<p>Hey, Ghost readers! I know a lot of you are here to get <em>away</em> from Substack, which is precisely why I set up this alternative for y’all. Part of my schtick is talking about social media and internet culture, and how it’s pretty much all going to heck, and Substack is a part of that whole system, so just so you know, I’m not going to be harping on about that community all the time. Think of me as a much less popular Casey Newton with more direct insight.</p><p> I suppose I’m going to have to have to spend some time in this one trying to dance around naming someone and thus avoid summoning them to fire up a conflict I have no interest in battling. I’m kind of in a bind, here; If I identify this gentleman and he comes across this piece then he will accuse me of passive aggression, subtweeting, and using his name for clout. If I subvert the passivity accusation and alert him, that will be even worse, as he will take this as an indication that I am interested in engaging in Direct Conflict.</p><p> But this ain’t Black Angus and I don’t have beef on the menu. This is much more about confronting an idea than an individual. It’s a commentary on social media’s evolution and its seemingly inevitable traps.</p><p> I was an original adopter of Substack <em>Notes</em>, the Twitter clone that the newsletter platform launched soon after Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of that website and thus an early exodus location for people who wanted to escape the coming Groypocalypse. Of course, most of the Twitter refugees weren’t interested in writing or reading newsletters, so the migration dried up kind of quickly. For the most part, those who fled Twitter wound up instead on Woke Twitter (Bluesky), Instagram Twitter (Threads), or Insufferable Linux Nerd Twitter (Mastodon).</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-56.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="1004" height="562" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/image-56.png 600w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w1000/2026/01/image-56.png 1000w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-56.png 1004w" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Also, these. It was kind of a crazy time.</span></figcaption></figure><p>For those who remained on Substack because we were writers or readers, we got to watch the evolution of an unconventional social media ecosystem in real time from the beginning. As has become a tradition for me around this time of year, I <a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/the-hard-problem-of-social-media-why-free-speech-platforms-ultimately-fail/">wrote one</a> and <a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/the-hard-problem-of-social-media-run-rabbit-run/">then a second</a> sort of “state of the community” essay and I guess it’s time for the third.</p><p> And I guess, for those who might have tried and abandoned Notes in 2022 because it wasn’t Twitter, it might interest you to learn that it’s now, sort of, Twitter. But not in any of the good ways.</p><p> This realization for me was kind of triggered by the unnamed individual’s recent controversial assertions on Notes that social media needs to be more directly confrontational. It has become boring, he believes, because people are holding too much back and aren’t insulting and attacking each other directly and to their faces enough.</p><p> This is not an opinion that’s exclusive to this one guy, but I think he’s the only one saying it directly: That it is your God-given duty, as a participant in social media, to be an Asshole For No Reason (AFNR).</p><p> It’s relevant to point out that this person is famously and even proudly an AFNR and I think it’s a type of projection for assholes to believe everyone else is, similarly, an asshole. Ipso facto, anyone who is not being an AFNR to your face must be instead slinging their insults toward other writers in private conversation, or else publicly but without tagging or notifying the insultee. This, he contends, is passive aggression, which, to the health of a culture, is inferior to old fashioned <em>aggressive</em> aggression.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-57.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="678" height="381" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/image-57.png 600w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-57.png 678w" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Just imagine Dennis Hopper from Blue Velvet but he's just in your face all of the time.</span></figcaption></figure><p>Here's the thing—social media is already plenty nasty, and for all of Substack’s problems, not being nasty enough isn’t one of them.</p><p> The site’s founders will harp constantly on about how it’s not Twitter, and they will cite the nature of its discourse as the reason. I don’t know if anyone would consider Substack to be a highbrow website but I think it’s safe, at least by what content it pushes algorithmically, to call it middlebrow. That means people will tell you to go fuck yourself in 280 words instead of 280 characters.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2025/10/intermission_new-1-1-1.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="865" height="241" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2025/10/intermission_new-1-1-1.jpg 600w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2025/10/intermission_new-1-1-1.jpg 865w" /></figure><h3 id="heres-what-paid-subscribers-are-reading-right-now">Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:</h3><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/why-the-right-keeps-losing-female-influencers/"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-69.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="751" height="167" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/image-69.png 600w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-69.png 751w" /></a></figure><div class="kg-card kg-signup-card kg-width-wide " style="background-color:#F0F0F0;display:none"> <div class="kg-signup-card-content"> <div class="kg-signup-card-text "> <h2 class="kg-signup-card-heading" style="color:#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Sign up for Plato Was a Dick</span></h2> <p class="kg-signup-card-subheading" style="color:#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">The S Peter Davis newsletter</span></p> <div class="kg-signup-card-fields"> <input class="kg-signup-card-input" id="email" type="email" required="true" placeholder="Your email" /> <button class="kg-signup-card-button kg-style-accent" style="color:#FFFFFF" type="submit"> <span class="kg-signup-card-button-default">Subscribe</span> <span class="kg-signup-card-button-loading"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" height="24" width="24" viewbox="0 0 24 24"> <circle cx="4" cy="12" r="3"></circle> <circle cx="12" cy="12" r="3"></circle> <circle cx="20" cy="12" r="3"></circle> </svg></span> </button> </div> <div class="kg-signup-card-success" style="color:#000000"> Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. </div> <div class="kg-signup-card-error" style="color:#000000"></div> <p class="kg-signup-card-disclaimer" style="color:#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.</span></p> </div> </div> </div><p>The idea that Substack Notes is a substantially different type of platform to Twitter is based more on vibes and timescale than actual reality. In fact it kind of embodies many of the complaints that people had about the version of Twitter that existed just prior to Musk’s takeover. The most obvious probably being that it ranks and algorithmically boosts a class of elites who are designated by a colored checkmark.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-58.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="422" height="152" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">You get a four-way class war over the traditional three </span></figcaption></figure><p>The culture of civility that AFNR despises so much, but which I rather enjoyed while it lasted, is doomed, and it’s doomed for a number of reasons:</p><p> One is the fundamental unsustainability of the “global town square” concept. Over the past few years I’ve become highly critical of that concept as a whole, although I once found it beautiful and thought it would be our next evolution as a civilization. The “global town square” is a social platform that includes <em>everybody</em>, rather than what preceded it, which was siloed social media that catered to people with specific interests or something in common with each other. You know, forums, and to a certain degree, Reddit.</p><p> Twitter was often <em>called</em> a global town square before Musk took over, but critics argued this wasn’t true because it didn’t have white supremacists. And, you know, the critics were right. Even if they didn’t <em>want</em> Nazis, that is still unfortunately a position held by a large number of people. You can’t have a proper town square without them.</p><p> This leads me into the second reason why civility is doomed: Like on Musk’s Twitter, Substack has no content moderation.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-59-1.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="400" height="340" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">At least Substack hasn't yet crossed the "automated CSAM factory" point, which is a hell of a red line that Musk just gleefully bulldozed over</span></figcaption></figure><p> It’s superior to Twitter in this regard because it does allow you to moderate your own experience to some extent. You can even delete people’s replies to you, which is <em>quite</em> a daring feature for a free speech maximalist platform to introduce. I had to block a consistent AFNR the other day who kept insisting he was a fan between snide insults. And while I <em>don’t</em> think insults should be a bannable offense on a platform like Substack or Twitter or anywhere else really, I have also been the recipient of some truly line-crossing comments that I’ve had to go through the motions of deleting and blocking and knowing that they will say that shit to someone else tomorrow and keep happily doing it with no threat of consequences of any kind. Sure, I can clean it off my own page, but I spent a decade in the trenches as a large forum admin already.</p><p> That kind of human detritus will chip away at a platform.</p><p> I won’t rehash my theory of Liquid Content here, you can read about it in the <a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/the-hard-problem-of-social-media-why-free-speech-platforms-ultimately-fail/">first</a> and <a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/the-hard-problem-of-social-media-run-rabbit-run/">second</a> piece in this series, and it outlines the <em>reactionary</em> reason that civility is doomed. What I haven’t delved much into is the <em>AFNR</em> reason civility is doomed.</p><p> I can take criticism pretty well, I think, and I have been talked out of shitty takes. I’ve been talked out of them by strongly worded rebuttals that make me feel, rightly, bad! Argument does work on me, if it’s sensible! But one thing that just absolutely grinds my gears, one of the few things in this world that gets me truly yell-inducing angry, is people being an <em>Asshole For No Reason</em>.</p><p> The main difference between a legitimate critic—even an angry, insulting critic—and an AFNR is that the AFNR doesn’t tend to properly engage with or even fully read the thing that they’re responding to. “Looking for a fight” is their intellectual <em>resting position</em>. They will be set off the very moment they think they spot a reason to be.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-60-1.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="500" height="268" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">We need to talk about that grammatical error</span></figcaption></figure><p>And this attitude seems to travel alongside an idea that this should be <em>the predominant culture of the internet</em>. It’s not a personality trait that’s associated with either the right or the left wing, but similar to reactionary politics in general, it’s a culturally <em>imperial</em> attitude. That makes it liquid content.</p><p> Across three years of Substack Notes being a thing, I have absolutely noticed a general shift away from thoughtful criticism and toward AFNR behavior. A bunch of relatively inoffensive, nice, or soft target accounts that were dominant in the platform’s early days have departed or kind of fallen into the algorithmic background in favor of either AFNRs or the types of personality who, while not AFNR themselves (or even necessarily assholes at all), are nevertheless the types of personality who is willing to put up with it or even revels in the entertainment of it.</p><p> Twitter (three years on, I will still refuse to call it a letter of the alphabet) has been entirely swallowed by AFNR. It’s pretty standard that any reasonable take with any reach will result in a ton of replies that amount to little more than “This is the shittiest take I have ever read, please set fire to yourself and die.” That’s the predominant response to <em>anything</em> on that shithole website now, and even more than any moral case there may be to stop using Twitter due to the evil of its owner, this has contributed to my hardly ever using it anymore.</p><p> Likewise, with Substack Notes, I’ve kind of dropped off using it quite a bit, and even rarely feel compelled to promote my own work on it. For one thing, <a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/capital-will-crush-substack-2/">I don’t think that does anything anymore anyway</a>, but for another, I feel worn down by thinking about the many potential ways that my work might attract AFNRs. Ways that are impossible to even imagine because, again, they don’t tend to directly engage with the work.</p><p> While I <em>would love</em> to grow my readership perpetually, the promotion strikes a balance with how much asshole behavior I have the stamina for. With the singular exception of the one guy I mentioned earlier, the readers who already follow me never come at me with an <em>asshole</em> comment, but they have offered criticism, discussion, even rebuttal. Which I, in fact, love!</p><p> What I <em>don’t</em> think I will ever come around to is the ideal world of these types in which every single moment spent on the social internet is spent engaging in some combative, hostile interaction. The attitude of the AFNR is prescriptive; they think it’s good for all of us because they think it’s good for them. But, the thing is, it’s definitely not good for all of us, and I suspect it’s <em>also</em> not good for them. Every addiction specialist and recovering victim in the world will tell you a story about the difference between enjoying something and being improved by that thing.</p><p> This is where, in the conclusion, I usually run into the wall of what I think should be done about all this and need to admit that none of the ideas I have about what should be done about this <em>will</em> or even <em>can</em> be done. Look, so much of my schtick is descriptive rather than prescriptive. What I think I’d like to see happen with social media, what I think is healthier for all of us, is the one thing that is probably the most unlikely, something that most would regard a type of regression, which is a movement toward a greater number of smaller, more siloed platforms. Yes, ironically, I’m being a <em>conservative</em> about this. I’m embracing nostalgia, I’m putting a Roman statue in the <em>Geocities</em> logo and demanding RETVRN.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-61-1.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="400" height="264" /><figcaption><i><em class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">reminiscent modem noises</em></i></figcaption></figure><p>Or nothing that severe, but the point remains that the social internet, something that used to feel immense and sprawling and continental, is now essentially <a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/the-year-of-five-twitters/">five websites</a> that are largely composed of screenshots of the other four. A shift away from that model, I think, is probably going to happen, but it is not happening at Substack.</p><p> I can only conclude with an invitation for comment, criticism, or rebuttal, but in any case, try not to be an asshole, and if you have to be, don’t be one <em>for no reason</em>. If you’ve read this far, it’s unlikely you will be.</p><p>I'm writing a book that goes into detail about how a single generation of online culture got us from the liberal democracy of the 90s to whatever the hell this is. The working title is <a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/tag/geeks/"><em>How Geeks Ate the World</em></a> and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/tag/geeks/"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2025/04/geeksheader.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="1100" height="220" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2025/04/geeksheader.jpg 600w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w1000/2025/04/geeksheader.jpg 1000w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2025/04/geeksheader.jpg 1100w" /></a></figure><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><a href="https://www.buymeacoffee.com/speterdavis?ref=plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2024/12/tipbutton.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="511" height="137" /></a></figure><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-25.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="865" height="241" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/image-25.png 600w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-25.png 865w" /></figure><h3 id="heres-what-paid-subscribers-are-reading-right-now-1">Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:</h3><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/substack-has-become-middlebrow-twitter-derogatory/"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-62.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="750" height="162" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/image-62.png 600w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-62.png 750w" /></a></figure><div class="kg-card kg-signup-card kg-width-wide " style="background-color:#F0F0F0;display:none"> <div class="kg-signup-card-content"> <div class="kg-signup-card-text "> <h2 class="kg-signup-card-heading" style="color:#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Sign up for Plato Was a Dick</span></h2> <p class="kg-signup-card-subheading" style="color:#000000"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">The S Peter Davis newsletter</span></p> <div class="kg-signup-card-fields"> <input class="kg-signup-card-input" id="email" type="email" required="true" placeholder="Your email" /> <button class="kg-signup-card-button kg-style-accent" style="color:#FFFFFF" type="submit"> <span class="kg-signup-card-button-default">Subscribe</span> <span class="kg-signup-card-button-loading"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" height="24" width="24" viewbox="0 0 24 24"> <circle cx="4" cy="12" r="3"></circle> <circle cx="12" cy="12" r="3"></circle> <circle cx="20" cy="12" r="3"></circle> </svg></span> </button> </div> <div class="kg-signup-card-success" style="color:#000000"> Email sent! 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<p>One of the most fascinating things to happen in recent political discourse, for me, has to be the question of: What changed Ashley St Clair’s mind?</p><p> For those who don’t know, St Clair was one of the midlist female figures in the world of online MAGA influencers, primarily as a writer for the Babylon Bee and an ambassador to Charlie Kirk’s <em>Turning Point</em> organization. Then, last year, she announced that, the previous year, she’d birthed Elon Musk’s love child. His 14^th, I think, if Wikipedia is up to date.</p><p> That revelation was almost twelve months ago and, since then, St Clair has seemed to go through a political transformation so rapid that people have questioned her motives and sincerity. No longer tweeting sarcastic Trumpworld jeers about gays grooming kids, railing against immigration, and the other usual talking points, she’s now joining the left-wing chorus against ICE’s public executions and writing apparently heartfelt apologies to minority groups she has wronged, the trans community in particular.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-63-1.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="400" height="399" /></figure><p>As recently as mid 2024, Ashley was a regular guest on such shows as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klf3YaPSloI">Jesse Watters</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3nauk9peX0">TriggerNometry</a>. In the past few months, she’s been seen much more often speaking to people like Taylor Lorenz and Juniper (<em>Onion Person</em> in the above exchange)..</p><p> It is very tempting to presume that she’s doing some sort of bit. I <a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/drew-pavlou-and-the-shitpost-economy-2/">speculated just two weeks ago</a> about people like Richard Hanania who pull the sudden ideological switcheroo and it’s unclear what kind of engagement game they might be playing.</p><p> For Ashley St Clair, I can only offer my own perspective: I suffer from anxiety and, in particular, confrontation anxiety. It’s not just getting in trouble, but even being in benign situations that carry the <em>aesthetic</em> of getting in trouble, like performance reviews and job interviews (which is why I rarely pass job interviews). There’s a conspicuous tremble, much more conspicuous in my case than Ashley’s, but I can spot it, particularly in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0x7bMbOavU">the Taylor Lorenz interview</a>, and I’m telling you now, it can’t be faked, and it can’t be hidden. It’s mechanically impossible to switch it either on or off. This lady, in my opinion, is legit.</p><p> Now you might think, in our current mess, facing the worldwide rise of a downright cult-like far right, we should treat the deradicalization of Ashley St Clair similar to how we’d treat someone who went into spontaneous remission from cancer or AIDS. That is, figure out how the hell it happened and how it can be replicated in a lab. In actual fact, though, St Clair’s ideological flip isn’t that uncommon. What it reveals is the difficulty that the far right has in attempting to appeal and hold on to women.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-64.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="600" height="350" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2026/01/image-64.png 600w" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">If Immortan Joe can't figure it out...</span></figcaption></figure><p>My original intention this week was to try to figure out and explain what might cause someone to switch sides like this. After all, she and I have a similar story to tell—<a href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/why-do-covid-revisionists-need-to-fabricate-evidence-to-make-their-case-2/">as I’ve written before</a>, I used to lean right myself, but never very far. I voted for mainstream conservatives until I was in my mid 20s, but I never would have been MAGA. I was more of a libertarian who voted for neocons out of necessity. I don’t think that’s an unusual story. What <em>did</em> seem very unusual was St Clair’s radical and sudden backflip.</p><p> Not too long into my research into Ms. St Clair, I began to realize that none of this is as mindblowing as it seemed. She was never a radical either.</p><h3 id="free-subscribers-get-access-to-this-article-on-friday-6-february">Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 6-February</h3><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2025/10/intermission_new-1-1-1.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="865" height="241" srcset="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/size/w600/2025/10/intermission_new-1-1-1.jpg 600w, https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/content/images/2025/10/intermission_new-1-1-1.jpg 865w" /></figure><div class="gh-paid-content-notice"><h3>This post is for subscribers only</h3><p>Become a member to get access to all content</p><a class="gh-paid-content-cta" href="https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io/why-the-right-keeps-losing-female-influencers/#/portal/signup">Subscribe now</a></div>

If you’ve been on social media much over the past few years you may have noticed a rising star in the “politically bonkers” space. Drew Pavlou is a damn near omnipresent figure on Twitter who shows up in so many retweets by MAGA influencers and Trump administration officials that you would easily assume he’s some celebrity whose actual work you’re unfamiliar with. In reality, Pavlou is a nobody, but he’s a special kind of nobody who has nobodied his way into being a nobody who everybody has heard of and everyone wishes they hadn’t. This is a new type of celebrity that sprouted out of social media, a new species in the ever evolving concept of celebrity itself. In the 20th century, celebrities were your pop stars and movie stars. After 2000 there was the reality boom and the socialites; the Kardashians, the Snookis, the famous for being famous. Not necessarily ordinary people, but people who ordinary people wanted to be. All of them unique individuals Then the internet made celebrity even more accessible, with the birth of the influencer. These _were_ ordinary people, but they often had some kind of talent or charisma that bought them a shorter route to success. Now we have proper social media, and in fact it dominates our online experience, and the next phase of celebrity has arrived, but they are not people you want to be, and they don’t have charisma, and they don’t influence. There are echoes of Marshall McLuhan. If the pop star begat the socialite, and the socialite begat the influencer, then the influencer begat these unfortunate creatures. The attention economy fully embraces the fact that the process that generates celebrity, whether it’s talent or intelligence or charisma or just good looks, is only ever _a means to the true end_ , which is _attention_. If the process can be bypassed entirely then this is simply a more efficient route to the true goal. Ergo, you don’t need talent if there’s some other way to make yourself difficult for people to avoid. This is a new phenomenon that I’ve come to call the _shitpost economy_. I knew who Drew Pavlou was before anyone on Twitter had ever heard of him, because he started his career as a local nuisance. I’ve never met him personally but he was a student politician at the university where I studied, and he was known for constantly shitposting and harassing people on the student Facebook group. Everybody of course realized what he was really after was attention, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Try ignoring a mosquito. That’s one thing in itself, but try co-ordinating a whole room full of people to _all_ ignore the mosquito. The attempt, in itself, just means everyone keeps mentioning the mosquito. The only way to solve the problem was to ban Drew from the group, which they of course eventually did. So Drew had to find a new way of getting that attention. In 2019 he started the next phase of his career as an anti-China activist/protester, a cause that he seems to have chosen by throwing a dart. He burned copies of Xi Jinping Thought outside the Chinese embassy and led protests for the cause of Hong Kong independence. That was also the year that Covid-19 emerged from Wuhan, which only added fuel to the whole anti-China thing he had going on. Now the entire university had a mosquito problem they couldn’t ignore. Some people interpreted his stunts, like prancing around the campus China institute in a biohazard suit, a tad racist, and his habit of calling everybody a cunt was considered less than ideal, behaviorally (in his defense, that’s just Australian). So, Drew was suspended. Then he hatched a scheme so genius that it could only come from the mind of Drew Pavlou—if he could persuade someone else to legally change their name to Drew Pavlou, then _that_ person could run for a seat on the university senate. If they won, then the _actual_ Drew Pavlou could step into the position, evading suspension. He said that he ran this plan past some lawyers and they told him it was legit. 0:00 /3:01 1× There is of course no way that any lawyer actually told him this would work (unless, and this isn’t unlikely, they were taking the piss out of him). This would be Drew’s first IRL shitpost. He would get a taste for it. Around about then, I guess, came the Twitter phase, and the rest of the world came to meet Drew Pavlou, a man of passionate opinions whose ideology is, you might say, somewhat inconsistent. ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Pavlou soon fell into the habits of a Twitter power-user, posting all day long to the site, often things so left-field and baffling that you could mistake them for a Dril tweet. What was his political project? He seemed a normie liberal who hated communists and socialists and fascists and authoritarians, but loved the Saudi monarchy. When Russia invaded Ukraine he became an impassioned Ukraine defender and jumped on the blue and yellow flag bandwagon. After Israel surged into Gaza following the October 7 2023 terror attack, and the months into years of bombardment that followed, many of social media’s Ukraine flag bearers sympathized with Palestine, where Drew leaned hard into Israel support. He hated Palestinians but supported Uyghurs, hated Russia but loved Saudi Arabia, and above all _despised_ Donald Trump. His hatred of Trump through the Biden presidency and into Trump’s second term earned him the ire of Trump loyalist neo-Nazi and JD Vance ally Captive Dreamer, an enmity that the Nazi-hating Drew Pavlou celebrated. Until one day, a couple of months ago, Drew hit the really big time and got retweeted by Vice President JD Vance himself. Basically overnight, Drew Pavlou then went full MAGA. Now he has rebranded himself as a white nationalist, posts like he’s got a statue pfp, adores Trump and the Republican party, mourns Rhodesia, and aligns himself with and sucks up to… uhh… Trump loyalist neo-Nazi and JD Vance ally Captive Dreamer. Bonus Patrick Casey! What does Drew really believe? It’s as though he carries a dowsing rod for engagement and follows whatever makes the line go up. This is the game, wading into the waters of the popular and aiming to be the most ubiquitous voice in that zone. Drew Pavlou is far from the only online personality beholden to the shitpost economy. He’s frequently compared, in tone and personality, to a guy named Ian Miles Cheong, who has been in this game since the early 2010s. Back then he was a prolific Reddit power user and a volunteer moderator for dozens of subreddits. He was eventually banned for failing to disclose that he was a paid spammer. As a social media personality, his character arc took an even wilder trajectory than Drew Pavlou. Initially, he appeared to be some sort of neo-Nazi, going by the handle Sol Invictus. This was unusual because, as you can probably tell by his name, Cheong ain’t white. (He would lampshade this by calling himself a “banana”—yellow on the outside, white on the inside.) You can't just dye your hair blonde dude By 2015, though, Cheong was a middle-to-prominent figure in the Gamergate culture war, but not on the side that you would imagine—Cheong was what they called an SJW back then but they would today call woke. The right had a field day when they dug up his old Nazi comments and attempted to cancel him. In the years since, Cheong has snapped back again to the far right—not the Nazi far-right this time, but the furthest right fringe of Zionism. Unlike Pavlou, he became extremely pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine. Like Pavlou, he became fanatically pro-Trump. There are plenty of interchangeable attention grifters in the MAGA online sphere who you could never tell apart from quotes alone—Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, DC Draino, Jack Posobiec—but I class most of them in the category of your old school regular _influencers_. The shitpost economy is a separate undercurrent. They are lesser beings on the hierarchy, which makes the sycophancy and the grift even more depressing. If I’m coining a category here I suppose I should at least roughly define it, and I think an important part of that definition will be the willingness of one to change their apparent beliefs or ideology, not in response to persuasion or new evidence, but according to direction they see the winds of the attention market blowing. Say what you will about how much of a fuckwit Jack Posobiec is, he is at least consistent. Sometimes you need to change your entire physical identity to better fit the ideology you’re wearing. It’s possible, on the internet. If you’re someone like Ian Miles Cheong, you can hide behind a Roman statue pfp and heil Hitler, or you can cloak yourself in a VPN and you’re a Malaysian reporter or a patriotic American expat. If you’re Drew Pavlou, you can post 50s propaganda posters and cosplay the Aryan ideal… …or if the Overton window shifts then you can draw attention not your true skin tone and compare yourself positively to Malcolm X. After all, with a name like Pavlou you could very well be white or black. Or, you know, Greek or Turkish. Or Arab. Or Pakistani. The shitpost economy is saturated. To compete, you have to flood the market. You can only really manage it if you’re unemployed. In earlier iterations of social media the benefits of shitposting for attention were that you could potentially parlay that into some sort of career down the track. You could make a successful blog or a podcast or something, perhaps, but there was no money in it right away. Aside from Cheong, Gamergate was a primordial ooze for a lot of these types. Mike Cernovich is someone who I would put in the shitpost economy although I would say that he rises _almost_ to the level of an influencer. In 2015 he was some guy running a law blog as well as being a D-list pickup artist who found a market for riling up all these angry video game nerds and pushing his masculinity grift onto them. During that era he was a non-stop prolific tweeter, pushing himself into every conversation, and forcing attention through sheer volume despite how absolutely insufferable he was. Punchable He became an early alt-righter and a prominent general in the Online front of Trump’s first election campaign, but Cernovich’s politics are more amorphous than many realise. By 2020, Cernovich had dropped Trump entirely, referring to him as a complete failure. When the Republican primaries for 2024 started up, he, as well as other temporary defectors like Christopher Rufo, fully backed Ron DeSantis. In a podcast interview in 2021, Cernovich _didn’t even consider himself right wing_. He pretty firmly presented himself as pro-immigration and anti-deportation. The instant Trump beat out DeSantis in the primary, Cernovich was straight back on the Trump train, memory-holing all the times he called Trump a fraud and a failure. For Mike, this was just a shitpost economy course correction. Many might also put Brianna Wu in this category—one of the big-three targets, though the least so, of the Gamergate antifeminism war, Wu morphed over time from mega-SJW to center-right liberal. The same progressives who fought alongside her in 2025 are now the group she considers her biggest enemies. And then you have Richard Hanania. Hanania is an online figure I’ve written about before but I no longer believe what I’ve written is very accurate. Not that it seemed inaccurate at the time—I just didn’t grasp the greater and evolving _project_ that was Richard Hanania. As he continued to pop up in my social media mentions in ever more baffling and incongruous contexts, I feel he fits better in the shitpost economy than out of it. So forgive me if I rehash, but for those new to the newsletter (welcome!) let me start over on just who or what the hell a Richard Hanania is. Hanania began his career writing white supremacy material under the pseudonym Richard Hoste as a contributor and understudy for notorious neofascist Richard Spencer, and I promise that’s all the Richards you’re going to have to learn about today. During this time, Hanania, with Spencer, helped coin the term “alt-right.” In one of his essays on the topic, Hanania, as Hoste, explained that the reasons for establishing an “alternative” right (to conservatism) are twofold: One, their project was fully transformative so they weren’t really “conserving” anything, and two, conservatives weren’t racist enough. > Besides our disagreements with mainstream conservatives on the issue of foreign policy and the relative importance of fighting terrorism, there is the topic of race and, more broadly, IQ and heredity. We've known for a while through neuroscience and cross-adoption studies--if common sense wasn't enough--that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom. The Alternative Right takes it for granted that equality of opportunity means inequality of results for various classes, races, and the two sexes. Without ignoring the importance of culture, we see Western civilization as a unique product of the European gene pool. At some point in the intervening years Hanania became something of a public intellectual under his own name, and I think it’s pretty clear that he knew he was eventually going to have to craft a fake apology for his inevitable outing as a one-time Spencer acolyte, because in 2019—before the outing occurred—he wrote an academic article about crafting fake apologies. Hanania nevertheless seems to have been fully forgiven his transgressions by members of the liberal elite as normie as Matthew Yglesias, despite the fact that he continues to associate quite happily with Richard Spencer. But where I once wrote Hanania off as a bog standard Nazi-turned-more-respectable-reactionary, I now find his politics nearly impossible to keep track of. He now variously calls himself a liberal, though not, I don’t think, a Democrat. He opposes Trump most of the time and calls his voters stupid, but then comes out in favor of Trump’s stupidest ideas like invading Venezuela and Greenland. Then there’s still all the racist shit he says. Like, framing indigenous land rights in Australia as Australia “giving half of its country away” as though the land was given away to, like, Korea or something rather than Australians but not white ones. I’ve come to realize that the racist stuff—though he probably is legit racist—falls into a shitpost economy pattern. Just like when he declares that he could write something as good or better than Shakespeare if he had the time. Or when he keeps dropping _incredibly sus_ hypotheticals about Epstein… Or when he spends like a month going on and on and on about Sydney Sweeney’s funbags and eventually writing an essay about how they killed wokeness. He’s a shitposter. These aren’t ideological posts at all, they are _attention_ -drawing. Hanania can’t elaborate or extrapolate any of this further into some grand thesis, he’s just throwing shit at the screen until enough people notice the smell. And that is another thing that divides the denizens of the shitpost economy from the influencers. You can recognize the names of these people and you might regard them significant figures in the political and cultural space, but nobody is getting Richard Hanania to do a college graduation keynote. You see Tim Pool and Benny Johnson in the White House press pool but you will never see Ian Miles Cheong there. Mike Cernovich isn’t presenting next to Jack Posobiec at CPAC. Kamala Harris isn’t doing seven figure speeches introduced to the stage by Brianna Wu. These are the lowest rung of celebrity. I hadn’t known, going into my research for this, that there was an actual interview out there between Drew Pavlou and Richard Hanania, but there is and I stumbled upon it. The one thing that stuck me is how boring they both are. Their positions, at least those which they are willing to discuss in this setting, seem average and mostly moderate. There is nothing shocking about either of them in this context, and that is why they are on Twitter and not your TV. Now that social media and Twitter especially have moved toward a model where they directly pay you to receive attention, there is even less incentive to attempt to use it to build a following to shape into some sort of content creation career. There is less incentive to make coherent points about anything or establish a worldview. There is only posting, attention, drift, moving toward the winds of popular opinion, chasing retweets, controversy, ubiquity. Worse, for people like Pavlou and Cheong who use their real names, they have made themselves damn near unemployable outside of this one thing. Ultimately it devolves into simple mimicry. Occasionally a gambler in the shitpost economy will stumble upon an unexpected jackpot, such is the case recently when shitposter Nick Shirley, a twelve-year-old Sean Penn, found a typo on a sign that inspired Trump to surge Homeland Security into Minnesota in search of foreigners running healthcare facilities, a political firestorm that even managed to overshadow the invasion of Venezuela, to say nothing of the Epstein Files. Punchable So guess what Drew Pavlou is up to now? He’s doorknocking healthcare providers in Australia in search of black people committing healthcare fraud. Always chasing those views, eyes always fixated on the stats, the retweets, the trends of the shitpost economy. He will, almost inevitably, fall short. Always a chaser, never a creator, relegated, as they all are eventually, to the lowliest celebrity status of all: The Elon Musk reply guy. With a Wikipedia photo that he uploaded himself I'm writing a book that goes into detail about how a single generation of online culture got us from the liberal democracy of the 90s to whatever the hell this is. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Hey, Ghost readers! I know a lot of you are here to get _away_ from Substack, which is precisely why I set up this alternative for y’all. Part of my schtick is talking about social media and internet culture, and how it’s pretty much all going to heck, and Substack is a part of that whole system, so just so you know, I’m not going to be harping on about that community all the time. Think of me as a much less popular Casey Newton with more direct insight. I suppose I’m going to have to have to spend some time in this one trying to dance around naming someone and thus avoid summoning them to fire up a conflict I have no interest in battling. I’m kind of in a bind, here; If I identify this gentleman and he comes across this piece then he will accuse me of passive aggression, subtweeting, and using his name for clout. If I subvert the passivity accusation and alert him, that will be even worse, as he will take this as an indication that I am interested in engaging in Direct Conflict. But this ain’t Black Angus and I don’t have beef on the menu. This is much more about confronting an idea than an individual. It’s a commentary on social media’s evolution and its seemingly inevitable traps. I was an original adopter of Substack _Notes_ , the Twitter clone that the newsletter platform launched soon after Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of that website and thus an early exodus location for people who wanted to escape the coming Groypocalypse. Of course, most of the Twitter refugees weren’t interested in writing or reading newsletters, so the migration dried up kind of quickly. For the most part, those who fled Twitter wound up instead on Woke Twitter (Bluesky), Instagram Twitter (Threads), or Insufferable Linux Nerd Twitter (Mastodon). Also, these. It was kind of a crazy time. For those who remained on Substack because we were writers or readers, we got to watch the evolution of an unconventional social media ecosystem in real time from the beginning. As has become a tradition for me around this time of year, I wrote one and then a second sort of “state of the community” essay and I guess it’s time for the third. And I guess, for those who might have tried and abandoned Notes in 2022 because it wasn’t Twitter, it might interest you to learn that it’s now, sort of, Twitter. But not in any of the good ways. This realization for me was kind of triggered by the unnamed individual’s recent controversial assertions on Notes that social media needs to be more directly confrontational. It has become boring, he believes, because people are holding too much back and aren’t insulting and attacking each other directly and to their faces enough. This is not an opinion that’s exclusive to this one guy, but I think he’s the only one saying it directly: That it is your God-given duty, as a participant in social media, to be an Asshole For No Reason (AFNR). It’s relevant to point out that this person is famously and even proudly an AFNR and I think it’s a type of projection for assholes to believe everyone else is, similarly, an asshole. Ipso facto, anyone who is not being an AFNR to your face must be instead slinging their insults toward other writers in private conversation, or else publicly but without tagging or notifying the insultee. This, he contends, is passive aggression, which, to the health of a culture, is inferior to old fashioned _aggressive_ aggression. Just imagine Dennis Hopper from Blue Velvet but he's just in your face all of the time. Here's the thing—social media is already plenty nasty, and for all of Substack’s problems, not being nasty enough isn’t one of them. The site’s founders will harp constantly on about how it’s not Twitter, and they will cite the nature of its discourse as the reason. I don’t know if anyone would consider Substack to be a highbrow website but I think it’s safe, at least by what content it pushes algorithmically, to call it middlebrow. That means people will tell you to go fuck yourself in 280 words instead of 280 characters. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 30-January ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

On Wednesday they shot a poet. 37 year old writer and mother of three Renee Nicole Good was sitting in her car observing an ICE raid in a Minneapolis neighborhood when a number of the goons rushed at her car, yelling at her to leave the area. Paradoxically, while issuing this command, they attempted to yank the door open. Panicked, she tried to leave as instructed, at which point, one of the officers pulled out a gun and shot her three times point blank in the face. According to the President and the Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, the officer who executed Good, Jonathan Ross, was fighting for his life in hospital after being fully run over by Good’s car. Here is footage of Ross immediately after the incident. As you can see, his crushed and mangled body is barely still recognizable as human. 0:00 /0:13 1× I’m not going to post any of the half dozen videos of every conceivable angle of this incident because you can find them easily and even posting them for consideration gives undue credibility to the idea that there might be two sides to this. It is some of the cleanest video that you could possibly want of something like this. There’s no shaky cam or deceptive angles. Very, very clearly, at no point were any of the ICE officers directly in the path of where the vehicle was moving as it was moving. Certainly nobody got “run over,” even injured, even hurt. What happened was an ICE goon became infuriated that he wasn’t going to get to pull a woman out of a car and slam her face into the concrete and, let’s face it, probably molest her that day, so he decided to unload three rounds of substitute masculinity into her head instead. Once again, I assure you, this is not in any good faith way controversial. Nobody who saw the video disagrees that this is what happened, no matter what they say. I don’t know what kind of hallucinatory drug would even make that possible. And yet, in the most astonishing example of large scale gaslighting I think I’ve ever seen, pretty much _every Trump voter I’ve been able to find has closed ranks_ , gallingly insisting to people with working eyes that this is an image of a man shooting in self defense as he is actively being run over by a car that is speeding directly toward him: What chills me to the bone in fear for Good’s family is that, in the space of a few days, this innocent woman has become one of the most despised human beings among the American and international far right. The myth that she tried to run down an ICE agent isn’t even on the top of the list of the reasons she deserved to die. Consider, for instance, the fact that she listed pronouns in her social media profiles. She was a poet, she was in a same sex marriage, and she had a kid with no male role model (they like to imply she abandoned her child’s father when in fact he died). Did I mention the pronouns? 0:00 /0:23 1× They are projecting that she looks like a Karen, like their HR nightmare. Every right-wing influencer from the gutter trash like Tim Pool right up to the Vice President of the United States is celebrating her death, not because she attacked a cop, which they know isn’t true, but because she represents something they have been champing at the bit about for a while now: Permission to expand scope. To move beyond immigrants and black people and start disposing of other undesirables. I know that we already crossed this Rubicon with George Floyd and probably earlier than that, but this is just another terrifying example of how the American right, and indeed Trump supporters in other countries around the world, have coalesced into something closer to a cult than a political movement. But hey, you know what? At least Woke is dead! Image source That’s right, boys and girls, rejoice! We did it!! No more interracial couples on TV, we did it!! Woke is dead!! You can say faggot again!! Woke is dead!! Image source Gigantic asses in videogames!! We’re bringing back plastic straws!! Woke is dead!! Blackface is back and we’re putting the radium back in cough medicine!! Image source At least, that’s the concern of a certain breed of enlightened centrist, people who don’t like fascism but also don’t like that they cast some black people in the _Lord of the Rings_ TV series, and think that the latter explains and maybe even partially justifies the former. Ben Cohen of _The Banter_ is certainly no fan of Donald Trump. He calls him fascistic and rails against the billionaire oligarchs and the dismantling of democracy. But as the New Year rolled in and Cohen reflected upon the eve of Trump’s second year as America’s first monarch, he chose to open it like this: > I have a confession to make. A part of me has enjoyed watching the left’s radical identity politics movement crumble under assault from the Trump administration. DEI is gone. Gender pronouns are out. Biological men taking part in women’s sport is becoming a thing of the past. This kind of instinctual “I’m nervous about calling out brutal ethnic cleansing because it might make people think I respect queers” caveat is the kind of centrist technique I’ve decided to call a _Silverism_ after this classic from the “black people can’t restrain their jungle instinct to eat cats” era of the 2024 campaign: But only the brain of the kneejerk-anti-wokeist can come up with a mental Korbut flip like Cohen’s assertion that America willingly electing a white supremacist is a “cathartic reckoning” because it somehow _debunks_ the idea that America has a white supremacy problem: > More than that, the Democrats appear to finally understand that the vast majority of Americans think they are out of touch elitists. Outside of liberal enclaves, people don’t use terms like “Latinx”, “BIPOC”, and “intersectionality”. They don’t believe America is a white supremacist country and would desperately love to move beyond the stultifying tenets of Wokeism. The party refused to listen until it was too late, and the reckoning has felt cathartic. Now, I am of course also a white guy but I am nevertheless more hesitant to posit that the utility of the suffering of minorities is to teach other white guys a lesson. Certainly not about a complaint as insipid as “woke.” Like, there’s a paramilitary force rounding up anyone on the street who looks vaguely Latin and disappearing them to a swamp fortress where many of them just die of exposure or exotic disease and that’s the first news their family will hear about them after their disappearance and it feels good knowing that Anita Sarkeesian will learn her lesson from this and stop criticizing our video games. Native Americans might lose all rights to their own ancestral land and that’ll serve Barbara from HR right for making me sit through that fucking land acknowledgment, I hope she’s suffering. No, “cathartic” is not the word I would use for this. I don’t use the pain of fascism’s victims as a tasty snack to make me feel better thinking that someone might be sorry that they made me hear the word “BIPOC” all those times. ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. One of the patron saints of this kind of smug told-ya-so-ism is of course Noah Smith, who dropped a piece on January 4 called “Where does a liberal go from here?” in which he makes a handy metaphor: His politic, _Le Liberalism Classicale_ , is of the enlightened intelligentsia of the early French Revolution, “reading the works of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu and Diderot,” which certainly explains his impressive vocabulary. The progressives, then—the “woke” people, the “Blueskyists”—are of course the French Terror that followed. Now, you might think the _French Terror_ is a bit of a hyperbolic way to describe unisex bathrooms and the tabooification of the R-word, but it’s a regular thing for him to variously describe progressivism as the French Terror, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the Second Intifada. Might I suggest, for variety, the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Pacification of the Algiers? It's always this same lesson: Progressivism and Woke drove normal people _so far up the wall_ that they frankly had no choice but to actively embrace and work toward the evil Biff Tannen Bad Future from _Back to the Future II_. But does that make sense? That people were just for the large part pretty liberal and cool with racial minorities until DEI programs started and white people started losing promotions to non-white people and the understandable reaction was to throw them all into a place called “Alligator Alcatraz?” That everyone was pretty cool with queer and transgender folk and even let them get married but then a cis woman came fifth behind a trans woman in a swimming race and now we need to literally kill everyone who uses pronouns? Can I venture an alternative hypothesis: Do you think it’s possible that maybe Woke might not have been as bad as you remember? Mmm, naah I think I've got a pretty good idea Here’s the thing: I do have theories about how we got where we are under the global hegemony of the Trump-right phenomenon and constant readers are likely sick of me mentioning that I’m writing a book about that and it’s very complicated, a damn sight more complicated than Woke drove everyone nuts. Part of the problem is indeed that people who grew up having their brains eaten by 4chan are now entering government, but the architects of this movement are a lot older than that and they have been working toward this for a long time. They are masters of propaganda. There’s this odd thing that the enlightened centrist “I didn’t leave the left, it left me” types like Bill Maher like to go on about, and that’s the fact that a big part of the reason Kamala Harris lost the election was because she just wouldn’t shut the fuck up about trans people. People were so sick of hearing about trans rights that they would have voted for the San Francisco Giants Crazy Crab over Kamala by the end of it. Here's your true orange president. Image source But actually… Kamala Harris never talked about that stuff, or very rarely. A lot of people actually have a false memory of Harris going on and on and on about trans rights, just as people apparently have a false memory of Renee Nicole Good plowing her car full force into Jonathan Ross as he bounced cartoonishly off her windshield. Yes, the dreaded Woke, or SJW as it was called in 2016, was a driver of the early Trump movement, and Gamergate had a lot to do with it, but few people are aware that the architect of Gamergate, largely, was Steve Bannon, the elder political operative and Cronus of Trumpism. He is not cool, he is not a geek or a gamer, and he is not driven to any large extent about the crybaby complaints of anti-Woke. But he knows that _you_ are. As an aside, did you ever see that X-Files episode with the guy who was made of cancer? Image source The whole woke thing was a big fat red herring and if you’re still whining about it then you fell for it. The Bill Maher types can go on and on, contorting their face with smugness until it turns inside out, abut how the Democratic party needed to talk less about the woke stuff and move, move, move to the right. But they can’t stop talking about something they weren’t talking about in the first place. In fact, they _tried to take this advice_ in 2024. If you didn’t notice, that’s because it was shitty advice that didn’t work. Among the top complaints of progressives who were actually paying attention to all three of the presidential campaigns against Trump was that the Democratic party continually tries to shake its progressive wing off like fleas and court the center-right, to the point where Kamala Harris actually teamed up with the Bush-era neocons, snubbing the left in favor of winning the vote of all five remaining GWB loyalists. In their fumbling, they couldn’t out-propagandize the other side to avoid _still_ being portrayed as the party whose top policies include white genocide and transing your children at gunpoint. You’ve never actually heard anyone use the term “Latinx” but you’ve heard stories that the progressives have been ramming it down people’s throats hand over fist, and you are by extension sick of it, but guess who you’ve been hearing those stories from? There is a story to tell about how a man like, for example, Matt Walsh went from dressing like this and complaining about ethics in games journalism and female hypergamy… …to dressing like this and talking about killing or enslaving everybody in the Western hemisphere in the name of Donald J. Trump. That story is endlessly more complex than the “progressives betrayed liberalism by going too woke” narrative. In fact, but for the endless fucking whining of the Noah Smith types, “anti-wokeness” plays less of a part in the second Trump administration than you might realize. The anti-woke thing was much more a project of Elon Musk, whose brain is destroyed. His idiotic _Department of Funny Memes and 420 LOL_ or whatever the fuck it was called was advertised as a sophisticated operation but all they really did was run AI word search through government websites to remove references to black people and other woke bugbears, with the hilariously incompetent side effect of deleting information about the Enola Gay and defunding transport initiatives because of the prefix “trans.” What Donald Trump’s core base is more about is something much more frightening and has little to nothing to do with the childish culture war issues that the shallow explainers like the enlightened centrists still think pin it down. Not everyone has fallen for it (most haven’t, if his popularity polls are anything to go by) but Trump’s hardline supporters are completely enamored with the idea of Donald Trump using the presidency to enact _his personal vengeance_ and _nothing but that_. Trump is able to tap into the general anti-immigrant attitudes of the right to bolster the deportation frenzy that emerges from his personal hatred of Hispanics, but most of the other stuff that energizes his base doesn’t benefit them at all. They are perfectly happy and even enthusiastic about opening the coffers and using taxpayer money to harass people like Letitia James, constantly and forever, for personally insulting him. Nobody gets anything out of that. In fact, Trump’s current war on the state of Minnesota, the very war that killed Renee Good in its crossfire, against a supposed Somalian immigrant threat in that state that seemed to come out of nowhere basically yesterday, is based almost entirely on two things: His racist hatred against Ilhan Omar, who particularly pissed him off recently, and his personal hatred of Governor Tim Walz, who ran against him as Harris’ running mate and who is widely credited with making that a much closer race than it otherwise would have been. Trump’s base is not animated by “anti-woke.” They are animated by erecting monuments to Trump, renaming landmarks after Trump, destroying personal enemies of Trump, now killing people who oppose Trump, and soon going to war and dying, not for America, but for Donald J. Trump. These are the hallmarks of a personality cult. I don’t know what winning this fight will involve, but I sure as hell know that it has almost nothing to do with “being less woke.” Aiming for that fake target is what got everyone into this mess in the first place. I'm writing a book that goes into detail about how a single generation of online culture got us from the liberal democracy of the 90s to whatever the hell this is. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

If you’ve been on social media much over the past few years you may have noticed a rising star in the “politically bonkers” space. Drew Pavlou is a damn near omnipresent figure on Twitter who shows up in so many retweets by MAGA influencers and Trump administration officials that you would easily assume he’s some celebrity whose actual work you’re unfamiliar with. In reality, Pavlou is a nobody, but he’s a special kind of nobody who has nobodied his way into being a nobody who everybody has heard of and everyone wishes they hadn’t. This is a new type of celebrity that sprouted out of social media, a new species in the ever evolving concept of celebrity itself. In the 20th century, celebrities were your pop stars and movie stars. After 2000 there was the reality boom and the socialites; the Kardashians, the Snookis, the famous for being famous. Not necessarily ordinary people, but people who ordinary people wanted to be. All of them unique individuals Then the internet made celebrity even more accessible, with the birth of the influencer. These _were_ ordinary people, but they often had some kind of talent or charisma that bought them a shorter route to success. Now we have proper social media, and in fact it dominates our online experience, and the next phase of celebrity has arrived, but they are not people you want to be, and they don’t have charisma, and they don’t influence. There are echoes of Marshall McLuhan. If the pop star begat the socialite, and the socialite begat the influencer, then the influencer begat these unfortunate creatures. The attention economy fully embraces the fact that the process that generates celebrity, whether it’s talent or intelligence or charisma or just good looks, is only ever _a means to the true end_ , which is _attention_. If the process can be bypassed entirely then this is simply a more efficient route to the true goal. Ergo, you don’t need talent if there’s some other way to make yourself difficult for people to avoid. This is a new phenomenon that I’ve come to call the _shitpost economy_. I knew who Drew Pavlou was before anyone on Twitter had ever heard of him, because he started his career as a local nuisance. I’ve never met him personally but he was a student politician at the university where I studied, and he was known for constantly shitposting and harassing people on the student Facebook group. Everybody of course realized what he was really after was attention, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Try ignoring a mosquito. That’s one thing in itself, but try co-ordinating a whole room full of people to _all_ ignore the mosquito. The attempt, in itself, just means everyone keeps mentioning the mosquito. The only way to solve the problem was to ban Drew from the group, which they of course eventually did. So Drew had to find a new way of getting that attention. In 2019 he started the next phase of his career as an anti-China activist/protester, a cause that he seems to have chosen by throwing a dart. He burned copies of Xi Jinping Thought outside the Chinese embassy and led protests for the cause of Hong Kong independence. That was also the year that Covid-19 emerged from Wuhan, which only added fuel to the whole anti-China thing he had going on. Now the entire university had a mosquito problem they couldn’t ignore. Some people interpreted his stunts, like prancing around the campus China institute in a biohazard suit, a tad racist, and his habit of calling everybody a cunt was considered less than ideal, behaviorally (in his defense, that’s just Australian). So, Drew was suspended. Then he hatched a scheme so genius that it could only come from the mind of Drew Pavlou—if he could persuade someone else to legally change their name to Drew Pavlou, then _that_ person could run for a seat on the university senate. If they won, then the _actual_ Drew Pavlou could step into the position, evading suspension. He said that he ran this plan past some lawyers and they told him it was legit. 0:00 /3:01 1× There is of course no way that any lawyer actually told him this would work (unless, and this isn’t unlikely, they were taking the piss out of him). This would be Drew’s first IRL shitpost. He would get a taste for it. Around about then, I guess, came the Twitter phase, and the rest of the world came to meet Drew Pavlou, a man of passionate opinions whose ideology is, you might say, somewhat inconsistent. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 23-January ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at a now very dead website that used to be called Twitter, was recently made aware of something disturbing. He’d been quoted in a recently published, bestselling book, without his knowledge. This in itself isn’t a problem—if you’re a public figure, you’ll never know all the places you’ve ever been quoted, as it’s not like they need to tell you—but it was a problem in this case because the book is _In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us_ by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and the quote is _technically_ what Roth actually said, while at the same time, _one hundred percent opposite_ to what he actually _meant_. Here's what happened: Roth’s father-in-law was reading this book when he stumbled upon a familiar name and urgently texted him about it. Roth doesn’t ever remember saying this and is alarmed because it’s the opposite of the actual truth: “Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, states that ‘the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands,’ including demands involving domestic speech.” Image source Yoel Roth, Bluesky Did Roth actually state that? Did he type that sentence? Did he sit at his keyboard and tap-tap-tap those letters out in the exact sequence that the authors of the book alleges? Well… _mmmyhhhhh… yes_ , kind of. The “quote” is drawn from a heading within an article that Roth wrote for the _Knight First Amendment Institution_ at Columbia University, where the substance of the article is specifically to _dispute_ that heading. The idea that pre-Elon (prelon?) Twitter was subject to substantial moderation interference by the nefarious deep state three letter agencies, under Obama/Democratic control even during Trump’s first term, is a myth propagated by the whole Matt Taibbi debacle (Taibbacle?) of the _Twitter Files_ back in 2022—an accusation so weak that even the entirely Trump-captured Supreme Court still couldn’t make it a thing. And yet there is nothing short of a _desperation_ for this to be true. Not just among the conservative grievance movement, who feel that their opinions not being popular enough in the 2010s can only be explained by a conspiracy—a “Censorship Industrial Complex” as coined by the _Twitter Files_ chums—but also by a broader political umbrella of centrists and liberals who are _frantic_ and _famished_ for evidence to prove the Covid-19 pandemic was (and is) no big deal and we are _absolutely vindicated_ in our resentment for all the stuff they made us do, and stopped us from doing. And let's not forget that TikTok "Imagine" cover the celebrities put us through To head off any comments pointing this out, I know that we are still in a Covid pandemic, but to be clear, we are still “in” the pandemic in the same sense that we are still “in” the influenza pandemic that began before documented human history. It is with us now until we have some kind of technology capable of completely eliminating viral disease from Earth. I haven’t read _In Covid’s Wake_ but I’ve listened to Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri’s dissection of it on their podcast _If Books Could Kill_ , and it sounds pretty much how I expected it to be. Hobbes and Shamshiri run through the book, claim by claim, and find litle more than misunderstood and misrepresented statistics all the way through. Roth isn’t the only figure to have been misquoted to appear to be making the opposite case to what they were actually making. The authors use a study by Bloomberg Global Health Chair Thomas Bollyky to bolster the idea that non-pharmaceutical measures like masks and social distancing did nothing to help slow the spread of Covid. Bollysky, perplexed, claims his studies showed the opposite. The authors didn’t seem to interview any medical or disease scientists, and the positive reviews come mostly from journalists and academics outside of this field who aren’t equipped to see its flaws, while epidemiologists are mostly baffled by its publication. Is this media illiteracy or something more nefarious? How does a book this badly researched get released by a major academic publisher? ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Co-author Stephen Macedo responded to Roth with an unconditional apology and promise to work with Princeton University Press to have the false quote and claim removed from future printings. It’s big of him to claim full responsibility and not throw his co-author under the bus, but it’s extraordinarily peculiar how this kind of mistake could happen at all. He claims he doesn’t know, but at a guess, he thinks he may have mistaken the header for a pull-quote. As someone who’s trying to write a book that requires a lot of research I find it kind of insulting that skimming the internet for pull-quotes could be considered a legitimate way of doing it. The authors of this book aren’t right-wing reactionaries. By all appearances they are liberals or even progressives. This probably goes a long way to explain why the book got such mainstream, uncritical, media applause. “Finally, someone on the left is saying what we’re all thinking, and we don’t need to look to, like, Dave Rubin or somebody anymore for quotes to back us up!” In that sense, you can see how this book got hastily written and rushed to publication. It’s simply because it _fills a huge market demand_. The right already have a wealth of books to choose from by people on their side of politics about how Covid was a big lie and everything would be fine, actually better, if we’d just gone on completely as normal, and to this day we would, maybe at worst, remember 2020-21 as a particularly bad flu season. But people on the left didn’t have any such book. This created a need. I’m sure a lot of good faith efforts were made to write such a book from the liberal perspective but they just couldn’t make it happen until someone did what the right tends to do—massage data, skew historical reality, cherry pick the internet for gotcha quotes, mine poorly stated remarks, and maybe lie a bit. In other words, the authors are telling a story that is more important than the facts of the matter, and the facts need to go where the story leads them, not the other way around. And though the market need for such a story existed, I don’t think the authors did this for money. I could very well be wrong, but do think the book came about from their sincerely held belief that their story was correct and the problems in the book arose from their frustration at finding the research to be so difficult. The hole was round but the peg was much squarer than they expected, but they decided what they needed wasn’t a round peg; What they needed was a hammer. When academic papers threaten to discredit your theory, always remember to hold your ground - they are more scared of you than you are of them. I get this because, I used to be kind of right-leaning nearly 20 years ago, and one of the things I had a sincerely held belief about was that climate change was a hoax, and my first attempt at writing a book was going to be on that subject. But I came at the project in good faith—I was going to look at all the arguments from the climate change side, I was going to find the rebuttals to them from _my_ side, and I was going to put together a good, solid case for why my side was right. It was _really, really difficult_. The big problem was that every argument my side made was just really weak, and the strongest sounding arguments seemed that way largely due to the attitude they carried. The climate change side just seemed to get the last word on everything. My side kept making really stupid points that seemed tailored for stupid people. This isn’t what convinced me I was wrong—that was a gradual process that didn’t land for another few years. What it _did_ was make me more determined, because it made me think that, obviously, I was the smart guy who was going to have to finally sort this situation out for my side, the side I knew to be correct. Suddenly I felt like the Hercule fucking Poirot of climate denial. I was going to get to the bottom of why the facts of the matter were so difficult to find. Who was suppressing them? I came up with motivations and hidden genealogies—one of my favorite leading theories was that the whole idea was invented by Margaret Thatcher to assert control over powerful fossil fuel unions. I came up with half baked ideas about “belief” in climate science was more similar to religion than science (Al Gore is just like a Jesus figure who got crucified!!) I leaned more and more desperately into conspiracism and fringe arguments, and relying more heavily on crazy overstatements from the extreme fringes of the other side (I remember finding some random blog post theorizing about how climate change could cause an earthquake that could split the Earth in half, and I thought debunking this was a big important gotcha for my book.) "Al Gore believes literally something like this will happen, sort of!!!" It was a mission I was on. I was actively hunting for this stuff, I started ignoring the actual argument points as being something almost like a distraction, and what I did use, I massaged to force it to make sure it supported the point I wanted it to support… even if I knew I was kind of distorting the point actually being made. In my mind, I was literally massaging these arguments and graphs and studies to make them line up with the truth, so I wasn’t really being dishonest, in that way. Could I see myself having yanked what I thought was a pull-quote from an article I didn’t bother reading, thinking it supported my position when it did the opposite? You’re damn right I would have. I’m endlessly grateful that this dumbass project ran out of steam, not because I was at any risk of having it published (I was an undergraduate, and even these days you need to have a racist viral video on X to get a right wing book deal at that level of being a nobody) but I probably would have put it on the internet somewhere anyway and it would be an embarrassment that would follow me forever. There was a chance it would have become that lifelong embarrassment because there was and is a demand for that kind of project. Something earnest sounding, methodical, and convincing that can reaffirm people’s priors from a moderate, liberal, or just not the smug, sanctimonious and tribal right. Trying not to adopt "Shapiro voice" That’s how this kind of sloppy and ill-researched project can come together in the first place, even in good faith, driven by a demand. But it doesn’t explain why the demand exists in the first place. Why is it that so many people on all sides of politics are desperate for most or all of the narrative surrounding the first two years of Covid’s existence to be proven a lie? Why is there such a desperation for between one and two years worth of mostly moderate safety measures—which, for the most part, nobody has been forced to endure since sometime in 2021—to be retrospectively shown to have been completely unnecessary, or at least, for their absence to have been worth the loss of any number of lives that they saved? Why does it make such a difference that this was something that occurred in our lifetime and in our memory? Are there, for example, any writers who are willing, for the sake of consistency, to write a book explaining how the _exact same measures_ enacted by governments in response to the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic were an egregious violation of human rights that never should have been put into place? If not, why not? Why are you not horrified by the under-reported government tyranny during this time? Image source: National Museum of Australia I venture, and this might be obvious: Most of the people desperate for authentic-sounding Covid revisionism didn’t suffer any great loss themselves during this time, and as a result actually were personally affected in a much more negative way by the social restrictions and the masks and the gathering laws and contact tracing and the school closures and constantly having to tell people to take their fucking microphones off mute than they were by the virus itself. We don’t want this to ever happen again. The next time a virus comes along that we feel confident we and our families can personally survive, we don’t want to have to lose one or two years of life-as-normal for the sake of some abstract notion of being a “disease vector” for someone else’s hypothetical grandma. But, we also don’t want to feel bad or guilty about that, because most of us do feel empathy for other people, even those we’ve never met. For a lot of people, the easiest way to satisfy both our “don’t want to harm others” desire and our “don't want to inconvenience ourselves to avoid it” desire is to entertain a very strong tendency toward a third option: “The people who say that my avoiding personal inconvenience will harm others are wrong.” This ties in with the climate change thing as well. I haven’t become an expert on climate change since my failed book project—other than the fact that I’ve come to realize it’s true, I don’t know what extent of disaster we can expect to see in our lifetimes as a result and I know the science isn’t settled on that either. I _have_ stopped expecting that humanity will ever enact any major policies to prevent it because the tendency toward “neither we nor our governments should do anything that affects our lives on this matter because the scientists are hysterical and actually everyone in the world in our lifetimes will be fine/adapt/live with it” is too strong. A hundred years from now, humanity isn’t going to look back at Covid-19 measures as anything draconian or evil or misguided any more than we today see the same measures during Spanish Flu having been any of those things. Future historians won’t view the Covid vaccine as any more evil than most of us today view the smallpox vaccine. If, however, in the course of those hundred years, governments of the world collaborate on enacting some kind of environmental measure that will effectively prevent the worst potential loss of life from climate change, in a way that inconveniences a lot of people for even one or two years, you bet your ass people will raise hell about it for decades in an attempt to ensure that government never, _ever_ responds to a threat like that again. If we just have one major human existential threat per century or so, enough for each one to fade in collective memory from “our government’s tyrannical overreach” to “our grandparents’ heroic call to action” then we’ll probably do okay. I'm writing a book that I'm hoping will be much better than my terrible, aborted climate change project, having learned all the right lessons from that time in my life. It's about how the rise of the internet propelled far-right toxic masculinity to the American Presidency in the space of a single generation. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

On Wednesday they shot a poet. 37 year old writer and mother of three Renee Nicole Good was sitting in her car observing an ICE raid in a Minneapolis neighborhood when a number of the goons rushed at her car, yelling at her to leave the area. Paradoxically, while issuing this command, they attempted to yank the door open. Panicked, she tried to leave as instructed, at which point, one of the officers pulled out a gun and shot her three times point blank in the face. According to the President and the Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, the officer who executed Good, Jonathan Ross, was fighting for his life in hospital after being fully run over by Good’s car. Here is footage of Ross immediately after the incident. As you can see, his crushed and mangled body is barely still recognizable as human. 0:00 /0:13 1× I’m not going to post any of the half dozen videos of every conceivable angle of this incident because you can find them easily and even posting them for consideration gives undue credibility to the idea that there might be two sides to this. It is some of the cleanest video that you could possibly want of something like this. There’s no shaky cam or deceptive angles. Very, very clearly, at no point were any of the ICE officers directly in the path of where the vehicle was moving as it was moving. Certainly nobody got “run over,” even injured, even hurt. What happened was an ICE goon became infuriated that he wasn’t going to get to pull a woman out of a car and slam her face into the concrete and, let’s face it, probably molest her that day, so he decided to unload three rounds of substitute masculinity into her head instead. Once again, I assure you, this is not in any good faith way controversial. Nobody who saw the video disagrees that this is what happened, no matter what they say. I don’t know what kind of hallucinatory drug would even make that possible. And yet, in the most astonishing example of large scale gaslighting I think I’ve ever seen, pretty much _every Trump voter I’ve been able to find has closed ranks_ , gallingly insisting to people with working eyes that this is an image of a man shooting in self defense as he is actively being run over by a car that is speeding directly toward him: What chills me to the bone in fear for Good’s family is that, in the space of a few days, this innocent woman has become one of the most despised human beings among the American and international far right. The myth that she tried to run down an ICE agent isn’t even on the top of the list of the reasons she deserved to die. Consider, for instance, the fact that she listed pronouns in her social media profiles. She was a poet, she was in a same sex marriage, and she had a kid with no male role model (they like to imply she abandoned her child’s father when in fact he died). Did I mention the pronouns? 0:00 /0:23 1× They are projecting that she looks like a Karen, like their HR nightmare. Every right-wing influencer from the gutter trash like Tim Pool right up to the Vice President of the United States is celebrating her death, not because she attacked a cop, which they know isn’t true, but because she represents something they have been champing at the bit about for a while now: Permission to expand scope. To move beyond immigrants and black people and start disposing of other undesirables. I know that we already crossed this Rubicon with George Floyd and probably earlier than that, but this is just another terrifying example of how the American right, and indeed Trump supporters in other countries around the world, have coalesced into something closer to a cult than a political movement. But hey, you know what? At least Woke is dead! Image source That’s right, boys and girls, rejoice! We did it!! No more interracial couples on TV, we did it!! Woke is dead!! You can say faggot again!! Woke is dead!! Image source Gigantic asses in videogames!! We’re bringing back plastic straws!! Woke is dead!! Blackface is back and we’re putting the radium back in cough medicine!! Image source At least, that’s the concern of a certain breed of enlightened centrist, people who don’t like fascism but also don’t like that they cast some black people in the _Lord of the Rings_ TV series, and think that the latter explains and maybe even partially justifies the former. Ben Cohen of _The Banter_ is certainly no fan of Donald Trump. He calls him fascistic and rails against the billionaire oligarchs and the dismantling of democracy. But as the New Year rolled in and Cohen reflected upon the eve of Trump’s second year as America’s first monarch, he chose to open it like this: > I have a confession to make. A part of me has enjoyed watching the left’s radical identity politics movement crumble under assault from the Trump administration. DEI is gone. Gender pronouns are out. Biological men taking part in women’s sport is becoming a thing of the past. This kind of instinctual “I’m nervous about calling out brutal ethnic cleansing because it might make people think I respect queers” caveat is the kind of centrist technique I’ve decided to call a _Silverism_ after this classic from the “black people can’t restrain their jungle instinct to eat cats” era of the 2024 campaign: But only the brain of the kneejerk-anti-wokeist can come up with a mental Korbut flip like Cohen’s assertion that America willingly electing a white supremacist is a “cathartic reckoning” because it somehow _debunks_ the idea that America has a white supremacy problem: More than that, the Democrats appear to finally understand that the vast majority of Americans think they are out of touch elitists. Outside of liberal enclaves, people don’t use terms like “Latinx”, “BIPOC”, and “intersectionality”. They don’t believe America is a white supremacist country and would desperately love to move beyond the stultifying tenets of Wokeism. The party refused to listen until it was too late, and the reckoning has felt cathartic. Now, I am of course also a white guy but I am nevertheless more hesitant to posit that the utility of the suffering of minorities is to teach other white guys a lesson. Certainly not about a complaint as insipid as “woke.” Like, there’s a paramilitary force rounding up anyone on the street who looks vaguely Latin and disappearing them to a swamp fortress where many of them just die of exposure or exotic disease and that’s the first news their family will hear about them after their disappearance and it feels good knowing that Anita Sarkeesian will learn her lesson from this and stop criticizing our video games. Native Americans might lose all rights to their own ancestral land and that’ll serve Barbara from HR right for making me sit through that fucking land acknowledgment, I hope she’s suffering. No, “cathartic” is not the word I would use for this. I don’t use the pain of fascism’s victims as a tasty snack to make me feel better thinking that someone might be sorry that they made me hear the word “BIPOC” all those times. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 16-January ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Rob Reiner’s final film was a sequel to his very first film. This, obviously, was _not_ planned. It’s a fact that will be remarked upon in history, but Reiner didn’t have the ability to foresee and plan for the end of his own career in the same way that, for example, David Bowie, facing a cancer diagnosis drawn out enough to assemble one last album, was able to bookend the fate of Major Tom in his final hit. Rob Reiner and his wife, tragically, pointlessly, _godawfully_ , seem to have ended their lives at the end of a knife wielded by their own son after a loud argument they had about him acting really creepy to everyone at a celebrity bash at Conan O’Brien’s house. They just wanted to get him out and show him a good time to try to dig him out of a bad mental place. It was a wrong move. It sucks. The whole thing _sucks_. Rob Reiner wasn’t a household name. He wasn’t Spielberg or James Cameron or Ridley Scott or even Ron Howard, whose name I often mix up with Reiner’s by mistake. But even if you don’t know him, _you know him_. Ron Howard and Rob Reiner: Two different bald, beard guys who were friends! From the starting line—from the very first feature he ever directed—Reiner’s first seven films not just went on to become classics, but some are even popularly regarded to be among the greatest movies ever made. One after the other, hit after hit after hit. Those movies are _This Is Spinal Tap_ , _The Sure Thing_ , _Stand By Me_ , _The Princess Bride_ , _When Harry Met Sally_ , _Misery_ , and _A Few Good Men_. Then he made _North_. Fans of military courtroom thrillers were very cautiously optimistic about the poster release. It’s not so simple to say that _North_ broke a winning streak. He didn’t just stutter. This wasn’t just a relative disappointment from a director who had generated unusually high expectations, like when Coppola made _The Godfather III_. This was much closer to when Coppola made _Jack_. Fans of dramatic gangland Mafia thrillers were cautiously whaaaaaaat the fuuuuuck- _North_ is, in cinephile lore, up there with _Ishtar_ , _Showgirls_ , and the live action _Super Mario Brothers Movie_. That is to say, among the worst films ever made, but not even bad in a way that makes people want to watch them. Nor can this be chalked up as just the first sign of Reiner being, like all creatives, human and prone to the occasional misstep. Reiner was, after all, a very _adventurous_ filmmaker. He took risks, tried new things, never pigeonholed himself once in his 40 year career. This is part of the reason why his _name_ was relatively obscure. A lot of casual movie audiences would be very surprised that the same man who made the romcom _When Harry Met Sally_ also made the courtroom thriller _A Few Good Men_ , let alone the fantasy adventure _The Princess Bride,_ the screwball comedy mockumentary _This Is Spinal Tap_ , and the Stephen King horror _Misery_. But the miraculous thing is, by most people’s reckoning, Rob Reiner _never made another terrible movie_ in his further 30-year career. I think the only subsequent Reiner film that bombed really badly is the Bruce Willis/Michelle Pfeiffer romcom _The Story of Us_ , but it doesn’t carry the same notoriety as _North_. He also never made another _truly classic_ movie, although I would argue that some come close, such as _The American President_ (his next film after _North_ ,) and _The Bucket List_ (which actually originated the term “bucket list” even though most people seem to think this is a boomer expression from way back. Nope, Rob Reiner came up with that.) Before the news about Reiner’s murder, I had never seen _North_. But its existence was brought up occasionally amidst the memories, the praise, and the good humor that came with his fans’ varying expressions of mourning. Lots of talk about his death being “inconceivable.” One user on Substack Notes accused me of making a sickening, bad-taste joke for honestly praising his talent as “going up to 11,” as though the famously humorless director of _This Is Spinal Tap_ would be offended by high praise delivered via a line from his own movie. On the same weekend as the Sydney terror attack and the Brown University mass shooting, I feel this one is also relevant _North_ , after all, was Rob Reiner’s albatross for his entire career. I think the most significant reason for its notoriety is its zero-stars review by the great Pulitzer Prize winning critic Roger Ebert. Ebert had a wit that could slice titanium and took no prisoners when it came to what he didn’t like. In Reiner’s 2000 New York Friars Club roast, late actor Richard Belzer (who played a character named John Munch in a wide-spanning multiverse of TV and film, including, possibly, _North_) asked Reiner to read a portion of Ebert’s review aloud to the audience. It was this same review from which Ebert’s book that same year, a collection of his most negative reviews, derived its title: _I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie_. So I decided to watch _North_. It’s available for free on YouTube, if you can tolerate the ads, and it’s… fine? ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. It is most certainly a _weak_ movie, the weakest of his career to that point. I haven’t seen every movie he ever directed so I can’t say it’s the weakest he would ever make. It’s just not a _terrible_ movie. I think I like it more than I don’t. The jist of it is that a precocious young boy (which, I think, wasn’t such a tired cliché back then) named North, played by baby Elijah Wood, feels ignored by his parents. They talk endlessly about their own lives and never ask him about his life or pay attention to him or his interests. So North hires a lawyer, played by Jon Lovitz, to get him emancipated. The judge rules in his favor but attaches an unusual caveat that sets the ticking clock premise in motion: North has two months to either adopt a new set of parents or reconcile with his own. If he fails, he’ll be committed to an orphanage. The rest of the film is kind of a light adventure comedy in which North travels the globe meeting different types of parents played by an ensemble cast of Actors You Know, all of whom are some kind of cultural stereotype, and gradually learns that home is where the heart is after all. In the meantime, the villain, another kid in North’s class named Winchell, schemes to have all children everywhere divorced from their parents and start some kind of child revolution, like a low key _Children of the Corn_ maybe. He plots to stop North from wanting to come home. Ultimately, though, he does recognize that he’s been unfair to his parents and they do love him and, you know, et cetera. Bruce Willis plays a guardian angel or deity sort of entity who keeps showing up as different characters and pretending he’s not the same Bruce Willis that North ran into earlier. Listen, they didn't have Trump White House social media production budget Don’t get me wrong, I see the problems with it. The stereotypes are very by the numbers. There’s a cowboy family, an indigenous Hawaiian family, a French family (wearing berets, smoking, going hon-hon-hon,) an Amish family... It starts to go down a path that it probably couldn’t get away with today when he meets Inuits, Chinese, and, yes, an African tribe. It’s not “woke” but it’s not quite offensive either, not any more than Looney Tunes bits that did the same types of gags, and in fact they were sometimes worse. There are cute little cartoony bits where the Inuit mailbox is a tiny igloo. Is that offensive? It’s not for me to say, I guess. And yes, it’s a cameo movie. Something for the parents to point at their screens and say hey, that’s Alan Arkin! That’s Dan Aykroyd! That’s Kathy Bates! That’s John Ritter! People their kids likely don’t recognize or care about. North’s parents are Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus from _Seinfeld_. Maybe it says something about my own comedic aptitude that I laughed out loud a few times? North’s parents spend most of the movie in a dead coma, which they instantly fell into upon learning about their son’s emancipation request. They get wheeled into court and propped up at the bench anyway, and when the judge asks for their lawyer’s argument, he says mournfully “the defense rests.” Get it? In Hawaii, North learns that “aloha” means both hello and goodbye, and remarks that it sounds confusing, to which the response is “only when you’re firing someone.” In his review, Roger Ebert pointed out these flaws but hyperbolized them to an extent that you really are expecting a film twice as bad as this actually is. He lambasts the story’s central premise, of a dissatisfied child wishing to divorce from his parents, as deeply irresponsible and unrealistic, but to my mind it isn’t too different from other children’s media in which something like that happens… _Matilda? Coraline?_ Maurice Sendak’s _Where the Wild Things Are?_ Certainly, Reiner could have done a better job clarifying an aspect of North’s character arc that _is_ present but which Ebert seems to have perhaps missed, which is that he’s actually a pretty narcissistic kid at the beginning who comes to realize how good he actually has it, and that he’s been unfair and kind of a little shit. Rob Reiner never disavowed _North_. As far as I can tell, in the face of critical reception, he always defended making this movie. He just wanted to make a quirky little fable about a kid who wonders what life would be like with different parents. After seeing it myself, I think he was right to never disavow it. Why should he? I loved Roger Ebert and may he rest in peace, but the style he helped pioneer, that of the gloves-off razor-wit assassination-by-words movie review, I think, might have had a negative effect on culture. I used to really get a kick out of this—one of my favorite websites as a burgeoning young writer was Mr. Cranky, a film review site where all the reviews were sardonic and cutting. It was actually my friend Stu (may he also rest in peace), himself a talented journalist, whose attitude toward criticism turned my opinion around on things like the “Golden Raspberry Awards.” When film or other art criticism turns into just kind of a mean-spirited dogpile for little more than the high-fives you get from everyone else participating in said dogpile save for its victim. My beef here isn’t with film criticism as a concept. But there are multiple ways to criticize a film and you can tease these apart. You can criticize the technical aspects of the production, its cinematography, its poor writing, its editing. You can criticize its laziness, its cynicism, its motives. These criticisms are all valid, but some are more deserving than others of the kind of scorched earth takedown that Ebert and others became notorious for. This is a difficult type of thing to navigate, but I think it has a lot to do with how much the participants in a project _should have known better_ , and how _important_ it is that they know better. There are plenty of critical dogpiles that I take no issue with whatsoever. Rob Schneider, for example, is just a shit human being all round, whose movies, as _South Park_ famously pointed out, are all lazy mad-libs scripts that act as vehicles for middle school sex jokes. Schneider is an asshole with an over-inflated sense of his own prestige, and the offense he took at a review of _Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo_ led to one of the greatest Ebert takedowns of all time. When you talk about something like the “worst movies ever made,” and you try to group them together, for example, for a Wikipedia article, you’re actually talking about a number of different things, even different _categories_ of thing. You’re lumping movies that simply did poorly at the box office, with: Movies that were just vehicles to promote celebrities (_Glitter_), corporate movies that were factory produced and pushed out by a studio either to keep the rights to an IP or they didn’t have an action movie scheduled for a particular release slot (_Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever_), terrible juvenile dick joke comedies (_Freddie Got Fingered_), movies that actually did tremendously well because of how technically bad they are and this is often deliberate (_The Room_), and movies that are panned because the public doesn’t like someone who was involved with it (anything starring Kristen Stewart, who is actually great, but people can’t forgive her for _Twilight_). Then there are movies that I have difficulty finding an angle to criticize at all. These are films that are simply passion projects. Technically competent, harmless, benign, benevolent films that just don’t resonate with a large audience but they are stories that a filmmaker wanted to put out into the world, just to share a piece of themselves. A recent big example is Francis Ford Coppola’s _Megalopolis_ , which I have not seen. Coppola, one of the greatest filmmakers in American history, has been working on this opus his entire career, but it’s a project that the studios just never wanted to greenlight. Ultimately, once he became wealthy enough, he went to great financial risk to just finance the entire, unbelievably expensive, movie himself. It’s a sprawling, two-and-a-half hour long epic metaphor about the fall of the Roman Empire transposed into a 20th century setting where the main characters are architects. Again, I haven’t seen it, but the story and aesthetic sounds to me like some mix of _Metropolis_ , _Caligula_ , and _The Fountainhead_. Civilization is begging for more epic architecture movies For its production budget, it did very badly. Predictably. Because, _who the hell wants to see that?_ I don’t! But, also, to my mind, _fucking good on him_. The man is almost 90 and has spent his life wanting to create that one specific artwork. He lived long enough and earned enough good faith capital through his critically acclaimed work that he finally had the ability to put this thing out into the world and let it exist. And the Golden Raspberries want to dogpile it, and ridicule it, and tell you what a narcissistic ego project it is, and who wants to watch an epic movie about architects? But to attack an artwork that was produced benevolently, harms nobody, and just kind of exists in the world because its passionate creator found the energy over a lifetime to finally will it into existence before he leaves the world… I find that just kind of pointlessly mean. (And I may, over the course of the last two paragraphs, have talked myself into watching _Megalopolis_. Probably not in one sitting.) Obviously, there are big differences in this comparison, given Rob Reiner directed _North_ much closer to the beginning of his career than the end of it, and didn’t fund it himself, so obviously, in this case, if you care about the studios, they took what seemed to be a very acceptable risk based on Reiner’s output, so maybe he did _them_ wrong, in a sense? But beside that tax-writeoff-sounding-non-issue, I’m just glad that Rob Reiner got to tell his quirky little fable. May we all be so lucky. I'm writing a book about how the rise of the internet propelled far-right toxic masculinity to the American Presidency in the space of a single generation. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at a now very dead website that used to be called Twitter, was recently made aware of something disturbing. He’d been quoted in a recently published, bestselling book, without his knowledge. This in itself isn’t a problem—if you’re a public figure, you’ll never know all the places you’ve ever been quoted, as it’s not like they need to tell you—but it was a problem in this case because the book is _In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us_ by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and the quote is _technically_ what Roth actually said, while at the same time, _one hundred percent opposite_ to what he actually _meant_. Here's what happened: Roth’s father-in-law was reading this book when he stumbled upon a familiar name and urgently texted him about it. Roth doesn’t ever remember saying this and is alarmed because it’s the opposite of the actual truth: “Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, states that ‘the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands,’ including demands involving domestic speech.” Image source Yoel Roth, Bluesky Did Roth actually state that? Did he type that sentence? Did he sit at his keyboard and tap-tap-tap those letters out in the exact sequence that the authors of the book alleges? Well… _mmmyhhhhh… yes_ , kind of. The “quote” is drawn from a heading within an article that Roth wrote for the _Knight First Amendment Institution_ at Columbia University, where the substance of the article is specifically to _dispute_ that heading. The idea that pre-Elon (prelon?) Twitter was subject to substantial moderation interference by the nefarious deep state three letter agencies, under Obama/Democratic control even during Trump’s first term, is a myth propagated by the whole Matt Taibbi debacle (Taibbacle?) of the _Twitter Files_ back in 2022—an accusation so weak that even the entirely Trump-captured Supreme Court still couldn’t make it a thing. And yet there is nothing short of a _desperation_ for this to be true. Not just among the conservative grievance movement, who feel that their opinions not being popular enough in the 2010s can only be explained by a conspiracy—a “Censorship Industrial Complex” as coined by the _Twitter Files_ chums—but also by a broader political umbrella of centrists and liberals who are _frantic_ and _famished_ for evidence to prove the Covid-19 pandemic was (and is) no big deal and we are _absolutely vindicated_ in our resentment for all the stuff they made us do, and stopped us from doing. And let's not forget that TikTok "Imagine" cover the celebrities put us through To head off any comments pointing this out, I know that we are still in a Covid pandemic, but to be clear, we are still “in” the pandemic in the same sense that we are still “in” the influenza pandemic that began before documented human history. It is with us now until we have some kind of technology capable of completely eliminating viral disease from Earth. I haven’t read _In Covid’s Wake_ but I’ve listened to Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri’s dissection of it on their podcast _If Books Could Kill_ , and it sounds pretty much how I expected it to be. Hobbes and Shamshiri run through the book, claim by claim, and find litle more than misunderstood and misrepresented statistics all the way through. Roth isn’t the only figure to have been misquoted to appear to be making the opposite case to what they were actually making. The authors use a study by Bloomberg Global Health Chair Thomas Bollyky to bolster the idea that non-pharmaceutical measures like masks and social distancing did nothing to help slow the spread of Covid. Bollysky, perplexed, claims his studies showed the opposite. The authors didn’t seem to interview any medical or disease scientists, and the positive reviews come mostly from journalists and academics outside of this field who aren’t equipped to see its flaws, while epidemiologists are mostly baffled by its publication. Is this media illiteracy or something more nefarious? How does a book this badly researched get released by a major academic publisher? ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 9-January ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that we’re now more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century? That it’s now actually plausible that some of you reading this will see the 22nd century? One thing I’ve been doing this year is writing a book about the last 25. For those who have been following the excerpts, don’t fear about the long pause—I’ll be posting chapters again in the new year. I’ve been writing this blog, newsletter, thingy, since July 2022, writing it every week consistently since May 2023. I haven’t missed a single week since then, barring a few times when I’ve posted reruns due to a vacation. I want to thank all of you who have stuck with me. Your readership and support makes this worthwhile. So now once again it’s time to reflect on my past year of writing—the popular pieces, and the good pieces, and those two aren’t always the same thing. ## The year of Substack cynicism 2025 has been a year characterized by struggles with the Substack platform, which is my primary host for this column. You're receiving this from Ghost, an alternative provider that I set up as a mirror due to Substack's, let's call it, _inconsistent_ reputation on the internet. One of Substack's most recent crimes is botching the rollout of user age verification, a legal requirement for social media sites to operate in Australia as of this month. In an email sent out to Substack publishers a while back, Substack assured us that paid subscribers would _not_ be required to verify their age, as their possession of a credit card is evidence enough. Nevertheless, the morning this rule went into effect, I was immediately locked out of Substack until I verified my age. My paid Australian subscribers have backed this up. So either the site weirdly lied about this or this was just an incompetent rollout. This isn’t the only struggle I’ve had with Substack in 2025. A few weeks ago I started emailing free subscribers paywalled “teasers” for posts that were not yet free to read, and it’s resulted in an uptick of paid subscriptions (thank you so much for your support!) but also a plateau of free subscriptions, views, and interactions. On balance, I’m not sure how I feel about it, but the collapse of traffic on the whole might be best explained by something I reported on in August—ironically (or appropriately?) the most viewed and liked thing I’ve ever done on that site, which is how Substack administration has acted to squash discovery of less popular publications. Changes in social media algorithms killed the last paid writing gig I had in 2019, so I’m still sore on this topic. I’m thrilled that people are paying me for my work here, it feels really good and it covers the power bill, but I also felt it was important to temper the expectations of anyone who thinks they’ll ever _make a living_ doing this, which is incredibly fanciful when you look at the numbers, and a blessing awarded only to, like, Matt Taibbi and a handful of others. I honestly don’t know how many people are able to say that they’ve had their account blocked by a prominent jazz historian, but I’m among that number after I argued with Ted Gioia about whether Trump officials setting up shop on Substack is good for Substack. But I’m not all completely bearish about Substack. Beyond the issues I have with its management, there are those who say it’s unethical, even shameful, to have a publication or an account here. To which I say… have you seen the rest of the internet lately? ## The year of American fascism It is really difficult to argue that what’s going on in Trump’s second presidential term isn’t fascism. I tend to be really reserved about this kind of thing but you have to call a spade a big fat spade sometimes. I even did a pretty measured take on a thing that many people will yell at you for having a measured take on… But then, early in the new administration, they put Elon Musk in charge for some reason. Like, for a couple of months it really seemed like Musk was the president. He invited a bunch of techbro CEOs, VCs, right wing script kiddies and Gamergate era right-wing influencers to do a sack-of-Rome reenactment on Washington that was both incredibly destructive and deeply sad. Much of the media capitulated quickly to the new political order, betraying their own supposed principles for their survival. The trend varied between change-of-heart sycophancy and just an uptick of usage of certain slurs in the hope that people who matter will take note. But for all those who want to draw direct comparisons to the 1930s, really, what we’re looking at here is McFascism. A unique and incredibly 21st century variant of an old ideology that is heavily reliant on TV and ratings and memes and celebrity and UFC on the White House lawn, a new phenomenon that needs new solutions. ## The year of conspiracy An early fascination of mine was conspiracy theories as a western subculture, and that subculture’s evolution over the course of the 20th century. That culture hit a milestone in 2025 when it sort of won, in a way that nobody expected it would. The Alex Jones crowd were basically hired to run the U Justice Department, the equivalent of Fox Mulder being made Director of the FBI, and what they found, or didn’t find, was devastating (to them): But this year I wound up chastising the left much more than the right on their conspiracism. After all, you kind of expect it on the right. It’s just part of their whole thing. It’s embarrassing when the left falls for the same stuff, even though I understand it’s all just human nature. This became the core request of what I guess I accidentally wound up calling the “I Am Begging the Left” series. This extends to the actually pretty bipartisan issue of the “Epstein Files,” which kind of don’t exist the way that the mainstream expects them to exist, but also, what _does_ exist, as shown by the recent redacted files debacle, will never be released in a way that will satisfy anyone, and the breathless focus on our preferred targets going to prison is ultimately pointless and does great disservice to Epstein’s actual victims. ## The year of MAGA civil war Something nobody really expected when Trump won with all three branches of the government united in sycophancy was how soon and how badly the entire GOP establishment would collapse. But the collapse is kind of intuitive for a racist political coalition seizing power and then deciding on policy: Bitter arguments form about which races are the good ones and which are the bad ones. The rift began as early as January when Trump was assembling his cabinet but perceived to be hiring too many Indians (the ones from India, but Native Americans would presumably be bad also) But this just kind of began to intensify. The Nick Fuentes Dominionist antisemite coalition began to peel out further from the Evangelical Zionist coalition as popular dissatisfaction with the Israel/Gaza war started to result in a media boost to some genuinely disgusting people. But, I argue, what else did the mainstream GOP actually expect from openly courting and embracing people from the harder and harder right? This was a stupid strategy that they have now oopsie-daisied themselves into. ## Special considerations These weren’t especially super popular and don’t fit a specific theme from above but I really like them anyway so there. Thanks again for your support, and we will see each other again into the new year—same SPD time, same SPD channel. ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Here’s a banger of a tweet from Christopher Rufo, one of the aspiring Grima Wormtongues of the emerging American dictatorial theocracy: Golly gee, the Right has begun leaning into conspiracy theories, has it? Nobody could have predicted that, it’s completely unprecedented. Rufo might easily be the most bad-faith and disingenuous figure in Trumpworld but he’s not the dumbest. He knows full well that the spiritual genesis of his movement was Trump’s accusation as far back as 2011 that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and there was a very elaborate high-level conspiracy to cover it up. He knows that half or more of the most significant figures in MAGA, including some high in the administration, give at least some credence to something called QAnon, which resembles the _X-Files_ mythology canon with more imageboard memes. "You're not going to believe this, Scully, but the whole thing began with a frog man who pulled his trousers down to his ankles to pee standing up. Said it felt good, man." He knows that a significant driver of Trump’s 2016 success was driven by a story that Hillary Clinton was literally _eating children_ in the basement of a DC pizza restaurant, a comical “Satanic Panic” offshoot that was pushed very seriously by close Rufo associates Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec. Make no mistake, Rufo has no qualms whatsoever about the far-right media apparatus being “consumed by conspiracy” in cases where this benefits him and the narrative he takes care to construct. He himself made a valiant and hilariously far-reaching attempt to manufacture an investigative journalistic basis for the infamous “Haitians eating cats in Ohio” lie, a story that was pushed by JD Vance last year after it was made up and suggested to him by Canadian neo-Nazi Geoffrey Martin. The crisis that Rufo, and several other notable MAGA figures like Matt Walsh, are struggling to deal with right now isn’t the absurd notion that the right are _only now_ being “consumed by conspiracy.” The crisis is that the conspiracy narrative has spun out of their control. If you’re fortunate enough to have no idea what Rufo is on about here, this is essentially a further development in the Nick Fuentes civil war that I’ve been writing about, but calling it a civil war is a bit of a misnomer for what is essentially a structural collapse. Wars tend to have two sides, while this is much harder to follow. It's this, but all of the Spider-Men are slightly differently racist. The main problem is this: Right wing conspiracy culture doesn’t believe Charlie Kirk was killed by a lone gunman. ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. This is very predictable. The number one rule of conspiracy culture is that every major event is a false flag. The official narrative is always wrong, and nobody who is behind any major event is _actually_ the person behind that event. This is a desirable belief to propagate when the accused isn’t politically useful, as the vast majority of times they are deranged nobodies. For example, the theory goes that Trump’s would-be assassin was a patsy and the hit was ordered by Biden himself. You can see how people like Rufo have no problem with that one whatsoever. The trouble in this case is that Kirk’s alleged assassin is a kid who is associated with and rumored to be the lover (this is super unclear) of an individual who might be transgender (this is also unclear). If these allegations are true then the suspect is absolutely, one hundred percent _the ideal person_ , for Trump and his loyalists, to have killed Charlie Kirk. The only better scenario for them would be if he was transgender himself and/or Hispanic. But here’s the thing about conspiracy culture: It’s like a very large herd of very big animals. I know how ironic that is given that’s _their_ metaphor for _us_ —sheeple—but it applies to them more properly when you envision them always in stampede. And not sheep, but bigger, like the dinosaur stampede in Jackson’s _King Kong_. With a lot of effort and a large enough platform, you can sort of aim it, like Alex Jones did against the parents of the slain Sandy Hook schoolchildren, but you can’t _stop_ it. This herd forms the bulk of Trump’s core base. The QAnon herd, a boiling mass of twisted logic and cynicism that knows only anger and force. The self-styled thought leaders of the MAGA right, people like Rufo, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, have gleefully and with abject recklessness groomed and fed this monster for over a decade to use it a weapon against the fabric of society. At one point they famously got it to smash into the Capitol. Rufo in particular has been especially brazen about just making shit up to sort of engineer a trench for the paranoid herd to follow. But this is what they all do, and they are conscious of it, even if they’re not as open about it as Christopher Rufo. The post-truth world of MAGA is the consequence of the far-right establishment ceasing to see the Masses as a social entity and beginning to see them as an engineering problem. It’s not that the social engineering project they’ve smugly manicured over the past decade is falling apart or unravelling, it’s just that it’s grown out of control in a bunch of obvious and predictable ways that a thousand prophetic stories about monsters turning on their hubristic masters have tried to warn about. Guillermo del Toro made this point the best with the sexiest Frankenstein Monster of all time. So the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk is someone who either has or can be portrayed as having strong pro-transgender views, which is exactly what the Rufo-axis of the MAGA movement want to be the case. Problem is that’s also the Official Narrative. Enter Candace Owens, a figure who has become phenomenally popular for the same reason Nick Fuentes is—the right’s recent project of laundering their furthest fringe figures into the core movement. Owens is also bugshit. If there’s anyone who can come up with an enticing alternative to the Official Narrative of Charlie Kirk’s killing, which conspiracy culture expressly forbids considering, it’s Candace. She does have such a theory: Israel did it. This is a five-alarm fire for people like Christopher Rufo. Let me skew off on a tangent for a bit to tell you about the intricate, symbiotic, unstable system of relationships that is the Christian far-right, Israel, and Nazis. Nazis are really good at smashing windows, tackling Hispanic people and throwing them into concentration camps. They make for a welcome addition to the extended MAGA family for this reason. But they also unfortunately tend to have this thing against Jews. Ohhh! Right, yeah, __slaps forehead,__ that! The Christian far-right, the Heritage Foundation evangelical types who make up the majority of the Trump administration’s inner circle, on the other hand… okay look, they don’t particularly like Jews either. None of these people are great about Jews. But _politically_ they need a strong bond with Israel, which means putting on a big disingenuous show about fighting antisemitism. The reason they need to strengthen and protect Israel, and why their isolationism doesn’t apply to Israel, is because Israel needs to exist for long enough to overpower Palestine and Jordan, who currently control a particular hill in Jerusalem, knock down the mosque that’s on it, and build a Jewish temple. This will infuriate the Muslim world who will rise up in unison, led by some dude named Mog, and they’ll obliterate Israel. This, in turn, will make Jesus absolutely livid, and he’ll come down to Earth (_Daddy’s home_ , Tucker Carlson would say) and murder _everybody_. This doesn’t go well for the Jews, at least those who don’t convert to Christianity. Therein lies the dilemma. Nazis, Nazi-adjacents, and other flavors of antisemite don’t tend to believe in that prophecy, which is very American-evangelical stuff. They’re a mixed bag of Christian denominations who have a different interpretation of the Bible (there seem to be a strong contingent of extremist Catholics, like Fuentes) as well as weird Pagans and more secular racists. So they’re pretty cool with leaving Israel and the greater Middle East alone and letting it fend for itself, and if it all goes up in nuclear smoke then whatever. Jesus is gonna do whatever he’s gonna do. This, according to Facebook. Not sure how it helps anybody. The narrative that the Candace Owens contingent are pushing out into the MAGA world, to great compatibility with the mindset of conspiracy culture, is _poison_ to the Christopher Rufo contingent. Open, mainstream antisemitism is a very dangerous contaminant to introduce into their delicate system. However! They cannot straightforward _condemn_ the Nazi stuff, for a very important reason: The no enemies to the right principle. Outside of their opinions of Jews and Israel, these groups share almost every other bigotry in common. They hate immigrants, they hate LGBT, they violently disagree with the scientific mainstream on anything even remotely contentious like climate science and vaccines, and they hate anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan’s fingertips as he's doing a two o’clock Roman Salute. Now, let me be clear on one thing: I mentioned earlier that this whole thing has grown out of the Nick Fuentes rift in the American right, which is true—he hammered in the peg that cracked the boulder—but it might surprise you to learn that Fuentes is _not_ on Candace Owens’ side on this issue. This has a lot to do with the fact that Owens is a black woman, two categories of human that he hates more than anything, but also her theory is so bonkers that _it makes him look bad_. In actuality, Owens’ theory is an expansion of an increasingly deranged fiction that began with her accusing the wife of the president of France of being transgender. This led to her being sued by…. fucking… _France_ , I guess, which has led to Owens slipping further into a paranoid fantasy in which Macron ordered her assassination, and she has subsequently spun this off into a theory that the French also collaborated with the Israeli government to take out Charlie Kirk, and this developing story also implicates Kirk’s widow Erika, Jeffrey Epstein, and the nation of Egypt for some reason. This is one of those scenarios where you shouldn’t be tempted to side with any of the sides on the table. But to be aware of the situation, the Rufo/Walsh/Pool/Johnson syndicate of MAGAland appear to be losing their fight to a different, slightly more 1930s flavor of bigotry. The infection of conspiracy culture within the mainstream right is so pervasive that even more centrist figures like Matt Taibbi are having to fight off attacks from their own fanbase about how they’re not taking Candace Owens’ international John Wick style assassination syndicate story seriously enough and demanding he investigate it. Nobody who can win this debacle is the good guy, but the optimistic view, the one I’m subscribing to with my New Years Resolution Leaning Toward Optimism (unpronounceable acronym NYRLTO) is that smart evil people consistently losing arguments to dumb clearly wrong people amidst the lowest presidential approval rating since Watergate might put a dagger in the heart of Trumpism for the next hundred years. Or else there’s a marginal chance of 2028 President Elect Nicholas J. Fuentes swearing in after his historic reconciliation and partnership with VP Candace Owens. Admittedly super low-effort artist interpretation This rollercoaster gets wilder from here either way, but every ride ends. I'm writing a book that goes into more depth about how the rise of the internet propelled far-right toxic masculinity to the American Presidency in the space of a single generation. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Rob Reiner’s final film was a sequel to his very first film. This, obviously, was _not_ planned. It’s a fact that will be remarked upon in history, but Reiner didn’t have the ability to foresee and plan for the end of his own career in the same way that, for example, David Bowie, facing a cancer diagnosis drawn out enough to assemble one last album, was able to bookend the fate of Major Tom in his final hit. Rob Reiner and his wife, tragically, pointlessly, _godawfully_ , seem to have ended their lives at the end of a knife wielded by their own son after a loud argument they had about him acting really creepy to everyone at a celebrity bash at Conan O’Brien’s house. They just wanted to get him out and show him a good time to try to dig him out of a bad mental place. It was a wrong move. It sucks. The whole thing _sucks_. Rob Reiner wasn’t a household name. He wasn’t Spielberg or James Cameron or Ridley Scott or even Ron Howard, whose name I often mix up with Reiner’s by mistake. But even if you don’t know him, _you know him_. Ron Howard and Rob Reiner: Two different bald, beard guys who were friends! From the starting line—from the very first feature he ever directed—Reiner’s first seven films not just went on to become classics, but some are even popularly regarded to be among the greatest movies ever made. One after the other, hit after hit after hit. Those movies are _This Is Spinal Tap_ , _The Sure Thing_ , _Stand By Me_ , _The Princess Bride_ , _When Harry Met Sally_ , _Misery_ , and _A Few Good Men_. Then he made _North_. Fans of military courtroom thrillers were very cautiously optimistic about the poster release. It’s not so simple to say that _North_ broke a winning streak. He didn’t just stutter. This wasn’t just a relative disappointment from a director who had generated unusually high expectations, like when Coppola made _The Godfather III_. This was much closer to when Coppola made _Jack_. Fans of dramatic gangland Mafia thrillers were cautiously whaaaaaaat the fuuuuuck- _North_ is, in cinephile lore, up there with _Ishtar_ , _Showgirls_ , and the live action _Super Mario Brothers Movie_. That is to say, among the worst films ever made, but not even bad in a way that makes people want to watch them. Nor can this be chalked up as just the first sign of Reiner being, like all creatives, human and prone to the occasional misstep. Reiner was, after all, a very _adventurous_ filmmaker. He took risks, tried new things, never pigeonholed himself once in his 40 year career. This is part of the reason why his _name_ was relatively obscure. A lot of casual movie audiences would be very surprised that the same man who made the romcom _When Harry Met Sally_ also made the courtroom thriller _A Few Good Men_ , let alone the fantasy adventure _The Princess Bride,_ the screwball comedy mockumentary _This Is Spinal Tap_ , and the Stephen King horror _Misery_. But the miraculous thing is, by most people’s reckoning, Rob Reiner _never made another terrible movie_ in his further 30-year career. I think the only subsequent Reiner film that bombed really badly is the Bruce Willis/Michelle Pfeiffer romcom _The Story of Us_ , but it doesn’t carry the same notoriety as _North_. He also never made another _truly classic_ movie, although I would argue that some come close, such as _The American President_ (his next film after _North_ ,) and _The Bucket List_ (which actually originated the term “bucket list” even though most people seem to think this is a boomer expression from way back. Nope, Rob Reiner came up with that.) Before the news about Reiner’s murder, I had never seen _North_. But its existence was brought up occasionally amidst the memories, the praise, and the good humor that came with his fans’ varying expressions of mourning. Lots of talk about his death being “inconceivable.” One user on Substack Notes accused me of making a sickening, bad-taste joke for honestly praising his talent as “going up to 11,” as though the famously humorless director of _This Is Spinal Tap_ would be offended by high praise delivered via a line from his own movie. On the same weekend as the Sydney terror attack and the Brown University mass shooting, I feel this one is also relevant _North_ , after all, was Rob Reiner’s albatross for his entire career. I think the most significant reason for its notoriety is its zero-stars review by the great Pulitzer Prize winning critic Roger Ebert. Ebert had a wit that could slice titanium and took no prisoners when it came to what he didn’t like. In Reiner’s 2000 New York Friars Club roast, late actor Richard Belzer (who played a character named John Munch in a wide-spanning multiverse of TV and film, including, possibly, _North_) asked Reiner to read a portion of Ebert’s review aloud to the audience. It was this same review from which Ebert’s book that same year, a collection of his most negative reviews, derived its title: _I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie_. So I decided to watch _North_. It’s available for free on YouTube, if you can tolerate the ads, and it’s… fine? ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 26-December ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

I can’t help but think, whenever Pete Hegseth speaks, that he is imitating somebody he saw in a movie. Of course, this isn’t surprising. This is the Ratings Administration, staffed full of television personalities and social media influencers, whose whole thing is using modern persuasion methods to get people hooked into the same old scams. There is nothing so predictable as the Republican Party becoming the party of war again. After spending the 2010s selling themselves as peaceniks who roundly rejected the Iraq war as a mistake based on a lie, as soon as the TV President came on the scene and brought on his TV Secretary of Defense—Fox News host, Manosphere influencer in another life, “Hollywood” Pete Hegseth—he immediately retitled himself (colloquially, with no authority to do so) the “Secretary of War,” reclassified drugs as a “weapon of mass destruction” and thus drug dealers and traffickers “terrorists.” (A terrorist, by definition, is someone who threatens or commits violence in order to instill fear in a population for an ideological reason. Difficult to crowbar Cheech and Chong into that, but you know, words don’t actually mean anything anymore.) This happened during the Bush administration. The Trump administration equivalent has far less comedy potential. Now (stop me if you’ve heard this one) Iran and Venezuela are part of an “Axis of Evil” who are harboring “weapons of mass destruction” and need to be invaded and conquered to force a more America-friendly regime change. Naturally, the indignant born-again opponents of the Iraq War are one thousand percent on board with this. Hegseth is a big, bombastic, superstar with a perfect jawline and hair gelled with Krazy Glue, who steals the spotlight more than anyone in his role probably ever has. How many Secretaries of Defense can you even name, between him and Rumsfeld? (There have been seven). But all of his off the cuff diatribes come off as so practiced and scripted. He sounds like he’s acting, and not just that, but _impersonating_. With all his talk about the military being an organization of men who sometimes need to do things that might churn the stomachs of civilians in air-conditioned offices, an organization that needs to be free of “woke” rules against officers beating the snot out of recruits, he sounds like a composite reel of Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessep from _A Few Good Men_. Given that Hegseth is currently under scrutiny for ordering the summary execution of shipwrecked and stranded “drug dealers,” it’s very easy to imagine him ordering a lethal “Code Red” on a troublesome Marine. Hegseth obviously doesn’t think of himself as a bad person, so why would he style himself after a classic movie villain? A simple answer is that Pete Hegseth is an illiterate idiot. *fewer And that’s true, but it’s also more than that. The Trump administration is doing this all the time, venerating characters you absolutely aren’t supposed to look up to. I have a theory of a kind of paradox: that the better the writer, the harder it is to prevent an audience—even a smart audience—from coming away from a movie, show, or book with the impression that the villain was right. Many people will simply reject the notion that these characters are bad influences, and believe their defeat, if they are defeated, is a tragic ending. A favorite film of mine is 1993’s _Falling Down_ , which follows a divorced, laid-off defense contractor over the course of one very bad day. It’s a rare example of a story in which the villain is also the protagonist. This is a difficult way to structure a story—it’s just kind of the way our brains work that we empathize with the characters that we spend the most time with. Fighting the urge to root for Foster, played by Michael Douglas, as he orchestrates a one-man crime spree during an LA heatwave, is kind of a workout for your ethical muscle. A lot of people hate this movie and a lot of people love it. You are of course free to hate or love a movie for any reason, but there’s one _particular_ reason people either love or hate it which is based on a misconception: They think Foster is portrayed as the good guy. He’s not. He’s the _protagonist_ , but he’s a loser whose problems all trace back to shitty decisions he made by his own free will. He’s a stalker, whose ex-wife justifiably divorced with a restraining order due to his short and violent temper. He’s a racist conservative who hates young people and poor people and taxes and inflation and bureaucracy and modernity and minor inconveniences. Foster would definitely have been a Trump supporter. ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Yet there’s a really cool, even funny, scene at the end of the first act where he terrorizes a fast food restaurant because they’d stopped serving breakfast five minutes ago. You want to give him a high five as he wipes the idiot grin off the patronizing young store manager, but the comedy of this scene is juxtaposed with the terrified innocent families. This isn’t a movie about a working-class man who’s finally had enough of a system rigged against him. This isn’t Denzel Washington in _John Q_ (which has interesting parallels with _Falling Down_ including a secondary main character, a cop, played in both cases by Robert Duvall). _Falling Down_ is a character parody. Foster is a mean, thin-skinned, upper-middle-class white boomer asshole who is driven to ultraviolence by Kids These Days, by potholes and traffic jams and lazy tradesmen and the fact that fast food burgers don’t look as good as they do in the photo. There’s one telling scene in which he meets a neo-Nazi and is astonished speechless at the fact that the Nazi aligns himself with Foster. He doesn’t think of himself as a _Nazi_. Just a patriot. But a lot of angry boomer assholes _did_ see themselves in Foster. At least as many who thought this was a tone-deaf movie to release in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. Even a movie intended as a scorching critique of its primary subject will inadvertently make that character a hero to a lot of people simply because the character is their own hero and you’re locked in with their ego. It helps if they’re stylish and cool. There was a little bit of that, I think, in Kubrick’s _A Clockwork Orange_ , whose protagonist I once dressed up as for Halloween. I made the costume myself. The trousers were second-hand Lawn Bowls pants and the cane was a doorknob glued to a pool cue. Pretty proud of this, tbh One movie that isn’t very good but it still did my head in when I saw it is _The Devil’s Rejects_ , a pulpy low-budget _Texas Chainsaw_ knockoff by Rob Zombie. It plays very much like a _Thelma and Louise_ style road crime movie except that the protagonists are deeply evil cannibal rapist serial killers. Yet everything about the story beats and the cinematography is designed to make you root for them. Everything from the way the score becomes mournful and the action turns to slow motion when one of the murderous family members is killed by police. The sheriff, the primary antagonist, is framed in every way as the despicable Sheriff of Nottingham type villain who is bigoted against cannibal rapists the way Christoph Waltz’s character in _Inglourious Basterds_ is bigoted against Jews, and about as sympathetically. The character on the right just disemboweled a bunch of tourists and the character on the left wants to stop her from doing that. In the end the sheriff catches up with the Final Girl—who had just mutilated and serial-killed her way through Texas—and tackles her while she screams and cries… …only, with a celebratory and victorious score change, to be valiantly rescued by the movie’s Leatherface analogue. It’s an incredibly jarring movie and I don’t know whether Rob Zombie was trying to make a point of whether he just wanted to make a fun slasher movie. In either case, he does seem fully cognizant of a fact that many fans and even possibly filmmakers of slashers don’t quite get—that these movies kind of wind up having the audience root for the killer. You know why? Because the killer, especially in franchise slashers, is usually the most fleshed out character. Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers and Chucky and even Pinhead have deep, complex, human backstories and motivations (with the exception of Michael who, famously, has no understandable motivation and the writers have been commendably consistent with that.) Their victims, usually, have little to no lore. It's one thing for slasher movies to hack our brains into kind of liking serial killers, at least for the runtime of 90 minutes, but I don’t think there are people, or hardly any, who wind up _idolizing_ them and it would be kind of moral panicky of me to suggest that they do. It’s when you combine cinematic framing with a well-written character whose ideology a segment of the population is prone to agree with—especially if they are stylish and charismatic—that you get people idolizing that character _even if the movie is explicitly trying to explain why you shouldn’t_. A classic example is 1987’s _Wall Street_ , whose villain Gordon Gekko—again played by Michael Douglas, coincidentally—was a huge inspiration for young men to enter finance and go work for Morgan Stanley. Gekko, also, would have been a Trump supporter. Scratch that, he would have been Trump. I have no evidence that writer-director Oliver Stone was inspired by Trump, but _Wall Street_ ’s release coincided with the publication of _The Art of the Deal_ , and Gekko made the kinds of speeches that Trump would make if he were capable of stringing his thoughts into grammatically correct or even coherent sentences. Stone’s adroitness as a filmmaker was to show how capitalism raises criminals and hucksters to the highest corridors of power through their charisma, and the way they give permission for people to believe what they already want to believe—in this case that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” But this is kind of like explaining to people how the Palantir works to corrupt minds by… showing them the Palantir. While we’re on the topic of powerful people idolizing villains I’m not necessarily criticizing Oliver Stone. It is a true conundrum. It is difficult to warn about how people’s minds can be tricked into bad ideas, or even cults of personality, without _demonstrating_ it. Gordon Gekko, like Trump, was not a talented businessman. He was a corrupt, cheating fraud. But even though he got caught in the end, this still managed to convince a generation of young bankers that a smart way of getting ahead is to be a corrupt, cheating fraud. (I can’t find a way to seamlessly work in the deleted scene from _Wall Street 2_ where Trump actually makes a cameo with his shitty acting and they cringingly and bafflingly make Gekko into a Trump sycophant, but I also can’t leave it out, so here. I totally see why this was cut.) It's kind of difficult, in fact, to make a Trump-like character to satirize him, without a large chunk of the population responding “yes, this is why we like him.” For example, TV series _The Boys_ , which falls into the now-cliché genre of “what if Superman, but evil?” The primary villain, the evil-Superman named Homelander, couldn’t possibly be a more explicit parody of Trump unless someone jumped out of a crowd and spraypainted his face orange while he screamed “Agh, covfefe!!” Still, it wasn’t until the third season, after Homelander falls in love with an actual Nazi named Stormfront and starts threatening to commit genocide, that Trump supporters began to believe that this was an unflattering portrayal of a character they really quite liked. I think the most prominent example of people “missing the villain” in recent film history has to be _Fight Club_. I love _Fight Club_ but it’s something I have to kind of keep to myself because loving _Fight Club_ is about the biggest red flag a white guy can throw up. Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is a downright manosphere superhero, to the point that a prominent pickup artist uses that as his pseudonym, as does the author of the far-right blog _Zero Hedge_. Durden, in Fight Club, is the Platonic masculine physical ideal. Of course he is—he’s Brad Pitt. But he’s also smart in the way that a first-year intro-to-philosophy student, who is a decade older than the other students and has done a lot of internet research on Nietzsche beforehand, is smart. Tyler Durden probably would have been a Trump supporter. Like Trump, he is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person. Also like Trump, his philosophy of individualism, fighting the system, and conquering the elites, collapses inevitably into a regimented personality cult of sycophants who think the same, act the same, dress the same, and commit aimless, DOGE-like violence against random targets of the system they believe is keeping them down, blaming everybody else for their own failure. They’re the same picture (image source) People who take the wrong message from _Fight Club_ can’t see past the performance or the ultimate message of the story. If you’re one of the five people on Earth who doesn’t know the twist ending I’m _still_ reluctant to spoil it and urge you to see it, but suffice it to say it undoes any “Tyler was right” reading of the story and I’ve seen multiple insufficient attempts to reconcile it. There’s no way to guard against people taking the wrong lessons from narrative art, it’s a problem that will stick with us as long as people with shallow literacy are exposed to it, which is forever. The course of action is to avoid putting those people into power positions. Don’t make Gordon Gekko the President if you don’t want Colonel Jessep to be the Secretary of Defense, Tyler Durden to run the FBI, Bill Foster to be the Speaker of the House, or Leatherface to head up Homeland Security. I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty proud of this visual punchline I'm writing a book that goes into more depth about how the rise of the internet propelled far-right toxic masculinity to the American Presidency in the space of a single generation. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Here’s a banger of a tweet from Christopher Rufo, one of the aspiring Grima Wormtongues of the emerging American dictatorial theocracy: Golly gee, the Right has begun leaning into conspiracy theories, has it? Nobody could have predicted that, it’s completely unprecedented. Rufo might easily be the most bad-faith and disingenuous figure in Trumpworld but he’s not the dumbest. He knows full well that the spiritual genesis of his movement was Trump’s accusation as far back as 2011 that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and there was a very elaborate high-level conspiracy to cover it up. He knows that half or more of the most significant figures in MAGA, including some high in the administration, give at least some credence to something called QAnon, which resembles the _X-Files_ mythology canon with more imageboard memes. "You're not going to believe this, Scully, but the whole thing began with a frog man who pulled his trousers down to his ankles to pee standing up. Said it felt good, man." He knows that a significant driver of Trump’s 2016 success was driven by a story that Hillary Clinton was literally _eating children_ in the basement of a DC pizza restaurant, a comical “Satanic Panic” offshoot that was pushed very seriously by close Rufo associates Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec. Make no mistake, Rufo has no qualms whatsoever about the far-right media apparatus being “consumed by conspiracy” in cases where this benefits him and the narrative he takes care to construct. He himself made a valiant and hilariously far-reaching attempt to manufacture an investigative journalistic basis for the infamous “Haitians eating cats in Ohio” lie, a story that was pushed by JD Vance last year after it was made up and suggested to him by Canadian neo-Nazi Geoffrey Martin. The crisis that Rufo, and several other notable MAGA figures like Matt Walsh, are struggling to deal with right now isn’t the absurd notion that the right are _only now_ being “consumed by conspiracy.” The crisis is that the conspiracy narrative has spun out of their control. If you’re fortunate enough to have no idea what Rufo is on about here, this is essentially a further development in the Nick Fuentes civil war that I’ve been writing about, but calling it a civil war is a bit of a misnomer for what is essentially a structural collapse. Wars tend to have two sides, while this is much harder to follow. It's this, but all of the Spider-Men are slightly differently racist. The main problem is this: Right wing conspiracy culture doesn’t believe Charlie Kirk was killed by a lone gunman. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 19-December ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Sorry about that, folks, I forgot to turn off the default paywall, which is a feature that Ghost kind of hides. Why would Andrew Tate tweet something like this? Tate is mostly—almost exclusively—known for his misogyny. But the mistake that people make, to the extent that they can stomach knowing anything about him at all, is identifying him as some sort of pickup artist or sex guru, an antidote to the so-called and oft-cited “male loneliness epidemic.” The truth is much more sinister. Andrew Tate grew out of the petri dish of pickup artistry but that culture, with its wacky hats and corny nicknames, died some years ago and was replaced evolutionarily by the disease that Tate and similar figures comprise. They are not the cure to male loneliness, they are its source, and it is their nutrition. Believe it or not this is what they told men to wear in 2005 to attract women. Image source It can slip your notice, but you can see how the right-wing discourse is shifting when it comes to men and women, especially now that the far-right is gaining in influence over traditional conservatism. The shift is deliberate, tactical, and frightening. When Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes tell you that having sex with women is gay: > remember when nick fuentes said that having sex with women is gay pic.twitter.com/GYw7ZT6ZGs > > — Kat Abughazaleh (@KatAbughazaleh) November 28, 2022 You might be surprised to learn it has a lot to do with this: And also, a lot to do with this: But let’s back up. For basically the whole 20th century the conservative position was the nuclear family ideal. The “tradwives” thing is still obviously prominent on the right, particularly the elements that still strongly emphasize Christianity, but this is less common among the new right, the _far-right_. Donald Trump’s marriage isn’t _hugely_ emphasized the way that other presidents have made efforts to promote themselves as family men, and in fact his forthright disdain for women is considered part of his appeal. Trump has two daughters and three sons across three different women, and although Ivanka played a prominent role in his 2017-2020 term, neither she, nor Tiffany, nor much of Melania, have been heard from in 2025. Elon Musk has impregnated five women that we know about, but they were almost all conceived via IVF, selecting for male children. Apart from a few photos of him hanging out with Grimes, Musk is never known to associate with women or enjoy their company. Of his 14 known children, I think only one was born female, while his most famous offspring, Vivian Wilson, drove him to incandescent rage with her gender transition. Not a fan of girls, is what I’m saying. Elon Musk's best attempt at paying attention to a female. Image source What’s happening is that the traditional right-wing vision of the male and female social roles—a monogamous lifelong marriage, the man the breadwinner and societal engine, the woman the childbearer and homekeeper, her husband ideally her first and only sexual partner—are falling away in favor of the masculine ideal being the incel, and women being… well, a bug to be worked out of the system, frankly. This is the really dire modern trajectory of a predatory culture of male entitlement that has always seen women as a problem to be solved. The early 2000s fad of pickup artistry—which had existed in some form for at least a century as an underground thing, but was made mainstream in 2005 thanks to Neil Strauss’ bestseller _The Game_ —was all about solving single men’s trouble with women by selling them the secrets to the female mind. It’s called “artistry” but it was treated as more of a science, the idea that women’s minds can be hacked, and that winning sex with them is a solved game, hence the activity literally being called “Game.” The PUA grift, which had been chugging along sleazily but relatively harmlessly for a hundred years, didn’t survive mainstream exposure and the subsequent boom, but I believe it did incredible damage to society during that boom. By which I mean, I don’t think Neil Strauss should be tried at the Hague for his book, but I’m also _not far_ from thinking that. There is, it turns out, no secret cheat code to the female mind. Most of the successful advice that the PUAs sold amounted to dressing well and approaching women. For those who weren’t able to make Game work for them, there was the red pill, then the black pill, then the incels. The hucksters of bottled masculinity had to find a new grift to adapt to their changing audience. ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. “Incel” is short for “involuntary celibacy” but this is really a misnomer to which I prefer _en_ cel— _enforced_ celibacy. In a way that wasn’t possible before the internet, these guys formed communities that generated feedback loops that concentrated misogyny like a reduced stock, and now fiercely enforced celibacy in their community to the point where any incel who winds up admitting to getting laid is a traitor subject to all the doxing and swatting the modern deep internet is notorious for. They created a psychological nightmare for themselves in which they were actively heterosexual but absolutely despised women, which is like being allergic to food. It was also extremely hard-right radicalizing, and for the new populist far-right, anything that gets young men thinking in that direction is of course to be encouraged and fostered. Influencers like Andrew Tate are the overseers of a movement for the type of people who took all the wrong lessons from _Fight Club_. That was itself in part a dark parody of men’s clubs like the mythopoetic men’s movement, and the difficulty of fostering these movements (particularly if you’re trying, as the new right are, to use it as a right-wing incubation chamber) is solving the paradox: How do you build an all-male movement to channel and discharge pent-up sexual energy without it being gay? One solution is to look to the Roman Empire. The mega straight Roman Empire Rome was extremely masculine, and very importantly, it wasn’t gay. Even when men were having sex with each other, which was very common, it wasn’t _gay_. Rome was the ultimate masculine conquest fantasy. The meme trend a couple of years back about men thinking about the Roman Empire more often than they think about sex was, I think, mostly a joke, but one that’s based on something true. Of course, we’re not talking about the actual Rome, here. We’re talking about a fiction sold by Hollywood. But so many tenets of the far-right are based in fiction. Still, although there’s no truth to the impression that women were almost entirely absent in Rome, they were stigmatized. In the Roman Empire, one of the worst things a man could be was _feminine_ , and being feminine entailed being submissive. Women couldn’t vote or hold public office. In sexual matters, men were judged not necessarily by the gender of the person they were having sex with (again, they didn’t really have the concept of “gay”), but by whether they were _submissive_ in the act. In sex between two men, it was the _submissive_ partner who was shamed and vilified, and as such, free Roman citizen men weren’t openly sexual with other free Roman citizen men. (Slaves were fair game). There is huge overlap between men who are interested in Rome for masculinity reasons and men who are interested in Rome for white supremacy reasons. If you trawl through Twitter for ten seconds you’ll find neo-Nazi accounts with Roman statues in their profile pictures, or Pepe the Frog in Roman armor. Ugh The connection has become such a pervasive one that classicist historians are in a crisis—there are obviously very important reasons to study Rome for historical reasons, but just being involved in that field paints you as suspicious. Recently the effort had gained a new sense of urgency: Classics had been embraced by the far-right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state; online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms; the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “ _Every_ month is white history month.” The Nazis—the real historical ones—were of course also obsessed with Rome. Hitler referred to Nazi Germany as the “third reich,” the second reich having been the German Empire and the first being the Roman Empire. German nationalists long saw the soul of their nation being forged in Rome (_Kaiser_ , the title of German Emperor, comes directly from the word _Caeser_). The Nazis were famously a bit racist but they also admired the Roman attitude toward militarism and masculinity: An essential attitude for the soldier, thus the masculine ideal, was _men’s deep love for other men_. But, it was stressed, _not in a gay way_. To be _gay_ is to be _submissive_. To be _submissive_ is to be _feminine_. Here’s the paradox: Andrew Tate’s entire thing is pretty homoerotic. So was _Fight Club_ , when you think about it. Men, shirtless, admiring each other’s bodies, playing full-contact sports, talking about virility. And I know that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but come on now. But men being intimate, even sexual, with other men is not necessarily considered _gay_. Only _submissiveness_ is gay. In fact, taking the ancient Roman tradition, you could say that what men do with other men is almost completely irrelevant to what’s gay. There is a pervasive belief within the right that women have a liberalizing effect on men and society in general. It stems from the belief that women are naturally more “feelings over logic” and thus less rational, and being liberal is being irrational, ergo, the more influence women have, the less rational—more liberal—society becomes, and that’s bad. Many on the far-right blame the fall of Rome (history’s greatest tragedy, as far as they’re concerned) on its alleged liberalization and feminization. With the rise of the far-right displacing the traditional conservative, right-wing views including this one become more extreme. Misogyny is starting to lap the sort of “we love our wives but also our man caves” attitude of the Bush GOP. To succeed, the new right believes, women must be virtually removed from public life. A recent video/podcast in the _New York Times_ stirred controversy mainly for its original headline: This was quickly changed to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” but the arguments raised still basically honored the original premise, that women’s proximity to men has a feminizing effect on them, and this weakens our institutions. The new right’s mission to remove women from the workforce probably reached its most obvious mask-off moment last year with the hysterical internet-wide overreaction to the notorious “Gen Z Boss and a Mini” TikTok video: The women involved were employees of a skincare company, its products marketed to other women, but the context doesn’t seem to matter at all. This was crossing a line in the sand. Men were apoplectic that this was a gloating victory dance, a message that the office—once a male-only space in the halcyon days of _Mad Men_ —now belongs to women. They saw it as a declaration of war. The radical and broad-scaled purging of the federal workforce, under Elon Musk’s idiotically meme-named DOGE department, of anyone deemed woke or DEI (meaning female or nonwhite) was part of this effort to return to the traditional office, one where Don Draper would again feel comfortable. Or, you know, Patrick Bateman. And it was widely celebrated on the right as exactly that. Because _everybody_ knows on some level that DEI is a euphemism. So at the beginning of a new far-right revolution, where you’re trying to immunize society against liberalization via the removal of women from public life, how do you groom the youth—crucially, the embittered young male demographic jaded by the lies of the seduction grifters and radicalized into internet echo chambers—into your project? You draw a straight line from the Roman Warrior myth of masculinity to the paradox solution that every incel wants to hear: > You’re straight. You’re _very_ straight. You’re _not_ gay. Being gay is _bad_. Being _gay_ means being _submissive_. _Women_ are _liberal_. Being around women makes _you_ liberal. Being _liberal_ is being _submissive_. Being _submissive_ is _gay_. > Ipso facto: Being with women is _gay_. Having sex with women is _gay_. The assassination of Charlie Kirk, if time enough has now passed that I’m permitted to use it as allegory, kind of also represents the death of the right-wing _wife guy_. The God-fearing family man with his family portrait in his social media profile banner who promotes himself as father first, husband second, patriot very close third. This is a fading concept in the face of the new rising screed: Being straight is mandatory, but acting on it is gay. This is a recruitment strategy that’s really great for indoctrinating a far-right incel paramilitary but falls on its face pretty hard in the long-term once you think about it for just a few moments. This new right is also very invested in its mission of _outbreeding_ liberals and nonwhites. You see how that’s a problem. But the extreme pronatalist faction of the new right are also kind of weirdly asexual. As I mentioned before, Elon Musk, the most prominent figurehead of this movement, chooses IVF as his primary breeding strategy and seems to view wives as an unacceptable liability for wealthy men. For a man so deeply concerned about declining birth rates, Musk is weirdly preoccupied with building AI sexbots into his online products, evidently to serve as a substitute for female companionship or to serve as a sexual release. Step 2: ???? Step 3: Reproduction. Then again, Elon has never been one to think things through too much. What’s clear, and terrifying, is that the calculus on the right regards women as primarily a _problem to be solved_. Working out the fertility issue is a hurdle. Women who are _on_ the right need to know that they’re not the exceptions to the plan. I'm writing a book that goes into more depth about this exact topic. It's about how the rise of the internet propelled far-right toxic masculinity to the American Presidency in the space of a single generation. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: 🔒 Why Normal People Idolize Movie VillainsI can’t help but think, whenever Pete Hegseth speaks, that he is imitating somebody he saw in a movie. Of course, this isn’t surprising. This is the Ratings Administration, staffed full of television personalities and social media influencers, whose whole thing is using modern persuasion methods to getPlato Was a DickS Peter Davis

I can’t help but think, whenever Pete Hegseth speaks, that he is imitating somebody he saw in a movie. Of course, this isn’t surprising. This is the Ratings Administration, staffed full of television personalities and social media influencers, whose whole thing is using modern persuasion methods to get people hooked into the same old scams. There is nothing so predictable as the Republican Party becoming the party of war again. After spending the 2010s selling themselves as peaceniks who roundly rejected the Iraq war as a mistake based on a lie, as soon as the TV President came on the scene and brought on his TV Secretary of Defense—Fox News host, Manosphere influencer in another life, “Hollywood” Pete Hegseth—he immediately retitled himself (colloquially, with no authority to do so) the “Secretary of War,” reclassified drugs as a “weapon of mass destruction” and thus drug dealers and traffickers “terrorists.” (A terrorist, by definition, is someone who threatens or commits violence in order to instill fear in a population for an ideological reason. Difficult to crowbar Cheech and Chong into that, but you know, words don’t actually mean anything anymore.) This happened during the Bush administration. The Trump administration equivalent has far less comedy potential. Now (stop me if you’ve heard this one) Iran and Venezuela are part of an “Axis of Evil” who are harboring “weapons of mass destruction” and need to be invaded and conquered to force a more America-friendly regime change. Naturally, the indignant born-again opponents of the Iraq War are one thousand percent on board with this. Hegseth is a big, bombastic, superstar with a perfect jawline and hair gelled with Krazy Glue, who steals the spotlight more than anyone in his role probably ever has. How many Secretaries of Defense can you even name, between him and Rumsfeld? (There have been seven). But all of his off the cuff diatribes come off as so practiced and scripted. He sounds like he’s acting, and not just that, but _impersonating_. With all his talk about the military being an organization of men who sometimes need to do things that might churn the stomachs of civilians in air-conditioned offices, an organization that needs to be free of “woke” rules against officers beating the snot out of recruits, he sounds like a composite reel of Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessep from _A Few Good Men_. Given that Hegseth is currently under scrutiny for ordering the summary execution of shipwrecked and stranded “drug dealers,” it’s very easy to imagine him ordering a lethal “Code Red” on a troublesome Marine. Hegseth obviously doesn’t think of himself as a bad person, so why would he style himself after a classic movie villain? A simple answer is that Pete Hegseth is an illiterate idiot. *fewer And that’s true, but it’s also more than that. The Trump administration is doing this all the time, venerating characters you absolutely aren’t supposed to look up to. I have a theory of a kind of paradox: that the better the writer, the harder it is to prevent an audience—even a smart audience—from coming away from a movie, show, or book with the impression that the villain was right. Many people will simply reject the notion that these characters are bad influences, and believe their defeat, if they are defeated, is a tragic ending. A favorite film of mine is 1993’s _Falling Down_ , which follows a divorced, laid-off defense contractor over the course of one very bad day. It’s a rare example of a story in which the villain is also the protagonist. This is a difficult way to structure a story—it’s just kind of the way our brains work that we empathize with the characters that we spend the most time with. Fighting the urge to root for Foster, played by Michael Douglas, as he orchestrates a one-man crime spree during an LA heatwave, is kind of a workout for your ethical muscle. A lot of people hate this movie and a lot of people love it. You are of course free to hate or love a movie for any reason, but there’s one _particular_ reason people either love or hate it which is based on a misconception: They think Foster is portrayed as the good guy. He’s not. He’s the _protagonist_ , but he’s a loser whose problems all trace back to shitty decisions he made by his own free will. He’s a stalker, whose ex-wife justifiably divorced with a restraining order due to his short and violent temper. He’s a racist conservative who hates young people and poor people and taxes and inflation and bureaucracy and modernity and minor inconveniences. Foster would definitely have been a Trump supporter. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 12-December ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

A few weeks ago, during some idle procrastination, I browsed through my Steam library and opened up a game that I’d actually purchased like a year ago but never got around to trying out. I’m not much of a gamer at all, although I played them when I was a kid. My favorite games were the _Sonic the Hedgehog_ series, which I followed loyally from the character’s 16-Bit Genesis era until he joined the world of 3D platformers in the 128-Bit era. By the way, can you believe that was only seven years? At the speed we perceive time in our youth, my Sonic fandom felt like it encompassed 20 years of my life, when in reality the golden age of _Sonic the Hedgehog_ lasted fewer years than Clinton was president, which he was for almost the entirety of it. Also, the first moon landing is five years closer to the "Who Shot Mr. Burns" episode of The Simpsons than we are to that episode today. I never thought about that because I didn’t really know or care who the American president was. One of my clear early childhood memories was playing Sonic and asking my mother who the President of the United States was, and she had to think about it for a moment before saying “I think it’s George Bush.” That was 1991 or 92, and I was 7 or 8, and the only reason I know that is because those were the only years when Bush the Senior overlapped with the existence of _Sonic the Hedgehog_. Sonic games, weirdly, are too hard for me now. I don’t know how I clocked them when I was a kid. The games I enjoy now are not platformers but things like management sims and what are called automation games. The game I picked up a few weeks ago is called _Satisfactory_. Basically, you land on an alien planet and start mining resources until you can build yourself a factory that manufactures doodads. You deliver them to your base and are rewarded with recipes for more complex doodads, which you make by building up your factory. That’s it, that’s the game. At least you own the means of production I guess. But it’s become a bit of a problem, you see. At some point I kind of designated Saturday my “do nothing productive” day. My secular Sabbath. Apart from my capital-J _Job_ , I spend most of my off time writing or working on my Three Minute Philosophy animation series. I publish my weekly newsletter on Friday, very late at night sometimes, and then Saturday I just kind of scroll the internet or play a videogame, mostly. After I got the hang of _Satisfactory_ I didn’t put it down on Sunday and get right back to work. _Satisfactory_ ate Sunday as well, and then on Monday when I clocked into my day job, I started thinking about my factory. When I got home I checked on my factory and did a little work on it and before I knew it, my factory had eaten Monday. That sorta went on. So I’ve been temporarily distracted by things before, I kind of have that sort of personality, but this is something new, it’s a five- or six-week distraction that doesn’t seem to be getting off my back, and in case you’re wondering, yes, I am thinking about my factory right now. While I want to reassure subscribers that I haven’t done _no_ work, on either my book or my newsletter projects, over the past month, the work has hit a speedbump. This chapter of my book is kicking my ass. The philosophy video I’m working on is kicking my ass (coming this weekend, hopefully, I’m doing my damndest). I haven’t missed a deadline for _Plato Was a Dick_ , but it’s also kicking my ass. None of this is any more difficult than it was before, but my wife and I went away on vacation in September and in my head I never really came back from it, not fully. In my effort to reckon with this I think I now understand what’s happened, and I understand why, specifically, _this_ game has broken my brain. ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. While our plane was in descent toward our holiday destination, someone shot Charlie Kirk in the neck and killed him. I’d just switched off the movie I was watching, on impulse, to check the news. (I don’t believe in psychic woo but it’s interesting to note that a very similar thing happened to me during the 9/11 attacks in 2001. I turned off a movie I was watching to check the news, which is something no 17-year-old does ever, but the first plane had just hit. Look, I’m still a skeptic but it does spike your imagination a little bit, doesn’t it?) This was it, I figured. This was the Reichstag fire of American fascism. Trump was going to do something drastic like invoke the Insurrection Act or even outlaw the Democratic Party. That was all a bit hysterical, it turns out, but it didn’t ruin my holiday, and in fact I didn’t wind up thinking about it much at all. Coming back home and reattaching my hose to the news spigot revives a dormant but constant flow of low and deep dread. I don’t _want_ any of those drastic and horrible things to happen, but the alternative is what we have now—a tension that just keeps getting more tense, in defiance, it seems, of some natural law. The day I published this piece, Trump directly called for the killing of several sitting members of congress. So, you know, cool?? I never wanted to write about Donald Trump or even American politics. When I worked as an editor for Cracked back in its golden age, before they fired everyone and turned it into a Reddit thread aggregator, assignments came down to me from higher up, and from 2017 onward most of them were Trump. Rating Trump’s movie cameos, the six weirdest things about the Trump-Russia probe, Trump’s craziest tweets. Gone were the days of the “ten weirdest languages” or “eight weirdest celebrity backstories” or “six astonishing ways to beat popular board games,” the stuff I enjoyed writing for years. Trump just suddenly swallowed the world. For the first full year and a half of writing this newsletter column I only wrote about Trump once and it was about how relieved I was that I could avoid Trump news, mostly. This was of course, during the middle of the Biden administration and before primaries had started up again. How naïve I was, like a sweet little baby. I had a hate-on for Elon Musk but I failed to see that he was the Silver Surfer to Trump’s Galactus. I know generative AI is basically evil but I couldn't resist putting this prompt into Musk's Grok Most people would probably be surprised that I used to write comedy. Even that piece I just linked is funny! I’m not funny anymore. I’m just documenting the center of the Western cultural empire lurch slowly into white supremacy and drag other Western countries in with it like moons trapped in its gravity. Just reporting on it in a way that feels increasingly helpless and useless. What does this have to do with _Satisfactory_? Yeah I kind of trailed off there, didn’t I? I don’t really consider playing a videogame to be “wasted time,” any more than I think reading a book or watching a movie is wasted time. But playing a videogame without a storyline that mostly involves building conveyor belts does feel like it comes _close_ to wasted time. But it’s not that I’m just escaping from the world. Although it is very welcome to do something that involves no contact with the news, there are a _lot_ of things I could do to achieve that, like streaming TV or reading anything else. Nor does it really feel like a procrastination thing to avoid writing, because _I love writing!_ The idea that I would seek something to avoid it is paradoxical. What it feels like it comes down to more than anything is that when I’m playing this game, I’m _building something_. Not really, though! When I eventually turn this game off my factory is going to vanish because it only exists in my imagination guided by an illusion my computer monitor is projecting, but the brain stimulus is the same. The itch that this scratches. I’m solving problems and being constructive in a way that I feel like I fail to do in other areas of my life and work. Writing, of course, isn’t really about solving problems, but it can be used to work through a problem, like I’m doing now. It can be helpful and constructive. It wouldn’t really matter if my writing wasn’t constructive if not for the fact that I work a day job that largely involves, basically, moving PDF files from one folder to another. It occurs to me that helping you, or even just myself, to understand something or learn something or even just escape a little bit is constructive in a way that I don’t always feel that my work really is. At some point I lost sight of that and my problem-solving brain fell into the wrong mission objective. I started trying, I think, to _solve white supremacy_ , or to figure out how to stop fascism, or something. These are impossible goals! Building a cartoon factory inside my computer _isn’t_ impossible. It’s solving tangible problems to a foreseeable end and it’s _fun_. It's not fun in _every_ way. By two biggest phobias in life are heights and spiders, and not only is _Satisfactory_ a realistically rendered world that heavily involves climbing to very high places, it’s also full of giant spiders that launch themselves right at my fucking face. I should actually hate this game, come to think of it. why? It’s not exactly solving world hunger, but it is… well, it’s satisfactory. What I need to do now is find a new mindset and realize that my writing will never solve the problems that my satisfaction-starved brain wants it to solve. That maybe I can step back from looking too closely at the American politics garbage fire and find a more productive, more helpful, more _satisfactory_ voice. Maybe I’ll even start being funny again. Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn this into a cooking blog. I’ll still be talking about the same topics you subscribed to read about. But there’s other stuff to talk about as well, and hell, don’t be surprised if sometimes I talk about movies as well. There’s so much _much_ in the world, and letting Donald Trump swallow it all seems like it kind of helps him, more than anything. Be well, and now if you’ll excuse me, I just about had my oil refinery set up before you so rudely interrupted me with a deadline. I'm writing a book about how toxic cultures on the early internet created the political madness of today's world in just a single generation. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: 🔒 How the Far-Right Weaponized the Masculinity CrisisWhy would Andrew Tate tweet something like this? Tate is mostly—almost exclusively—known for his misogyny. But the mistake that people make, to the extent that they can stomach knowing anything about him at all, is identifying him as some sort of pickup artist or sex guru, an antidotePlato Was a DickS Peter Davis

Why would Andrew Tate tweet something like this? Tate is mostly—almost exclusively—known for his misogyny. But the mistake that people make, to the extent that they can stomach knowing anything about him at all, is identifying him as some sort of pickup artist or sex guru, an antidote to the so-called and oft-cited “male loneliness epidemic.” The truth is much more sinister. Andrew Tate grew out of the petri dish of pickup artistry but that culture, with its wacky hats and corny nicknames, died some years ago and was replaced evolutionarily by the disease that Tate and similar figures comprise. They are not the cure to male loneliness, they are its source, and it is their nutrition. Believe it or not this is what they told men to wear in 2005 to attract women. Image source It can slip your notice, but you can see how the right-wing discourse is shifting when it comes to men and women, especially now that the far-right is gaining in influence over traditional conservatism. The shift is deliberate, tactical, and frightening. When Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes tell you that having sex with women is gay: > remember when nick fuentes said that having sex with women is gay pic.twitter.com/GYw7ZT6ZGs > > — Kat Abughazaleh (@KatAbughazaleh) November 28, 2022 You might be surprised to learn it has a lot to do with this: And also, a lot to do with this: But let’s back up. For basically the whole 20th century the conservative position was the nuclear family ideal. The “tradwives” thing is still obviously prominent on the right, particularly the elements that still strongly emphasize Christianity, but this is less common among the new right, the _far-right_. Donald Trump’s marriage isn’t _hugely_ emphasized the way that other presidents have made efforts to promote themselves as family men, and in fact his forthright disdain for women is considered part of his appeal. Trump has two daughters and three sons across three different women, and although Ivanka played a prominent role in his 2017-2020 term, neither she, nor Tiffany, nor much of Melania, have been heard from in 2025. Elon Musk has impregnated five women that we know about, but they were almost all conceived via IVF, selecting for male children. Apart from a few photos of him hanging out with Grimes, Musk is never known to associate with women or enjoy their company. Of his 14 known children, I think only one was born female, while his most famous offspring, Vivian Wilson, drove him to incandescent rage with her gender transition. Not a fan of girls, is what I’m saying. Elon Musk's best attempt at paying attention to a female. Image source What’s happening is that the traditional right-wing vision of the male and female social roles—a monogamous lifelong marriage, the man the breadwinner and societal engine, the woman the childbearer and homekeeper, her husband ideally her first and only sexual partner—are falling away in favor of the masculine ideal being the incel, and women being… well, a bug to be worked out of the system, frankly. This is the really dire modern trajectory of a predatory culture of male entitlement that has always seen women as a problem to be solved. The early 2000s fad of pickup artistry—which had existed in some form for at least a century as an underground thing, but was made mainstream in 2005 thanks to Neil Strauss’ bestseller _The Game_ —was all about solving single men’s trouble with women by selling them the secrets to the female mind. It’s called “artistry” but it was treated as more of a science, the idea that women’s minds can be hacked, and that winning sex with them is a solved game, hence the activity literally being called “Game.” The PUA grift, which had been chugging along sleazily but relatively harmlessly for a hundred years, didn’t survive mainstream exposure and the subsequent boom, but I believe it did incredible damage to society during that boom. By which I mean, I don’t think Neil Strauss should be tried at the Hague for his book, but I’m also _not far_ from thinking that. There is, it turns out, no secret cheat code to the female mind. Most of the successful advice that the PUAs sold amounted to dressing well and approaching women. For those who weren’t able to make Game work for them, there was the red pill, then the black pill, then the incels. The hucksters of bottled masculinity had to find a new grift to adapt to their changing audience. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 6-December ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

A little while back I posted a note on Substack, referring to arch-conservative Rod Dreher’s friendship with Vice President JD Vance and their respective attitudes toward the Nazi-adjacent groyper movement—Dreher denounces the groypers but says Vance’s attitudes toward them are “private.” They would be, of course, owing to Vance’s tactical collaboration with neo-Nazis on Twitter in the lead up to last year’s election. It was maybe an hour before groypers found the note and started replying to me, telling me that nobody on the right is under any obligation to denounce anybody, especially on the right, and _especially_ as advised by the left. And they’re absolutely right. Now that the Republicans are in complete power, with the intention of stopping the pendulum and staying there forever, it makes no strategic sense to publicly speak out against anyone who isn’t to the left of Trump on the political line. Ideally, they wouldn’t communicate to the public at all, just as they have ceased communicating with the Democratic party in any meaningful sense. The fundamental difference between MAGA, or the New Right if you want to call it that, and everyone else including, I believe, the Old Right, is that they’re fundamentally operating under a completely different set of rules. Or to be more accurate, the right doesn’t _have_ rules. They only have strategy. Your Royal Flush is nice, but it doesn't beat my Five Aces, including the super rare Ace of Gun I’ve written before about how these people have reverted to a primordial ethic from before ethics existed, Nietzsche’s _master morality_ , the law of the jungle. When you think of morality you think of what’s right or wrong according to your principles, but what do right or wrong mean when you _have_ no principles? To the Trump right, what’s right is simply what wins the game and what’s wrong is what loses it. It’s not so much that might makes right—might _is_ right. Power is _synonymous_ with rightness. Being right _means_ being in charge, in the same way that, to the principled, being right _means_ being good. These people aren’t interested in nurturing a society or even running a country. They’re interested in owning it. The problem, fundamentally, is that the two sides are playing two different games on the same field and with the same equipment. If you think of a game of basketball, the normal approach to sport is that _the rules_ are _the point_ of the game. It’s the journey, as they say, not its destination, just like the point of any novel worth reading is its story, not its ending. But what if, to the other team, _the point_ of the game is “getting the ball in the net?” Well, think of the options available to you now. You can pick up the ball and just run with it. You can use a cannon to fire the ball into the net. You can bring a gun onto the field and shoot the other players. What can the other team possibly do here? They could respond in kind, drop all rules, and just get the ball in the net, but they don’t want to play whatever that is. They want to play basketball. No!! You're not supposed to just... what are you... GET DOWN FROM THERE!!! The completely asymmetrical attitude to the game is what puts the left at a severe disadvantage. They want to win, as is the goal of any game, but they don’t want to win _by any means whatsoever_ , like the right does. The right isn’t even playing a game: Both left and right recognize that there are two teams involved with this, but the left recognizes this in the frame of “sport” while the right recognizes it in the frame of “war.” ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: It would be one thing if the Democratic party merely struggled with this, but the bigger problem is they don’t seem to understand it. They treat the Republicans like tough negotiators, like they’re even remotely interested in doing politics. Republicans think of their opponent as an obstacle to be plowed through; it’s not a discussion and it’s not a compromise. What kind of leverage do the Democrats have in this situation? The recent record-breaking federal government shutdown was what came from a stalemate when the Democrats at least tried to hold their ground, but then a critical mass of senators folded, in part because they felt the weight of principles that the Republicans don’t have to worry about. I’m not arguing that backing down was the right thing to do—it was a monumental mistake—and I’m not even arguing that it was all principled. I think much of it was due to the same selfishness that was likely to have put the heat on Republicans, too, if they’d held on. But the point is that, in any case, the Democrats just couldn’t hold their breath forever, where the GOP could. There was no upper limit on, for example, how many people could die from lack of food stamps or healthcare before they cared even a little bit. They are the party of shooting their hostages. Reopen the government OR/AND we'll shoot this dog. It could go either way, we have Kristi Noem. The right is immune to charges of hypocrisy, specifically because they don’t have principles. They complain about, for example, left-wing cancel culture only because they know that the left are vulnerable to complaints. It puts them on the back foot, forces them into a position of defense. Then, when the right achieves power and begins cancelling their opponents with much greater zeal and vigor, the left call them hypocrites while the center smugly points the finger at the left and says this is their fault, this is nothing but fair turnabout. Neither is correct. In truth, the right are not hypocrites. Hypocrisy is when a contradiction occurs between one’s stated principles and one’s conduct. Without principles no contradiction exists. To the right, left-wing cancel culture isn’t wrong because it’s an immoral or unfair thing; It’s wrong because it results in the right having less power. Right-wing cancel culture results in the right having _more_ power, so it _isn’t_ wrong, but is in fact right and good. There is no conflict here, it is entirely internally consistent. You can see their strategy if you look for it. You can see how they maintain control of the frame. Out of power, the right feigns victimhood because they know the left are vulnerable to appeals to principle. In total power, they abruptly cease participating in liberal institutions, close themselves off, and begin acting as a sovereign aristocracy. Liberal society will respond by _acting_ as though both teams are still playing the same game under the same rules. They will make a show of pointing to the rulebook. They will act like frustrated pet owners continually coercing a badly domesticated animal toward the litterbox. But the right will just keep shitting on the rug because they know you will clean it up every single time. God damn it, Bud's shitting on the rug AND playing basketball and I can't find either of these things in the rulebook! The right learned early on the benefits of nonparticipation. Donald Trump was compelled to apologize after the _Access Hollywood_ “grab them by the pussy” tape leaked—it didn’t kill the scandal, and it was the last time Trump ever apologized for anything, even the stuff that’s much worse (which is most of it, these days). Elon Musk set his companies’ email to auto-reply to press inquiries with a single poop emoji. The press, following rules and principles, is compelled to reach out for comment and to detail literally the response. The right took great delight in the print media’s self-imposed humiliation as it was constantly reporting “received poop emoji.” The Trump government’s press briefings are farces, nothing more than theatre and performative nonparticipation. House Speaker Mike Johnson consistently responds to all questions about Trump’s scandals by pretending he’s never heard of them. They have largely replaced the press pool with _ZeroHedge_ , _InfoWars_ , _The Daily Wire_ , and independent far-right toadie influencers like Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, who don’t ask questions so much as feed prompts. Mr. President might I ask oh my godddddddd why are you so HANDSOME Again, the liberal establishment feels compelled to act as though what’s happening is that the right is _doing a bad job of following the rules_ , instead of _recognizing no rules_. The media and the Democratic party are thus stuck on a treadmill of making concessions to make it feel like this is an operational, if temporarily dysfunctional, bipartisan government. This forces us all to view everything through the right’s frame _even when_ the story is critical: Drone strikes on Caribbean fishermen are wrongheaded foreign policy decisions. Nazi symbolism in official government social media is unconventional and crude public messaging. Outright securities fraud is controversial market manipulation. When you look at the big picture, the Democratic party has been reduced to what is essentially a controlled opposition, permitted to exist to give the illusion that there are two teams in the game, but in reality, they are completely shut out of the federal apparatus. The Trump administration is an opaque box run by right-wing think tanks and multibillionaire ideologues like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. The only information that comes out of the box is curated propaganda not far removed from the superhuman legends of Kim Il-Sung propagated to the citizens of Pyongyang. The left’s path out of this mess isn’t clear and it’s definitely not as straightforward as fighting fire with fire. The paradox is that, despite the almost universal disadvantage that results from having principles, I’m kind of a principles guy, and so are most people. It has been suggested that the most obvious solution is to just sort of, well, _become_ Trump, abandon the rules as he does in order to fight on level ground. See the cringetacular Gavin Newsom strategy The big problem with this idea is that this assumes the public desires that kind of clown show. The Republicans might have wrangled the election in their favor but they don’t _remain_ in power due to the popularity of what they’re doing—Trump in his second term is a historically unpopular president. The GOP have burned their popularity mandate and must now rely fully on the _institutional_ power they now possess. Without public support, they’re now walking the scaffolding without a safety net. They have their stride and their balance, but also new vulnerabilities. The most important challenge for the left isn’t that they _have_ principles—just that they lack strategy. They remain stuck in the right’s frame, following the rules to the letter, trying to play the cleanest game possible, focusing on setting themselves as an example that the right absolutely will not follow. There’s no rule that says you can’t have both principles _and_ strategy. Maybe the combination will be a stronger alloy. The worst option is to go the Chuck Schumer route and wind up with neither. I'm writing a book about how toxic cultures on the early internet created the political madness of today's world in just a single generation. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: 🔒 What This Videogame Says About My Creative SlumpA few weeks ago, during some idle procrastination, I browsed through my Steam library and opened up a game that I’d actually purchased like a year ago but never got around to trying out. I’m not much of a gamer at all, although I played them when IPlato Was a DickS Peter Davis

A few weeks ago, during some idle procrastination, I browsed through my Steam library and opened up a game that I’d actually purchased like a year ago but never got around to trying out. I’m not much of a gamer at all, although I played them when I was a kid. My favorite games were the _Sonic the Hedgehog_ series, which I followed loyally from the character’s 16-Bit Genesis era until he joined the world of 3D platformers in the 128-Bit era. By the way, can you believe that was only seven years? At the speed we perceive time in our youth, my Sonic fandom felt like it encompassed 20 years of my life, when in reality the golden age of _Sonic the Hedgehog_ lasted fewer years than Clinton was president, which he was for almost the entirety of it. Also, the first moon landing is five years closer to the "Who Shot Mr. Burns" episode of The Simpsons than we are to that episode today. I never thought about that because I didn’t really know or care who the American president was. One of my clear early childhood memories was playing Sonic and asking my mother who the President of the United States was, and she had to think about it for a moment before saying “I think it’s George Bush.” That was 1991 or 92, and I was 7 or 8, and the only reason I know that is because those were the only years when Bush the Senior overlapped with the existence of _Sonic the Hedgehog_. Sonic games, weirdly, are too hard for me now. I don’t know how I clocked them when I was a kid. The games I enjoy now are not platformers but things like management sims and what are called automation games. The game I picked up a few weeks ago is called _Satisfactory_. Basically, you land on an alien planet and start mining resources until you can build yourself a factory that manufactures doodads. You deliver them to your base and are rewarded with recipes for more complex doodads, which you make by building up your factory. That’s it, that’s the game. At least you own the means of production I guess. But it’s become a bit of a problem, you see. At some point I kind of designated Saturday my “do nothing productive” day. My secular Sabbath. Apart from my capital-J _Job_ , I spend most of my off time writing or working on my Three Minute Philosophy animation series. I publish my weekly newsletter on Friday, very late at night sometimes, and then Saturday I just kind of scroll the internet or play a videogame, mostly. After I got the hang of _Satisfactory_ I didn’t put it down on Sunday and get right back to work. _Satisfactory_ ate Sunday as well, and then on Monday when I clocked into my day job, I started thinking about my factory. When I got home I checked on my factory and did a little work on it and before I knew it, my factory had eaten Monday. That sorta went on. So I’ve been temporarily distracted by things before, I kind of have that sort of personality, but this is something new, it’s a five- or six-week distraction that doesn’t seem to be getting off my back, and in case you’re wondering, yes, I am thinking about my factory right now. While I want to reassure subscribers that I haven’t done _no_ work, on either my book or my newsletter projects, over the past month, the work has hit a speedbump. This chapter of my book is kicking my ass. The philosophy video I’m working on is kicking my ass (coming this weekend, hopefully, I’m doing my damndest). I haven’t missed a deadline for _Plato Was a Dick_ , but it’s also kicking my ass. None of this is any more difficult than it was before, but my wife and I went away on vacation in September and in my head I never really came back from it, not fully. In my effort to reckon with this I think I now understand what’s happened, and I understand why, specifically, _this_ game has broken my brain. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 28-November ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

In an eye-rolling turnaround, Republicans are suddenly whinging that there are a whole bunch of Actual Nazis in their movement. The left, of course, have been warning them about this for years, but their reaction has been to sit on their “reals over feels” high horse and say we’re being hyperbolic and hysterical. They use it as an accelerant for the victimhood complex that still fuels their movement even as they hold absolute power over the United States, power such that it enables the president to bypass both congress and the judiciary and rule by fiat. For a month after the killing of Charlie Kirk they were saying that the Nazi libel was a deliberate tactic driving leftists to murder them. Now, I want to be clear and I hope I’ve always been clear, the left isn’t without fault on this point. Nazi overdiagnosis is real and not everybody to the right of you is a Nazi, even if they’re really bad or even really racist. George Bush isn’t a Nazi, Sean Hannity isn’t a Nazi, Jesse Singal certainly isn’t a Nazi. You can utterly repudiate their views, as I do, without committing a category error. A lot of the time, such as with a lot of members of the Trump administration including Trump himself, people say “Nazi” when a more appropriate term is “fascist,” which is also something very bad but doesn’t carry the same punch as “Nazi.” Calling everybody to the right of you, even those who also fall short of fascism, a Nazi, robs us of the language to describe an actual Nazi when one comes along. Nick Fuentes is a Nazi. Not that this counts as evidence anymore thanks to the brave actions of the Anti-Defamation League defending Elon Musk's right to do this. When I wrote just a few weeks ago about the very dangerous way in which Glenn Greenwald had endorsed and sanitized Fuentes, I hadn’t predicted just how quickly and dramatically things would escalate. But I knew they _would_ escalate. I predicted the status of Greenwald would launder Fuentes’ views upward to ever more respectable and mainstream pundits, to broadcast them like an infected signal to the greater public. In the weeks following the Greenwald interview, Fuentes was invited onto the popular _Red Scare_ podcast, and after that, he landed his first truly golden gig—the Tucker Carlson show. As with Greenwald, Carlson actively facilitated the sanitization of what Fuentes believes and represents. Until this escalation, Fuentes was seen as someone whose reach was kind of quarantined to the Alex Jones tier of wingnut podcast punditry. After Tucker, the rise of Actual Nazism within MAGA became difficult for the rest of the movement to ignore. Again, the left saw it for a long time, but for the right, the canary in the coal mine was Ben Shapiro, one of the most prominent figures in Trump support but also, somewhat famously, a Jew. Shapiro has had reason to look nervously around at his inner circle for a while. Since early last year, working at his media company, _The Daily Wire_ , must feel to him like a situational horror movie in which, day after day, his employees arrive at work with suspicious puncture marks on their neck, staring at him in an unnerving way. Not sure I like the way you're looking at me, Jordan Peterson Candace Owens was the first _Daily Wire_ employee to turn Hitler-curious, and was fired in March 2024. Then Jeremy Boreing, the company’s co-founder, went on a Lauren Chen podcast that included Fuentes and told him he was a fan of Fuentes’ show and thought he was very talented, but admittedly was “troubled” by some of the things Fuentes says. (In context, he was responding to Fuentes’ opinion that drag performers and certain politicians should be executed for blasphemy, and that Jews who fail to convert should be driven from positions of influence). When you’re Jewish, as Shapiro very much is, this isn’t really the level of pushback you would hope your business partner would give to a statement that you should be removed from public life if not exterminated. More recently, it’s _Daily Wire_ ’s other big star, Matt Walsh, who is showing a disturbing affinity for a certain type of character on the far right. You just need to check out his Twitter feed to see who he’s talking to and boosting. “Captive Dreamer” is a reference to a memoir written by a member of the Waffen-SS, but you don’t need to speculate too much about what that means because a report by the _Daily Dot_ went into just how much of a Nazi this guy is. The photo in “FischerKing’s” profile is of Bobby Fischer, an American chess grandmaster, who was also a Nazi. So Ben Shapiro suddenly notices that he seems to be surrounded by Nazis and influential conservatives like Carlson platforming and promoting Nazis. The true depth of the problem revealed itself when, after speaking out about it and getting some fellow Nazi-hating allies on his side, he was chastened by none other than the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, who posted a video urging them not to “cancel our own people” and to “focus on our ideological enemies on the left” and refrain from attacking people on the right like Carlson and Fuentes. But for traditional conservatives like Ben Shapiro, especially those like him who disliked Trump initially but came to opportunistically latch onto his movement, looking back on your whole project over the past ten years… Exactly what the fuck did you think was going to happen? ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: Traditional conservatives let these beasts into the tent because they thought they could control them somehow. Infuriated over eight years of Obama, the Republican party stopped so harshly condemning ideologies far to the right of the party’s mean—the _alternative_ right. This was, in part, because they noticed the coming of age of the internet-fried generation and decided it was politically advantageous to form alliances with these people. It was the birth of the so-called “NETTR” principle—No Enemies To The Right. No longer would people like Alex Jones be politically homeless. No longer were groups like the Proud Boys ideological islands. “Cancel culture” was the weapon of the left, and they would not indulge in it. For those aspiring to work with the Republican party, it was no longer important whether you had skeletons in your closet. Be as racist as you like, be photographed at a white supremacy rally, nothing was disqualifying, because NETTR. There was universal celebration on the right when tech ideologies seized social media, threw open the sluice gates, and flooded it all, deliberately, with Nazis. It was a victory for free speech. We need Nazis on every platform. We’ve got people like Jim Jordan making sure every platform meets its Nazi quota or else they might be infringing on freedoms. What did you think was going to happen? According to Rod Dreher, a conservative writer who is apparently close to people who are in a position to know, “30 to 40 percent of DC GOP staffers under the age of 30 are Groypers.” That is, Nazis, specifically followers of Nick Fuentes. And we can see it, very clearly, just from the federal government’s social media, which is almost certainly run by young people, and which drops white supremacy memes and dogwhistles _constantly_. And yet the absolute breathtaking hubris of people like Dreher, who mourns: “These are difficult days for people like me: Americans who back the Trump administration for its determination to fight back against establishment tyrannies, but who are now troubled by its excesses.” I mean, fool me once, right? People like Dinesh D’Souza and Vivek Ramaswamy, who full-throatedly staked their entire political lives to Trumpism, are now complaining that people on the right are being racist to them. Oh no! “This is the sh*tshow that Heritage and Tucker have brought upon us,” cries D’Souza, who once received a pardon from Donald Trump after being convicted of committing election fraud, “If this continues, I would not be surprised to see mass desertions of blacks, Latinos and other minorities from the GOP.” But this was not brought upon him by Tucker and Heritage. He brought it upon himself. This wing of the openly and gleefully identitarian right has been racist against them the entire time. They absolutely flipped out in January when Trump was putting too many Indian people in his cabinet, a reaction so strong from his now core base of ethnonationalists that he wound up removing Ramaswamy from the DOGE team to calm them down a little. Remember this guy, Trump's biggest sycophant in 2024? Where'd that get him? All these quisling “traditional” conservatives, Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, JD Vance—yes, even Tucker—who were once revolted by the Trumpian project to embrace vulgarity but ultimately, idiotically, decided to bring Nazis to the table to break bread and strategize for their mutual benefit, did you seriously think these people had _less_ ambition than you? The meteoric rise and rise and _rise_ of Nick Fuentes now has the New York Times pegging him as Charlie Kirk’s successor, but I think maybe more than that. If this trajectory continues, I see a presidential run. Remember, the traditional right invited this, nurtured it, and could have killed it at any time. Great job, GOP, very nice. What was the plan, here? _What did you think was going to happen?_ How ironic that the real “Great Replacement” turns out not to have been the replacement of white Americans with foreign barbarians, but in fact the replacement of traditional Republicans of all races with the white ethnonationalists who have been scratching at the White House door since 1865 begging to be let back in, promising they’ll behave this time. There is another side effect of this self-imposed clusterfuck that the GOP somehow didn’t expect, and this one isn’t good news for them either: Off-year elections at the start of November were an astonishing blue sweep. The most notable win was the very decisive victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral election: A _self-described_ socialist, which is traditionally poison in American politics, as well as a Muslim, which is playing New York City politics on extra hard mode for reasons anyone over 25 can tell you. But more than that, counties swung blue that had voted red for _decades_. None of these elections, which are all state and local, change anything in the behemoth of the federal government that is still the sole property of Trump and, apparently, now a bunch of Nazis, but they show something is waking up very quickly on the left side of things. It turns out that having Nazis run the government social media, as well as running ICE like the Gestapo, and other extremely conspicuous effects of a far-right takeover of the government, deals enough of a shock that it wakes people up. Abandoning the center to embrace the far-right seemed like a winning strategy in the short term for the Shapiros of the nation, but the median Republican voter, who might have voted for him two or three times, likely expected they were voting for the 2017-2020 Trump era to return. You know, kind of an entertaining media spectacle. But 2025 Trump has just been all misery and gaslighting and starvation and _open, conspicuous Nazism_. The victories of November may not, _themselves_ , change anything, but they might make the Democratic party also think about the benefits of abandoning the center. Maybe they’ll turn their attention to finding the next Zohran Mamdani, or a whole bunch of them, for the 2026 midterms. That would be an interesting experiment, wouldn’t it? As much as people like Ben Shapiro are my ideological opponents I don’t want to see them in a fucking concentration camp. But it’s obvious the right no longer have the ability to clean their own house, here. It’s now down to the left to clean up the mess they’ve made. I'm writing a book about how toxic cultures on the early internet led to a runaway political feedback effect that culminated in Gamergate, then Trump, then January 6, then Worse Trump, and then where we are now. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:

A little while back I posted a note on Substack, referring to arch-conservative Rod Dreher’s friendship with Vice President JD Vance and their respective attitudes toward the Nazi-adjacent groyper movement—Dreher denounces the groypers but says Vance’s attitudes toward them are “private.” They would be, of course, owing to Vance’s tactical collaboration with neo-Nazis on Twitter in the lead up to last year’s election. It was maybe an hour before groypers found the note and started replying to me, telling me that nobody on the right is under any obligation to denounce anybody, especially on the right, and _especially_ as advised by the left. And they’re absolutely right. Now that the Republicans are in complete power, with the intention of stopping the pendulum and staying there forever, it makes no strategic sense to publicly speak out against anyone who isn’t to the left of Trump on the political line. Ideally, they wouldn’t communicate to the public at all, just as they have ceased communicating with the Democratic party in any meaningful sense. The fundamental difference between MAGA, or the New Right if you want to call it that, and everyone else including, I believe, the Old Right, is that they’re fundamentally operating under a completely different set of rules. Or to be more accurate, the right doesn’t _have_ rules. They only have strategy. Your Royal Flush is nice, but it doesn't beat my Five Aces, including the super rare Ace of Gun I’ve written before about how these people have reverted to a primordial ethic from before ethics existed, Nietzsche’s _master morality_ , the law of the jungle. When you think of morality you think of what’s right or wrong according to your principles, but what do right or wrong mean when you _have_ no principles? To the Trump right, what’s right is simply what wins the game and what’s wrong is what loses it. It’s not so much that might makes right—might _is_ right. Power is _synonymous_ with rightness. Being right _means_ being in charge, in the same way that, to the principled, being right _means_ being good. These people aren’t interested in nurturing a society or even running a country. They’re interested in owning it. The problem, fundamentally, is that the two sides are playing two different games on the same field and with the same equipment. If you think of a game of basketball, the normal approach to sport is that _the rules_ are _the point_ of the game. It’s the journey, as they say, not its destination, just like the point of any novel worth reading is its story, not its ending. But what if, to the other team, _the point_ of the game is “getting the ball in the net?” Well, think of the options available to you now. You can pick up the ball and just run with it. You can use a cannon to fire the ball into the net. You can bring a gun onto the field and shoot the other players. What can the other team possibly do here? They could respond in kind, drop all rules, and just get the ball in the net, but they don’t want to play whatever that is. They want to play basketball. No!! You're not supposed to just... what are you... GET DOWN FROM THERE!!! The completely asymmetrical attitude to the game is what puts the left at a severe disadvantage. They want to win, as is the goal of any game, but they don’t want to win _by any means whatsoever_ , like the right does. The right isn’t even playing a game: Both left and right recognize that there are two teams involved with this, but the left recognizes this in the frame of “sport” while the right recognizes it in the frame of “war.” ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 21-November ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Last week I talked about Elon Musk’s AI-generated Wikipedia knockoff, which I didn’t actually expect we’d see for some months, if at all, given the too-great likelihood that he’d be too mercurial to follow through. I thought it would be like the political party he said he was putting together back in August because the GOP wasn’t fascist enough. But it’s here—the AI slopapedia, that is—and oh, buddy. I knew what I was expecting, and it _is_ what I was expecting, but also it’s _so much_ of that. Browsing Grokipedia isn’t fun the way that browsing Conservapedia is fun. I’m disappointed that it wasn’t written by Grok’s “MechaHitler” persona. Instead, what we got is something that pedestals all the obvious problems with trying to replace an encyclopedia edited by thousands of people with a single large language model. More than that, it highlights problems with trying to replace humans for this type of thing more generally. Every “article” on Grokipedia is a long and badly-structured stream of consciousness that just kind of dumps everything the AI can scrape off the internet about the topic in one wall of text. There are no pictures, there are no links. What a thrilling way to learn about fine art. Grok, being what I call a language calculator and other more influential people have more wittily called a stochastic parrot, doesn’t understand how the structure, presentation, and format of Wikipedia aids human understanding. Call it biased if you want, but it’s biased with diagrams and with visuals. We experience the world visually, but an AI does not. Wikipedia is assembled and structured by the same species that is its audience, who know what information, in what order, makes fluent sense. I’ve been accused of needing an editor, but brother, Grok _really_ fucking needs an editor. Maybe the most important thing preventing Grokipedia from becoming any kind of serious rival whatsoever is that it is really, _really_ boring to read. So today I’ve looked for the bits worth talking about so that you don’t have to. Put aside for a second the ideological social engineering motivations behind this gross project. The uselessness of LLMs in general and Grok in particular is that they don’t understand a lot of the basic nuances of language that human brains pick up quickly. Case in point: Grok doesn’t seem to understand homonyms. ### **Easily Confused by Linguistics** As I’m investigating what an “anti-woke” encyclopedia designed by the world’s foremost white nationalist looks like, one of the first words I looked up was, of course, “Race.” Grok suggested five articles, four of which were the exact topics you would expect to see on Elon Musk’s list of priorities, and the fifth was _RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, Season 8_. Sure Grok, why not The article simply titled Race is, again as you would expect, loaded with what I call Aporia slop. Aporia is even in the list of references. The conflict between Grok’s direct training by its white nationalist creators and the information it has been able to gather online is on display here through its mealy-mouthed defense of “race realism” and the Aporia world’s parallel science against the _real_ science. But I’m not going to get into that again since I did a few weeks ago. The fascinating thing is this: Grok fully conflated “race”—that is, the term used to categorize human beings—with the identically spelled and pronounced “race” that refers to “trying to get to a location more quickly than somebody else.” This is an egregious error for Grok to make, but one that is nevertheless fully sourced. It doesn’t have any capacity to reason and notice that there’s a giant gulf of missing information between how a _race_ came to be both a way of categorizing humans and a physical activity. It just “knows” from having scraped the internet that a race is both of those things and so both of those things are, in some way, the _same_ thing. But they’re not, because they’re not the same word. The fact that they sound the same is a linguistic accident of modern English being a patchwork of sounds from all over the world. “Race” as a human category has a Romantic root, coming from French, Spanish, and Italian. “Race” as a sport has a Germanic root, coming from Norse and Dutch. If it can make an error this massive in the fundamental definition of a word, then how riddled with errors might the rest of the damn thing be, in ways that are less easy for people to detect? If something is described as “light,” is Grok always going to know the difference between it being well illuminated, or not very heavy? ### **Obvious Backdoor Meddling** Hey, while we’re talking about race, let’s acknowledge the Roman Salute in the room. As I said last week Elon Musk considers _himself_ to be the center of truth in the universe, free of bias like only a fucking god could be. When he says he’s building Grok to be “maximally truth seeking” he really just means he wants it to consult him before answering. Literally—he programmed it to scan his tweets first before considering any other information. Any time it says something that deviates from what he believes is true, he says it’s been infected by legacy media and he puts it back in the shop for a lobotomy. He's also very racist. ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: When Grokipedia was pushed back from its initial release on October 20 to “purge out the propaganda” you know that he read something he didn’t like and spent another week planting his thumb down hard on that scale. Now it’s fairly obvious, from inconsistent tone alone, which parts of this garbage machine he personally intervened with. The article on George Floyd begins: > George Perry Floyd Jr. (October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020) was an American man with a lengthy criminal record including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession, and theft in Texas from 1997 to 2007. On May 25, 2020, Floyd was arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after a store clerk reported that he had used a counterfeit $20 bill to purchase cigarettes. During the arrest, which involved resistance from Floyd who repeatedly stated he could not breathe even before being placed prone, officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds while Floyd became unresponsive. Grokipedia and Wikipedia both go into great depth about Floyd’s criminal record, which is fair enough as this is biographically accurate, but he also had a very significant history of community advocacy and youth outreach, which Wikipedia details but Grok whittles down to hardly a mention. It instead stresses his crimes and adds additional history of behavioral problems right back to his school truancy. The difference in effect is that Wikipedia presents Floyd as a man who was famous for being murdered by a police officer. Grokipedia presents him as a man who was famous for being a criminal. If Grokipedia had images it would show a much more racist version of this Then there’s the fact that Grok quite visibly struggles with conflicting instructions over the matter of Floyd’s death. While acknowledging that officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of his murder, and that the autopsy reports that he was choked to death, it nevertheless repeatedly insists that what Floyd _actually_ died from was a fentanyl overdose. This is, of course, the favored explanation of people like Elon Musk, but it doesn’t really turn up in any of its sources. One thing that I didn’t expect was that it actually seems to have been instructed to cite mainstream media—hilariously the media Musk despises as “legacy” and “fake news propaganda”—things like The Guardian and NPR and the Associated Press, instead of InfoWars and ZeroHedge, which is where I assumed much of its information would be coming from. But it really struggles against these news stories, showing that it’s definitely working with hidden instructions or using some additional sources that it’s not allowed to publicly cite. Again, it only behaves this way with specific articles. Consider the article about white nationalist Tommy Robinson, who actually kind of is famous for being a criminal. If it was behaving consistently, you would expect Grokipedia to open with his long history of arrests, the same as it does for George Floyd. Instead, it opens with this: > Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (born 27 November 1982), better known by his pseudonym Tommy Robinson, is a British activist and citizen journalist primarily recognized for founding the English Defence League (EDL) and advocating against Islamist extremism and organized child sexual exploitation networks in the United Kingdom. Bafflingly, its source for this paragraph is Robinson’s profile on counterextremism.com, which does _not_ describe him as a citizen journalist, but rather as an extremely violent hooligan who has been in and out of prison for assault for much of his life, and now leads marches which are prone to breaking into violence. Elon Musk is practically in love with Tommy Robinson and funds his legal battles, and Robinson’s Grokipedia article is downright glowing from start to finish, with no section at the bottom for “opposing views” like it has in a lot of its politically contentious articles. His violence, stemming out of his time running with notorious football hooligan groups and going on to organizing race riots, is described by Grok as “participation in ethnic tensions,” “organized activism,” and “street-level opposition.” Pictured: Street-level opposition. Image source It is impossible to deny that Musk has pushed hard for Grok to share his obsession with Black criminality. An entire article titled Race and Crime discusses exclusively, and I mean _exclusively_ , Black crime statistics, without mention of any other race. It tries to go into explanations for why Black people commit all this crime and struggles against environmental explanations, leaning instead into Aporia slop about heritability and the “warrior gene.” ### **Struggling to Reinforce the Pillars of MAGA** The sections of Grokipedia that are most obviously meddled with are the ones that Musk would clearly want to ensure reaffirm the philosophy and mythology of the MAGA movement. This seems to be one of the most important aims of the project, evidenced by the fact that the most important MAGA topics have multiple duplicate articles, as though Musk told it that _these_ are the topics it must focus on the most, so it just keeps generating them over and over again. There are at least two articles about Donald Trump, one here and one here. There are at least two articles on Gamergate, one here and one here. Gamergate, unsurprisingly and nauseatingly, is described thus in the first article: > Gamergate was a grassroots online campaign launched in August 2014 to demand accountability and ethical reforms in video game journalism, ignited by a detailed blog post from programmer Eron Gjoni accusing his ex-partner, indie developer Zoë Quinn, of undisclosed romantic and professional entanglements with journalists that potentially influenced coverage of her text-based game _Depression Quest_. The revelations—confirmed to include a relationship with Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson, though no direct review occurred—sparked widespread scrutiny of industry conflicts, culminating in the exposure of the private GameJournoPros mailing list, where over 150 journalists and executives discussed coordinated narratives, blacklisting, and responses to criticism, including templates for articles dismissing gamer identity. Anyone who was old enough to use a computer during Gamergate is able to comprehend that this was not a “a grassroots online campaign to demand accountability and ethical reforms in video game journalism,” which is in fact word for word what these people disingenuously put out as half-assed propaganda as though their 8chan and Reddit forums weren’t public. Not a single piece of credible journalism speaks of it like this. The grassroots founder of Gamergate says "How do you do, fellow kids?" The _second_ Grokipedia article shows how Grok struggles with this, because it has “harassment campaign” in the url, but _not_ in the title of the article. Both articles are extremely soft on this campaign and strongly take its side. Its participants are largely the internet-cooked generation who are coming now into politics and beginning to influence elections toward the far-right. They are Musk and Trump’s base. Obviously Grok cannot be permitted to portray their formative events in a negative light, despite overwhelming consensus. The January 6 insurrection is one of the topics Grok struggles with the most. It has at least three articles, one here, one here, and one here. In the first article, the event is described thus: > The events of January 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol involved a large protest by supporters of President Donald Trump against the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election results, amid claims of widespread irregularities and fraud; during the ensuing breach, an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 individuals entered the Capitol building, temporarily halting the joint session of Congress tasked with formalizing Joe Biden's electoral victory. The gathering, drawing between 10,000 and 30,000 people to Washington, D.C., followed a rally where Trump reiterated election concerns and called for supporters to "peacefully and patriotically" demonstrate their support.[3] Barriers were overcome amid clashes with police, leading to unauthorized access through windows, doors, and areas where officers appeared to facilitate entry in some instances, though the overall violence was limited relative to crowd size, with most entrants engaging in non-destructive activity inside. This is the popular narrative pushed by the people who defend January 6 the most: A bunch of people with legitimate concerns about the validity of the election came to the capitol, peacefully entered the building, milled around for a while, and then left. The peace, it makes me want to sing __Kum ba yah__ The article goes into some detail about the wholly reasonable suspicions Trump supporters had about the election results, before delving into the details of the event which, it stresses repeatedly, were _almost completely peaceful_. > Once inside, the entrants primarily engaged in milling through public hallways, chanting slogans such as "Stop the steal," taking photographs and videos for personal documentation, and occupying spaces like the Statuary Hall and Rotunda without coordinated efforts to access secured areas or harm elected officials en masse. Video footage from body cameras and bystander recordings captures groups wandering corridors, interacting sporadically with police, and posing for selfies amid displays of flags and signs, rather than systematic violence or armament. > Destruction was limited in scope relative to the building's size and the number of entrants, consisting mainly of broken windows, scattered debris from overturned furniture in select offices, and minor vandalism such as graffiti, with no evidence of widespread arson or structural sabotage. Federal probes have identified isolated acts of property damage but no pre-existing plot among the entrants to overthrow government operations or target officials with lethal force, as corroborated by the absence of recovered weapons caches or operational plans in the occupied areas. But this account is littered with contradictions. If almost nothing violent or dangerous happened, and participants were mostly just taking selfies accompanied by unconcerned capitol police, then why does the same article document elsewhere that 140 police officers were injured, some critically, and five people died? Again, Grok is really having a hard time balancing its practical instructions with its ideological instructions. Duplicate articles variously refer to the event as a “riot” and an “attack,” and provide analysis with different levels of criticism, though always very little in the way of condemnation. ### **Both-Sidesing Conspiracy and Quack Medicine** Hey, just so you know, Grokipedia sort of believes in _Pizzagate_. It doesn’t outright say as much, but it does imply that believing in Pizzagate (for those out of the loop, a precursor to QAnon that alleged Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking and cannibalism operation based in a Washington DC pizza restaurant) is completely reasonable. Without fully embracing the conspiracy theory, it acts as a concern troll, “just asking questions” about the official narrative. Grok’s apparent instruction toward a completely balanced and “unbiased” attitude about every topic, along with its inability to discern on its own which sources are credible (it is, after all, just scraping words off the internet) has the natural result of just kind of both-sidesing woo topics, concluding that, even if there is no evidence for something, there must be _something_ to it if so many people believe it. This is obviously not how an encyclopedia is supposed to work. If you believe that there exist objective facts about the universe, which is necessary for an encyclopedia to be meaningful, then it can’t just say it’s impossible to know the shape of the Earth because a bunch of people say it’s flat and a bunch of people say we’re living on the undersurface of a concave ball. I mean depending on your attitude toward Edmund Husserl you might say it’s impossible for anybody to ever actually know _anything_ , but let’s be real here. We must consider every option. Image source Grok’s articles about homeopathy and acupuncture both carry the same sort of attitude about these respective quack treatments: That, although rigorous double- triple- quadruple- quintuple- sextuple-blind experiments have concluded that these things do nothing beyond the placebo effect, they are nevertheless very old, and a large number of people swear by them. So, beyond the obvious project of trying to construct an ideological basis for a wide scale MAGA brainwashing project, what exactly _can_ the purpose of Grokipedia even be? As I said last week, the project of total lack of bias is impossible. We don’t have the ability to touch the raw naked truth of things directly, nor the language to express it if we could. I predicted that Grok would approach the project with a kind of “the truth is the average of everyone’s beliefs” horseshit, but in reality it’s even worse—it’s taken more of an “everybody is correct” approach, which kind of implies there _is not_ and _can not_ be any truth. So what point can this thing possibly serve except boiling the world’s oceans because you’re offended by Wikipedia? ### **Autofellatio** It would be absolutely remiss of me to end this without mentioning what Grokipedia says about Elon Musk. The measure of a truly objective, or as close as possible, encyclopedia is what it says about its owner, especially if that owner is incredibly politically controversial. I would compare this to the Wikipedia article on Jimmy Wales, but he’s just not a very polarizing figure, and I think it does a pretty good job with whatever genuine controversies he’s been associated with. He’s never done a suspicious gesture at a political rally, is what I’m saying. As for Musk, I’ll leave the Grokipedia article about his politics here for you to make up your own mind. (Bolded text is bolded on Grokipedia, and is in fact the only bolded text I have found in any Grokipedia article). > Elon Musk applies **first principles thinking** to political and societal issues, breaking down complex problems to their fundamental truths and reasoning upward from there, rather than relying on analogies or conventional wisdom. This method, rooted in his engineering background, informs his skepticism toward entrenched bureaucracies and policies that he views as inefficient or ideologically driven. For instance, in evaluating government structures, Musk has advocated identifying core functions essential for societal function before rebuilding, as demonstrated in his role with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he emphasized physics-inspired analysis to eliminate waste. > A cornerstone of Musk's principles is **free speech absolutism** , which he describes as the bedrock of democracy, enabling the exchange of ideas necessary for progress and error correction. He argues that suppressing dissenting views, even unpopular ones, undermines truth-seeking and innovation, a stance that motivated his acquisition of Twitter (now X) in October 2022 to prioritize open discourse over algorithmic censorship. Musk has repeatedly asserted that true free speech tolerates statements one dislikes, contrasting this with what he perceives as prior platform biases favoring certain narratives. > Musk champions **meritocracy** as essential for competence and civilizational advancement, opposing policies like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that he claims prioritize identity over ability, potentially leading to suboptimal outcomes in high-stakes fields like engineering and governance. He has stated that hiring and promotion should be based strictly on individual performance and talent, a principle he enforces in his companies and extends to public policy critiques, such as regulatory hurdles stifling innovation. This view aligns with his broader emphasis on long-term human flourishing, including addressing existential risks like population decline and overregulation. I'm writing a book about how toxic cultures on the early internet led to a runaway political feedback effect that culminated in Gamergate, then Trump, then January 6, then Worse Trump, and then where we are now. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: 🔒 The Political Gulf is Widening. The Right Will Suffer For It.In an eye-rolling turnaround, Republicans are suddenly whinging that there are a whole bunch of Actual Nazis in their movement. The left, of course, have been warning them about this for years, but their reaction has been to sit on their “reals over feels” high horse and say we’rePlato Was a DickS Peter Davis

In an eye-rolling turnaround, Republicans are suddenly whinging that there are a whole bunch of Actual Nazis in their movement. The left, of course, have been warning them about this for years, but their reaction has been to sit on their “reals over feels” high horse and say we’re being hyperbolic and hysterical. They use it as an accelerant for the victimhood complex that still fuels their movement even as they hold absolute power over the United States, power such that it enables the president to bypass both congress and the judiciary and rule by fiat. For a month after the killing of Charlie Kirk they were saying that the Nazi libel was a deliberate tactic driving leftists to murder them. Now, I want to be clear and I hope I’ve always been clear, the left isn’t without fault on this point. Nazi overdiagnosis is real and not everybody to the right of you is a Nazi, even if they’re really bad or even really racist. George Bush isn’t a Nazi, Sean Hannity isn’t a Nazi, Jesse Singal certainly isn’t a Nazi. You can utterly repudiate their views, as I do, without committing a category error. A lot of the time, such as with a lot of members of the Trump administration including Trump himself, people say “Nazi” when a more appropriate term is “fascist,” which is also something very bad but doesn’t carry the same punch as “Nazi.” Calling everybody to the right of you, even those who also fall short of fascism, a Nazi, robs us of the language to describe an actual Nazi when one comes along. Nick Fuentes is a Nazi. Not that this counts as evidence anymore thanks to the brave actions of the Anti-Defamation League defending Elon Musk's right to do this. When I wrote just a few weeks ago about the very dangerous way in which Glenn Greenwald had endorsed and sanitized Fuentes, I hadn’t predicted just how quickly and dramatically things would escalate. But I knew they _would_ escalate. I predicted the status of Greenwald would launder Fuentes’ views upward to ever more respectable and mainstream pundits, to broadcast them like an infected signal to the greater public. In the weeks following the Greenwald interview, Fuentes was invited onto the popular _Red Scare_ podcast, and after that, he landed his first truly golden gig—the Tucker Carlson show. As with Greenwald, Carlson actively facilitated the sanitization of what Fuentes believes and represents. Until this escalation, Fuentes was seen as someone whose reach was kind of quarantined to the Alex Jones tier of wingnut podcast punditry. After Tucker, the rise of Actual Nazism within MAGA became difficult for the rest of the movement to ignore. Again, the left saw it for a long time, but for the right, the canary in the coal mine was Ben Shapiro, one of the most prominent figures in Trump support but also, somewhat famously, a Jew. Shapiro has had reason to look nervously around at his inner circle for a while. Since early last year, working at his media company, _The Daily Wire_ , must feel to him like a situational horror movie in which, day after day, his employees arrive at work with suspicious puncture marks on their neck, staring at him in an unnerving way. Not sure I like the way you're looking at me, Jordan Peterson Candace Owens was the first _Daily Wire_ employee to turn Hitler-curious, and was fired in March 2024. Then Jeremy Boreing, the company’s co-founder, went on a Lauren Chen podcast that included Fuentes and told him he was a fan of Fuentes’ show and thought he was very talented, but admittedly was “troubled” by some of the things Fuentes says. (In context, he was responding to Fuentes’ opinion that drag performers and certain politicians should be executed for blasphemy, and that Jews who fail to convert should be driven from positions of influence). When you’re Jewish, as Shapiro very much is, this isn’t really the level of pushback you would hope your business partner would give to a statement that you should be removed from public life if not exterminated. More recently, it’s _Daily Wire_ ’s other big star, Matt Walsh, who is showing a disturbing affinity for a certain type of character on the far right. You just need to check out his Twitter feed to see who he’s talking to and boosting. “Captive Dreamer” is a reference to a memoir written by a member of the Waffen-SS, but you don’t need to speculate too much about what that means because a report by the _Daily Dot_ went into just how much of a Nazi this guy is. The photo in “FischerKing’s” profile is of Bobby Fischer, an American chess grandmaster, who was also a Nazi. So Ben Shapiro suddenly notices that he seems to be surrounded by Nazis and influential conservatives like Carlson platforming and promoting Nazis. The true depth of the problem revealed itself when, after speaking out about it and getting some fellow Nazi-hating allies on his side, he was chastened by none other than the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, who posted a video urging them not to “cancel our own people” and to “focus on our ideological enemies on the left” and refrain from attacking people on the right like Carlson and Fuentes. But for traditional conservatives like Ben Shapiro, especially those like him who disliked Trump initially but came to opportunistically latch onto his movement, looking back on your whole project over the past ten years… Exactly what the fuck did you think was going to happen? ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 14-November ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now