Vibelash: Reflecting on the present disintegration of the rightwing public mind

Bowling alone

We are in the middle of a vibe shift.

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

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

Nothing. Not necessarily anything, at least.

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

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

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

The most amazing thing I’ve ever seen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From George Leggett’s “The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police,” page 197.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No time for caution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Kill Your Self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think about who viciously attacked Trump for throwaway statements regarding H1B visas as Trump was simultaneously appointing immigration hardliners to every single important immigration role in his admiration. These same people are lavishing praise on Massie right now despite his record on this issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come on, man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drippy drip da-drip de-drip drop-let

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

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

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

Schopenhauer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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