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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Accept that the break has already occurred

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

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

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

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

2. Don’t debate, discredit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Remember that shit attracts flies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First week’s discussion post:

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

First book club episode:

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

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

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

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Discussion prompt highlights

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

MikeyLemons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NorthWest Manny:

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

Henry:

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

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

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

MikeyLemons:

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

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

INEPTIRE:

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

Spraktoz:

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

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

MikeyLemons:

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

nopiqweutaa:

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

BradleyBColeman:

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

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

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

KC:

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

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

INEPTIRE:

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

Really good point:

Graham Bradley:

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

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

REPLY: WDot

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

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I come to you with my hat in my hand. I’m truly sorry, but the first book club episode is officially delayed. I’m currently in the middle of editing the first book club episode (about 50 minutes of edited material so far, with an estimated 30-40 minutes to go). Honestly I just think I sound straight-up retarded in these upcoming…

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It appears that Musk managed to buy his way back into Trump’s good graces. However, nearly the exact same cast of characters is once again running through this destructive strategy. Tucker Carlson has just revealed that he’s planning a 3rd party, presumably to be staffed with the same people and talking points that were defeated in KY-04 primary.

You don’t really have to parse these peoples’ motives too deeply. Some are probably behaving purely cynically, others have probably become mentally unbalanced, others are probably being fed these terrible ideas by people they shouldn’t trust, others are probably just stupid. Whether you’re forming an insurgent 3rd party because Trump is too hostile to legal immigration or not hostile enough, all you really have to ask is “If these people were just trying to make liberals win, would they be doing anything different?”

I think it was a failure to properly crack down on behavior like Musk and his accomplices’ during this incident, and even the rightwing opposition to Trump before 2024, that led to this situation. People on the Right need to be taught that you can have a wide variety of views on a wide variety of topics, but the second you start trying to secure victory for the enemy you are gone for good. Cutting these people out is the only method that works. You have to demonstrate to observers that they will be gone too if they do this stuff or even enable it. If you can’t demonstrate this, don’t be surprised when the behavior spreads and get worse as these people try to figure out what they can get away with.

As this is a long one I recommend you listen to it on Substack’s text-to-speech program.

I read a lot about the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War. It’s often hard to read new books about these topics because the biggest lesson you’ll learn from extensive study of the period is that all the tragedy was not inevitable.

Everyone identifies roughly the same factors that led to Bolshevik victory. They weren’t hard to identify, people noticed them at the time. The Bolsheviks were not popular, they were not particularly competent, and they made plenty of mistakes that should have been fatal. On a military level, the Bolsheviks were inferior to the Whites (who secured the loyalty of far more former Russian military officers and specialists) for most of the war despite the Bolsheviks’ great advantage in raw numbers and material.

However, the various White armies formed to oppose the Bolshevik coup suffered from a profound political retardation. They could not agree on what they wanted, who was in charge, how they should act, or that they even needed to have “a side.” It is truly sobering to realize just how many unforced errors the Whites, who could and should have won, made as the Bolshevik freight train hurtled towards them.

One of the main contributors to the Whites’ defeat was political inexperience. This concept is frequently mentioned in Peter Kenez’s excellent books Red Attack, White Resistance and its sequel Red Advance, White Defeat, which are the best military histories of the Russian Civil War, as well as The White Generals by Richard Luckett, which I think is the best overall summary of the conflict (but not the Revolution more generally, if you want a good survey of that I’d recommend The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin). Although I was already planning a different article on this exact topic, Elon Musk’s recent very public breaks with President Trump offer a good launching point to explore this concept.

White leadership primarily consisted of military leaders who brought with them the assumptions of a military hierarchy and Russian society that no longer existed. They were ruthless when a light touch was required, passive before events that demanded a response, tolerant of obvious liabilities and needlessly hostile to potential allies, stubborn about all the wrong things, demanding of the impossible, and just fundamentally unable to make something work.

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The challenge wasn’t that the leaders of the White Army weren’t brave or smart or good or right, it was that they literally didn’t know what they were doing. They had never been in that situation before and did not know how to navigate it. Luckett writes:

“[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.”

In contrast to the counter-revolutionary Whites, the revolutionary Bolsheviks had decades of experience in political and diplomatic matters owing to the nature of the radical community. They were very adept at working within parliamentary organizations and easily outmaneuvered their naïve and inexperienced leftist rivals during the tumultuous months of the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks made plenty of mistakes, but it was their experience and discipline that allowed them to recover. Because they were so used to operating outside of the law and the norms of society, they could much more easily adapt to the state of chaos that the former Russian Empire had fallen under.

General Wrangel wrote that his first reaction to learning of the Czar’s abdication was “This is the end of everything. This is anarchy.” Wrangel was, as usual, uncommonly perceptive.

The Russian Revolution should not be understood as a popular uprising with a predetermined outcome, but rather a prolonged state of anarchy that eventually transformed into a new order steered by a small group of unpopular radicals who just played their cards right. Not only was the government overthrown, but everything people “knew” started to shift.

Dietrich Neufeld (aka Dirk Gora, he had to use a pseudonym due to the threat of assassination), a Dutch Mennonite living in Southern Ukraine, where the anarchist bands of Nestor Makhno launched a mass robbery and ethnic cleansing campaign targeting non-ethnic Ukrainians, wrote in his book A Russian Dance of Death that:

The Ukrainian peasant has become rebellious in consequence of a constant change of regime. Is it not true that for two years he has had to endure, with almost every new moon, a new government? After this, and very soon, there will not be an administration which can easily gain his respect.

Certain moral conceptions, which should underlie any form of state, have been overthrown.

Not a lot of people are prepared to deal with a society where “stealing is wrong” is no longer an assumption that most people carry with them, yet that’s exactly the situation that Neufeld and millions of others found themselves in. Czar Nicholas II was bewildered when he received petitions from many prominent members of society to pardon the men who had murdered the folk-healer Rasputin, because they believed (incorrectly on all counts) that Rasputin was a German spy, exercised an enormous amount of control over the royal family, and possessed evil wizard powers. Didn’t they know that murder was wrong? Not anymore. Things were starting to come apart.

The Bolsheviks, who had operated as a clandestine political party and quasi-terrorist group for more than a decade, were suited for this environment in a way that the various anti-Bolshevik leaders were not. They understood the importance of vision, ruthlessness, and organization, things that many White leaders took for granted because they had always been able to rely on broader society to provide all of these things. Because the Bolsheviks had existed outside of the law and social order for so long, they were more capable of acting as a law and social order onto themselves.

Especially in the early days of the White Army, political inexperience served as a huge obstacle to the Whites’ efforts. Volunteer Army leaders like Alexeiev and Denikin, whose pre-Revolution experience was almost solely in the realm of military operations, made political mistake after political mistake. Their public position was that the Bolsheviks must be stopped so that Russia could reenter the war against Germany, even though the war had become extremely unpopular and they were at the time dependent on the protection that local German garrisons provided to their flanks, on top of huge shipments of critical German arms and ammunition that were being passed to them through Pyotr Krasnov’s Don Cossack government. It would have probably been better if they had said nothing about this topic at all, since their sympathies should have been and were obvious to outside observers.

Krasnov, a charismatic adventurer with limited political experience, made himself too conspicuous an ally of Germany, which at the time was losing World War I. Although Germany did provide Krasnov’s Don Army with desperately needed weapons and ammunition, his unnecessary and flamboyant public pronouncements of his German orientation created numerous diplomatic headaches for anti-Bolshevik forces in the region when dealing with the Allies, who were still toying with the idea that Bolshevik Russia might be persuaded to re-enter the war against Germany. Krasnov probably could have gotten what he wanted without closing those doors for himself, but did not know how or why he should do so.

This inexperience extended down the ranks. The former Russian military officers who composed the core of the White Army simply weren’t used to dealing with the political and diplomatic considerations that they were presented with. There was little sense of where the public mood was, or of what was and wasn’t possible or effective.

Denikin frequently complained that a large swath of his men were ardent monarchists, even though the monarchy was very unpopular at the time and there was no clear successor to Czar Nicholas II, who had been imprisoned and murdered in secret by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. Whatever the theoretical arguments for monarchy may have been, how could the monarchy actually be restored in practical terms at that moment? It was impossible, but Monarchist officers weren’t really thinking about that and didn’t feel they had to because they could control their territory through force of arms. This control proved to be far more tenuous than they expected without the support or at least indulgence of the public, which they gradually lost despite general opposition to the Bolsheviks.

Kenez theorized that the way Whites handled diplomatic and political disagreements was most similar to the way that a gossip or rumor campaign would be conducted at a military academy or a bureaucratic power-struggle would proceed in the pre-Revolution military. These struggles presume that participants have similar backgrounds and a similar interest in the military’s continued existence. If you “lost” such a struggle, the worst thing that might happen to you is being transferred to an undesirable post or perhaps forcibly retired early. These were matters that the Whites all had extensive experience in, but that experience proved to be mostly useless in the realm of real-world politics or civil war, where the existence of institutions and norms they had once relied upon was not a given and losing meant having your country destroyed and maybe ending up in front of a firing squad.

Many groups other than military officers were experiencing these kind of growing pains as Imperial society collapsed around them during the Revolutionary period. Historian Richard Pipes writes in The Russian Revolution that:

… [N]early everything the peasant learned in his familiar environment proved to be useless and sometimes positively harmful when applied elsewhere. Living in a small community, the Russian peasant was unequipped for the transition to a complex society, composed of individuals rather than households and regulated by impersonal relations, into which he would be thrust by the upheavals of the twentieth century.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most successful anti-Bolshevik general of the period, Marshal Mannerheim of Finland, had a background as a diplomat, explorer, and spy on top of his successful military career. He knew how to talk to people and how and when to make a deal.

General Wrangel’s remarkable (though sadly not decisive) success probably stemmed from his previous experience commanding Cossack troops and being stationed in Poland before the Civil War. He could navigate the complex social dynamics of the period in a way that many of his peers could not. Even as a young officer Wrangel was considered a social butterfly while the bookish and insecure Denikin had trouble making friends and relating to his peers. This might not have been an issue in an organized military force fighting a conventional conflict with a rival power but became a huge one when Denikin was forced to act as both head of state and commander-in-chief of a political army during a civil war.

When the Volunteer Army, which mostly consisted of non-Cossack refugees, initially arrived in Don Cossack territory, one of their only local allies was General Kaledin. Kaledin was a former military officer who had declared himself the dictator of the region to stop a Bolshevik uprising during the October Revolution. This was later ratified by the local Cossack government. Although Kaledin was nominally in political control, his power and resources were very limited and required constant negotiation with other parts of Cossack society, which had also been plunged into a state of anarchy. This meant he often had to say “No” to requests from the Volunteers.

Although Alexeiev was frustrated by this, he tried to maintain good relations with Kaledin, who was pretty much the only major local figure who tolerated his men. Without Kaledin, it is certain that local Bolsheviks would stage an uprising that was also certain to be successful. However, one of Alexeiev’s top lieutenants took Kaledin’s constant refusals as a sign that Kaledin needed to be removed and replaced with a Volunteer government. He began planning a coup against Kaledin without any authorization from Alexeiev.

This Volunteer coup would have had no hope of success: Although Kaledin’s popularity waxed and waned, the Volunteers were always far less popular than Kaledin was with the Don Cossacks. As outsiders, they would have had no base of power or public support to draw from. In fact, staging a coup against the locally elected leader would have only seemed to confirm Bolshevik propaganda that reactionary military officers were really just trying to overthrow the will of the people. A coup government wouldn’t have lasted more than a few days.

The fact that a Volunteer coup against Kaledin was unnecessary and that success was impossible notwithstanding, the officer behind this effort also just had no idea how to plan a coup or conduct any kind of clandestine activity. He was a military officer, that’s all he’d ever done. As soon as he tried to do something else, he floundered because he had no idea what he was doing. Word of the planned coup quickly spread and it greatly embarrassed Alexeiev, who had to reassure Kaledin that he wasn’t planning anything, he merely had limited control over his top subordinates, who also might be morons. It made the Volunteers look like an unstable and potentially treacherous partner.

The most insidious aspect of the coup attempt was that it was directed at one of the only officials who bothered to engage with the Volunteers. They knew Kaledin existed and that made him a target for some ill-formed conspiracy. This created heavy disincentives to interact with the Volunteers. Many former Russian officials and prominent members of society thought it was not worth the trouble to negotiate with such an immature and unstable organization, preferring to wait and see what new potential partners might emerge from the chaos.

Boris Savinkov, a former radical socialist who had become an unlikely ally of the military during the chaotic days of the Provisional Government that preceded the Russian Revolution, travelled to Volunteer Army territory shortly after their victorious Ice March (details of that here) eventually allowed them to settle into a more stable base in the Kuban. Savinkov was one of the few high-ranking officials in the Provisional Government who had supported General Kornilov, one of the founders of the Volunteer Army, during the Kornilov Affair (you can find a rundown of that complex sequence of events here). Although Kornilov had been killed in battle, Savinkov was still a hardcore anti-Bolshevik and approached Denikin and Alexeiev to see if they could unify their efforts.

Savinkov had previously proven himself to be a reliable opponent of the Bolsheviks, offered some degree of legitimacy as a member of the recently-deposed Provisional Government, maintained an extensive network of spies and supporters in Bolshevik-controlled Moscow and Petrograd (which the conservative military officers of the Volunteers did not have), and was trusted by the Allied governments (they would eventually equip Savinkov with hundreds of millions of dollars for an anti-Bolshevik coup attempt) who were at the time skeptical of the Volunteer Army. Despite this, Alexeiev and Denikin gave him the cold shoulder. He was warned that he would be murdered if he stayed in Volunteer territory and departed soon afterwards to try to organize anti-Bolshevik forces in another part of the country.

The pair actually had good reasons to be hostile to Savinkov. They thought he was a piece of shit, and he was. After all, Savinkov was not only a morphine addict and a former radical leftist, he was also a murderer. He had been convicted for his role in several terrorist bombings targeting officials of the old Imperial government but was pardoned by the Provisional government as a snub to the old regime. Despite this horrible past, he was exactly the sort of character who the Volunteers could have and probably should have made something work with. They needed the things he had to offer and, having failed to make an agreement, no one benefitted.

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A similar failure could be found in the Whites’ early treatment of the newly independent nation of Georgia. Georgia, like many parts of the former Russian Empire, had declared its independence after the legitimate Russian government had collapsed. Despite being nominally independent, the Georgian government seemed eager to make a deal with the Volunteers. Not only did they not have much of a military of their own, but also the Georgian government was dominated by Mensheviks, a leftist party that had split away from the Bolsheviks several decades prior. Georgian Mensheviks knew that if the Bolsheviks were triumphant in Russia, an invasion and conquest of Georgia would follow soon afterwards.

Early diplomatic contact between the Volunteer Army’s envoy and the commander of Georgian military forces went surprisingly well. The two men hit it off immediately and developed plans to collaborate against the Bolsheviks. As a gesture of good will, the Georgians gifted the Volunteers an armored train (the first to come into the Volunteers’ possession) before sending their own diplomatic delegation to Volunteer territory to try to work out some kind of deal.

The Volunteers didn’t even bother to meet the Georgians at the train station. When the Georgian delegation eventually made their way to Volunteer headquarters, Denikin, Alexeiev, and the other assembled staff laid into them for their bad behavior before the Revolution. They refused to acknowledge Georgia’s nominal independence, in other words to acknowledge that the delegation even had the ability to negotiate, and maintained an atmosphere of total hostility. Nothing of substance was discussed, nothing was gained from negotiations. The Volunteers even made dubious criticism of the armored train the Georgians had just gifted them. The Georgians walked away from the meeting thinking there was no way they could ever make anything work with the Volunteers.

The funny thing is, the Volunteers’ hostility was mostly justified. The Georgian Mensheviks were extremely belligerent towards both the Czarist regime and the Provisional Government. This belligerence contributed to the collapse of both of these governments and the rise of the Bolsheviks. From the perspective of the Volunteers, the Georgians bore a large portion of responsibility for the predicament they now found themselves in. There was a lot of well-earned bad blood between the two parties. Furthermore, the Volunteers already had to deal with a clown-car’s worth of secessionist groups with claims of wildly varying validity. It was easy for the Volunteers to dismiss tiny Georgia, which had no ability to defend itself and seemingly no ability to challenge the Volunteers.

Even still, however justified the hostility may have been, it was not productive at all. By blowing up the negotiations, the Volunteers failed to make any kind of deal with their southern neighbor, which had shown signs that it was willing to work with them and which the Volunteers could not overthrow or occupy on their own.

Georgia could have been a very useful source of supplies or international support. Although it was a weak government, it was a government that actually had a real organization and buy-in from the people it claimed to represent. This is more than you could say for the Whites in most areas they controlled. The Whites, with little experience or interest in politics, only ever developed primitive political bodies and civil administration, leading to total disorganization behind the lines (this would prove to be a fatal flaw during Denikin’s March on Moscow). The Volunteers were fighting a multi-front war and still turned a potential ally, or at least a potential neutral party, into an enemy.

After negotiations failed, the Georgian government funded guerilla bands that caused havoc in the Whites’ rear as the main White force was occupied farther north on the frontlines facing the Bolsheviks. They thought (incorrectly but understandably) that a total White victory might be as bad for them as a total Bolshevik victory. The two sides couldn’t make a deal and so both ended up losing big. The Southern grouping of the Whites would be defeated in 1920 and Georgia would be invaded and conquered by the Bolsheviks in 1921.

I think the mistake stemmed from political inexperience. The Volunteers were probably “right” but that ended up not mattering as much as they thought it would. “Correct but not productive” is not something they usually had to grapple with in a diplomatic context. Instead of keeping the door open for some kind of future deal, Denikin and Alexeiev slammed it shut permanently. They weren’t used to navigating these complex political dynamics and so preferred not to navigate them at all. This is not a viable strategy in an inherently political conflict like a civil war. Despite the Whites’ huge military successes, lots of stunning bravery against overwhelming odds, their political failures ended up sinking them.

This dysfunction was most obvious in times of crisis. One of the biggest political challenges for the Whites came from the split between Denikin and Wrangel. This dispute is covered extensively in Wrangel’s memoirs, I won’t recount it here. Although the various public and not-public direct clashes between Wrangel and Denikin are covered in that book, the aspect of the feud I think is most interesting came from outside of the parties.

There were many people outside of Denikin and Wrangel who actively tried to engineer their dispute, nominally to “help” whichever leader they supported. Denikin’s chief-of-staff, Romanovsky, seems to have deliberately withheld supplies and reinforcements from Wrangel and tried to have many of Wrangel’s associates set up on false charges. He likely concealed these efforts from Denikin.

Wrangel’s own supporters, against Wrangel’s wishes, also attempted to force a break between the pair. They leaked internal reports criticizing Denikin’s strategy and proposed that Wrangel take Denikin’s place at the top of the White Army. One officer even staged a mutiny and demanded that Denikin resign and accept Wrangel as his replacement. Denikin assumed, incorrectly, that all of these efforts were being directed by Wrangel and retaliated further.

Wrangel, for his part, understood the political situation well. Despite his obvious issues with Denikin, Wrangel publicly condemned all efforts to subvert Denikin’s authority and stated, correctly, that coups and mutinies were not how succession should happen in a military organization. In times of war you have to obey your commanders’ orders. That’s how hierarchical organizations work. If everyone is off doing their own thing, it becomes impossible to get anything done at the scale required for success. Public infighting in this way for any reason is inherently harmful. Rather than acting like members of an army, many White leaders were trying to act like political operatives or spies and doing a very bad job of that.

Wrangel’s pleas for good order fell on deaf ears as the White Army’s front collapsed, however, and the break between Wrangel and Denikin eventually became irreparable. Wrangel was exiled under pain of death by Denikin, who himself fled Russia soon afterwards. The factions had engaged in so much subterfuge only for both to lose. No one knew what they were doing. When they tried to do things, they ended up making the situation worse.

Finally, there was a total lack of discipline in the areas the Whites controlled: Corruption, speculation, and extrajudicial killing were all commonplace. On one hand, this is understandable: The police, the courts, and the legal system in general had collapsed. It was difficult to find anyone to step up and do basic low-level law enforcement and the Whites preferred not to tackle such a complicated problem.

Denikin tolerated enormous unauthorized requisitions of supplies (which disrupted the flow of critical arms, ammunition, and fuel to various sections of the front), along with various outrages that alienated the public, by figures like General May-Mayevsky, an alcoholic and drug addict whose chief aide proved to be a Bolshevik agent (which many warned him about because the aide’s brother was known to be a high-level Bolshevik secret police officer, though these warnings were ignored). These kind of lapses were commonplace. Denikin worried that if he started imposing basic standards of behavior he would have very few soldiers or commanders left.

It was only after May-Mayevsky began to lose battles that Denikin worked up the courage to fire him and replace him with Wrangel. By then, the damage had already been done and it was difficult to repair the Whites’ reputation in the areas that May-Mayevsky’s bad behavior had thrown into disarray.

It’s not like this problem was impossible to solve. Wrangel was notorious for holding field court martials for criminals, civilian or military. This strict discipline made him more, not less, popular with his men and the public. I’ve read a lot of memoirs about the Russian Civil War, and the anecdote that appears the most in these memoirs is Wrangel deciding to publicly try and hang a railroad official who accepted a bribe to transport merchants’ goods rather than civilian refugees away from an area of the front that was being evacuated. After the trial and public execution, the evacuation proceeded more quickly than expected.

The story is well known probably because this kind of decisive action against wrongdoing was so rare in the areas that Whites controlled. Wrangel didn’t walk up to the railroad worker and shoot him or engage in some complex maneuvering against him. Wrangel just did what a military leader was supposed to do during a national emergency, no more no less. He was the law, and a real law that most people could and would accept as legitimate.

None of this is to say that political mistakes were exclusively the realm of conservative military officers during the Russian Civil War. A great deal could be written about the naïve and dysfunctional socialist and liberal governments that populated Siberia and crippled anti-Bolshevik military efforts in that region (which should have served as the Whites’ strongest base) or the malignant chorus of exiled Russian public figures abroad who tried to undermine the Whites’ international support at every turn.

Inexperienced people were trying to figure out their roles on the fly and the results were less than spectacular. It should not be surprising that it was difficult to manage political disagreements without seasoned politicians, to conduct diplomacy without trained diplomats, and to manage states without statesmen.

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I could go on (I had planned to talk about Denikin adopting an unnecessarily harsh view of Russian officers who had served in various anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian formations and his naïve banning of former Imperial secret police officers from his already dysfunctional government but this is running a little long), but I think Elon Musk’s recent bizarre implosion demonstrates a similar failure to adapt to unfamiliar circumstances.

Musk entered the world of conservative politics very late. He inexplicably voted for Biden in 2020, only publicly shifting his party affiliation after his child was trans-ed and it seemed clear that a victorious Kamala administration would throw him in jail and take his money. Musk was very open about not being particularly conservative, which seemed fine because he brought hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations and a great easing of censorship of conservatives on Twitter to the table. I think these contributions played a decisive role in the 2024 election and Musk deserves an enormous amount of praise for them.

Trump made good faith efforts to incorporate Musk into his administration, appointing him to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency and take an uncommonly prominent role at public events. Musk repaid Trump’s trust with a series of embarrassing and unnecessary blunders, popping a meme Roman salute at Trump’s inauguration (everyone can stop pretending that this isn’t what happened now), giving speeches where he was obviously under the influence of drugs, and allowing his bizarre paternity scandals to creep into the public eye. This is not how someone who is legitimately “in charge” is supposed to act and everyone knows it.

Musk was obviously not used to dealing with the world of politics and government, his views about both seem, frankly, stupid. He supported liberals for most of his life, even though liberals harmed his child and tried to take his money before he had even done anything to them. Musk then supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s obviously doomed primary effort to unseat President Trump. Musk dramatically underdelivered his promised cuts to government spending and fumbled badly during the public feuds he started, such as the Christmas H1B fiasco. Musk was not a good politician, bureaucrat, or administrator—roles that he had asked to take on as a reward for his contributions during the election.

Instead of trying to figure out what had gone wrong or reevaluate his position, Musk chose to lash out and behave even more erratically. Rumors (which I believe) claim that he physically attacked Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent after a heated debate in the White House and was punched in the face for his trouble. I find it very difficult to believe that Musk wasn’t on drugs when this happened.

This was all obviously not appropriate behavior for someone occupying a high position. It undermines the legitimacy of American institutions, which rely on public trust. Musk was politely shown the door. However, Musk couldn’t accept defeat quietly and embarked on a bizarre series of tirades where he claimed that Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vance, that Musk should form a new party to represent the imagined “80% in the center,” and then that Trump was a pedophile.

All of these claims demonstrate a profound lack of fluency in politics. What Musk did was not just stupid, it had no chance of success. It was a pure waste. If he wanted to have a break with Trump (a very dumb decision, but OK), there were many better ways he could have done it. Yes, Musk is likely a drug addict, but I think this traces back to his profound political inexperience. Musk has experience as a business executive. He’s never been in this situation before and just doesn’t know how to navigate it. In flailing, he makes his situation worse and worse.

First off, the proposal that Vance should replace Trump was just stupid. No reasonably intelligent person would even suggest a move like that. There were no real grounds to impeach Trump and Vance’s political future depends on Trump’s support. If Vance were to betray Trump, not only would he have to contend with the future ire of the most powerful organization in conservative politics, but he would also label himself as a betrayer. This is not a good label to have if you want to forge future partnerships.

All Musk really did by proposing impeaching Trump was announce that he was trying to drive a wedge between the two most prominent and important Republican politicians, something that naturally Republicans would be hostile to because a wedge in your party probably means you’re going to start losing elections.

Musk’s proposal to form a party to represent the “80% in the center” is somehow even more moronic. Americans are more politically polarized than ever before. There is no center. One of the few things that Americans of all political persuasions are united by is dislike for Elon Musk. Liberals will never forgive him for the role he played during the election and early Trump administration. They were saying that he was Trump’s co-president. The Biden administration launched more than a dozen punitive investigations of Musk and his businesses before Musk had even attached himself to Trump. If liberals take power, it’s a certainty that they'll resume their efforts with a vengeance.

Conservatives had been more friendly to Musk (there was remarkably little bad blood left over from Musk’s support for DeSantis) but clearly very little support for him as anything other than an eccentric sidekick to Trump. I don’t think anyone beyond the exiles Massie and Paul, the Indian subcontinent, and various paid internet shills took Musk’s side during the dispute. There was no real-world base of support for what Musk was proposing on the Left or the Right, suggesting that Musk was delusional and must have badly misjudged popular sentiment to even attempt this.

Finally, claiming Trump is a pedophile reflects very badly on Musk. First, it’s not true. Trump is perhaps the most heavily scrutinized figure in political history. If there was damning evidence against Trump in the Epstein files or anywhere else, there is no chance that it would not have been leaked or otherwise publicly used against him over the last 8 years of total war against Trump that has been waged by various domestic and international security services. Second, Musk claiming Trump is a pedophile raises the question of why Musk was an eager public supporter of Trump until he suffered the severe professional and personal embarrassment that led him to be booted from the White House.

Musk’s supposed revelation that Trump was in the Epstein files, which was obviously meant to imply that Trump engaged in sexual abuse of children, is obviously only coming from a desire for “revenge” rather than a genuine concern about punishing wrongdoers. Why would anyone knowingly work with a pedophile or conceal that someone is a pedophile? It’s obvious that Musk does not actually believe that Trump is a pedophile and is merely trying to cause problems for a former associate-turned rival. This is not productive behavior. It’s not how adults should act.

Finally, calling someone a pedophile should permanently close the door to cooperating with them on anything in the future, something that I’m not sure Musk intended to do, or at least that Musk should have known not to do if he planned to remain in the world of Trump-dominated conservative politics, which he clearly does.

Anyone conservative who Musk backs in the future must now explain their association with Musk and will be known as an opponent of the largest and most powerful faction in conservative politics. In trying to attack Trump publicly, he doomed any private effort to undermine Trump, which is a good thing because Trump is one of the few conservative politicians who is not completely worthless, but probably not what Musk intended.

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What Musk did was not just dumb, it had no chance of success. That’s the worst part, I think: The coup attempt had no hope of achieving its purported goals, the most it could have done was derail a productive effort and allow liberals to win. This is not how internal disputes can be allowed to proceed in a political movement. There is nothing but vanity, ego, and stupidity behind these moves.

Certainly, heavy drug use explains Musk’s erratic behavior, but at every turn Musk just seems to be divorced from reality and lashing out blindly. He has no idea what he’s doing. He is out of his depth. In short, his political inexperience has generated all sorts of problems for himself and others.

As quickly as Musk’s attempted rebellion failed, it’s important to remember that it was harmful even in failure. Musk was an asset and now he’s a huge and permanent liability. He provided Democrats and various anti-Trump bad actors on the Right with ammunition to deploy against Trump and undermine the very necessary implementation of Trump’s agenda. Musk set a terrible example for others, who might mistakenly believe that all this is “normal” rather than a counterproductive clown show. Panic and despair and bad behavior are contagious in modern conditions, where they have become so common that there are no real social barriers to their spread anymore. We are not working with the historical American middle class and the norms that propelled it (and the country) to such success.

So, what is to be done? It’s embarrassing to have to deal with Musk because it begs the question as to why such an unstable and moronic person, who apparently is a heavy drug user, was allowed into such a high position to begin with. However, I think harsh treatment is very necessary anyway. Bad actors often try to create these hostage situations: They cause trouble because they know getting rid of them would be trouble in its own right. In these situations, people are better off shooting the hostage rather than allowing bad behavior to go unpunished forever. As I’m sure most of you have noticed, someone who behaves in this way usually only gets worse.

I wrote most of this article a month ago but decided to sit on it because it was a little unfocused (it might still be) and too harsh after Musk disappeared with his tail between his legs when the coup failed. However, it seems that Musk has elected to once again reenter the public stage to try to block the Big Beautiful Bill, an item that I don’t know much about and don’t care much about beyond the historic increase in immigration funding that the bill will provide (more than $100 billion for border security and internal enforcement, along with numerous increases in fees and taxes to discourage immigration).

There doesn’t seem to be any alternative way to secure this funding in whole or in part, and in my opinion immigration is Trump’s most important issue, so one way or another at the end of the day the bill has to pass.

Having embarrassed himself in the way he has, Musk is likely going to try to play the spoiler forever. Every anti-Trump figure follows the same pattern: They get ejected from practical politics (to which Trump provides the only access) for bad behavior and realize that their only potential path back to influence is to engineer some kind of catastrophic collapse that will get Trump and his supporters out of the way, without regard to the consequences that that collapse, which would entail total liberal victory, might have. That’s what Massie and Paul are trying to do in their attempt to block the BBB. They complain that Trump has not achieved X, Y, or Z campaign promise while simultaneously trying to take away the tools that might allow him to do so.

People assume this kind of sabotage is a natural reaction to an internal political split. It’s not. One of the biggest mistakes I think Trump made was his treatment of former Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions was an early Trump supporter and outspoken immigration restrictionist, one of the earliest senior and respected politicians to support Trump during his 2016 primary run. Trump requested Sessions resign over Session’s decision to recuse himself from the Russiagate investigation, which caused Trump all sorts of problems. Even though I think Sessions made a big mistake there, it was motivated by Sessions’ good faith understanding of the situation and the law. Trump continued to treat Sessions harshly after Sessions left the White House, supporting his primary opponent during a 2020 Alabama Senate race.

Despite the harsh treatment he received, Sessions has not staked himself out as some outspoken opponent of Trump. He has not engaged in the kind of self-indulgent counterproductive behavior that typifies people who have fallings out with the Trump camp. He hasn’t cynically changed his views to account for his turn of political fortunes. This is all because Jeff Sessions is actually a patriot who loves his country and wants good things to happen to it, even if he’s not involved, while most conservatives who have elected to be anti-Trump are ultimately just in it for themselves. I hope there’s a reconciliation between Sessions and Trumpworld at some point, because people like Sessions are rare and always have something to offer.

For people like Musk, the only way to get rid of the threat they pose is to get rid of them. I hope that Musk is run out of politics and that the Trump administration pulls every lever they can against him: Piss test him at an inconvenient moment and take away his security clearance. Charge him with assault on a federal official for attacking Bessent and throw him in jail. Sue him for defamation by implication for his tweets about the Epstein list. Support shareholder efforts to get him removed from his companies in light of the huge fluctuations in stock prices that his erratic behavior has caused.

Musk has demonstrated that he’s only going to get worse and not learn anything from his mistakes. He made a lot of real contributions, but he did not buy a license to fuck everything up forever and no one should sell him one. Similar harsh treatment should be extended to anyone who supported Musk or who used Musk’s failed moment as an opportunity to get in cheap shots at the Trump admin. These guys are going to do this forever until they’re stopped. People must learn not to interact with them without hostility.

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It’s unlikely that someone as wealthy and prominent as Musk could ever be fully removed from politics. However, he can be brought down a peg or three to permanently reduce his influence. He’s broken the law and should suffer the consequences for it. It’s not like Musk can go back to the Left, they’ll set out to kill him if they ever manage to regain political control. Most importantly, harsh treatment of Musk and his associates would demonstrate that bad behavior on the Right actually has consequences, which it currently doesn’t.

There are basically zero standards on the American Right. It is incredible the kind of characters who are tolerated and excused. Someone can engage in bad behavior for years, even directly advocating for liberals to be given full control, and still be welcomed back into the fold for merely saying the right words. That’s a consequence of how most people treat this stuff, as an idea contest or game rather than a struggle for political power with very real effects on you and everyone you know.

You should not expect people to develop standards on their own in America’s basketcase social conditions, they have to be re-imposed. When Wrangel hanged that railroad official, he was giving the spectators very important political experience: The stakes to what they were doing were very high, the fate of their country was on the line. When you were around Wrangel you had better act correct because there was important work to do.

I just wanted to remind you that we’re going to have our first book club episode next week.

I’m very excited about this program. Our first book is one of my favorites: Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel. We’ve already gotten an enormous number of very thoughtful responses to my discussion prompts on the first 3 chapters, which cover up to the start of the Russian Civil War. If you want a refresher on the high level history of this period, check out my brief introduction to the Russian Revolution.

If you haven’t done so already, please get into the comments section of this post and leave your thoughts! I want to hear from you and I’m sure a lot of other people do as well. Paid subscribers only.

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

I just wanted to let you know that American Moment, one of the most prominent conservative organizations in the country, has just opened applications for its Spring 2027 Fellowship for American Statecraft.

The program runs from January to April 2027, and offers fellows professional training, job placement, housing assistance, and networking sessions. They do all this while also paying fellows ($3250 a month) and giving them health insurance. This is basically everything you’d need to get your start working in government.

Most notably, American Moment encourages young people who don’t have political backgrounds or “relevant” education to apply. You do not need a college degree. You do not need to know someone. You do not need to have ever worked anywhere near politics before. If you’re married, have a kid, whatever, I’m sure they can try to find some way to make that work. There’s a lot of untapped talent out there and they are trying to funnel it into the Trump administration.

Youth unemployment and underemployment is probably my biggest concern right now. If you’re working some shitty job and don’t know what you’re going to do next, or if you’re just interested in politics and don’t know how to get your start in DC, I strongly encourage you to apply.

Trump has cleared out tens of thousands of liberal public employees since taking office. We need to flood the zone with their replacements. It’s our country. It’s our government. If you want to help with the massive changes occurring these days, you should definitely look into this.

Applications close July 12, 2026, make sure you apply as soon as possible!

One note: These are serious people, so make sure you’re putting your best foot forward in your application. I wouldn’t mention any out-there online stuff or even fringe figures like myself.

The online sphere is dying; DC is where all the action is now. Good luck!

Spring 2027 Fellowship for American Statecraft Application

I just wanted to let you know that Elon Musk has made the new film Citizen Vigilante available for free on Twitter.

Once you watch the film, you can hear my take on it in the most recent episode of the podcast:

Ep89: New anti-migrant thriller Citizen Vigilante (2026) really makes you think

That’s all I got. Take care!

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One of my top priorities for this Substack recently has been increasing the amount and quality of content being released for paid subscribers. I genuinely only care about paid subscribers. If you are reading this and you are a free subscriber to this Substack, however you managed to come across it or enthusiastic you might be about me or my work otherwise, I genuinely wish you the worst. Go fuck yourself.

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America is rapidly transforming into a post-literate society thanks to short form video. In order to help address this problem, the paid subscribers and I will be embarking on a shared journey through some of the most important books in the modern literary canon.

We’re all going to read the same thing at the same time. I’m going to break up books into bite-sized chunks that we’ll discuss at regular intervals. I think establishing foundational texts is very important: Not only are great books rewarding in isolation, when read together they provide a kind of shared “language” to help understand complex ideas and current events and each other through. We can get a lot more out of these books together.

Paid subscribers (and paid subscribers only, free subscribers are not welcome) will be provided with discussion prompts and encouraged to offer their own answers and ask their own questions, to be addressed by me in a bi-weekly “book club meeting” where I’ll also provide my own thoughts on the assigned reading, any relevant background information, and generally whatever else might seem be interesting.

Our first MGBC title will be Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel, which is obviously a very special book to me. Wrangel’s insights into the tragedy of the Russian Revolution and Civil War are still very relevant today. There are lots of nuances to the book that I rarely see mentioned in discussions of it that I can’t wait to talk with you about and to hear your own thoughts on.

Wrangel’s memoirs have come a long way since the crude print-on-demand version I helped put together many years ago. Passage Press has released a handsome new edition of Always with Honor that features new and overhauled maps, numerous corrections of typos (painful for me, I’m sorry) or translation quirks from the 1st edition, and two new appendices with previously uncollected material that adds enormously to the book. I think this is the best way to read Always with Honor and recommend you buy a copy from them. However, if you need to save a few bucks to afford a few more months of my podcast, the book is also readily available on the secondary market.

Below you’ll find the assigned reading, discussion prompts, and guidelines for the MGBC more generally, but only if you’re a paid subscriber. Free subscribers, you don’t deserve anything except our collective contempt. Really easy to upgrade to a paid subscription, pal. I guess maybe you’re just too stupid and/or broke to do so. No big deal, you’d probably only screw things up if you were allowed in.

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Earlier this week, Vice President Vance appeared for an interview on Megyn Kelly’s show. Although the interview was nominally to promote Vance’s new book, the interview seemed to me to be (and was widely understood as) an attempted olive branch to the rightwing podcast/influencer sphere, which had become hostile to Trump and the Trump administration in the months following the 2024 election. This hostility was greatly accelerated by the botched rollout of the Epstein files, kicked into overdrive by the Charlie Kirk assassination, and finally developed into a clear break during the Iran War, which has hopefully this week settled into a lasting peace.

The interview itself was largely unremarkable. Vance gave a well-spoken defense of the recent Iran deal. The reaction that I saw on Twitter was pretty much entirely positive, outside of Israel shills freaking out about the Iran deal and Vance’s dovish foreign policy instincts more generally. The most praise seemed to be directed to this short clip that contained the following exchanges alluding to the oft-discussed “MAGA Civil War”:

Vance: We have a constituency right now that is saying that ‘We’re going to send boots on the ground.’ They want Donald Trump to send hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Iran… [W]e need people to be pushing back from inside the tent.

Kelly: ‘Some of us push back and then we’re told, ‘Those who speak ill of Mark Levin are not MAGA.’

And then later

Vance: The frustration that I’ve had with the non-interventionist side has been that the attitude seems to be that ‘We disagree with the President on this particular policy’ look, we can have that debate, but fine, you disagree with the President on this particular policy that doesn’t mean you can give up on the entire enterprise… I don’t like this idea of ‘the President did something I didn’t like, so I’m out.’ I think that’s a very immature way to approach the political process and it’s a very good way to ensure that your enemies always win.

Kelly: I agree with you

I don’t disagree with anything Vance said here. There is a powerful constituency that is very upset with the recent Iran peace deal and was pushing for unending escalation at every stage of the conflict. Likewise, there is a large constituency that has, under the guise of non-interventionism, advocated for a withdrawal from politics all together (which would only mean their certain defeat).

My objection is that Megyn Kelly, and many other large figures in the Influencer sphere, were not merely pushing back on the Iran War or merely advocating for a withdrawal from politics.

Just in the past 30 days, I have watched Kelly nod along to Sean Ryan claiming that core MAGA is now the “pedophile supporting Israeli lobby” and Buckley Carlson saying that there would be no difference if former Socialist Rifle Association officer Graham Platner became the Senator for Maine, rather than a Republican who votes with her party roughly 94% of the time. Kelly even proclaimed that “The line between Left and Right is merging… There’s something rising out of the middle of that that is far less partisan… People think of me as a Republican, but I haven’t been a Republican in over 20 years.” She insisted that Trump was cheating on his wife and described the (widely known to be retracted) rape allegations against Trump from his ex-wife. Kelly even bemoaned the fact that disgraced ex-National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, who apparently leaked the late Charlie Kirk’s text messages to Candace Owens and said he’d be willing to testify for the defense at the trial of Tyler Robinson, had resigned from his position in government rather than staying on to leak to her.

I think Kelly is part of a circle of media personalities that was working to secure a Democrat victory in the midterms in order to expand its influence within Republican politics. I don’t think that these people didn’t understand what they were doing. I don’t think that they were representing their motivations honestly. In many cases, I don’t think that they genuinely believed the things that they were saying. In essence, I think that these are not good faith critics of Trump and the Trump administration.

I know that Vance is on a book tour now, and that Megyn Kelly has a large platform to promote his book. However, I think the obvious attempt here to bring someone like Kelly (presumably along with other figures in her orbit) “back on board” is a big mistake and betrays a misunderstanding of the situation that has been created by these people.

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Megyn Kelly became an outspoken defender of Candace Owens. She claimed that Owens had not accused Erika Kirk of killing her husband, even though the implications of what Owens was saying were obvious. As Owens’ attacks on Erika Kirk and TPUSA staff escalated and objections to these attacks became louder, Kelly bragged that “[Owens] and I actually have only gotten closer over the past couple of months as people try to make me attack her.”

It was this closeness, born at a time when Candace Owens was claiming that Kirk had been killed by virtually everyone except Tyler Robinson, who was caught on video entering and leaving the scene, turned in by his own parents, and confessed to the crime, that allowed Kelly to broker an extremely ill-advised “detente” meeting between Owens and Erika Kirk. Unsurprisingly, Owens’s attacks on Erika Kirk only accelerated after the meeting. Owens is now campaigning to free Charlie Kirk’s murderer.

Owens was a bad faith critic. She says things that aren’t even plausibly true while concealing her true, deeply cynical, motivations. Megyn Kelly helped launder this behavior to her audience. I am still today just as disgusted by this clip of Kelly and Tucker Carlson laughing about how Candace Owens really upsets certain people and claiming that she’s just “asking questions” about potential Israeli involvement in Kirk’s murder as I was when I first saw it.

This bitch is a complete disgrace. It’s really shameful how many figures acted after the Kirk murder. You should treat the people who indulged Candace Owens’s harassment campaign targeting Erika Kirk and TPUSA after the murder as though they have engaged in cannibalism. If you merely interact with these people without hostility, I do not have very much respect for you. If you think there is any kind of future for the Right where this stuff is tolerated and widespread, you are very wrong.

It is currently tolerated and widespread because of people like Megyn Kelly. It is crazy to me that the people who helped to create this problem are treated as regular participants in political discourse. There is no kind of whataboutism that you can come up with to explain away the total loss of standards and normalization of demented behavior on the Right. Theo Von makes a joke about Candace Owens’ theory that Erika Kirk helped murder her own husband and then posts a picture of Owens at his Easter Party. The very next week, Vance recommended that people listen to Von’s podcast. Is this stuff OK? Do any of these people actually add very much? I don’t think so.

As I wrote in my very brilliant recent retrospective on Year 1 of the Second Trump Administration:

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.

Bringing figures like Kelly back on board is not a noble venture. I do not give anyone credit for negotiating a détente with someone who was engaging in bad faith. In fact, I blame the “peacemakers” for whatever damage these characters manage to do when they inevitably fall back into their old patterns of behavior, with the added credibility that weak people have given them by signaling to others that their earlier behavior was not disqualifying. Someone who acted in the way Kelly has during the last few months should never be trusted again. In fact, interacting with this woman as though she were still a respected journalist is an endorsement that she does not deserve.

I see it as trying to launder her bad behavior. If you don’t object to Megyn Kelly being brought back into the fold, what kind of objection are you going to be able to muster against a similar rehabilitation of all the people who she’s been thick as thieves with for the past few months who have been declaring that Trump is the anti-Christ, a supernatural deceiver who abandoned his domestic agenda after being blackmailed by the kikes into starting WW3 because he was caught up in a pedophile conspiracy? Do you think Kelly is going to stay your friend when you have to keep these guys out? All of them are replaceable. None of them bring anything particularly new or interesting to the table. Normies can and will find different morons to listen to if you simply stop throwing these people bones after they cross lines that were crossed a long time ago.

If you want to know why the Trump administration seems to have lost so much ground with young men, it’s because lots of big figures have been lying about the Trump administration constantly, and the Trump administration and its surrogates have failed to hit back with the necessary force because the lies nominally had “based” intent. Bad faith attacks are responded to with shrugs and sheepish grins. Malignant figures are indulged forever, even when they begin openly pushing for real-world political victory for liberals. This weakness allowed lies to become common knowledge. If you won’t defend yourself, you shouldn’t expect anyone else to.

No one likes hearing this perspective. There are lots of friendships and favors and financial relationships that make cutting ties hard. It’s tough to close yourself off to what seem like valuable resources and to ignore people who are saying all the right words. “Don’t you understand we have to beat the neocons!” Yes, I do, I’ve opposed those people for a long time. Figures like Megyn Kelly were really late to the party on many of the issues that seem so important to them now. These morons associating good views with their indefensible and counterproductive behavior is the greatest gift that Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham ever received, even if those legacy figures’ decline and eventual extinction is still already baked into the cake.

Unfortunately, the only way to end the “MAGA Civil War” is to win it. The impulse to compromise or make peace is very harmful here. The people who did these bad things to hurt us should not be given any more spins of the wheel. Whether they’re saying good things or bad things, you have to be willing to simply not care and keep them out.

Vance is almost certain to be Trump’s successor. This became true the second that Trump announced him as the Vice Presidential nominee. I do not believe any reports that Trump is considering endorsing Marco Rubio, who I do not think has any chance of even running if Vance does. Figures like Cruz or Massie have no chance at all of even being competitive. Barring some huge break with Trump, Vance is going to win the 2028 primary in a landslide. I think he’ll probably be a great candidate in the general and a great President after that.

Vance does not need Megyn Kelly’s permission to win. He does not need access to Megyn Kelly’s audience (this is why I don’t care about Vance making a more combative appearance on The View on the same day as his Kelly interview), Megyn Kelly viewers were certainly already primed to listen to the Republican Vice President. These media figures are not actually powerful in their own right. They are dependent on credibility from others. As Trump has demonstrated many times before, if you actually fight back when you need to, the illusion is shattered and audiences begin to slip away. Vance does not need to fight these people right now, he doesn’t need to condemn people who he’s had long running friendships with, but he really shouldn’t help them after what they did.

Because no article is complete without a tenuous Russian Revolution connection: Those adamant that the Retard Right be rehabilitated after months of pushing for defeat in order to guard against a supposed future resurgence of the neocons should examine the fate of leftwing Prime Minister Kerensky after he let the Bolsheviks, disgraced and imprisoned for plotting to overthrow the government, out of jail in order to fight against a supposed rightwing coup. The rightwing coup ended up being imaginary. It was the newly freed Bolsheviks, who had already proven they couldn’t be trusted, that ended up overthrowing Kerensky and taking all of Russia down with him. Unlike the Bolsheviks, I don’t think the Retard Right has any chance of taking power in its own right. They might, however, deliver power to the Left if they are given the ability to do so by people who should have stopped indulging them a long time ago.

Dragging all of these people into the future is unnecessary and harmful. Pitmommy politics on the Right must come to an end. We don’t just have to put up with your retarded piece of shit dogs. Towards the end of the interview Vance says, “The coalition that made Donald Trump the President of the United States… It was Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. It was also Mark Levin and John Podhoretz.”

Perhaps this is true, but I don’t think any of these people actually have much to add anymore. Mark Levin is a fucking idiot. It’s a problem that anyone still listens to him. You’re never going to break this cycle by anointing some other idiot to act as your champion against him. If Vance wants to push back against Levin, he should do that himself, directly, or at least not through empowering surrogates with their own baggage like Kelly. You do not need Kelly to sell peace in the Middle East; this is something that is already very popular. You do not need Kelly to sell the Trump administration; this is already something that is far more popular than any podcast retard ever could be. All the good things that we are going to do and all the bad things that have been prevented flow through Trump, not the people who are trying to steer the ship by sinking it.

Anyway, sorry for the extended rant. I hope you were listening to this on Substack’s text-speech-program, I just saw a bunch of people praising this thing that I thought was actually really bad. We can’t all just get along. I’m not going to forget the last few months or in many cases the last few years. I have seen continued indulgence of bad faith actors or malignant characters ruin groupchats, social circles of a few hundred people, and eventually Twitter dot com. This behavior is something that I pointed out would become a problem in an article released at 2AM the night that Trump was reelected in 2024, when everyone was talking about a vibeshift. Most people are too weak-willed to tune out the noise and just say “No.” It’d be a shame if this stuff was allowed to ruin rightwing politics (and, from that, America) at a time when we have more opportunities to fix things than ever before.

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Robbery Homicide Division (lost Michael Mann TV show)

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The Call of Cthulhu (2005) - Related silent film

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Ep80: Wuthering Heights (2026) review (Paid)

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Ep19: This forgotten Russian Civil War memoir shows why “Ruralite retreat” localism is dumb (Free)

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Police Story pilot episode: “Slow Boy”

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Ep82: Should we kill you if you liked Project Hail Reddit (2026)? (Paid)

Ep81: Beloved Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is woke trash and so are you if you liked it (Paid)

Ep80: Wuthering Heights (2026) review (Paid)

Ep79: Should you watch 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple? Are you a normie now? Idiot. (Paid)

Ep78: Genius furry epic Avatar 3 shows that white genocide films are EVOLVING (Paid)

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

Ep76: Does this videogame where you accidentally shoot 10 million Chinese people prove that Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) is actually bad? (Paid)

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Ep14: Emergency surprise free Christmas review of the Prometheus Engineer chronicles (2012) (Free)

Ep15: “A Disease in the Public Mind” is the most important book to read about the Civil War and America today (Free)

Ep16: Someone finally made a good Afghanistan War movie and nobody noticed (Paid)

Ep17: If you don’t watch this new movie in theaters, you are betraying me and yourself (Paid)

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Ep25: Returning to the scene of the crime against cinema, the Dune 2 rewatch episode (Paid)

Ep26: I rewatched The Lord of the Rings and all I could think about was how bad Dune 2 was (Paid)

Ep27: The new Road House movie is an obscene act of cultural terrorism (Paid)

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Ep32: Canadians accidentally made a sci-fi movie about the Ukraine War in 1995 (Paid)

Ep33: The new Fallout TV show is really, really, bad (Paid)

Ep34: I found the single most important American history book for rightwingers to read today (Paid)

Ep35: The differences between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 are a little too relevant to today’s problems (Paid)

Ep36: Why exactly has Fallout: New Vegas stuck around for so long? (Paid)

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Ep42: You really really *really* need to watch Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Paid)

Ep43: The Bikeriders is an eternal story about cultural decline in a very small place (Paid)

Ep44: Is new western Horizon (2024) the start of Kevin Costner’s redemption arc? (Paid)

Ep45: The Ultimate Bladerunner 2049 Retrospective (Paid)

Ep46: Should people who enjoyed new movie Alien: Romulus (2024) be killed? (Paid)

Ep47: Everyone who didn’t enjoy Top Gun: Maverick should be beaten to death with hammers (Paid)

Ep48: I am humbly requesting that you watch Andrei Rublev (1966) right now (Paid)

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Ep50: I have very bad news about Joker 2 (Paid)

Ep51: Why exactly is Dead Rising the greatest zombie game of all time? (Paid)

Ep52: I watched terrible new Trump movie The Apprentice (2024) so you don’t have to (Paid)

Ep53: Smile 2 (2024) is a nearly perfect horror sequel that you should watch in theaters while you can (Paid)

Ep54: ELECTION DAY SPECIAL! The definitive Halo: Combat Evolved retrospective (Paid)

Ep55: Should you threaten to kill yourself if your family wants to see Gladiator 2 (2024) over Thanksgiving? (Paid)

Ep56: Terrible new Dune TV show targets Femgooners, unlocking secrets of wifejak and the genderwar (Paid)

Ep57: CHRISTMAS SPECIAL! The definitive Halo: Reach retrospective (Paid)

Ep58: Horror snoozefest Nosferatu (2024) is basically Hamilton for redpilled people (Paid)

Ep59: This new Academy Award-winning romantic comedy about a prostitute is what rightwing pseudo-intellectuals pretended Nosferatu (2024) was (Paid)

Ep60: MEGA VARIETY EPISODE - Did this new Ukrainian shooter unlock the secret of our time? (Paid)

Ep61: Can one humble strategy game tell us what was so special about the 1990s? (Paid)

Ep62: Terminally dogshit new spy thriller Black Bag (2025) illustrates that movies are officially over. I hate movies now (Paid)

Ep63: I was planning on killing myself in public to protest the death of film but then I saw Minecraft (2025). Movies are officially BACK! (Paid)

Ep64: Warfare (2025) is a shockingly perfect new movie that you absolutely have to see in theaters while you still can (Paid)

Ep65: The definitive introduction to LOST: Season 1, objectively the best television ever produced (Paid)

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Ep67: URGENT🚨WW3 Emergency Geopolitics Episode🚨 Analyzing Mid-East Strategic Rocket Forces 🚀🚀🚀 and Trump’s Betrayal🔪 (Paid)

Ep68: “Days of Rage” is the most important book for you to read today, right now (Paid)

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Ep70: A brief introduction to True Detective Season 2, our Great American Novel (Paid)

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Ep73: I hated normieslop F1 the Movie (2025) in a way I didn’t think possible (Paid)

Ep74: The Mega WW2 episode (Paid)

Ep75: Does this secret book about WW2 (Jews, Holocaust, Israel) provide the key to winning America’s impending CIVIL WAR? (Paid)

Ep76: Does this videogame where you accidentally shoot 10 million Chinese people prove that Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) is actually bad? (Paid)

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

Ep78: Genius furry epic Avatar 3 shows that white genocide films are EVOLVING (Paid)

Ep79: Should you watch 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple? Are you a normie now? Idiot. (Paid)

Ep80: Wuthering Heights (2026) review (Paid)

Ep81: Beloved Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is woke trash and so are you if you liked it (Paid)

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Stuff I mention in the episode:

Interview: World-Making, Architecture, and Game Design in Marathon. With Art Director: Joseph Cross!

Aleph One: Play the original Marathon games for free

Rhythm of Writhing Constellations - Cryo Exfil music

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Ep80: Wuthering Heights (2026) review (Paid)

Ep79: Should you watch 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple? Are you a normie now? Idiot. (Paid)

Ep78: Genius furry epic Avatar 3 shows that white genocide films are EVOLVING (Paid)

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

Ep76: Does this videogame where you accidentally shoot 10 million Chinese people prove that Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) is actually bad? (Paid)

Ep75: Does this secret book about WW2 (Jews, Holocaust, Israel) provide the key to winning America’s impending CIVIL WAR? (Paid)

Here are all the podcast episodes available now (most are paywalled):

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Ep14: Emergency surprise free Christmas review of the Prometheus Engineer chronicles (2012) (Free)

Ep15: “A Disease in the Public Mind” is the most important book to read about the Civil War and America today (Free)

Ep16: Someone finally made a good Afghanistan War movie and nobody noticed (Paid)

Ep17: If you don’t watch this new movie in theaters, you are betraying me and yourself (Paid)

Ep18: Michael Mann’s Ferrari is the death-song of Esoteric Boomerism (Heat is overrated btw) (Paid)

Ep19: This forgotten Russian Civil War memoir shows why “Ruralite retreat” localism is dumb (Free)

Ep20: “In ‘First Man,’ Triumph for White Male Dreams” -The Harvard Crimson (Paid)

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Ep21: Hunt: Showdown is a late 1800s horror-shooter that simulates normal life in Maryland (Paid)

Ep22: COMBAT DROP! Surprise Emergency Free Starship Troopers (1997) Sunday Show (Free)

Ep23: Dune 2 was unironically really bad and you’re actually stupid if you enjoyed it (Free)

Ep24: Witness (1985) is a masterclass in the lost art of the popular thriller (Paid)

Ep25: Returning to the scene of the crime against cinema, the Dune 2 rewatch episode (Paid)

Ep26: I rewatched The Lord of the Rings and all I could think about was how bad Dune 2 was (Paid)

Ep27: The new Road House movie is an obscene act of cultural terrorism (Paid)

Ep28: This is most important Dune 2 podcast episode that you’ll ever listen to (Paid)

Ep29: If you don’t follow this esoteric health advice you are actually going to die (Paid)

Ep30: Free ($0) sample episode - What is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl about? (Free)

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Ep32: Canadians accidentally made a sci-fi movie about the Ukraine War in 1995 (Paid)

Ep33: The new Fallout TV show is really, really, bad (Paid)

Ep34: I found the single most important American history book for rightwingers to read today (Paid)

Ep35: The differences between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 are a little too relevant to today’s problems (Paid)

Ep36: Why exactly has Fallout: New Vegas stuck around for so long? (Paid)

Ep37: The long-awaited/much-demanded review of A Perfect World (1993) (Paid)

Ep38: ($0 free episode) Cyberpunk 2077 is the one game you need to play before the 2024 election (Free)

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Ep39: Should you watch Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga? (Paid)

Ep40: Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty shows us how to complete a perfect story (Paid)

Ep41: You really *really* need to watch the first Mad Max movie (Paid)

Ep42: You really really *really* need to watch Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Paid)

Ep43: The Bikeriders is an eternal story about cultural decline in a very small place (Paid)

Ep44: Is new western Horizon (2024) the start of Kevin Costner’s redemption arc? (Paid)

Ep45: The Ultimate Bladerunner 2049 Retrospective (Paid)

Ep46: Should people who enjoyed new movie Alien: Romulus (2024) be killed? (Paid)



Ep47: Everyone who didn’t enjoy Top Gun: Maverick should be beaten to death with hammers (Paid)

Ep48: I am humbly requesting that you watch Andrei Rublev (1966) right now (Paid)

Ep49: New movie Megalopolis (2024) is a grand failure of Boomer Lib vision (Paid)

Ep50: I have very bad news about Joker 2 (Paid)

Ep51: Why exactly is Dead Rising the greatest zombie game of all time? (Paid)

Ep52: I watched terrible new Trump movie The Apprentice (2024) so you don’t have to (Paid)

Ep53: Smile 2 (2024) is a nearly perfect horror sequel that you should watch in theaters while you can (Paid)

Ep54: ELECTION DAY SPECIAL! The definitive Halo: Combat Evolved retrospective (Paid)

Ep55: Should you threaten to kill yourself if your family wants to see Gladiator 2 (2024) over Thanksgiving? (Paid)

Ep56: Terrible new Dune TV show targets Femgooners, unlocking secrets of wifejak and the genderwar (Paid)

Ep57: CHRISTMAS SPECIAL! The definitive Halo: Reach retrospective (Paid)

Ep58: Horror snoozefest Nosferatu (2024) is basically Hamilton for redpilled people (Paid)

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Ep59: This new Academy Award-winning romantic comedy about a prostitute is what rightwing pseudo-intellectuals pretended Nosferatu (2024) was (Paid)

Ep60: MEGA VARIETY EPISODE - Did this new Ukrainian shooter unlock the secret of our time? (Paid)

Ep61: Can one humble strategy game tell us what was so special about the 1990s? (Paid)

Ep62: Terminally dogshit new spy thriller Black Bag (2025) illustrates that movies are officially over. I hate movies now (Paid)

Ep63: I was planning on killing myself in public to protest the death of film but then I saw Minecraft (2025). Movies are officially BACK! (Paid)

Ep64: Warfare (2025) is a shockingly perfect new movie that you absolutely have to see in theaters while you still can (Paid)

Ep65: The definitive introduction to LOST: Season 1, objectively the best television ever produced (Paid)

Ep66: Mission Impossible has fallen (Paid)

Ep67: URGENT🚨WW3 Emergency Geopolitics Episode🚨 Analyzing Mid-East Strategic Rocket Forces 🚀🚀🚀 and Trump’s Betrayal🔪 (Paid)

Ep68: “Days of Rage” is the most important book for you to read today, right now (Paid)

Ep69: Zen police ultraviolence simulator Ready or Not (2023) is the only game for our time (Paid)

Ep70: A brief introduction to True Detective Season 2, our Great American Novel (Paid)

Ep71: New movie in theaters Weapons (2025) is an inspired horror-comedy-mystery that’s really about... uh... umm... (Paid)

Ep72: I forgot to cancel my HBO free trial subscription and ended up watching anti-white vampire action epic Sinners (2025) as a cynical cash grab (Paid)

Ep73: I hated normieslop F1 the Movie (2025) in a way I didn’t think possible (Paid)

Ep74: The Mega WW2 episode (Paid)

Ep75: Does this secret book about WW2 (Jews, Holocaust, Israel) provide the key to winning America’s impending CIVIL WAR? (Paid)

Ep76: Does this videogame where you accidentally shoot 10 million Chinese people prove that Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) is actually bad? (Paid)

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

Ep78: Genius furry epic Avatar 3 shows that white genocide films are EVOLVING (Paid)

Ep79: Should you watch 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple? Are you a normie now? Idiot. (Paid)

Ep80: Wuthering Heights (2026) review (Paid)

Ep81: Beloved Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is woke trash and so are you if you liked it (Paid)

Ep82: Should we kill you if you liked Project Hail Reddit (2026)? (Paid)

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