics that people are so preoccupied with these days in order to win and then make the world a better place, but I would respond that Trump did not do this and he was elected President (saving the country) twice, while the people who make these topics core components of their online brands have no real world political accomplishments to their names and frequently try to sabotage productive efforts.

Trump is “the good part.” He has allowed rightwingers to access the real world levers of power in a way they normally would not have been able to, and has done real world damage to the forces arrayed against us at a magnitude that all of his critics combined could not hope to match. Our horizon of possibility has been expanded rather than closed forever. No one who criticizes Trump has accomplished more than him, or even a tiny fraction of what he has accomplished. That means something big, whatever quibbles you might have about Trump’s policies or their implementation. The promise of Trump is not that you will get whatever you want automatically, but rather that you have a fighting chance where none existed before.

I said in my previous essay that there is no anti-Trump Right, only Trump and the enemy. I sincerely believe that, even when Trump is unambiguously wrong and his rightwing critics are unambiguously correct. Trump’s continued success means that we continue to have the opportunity to improve the situation. There is no real world alternative in existence. None. Trump is the only game in town when it comes to achieving things in reality. Trump failing to achieve his goals would not provide an opening for X, Y, or Z new rightwing system. Rather, it would allow liberals to reassert their control and complete the nearly-finished destruction of our country. This is obvious unless you are divorced from reality (due to self-obsession or otherwise), which, as I have laid out earlier, a large and growing portion of rightwing circles are.

I have to say, if you’ve fallen for the latest round of “principled” opposition to Trump over any topic, you lack the emotional stability and discernment required for meaningful discourse. You are probably just a normie who changed the channel. You still do not understand anything.

Take the new rightwing hero of the hour, Thomas Massie. Massie is a libertarian congressman from Kentucky who has received widespread (and deserved) acclaim for his principled opposition to Israeli influence in American politics.

Thomas Massie also opposed President Trump during the 2024 primary and “joked” about writing in Governor Ron DeSantis on Election Day. There’s clearly very little love lost between Trump and Massie. People attribute this solely to the Israel issue, but that’s only because the Israel issue is all they have been socialized online to think or care about. Massie also opposes the important E-Verify program and sponsored a bill to expand the H1B visa program (which fortunately wasn’t signed into law). I don’t think he’s an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist, his biggest donor is a Jewish billionaire and his biggest political ally, DeSantis, is devoted to Israel, even attacking Trump for not being slavish enough, and pushes unconstitutional legislation to fight antisemitism. Massie is basically a normal disagreeable libertarian, one of many who existed before Trump and totally failed to move the needle.

There are lots of other reasons why someone who has acted in the ways that Massie has should be removed from their position of authority, especially since Republicans are operating on razor-thin margins where a single congressman going rogue can derail critical legislation. Most of Massie’s fans only like him because they hear about him online about every six months and he allows them to socially signal their opposition to Israel or their antisemitism or their hatred of Trump.

Look at Trump’s recent air strikes on the Houthis in the Gulf. The Houthis are a rebel group that has been firing missiles at civilian ships in waterways under protection of the US Navy for years. They even fired at US military ships. It was humiliating that Biden was unable to respond to these provocations. Today Trump is attacked as a neocon and a warmonger for doing basic tasks required of any President. Foreign groups get to shut down international shipping if they don’t like what Israel is doing? We need to have a debate over whether or not we should retaliate against people shooting missiles at our ships? Is that how the world works? Is that sustainable?

This sort of unreasoned and reflexive criticism always seems to emerge from the same people who happened to have attacked Trump for years for other dubious reasons. There is no argument occurring, they are just trying to damage Trump. The goal isn’t a good real world outcome, it is to undermine Trump. It is merely to say “I don’t like Trump.”

Such characters engage in unending circular discourse to illustrate that they do not like Trump. Trump’s accomplishments go ignored or even denied (this is often tied to the Israel issue, which such people falsely claim is the only thing Trump acts on because it is all they pay attention to), while every failure is embellished and attributed to indifference or betrayal. There is no attempt to achieve anything good. In fact, the only effect is to try to block others from potentially achieving anything good.

British journalist John Ernst Hodgson wrote of the persistent attempts to undermine General Denikin’s efforts to fight the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War:

If ever a rumour adverse to his cause gained currency, if ever a lie began to creep round South Russia which would have the effect of sapping public confidence, if a harmful or fabricated cablegram from Europe got into circulation, the Rostov Jews were responsible. They appeared to me to be contemptible people, and, quite unlike the majority of our own Jews, apparently owed patriotic allegiance to no country. They were quite incapable of serving any cause but the most debased type of commercialism.

The behavior of the Rostov Jews towards Denikin in 1918 seems to perfectly mirror the behavior of many rightwing personalities towards Trump today.

In 2024, numerous rightwing figures began actively pushing for Kamala Harris to become President because Trump was going to start WW3, open the border to India, and numerous other claims that flew in the face of Trump’s record as the most consistently anti-war and anti-immigration President in decades. These attacks on Trump in particular reflected a total divorce from reality and an inability to discern relative importance. Whatever Trump’s objectionable election rhetoric may have been, his record was clear and so was the record of the alternative, the incumbent Kamala Harris, who actually had opened the border and left the world in conflict and turmoil immediately beforehand.

The people who engage in this kind of political hemorrhaging, that is, those who are not merely adopting these incoherent and harmful positions to benefit themselves for financial or professional reasons, are genuinely stupid and weak-willed. They are easily led around by bad actors. They exist in a state of total disorientation and should be counted on to try to make bad situations worse.

Many today claim that they want a new rightwing culture to accompany the present “vibe shift” when really they just want someone to repeat their own views back to them. They want their identities affirmed. They don’t want anything resembling organic cultural development, which produces new things for the sake of the thing itself, they want a new waifish e-girl to parasocially attach themselves to or a new gamerchair retard to read Wikipedia to them. They want to watch an 8 hour stream of a 14-year-old owning an OnlyFans girl in a debate with facts and logic so they can imagine themselves as the 14-year-old, oblivious to the fact that the stream itself is paid promotion for the OnlyFan girl’s fuckvids. They want someone to write a GQ article about how they are cool or relevant or important that no one will bother to read. They want to repeat a canned argument they saw someone else make years ago, badly.

It must stop. Your journey of self-discovery is not interesting. Your political awakening is not interesting. You argument is not interesting. Your insights are not interesting. Your problems are not interesting. I’m not impressed. No one wants to hear about your faggot life. Abolish yourself. Abolish discourse. People need to become human again, which is to say they need to become instincts, duties, and roles rather than egos and memes.

I have really enjoyed my personal research on the Russian Revolution and Civil War. This began as a hobby, and I guess it still kind of is, though I’m trying to do more serious writing and preservation work (albeit with the limitations of someone who does not speak Russian and has no advanced education of any kind).

What I enjoy most about it is that I constantly get to genuinely learn something new. I am not Russian or Jewish or a member of any of the other ethnic groups that were tied into the conflict at an existential level. I have no meaningful connection to these events beyond living in a world that is affected by the Russian Revolution. Because these events are so sparsely covered by the media and academia, I have very little preconception of what I’m going to find or what I should be looking for before I start looking. I am not just working my way backwards to justify my beliefs, and couldn’t even if I wanted to.

Obviously I have noticed the parallels between what happened in Russia in 1917 and the dysfunction that you see in America today. However, the situations are dissimilar enough that something that occurred in the Russian Revolution could never be cited to justify any kind of specific policy. Although there are many useful lessons and principles to mine from the period, our methods will always be different. Pyotr Stolypin’s emergency courts martial were very effective in bringing the 1905 Revolution to a close. Could we implement something similar? Probably not. America 2025 has a totally different people, legal code, and civilizational mindset than Russia 1905. I firmly believe that there will be a communist revolution within the decade, but it’s very unlikely the participants will describe themselves as communists, and most of them will likely have no strong political beliefs at all beyond those temporarily granted by the mob (this is one great lesson from the Russian Revolution).

What I most frequently learn is how little I know. I’m probably among the most well-read Americans on the Russian Revolution at this point, like top 1%. That might sound arrogant to say, I don’t think it means I’m in the top 1% of intelligence or anything like that, but most people just genuinely have no clue about these topics, if they even know that these topics exist. Reading one book about the Russian Revolution probably puts you far ahead of the average person.

Despite this, I am still wrong all the time. I frequently make bad assumptions and embarrass myself when talking with people who know more than me. There are huge gaps in my knowledge of this topic that I know pretty well. Learning more only makes me more conscious of my deficiencies.

I am constantly reminded of this quote from a lecture given by sci-fi author Michael Crichton describing Gell-Mann Amnesia, a term he coined after a conversation with Nobel-prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

We live in a society with amnesia. We forget how little we know. Nearly everything important has been forgotten or overwritten. As the grand lies that defined our lives for so long come apart, people are trying to fill the gaps left behind with themselves. We are not enough.

I am conscious of the fact that my understanding is even more limited of topics that I have not read dozens of books and articles on, which is pretty much everything but the Russian Revolution. Remember the start of the Ukraine War? I literally could not have been more wrong about how that conflict would proceed. I often don’t have much to add to discourse unless we’re talking about movies or something. I don’t know, and I’m fine with that now. That’s how most people are with most topics. It’s usually not a problem. The problems come from thinking you know far more than you do, causing you to react (or not react) in inappropriate ways. It seems like many issues in fringe spaces today trace back to an inability to admit “I don’t know.” Instead of admitting they don’t know something, people begin talking about themselves.

Take the response to Trump’s mass deportations or, rather, the lack of them. In my (very pessimistic, I predicted that everyone would start losing their minds) election night victory essay, I said that mass deportations should be a top priority for the incoming Trump administration. Although it appears the Trump administration made some attempt to carry out large-scale deportations early on, whatever they were doing seems to be on pause for whatever reason. They might be being blocked by the courts, they might be out of money, they might not have the real world capacity to carry out these deportations right now (I have heard one issue is that DHS has maxed out its existing capacity for detaining illegals awaiting deportation). I don’t know.

What is probably not true is that mass deportations aren’t happening because the people in the Trump administration just don’t want to do them. Every single person who Trump has appointed to an immigration role is an immigration hardliner. Trump’s top adviser, Stephen Miller, has made immigration restriction of the focus of his entire career, and Trump himself has made immigration issues the centerpiece of his platform since his initial primary run.

And yet, that Trump is somehow hopelessly compromised on immigration is the only conclusion that people online seem to be able to reach from this sequence of events. The major positive steps that Trump has made on immigration, suspending millions of work permits for illegal immigrants, cancelling billions of dollars in grants directed to groups that facilitate illegal immigration, effectively ending illegal border crossings, and deporting dangerous gang members in a highly visible way to Guantanamo Bay or the El Salvador supermax prison, are ignored or even attacked as distractions. They just keep making the theoretical argument for mass deportations over and over again when the problem is practical, as though you can argue someone around an obstacle. They don’t really care about immigration, they care about making the argument.

There are many people who can make the theoretical case for mass deportations, but only a few people who could make mass deportations happen. Trump is the only reason we can even have this conversation. He was the only Republican candidate who could have won the election and also deliver the House and the Senate, allowing executive action to be carried out with the help of Congress. Trump’s officials are right now engaged in a variety of conflicts with the judicial system and administrative state in order to implement Trump’s agenda, including mass deportations. The solution that Trump’s critics always arrive at, jettisoning the only people who can actually do things for them, illustrates that they do not value achieving their supposed goals in any meaningful way. They are just here to talk. They are just here to talk about themselves.

What alternatives have such people proposed? I have seen many of them suggest replacing Trump/Vance with Massie/Paul, libertarians who not only could not win nationally but also oppose many of Trump’s restrictive immigration measures, because they just heard about Massie online recently and think (incorrectly) that he hates Jews. There is also the recurring smattering of accelerationist fantasies which, as I laid out earlier, simply are never acted on and are more about reinforcing one’s online identity than achieving anything in the real world. Finally, there are the people who don’t even pretend to offer an alternative to Trump (beyond the fantastical arrival of a huge rightwing revolution or new Hitler), but claim that Trump’s tardy mass deportations prove that he was an unsuitable candidate and that rightwingers should not have participated in the system at all, which would have accomplished nothing beyond ensuring victory for Kamala Harris, who promised open borders and amnesty and permanent defeat for the American Right. All of these suggestions move you farther away from mass deportations than blindly supporting Trump does.

The whole thing is retarded. All of these people are retarded. We cannot work with this material, at least not towards anything good. This is a problem because the narrow (and shrinking) range of individuals who are smart and energetic enough to be capable of productive action, who you want to be engaged with rightwing thought, are increasingly funneled into a schizophrenic conspiracy culture where people are socialized to lie incessantly and talk only about themselves, rather than encountering a well developed pedagogy for an emerging rightwing capable of pursuing realistic objectives over of the long term. Talent is wasted and eventually lost forever, and, worst of all, it is all for nothing. No one gains anything from this arrangement.

The Right’s mental health has died of neglect. Indecision and lack of discernment are the rule rather than the exception. Although before there were too many gatekeepers and they were gatekeeping for the wrong reasons, today all manner of unacceptable behavior is tolerated forever. There is a huge effort in the conservative media space to create new magazines, but no corresponding effort to create new magazine readers, or any kind of reader for that matter. Cultivating a conservative culture and intellectual climate that produces people who are capable of encountering new information and doing something useful with it is difficult and complex. Money and attention flow to the lowest common denominator and worst impulses, or, perhaps even worse, to crude clones of the pre-Trump gatekeepers who tried and failed to contain the truth.

To make a tangentially-related extended aside, if you are a very rich person reading this and are concerned about the deterioration of rightwing cultural spaces into nothing but meme antisemitism, I encourage you to stop funding efforts to combat antisemitism. There is no more patience or trust for the people who are hired to do this work. They have proven themselves to be uniformly stupid and dishonest. Brain-drain among the shill class has left only a crude remnant who cannot make their arguments without invoking Jewish chauvinism, clear hypocrisy, or obvious lies. These people create such a bad impression that they have become one of the primary generators of antisemitism today. You would be better off burning the money in your front yard than giving it to these people and their organizations.

The present dynamic reminds me of the controversy surrounding the 1937 bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. In essence, German military “advisors” (Germany provided support to Franco during the conflict, but it was primarily to provide their own forces with combat experience and to test new tactics and technology) bombed the town of Guernica, which was then in the hands of the Soviet-backed Republicans. The bombing caused many civilian casualties and a firestorm that devastated the city, leaving behind only a skeletal husk of what had been.

Franco immediately knew what had happened: The German advisors were targeting a strategically important bridge near the town in order to cut off the retreat of the Republicans, who were using the town as a regional headquarters. The bombers had missed their target. It was all a tragic mistake. The Germans hadn’t notified Nationalist command in advance of the air raid. Although the Germans did provide substantial aid to Franco, they maintained a separate military command (the diplomatic relationship between Franco’s Nationalists and Nazi Germany was much more distant than that of the Republicans and the Soviet Union, which controlled nearly all aspects of Republican policy). Franco hadn’t ordered the bombing and wasn’t culpable for it.

The reaction to the bombing at Guernica was immediate: The public proclaimed that it was an atrocity deliberately inflicted by Franco on his own people. The media of the time, which was nearly all pro-Republican, set the death toll at 1,600 and theorized that it was a terror bombing rather than a mistake that had occurred in pursuit of a legitimate military target. The Guernica myth gained widespread public buy-in and became a major tool for the Republicans in gathering international support. A tapestry copy of a painting about the tragedy by Pablo Picasso still stands in the United Nations building, a monument to the horrors of war and the fascist Franco regime in particular.

The myth gained buy-in even from Franco, who banned investigation of the event for most of his reign over fears that new discoveries might embarrass the government. It was not until a full survey of the victims of the bombing at the cemeteries surrounding Guernica was done by local historians in the 1980s that it was discovered that the actual death total was around 160, a mere 10% of what the media narrative had been for nearly half a century. Activist journalists in the 1930s had simply fabricated the original death total that sealed the event into the public memory.

Certainly the death of all those people was a tragedy, as was the loss of so many homes, but inadvertent civilian casualties during air raids were sadly commonplace during this time period. Far worse events occurred regularly during WW2, perpetuated by both sides of the war, that no one raises an eyebrow at. Franco’s stifling of inquiry into the historical facts surrounding Guernica ended up allowing that arrangement to continue. Furthermore, his suppression of the truth only further convinced outside observers that there was “something there.”

It is unsurprising that so many normal people have been going crazy when they talk about World War II (which usually leads them into going crazy about a bunch of other things) when American schools and media have been presenting this historical event as a touchstone moral parable for decades. The alleged special significance of World War II along with the climate of dishonesty and censorship and emotional performance that has come to surround it has damaged the way that people think about it and ultimately all history.

Discussing the Jewish role in many events has been considered taboo for quite a while. I actually now understand where this impulse comes from for certain Jews having interacted with the history of the Russian Revolution and the discourse around that history for long enough, even though I strongly disagree with this approach. It was incredible to read the book With Denikin’s Armies by John Ernst Hodgson and discover that many of the dysfunctional dynamics you see associated with antisemitism discourse today were present even back then.

Hodgson doesn’t pull any punches: the local Jews in White Army-controlled Rostov in 1918 were extremely hostile to the Whites and hindered them whenever possible. Hodgson mentions that many Bolshevik officials he knew of were Jewish. However, antisemitism also seemed to act as a mind virus for Russians he met. They would insist that American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George were Jewish. They would invent conspiracies that had little bearing to reality and then act on those fantasies. Symon Petliura, leader of the Ukrainian nationalists during this time period, recruited men for his army by claiming that the Whites (the force that had the best chance of beating the Bolsheviks) were mere tools of the Jews while simultaneously allowing the (heavily Jewish-led) Bolshevik Red Army to travel through his territory unharmed to attack the Whites. The discourse concerning Jews had a degree of truth but was also frequently fake or cynical and often rendered people just deranged.

Jewish activist groups, too, Hodgson reports, bore partial responsibility for this impossible situation and the disaster that ensued. He describes how Denikin (who had many views that would likely be characterized as anti-Semitic today) would receive protests from these groups over atrocities against Jews that never happened. Their frequent demands for express condemnations of anti-Semitism or prohibitions on anti-Semitic violence separate from normal military discipline (demands that were often presented as requirements for the continuation of Allied military aid) ended up only confirming in the eyes of Denikin’s men that Jews were receiving special treatment, increasing resentment of Jews and undermining Denikin’s authority.

I find the above dynamics a lot more interesting and revealing of our current predicament than the various truthnukes that people usually try to drop on me regarding the Russian Revolution. Rasputin’s wizard powers (he was just a weird folk healer who was the target of a rumor campaign from British-backed aristocratic circles because he was anti-war and his eccentricities could be used to embarrass the Czar)? The Imperial family murdered in a Jewish religious ritual (I’ve never seen any evidence of this and it flies in the face of what we actually know about the murders)? Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (Real but no one bothered to actually read this book, it wasn’t just Jews and it was more about breaking open the Russian economy than anything else)? It’s all not as exciting as people pretend it is.

The taboo nature of these discussions is what generates the excitement. Lots of perfectly serious and academic books were dubbed antisemitic for daring to explore the Jewish role in the Russian Revolution (such critics were very unkind to Robert Service’s excellent biographies of Lenin and Trotsky). Again, I actually kind of get it now having seen many people discover that Jews exist and then developing a socialized myopia (they only look for Jews, which then are unsurprisingly all they find) that drives them insane, but here the solution of unfairness, dishonesty, and censorship is obviously generating the problem it nominally exists to solve (among a bunch of other far-less sympathetic motives that various groups have to manipulate history).

You will never “make a good point” by lying. I cannot tell you how maddening it was to see Elon Musk force the leader of German rightwing party AfD, Alice Weidel, to agree with the idea that the Nazis were leftwing shortly before Germany’s parliamentary election. Weidel clearly does not think this, no one actually thinks this. Weidel’s private views about German history are likely much more radical than she can publicly say. She doesn’t need to say them. No one needs to say anything about these topics to make their case today. Oftentimes it seems like discourse itself is what is causing the problem. People would likely reach better places if they simply did not make these topics the center of attention and didn’t feel the need to lie about them. This is not how adults should talk to each other.

It’s degrading to be lied to. It’s degrading to lie. We live in a shithole because everyone lies all the time. In order to correct this problem, you must create a nucleus of culture around truth and very carefully manage it so it can grow and flourish.

Rightwing online cultural dominance as we know it today (in a greatly vulgarized form) was produced by eclectic far right forum culture briefly breaking into relatively unrestricted mainstream channels at exactly the right moment for it to be attached to a real world metapolitical sea change. Forbidden or at least very obscure lines of thought entered the open intellectual frontier that flowed from Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party and subsequent toppling of all politics as normal. This radically reshaped the way that Americans think about government, social relations, and their health for the better.

All of the cloistered far right forums that people used to go to are gone now. The cultural climate that produced the 2016 crossover moment no longer exists. The major figures have largely disappeared or burnt out. The degraded scene that you see today has totally different demographics, preferences, and priorities. There are a lot more people and a lot more money is floating around, but simultaneously far fewer opportunities for quality to emerge. We are in uncharted territory and that’s fine, but you can’t expect things to get better on their own.

Recapturing that lightning in a bottle will take years and it will be even longer before you see any visible returns. Still, this is very necessary work. As bad as things are now in rightwing spaces, they are only going to get worse. Conservatives already suffer from an extreme shortage of competent and stable people, and this shortage will only accelerate as the social pressure to conform to the various dead-end behaviors that have come to define rightwing online spaces increases by orders of magnitude in the real world.

About a year ago I recorded a (very good) podcast episode on the post-apocalyptic role playing game Fallout: New Vegas. In the episode, I argued that the game was the closest thing that Zoomers and Millennials had to a Great American Novel.

The game’s enduring appeal stems from presenting a relatively fleshed-out (power plants, agriculture, water systems, trade networks, factions with histories that stretch back hundreds of years) but still comprehensible world, a world that posed substantive questions to players about the nature of society, and then forced players to engage with those questions substantively (i.e. you have to make choices based on the game’s lore to advance). There’s a lot to talk about and disagree on here, but little need for it to get personal. There are boundaries to the game, media is inherently limited, so there is only a limited amount of information that players will have to base their decisions on. People who finish Fallout: New Vegas will all be conversant in roughly the same substantive thing.

Being conversant in something is important because it means you can actually have a conversation. It’s a prerequisite if you don’t want to just talk with or about yourself. Everyone is entering into discussions of Fallout: New Vegas with roughly the same background knowledge and they are talking about roughly the same thing. That is not the case for the overwhelming majority of discussions occurring right now. There is very little to be gained from such discourse, it usually only serves to confuse rather than clarify. People do not understand the things they are talking about and often do not want to understand. However, with a cultural object like Fallout: New Vegas, you can talk about the thing itself, instead of a person, with others.

Talking about the thing itself is a socially and personally rewarding process. A relatively large number people in the same age cohort have played Fallout: New Vegas. Not only is the thing substantive, but you have the opportunity to actually discuss it with your peers. I think something that young people crave is to participate in something that they take seriously, and to believe that they are worth being taken seriously by other people. Such feelings don’t always stem from self-obsession. People genuinely can reach a better understanding of things they like or tangentially related topics or each other or even themselves through discourse. If you want to understand anything well, you have to go through an iterative process, refining your views with different pieces of new information and different perspectives to view that information through.

There is little incentive to lie about Fallout: New Vegas or to misrepresent your true opinions regarding it. If you engage in any of the performances or self identification rituals that define modern discourse, it is immediately noticeable and regarded as obnoxious. It’s a video game, why bother? People are more defensive of things that are fun and apolitical than they are of things where it’s kind of accepted that there’s some degree of hamming it up like politics.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the various hallmarks of modern rightwing online culture did not come from people who spent all their time talking about politics. These forums and the broader social media circles they spawned were full of hobbyists who often had very eclectic interests that ranged from books, to movies, to videogames, to anime, to fitness, to love and romance (It would be very interesting to see a formal study of the influence of early 2010s PUA blogs on far right thought). It was a small self-selected group that was truly fringe: They were interested in things that were out of the ordinary.

People may mock all of these topics as trivial, but the broader fringe internet subculture (which was also far more demographically homogenous than its equivalent today) trained participants to explore a variety of niches thoroughly. There was little incentive to lie or misrepresent your views (at least about whatever was being discussed). It was all very low stakes and you were interacting with people who you could understand and could understand you. Furthermore, this level of fluency between group members allowed various disingenuous or destructive behaviors (commonplace online now) to be instantly recognized and dismissed.

When the political moment arrived in the form of events like GamerGate and the early Trump campaign such people were far better equipped to flow with the giant energies at work than anyone who reads the newspaper or political blogs every day. I should add that I don’t think this fringe online cohort caused the Trump moment. I think that they merely were able to capitalize on it in a way others were not, and we still see that positive influence (however degraded) today.

Of course, everything is different now. It is important not to lionize all of these people too much, their moment is over and not coming back. You can’t recreate what happened. It is possible, however, to cultivate a new fringe that is capable of producing new and good things again.

There must be a real effort to build and maintain a non-political fringe conservative culture. This means building places where smart young people can go to be free of politicized thought, and then policing those places to keep out bad influences and/or liberals. It also means bringing focus to a limited number of cultural objects at a time. You need to have common ground to work from, a new canon for you new audience.

Conservatives should place far more attention on nominally apolitical media, movies, television shows, videogames, etc. There need to be more conservatives spaces where it’d kind of be weird for you to talk about politics. As philosopher Jonathan Bowden said, “If you look at mass and popular culture, the heroic is still alive. It’s still alive in junk films, in comic books, in forms that culturally elitist society and intellectuals deprivilege.” Genre media is huge. Hobbyist communities are huge. People should be provided with implicitly rightwing platforms where they can build fluency with actual things rather than spouting off memes all the time. People should be able to communicate with each other about things they like or enjoy without the shadow of World War II or any other stage for contemporary performance looming over them.

You must do the opposite of what conservatives are doing now. You must be implicit. Did liberals go around saying “I am liberal. No conservatives allowed.” as they dominated culture for decades? No. In fact, it was only when they had to say those things that their cultural power began to wane. Ideally, people should be being exposed to conservative thought without even understanding it as conservative thought. It should just be art. It should just be knowledge. It should just be fun. Liberals used to do that really well. They had cultural professionals and overlapping “lessons” and creative spaces that allowed people to gain a thorough understanding of their views. When someone arrived at a conclusion liberals wanted them to arrive at, it felt natural to them rather than a performance for a crowd.

Of course, eventually it became just a performance for a crowd. Liberals were delusional and malicious for quite some time before their ignoble implosion but gradually lost any ability to defend their indefensible policy choices. There was no logic or real principle left after they shed their camouflage to wage total war against Trump, only naked force and group identity. Conservatives beginning to identify as “based” represents the same degraded thinking of modern liberals. All of the good rightwing ideas of the last 10 years have become identity signifiers rather than ideas. You must return attention to the thing itself to prevent rightwing audiences from going insane.

Take the rightwing response to the film Anora (2025), which sold lots of tickets and won many awards. It’s a good movie that actually represents a change in the public consciousness (I have a podcast episode on Anora talking about why I liked it and what I think it had to say). This movie could not have been made a few years ago, and contains many messages that rightwingers would be sympathetic to (and that liberals are very hostile to) even if you find the film’s nudity and sexual content objectionable. The fact that it did so well with the public demonstrates that people (especially young people) are open to thinking about these topics in a way that is far more friendly to us. There is nothing wrong with not liking Anora, but it’s something that rightwingers should at least be able to speak about intelligently if they’re going to talk about it.

How did rightwingers respond to this genuine cultural victory? With absolute stupidity. Rightwing figures just began talking about themselves rather than the movie. They complained about “degeneracy” even though the film already has a message that’s fairly contemptuous of degenerated modern social conditions. Essentially, the movie lays out how a prostitute has ruined her own life and destroyed her ability to form meaningful connections with other people through her behavior. Rightwingers invented flimsy nonsense criticisms solely to provide themselves with the opportunity to launch into diatribes that really didn’t mean anything other than “I am based.” Their audiences, who probably hadn’t seen the movie, were happy to cheer this behavior on. This is the perverse incentive structure created by such signalling.

If you were a young person who liked Anora, you must have thought that all of these people were retarded. Not only did they not understand the movie, which was not particularly subtle or complex, they didn’t seem to want to. One imagines them watching the movie waiting for something to get angry at. It was astounding to watch this dynamic unfold. People who frequently say that we need new rightwing film studios and festivals and culture revealed that they can’t even manage to watch a movie without making it all about themselves. Anora was just a romantic comedy that a lot of people liked and rightwingers couldn’t handle that on its own terms.

There are many people who just don’t get it in rightwing spaces and can’t get it because they’re too self-obsessed, stupid, or mentally ill. The surging popularity of online personality feuds and empty signalling signals the influx of huge numbers of people into rightwing online spaces who can only understand personality feuds or only understand empty signals. The ideas and arguments are nonsensical because the ideas and arguments no longer matter, only defining yourself. Keeping out these destructive audiences is as important as keeping out the figures and trends they enable.

Conservatives must create a little world that can fulfill the intellectual and creative needs of capable people, where they will not be subjected to the various brain scorchers of modern discourse and be in dialogue only with each other rather than a public mind that is rapidly in decline. I praise the comments section of my podcast all the time. It’s not a bit, the guys in the comments section really are very bright. They have a lot to add to conversations and I learn new things from them or get good recommendations and insights constantly. It’s very reassuring to see them interact with each other. They have the right attitude, I’ve never had to ban anyone.

This is a small self-selected group that is directed at things rather than people, and a lot of different things too—movies, tv shows, books. People know a lot and are open to new things. I use the expression “wallpaper in your mind” to describe this kind of effect. You never know how depoliticized trivia (even if it’s just riffing on a videogame you’ll never play) might help you. It might allow you to make a connection you wouldn’t have made before, or stumble onto something else you wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. I’m sure everyone in the comments section is conservative or otherwise rightwing, but they don’t feel compelled to prove it constantly. It would be kind of weird if they did. There are a lot of very nice and rewarding things to talk about other than politics. Because everyone lies constantly about politics, implicitly political communities are usually a lot more productive than explicitly political ones.

Recreating this effect at scale means a lot more than a new podcast or a new movie or a new book or a new magazine. It means a constellation of apolitical cultural spaces, organizations, workshops, affinity groups, think tanks, historical institutes, events, roundtables, retreats, camps, schools and all of the things that liberals maintained to cultivate talent and ruthlessly drove our people from. These things should be in communication with each other with overlapping messages and casts of characters.

Of course, if you build it they won’t necessarily come. It is also extremely important for conservatives to put more effort not just into creating a community of cultural professionals, but also elite consumers of their products and services.

It’s tough to do this in the wilderness of modern conditions. Things are not good anywhere. The internet means that the worst social trends can be beamed to the most remote locations on the planet. Furthermore, there is so much noise that it is genuinely difficult for good people to find each other. You can build the perfect system and there’s no guarantee that the people you want to attract will even hear about it, much less feel compelled to participate.

I think the best model is something like the Apollo program: You must select for and concentrate the best of the best. Administer an IQ-adjacent test to a very large number of young people and select only from the best performers. Put them in environments where they’re given background knowledge and training that will help them make the most of their natural talents, and kick out anyone who can’t handle the social component of this kind of circle. Most importantly, pay them to do all of this.

For the same amount of money deployed by conservative media outlets to hire and support a single gamerchair retard who might seem to be slightly better on the issues, you could fund stipends ($1000 extra a month goes a long way) or jobs (someone has to staff the constellation of apolitical cultural organizations) to support 1000 young people who are not interested in hearing what gamerchair retards have to say. These are people who can actually generate new culture and participate in constructive projects.

Money talks. It is depressing to see how many institutional resources go towards propping up more or less useful fandoms and cults and vanity projects that ultimately produce nothing while many smart and capable young people, who could change the world for the better if they were given resources and opportunity to pursue their own interests, are left to wither on the vine.

These unsupported young people either drop out, focusing on their careers and families and all the other nice things separate from the dishonest performances of modern politics, or, worse, burn out. These burnouts are the bleakest aspect of modern online spaces.

Watching young people who could have contributed towards something good get involved with drugs, deviant behavior, or a fandom that will cause them to turn on all of their old friends has become just another part of being online. As these people close doors for themselves, they flail and lash out rather than admit their mistakes. Someone who goes crazy and embittered usually only gets crazier and more embittered. The worst part is knowing that, if they had been given the opportunity to be part of something better, this crazy person likely would have risen to the occasion and avoided all of this.

George Soros terraformed the minds of Eastern Europeans by building a centrally-coordinated network of nominally apolitical cultural outposts. He fundamentally transformed the American justice system (flatlining quality of life in major cities) by pouring money into critical local elections that most conservatives don’t bother to participate in. There are lots of crowns in the gutter waiting for someone who can look a few steps ahead to pick them up. Please, really rich conservative guy reading this, stop investing in a one-off object that’s flashy or thoughtful and start investing in building a core population that is capable of sustaining your goals over the long term.

As I said before, liberals should be excluded for anything good to stay good, as should the liars, troublemakers, and bad actors who have plunged rightwing spaces into their current sorry state. The best organizing principle and hard line for such a new scene, I think, is support for Trump.

Yes, it all comes back to this. I am a Trump sycophant. I am loyal to my leader Donald Trump. My cards are all on the table. This is not a bit. I’m not exaggerating. I’m like this in real life and really nasty about it. I think anything other than enthusiastic support for Donald Trump and his agenda is at best useless or masturbatory and at worst actively harmful. I have yet to see anyone who criticizes Trump who offers even a tiny fraction of what Trump offers to America, the world, and you personally. Trump could shoot me on 5th Avenue and I’d still support him in my dying moments. In fact, I hope that this happens so I am spared the indignity of watching countless ungrateful, ignorant, and self-obsessed rightwingers lash out at their only hope of success.

Support for Trump means support for doing things in the real world. You cannot think your way around doing things in the real world. Anyone who believes they can merely establishes themselves as a liability who should be ruthlessly excluded from rightwing thought and public discourse. Such people, and those who would throw them lifelines by engaging with them, must be excluded. The broken clock should never get any credit for being right twice a day or even 90% of the day. No traitors.

It’s better to set a one strike policy for such saboteurs than the current arrangement of allowing them to circulate forever. Great Britain’s medieval treatment of felons produced centuries of relative stability and success for the British people. Figuratively comparable harsh treatment of those who view politics as a mere stage for self-aggrandizement would likely pay dividends for the American Right. The most unbreakable policy must be that you cannot betray. You can never be allowed to help the enemy for any reason. As Trump is essential to our success in the near and long terms, attacking him in non-productive ways (the only ways these people seem to be capable of) only weakens us and helps the enemy.

People are taught to think of themselves as consumers. They consume rightwing content. They have opinions about whether various developments are good or bad, and those opinions (tied to ego and group membership) eventually become the most important things in the world to them. They do not see themselves as participants in all of this drama, something that they might have a real effect on and which certainly has a very real effect on them. Rather, they are in a constant negotiation with reality. What will it take for them to agree to survive? Eventually the world itself stops mattering, and such people become consumed with their little selves and other petty issues as the salvageable real world situation is allowed to decline into nothing.

This is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, it might be an eternal one. John Ernst Hodgson described his arguments with White Army officers during the time of the Russian Revolution:

One emerged from these talks with the impression that the average Russian loved a debate for its own sake, that he started from a fixed point and always managed to get back to that point, and that he was able to think deep down into himself but seldom along extraneous lines. This may be why his thinking has seldom been progressive and constructive. He reminded me of the classic story of the Byzantine theologians who went on discussing metaphysics while the Turks thundered at the gates of their city.

The Turks are here and all of these retards are still arguing about metaphysics. We’re not going to have an argument about whether or not it’s appropriate to fight and live. We’re not going to have an argument about whether or not we should throw out our only hope of success in favor of a theoretical more pure leader in the future. A.W. Smith put it more simply in his memoirs A Captain Departed “In the end [the White Army] cracked because of that fungoid growth that seems to attack all Russian enterprise. Talk, graft, and lassitude combined to its downfall.”

Efforts must be made to inoculate the rightwing public mind against the fungoid growth of talk, graft, and lassitude, but this is impossible in the open sewer of rightwing online spaces as they exist today. You must construct the little world, a little place where people can be human again, which can eventually grow and supersede the various big places and modes of communication that have by now far outlived their usefulness.

This essay was written over the course of a little over a month. It is regrettably about ten times as long as I had originally planned. I’d be ready to put a bow on it, then something new to talk about would arrive. Realistically it should have been several different essays but I couldn’t think of an elegant way to break it apart into chunks. I don’t want to ever write anything this long again and I’m skeptical that such a winding and disorganized document will be of much use to anyone other than myself but, frankly, the content drip on this Substack has been pretty slow lately so I might as well publish it. I am conscious of the fact that the therapeutic aspect of writing these things down might display the exact same self-indulgence that I rail against. Still, I am comforted by the thought that such a lengthy and confused document will likely frustrate people who were hoping to mine damaging quotes from the piece, if they bother to read very far down at all.

As bad as things are now, and they are really bad, they are only going to get worse. Internalize that reality. Human capital decline in America 2025 is steep and accelerating. They’re not making new Oldheads. People are losing it now, while the real world situation is actually pretty good. There are things so bad we haven’t even considered them yet on the horizon. You need to get mentally in the right place, and find other people who are in the right place as well, while you still can. Everyone who is going to fall apart or begin helping the enemy at the next twist of fate needs to be jettisoned before they are in a position to do real damage.

Nothing has to happen. We could easily pull out of this present moment like it was nothing and everyone will forget all about it. People forget very quickly now. We could also easily toss aside all the gifts and opportunities we’ve been given and fall very far from these heights. We get to choose what we do.

I’m optimistic, all things considered. If there’s one thing that reading about the Russian Revolution teaches you, it’s that people usually run out of will far sooner than they run out of chances to improve their situations. Read my introduction to the Russian Revolution: Lenin’s regime suffered disaster after disaster. The Bolsheviks were constantly one second away from oblivion. Both sides of World War I started gobbling up their territory. Their soldiers wouldn’t fight and when they did would lose against forces that they outnumbered 10-to-1. Lenin gets shot 3 times in the chest. And yet, the Bolsheviks cartwheeled forward into history in spite of their numerous fatal wounds. They simply refused to die. They believed that their victory was necessary and good, despite neither of these things being true. The Whites, on the other hand, lacked a similar clarity that might have allowed them to achieve a comparable unity of force and purpose.

I really do believe in this stuff. I think we are telling the truth and are going to make the world a better place. I believe that our victory is necessary and good, and that this is something we can will into reality. As I said in my election night essay: Everyone is so unhappy. Everyone is so stupid and angry and ungrateful and insane. It has to stop. It will stop. We will stop it.

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