Yes, this is apparently the talking point on the left, as I learned recently from a Leftist friend of mine. He told me that I needed to be very concerned about Flock cameras, because they are being “almost exclusively” placed in black neighborhoods. This seemed like a strange argument to me, since neither he nor I are black. Why would I care about Flock cameras if they’re only in black neighborhoods?

But of course, blacks are to Leftists as jews are to Conservatives. They are the group of people that whites are allowed to care about, since they aren’t allowed to care about themselves.

As an aside, I had a Boomercon breathlessly relate to me the troubling “rise of anti-semitism” in America recently, as if I was supposed to give two shits. I asked if perhaps the rise in anti-semitism had anything to do with Gaza, and got a splutteringly indignant response. And here’s the thing, I don’t care about Gaza. It just seems intuitive to me that the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the Jewish State might have some correlation to a rise in anti-semitism around the world. I could be completely wrong about that, but I don’t care. I’m not a Semite, so I’m just not concerned about anti-semitism.

Similarly, I don’t care if Flock cameras are used to target blacks. I don’t know if thats even true, but it does make intuitive sense that if 13% of the population is committing 50% of the violent crime, then we would want to focus the bulk of our surveillance on that particular community. Not that the police would be explicitly doing this (the police chief of my city is a black lesbian, btw), but if you take a map of “high crime neighborhoods” and you overlay it with a map of “black neighborhoods”, they’re going to be the same map. None of this matters though because I don’t care about black people. I’m not black, and I don’t live in a black neighborhood, so it sounds like the Left is telling me that I don’t need to worry about Flock cameras.

Now, obviously, I am not so naive as to actually believe that Flock cameras (or any surveillance technology) is really only being used to target minorities. Flock cameras will be used to target the political enemies of whoever has control of them. This is the nature of politics. Let’s say, for example, that Flock cameras existed in 2021, and Flock data was used to hunt down and arrest all participants in the January 6th protests. Do you think my Lefty friend would have a problem with this? Fuck no. He would probably be celebrating the use of technology to “save our democracy.”

So, let’s give the “libertarian” wing of the Republican party their due - at least they are capable of understanding how a given technology can be used against them. But, they never consider how they could use the technology against their opponents. And they fail to realize that the logic of the Techno-Industrial system ensures that the technological dystopia is inevitable.

Ted Kaczynski predicted all of this 30 years ago in his book Industrial Society and Its Future. I’m currently working on a more thorough exploration of his ideas, but for the purposes of this little rant, he basically concludes that the only way to stop the march of “progress” is to completely dismantle the Techno-Industrial system and revert to pre-Industrial Revolution technics. This seems a bit, shall we say, unrealistic.

The reality is that we will never be able to put the technological genie back in the bottle. The breaks have been cut and we’re just going to have to ride it until the wheels fall off. I can’t think of a third fitting metaphor but you get the idea. Instead, we should be embracing a 40k-style Imperium of Man, and using the technology for our purposes. Yockey speaks of this.

Technics is even less capable than science, then, of satisfying the need for a world-outlook to this age. Physical power - for what? The age itself provides the answer: physical power for political purposes.

Let’s go through a quick list of the concerns leveled against Flock.

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Racial Profiling

Many “civil-rights” groups are concerned that Flock data will be used to racially profile minorities. The LAPD, in fact, recently cancelled their Flock contracts over precisely these concerns. I’m unable to find any actual explanations of how exactly Flock does this, it’s always some vague reference to systemic racism, such as this from the ACLU:

While some uses, like for toll collection and Amber Alerts, with the right guardrails in place, are not particularly problematic, some ALPRs are used to target communities of color and low-income communities for fine/fee enforcement and for minor crime enforcement, which can exacerbate existing policing inequities.

In other words, the ACLU doesn’t think black people should be required to pay parking tickets. Disagree. Next.

Immigration Enforcement

Flock doesn’t share any of their data directly with the Federal government, but what the customer does with the data is based on the local laws and regulations regarding interagency cooperation. In California, Virginia, and Illinois, laws have been passed explicitly prohibiting local law enforcement from sharing Flock data with ICE. This is obviously just Leftist jurisdictions attempting to further the Great Replacement. It’s unfortunate, but it’s really no different than other types of “sanctuary” laws for illegals.

The good news is, in many other states, local law enforcement has been sharing Flock data with ICE, and it has resulted in tens of thousands of arrests. This is obviously a good thing. The only improvement I would suggest is ICE demanding a secret backdoor into Flock data the way the FBI got a backdoor into your cellphone metadata, so they can work-around sanctuary laws.

Creepy Cops

This one is actually a bit of a concern. There have been quite a few cases of local police utilizing Flock data to stalk their ex-girlfriends and stuff like that. Obviously this is less than ideal, and more can probably be done to curtail such abuses, but it isn’t a problem unique to Flock cameras. Cops have been caught using surveillance tools for unethical private uses for a long time. It’s also a case of individual misuse at the local level, rather than institutional, politically-motivated abuse. Which leads us to the real, although admittedly theoretical, concern that a right-winger should have regarding Flock.

Political Targeting

As in my January 6th example above, it’s easy to see Flock cameras being used to target political opposition. But, in order to understand exactly how this would look in practice, it’s important to understand what Flock cameras actually do.

Currently, Flock cameras are used to record license plates of cars that pass by them. Using vehicle recognition software, they can also determine the make and model of vehicles. Flock claims that they don’t do facial-recognition, but they could certainly be lying about this, and even if they don’t currently do it, clearly this will eventually be a feature they support. So, let’s assume that they are also used to track individuals.

Why would law enforcement want this capability? Well, an immediate use case would be tracking down stolen cars, or tracking down a suspect. Like, for example, if a witness to a murder saw the perpetrator drive off in a “brown Toyota Corolla,” the police could use Flock data to find a car fitting that description seen leaving the scene, obtain the license plate number, and then arrest the suspect.

Perhaps more controversially, however, the data could be used to monitor and profile a suspect over time. For example, Flock cameras could be used to track a suspected drug dealer. Where does he go? Who does he hang out with? One could envision how sting operations could be greatly facilitated with such technology. But, of course, it could also be used to monitor political dissidents.

We see this currently in the Yookay, one of the most heavily surveilled countries on the planet, where a sensitive young man who attends an anti-immigration rally could find himself tracked down and arrested for “hate speech.” Interestingly, the surveillance cameras never seem to be used to arrest Muslim serial child rapists. Curious.

But, this is entirely a function of who controls the cameras. The Yookay is cooked. The US is not. Yes, we have been suffering under the reign of Gay Race Communism for the past 30+ years, and many right-wingers have an understandable case of battered wife syndrome. But, the answer is not to shun the technology in the moment of our ascension, in the fear of what the opposition might do with the power. If the Left regains power (and it’s questionable whether they have even truly lost it), they will simply reverse their position on Flock cameras, like they always do, and immediately begin utilizing them against their political enemies. So regardless of whether we use them now, the Left will use them against us if they ever get the opportunity.

The answer is to just not lose.

Imagine the same monitoring power used against Antifa. Or, consider how many pedophiles we would catch if we just started preemptively profiling every “trans” person? I already mentioned the benefits to immigration enforcement. What if whenever a leftist judge released a violent felon back out on the street, the police just immediately began monitoring them for any infraction. What if they started monitoring the judge? You don’t think judges ever drive over the speed limit? Give them death by a thousand paper cuts of minor traffic infractions. And Leftists are infamous for posting the most unhinged violent rhetoric under their full legal name on the internet. Put them on a watchlist.

And lest you be concerned that too much overreach might scare off the “normies”, remember that Edward Snowden dropped absolute bombshells about government surveillance abuses over a decade ago, and the American public just shrugged their collective shoulders and went about their business. The average Joe just doesn’t care about police recording their license plate number. And to be honest, Joe probably has the correct take here. What are you doing spiking your cortisol worrying about some inevitable shit anyway?

Briefly, the facts of the case are this: A left-wing activist attempted to impede ICE agents in the execution of their lawful duties by blockading the street with her car. After a brief but contentious confrontation, the ICE officers ordered the woman to exit the vehicle, which she chose not to do. From here, opinions as to what happened differ, splitting exactly down the ideological lines that you would expect. From one perspective, the perpetrator attempted to ram the officer with her car, resulting in a completely justified self-defense shooting. From the other perspective, she was merely trying to evade arrest, and he could have stepped aside and let her escape.

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I don’t particularly care either way, to be honest, because an Incident like this was bound to happen eventually. In fact, it’s part of the left’s strategy. There is a reason Leftist leaders have been encouraging and provoking their rank and file to engage in vaguely illegal confrontations with ICE for months now. Much like monkeys on typewriters, they know that an infinite number of Karen’s harassing and obstructing an infinite number of ICE agents will eventually lead to An Incident. They can then leverage The Incident to bolster support for their cause and call for increased “direct action.” This is a horribly cynical maneuver, but also quite effective.

So, we should acknowledge that this SSRI-brained midwit is a victim of an elaborate psyop that convinced her to throw her life away in defense of violent criminal aliens who don’t give a fuck about her. This is tragic. With that being said, I would be lying if I said I didn’t experience just a little bit of schadenfreude listening to this bitch mouth off to the feds, knowing she’s about to leak brain in t-minus 5 seconds.

Because, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m getting real tired of these middle-aged women running amok like the rules don’t apply to them. Contrary to the Leftist narrative, this foid was not “afraid,” she didn’t stomp on the gas in a moment of “panic.” She’s smirking. She thinks its a joke. Her “wife,” who purports to believe that ICE agents are literal Nazis, is standing there mocking and belittling them like the Mary-Sue protagonist of a Netflix original series, secure in the belief that nothing bad could possibly happen to her because she has plot armor. Is she some kind of Holocaust denier? Does she not believe the literal Nazis might, I dunno, shoot her?

But enough about this particular woman. As I said, this was eventually going to happen and the details are not that important. What should the Trump administration actually do? The most important thing Trump can do right now is hold frame. The ultimate goal of the Left is to replace the native population of the West with third-world client groups that they can use to amass power (see: Learing Center). To that end, they need open borders, which means they need to shut down ICE. Much like the George Floyd riots and subsequent “Defund the Police” movement resulted in a decrease in police activity during the Biden regime, they are hoping widespread protests will have a “chilling effect” on ICE (see what I did there?)

Here’s why it’s different. First, blacks are racist and they don’t care that a white girl died, so they won’t show up in huge numbers like they did in 2020. Sure, there are Antifa larpoterrorists chanting and carrying on outside of ICE facilities across the country right now (in other news, sky still blue), but it’s nowhere near the mass movement the BLM riots were.

Boomers will show up and wave placards, but Boomers are constitutionally incapable of taking meaningful action. Even if they weren’t old and frail, Boomers are perpetually locked into a worldview formed during the high-trust era of their youth, believing that if they simply complain loudly enough they will get their way. They are fundamentally unable to comprehend realpolitik, and are thus useless in a post-legal world. Antifa needs the blacks to show up en masse to serve as their loyal footsoldiers-slash-cannon fodder. Without them, the protests will fizzle.

The second reason this situation is different then the Floyd riots is that ICE is a federal agency, and Trump is President. In 2020, every Democrat politician in every major metropolitan area made it clear to law enforcement that they had targets on their backs. If they made a bad call in the line of duty, not only would their career be over but their life would be ruined, and they would probably end up in jail. As a result, many police officers began to take a decidedly “laissez-faire” attitude towards law enforcement, and crime spiked accordingly.

But this is not the case with ICE. ICE is a Federal agency, under no circumstances should Trump allow a Minnesota show trial to convict this officer of wrongdoing. Whatever he needs to do, grant a Presidential pardon, I don’t care. As long as the administration stands strong in it’s support of immigration enforcement, the deportations can continue apace. So far, they have.

But, I think Trump can do more. Trump should invite the ICE agent in question to the White House, and publicly award him a medal, just as the Biden regime did for officer Michael Byrd, the man who murdered Ashli Babbitt. Do you remember that? Rightoids at the time were appropriately aghast at the sheer brazenness of this maneuver. After all, even if you were to give Byrd the most generous benefit of the doubt, and believed that he really felt his life was in danger from an unarmed woman (who was not behind the wheel of a 4,000 pound death machine), the best you could possibly say about him was that he made a questionable call during a tense situation, which resulted in an unnecessary death. How is this deserving of a Congressional Gold Medal?

The answer is that the Biden regime didn’t care about the merits of the case. They cared about sending a message. If you oppose us, we will use the power of the state to murder you in cold blood. We won’t even try to hide it, and we will honor your killer. This is a demoralization tactic, and it may seem brutal, but it is effective.

Do the implications of the preceding paragraph make you somewhat uncomfortable? Do you find yourself thinking “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”? Well, I’ve got news for you: the Left is going to keep plucking eyeballs whether or not you decide to fight back. Welcome to the politics of the real.

Ask yourself the following questions. Do you believe that it is important to deport violent criminal aliens? Do you believe it is important to break up billion-dollar fraud rings composed of antagonistic foreigners? If the answer is “no,” then okay. Agree to disagree. But, if the answer is “yes,” then we need ICE to go and do that. That means going into “sanctuary cities” where hostile organizations are going to do everything they can to make that process difficult. Gird your loins, because shit like this will occasionally happen.

One last point and then I’m done with this Happening forever. I have seen many right-libertarian types making arguments along the lines that if you support ICE you’re a bootlicker or something like that. This is absurd and counterproductive.

There has always been a strain of skepticism towards authority on the American Right, and I think this is healthy. But ask yourself honestly, has positioning yourself in opposition to the government in every case, regardless of context, over the past 80 years actually benefitted the cause of Liberty? Do we have a limited government? No. But, by abdicating power completely, the libertarian-right did manage to ensure their enemies consolidated control over every single lever of power.

Here’s an important bit of information for you. Did you know that those Founding Fathers Boomercons love so much didn’t just rebel against the British Crown? They also subsequently created a government! The guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence actually became President. At some point, you have to stop opposing the old, bad government, and put in the actual work of constructing the new, good government.

That’s the opportunity presented by the Trump administration. Trump, clearly imperfect as he is, represents an opportunity for Rightoids, who’ve been shut out for decades, to gain access to the levers of power. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you are concerned that ICE might come after the anti-Zionist Right next. This is an actual argument that I’ve seen floating around social media. There is an easy solution to this problem: you can join ICE!

That’s right, that could be you out there performing field lobotomies on schizoid leftists in the streets of Minneapolis! But no, you’d rather sulk in your goon cave and rant about Jewish space lazers or whatever fake and gay bullshit you’ve come up with to avoid having to ever do anything, ever. It’s so over bros, ICE agents are evil Feds.

No faggot. ICE is the Freikorps. Did you know that ICE has more than doubled in size since Trump took office? Do you think anybody who is not ideologically aligned with the Right would ever join ICE in the current political climate? That means at least half of all ICE officers are straight-up frogs. This is the tip of the spear for reclaiming the federal government from the Neoliberal establishment. You’re blackpilling about ICE of all fucking things?

If I was more conspiratorially minded, I might be inclined to wonder if some of the “anti-ICE rightist” aren’t themselves feds engaging in a demoralization campaign. But, I think the reality is that most of them are just losers who want an excuse to give up without fighting. For all their talk about “watering the tree of Liberty” and “prepping for SHTF,” they always seem to stumble into the perfect confluence of worldviews that justify their complete inaction.

At least Renee Good had the courage to live out her absurd main character fantasy in the real world, and suffer the consequences. If you are hiding in your room, feverishly imagining the perfect conflagration of events in which your true heroic qualities can finally be made manifest, I’ve got news for you: If you are a loser now, you will still be a loser in the Zombie Apocalypse. And I’m going to kill you and take all your stuff.

But don’t let that stop you from subscribing to my Substack!

So I’m not opposed to war per se. What I am opposed to is the feckless and incompetent leadership of the American Empire engaging in avoidable wars, which don’t serve the interests of the American people, and which they ultimately end up losing. As an example, let’s look at my personal favorite punching bag, Afghanistan.

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Many people are more ambivalent on Afghanistan then they are on Iraq, because it seems like a more reasonable casus belli. After all, Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, but al-Qaeda did blow up the world trade centers. Even if this was blowback for 30 years of CIA shenanigans in the Middle East, what was ol’ Dubya supposed to do, just let that shit go?

Of course not. But, did you know that in December of 2001, a mere two months after 9/11, Delta Force operators had Osama bin Laden positively ID’d in a training camp near the town of Tora Bora in the Nangarhar province of eastern Afghanistan? They repeatedly requested additional manpower to go in and block and sweep the encampment to kill or capture all the terrorists, but the Defense Department rejected the mission. General Mattis, who was at the time commanding I MEB in Kandahar, volunteered his entire brigade in support of the mission, but it was declined.

After a few weeks of inaction, bin Laden was able to outmaneuver the small number of Delta Force operators trying to keep him hemmed in, and escaped over the border into Pakistan, where he remained for the next decade while America fruitlessly attempted to build schools for girls in Afghanistan.

Why would the Bush Administration allow the most infamous terrorist in the world to just escape like that? Why didn’t they go in to Tora Bora? According to minutes from a National Security Council meeting reported by Bob Woodward in his book Bush At War, the reason was because

Rumsfeld worried that a coalition built around the goal of taking out al Qaeda would fall apart once they succeeded in that mission, making it more difficult to continue the war on terrorism elsewhere.

In other words, the Bush administration was purposefully losing the war in order to expand the war.

Imagine if, instead of letting bin Laden get away, and blowing trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on a failed nation building exercise in some third world shithole, Bush had let Mattis and the Marines storm Tora Bora, lay waste to their enemies, and revel in the lamentations of their women? The great War on Terror would have been over in December of 2001.

This is essentially what just happened in Venezuela. I have seen perpetual-loser Libertarian types poasting shit-tier memes like this on my socials this weekend:

If you found yourself liking or sharing this meme over the past 48 hours, do me a favor and punch yourself in the dick. Venezuela is not Iraq. In the time it took to even make this meme, the “war” in Venezuela was already over. And the Venezuelan government has announced that the apprehension of Maduro was part of a “structured settlement” they reached with the US. This is obviously false, but it’s similar to Germany pretending, after we blew up Nordstream Pipeline, that they believed the Russians did it. It’s a way for them to accept the fait accompli while saving face. It’s over. Regime change accomplished, zero US casualties.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have criticisms of the operation in Venezuela. Was this operation necessary? Was Maduro really a “narcoterrorist”? I admit that I haven’t really been following all the drama with Venezuela recently, but my intuition is that Maduro was probably accepting bribes to look the other way with regards to drug trafficking, rather than being directly involved. And sure, he was a socialist dictator but there’s plenty of those around. The US doesn’t go and topple dictators unless there is a perceived US interest in doing so.

What Maduro was actually doing was cozying up to China. In fact, he had just finished a meeting with some Chinese ambassadors hours before Delta Force snatched him up by the scruff. This was actually a warning to China not to mess around in our hemisphere. The Trump administration is re-establishing the Monroe Doctrine, or, as he recently called in a press conference, “The Donroe Doctrine.” As far as I can see, this is completely in keeping with my preferred Vitalist Foreign Policy.

You can agree or disagree with this show of force, but please don’t whine to me about “International Law.” International Law is fake and gay. I certainly don’t care that the Trump administration “targeted a political leader.” This is the complaint being leveled by many leftists in regard to the operation. Really, this is just because leftists are anti-American third-worldists, and they are filled with butthurt because “their guy” lost. But, let’s examine this “rule” of not being allowed to target a countries rulers, because it’s particularly ridiculous.

If you have a problem with a specific country, who do you really have a problem with? You have a problem with that countries leaders, since they are the ones making the decisions. Why wouldn’t you target the leaders? The only reason is that all the leaders from all the countries got together and agreed that they wouldn’t target each other. They would rather resolve their differences by throwing cannon fodder at each other, while keeping themselves off the table. And sure, I understand why that is great for them, but not why it would be great for me (or you).

Of course, the CIA has been ignoring this “international law” for decades, but they’ve been doing it in a very effeminate way, skulking about the world, funding Color Revolutions and clandestinely arming insurgent groups in order to subvert existing regimes. The Donroe Doctrine is much better. Imagine if the Trump administration had tried to handle Maduro the way the Obama administration tried to handle Assad. Fund a decades long civil war, accidentally establish a caliphate, fight a war against said caliphate, facilitate the deaths of tens of thousands of Christians, all to have an even worse dictator eventually rise to power.

So no, I don’t care about International Law, I’m not worried about Venezuela becoming another Iraq, I do wish the Trump administration would focus more on domestic issues, since Venezuela doesn’t effect me one way or the other. But, at least Trump did something fun this weekend, my Substack feed has been nothing but genderwar slop for weeks now, and now it’s much more interesting.

Well, here we are, dear reader: a New Year, and New You, amirite? (Spoiler alert: it’s the same you). You’re probably thinking it’s about time to pick up a new self-improover plan and turn your life around! Maybe you are thinking about doing 75 Hard. Well, allow me to piss in your Cheerios.

I first heard about 75 Hard from a fat Latinx at work, and being the habitual self-improover that I am, I thought it sounded interesting and decided to do it with her. She, of course, tapped out immediately. But I didn’t! I completed the 75 Hard challenge. Was it easy? Not at all. Was it worth it? Also no. Here are my key takeaways.

If you are not familiar with 75 Hard, it is a self-improvement program “designed” and promoted by “hustle-bro” podcaster and two-time Jocko Wilinck impersonation award winner Andy Frisella. He’s kind of a retard. Don’t believe me? Check out this podcast episode where he initially introduced the idea of 75 Hard. It’s unlistenable.

Frisella goes to great lengths to impress upon the listener how much effort he put into coming up with this plan. But, there isn’t really much to it. Every day for 75 days, the participant must do 5 things: Stick to a diet, complete two workouts, drink a gallon of water, read 10 pages of a non-fiction book, and take a selfie.

You may find yourself asking, why 75 days? Is there some sort of evidence or study suggesting this is the amount of time necessary to cement new habits? No. Frisella just literally pulled it out of his ass. Apparently he had a work deadline or something that was coming up, and he decided he needed to “focus” for the next 75 days - and then decided to turn that into a workout routine? Anyway, let’s go over each point.

Stick To A Diet

Stick to a diet is good advice. If you were to come to me and say “Bingo, what’s one thing I should do to get healthier and feel better?” I would probably say “start eating healthy.” If, however, you asked me a follow-up question, like, “what constitutes healthy eating?” I would try to give you some advice, or at least point you in the right direction. Frisella does none of this.

The “diet” portion of the 75 Hard challenge is entirely up to you, Frisella offers no guidance on what the diet should consist of. To steel man this “design choice” a little bit, it is true that your diet will be dependent on your fitness goals. If you are trying to lose weight, your diet will look a lot different than someone who is training for a powerlifting meet. Frisella wants his plan to be as applicable to as many people as possible, so he leaves the actual diet open, with the only requirement being that you must stick to it 100% for the entire 75 days.

I understand the argument here, but it still feels like a cop-out. He couldn’t give some general guidelines like “avoid high fructose corn syrup and seed oils”? For a guy who really wants to convince us that he put a lot of time into coming up with this program, it seems like Frisella avoids doing any type of heavy lifting here.

He does sort of say you “can’t cheese it” and come up with the “Bannoli only diet” or something silly like that. But again, he’s putting the onus on us to do the legwork of coming up with a diet. Most people who have unhealthy diets don’t know what they don’t know. They are coming to you for a plan. Hey bro, just eat healthy is not a plan.

I personally did the diet from the Spartan Health Regimen, because it had been recommended to me by a friend and it was something I wanted to try. It’s a particularly onerous diet, as it cuts out all processed grains, meaning no bread products, no pasta, no white rice, etc. And by day 70 the muffins at the coffee shop were calling my name, let me tell you. And I don’t even particularly like muffins.

For me, the diet part of the challenge was easily the hardest, but that’s because I chose a particularly restrictive diet. Someone else could have chosen a much easier diet, and technically we would have both completed 75 Hard, although the difficulty level would have been extremely different.

Which brings me to section two.

Twice Daily Workouts

Frisella prescribes two workouts a day, every day for 75 days with no rests. As with the diet, he completely dodges the question of what the workouts should consist of, other than to specify that at least one workout must be outside (this is to build mental toughness), and each must be a minimum of 45 minutes in length.

Again, Frisella is trying to cast as broad a net as possible here (which was apparently effective, since his “plan” has become somewhat of a viral sensation), so he puts the onus on us to come up with workouts that are challenging for our current fitness level, with the instruction to simply “not cheese it.”

In other words, if you are out of shape, a 45 minute walk may count as a workout for you. But, if you are a marathon runner, you know a 45 minute walk is cheesing it, so you need to have the integrity to make sure each workout is a challenge. But, there in lies the problem. You physically can not do two hardcore workouts a day, every day for two and a half months. Your body will break down. Imagine trying to do heavy deads twice a day for even a single week. This is a great way to fuck your back up.

So, you have to have enough fitness knowledge to properly assess workloads and calibrate your workouts to be sustainable for 75 days, which necessarily means “cheesing” some workouts more than others. Because Frisella puts in zero effort to provide a structure for what this might look like in practice, it’s left as an exercise for the participant. This plan might be fine for people who are seriously out of shape, because going for two 45 minute walks a day is certainly not going to kill you, regardless of your current fitness level. But, if you are already in decent shape, you are going to have to come up with your own plan to make this work.

For myself, I was already lifting three days a week, doing cardio three days a week, and resting on Sunday (as the good Lord intended). So I stuck with this basic format, because I wanted to continue to make actual progress in these areas, and the 75 Hard “plan” has no progression strategy or anything approaching what one would consider an actual “fitness program.” As it was, my lifts suffered a little bit.

What I did was basically throw in secondary “workouts.” On days that I lifted, I also went for a 45 minute walk in the evenings to get my “outside” workout. On days that I ran, I did 45 minutes of yoga in the evening (Frisella explicitly calls out yoga as an acceptable workout, which it is by the way. If you’ve never held warrior poses the day after doing heavy squats, let me tell you - it’s brutal). On Sundays, I did a walk and a yoga.

Did I “cheese” the exercise portion because not every workout was 100% effort? As in most aspects of the program, it’s unclear. I was definitely feeling the physical toll by the end of the program, and as I said, I stopped making progress on my lifts because I was overly-fatigued. But, at least I was hydrated.

1 Gallon of Water a Day

The third requirement is to drink a gallon of water a day. Like the first two requirements, this isn’t necessarily bad, eating healthy, working out, and staying hydrated are all good ideas. I do think it’s funny that this is the first requirement where Frisella gives us a clear, unambiguous metric - it must be a full gallon, every day, no excuses - but, it’s also the only requirement where he was forced to issue an addendum.

Apparently, he was inundated with enough Redditors complaining that one gallon was an unhealthy amount for their body size, that he updated this requirement so that, if you have a note from your doctor, you can substitute your doctors recommended water intake for the gallon. Now, I feel like, even if you are a woman or a manlet, drinking a gallon of water a day isn’t going to kill you, but I do find it amusing that Frisella, for all the effort he put into his brilliant plan, couldn’t be bothered to google “how much water should a person drink?”

Anyway, I drank a gallon of water every day because I’m an adult human male. This is actually hard to do if you aren’t used to it. You really have to pace yourself or before you know it it’ll be 7pm and you still have half a fucking gallon of water to drink. No bueno. Anyway, if you are also an adult human male, you should be drinking a gallon of water a day, and this is one thing that I’m going to continue to try to keep up with. Next.

Read 10 Pages Per Day

Remember in school when you had to take those standardized tests, and they gave you a list of things, and you had to pick which one didn’t fit? This feels a little bit like that, doesn’t it? You could be forgiven for being confused by this requirement, as up until now all the requirements have been related to fitness.

But, technically this isn’t a “fitness program.” I mean, clearly it isn’t a fitness program. But, according to Frisella himself:

If you’re looking for a new fitness program or challenge, this is not it.

This is a program that can change your life … starting from the inside.

Are there physical changes? Yes! But trust me when I say the physical changes you see on the outside are a FRACTION of the results you can earn by completing 75 HARD.

As you read & learn about the 75 HARD program below, keep that in mind.

This is not your next “internet challenge” [it is]

THINK OF THIS AS AN IRONMAN FOR YOUR BRAIN

YES! 75 Hard is not some fitness program for you to get in shape. Despite the legal disclaimer on the site which explicitly says otherwise.

This is an IRONMAN FOR YOUR BRAIN! And how are we going to train our brain? By reading 10 pages of a non-fiction book everyday!

Now, in fairness, if you are someone with a barely functioning brain, reading 10 pages a day may be an actual challenge. There are people out there who can’t read very well, and because reading is a struggle, they tend not to do it because they don’t enjoy it. But, compared with the workout requirements and the diet, the page count requirement seems trivial. It makes me wonder if maybe Frisella can’t read too well, and in his mind he thought this was more challenging then it is?

I will say though, this pivot away from fitness program to mental ironman is somewhat belied by the final requirement which is…

Take a Progress Photo Every Day

The purpose of a progress photo is, of course, to track changes in your physical appearance over time. The idea being that you would be getting in better shape because of the fitness program. So, it seems to me that four out of the five requirements for our “not fitness program” are fitness-related requirements, and the “not fitness program” label is just a get-out-of-jail-free card for Frisella to shirk the duties of putting together an actual fitness program. And he just throws in a trivial amount of reading to make it sound like a balanced “mental challenge.”

That being said, in practice the progress photo is more of an annoyance then anything else. Your body is simply not going to change significantly enough on a day to day basis for daily progress photos to hold relevance. So it’s just another check box you have to remember to do.

However, I will say that, after 75 days of not eating processed grains, my abs do look a bit more defined then they did at the start of the program. So, doing something like monthly progress photos is probably useful (or even weekly if you are out of shape, because you will see more rapid progress early on as you go from “zero to one”).

So, you may be asking yourself, Bingo, if you’re so down on the program, why did you complete it? Well, first off, my momma didn’t raise no quitter. But, secondly, if I hadn’t completed the program, then the people who are all about it could rightly claim that I simply couldn’t hack it. This is a common phenomena, where a person tries and fails at something, and rather than admitting that they couldn’t measure up, they come up with all sorts of excuses about why the thing they can’t do isn’t really worth doing.

I can do 75 Hard. And so can you. But, the question is, will 75 Hard actually help you accomplish your goals? If your goals are fitness related, 75 Hard is explicitly telling you it’s not a fitness program, so you should pick something else. You are basically going to have to build your own fitness program inside the 75 Hard framework anyway, since Frisella offers no guidance.

If your goal is to cultivate your mental toughness, then maybe 75 Hard can help. But remember, the chubby latinx I mentioned at the beginning of the article bailed a week into the program. I, on the other hand, have been through Marine Corps bootcamp, MCIWS training, and combat deployments in Afghanistan, so my threshold for dealing with gay bullshit is higher then most. So, did I become more mentally tough because I completed the program, or did I complete the program because I’ve already cultivated a certain degree of intestinal fortitude? The perennial chicken-or-the-egg problem.

My intuition is, if you don’t already have mental toughness, you are just going to end up being one of the many people on the sub-reddit failing the program. If you do have mental toughness, then you will just have a bunch of annoying tasks that you have to complete each day, and I don’t know that you will get much out of it.

Anyway, best of luck and Happy New Years.

But that ends today! For here is an official poast!

As I have already stated, this is the follow up to my previous post, in which I announced that I am organizing a D&D campaign for the Substack frens. In that post, I described the kind of campaign I like to run, in the hopes of whetting your appetite. If you haven’t already read it, I would politely request that you do so now.

But if you can’t be bothered, I will just tell you that, in that article, I promised to publish a follow-up describing how the game would work, and how you could join. This is that article.

As far as “how the game will work,” I would like to take a step back and explain the concept of a West Marches campaign, for those who are unfamiliar. A few years ago, a guy named Ben Robbins ran a game for some friends in a campaign setting he referred to as “The West Marches.” He ran the game in a specific fashion which has become known as the “West Marches” style (for reasons that should hopefully be obvious). According to Robbins, he was trying to solve for two problems:

My motivation in setting things up this way was to overcome player apathy and mindless “plot following” by putting the players in charge of both scheduling and what they did in-game.

A secondary goal was to make the schedule adapt to the complex lives of adults. Ad hoc scheduling and a flexible roster meant (ideally) people got to play when they could but didn’t hold up the game for everyone else if they couldn’t. If you can play once a week, that’s fine. If you can only play once a month, that’s fine too.

It’s interesting that Robbins cites player engagement as his primary motivator, and scheduling as a secondary concern, since most subsequent game masters who have advocated for the West Marches style have touted it primarily as a scheduling solution. But what is the West Marches style? How is it different from a normal D&D campaign?

The West Marches Style

According to Robbins, the basic setup for the game was this:

1. There was no regular time: every session was scheduled by the players on the fly.

2. There was no regular party: each game had different players drawn from a pool of around 10-14 people.

3. There was no regular plot: The players decided where to go and what to do. It was a sandbox game in the sense that’s now used to describe video games like Grand Theft Auto, minus the missions. There was no mysterious old man sending them on quests. No overarching plot, just an overarching environment.

A West Marches campaign has no scheduled “game night.” Instead, Robbins created an email list (I’ll be using Discord) and allowed the players to self-organize expeditions. Because the campaign was exploration based, rather than narrative based, (a concept I explained in my previous poast), there were many interesting locations on the map for the players to choose from, but no overarching plot that needed to be addressed - no big baddie trying to destroy the world.

As Robbins noted, he had up to 14 people in his campaign, but not every player participated in every session. In fact, it would be quite unwieldy for that to be the case. Instead, the players would organize different expeditions with different party members, depending on who was available. Each session would begin and end in town, so that each new session could begin with any combination of players, without breaking verisimilitude by having characters apparating in and out of the dungeon.

How it would typically work is this: A player, let’s call him Ben, decides he wants to explore the Abandoned Monastery a previous expedition discovered in the Dimwood Forest. He knows the last group only explored the first level of the catacombs, and he thinks there is probably some good treasure there - plus, it seems like an interesting adventuring location to him. He posts in Discord and asks if anybody else is interested. He gets three other people who are also interested, and they work out a time that fits for everyone (including the DM). The session is booked. Because the DM knows where the party is planning to go, he has time to make sure the location is all prepped up prior to the session. The party goes on the adventure, hopefully gets some good loot, and heads back to town. Then they update the group map with any new areas of note.

Inevitable Modifications

In my experience, the idea of starting and ending each session in town works well at lower levels, but starts to break down at higher levels. This is because D&D is fundamentally a resource-management game.

Players are trying to acquire as much treasure as possible, before they run out of hit points, spell slots, torches, etc. The tension comes from seeing how far you can push it. It can be a long, arduous, and sometimes dangerous journey to even get to the dungeon, so the inclination is to not leave until you’ve gotten enough loot to make it worth your while, but without overextending yourself and getting wiped out. Can we clear another couple rooms, or should we head back? The perennial question.

The higher level the party, the more hit points, spell slots, etc, they have. Therefore, the farther afield they can journey, and the deeper into the dungeon they can delve, before being forced to turn back. To place an artificial time constraint on when they must return, just to ensure they end the session in town, essentially nerfs the adventure because they will never expend enough resources to feel endangered.

So, while beginning and ending in town is still the ideal game loop for this campaign, it’s probably worth acknowledging up front that, as players reach higher levels, we may have to start ending sessions on “cliffhangers.” Of course, doing this degrades the scheduling benefits of the West Marches campaign somewhat, since, if Ben and his buddies end their session in the middle of the dungeon, all four of them will have to be available for their next session. However, this is not an entirely insurmountable problem. For example, if John is going out of town for two months and can’t play, the party can decide via Discord that they are sending John’s character back to basecamp with the loot, and the remaining three characters can continue without him.

Ultimately, I think it will sort itself out. Players whose schedules are similar will end up adventuring together. Players who play more frequently will end up running with other players who play more frequently, while players with busier schedules will probably end up adventuring together. This is something that Robbins tried to avoid in his original game, and I can see his reasoning. He didn’t want to feel like he was just running three or four separate campaigns all set in the same world. He went as far as to introduce rules requiring parties to mix after two adventures, to keep cliques from forming.

I don’t really see this as a problem though. Part of the excitement of the West Marches style, to my mind, is the competition of wanting to be first. After all, treasure doesn’t respawn, so once that bottom floor of the Goblin Tower has been looted, the loot is gone. There may be more treasure higher up, or there may be a secret door the last party missed, but whatever got picked up got picked up. So, different adventuring parties competing with each other for loot is part of the fun. It feels natural to me that different “rival” parties would form.

But, if you are someone who feels like you probably won’t have as much free time as some of these NEETs, don’t worry about all the treasure getting looted. I’m planning on putting enough shit in the world that there will always be new places to explore that haven’t already been raided.

Players who want to play more frequently can also keep in mind that they can create multiple characters. If your PC is stuck in a dungeon with a group that can’t meet up until two weeks from now, but you want to go on the adventure tonight, you can always roll up a new character and have him go out with a different party. The only rule is new characters always start at level 1.

How To Play

Obviously, DM’ing for even a small group is a huge amount of work, and as I mentioned at the start of the article, part of the reason I’ve been putting off publishing this “part two” was that I’ve already been stretched quite thin recently, and I didn’t want to start something I couldn’t finish. Fortunately, some recent events have conspired to considerably speed up my five year plan. I don’t want to say too much, but the letters “I” “P” and “O” are involved.

Which is to say that I don’t plan on really starting this campaign up until January, but I do plan on having plenty of free time to DM by then. In the meantime, if you are interested in playing, the first step is to Join the Discord Server:

Bingo's Discord

One thing to note: you don’t have to be a paid subscriber to play in the game. The whole point of me job stacking was to make a bunch of money so I can go and do shit like this without worrying about how to monetize it. Besides, the math ain’t mathing anyhow. Let’s say I restricted the game to paychads, and I even managed to get 100 people to purchase paid subscriptions in order to play. That would be incredible, I would be very happy with that. But, at $5 a month, that’s still only $500, which is not really a “replacement” for a job. Meanwhile, I will have obligated myself to run D&D for one hundred people, which, West Marches or no West Marches, is a fuckton of people.

Really the only way you can scale D&D financially is to do streaming, like Critical Role or some of these other popular shows. But, there is a big difference between making D&D fun for the players and making D&D fun for an audience. Matt Mercer and company are all professional voice actors, they play a very narrative-style game, and its more like watching a show. I would rather focus on making sure my players are having fun than have to worry about entertaining a third-party audience. That and I am not a professional voice actor, so it probably wouldn’t even work if I tried.

So don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the paychads, and you guys will definitely get priority when it comes to adding players. But, the game will not be pay to play. Anyone who wants to play can join the Discord. If you have a friend who isn’t even on Substack, but you think they would enjoy playing, send them the invite link.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will post handouts in Discord giving an overview of the campaign setting, as well as the rules for those unfamiliar with B/X. I’m actually working on my own condensed version of the old-school rules tentatively titled “Bingo’s BECMI.” One problem that new players often have with older versions of the game is the formatting of the old TSR source books are kind of a mess. Newer “retro-clones” like OSE solve this formatting problem, but sometimes they change certain rules (like Armor Class) or interpret nebulous sections in ways I don’t necessarily like. If you are familiar with B/X or any of the newer retro-clones like OSE, Labyrinth Lord, LotFP, etc - you basically know how we are going to play. And if you don’t, I’ll explain it in great detail over a series of posts that I’m planning to make in the coming weeks.

Also, feel free to join the Discord “community” even if you aren’t sure you want to play, or don’t think you’ll have the time. If you just want to shoot the shit, learn more about table-top gaming, or just poast dank memes, you are welcome to join. Who knows, perhaps the sight of everyone else having fun around you will inspire you to get in the game.

Final Note: Player Agency

I will provide an Obvious First Thing To Do in the Discord to get players started adventuring. Robbins began his campaign by handing out low-resolution treasure maps to get the players started off in a direction. I will do something similar. But remember, it’s on you the player to decide what your character wants to do. I will help resolve scheduling issues when I can, but I’m not going to come in the Discord and drop obvious plot hooks like “hey guys, you heard a rumor there is an abandoned mineshaft filled with diamonds to the East!” You must discover this for yourself.

In this same vein, I will be refraining from posting session write-ups, which is something I normally enjoy. Obviously, I have a Substack, so I like writing, but in keeping with the player-led nature of the West Marches campaign, it will be incumbent on the players to keep each other abreast of their discoveries. As Robbins writes:

Players were strongly encouraged to chat about their adventures between games. Email (specifically a list devoted to the game) made between-game communication very easy, something that would have been next to impossible years earlier. This discussion theoretically mirrored chatter between characters who had made it safely back to the town. Did you stumble into the barrow mounds in Wil Wood and barely escape with your life? Warn other adventurers so they can steer clear. Did you slay wolves on the moors until the snow was red with blood? Brag about it so everyone else knows how tough you are.

What started off as humble anecdotes evolved into elaborate game summaries, detailed stories written by the players recounting each adventure (or misadventure). Instead of just sharing information and documenting discoveries (“we found ancient standing stones north of the Golden Hills”), game summaries turned into tributes to really great (and some really tragic) game sessions, and eventually became a creative outlet in their own right. Players enjoyed writing them and players enjoyed reading them, which kept players thinking about the game even when they weren’t playing.

I’m already planning on making a separate Substack where I post musings on gaming (so that PBP subscribers who aren’t interested won’t get spammed with a bunch of D&D crap that they don’t care about). I would love to post session summaries written by players (with credit to the author, of course) - but if you aren’t the literary type that’s fine. A simple “We found some ruins north of the swamp” will suffice.

And that’s basically it. I have no idea how much actual interest this post will generate. Based on the feedback on the previous post, it seemed like we may get a goodly number. If that’s the case, and I feel like its too many people to run for, there may be a waitlist, or I may do something where, like I said, I prioritize paychads (there has to be some benefit to giving me money, after all) but cycle in freefags as well. I haven’t put too much thought into it to be honest, because we may end up only getting a total of like 10 players. Which would be fine, by the way. As much as I think it would be cool to run a giant VTT D&D MMO, that will probably take time and word of mouth to accumulate.

Anyway, that’s enough blather. Join the fucking Discord already.

Bingo's Discord

During the 2020’s “Summer of Love,” at least thirty statues of Christopher Columbus were vandalized or destroyed.

Huge crowds surrounded monuments to the explorer, dragging them down with ropes and spray-painting slogans on the rubble. News outlets found this quite inoffensive, even a relief. A Bloomburg headline from those months, instead of lamenting the destruction, reads “Why are there still 149 statues of Christopher Columbus in America?” Dozens of others echoed this sentiment - “it’s about time.” In cities where riots had flattened storefronts and historical monuments, officials gave trite speeches about “decentering white supremacist symbols” and “platforming BIPOC voices.” Removing statues of Columbus was painted as an objective moral good, even an imperative.

These speeches and articles provided very little reasoning for their claims, only citing “discomfort” and “historical prejudices.” Similarly, articles refered to the change from Columbus Day to “Indigenous People’s Day” as already settled, something that is no longer up for debate. The reader is simply expected to understand that Columbus was an evil man, who should be looked upon with scorn; that the early explorers of the New World were reprehensible figures. To look upon them with anything but derision is passe, even dangerous. One is expected to know that any discussion not based on this consensus is beyond the pale.

But this perspective on Columbus and his contemporaries is a new phenomenon, and its rapid, unilateral acceptance in education and mass media points to nothing short of a propaganda effort. […]

Christopher Columbus was a pioneer and a hero, a man we should strive to imitate rather than vilify. The story of the conquistadores is one of the most impressive military conquests in human history, and names like Cortes and Pizarro should rank alongside Alexander and Caesar. These men were models of vitality and sheer will. Bringing civilization to untamed lands is an objective moral good, a Faustian endeavor. […]

All modern slander cannot stand up to the fact that the explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are some of the most impressive people in history. Their lives would stand as great if told to an ancient Greek, Roman, Assyrian, or Mongol. There is in the Age of Exploration a Classical sense of vitality, of excellence and triumph. […]

Because of this innate sense of Classical greatness present in the explorers and conquerors of these centuries, much effort is dedicated to making them seem banal or incompetent, unworthy of special interest beyond scorn. Besides slander of their motives - most often a reduction to the simple drive to pillage - and their religion - by calling their Christianity skin-deep, a mask under which they concealed raw greed - historians and culture warriors have a particular tendency to dismiss the Age of Exploration as being dominated by men who were boring … which in historical education is perhaps the greatest sin of all.

But Columbus and the explorers that followed him to the New World were anything but boring. Their lives and adventures are worthy of dozens of blockbuster movies, and it is merely politics that prevents their lives from being well-known today. These explorers demonstrated the same drive and talent as Alcibiades or Themistocles, yet have been unjustly filed into the dustbin of history in a blatant propaganda effort. […]

Here, I would like to discuss an alternative view of Columbus, something that hints at a greater sense of genius than even the pre-Zinn [leftist revisionist] description of his voyage.

That is: the idea that Columbus knew from the beginning where he was going.

This view stands in stark contrast to the commonly-accepted story of Columbus, which (moralizing and propaganda aside) asserts that he aimed to find a passage to Asia via travelling west. This route was based on Columbus’ own geographical calculations, which cut the diameter of the Earth nearly in half. […]

But there is a compelling case to be made for the idea that he did not, in fact, set off in 1492 for an Asian trade route; that his proposal was intentionally and obviously farcical, meant to conceal his true knowledge. […]

By the late fifteenth century, scholars knew well the size of the Earth, with astonishing accuracy given their technology. In fact, the first approximate calculations of the Earth’s circumference had been done by Eratosthenes - over a century before the birth of Christ! Even when his work was lost in the West, monks during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages had completed and verified similar calculations, based on astronomical observations; additionally, Muslim scholars had come to similar conclusions during the Islamic Golden Age.

All of these calculations were widely available to scholars in Portugal and Spain, and well-known among the court astronomers and cartographers who rejected Columbus’ premise. It was instantly and obviously absurd to anyone with a serious education.

Traditionally, this absurdity is explained by asserting that Columbus just “wasn’t that good” at math or cartography. Considering his lifetime of naval success and career as a cartographer, as well as his impressive navigation across the Atlantic, this is a weak explanation. At best, it is hand-waving to fill gaps in the historical record. The alternative explanation requires some context as to the politics surrounding naval exploration in the late 1400s. […]

The culture among sailors for each nation, particularly in Portugal and Spain, was one of entrepreneurial spirit, national pride, and ruthless competition. Naval exploration was dangerous and expensive, but incredibly lucrative; each expedition funded by the crown functioned something like a modern startup. Each proposed voyage was a venture seeking millions in investment, for a high-risk endeavor with a potentially massive upside.

In this unpredictable environment, inside knowledge and personal reputation reigned supreme. Astronomical charts, trade winds, currents: these were industry secrets, and important matters of personal and national security. Many discoveries were kept under lock and key, or only shared by word of mouth. Personal recommendations meant everything. The entire culture of captains, court scholars, and royal investors was thus one of high trust and extreme concern. Imagine a group of modern venture capitalists, their analysts in tow, considering the latest proposal of someone who’s had a dozen successful startups and exits; this was the situation between Columbus and the Portuguese, then Spanish, royal court.

It was in this environment that Columbus made his proposal, which was immediately recognized as ridiculous. His claims about the size of the Earth were demonstrably false; and, even if they were true, the distance of the voyage stretched the limits of publicly-known sailing techniques.

On top of this, Columbus asked for laughably generous terms. Namely, he requested a 10% share of all ongoing trade along his route, as well as governorship of any lands conquered in the voyage. By contemporary standards, this was a massive ask. […]

Additionally, the idea that Columbus would conquer lands in East Asia was bold, to say the least. From the writings of Marco Polo and dozens of other sources, scholars of Columbus’ day (and Columbus himself) knew that East Asia was controlled by vast, powerful empires, none of which he could conquer with a few lightly-armed men, thousands of miles from support.

So, in total: Columbus’ math was drastically wrong, his terms were absurd given the stated goals of the voyage, and these goals made very little sense in context. What are investors meant to conclude from this?

That Columbus knew something he wasn’t letting on.

His proposal was intentionally ludicrous. Columbus was not a person prone to rash reasoning or sloppy thinking, and his recommendations said as much. These letters were high accolades from prior investors and associates, an introduction which gave him an audience at the Spanish royal court. They knew he was competent. So, the intended inference was that he presented this farcical theory to conceal something only he knew - some inside edge he couldn’t publicize. […]

But where did Columbus get this idea? What actually was his insider information?

This is where we see a deeper genius in Columbus, and get a better sense of the brazen courage involved in his voyage across the Atlantic. His pieces of evidence for the New World, when taken alone, were little more than legends and rumors. But, when taken in combination and approached with rigor, they provide a more comprehensive image of his voyage as a highly intentional act, based on rumors and legends carefully examined and combined into a groundbreaking revelation. […]

Myths, legends, rumors. Vague notions of something being out there, but without a clear guide. When Columbus’ thinking is understood in this more complete context, his note in the margins of Imago Mundi takes on a decidedly different tone:

There is no reason to believe that the ocean covers half the world … Not because the Earth is half-sized, but because there is something there!

Don’t let revisionist Leftist pseudo-historians taint your understanding of Columbus. He was a Great Man, in the truest sense of the word. A hero, embarking upon an epic quest of mythic proportions, journeying steadfastly towards vast untamed vistas on the horizon. The small-souled bugman cannot contemplate such an individual, which is why we must memorialize him.

I will leave you with this quote from Samuel Eliot Morison’s seminal history of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea:

Other discoveries there have been more spectacular than than of this small, flat sandy island that rides out ahead of the American continent, breasting the trade winds. But it was there that the Ocean for the first time “loosed the chains of things” as Seneca had prophesied, gave up the secret that had baffled Europeans since they began to inquire what lay beyond the western horizon’s rim. Stranger people than the gentle Tainos, more exotic plants than the green verdure of Guanahani have been discovered, even by the Portuguese before Columbus; but the discovery of Africa was but an unfolding of a continent already glimpsed, whilst San Salvador, rising from the sea at the end of a thirty-three-day westward sail, was a clean break with past experience. Every tree, every plant that the Spaniards saw was strange to them, and the natives were not only strange but completely unexpected, speaking an unknown tongue and resembling no race of which even the most educated of the explorers had read in the tales of travelers from Herodotus to Marco Polo.

Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492 when the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.

Anyway, I’m not going to do what everybody thinks I’m going to do, and flip out man.

Let’s first stop and count our blessings. Trump is still a better president than Harris. Do you think Harris wouldn’t have bombed Iran? Her husband is Jewish. Plus, she is literally a empty suit, she would have done whatever the deep state told her to do, and the deep state is apparently run by Mossad. So, we would still have war with Iran, but we would also have infinite illegal immigration and accelerated Gay Race Communism. It would have been all the other terrible things plus war with Iran.

Not that I think war with Iran is good. But, I’m also using that phrase as shorthand, because we aren’t really “at war with Iran.” Yet. If you remember, Trump launched air strikes on Iran in his first term as well, and many people were (rightly) concerned that it could lead to a larger conflict. But it didn’t. This is largely because, contrary to what faggot retard Lyin’ Ted Cruz thinks, the Ayatollah is actually not insane. He understands that getting into a full-blown war with America would go very poorly for him.

In fact, one might argue that this is why Iran wants a nuclear weapon. I’ve seen no evidence that Iran was actually building a nuclear weapon, by the way. But, if they were, it would be entirely reasonable. You may be in favor of nuclear non-proliferation, but you have to at least concede the perspective of a non-nuclear power that is constantly being attacked and bombed by a nuclear power. Surely Iran wants a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against Israeli/American aggression (I listed out Israel and America separately, although they are apparently one and the same now).

As an aside, since we are discussing nuclear non-proliferation, do you know why Israel has never publicly acknowledged its nuclear program? It’s an open secret that Israel has one, but they have an official policy of “Strategic Ambiguity.” The reason for this is simple: Under US law, Israel’s nuclear program disqualifies them from receiving US Aid. Yet US lawmakers (funded by AIPAC) ignore Israel’s WMDs and continue to send them billions of our tax dollars, in direct violation of US law.

Anyway, the idea that Iran, if they acquired a nuke, would immediately use it against the United States (or Israel, which again, is apparently the same thing now) is silly. Also, for readers too young to remember the lead up to the Iraq war, this was literally the exact same argument being used to support war with Iraq. We were told (incorrectly) that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. We were also told (incorrectly) that he had plans to hand these weapons off to “proxies” who would carry out a chemical weapon attack in a major metropolitan area. The Iraq War was always framed in the context of American security. Saddam was the single greatest threat to America, and that is why we had to go in there and topple his regime.

It’s funny because in his disastrous interview with Tucker Carlson, aforementioned faggot Ted Cruz said multiple times that he was “against” the Iraq War. Tucker let him get away with this, but I can assure you he is lying. Again, for people who don’t remember the early 2000s, let me set the stage for you. 9/11 had just happened. Patriotic feeling was at an all-time high. George W. Bush (yes, that Bush) had a fucking 70% approval rating in April of ‘03.

CNN (yes, that CNN) was doing puff pieces on the US military and proudly showcasing footage of US air strikes on Baghdad while waving American flags. All but six Republican congressmen voted for the bill authorizing the use of military force against Iraq (and the ones, like Ron Paul, who voted against it, Cruz would consider to be “isolationists”). Even most Democrats voted for the bill, including all the ones we know and love: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein, John Kerry, etc. It wasn’t until years later, as the war turned into an unpopular quagmire, that the Democrats began calling it “Bush’s War” and distancing themselves from it.

But, the Republicans were still bought in. John McCain ran in 2008 on the very failed platform of “as long as it takes.” It wasn’t until around 2012 (the year Cruz came into the Senate) that it had become generally accepted amongst the establishment Republicans that the war in Iraq had been a mistake. In other words, Cruz condemned the Iraq War when it was safe to do so, but I find it incredibly unbelievable that this slimy turd was the one guy in 2003 who was opposed to US involvement in Iraq. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show me a Pat Buchanan style op-ed from Cruz voicing his opposition to the Iraq War. I guarantee such a document does not exist.

Especially considering that Cruz is using the exact same neoconservative “American security” argument to advocate now for regime change in Iran. The Ayatollah has, or is making, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Once he gets them, he will use them against a major American city, such as Tel Aviv or New York. (Yes, Cruz included Tel Aviv as being just as important to defend as an American city). Iran is America’s greatest security threat, and toppling their government is actually America First!

Anyway, enough about that faggot. What about JD Vance? From what I’m hearing, Vance is the only one within the administration who pushed back on these air strikes.

I’ve had friends of mine express the hope that Vance will publicly break with Trump on the Iran issue. While I agree that would be based, it’s probably not going to happen. Vance has to be thinking about his 2028 run right now. He has two choices, and they can either go very good or very bad, depending on what actually happens with respect to Iran.

Option 1, Vance can come out publicly and denounce the strikes on Iran. This will inevitably blow up into an Elon-style social media spat with Trump, who would then sideline Vance. If the Iranians decide not to retaliate, than this whole thing will blow over in a few weeks and Vance will look like a fool, thus torpedoing his chances to run as Trump’s successor. But, if Iran does retaliate, and this thing escalates into a full-blown invasion of Iran which will inevitably go badly and be very unpopular, than Vance can run in 2028 with legitimate credibility as having opposed the war from the start.

The other option is, Vance says nothing and does not break ranks with the President. In the case where Iran does nothing, then Vance is in the clear and is still the Republican front-runner for 2028. In the case where Iran does retaliate, and war does happen, he will get attacked as being part of the pro-war administration and will likely lose.

So the question for Vance, as for us all, is - what will Iran do? Contrary to the uninformed opinions of retards like Ted Cruz, the Ayatollah is not actually a suicidal maniac. If he was, he would have initiated a hot war with Israel/America a long time ago. Iran wants to avoid being invaded by the United States, and will likely offer only a minor “face saving” retaliatory strike like they did in 2018 when Trump killed General Soleimani. But, I have seen in my news feed that the Iranian parliament voted to close the Strait of Hormuz. This would be pretty bad for the US economy. Buy Bitcoin.

But, what do they mean “close” the strait of Hormuz? Are they going to rope it off? If the US sends a carrier strike group into the Strait and says, “no actually, this stays open,” then Iran is in exactly the same situation that they are in right now. Yes, they have missiles that can strike US aircraft carriers. But, if they use them, and blow up a ship with thousands of US sailors on board, they will get invaded for sure.

A US invasion of Iran is obviously bad for both parties, but Trump has made it clear that he cares more about Israel than his own constituents, so he would likely do it if pushed. There is a saying: in order to win a negotiation, you need to be the craziest one in the room. As much as Lyin’ Ted wants to paint the Ayatollah as an unpredictable time-bomb, it’s actually the United States which has a wildly irrational and erratic foreign policy. The Art of the Deal, indeed. If only Trump would deploy his idiot wildcard energy on behalf of Americans rather than Israelis, we’d be all set.

Personally, I’m all in on nothing ever happens. I predict that saner (Iranian) heads will prevail, and there will be no serious retaliation. Basically, they will shut up and take it, because they can’t do anything else. Of course, this will breed continued resentment against Israel and her lapdog America throughout the Middle East, which will have a blowback effect. Hopefully against Israel more so than America. But I guess we will see.

Mazel tov.

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

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

Believe it or not, I actually do have hobbies outside of bitching about politics on substack dot com. I quite enjoy playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not even particularly creative. But I can run a mean D&D campaign let me tell you.

So, why D&D? Well, as many have noted, the hobby has suffered from the infiltration of Gay Race Communism in the same way that many fandoms have. But, unlike video games, movies, etc, D&D players aren’t required to consume the corporate slop in order to engage in the hobby. Tabletop RPGs are all about what you and your friends create at the table. You can create your own campaign settings, your own characters, your own stories. You can literally play D&D without purchasing a single Wizards of The Coast product. And I intend to - although I have purchased a lot of TSR products, a distinction I may get into in a future essay.

In this first article I will describe the kind of game I want to run, and in a subsequent poast, how I envision it working in practice. For this campaign, I will be pulling from the collective wisdom of a community of gamers known as the Old-School Renaissance (heretofore referred to as the OSR). The OSR is a “RETVRN” to the golden era of tabletop gaming - not simply for nostalgia purposes, but because that style of game facilitates a certain low fantasy “Swords and Sorcery” gaming experience that can’t be replicated by newer versions of the game.

I should say up front that this article isn’t intended to bash modern RPG systems. I play a lot of 5th Edition in particular, and it can be a lot of fun. But, games like 5e and Pathfinder are designed for a more heroic, high-fantasy style of campaign, which isn’t the vibe I’m going for with this campaign.

In order to understand why I prefer running old-school D&D to more modern versions of the game, I’m going to provide you a quick overview of two first-level adventures. One, run in the 5e style, and the second run in the “1e” style. And when I say “1e,” there is some confusion about older editions because they didn’t used to number them like they do now. So I will just say that I’m specifically going to be running the 1981 Moldvay Basic / Expert rulebooks, colloquially known as “B/X D&D” because it is my personal favorite.

5e Adventure

So let’s start with a 5e campaign. Perhaps the player characters all meet in a tavern (many such cases). After briefly introducing their characters to each other and maybe engaging in some light banter, the local blacksmith bursts into the common room. Goblins have kidnapped his daughter! If only there was some brave group of heroes in town who would be willing to risk life and limb to save her! Fortunately, such a brave group of heroes exists, in the form of the adventuring party.

After some obligatory hemming and hawing (there’s always one player in the group who wants to pretend his character doesn’t want to go on the adventure) the party sets off. The DM handwaves traveling to the goblin lair, because overland travel is boring. “The townsfolk know where the goblins live, it’s in an old abandoned wizards tower on the edge of the swamp. Nobody goes there because of the goblins, but they can give you directions.” The party arrives at the goblin lair.

Now, the players are here to roll dice and kill bad guys. They trust that the DM is a good DM, and the encounters are going to be properly balanced for a first level party. They know that as long as they play reasonably smart they should be able to kill all these goblins and rescue the girl. So they go in swinging. The goblins are basically just piñatas filled with experience points, and the players fight their way through each room until they reach the Goblin Chief, who is about to commit unspeakable acts upon his human captive. There is a big boss fight, the Ranger goes down, but the Cleric is able to use Healing Word to bring him back up. The fight is won and the girl is rescued. They notice when searching the Goblin Chief’s corpse that he has a sack of gems on him. The Rogue takes the gems because he feels like that’s what his character would do, but then forgets he has them by the next session.

1e Adventure

Now let’s compare that to a typical old-school adventure.

The old-school adventure also starts in a tavern. But, there is no “scene” where an obvious heroic plot hook is introduced. In fact, it’s not even assumed that the adventurers are heroes, properly understood. They are adventurers. The analogy I like to use to understand an adventurer is the Spanish Conquistadores. They crossed the sea and explored dangerous, uncharted territory in the hopes of material gain. Sure, some Clerics among them probably sincerely hoped to spread the faith of The One True God, but for the most part, they were in it for the money. And this sort of high risk, high reward undertaking attracted a certain type of person. These are your adventurers.

So anyway, the adventurers start buying rounds for some of the locals and plying them for rumors. They learn about an old abandoned wizards tower on the edge of the swamp. Some locals say it’s haunted (it’s not haunted, but not all rumors are true). Some locals say its been taken over by a tribe of goblins. One local man mentions that the wizard who used to live in that tower was a collector of rare antiquities.

So, a wizards tower, possibly haunted, possibly infested with goblins, possibly home to a treasure trove of ancient valuables? Sounds like it’s time to go on an adventure! Do any of the locals know where this tower is? Not really. They know the general direction, but the party is going to have to go on a hexcrawl to find the damn thing!

So the party sets out into the wilderness. They roll some random encounters, but they manage to avoid combat. In old-school D&D, experience points are awarded for recovering treasure, not for killing enemies. And encounters aren’t necessarily balanced. If a first-level party comes across a group of three ogres at a campfire, they better pray they don’t draw attention to themselves.

Before they reach the abandoned tower, they find an old overgrown shrine in the woods. Upon investigation, they discover a trap door behind the altar that leads down into some sort of catacombs. That looks interesting, but they are on a mission right now, so they mark it on their map for later and keep moving. Eventually they find the tower.

The Thief sneaks up to the tower and peers in a window. He is able to confirm that there is indeed goblins in there. The party knows that they are no match for a whole tower full of goblins, so they hide in a copse of trees for awhile to observe. Around midnight, a large group of goblins exits the tower and heads off into the woods, no doubt to engage in nefarious goblin-doings. But this means there are far fewer goblins in the keep, now is the time to strike!

The Wizard uses his one spell slot to cast Sleep on the goblins guarding the door, and the party slits their throats. They then make their way carefully through the tower, killing a few sleeping goblins, and discovering some secret passageways and trapped chests, etc. They get some good loot. Eventually, they find the vault where the previous occupant kept his most valuable treasure. Unfortunately, the Goblin Chief has decided to make this room his “throne room,” so the party is going to have to fight if they want the good stuff. The fight is quick and deadly. The party wins, but the Thief dies (in 1e it’s death at 0 hit points, and a Thief only has 1d4 hit points at first level). While that player rolls up a new character, the rest of the party loads up their packs with as much gold as they can carry and head back to town.

While these are, essentially, the same adventure: journey to the goblin-infested tower and slay the Goblin Chief, there are some major differences which I think illustrate the different playstyles.

Narrative vs Exploratory Playstyle

A “Narrative style” adventure doesn’t necessarily mean “railroad.” Of course, a narrative campaign will by definition be more railroady than a sandbox setting, but a narrative campaign can still be done well. For example Dragon Age: Origins is one of my all-time favorite video games (a shame they never made any sequels). DA:O is very narrative-driven, and part of what makes it good is that it has a really interesting and compelling story. But, it also allows for player agency. You can choose what order to do quests in, and you can make actual meaningful choices that impact the outcome of the game - like siding with the werewolves instead of the elves, for example. But, it is different than a sandbox game. The Blight is coming, and you have to save the world. That’s what the story is.

Most modern D&D tends to be very narrative-based, meaning it’s the responsibility of the DM not just to come up with an adventure location, a dungeon with a map, some enemies, and some treasure, but also a story, in which the player characters are the protagonists. Old-school D&D is more exploration-based, meaning the players decide where they are going and what they investigate.

Obviously, in this example it’s the first session, so the DM has likely only prepared one adventure location - the goblin tower - and you’re kind of being an asshole if you don’t go explore the thing he has prepared. But notice that the party also finds an interesting shrine on their way to the tower, which they could choose to explore later. Over time, they will discover more locations on the map. Also, old-school adventures often feature larger adventure locations, sometimes referred to as “megadungeons,” that would be impossible to fully explore in a single session. They will have to come back to the same megadungeon multiple times if they want to fully explore it. So the party will slowly accumulate different points of interest on the map, and the campaign becomes more player led as they decide what they want to do in each particular session.

This doesn’t mean that there is no story to an old-school campaign, it’s just that it is an emergent story. The job of the DM is to provide a plausible setting with some interesting NPCs, and then decide how the world reacts to the actions of the players. Rather than the campaign being entirely pre-planned by the DM, as if he was writing a novel, the “story” of the campaign becomes a shared exercise, where the players do things, the world reacts to them, they react to the world, and so on. Who knows what could happen. You could even become King!

Hexcrawling

Another difference is how overland travel is handled. The 5e DMG does have rules for running overland travel, but in practice, most groups handwave this. It’s not the interesting part of the story, so, other than maybe describing the scenery and telling the party how long it took them to reach their destination, the DM will usually gloss over it. This is, I think, partly why the Ranger class feels so underpowered in 5e, a lot of his class abilities have to do with wilderness exploration, which is heavily de-emphasized in modern D&D.

In contrast, a major component of 1e play was wilderness exploration. The party would start with a blank map, and slowly fill in locations as they explored the area. This is where Random Encounters would come in. Modern DM’s often poo-poo the idea of Random Encounters, and it makes sense from the perspective of a narrative adventure. If we are on the way to rescue the blacksmiths daughter, we don’t want to get bogged down fighting a bunch of random wolves in the forest. It’s sort of extraneous to the story. But if we are exploring, then having random encounters is what we are here to do!

And the encounters aren’t necessarily always combat encounters. You might roll a group of veterans on the march. Where are they coming from? What army are they a part of? Maybe they invite the characters to visit their garrison and join the army. Maybe you roll up a merchant caravan. Great, an opportunity to buy some much-needed supplies. Even “enemy” encounters aren’t necessarily “combat” encounters, because you might roll up something really deadly that you don’t want to mess with. You might roll up a group of orcs who aren’t immediately hostile, and you negotiate with them. Notice in the example I wrote above, the party avoided combat with any wandering monsters they encountered.

Unbalanced Encounters

Avoiding combat also ties into the idea of Unbalanced Encounters. In 5e, Pathfinder, and other modern RPG’s, there is an emphasis on “encounter balance.” There is an idea known as “Flow State” which was coined by a psychologists named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is key to modern game design theory. Basically, the premise is that if you make a game too difficult, players will become frustrated and stop playing. But, if you make a game too easy, players will become bored, and also stop playing. Ideally, you want the difficulty to be right in the middle, where the players feel challenged, but not too much. As they get better at the game, you have to increase the difficulty to keep them engaged.

This is an important design pattern to keep in mind when developing video games and the like, but when applied to TTRPG’s I think it misses the point of what makes a tabletop RPG unique. The name of the game in TTRPG’s, from my perspective, is verisimilitude. The setting should feel like a real, living world. The creatures you meet aren’t just there to be killed, they exist independent of the players. There is no guarantee that encounters will be “balanced” in any meaningful sense. If the party happens upon a group of trolls in the woods, they would be wise to give them a wide berth.

One game mechanic in 1e that facilitates this playstyle is the way that XP is awarded. In modern D&D, experience points are mostly awarded for killing monsters. This encourages murderhoboism. In our 5e example above, the party charges into the goblin tower, confident that if they play their characters well - ie if the tanks tank, the healers heal, etc - they will be able to overcome the enemy and acquire experience.

In contrast, old-school D&D awards experience for treasure. 1 XP is awarded per 1 gold piece worth of treasure successfully brought back to town. The players are encouraged to search for treasure, not necessarily kill badguys. Some old-school aficionados take this to an extreme, declaring “Combat is a Failure State,” meaning that the players should always be trying to avoid combat. I think this overstates the case. Sometimes, if you want to get the loot, you got to fight for it (like the example of the Goblin Chief). Also, we are playing a “Swords and Sorcery” game, we want to use our swords and our sorcery sometimes. A better example is the idea of “Combat as Sport” versus “Combat as War.” Ben at Questing Beast had a great video on this concept.

In the 5e example above, note that the party found gemstones on the Goblin Chief, but they didn’t really know what to do with them. I’ve noticed this a lot, there is this sort of vestigial tail in modern RPGs where treasure chests and stuff still exist in the dungeon, but the players don’t really care about them. The DM’s Guide still has all these charts for converting various gemstones to gold values and so on. What is this for? It just results in players accumulating more wealth than they know what to do with, but this isn’t the case in old-school games.

Everything costs in old-school games. Besides just spending money on general upkeep, replenishing supplies such as arrows, rations, torches, and lantern oil, players were encouraged to hire henchman in older versions of D&D. Larger parties were the norm because combat was so deadly - it was wise to bring along a couple extra sellswords. And how was one to transport all the loot back to town without becoming over-encumbered, anyway? You may find yourself hiring non-combatants just to carry packs, or maybe you buy a couple mules or horses. What if you are near a river, or the coast? You may want to buy a riverboat or a sailing ship so you can get around faster. Of course, these vehicles need to be manned by a captain and crew. If you are traveling overland, it might behoove you to hire a caravan guard. You may invest in the services of a sage or researcher to help you locate new adventuring locations. Perhaps you hire an alchemist to keep you well stocked with healing potions.

And then there is magical research. Magic users don’t automatically learn new spells when they level up. They only get additional spell slots. If you want to learn new spells you have to spend time and money researching them. You can also spend money to create spell scrolls to use on your adventures. If you are using the optional weapons mastery rules, you have to spend money on training to improve your weapon proficiencies.

And then of course there is domain level play. It was assumed in older editions of the game, and this is my assumption as well, that the player characters are accumulating wealth in order to increase their power and prestige in the world. It never made sense to me that high level characters would still be traveling around from village to village like hobos. You should be founding a Thieves’ Guild. You should create your own Barony. Who doesn’t want to be a Baron? But of course, if you’re going to be a Baron, you’re going to need a stronghold. And you have to hire guards to man it. And of course, if you have a Barony, you have to defend it from invaders. There could be hordes of orcs, or even greedy neighboring nobles looking to expand their own territory. You’ll have to raise an army, outfit them and train them. All this costs money.

Now granted, some of this stuff is more playstyle related than actually mechanical. You certainly can run a hexcrawl in 5e. In fact, the Alexandrian has some pretty good homebrew rules on his blog that aren’t explicitly 5e, but assume the existence of things like Survival checks. And you can throw unbalanced encounters at your players in 5e - although you should definitely let them know ahead of time that this is what you are doing or else I guarantee they will just try to fight everything. You can also make minor tweaks to the 5e rules. I’ve run a 5e campaign where the only change I made was XP for gold. I’ve run a 5e campaign where I added a “Permanent Injury Chart,” which, while not quite death at 0 hit points, at least makes 0 hit points feel a little more consequential.

But ultimately, I think if you want the true “old-school” gaming experience, it’s best to just run an old-school system. The main reason, I think, is that 5e or Pathfinder characters just feel overpowered. They get so many feats, special abilities, and so on that you can really only run a high-fantasy campaign in these systems. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise. 5e characters feel like superheroes, which is fine if that’s the kind of campaign you want to play - but if you want a more “Swords and Sorcery” type campaign, I think old-school is the way to go.

So anyway, that’s the kind of game I plan to run. I know I said at the start that I’m recruiting players, and you might think to yourself “how many fucking players are you going to have Bingo?” That’s a great question. I’m going to write up a “part two” where I explain a little more the logistics of how the game will work. But, for now I’ll just say, more players than you would think.

Stay tuned.

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On April 7th, I published an article reflecting on the state of the markets, and monetary theory more generally. In it, I suggested that the reader “buy the dip.” I was informed by at least one commenter that this was “Boomer-tier advice,” and that we were actually in the midst of a deep, deep recession. Far be it from me to disparage the economic insights of the Elite Human Capital, but it just so happened that the day I published that article, a mere four weeks ago, SPY hit the very bottom of the Tariff Correction at $481 a share. Since then, it recovered back up to $565. I made money. Did you sell, like a chump? You know you’re supposed to buy low and sell high right? Or did they not teach you that in Elite Human Capital School?

The real “Boomer-tier” behavior is to still be listening to the corporate media and accepting their narrative framing. We all lived through Covid right? We all lived through Russiagate? Why do you still believe this shit. My liberal aunt told me just last week that the stock market is the lowest it’s been in 50 years! No it very much isn’t. That’s not even difficult to fact-check, you can just look at the ticker on Yahoo finance. Now granted, she is a complete retard, but I’ve heard people on the “right” saying things that are just barely less stupid.

I’ve seen right-wing commentators describe the economy as crumbling, cratering, or collapsing. Is it really? Have you gone outside? Have you or anyone you know been laid off because of tariffs? Are any of the local businesses in your community going out of business because of tariffs? How exactly is the “economy collapsing”, is it this chart?

Here is a chart of the S&P Index over the past 5 years. I’ve helpfully drawn red circles around the times that “line go down.” The first one was Covid, when SPY dipped from a high of $323 to a low of $218 before making the so-called “V-shaped recovery.” The most recent one is the Tariff Apocalypse, when SPY dropped from a high of $610 to a low of $481 (as I mentioned above).

The one in the middle was the miniature bond crises we had in 2022. Who remembers that? When Silicon Valley Bank and a few others were upside down in their treasury holdings and the Fed had to come in and bail them out? Do you remember when the economic institutions redefined what a recession was so that they wouldn’t have to acknowledge that the economy was in recession under Biden during the midterms? Were the Elite Human Capital of the right out there decrying the economic illiteracy of the Biden administration? Or were they opining about how Trump was “hurting the Republican brand” with his Big Lie election “nonsense”?

And look, I understand wanting “your team” to be the best versions of themselves, and admonishing them to “do better.” In a sense, that’s what I’m doing right now. But if you constantly pull your critiques of the Right from the talking points of the Left, then it does beg the question - which side do you actually agree with? And why? Why is the leftist narrative that Trump is tanking the economy (which is objectively false) so much more compelling to you than the narrative that the economy was a disaster under Joe Biden?

The answer I think lies in the fact that there is a certain type of person who defines themselves by their high intelligence. It’s very important to such people that they be regarded as the smartest guy in the room. The worst possible scenario is one in which they end up looking stupid.

Unfortunately, because Western institutions have been taken over by the Left, the majority of the “expert” class have been trained in globalist neoliberalism. Being heterodox by definition means disagreeing with the other “smarts.” But, if you disagree with the other smarts, and turn out to be wrong, then you look dumb. Whereas if you agree with the consensus, and the consensus ends up being wrong, you can always shrug your shoulders and say “well, nobody could have predicted …” So, it’s intellectually safer to just go along with the consensus, even if that consensus has been slowly driving the nation off a cliff for the past 30 years. Which brings us back to tariffs.

If you actually follow the stock market, you know that sometimes, line go down. But, in this particular instance, the line went down specifically because of the tariff policy of the present administration. So it’s worth asking: Are tariffs good? In order to answer this question, we first need to understand the actual strategy behind the tariff regime, beyond the histrionic headlines and “fell for it” memes.

In order to understand the tariff policies, we need to first understand the policy objectives. A good place to start is Steven Miran’s whitepaper A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System. Miran is one of Trump’s top economic advisors, and unlike you, dear reader, he is actual Elite Human Capital. He even has a shiny PhD in economics from Harvard and everything! But, what’s more important, is that Miran is not afraid to be heterodox. And seeing how “expert consensus” is what got us where we are in the first place, I think there is inherent value in heterodoxy.

The first thing to understand regarding the current situation vis a vie global trade, is that pretty much every country on earth has tariffs imposed on US imports, but the US has virtually no tariffs on them (until recently). This results in an unfavorable balance of trade for the United States. There is a reason for this. During the Cold War, the US was trying to bribe or entice countries to align with us against the Soviets. The idea was, seeing that the United States was essentially the world economic hegemon, we could afford to make slightly unfavorable trade deals with other countries, if it furthered our larger geo-strategic objectives.

And that’s probably true. I’m not criticizing the decisions of leaders from that time, it was the context of the Cold War, and it seems like a reasonable strategy. The problem is the Cold War is over, actually. And the United States is no longer the world’s largest creditor nation. In fact, we are the world’s largest debtor nation. Our middle class is being hollowed out. It’s time to reverse these policies.

Our negative trade imbalance has led to the process of deindustrialization in the United States, which most people recognize as a bad thing, although the “experts” assure us it’s no cause for concern. In fact, neoliberal shill organization CATO published this helpful infographic, which made the rounds on social media, to explain to the chuds that they are in fact stupid.

See, more people think there should be manufacturing jobs than actually want to work in manufacturing! Stupid chuds. Of course, you could do this with any job: How many people think there should be cops? How many people want to be police officers? Welp, better defund them.

The reality is that 80% of Americans (a bipartisan majority) realize that any self-respecting sovereign Nation needs an industrial base to be self-sufficient. And over 20% of working age Americans, that is to say over 40 million people, believe their lives would be materially better if they had a career in manufacturing. This despite the manipulative wording of the survey (the phrase working in manufacturing in the first question and working in a factory in the second have different connotations, even though they technically mean the same thing. This is a known tactic of politically-motivated surveys to engineer the desired response).

Can you imagine if Trump created 40 million manufacturing jobs in his second term? That would be astounding. Will it happen? I kind of doubt it, to be honest. There are a lot of reasons besides tariffs that companies moved their manufacturing offshore. One is labor costs. It’s tough to compete with a Vietnamese child who makes $2 a week.

What we really need in this country is some good old-fashioned Deflation. Which is why I was disappointed to see Trump temporarily suspend the tariffs a few weeks ago, just because the stonks went down a little. People are terrified of deflation because it’s associated with the Depression - but there are a lot of economic myths about the Depression that don't hold up to scrutiny. The thing you need to know is this: Inflation is when things get more expensive. Deflation is when things get cheaper.

Would it be so bad if, for example, the housing market went through a deflationary cycle? Depends on who you are, I guess. If you are a Boomer who put a reverse mortgage on your home so you could take a Viking Cruise to Norway, than yeah maybe it’s bad. If you are a 23 year old trying to buy your first home so you can start a family, a deflationary housing market would be fantastic. Of course, Boomers control the levers of power and only care about themselves, so they will do whatever they can to make sure that doesn’t happen. The question is, will the Boomers die off in time to save Western civilization?

But I digress. My point is this: Tariffs may or may not work. Or they may partly work. But, they are not the economic apocalypse the Left, and their lapdogs amongst the “Elite Human Capital” pretend that they are. If you find yourself upset that “stupid people” are in charge, I suggest you look inward. The responsibility, the noblisse oblige, if you will, of the ruling class is to provide for their constituents. If you fail in that duty, then you can’t act surprised when the people rise up and replace you. This will happen regardless of the “form” of your government. In a democracy, elite circulation is performed at the ballot box. In a monarchy, it’s performed with a guillotine. Regardless, you don’t get to continuously fuck up and stay in charge.

Pretending tariffs are some uniquely terrible economic policy wreaking havoc on America isn’t going to convince anyone to change their mind about Trump. More importantly, it isn’t going to convince anyone to change their mind about you.

First of all, I will say that I don’t much like listening to online “debates” these days, because they mostly just raise my blood pressure and nothing is actually accomplished by this. People who already agree with one side or the other cut clips of the best moments from “their guy” and then poast the uber pwnage on Twitter. Very few people’s minds are actually changed. It’s basically the podcasting version of Crossfire.

In the case of Smith v Murray, I already pretty much agree with Smith on all points, but that doesn’t automatically mean I think he won the debate. Back when I was a doctrinaire libertarian who thought he already knew everything, I would just assume that whoever was making the point that resonated best with me obviously won. Nowadays, whenever I hear a debate, I can’t help but put myself in the position of a neutral third party. Is the side that I agree with making their points in the best possible way? Is the “opposition” arguing their points effectively? Who’s actually winning?

Darryl Cooper

The first topic under discussion was Holocaust Revisionism, which Murray continued to conflate with Darryl Cooper, who is not a Holocaust revisionist. This was frustrating to listen to as a long-time subscriber and fan of the Martyr Made podcast, because it was very clear that Murray was not at all familiar with who Cooper is or what his content is about. Multiple times he incorrectly referred to Cooper as a “comedian,” and insinuated that he was just “talking shit” without doing any research whatsoever. I understood why what he was saying was absurd, because I have the context on Cooper, but I kept wondering what a person who wasn’t familiar with Cooper’s work would take away from the discussion.

There is a phenomenon, labelled by Michael Crichton as “the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect,” where a person will read a newspaper article on a subject that they know well, and immediately identify all the places where the journalist got it wrong, and how much misinformation it contains, etc. But then they will flip to another article and read about a subject with which they are unfamiliar, and accept the journalist’s claims as gospel. I wonder what someone who is as unfamiliar with Darryl Cooper as Douglas Murray clearly is would take away from that exchange.

Did Rogan and Smith adequately convey their points in defense of Cooper? I’m honestly asking because I don’t know. I kept hoping that Rogan would bring up Dan Carlin (which he finally did, briefly), but I don’t know that he made the point I was making in my mind. So, I’m going to armchair quarterback a little bit here, acknowledging that I am in no way a “debater” and that fielding arguments and rebuttals in real time is incredibly stressful and difficult, and I certainly would not be better at it than Dave Smith.

The first thing I would like to acknowledge is that Murray is describing a phenomenon that is sometimes deployed. This was actually very popular in the early 2010’s, at the height of the “fake news comedy show” era of political discourse in America. Shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were incredibly popular. Especially, as one might imagine, on the left. But even centrists and moderates watched these shows because they were funny. There was a study from around 2012 that showed more Americans got their news from The Daily Show then from any other source.

Of course, Jon Stewart and company had a particular ideological perspective, and they biased their “reporting” in that direction. But, if some policy nerd showed up to “but, akshully” them when they were being misleading or were even straight-up wrong, they would retreat behind the “I’m just a comedian” excuse. This is the kind of motte and bailey strategy that Murray was accusing Cooper of engaging in, but it’s clear that Murray hasn’t upgraded his firmware in a decade.

The reason I thought bringing up Dan Carlin was important was because it seemed to me that Murray was unfamiliar with what a history podcast actually is. He kept saying that Cooper is “not a historian,” but that he talks about history on a podcast, and that’s … wrong … because he doesn’t “know what he’s talking about.”

Dan Carlin also has a long-form history podcast called Hardcore History, which is quite good - although I find his politics abhorrent and am increasingly finding it difficult to disassociate the artist from the art. But, for example, his multi-part series on WWI, Blueprint for Armageddon, is objectively fantastic. One of my all-time favorite podcast series, I would say. Carlin is also quite careful to reiterate to his audience that he is not a historian. He’s just a guy who is interested in history and likes telling stories.

What he means by this is that he is not actively involved in the academic pursuit of History. He is not doing independent research. He is not combing the archives, as they say. But that’s not the same as saying he is uninformed. Dan Carlin is incredibly well-read in the historic topics that he covers. As is Darryl Cooper. Dan Carlin has also had some spicy takes on Churchill (although it’s now apparently paywalled). I think taking a step back and explaining to the audience what a historical podcast is and what we mean when we say someone isn’t a historian would have made the pro-Cooper case stronger.

In a way, it’s a bummer that Murray conflated Cooper with his broader point because I think he actually had something reasonable to add to the conversation. His argument was basically that, yes, the “experts” have fucked everything up over the past decade or two, but that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. We can’t just decide to start giving “equal weight” to the opinion of any random twitter anon that we do to people who have spent decades acquiring expertise in a given field.

I don’t know that I fully agree with him. I think the current “expert” class in the west has so thoroughly beclowned itself that there is a strong argument for just sending them all to Greenland to work in the mines. But, that is at least a debate that would have been interesting, instead it got muddied with arguments about what Darryl Cooper believes about the Holocaust. (Again, Cooper is not a Holocaust revisionist).

Ukraine

I think Dave Smith “won” the Ukraine portion of the debate handily. Maybe that’s just my personal biases, but I can’t imagine too many people were persuaded by Murray on this one, and he himself changed the subject rather quickly to the Middle East and Israel, so I think he could sense that he was losing.

Maybe if you were already a diehard Ukraine supporter, Murray came out ahead? I don’t know. He kept making the claim that Putin wanted to invade Germany and reconstitute the Soviet Union, an argument that even people on his side have abandoned. There is also this moment where he makes an absurd straw-man out of Smith’s position, implying that he blames America for every action of every country in the world. When Smith calls him out on this, he backtracks, saying “oh I’m not saying you’re saying this, just that some people say this.” Ok, but right now you are debating Dave Smith. So if Dave Smith is not saying that, then why the fuck are you bringing it up?

He also does this weird thing where he “calls out” Smith for quoting foreign policy luminaries who were opposed to NATO expansion, as if this is somehow ideologically inconsistent with his earlier critique of the “experts.” I can’t imagine this tactic was particularly persuasive to a neutral third party.

Dave Smith: George Kennan warned that NATO expansion would provoke an aggressive response from the Russians.

Douglas Murray: So now we believe the experts?

I feel like even people who agree with Murray were groaning on that one. Was Murray trying to say that he didn’t believe the experts when it comes the foreign policy in Eastern Europe? The reality is he just didn’t have a response. He repeatedly asserted without evidence that NATO expansion didn’t provoke Russia, and when Smith quoted literal “foreign policy experts,” which Murray had been bemoaning the lack of for the past hour, he didn’t even have his own experts that he could cite in response. Sad.

Israel

This is probably the issue I have the most ambivalence about personally. This is actually because I listened to the aforementioned Darryl Cooper’s fantastic long-form history podcast Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem which gives an incredibly detailed, balanced, and nuanced perspective on this 100 year long conflict. I can honestly see both sides of the issue, so Murray had the opportunity to win me over.

He didn’t. I don’t know that Smith killed it on this one either, but a lot of Murray’s points seemed very one-dimensional to me. Like he was almost purposefully excluding context. Going back to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, I wonder if his arguments would be more effective on someone who hadn’t listened to 30+ hours of podcast content on the subject, and then read multiple books about it which were recommended by the podcaster. His best argument was probably when he pointed out that the purpose of the blockade was to prevent weapons from entering Gaza. His worst argument was the assertion that a two-state solution had already been implemented in 2005. Talk about “fringe” perspectives. Literally nobody thinks that.

He was also doing the weird thing again, where he pretends that quoting Likud government officials or The World Bank is somehow incompatible with Smith’s position vis-a-vie experts. For the record, I am not convinced of the degree to which Likud was actually funding Hamas in order to forestall peace talks, but again, if he wanted to refute that claim he would have had to provide counter-evidence.

This was also the section that is being most meme’d for his claim that you have to physically go somewhere in order to know what’s going on there.

To be honest though, I understand the point he was making. It wasn’t a great point, but it wasn’t the worst one. I thought the fact that he was insinuating that the World Bank was lying about the economic impact of the Israeli blockade was a worse argument. But then Smith only had stats on the economic impact of the 1997 blockade, which wasn’t the blockade in question, so I don’t know. I guess I have to go do my own research now?

He should have said that of course there is an economic impact from a blockade, but seeing that the purpose of the blockade was to prevent weapons from getting into the hands of terrorists, who were actively firing rockets into Israel, that’s kind of on them. To be fair, he did make the second part of that point (that the blockade was intended to prevent weapons entering Gaza), but he was also trying to deny the economic impact of the blockade which seems silly to me.

When I think about geopolitics, I always think about what I would do if I was playing Hearts of Iron IV or some such strategy game. That’s really the best way to think about it, because realpolitik is basically amoral. If I was Putin and my geopolitical rival was trying to bring Ukraine into an anti-Russian military alliance, I would invade to prevent it. If I was Netanyahu and an extremely hostile regime was launching rocket attacks across the border at civilians in my country, I would enact a blockade to prevent them from obtaining weapons. Simple as.

But was Netanyahu actually maneuvering behind the scenes to ensure that Hamas retained power in Gaza so as to prevent peace talks and an inevitable two-state solution? Smith quoted sources within the Israeli government (including Netanyahu himself) which seemed to indicate that was the case. Is that persuasive to a neutral third party, or does that sound too conspiratorial and it will turn off normies? Hard to say.

All and all, I think the debate was just a Rorschach test for the viewer’s pre-existing opinion, and reflects the current debate that seems to be emerging in what can generally be referred to as “the right wing.”

Fundamentally, I think this divide boils down to the degree to which you believe the institutions of the West have been subverted. To the Douglas Murray crowd, neoliberalism is essentially good, some people just got a little carried away with the pronoun stuff. Fundamentally, corporate media, the academic institutions, and the government bureaucracy are trustworthy and just need a little tweaking. I think this perspective massively underestimates the scale of the problem. I will have to elaborate my thoughts on this in more detail in a future poast, but I think Auron MacIntyre sums it up succinctly in his recent article:

This moment terrifies the ruling class. Its members' entire strategy relied on institutional consensus to shape truth and steer public opinion. This is why disillusioned liberal voices like Sam Harris or Douglas Murray, once celebrated for challenging orthodoxy, now beg the public to get back in the box and stop asking questions.

Today I’m going to write about monetary policy. Riveting stuff, amirite? But as we shall see, it is important. And hopefully, if I do my job well, it will actually be less confusing than it initially seems.

Pretty much everyone is familiar with the value provided by having a currency as a means of exchange, but just to make sure we aren’t skipping any steps, let’s talk briefly about the benefits of monetary exchange versus straight barter.

In a barter system, goods and services are exchanged directly whenever trade is conducted. I have chickens, and therefore my cup runneth over with eggs. But I don’t have apple trees, or cows. It would be to my benefit to exchange some of my eggs for someone else’s apples, or milk. But how many eggs are equal to how many apples? Or what quantity of milk? Without a medium of exchange, we must arrive individually at a fair exchange of goods every time we make a trade. The more complex the economy becomes, the more untenable this situation grows.

For example, how many eggs are equal to one chair? Probably more than my chickens are capable of producing at one time. And what is the carpenter supposed to do with all those eggs before they go bad? In this case, it would be beneficial for both of us if we had some asset that could be used as a store of value. If I could save the value of multiple egg exchanges, until I had accumulated enough value to purchase a chair. If the carpenter could accept payment for the chair, and not worry that the value of the payment would rapidly depreciate if not used immediately. Enter money.

The Evolution of Money

A natural money is a money that arises organically within a society. That is to say, without government mandate. In a completely “free market,” individuals are free to use whatever medium of exchange they choose. You and I can trade in bottle caps, if we want. Over time, the best “monies” will dominate the market, and these are what we call natural monies. Historically, this has been the precious metals, specifically gold and silver. But it doesn’t have to be. Gold and silver did not become money via government fiat, but rather through market forces.

This is important as Goldbug types will often criticize Bitcoiners, claiming that bitcoin is not “real money” because it’s in the computer or something. But, as long as enough people choose to do business in bitcoin, that is to say, use it as a medium of exchange rather than simply as an investment vehicle, then it would absolutely qualify as a natural money. Whereas a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) would not, since it would be enforced currency via government fiat.

However, thousands of years ago there were no computers, so people chose to trade in precious metals. But they weren’t just using lumps of metal. That would hardly be better than direct exchange. One of the major benefits of metals as a means of exchange is that they lend themselves well to coinage. Coinage is the act of standardizing weights and measures. Rather than needing to carefully measure the exact amount of metal being used in the exchange, both parties can rest assured that each coin is the same weight, and the amount of metal being exchanged can be quickly calculated by simply counting up the coins.

But, this introduces a problem. If we are trading using coins, who is minting the coins? A coin is only useful if it was issued by a trustworthy source. Otherwise, we will still have to go through the trouble of weighing the coins to make sure that they actually weigh what they claim to weigh. A modern person might assume that the minter must be a government, but historically this is not the case.

A trustworthy coin is actually more valuable than just it’s weight, because of its usefulness in facilitating trade. There is therefore a premium on trustworthy coinage - meaning people are willing to pay a higher price for coins than for bullion. Historically, entrepreneurial-minded individuals were able to make a living by minting “true” coins, and selling them at a premium. This system worked well, because competition between minters kept them honest. However, once governments exerted monopoly control over the money supply, problems ensued.

On the surface, it’s easy to see why many people believed a government monopoly on money production was a good thing. After all, we wouldn’t want to leave such an important task to the hands of private individuals. They might do something untoward, like counterfeit coinage. This is the impulse that drives much of Leftist policies, such as government monopolies on education, healthcare, food distribution, etc. The idea is that individual people are untrustworthy, but groups of people with a monopoly on force are honest. However, history has shown that governments are, if anything, less reliable when it comes to money production, precisely because of their enforced monopoly status.

Quick Detour: Inflation is Bad

The term “debasement” comes from the practice, dating back to Roman times, of adding base metals into coins during the minting process. Governments did this in order to decrease the actual precious metal content in each coin, and thus inflate the money supply. Jorg Guido Hulsmann, in his book The Ethics of Money Production, defines inflation as such:

Inflation is an extension of the nominal quantity of any medium of exchange beyond the quantity that would have been produced on the free market. Since the expression “free market” is shorthand for the somewhat long-winded “social cooperation conditioned by the respect of private property rights,” the meaning of inflation is that it extends the nominal money supply through a violation of property rights. In this sense, inflation can also be called a forcible way of increasing the money supply, as distinct from the “natural” production of money through mining and minting. This was also the original meaning of the word, which stems from the Latin verb inflare (to blow up).

Inflation is caused by the fact that “prices” are always relative. Thinking back to our barter example, we are pricing apples in terms of eggs. The price of each commodity is dependent on their relative scarcity. If everyone on my street has their own chickens, my eggs become less valuable because everyone already has eggs. The same is true with money. When I price my eggs in dollars, I am comparing the relative scarcity of my eggs with the relative scarcity of money.

If there is, for example, an outbreak of bird flu which decreases the quantity of available eggs, than each of my eggs is worth more in terms of dollars. However, if the egg industry overcorrects in the future and produces way more eggs than people need, egg prices will drop accordingly.

But, just as we can think of eggs as priced in dollars, we can think of dollars as priced in eggs. The more dollars in circulation, the less eggs each individual dollar will be worth. This is where it becomes valuable to hold a monopoly on money production. If I am able to create new dollars, then I can use those dollars to buy eggs, apples, or whatever I need, before the increase in dollar supply causes a general dollar devaluation. As Hulsmann writes,

Why do people inflate the money supply in the first place? As we have seen, each new money unit benefits the first recipients; for example, under a silver standard, the miners and minters of silver. We here encounter a providential incentive for the natural production of money. But we must not ignore that the benefits that accrue to the first recipient also present a constant temptation to forcibly increase the money supply. The history of monetary institutions is very much the history of how people - governments and private citizens alike, but mostly governments - have given in to this temptation. People inflate the money supply because they stand to profit from it.

The money producer benefits from increase in the money supply, because they are able to use the new money to buy goods and services at current prices. In other words, that money functions at full value for them, but then devalues the existing money held by the rest of society.

Fractional Reserve Lending

The value of the coin comes from two places. There is the value of the actual metal, and the additional value of the “certification” provided by the stamp. Assuming both buyer and seller trust the mint, you can exchange a silver coin marked “1 oz” for 1 ounce silvers worth of of goods without bothering to weigh it. Taking this one step further, in a high trust society, you could theoretically provide the seller instead with a piece of paper marked “Redeemable for 1 oz Silver.” Again, assuming both buyer and seller trusted the institution issuing the paper, this trade can happen.

These so-called “bank notes” started becoming popular in the 1600s to facilitate the explosion of trade happening in Western Europe during that time. It’s easier to trade back and forth pieces of paper than to lug about sacks of doubloons or what-have-yous. However, we should pay attention to what a bank note is not. A bank note is not actual “money,” properly defined. A bank note is an IOU, redeemable at the issuing bank for actual money.

While this system presents a lot of advantages in terms of storage and transportation, it introduces a particular moral hazard, which you may already have guessed. Because the vast majority of bank notes in circulation are never actually redeemed, there is an opportunity for an unscrupulous issuer to simply issue notes for which they have no reserves. (And they could be any ethnicity by the way, why did you immediately think that?) As we covered above, these issuers would then be able to profit by using the new notes at current prices, before their wider circulation caused an inflationary effect.

As Hulsmann notes, the history of money production is basically a history of monetary institutions giving in to the temptation of inflationary activities. But, as long as the banks in question were private institutions, this impetus was somewhat checked by the possibility of a bank run. A bank run occurs when some event spooks the market, and suddenly a majority of the holders of bank notes try to redeem them at the same time. If the bank doesn’t actually have the reserves necessary to redeem the notes, then its gg well played.

But, what if I told you there was a way to privatize your gains but socialize your losses? Enter government. The first example is the Bank of England, founded in 1694 explicitly for the purpose of loaning money to the government of England to finance wartime expenditures. In exchange for providing blind loans to the government, the BoE was granted several legal privileges, including the right to suspend payments. In other words, they could simply tell customers “Saar, do not redeem” if they so chose. And in fact, they did so choose as early as 1696 during a currency shortage. In 1751, the BoE was given monopoly rights over the administration of public debts in England, and in 1812, BoE notes were granted legal tender status.

The step of making a specific bank note legal tender was an extremely consequential one. Up until this point, if a particular bank was deemed untrustworthy by the public, people could simply not use their notes. This served, again, as a check on inflationary practices. But once the government of England required citizens to accept Bank of England notes by making them legal tender, the bank was free to issue as many as it wanted without fear of repercussions. In fact, it was encouraged to do this by the fact that the government would continue to borrow large sums of money from it, money that both parties had to know didn’t previously exist.

However, the Bank of England proceeded fairly conservatively in it’s inflationary practices. This is because they understood that what they were doing was harmful to the economy. Therefore, the expansion of government-backed fractional reserve lending happened over the course of many decades. For example, I claimed above that BoE notes were made legal tender in 1812, and this is true, but legal tender status was removed again in 1819, and then granted again in 1833 - but only for sums greater than £5. And up until 1931, the entire system was, at least theoretically, tied to gold, which was the actual money underlying the complex web of legal fictions propping up the BoE notes.

In 1931, gold was replaced by US Dollars as the reserve currency of the Bank of England. This was a natural extension of what had become the status quo. By this time, private banks in England were no longer holding gold money in reserve, but rather Bank of England notes. Holdings in private banks could be exchanged for BoE notes. BoE notes could, theoretically be exchanged for gold money, but in practice this was almost never done. Why not just replace gold with dollars? (There were practical considerations for this stemming from the financial catastrophes of WWI).

But ultimately, gold was still the reserve currency in the US. While private banks in the US held their reserves in Federal Reserve notes (the central bank of the US, established in 1914), the Federal Reserve still held it’s reserves in gold. So, again, theoretically, Federal Reserve notes could be redeemed for gold money. Although, again, in practice this never happened. So Bank of England notes could be redeemed for Dollars, which could then be redeemed for gold.

By 1944, all the rest of the developed world had followed Englands lead, and the US Dollar became the world’s reserve currency. This is what was known as the “Bretton Woods System,” since the scheme was concocted at an international conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Basically, the plan was that all the world’s gold reserves would be stored in one place (Fort Knox), and the Federal Reserve’s would be the only bank note redeemable for gold. Everyone else would redeem their notes in Federal Reserve notes.

This gave the United States almost unilateral control over global inflation. Not quite unilateral, as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were also created at Bretton Woods, specifically in a (failed) attempt to soften US economic hegemony. But, because there was now no true competing currency checking the ability of the Federal Reserve to engage in monetary inflation, it was merely a matter of time before it exercised it’s right to “suspend payments,” and this is precisely what it did in 1971. Under President Nixon, the US declared that it’s currency would no longer be redeemable for gold. The world was officially on a “fiat” system. I would highly encourage the reader to click the above link and review some of the economic data resulting from this decision, but in case you can’t be bothered, here are some of the graphs I personally find most compelling.

Fiat Paper Money

So, we find ourselves in a situation now where all of our money is completely divorced from any type of physical commodity, and the powers that be can simply create more of it whenever they want. This is what people mean when they colloquially speak about “printing money.”

In my experience, when a relatively smart person hears that the Federal Reserve is “printing money,” they assume that it must be more complicated than that. They can’t just be making money up, right? But, while there are certainly obfuscatory steps in the process, it actually really is that simple. There are several ways in which the Federal Reserve can increase the money supply, including “lending” money to member banks at near zero interest, or purchasing treasury bonds.

When the US government needs more money, it sells a Treasury Bond. Which is to say it gets a loan. (A bond is a loan, where the purchaser of the bond is entitled to receive the cost of the bond plus interest at an agreed upon date from the bond issuer). When there is nobody else willing to buy Treasuries (or at least, to buy them at the current interest rate), the Federal Reserve serves as the “lender of last resort,” and “buys” the bond with newly issued bank notes. In the aftermath of 2008, the Federal Reserve overtook China as the single largest purchaser of US Treasury bonds. In response to Covid, the Federal Reserve became the purchaser of the majority of new government debt.

These loans were made with newly “printed” Federal Reserve notes, backed by nothing except the “full faith and credit” of the US government, which seems somewhat circular since the government is also the debtor in this situation. It’s no surprise then that the cumulative inflation since 1913 has been over 3000%.

So-called Modern Monetary Theory holds that this system is sustainable, akshully. Government-backed banks can simply print infinite money, forever. This is pure, unadulterated midwitery. This is Francis Fukuyama’s End of History: Economics Edition. Because this system hasn’t collapsed for the last few decades, it can continue apace into the future, forever. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Stock Market

Here is a chart of SPY as of close of business Friday, April 4th. I use SPY as a basic measure of the stock market because it is an index fund that tracks the S&P 500, and because I personally own around $100k worth of SPY, so I care what the price is. As you can see, there is a fairly clear trend line here. (Namely: Up). But, this should not be confused for organic growth reflecting a healthy economy. In fact, when compared with all other metrics of a healthy economy, like purchasing power parity, home ownership rates, workforce participation rates, etc, the stock market seems to be inversing general economic trends. What this actually reflects is the acceleration of monetary inflation pumping Federal Reserve notes into asset bubbles.

In January of 1997, SPY opened at $74.38. By January of 2008, on the eve of the housing crash, it was $146.53; it had just about doubled in eleven years. Did the actual US economy double during this time? Its pretty hard to argue that this is the case. Yes, there was a lot of growth in the tech sector specifically with the rise of e-commerce and the dotcom boom (and subsequent bust), but this was also a period of rapid deindustrialization as the US transitioned to a “service economy.” What this actually represents is an asset bubble, which initially popped in the housing market, but then impacted the wider financial markets.

When the bubble finally popped, the Fed cut interest rates and instituted Quantitative Easing specifically designed to blow air back into the bubble. By January of 2018, ten years later, SPY closed at $281.90, having doubled again. Is anyone really even attempting to argue that the US economic output doubled during the 2010s? This is a period that saw home ownership rates hit historic lows. Inflation-adjusted real incomes plummeted. Americans were so disillusioned with the economy that they elected an orange game show host who promised to fix it.

But all that is nothing compared to the post-covid bubble. After a brief downturn in March of 2020, the Fed pulled out all the stops to keep the financial party going. Within just seven years, SPY went from $281.90 in 2018 to $601.82 in January of 2025. More than double. At this same time, price inflation went through the roof while every economic indicator signaled a declining standard of living for the average American. If there was ever an indictment of “line goes up” economics, it was the Covid era.

Which brings us to last week. While the Trump tariffs are certainly the proximate cause of the current downturn, the hyperbolic cries from the “elite human capital” that this is the end of America seem a tad overwrought. Trump certainly has a strategy here, some of which I think he will accomplish. Here’s what is likely to happen over the next few weeks and months: There will be blustering headlines from the EU and so on about retaliatory tariffs, the stock market will sell off. Then, the governments in question will get together and negotiate terms that will be acceptable to both parties. The tariffs will be reduced. The Fed will bring interest rates back to zero, the stock market will go back up. The big financial institutions will continue to make money hand over fist while the purchasing power of your paycheck continues to decline.

So what can you do to protect yourself in these trying times? Man, I should really paywall this incredibly valuable, actionable information that I’m about to impart to you. But I’m not going to because I’m such a cool guy.

Buy the dip.

Whenever there is a market drop, it’s because people are panic selling. But, for every trade, there has to be both a buyer and a seller. The way it works is this: people wanting to sell offer an Asking price, and people looking to buy offer a Bid. No transaction can take place unless the Bids match the Asks. So, if the Bids are below the Asks, one of two things has to happen. Either the Bidder has to raise the price they are willing to buy at, or the Asker has to lower the price they are willing to sell at.

In a bullish market, Bidders get greedy and raise their Bids to match the Asks. This is the actual mechanism that is causing the price to increase. In a bearish market, the sellers are fearful and lower their price to offload their stocks. The trick to making money in the market is to be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy. This is actually incredibly difficult, because human beings run mostly on emotion. And it’s very emotionally trying to watch “line go down” when the line represents your own money. This is why even “professional” traders often lose money in the stock market. It’s a lot easier if you are actually Autistic. I’m not autistic, but I hedge with potatoes so I tend to do okay because I don’t really care about my investments. It’s all just fake Federal Reserve notes anyway, remember?

The last time I loaded up on SPY was actually in the aforementioned March of 2020, when everyone was in full-blown Covid panic and the price crashed from the $320s down to a low of $218. I’m not pretending that I timed the bottom exactly, of course; I actually wished that the downturn would have lasted longer so I had more time to dollar cost average in. But I did buy a bunch of SPY around the $250 spot.

Similarly, the market has been getting soft (like your penis) for awhile now and I have been thinking it was about time to sell some SPY. I wanted to free up some cash to dollar cost average into QYLD as the market sold off. Unfortunately, I had sold calls on SPY which don’t expire until April 17th, so I was kind of stuck holding until then. I wish Donnie T had waited two weeks to announce the Tariffpocalypse, but it is what it is. I would definitely not recommend selling anything right now, especially if you bought the top like a retard. Buying high and selling low is the opposite of a good trading strategy.

Unsurprisingly then, the Left has cast about for whatever copium they could find to salvage their shattered egos. And they seem to have found it with this:

Doubling down on the elitism that has made them so incredibly popular, the Left’s big talking point now is that the smart people voted for Harris. If only those stupid Walmart-Americans would stop voting against their own interests! Of course, this is not exactly a ringing endorsement of “Muh Sacred Democracy,” but at least the Leftoids are willing to concede that some people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. I agree. But is it true that Leftists are just so much smarter than us dumb-dumb MAGAtards?

It is true that the college educated have a higher average IQ than the non-college educated, although that gap has shrunk massively in the years since WWII (from an average of 119 in 1939 to just 102 as of 2024). This is largely a downstream effect of the Lyndon Johnson era “Great Society” initiative, in which the Democrats pushed an expansion of the Education system and attempted to get more Americans into university. From President Johnson’s 1968 address to Congress:

It is one of the triumphs of American democracy that college is no longer a privilege for the few. Last fall, more than 50 percent of our high school graduates went on to college. It is our goal by 1976 to increase that number to two-thirds.

Johnson meant well. He was operating on the assumption that sending Americans to college would improve their lives, and he wanted everyone to have the opportunity to attend university. He said as much in a famous speech at Michigan University, where he offered the clever turn-of-phrase:

Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

The problem is, the galaxy-brains on the Left mixed up cause and effect with regards to education. It wasn’t that educated people were successful, it was that successful people were educated. In other words, the kind of person who was likely to succeed in other areas of life was also likely to succeed in college. A college education thus served a credentialing function; a way for a bright young person to demonstrate their value. By increasing the number of people attending university, they were actually devaluing the diploma. Think of it this way, if everyone in America received a four-year degree, we would still need gas station attendants. We would just have college-educated gas station attendants.

As it currently stands, while the value of a college degree has declined precipitously in recent decades, it still serves it’s function as a credentialing mechanism. Only now, rather than demonstrating elite status, it signals your nominal fitness for a middle-class corporate job. Children from middle-class families are admonished from a tender age that they absolutely must attend college in order to find white-collar work, as befits their socio-economic status. And this is true. You simply won’t get your foot in the door at any kind of office job without a degree. This is regrettable, as college has mostly become an expensive waste of time for anyone outside of STEM. But it is still, unfortunately, the case.

Therefore, while the average IQ of college students is declining, it is still higher than the non-college educated. This is the meagre scrap upon which the Left now hangs the entirety of their self-esteem. But, does this automatically mean that Harris voters are smarter? Let’s dig into the numbers.

I somewhat provocatively titled this essay “The Myth of the High IQ Liberal,” but obviously there are some smart Leftists. As a very stable genius once said, “there are good people on both sides.” But, for every Slavoj Zizek character, there are literally thousands of Starbucks baristas with unsightly nose rings and $100k in student debt that they will never pay off. Not all college graduates are equally intelligent. And while it is true that Harris beat Trump amongst “college-educated” voters, it was only a 13 point margin (55% for Harris, 42% for Trump). It’s my contention that the 13 point gap consists entirely of midwits.

First, it should go without saying that not all degree fields are created equal. There is an extremely wide gap between the majors with the highest average IQ and the majors with the lowest average IQ. According to one study, the average IQ of Physics graduates (the highest) was 133, whereas the average IQ of Social Work graduates (the lowest) was a measly 103 - just barely above average.

As an aside, we don’t have any data on the “Activist Disciplines” specifically - Gender Studies, African-American Studies, etc. They have been rolled up into “Other Social Science.” My biased intuition is that these fields, if they were separated out, would have a lower average IQ than Social Work.

While don’t know the voting demographics broken down by degree program, we do have data on voting demographics broken down by gender. Trump did much better amongst college-educated men than college-educated women. Why is this important? Because fully 80% of Physics majors are male.

We can therefore extrapolate that Trumps support amongst Physics majors is closer to the “College-educated males” breakdown than to the “Overall college.” Meaning he’s about 50-50. The numbers look even better for Trump when we consider that 68% of Physics majors are white, and he was actually +2 with college-educated white males.

But what about on the bottom end of the IQ ladder? What’s the percentage of males with Social Work degrees? It’s almost completely the inverse of Physics, with male students making up around 20%. This means that, amongst Social Work majors, the Trump support probably reflects the “College-educated females” breakdown, where Harris beats him handily.

With Trump taking a disproportionate share of the Physics majors, and Harris taking a disproportionate share of the Social Work majors, the average IQ of a college-educated Trump supporter is actually higher than the average IQ of a college-educated Harris supporter. To demonstrate this, let’s take a simplified example of 100 Physics majors and 100 Social Work majors, and assume that they break down more-or-less according the the gender distributions. The calculations would look like this:

Trump supporters: ((48 * 133) + (37 * 103)) / 85 = 119.94 average IQ

Harris supporters: ((49 * 133) + (61 * 103)) / 110 = 116.36 average IQ

While there are more total Harris supporters, the average IQ among Trump supporters is higher. And this is just for the top and bottom college majors on the list. It turns out that the pattern holds across the entire spectrum of degree programs, with percentage of female students being inversely correlated with IQ:

The more male-dominated a particular field is, the higher the average IQ. And, presumably, the higher the percentage of Trump support. I’m not saying this just to shit on women, by the way. But, it is a known fact that women stack up in the center of the IQ distribution graph, while men tend to have longer tails. This means that both the dumbest and the smartest people tend to be men, while women tend to be midwits. It is to the midwit that the modern Democratic party primarily appeals, due to their emphasis on groupthink, conformity, and appeals to authority. It’s literally the meme.

Now, it is also true that Trump is incredibly popular amongst the working class, and the IQ’s of the non-college educated Trump supporter pulls our averages way down. But, this is not something that the smartypants rightoid should be embarrassed about. This is the foundational premise of noblesse oblige. Caesar was a Populares, not an Optimates. Trump is popular with the plebs because he promotes policies that benefit them. This is what a leader is supposed to do. I’m old enough to remember when the Left was actually interested in the well-being of the working class as well, before they pivoted their marketing strategy to target faggots and troons.

Truth is, the insufferable smugness of the common pseudo-intellectual Leftist is a mask covering deep insecurity. These folks know deep down how aggressively mediocre they are. This is why they must constantly signal to anyone willing to listen how incredibly intelligent they are. A true elite is confident in himself and his abilities, and cognizant of his responsibilities towards those he would presume to rule.

If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons, than you know that there is a difference between your INT score and your WIS score. Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

If you want to increase your Wisdom score, than you should buy my friend GLO’s book, The Pillars of Wisdom.

If you are familiar with GLOs substack then you are already familiar with his absurdist, irreverent humor (If not you should check him out). And while there is plenty of that in here, nestled within are also some deep insights that I found very valuable. If you want to learn more about navigating career, relationships, and just basic human psychology in our fake and gay economy, I would highly recommend it. Plus, you’ll be supporting a fellow Substacker and independent author, which is always a good thing.

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Amongst the myriad midwits clogging my comments section with their bad faith arguments in the same manner that they’ve clogged their own arteries with high fructose corn syrup, I picked up on a theme. I call this the Psychology of the Blue-Pilled Regime Enjoyer.

Because it was entirely people of the blue-pilled persuasion who were acting like snarky faggots in the comment section. The Hitler Lovin’ Nazis were all chill. This tends to support my personal thesis that most “Holocaust Revisionism” online is a phenomena of “strong opinions, weakly held.”

These gentlemen intuit (correctly) that the dominant narrative is bullshit propaganda. More importantly, it’s propaganda that has been specifically weaponized against them and their cohort. So, they cast about for alternative theories, and, while there is apparently some evidence in support of “Revision”, for the most part they aren’t married to these positions.

Blue-pillers, one the other hand, have no such mental flexibility. To them, WWII is “settled science” and anyone who would dare blaspheme against the holy word of the Cathedral must be cast down. I use the term “blaspheme” intentionally here, because World War II is the foundational mythology of the Boomer Era (which is coming to an end). By mythology, I don’t mean that the war didn’t happen. Obviously, it did. Rather I’m merely observing that the official narrative interpretation of the war serves as the moral foundation of the current world order.

And it is an interpretation, not a fact. Facts by themselves are merely minutiae, they can be right or wrong. But a theory is the interpretation of those facts, which can be more or less convincing based on how effectively it marshals the existing facts to form a consistent narrative. For that reason, I’m thinking of doing a whole series where I dig into WWII with more granularity, since it’s impossible to cover in it’s entirety in a single blog poast. But, that is a a huge commitment, and ultimately I think unnecessary. Pat Buchanan already did that better than I could anyway. So, we’ll see.

It’s very important to Boomer mythology that German aggression and genocide were inevitable, and absolutely nothing could have been done differently to obtain a better outcome. Nobody objected to my comparison of the Soviets and the Nazis. Almost nobody disagreed that the war guarantee was a bad idea - other than to defend Churchill’s role in it, since he was apparently a weak appeaser who didn’t care about Polish territorial integrity. The womanly hysterics were reserved for the mere suggestion that the Allies actions in WWII made the situation worse, and that different choices could have led to a better outcome.

This is what the Boomer mind cannot accept. In the official story, where the Nazi’s were always intent on genocide, the West’s participation in World War II can be seen at worst as net neutral. We weren’t able to prevent the Holocaust, but at least we tried, and we punished the perpetrators. We were on the Right Side of History. But, if we suggest that maybe the war led to the Holocaust, than the West’s participation wasn’t net neutral, it was actually net negative.

In his book The Pillars of Wisdom, describes the psychology of the average American thusly:

Americans place themselves as either the victims, the persecutor, or the rescuer. Their assigned roles define everything that they do. The victim’s role is to suffer - every action expresses pain. Everything the persecutor does causes the victim pain and harm. The rescuer must sympathize with the victim and punish the persecutor. The rescuer does not ease the victim’s suffering or cause change. There are even hierarchies of victims and persecutors: everyone must know their place in this endless game.

This psychology is downstream from the foundational myth of the Boomer Cycle of History, which takes an identical form. As above, so below. Hitler is the Ultimate Persecutor, Jews the Ultimate Victim, and Churchill the Ultimate Rescuer. It doesn’t matter that nothing Churchill (or America) did benefitted the victims. The Holocaust happened anyway. Poland was occupied anyway. This is actually not a bug but a feature. After all, if the victims’ suffering was alleviated, they wouldn’t be victims anymore, would they?

This is the fundamental presupposition of Gay Race Communism as well. It’s true that Leftists now hate Winston Churchill for being a Racist and an Imperialist (to his credit, he was both these things). But, they will still flip on a dime and use the Churchill-Chamberlain dichotomy if you dare suggest, for example, that America should be more concerned with its own borders than with Ukraines.

This is also why my good friend Walt’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion of giving blacks reparations in the hopes of finally shutting them up would ultimately fail. It’s not just that 90% of blacks would waste their reparations money on sneakers and be broke again in three months, it also runs counter to the entire narrative of the Boomer Age that an aggrieved party could ever be made whole. We see this with the fact that, despite having a clear statistical advantage in the hiring and promotion process due to DEI, we never once heard an acknowledgment from the black “community” that their situation was improving.

Most of those on the Ascendant Right (formerly known as Dissident) are familiar with the case against Civil Rights, but in case you are not, briefly:

Civil Rights law made it illegal to discriminate in the hiring practice based on certain protected attributes, like race. But, proving racial discrimination in the hiring practice is a tricky thing. After all, if I hire a white guy instead of a black guy, how can you say for sure that it was because of racism. Even if the black guy had an objectively “superior” resume, graduated from a better school, had more years of experience, etc, that doesn’t automatically make him the correct choice. If it was that simple, there would be no need for an interview, just compute the “best” resume based on these criteria and hire that person, sight unseen.

Obviously there is a level of subjectivity in the hiring process, there has to be. This means a racist hiring manager can come up with all sorts of ephemeral reasons why he didn’t like this or that candidate. This is where Disparate Impact comes in.

Because it’s impossible to prove discrimination in the hiring practice (unless the hiring manager is a complete retard and straight up says “I don’t hire blacks”), the courts have ruled that the outcome of the hiring practice is enough to demonstrate culpability. In other words, if a plaintiff can show that a companies hiring practice has resulted in an unrepresentative number of a minorities being hired, than that hiring practice has a disparate impact on said minorities, regardless of whether its intentional or not.

There was even a case of a company using a random number generator to select candidates from a large pool. It sounds like one of those clickbait “Oh the Left thinks Math is racist!” articles, but it was actually ruled that, because enough blacks were unlucky, that random number generators are in fact racist.

So in practice, if you run a company, you have to have a DEI / Affirmative Action program in place to ensure you have the proper number of minorities in your employ. Hiring on merit opens you up to a lawsuit, even if you aren’t racist, because if you accidentally don’t hire enough blacks, you will be guilty of Disparate Impact.

When NormieCons complain about DEI and say things like “We need to just go back to a merit based system,” they literally don’t understand the incentive structure built into the legal code that ensures DEI policies. If you suggest that we should roll back Civil Rights legislation, they look at you like you just sprouted a second head. And that head has a funny mustache.

I’m glad that the Trump administration has banned “DEI” within the Federal government. This is valuable from an optics perspective, showing that we can, in fact, roll some of this nonsense back. But, ultimately the private sector will not follow suit. They may change the name of their racial hiring programs to appeal to the current administration, but they will still have them so long as they need them to prevent lawsuits.

In the same way that DEI can never be truly defeated without rolling back Civil Rights legislation, America’s disastrous foreign policy of the last few decades cannot truly be corrected until the mythos of WWII is dispelled. To the NormieCon, every foreign adversary is Hitler. Anyone who suggested, for example, that maybe Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction was a weak, appeasing Chamberlain. Clearly the only course of action is to be a strong, decisive Churchill, and confront evil preemptively.

I’ll admit here that as a youngster I fell for the Churchill-Chamberlain dichotomy. I don’t want to sound like a know-it-all. I was very wrong about the War on Terror during the Bush years, but at least I’m man enough to admit it. Many of the the same people who insisted the loudest on going to war against Saddam-Hitler now pretend that they knew all along that it was a bad idea, and didn’t support it. (Much like Churchill’s 1948 book, by the way.)

But, these folks do support war with Putin-Hitler, which is totally different because he’s going to, like, invade Germany. Again, if you suggest that Putin-Hitler may not want to invade Germany, and that the territorial dispute in eastern Ukraine might be caused by something other than a brain tumor, you are obviously just a weak, appeasing Chamberlain. This pattern will continue until we re-evaluate our relationship with WWII.

Anyway, subscribe to my Substack or the terrorists win!

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While I have you, how do you feel about Wisdom? Would you like to be wise? Of course you would, so you should buy my nigga GLO’s new book, Pillars of Wisdom.

If you are familiar with GLOs substack then you are already familiar with his absurdist, irreverent humor (If not you should check him out). And while there is plenty of that in here, nestled within are also some deep insights that I found very valuable. If you want to learn more about navigating career, relationships, and just basic human psychology in our fake and gay economy, I would highly recommend it. Plus, you’ll be supporting a fellow Substacker and independent author, which is always a good thing.

Buy This Book Bros!

As we transition into this new Cycle of History, it’s important for us to re-examine the founding myths of the previous era. This means, dismantling the mythic narrative of WWII, which serves as the backbone of the “Boomer Truth Regime.” This does not mean taking the position that Hitler was right, although it does mean evaluating Hitler as a historical figure rather than a boogeyman.

My intention in this article is to stake out a new “Centrist” position on WWII, one in which the central lesson of the conflict is not “preemptive war is the only alternative to mass genocide,” but rather, "unnecessary conflict escalation will lead to catastrophic disaster.” Hopefully, this becomes the founding principle of the new world order.

The Case for Non-Intervention in the Polish-German War of 1939

Why was the Second World War fought? The Holocaust is often cited as a post-hoc justification for WWII. In other words, the war had to be fought to stop a genocide. But, this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, because the Holocaust didn’t happen until many years after the war had already started, the US was turning Jewish refugees away at Ellis Island, and the British blockade of Germany was preventing the Nazis from executing their plan of shipping all the Jews to Madagascar (yes, this was real). In other words, the war didn’t happen because of the Holocaust, but, I think it’s fair to say that the Holocaust happened because of the war. But we’ll get to that below.

If the war wasn’t fought over the Holocaust, why was it fought? It actually started over a border dispute in Eastern Europe. In 1919, the Allies made Germany sign the punitive Versailles Treaty, which parceled up land that had previously belonged to Germany amongst her neighbors. Almost immediately, everyone involved (besides France) recognized that this was unfair, and likely to lead to future conflict - not least of all because the land taken from Germany was, unsurprisingly, majority ethnic Germans. The newly formed countries, such as Poland, viewed these ethnic Germans as potential fifth columnists, and treated them as such. This caused the ethnic Germans to be resentful of these governments, and in many cases to become fifth columnists.

Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the Danzig Corridor of the newly formed Polish state. The Danzig Corridor was particularly ridiculous because it split Germany, creating the small, disconnected region of East Prussia:

The Germans wanted Danzig back, and the Poles did not want to give it up. This was an ongoing issue preceding the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, but it was an issue Hitler was not willing to overlook. The British then offered a war guarantee to Poland in order to deter German aggression, but, as we will see below, it backfired massively.

One can certainly argue that territorial disputes don’t justify war, but one can’t deny that wars break out over territorial disputes all the time. In 2023, Azerbaijan invaded Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, displacing over 100,000 Armenian refugees. This was a relatively low-level conflict, but that’s mainly because no Great Powers chose to intervene. Juxtapose this to the conflict in Ukraine, where, largely because of intervention on the part of NATO, the conflict has dragged on for multiple years, tallied hundreds of thousands of casualties, and created millions of refugees.

The choice by the British Empire to intervene in the Polish-German border dispute is even more baffling when we consider that the official position of the British was that Danzig should be returned to Germany. From Pat Buchanan’s book, Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War:

The British cared nothing for Danzig, or, if they did, sympathized with the German case. Lord Halifax considered Danzig and the Corridor “an absurdity.” Indeed, of all the German claims to lost lands, the claim to Danzig was the strongest. It had always been a German city. It’s population was 95 percent German. Any plebiscite would have produced a 90 percent vote to return to the Fatherland. And Britain had no objection to Danzig’s return, as long as it came about peacefully through negotiation, not violently through military force. On Danzig, the basic British and German positions were almost identical. Both wanted its peaceful return to Germany.

In other words, the British government wanted to illustrate the utility of their fancy new League of Nations by resolving the Danzig question diplomatically. But, the Weimar Republic did make diplomatic attempts to negotiate the return of the territory, they were refused by the Polish government under Jozef Pilsudski, who had come to power via a bloody coup in 1926. Hitler also attempted to negotiate the peaceful return of Danzig, under very generous conditions for Poland. At one point, he even offered a mutual defense pact to Poland against the Soviet Union. Pilsudski had led the Polish army against the Bolsheviks the Polish-Soviet war, and his Polish Nationalist coalition certainly had no love for the commies. But, the Polish Nationalists were loathe to surrender territory to the Germans, or to enter into an alliance where their country was seen as the junior partner.

It’s interesting to theorize what would have happened if Germany and Poland had reached an agreement, and formed a military alliance against the Soviet Union. Would they have ended up invading in a joint venture? Possibly. Hitler was pretty open about hating the Bolsheviks, and Communists more generally. Pilsudski and his successors (he died in 1935) also hated Bolsheviks, but Poland was in a more strategically delicate position, nestled as it was between two powerful neighbors. Perhaps having a “buffer state” between Germany and the USSR would have prevented any war from breaking out, or perhaps war was inevitable.

Either way, when talks broke down between Germany and Poland in March 1939, Britain issued a war guarantee. They promised Poland that, should Germany (and only Germany) invade Poland, the British government would immediately declare war on Germany. It was the intention of the British to deter Hitler from attacking Poland by threatening to intervene militarily. Not because they didn’t want Danzig returned to Germany, but because they wanted to force a diplomatic solution to the problem. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect.

Given the explicit backing of the British Empire, the Poles believed (incorrectly) they were now immune to German hostilities. This stiffened the Polish resolve, and actually made peaceful territorial transfer much more difficult. Meanwhile Hitler, who was a figure animated most of all by anger over the humiliation of Germany after WWI, was provoked by what he saw as British meddling into a more bellicose stance. Hitler theorized (correctly) that Britain actually had no ability to project military power into Eastern Europe, and decided to call their bluff.

We can’t say for sure that war wouldn’t have broken out between Germany and Poland anyway, but the British War Guarantee insured that it did, as even drunk retard Winston Churchill in his 1948 book The Gathering Storm would admit:

And now Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand to guarantee the integrity of Poland - of that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State [Germany and Poland had jointly partitioned Czechoslovakia at Munich]

Moreover, how could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? … Here was a decision taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.

The British war guarantee was completely worthless to the Polish. No British soldier (or French, or American) would ever set foot in Poland. The territorial integrity of Poland would not be preserved, it would be occupied by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes until the end of the war, at which time it would become a Soviet satellite state, and face brutal Communist oppression for the next 50 years.

Because, the Germans weren’t the only ones to invade Poland in September of 1939. Due to the British war guarantee, instead of Hitler making an anti-Communist alliance with the Poles, as he had originally intended, Hitler and Stalin came to an entante cordial where they agreed to the partition of Poland. But, for some reason, Britain didn’t declare war on the Soviet Union when they invaded Poland from the East, and in fact, would end up forming an alliance with them in 1941. Let’s talk about that.

Deal With The Devil

The Boomer Truth Regime paints WWII as “the Good War,” in which the forces of Liberal Democracy defeated the big bad Fascists. This ignores the rather large role (in fact, the primary role) played by the Soviet Union in the war. France spent the majority of the war occupied by Germany, Britain spent it launching random bombing campaigns against civilian targets across the channel. The majority of the war was fought, and ultimately won, in the East. It was the defense of Moscow, the battle of Stalingrad, and finally Kursk, that broke the Wehrmacht. Of the 18 million or so combat deaths in the European theater, almost 17 million occurred on the Eastern Front.

World War II was not a war between the Liberal Democracies and the Fascists, it was a war between the Fascists and the Communists, with the Liberals contributing to the side of the Communists. Was this a morally defensible action on the part of Western Democracies?

The Holocaust is often cited as a post-hoc justification for the Second World War. After all, we had to fight Hitler, to prevent genocide. Never mind that the genocide happened anyway, it’s the thought that counts, I guess - just like the “defense” of Poland. But, as of 1939, the Nazi’s hadn’t actually committed a genocide yet. But, you know who had? The Soviets.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Holodomor, in the years 1932-33, the Soviet regime executed a deliberate starvation campaign in Ukraine. After the Soviets collectivized the farms, food production decreased, because Communism doesn’t work. But, rather than moderate his agricultural policy (as his predecessor Lenin actually did), Stalin decided to “punish” the “saboteurs” who had struck this counter-revolutionary blow to the Union. This meant a campaign of weaponized mass starvation against the Ukrainians as a people. Timothy Snyder, in his book Bloodlands, describes the situation in Ukraine:

The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did. Ukraine in 1933 was full of orphans, and sometimes people took them in. Yet without food there was little that even the kindest of strangers could do for such children. The boys and girls lay about on sheets and blankets, eating their own excrement, waiting for death.

In one village near the Kharkiv region, several women did their best to look after children. As one of them recalled, they formed “something like an orphanage.” Their wards were in a pitiful condition: “The children had bulging stomachs; they were covered in wounds, in scabs; their bodies were bursting. We took them outside, we put them on sheets, and they moaned. One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, Petrus. They were tearing strips from him and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood. We took the child away from the hungry mouths and we cried.”

The number killed in the Holodomor is most often quoted at 5 million (we have to ensure its lower than that magic 6 million number, after all), but Snyder considers that to be a low estimate. Soviet officials at the time privately estimated 5.5 million, but if we include ethnic Ukrainians who were killed in Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan as well, the number is closer to 6.6 million. Note that I’m not trying to diminish the Holocaust, just pointing out that, in 1939, the only genocide that had happened was the one perpetrated by our ally.

Now, one thing Hitler did do was orchestrate the assassination of his political rivals. In 1934, in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered SS hitmen to murder a number of high-profile political targets, and thus solidified his rule over Germany. The total number killed was 85. That’s a lot of assassinations, to be sure. That would make Hillary Clinton blush. But when it comes to eliminating political rivals, the award again has to go to Joseph Stalin.

With the assistance of the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin would construct a vast conspiracy theory, in which so-called “Trotskyites” were secretly in the pay of the Capitalist forces of the West, and actively working to undermine the USSR and bring about its destruction. Party members accused of being part of the plot were rounded up, beaten, and tortured until they signed an absurd written confession. They were then forced to confess publicly in a show-trial, and then they were shot. By 1937, a total of fifty thousand people were murdered in purges of the armed forces, state institutions, and communist party.

Of course no survey of the horrors of Nazism would be complete without talking about racism - and anti-semitism more specifically. Of course, as we mentioned, in 1939, the Holocaust hadn’t happened yet. The Nazis did pass the Nuremberg Laws, which placed restrictions on Jews, Romani, and other non-Germans, reducing them to second class citizenship. Nobody is defending this. Although, as Hitler would point out at the time, the Nuremberg laws weren’t really any worse than the Jim Crow laws of the contemporary American South.

The Nazis did, however, commit a pogrom. In 1938, in response to the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish terrorist, the state organized a pogrom against the Jewish community of Germany, which became known as Kristallnacht. Thousands of Jewish owned business were looted and burned. This is wrong. It’s not okay to loot and burn private businesses (unless you’re BLM, I guess). A total of 91 Jews were killed. This is no good. Killing people based on their ethnicity is wrong (arguably killing people for any reason is bad). But remember, during this same period, from 1937-38, the Soviet Union would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians because of their ethnicity.

During the Great Terror of 1937-38, the Soviet regime would apply the same tactics used to purge political rivals from the institutions to purge “socially undesirables” more generally. The Great Terror began with the liquidation of the “kulaks,” a Bolshevik term for a class of prosperous farmers, the threshold for inclusion in which would be continually revised down until it included basically any landholding peasant. During the years 1937-38, a total of 378,326 “kulaks” would be murdered by the NKVD, and another 389,070 shipped to slave labor camps in Siberia.

But the Great Terror wasn’t focused only on so-called “class enemies.” There was an ethnic component as well. By this time, Stalin had moved away from more traditional Marxism-Leninism to what he termed “National Bolshevism.” In other words, all animals were equal, but some animals were more equal than others. And those animals were the Russians. All other ethnicities were suspect, but particularly Poles.

In addition to the Kulaks mentioned above, over 140,000 ethnic Poles were arrested by the NKVD in the 1930s, ostensibly for suspicion of “espionage” on behalf of the Polish government. But, these were not Polish spies, they were just random Polish civilians, who happened to live in Soviet-controlled Belarus or Ukraine. Of those arrested, 111,091 were executed.

I’m listing all of these crimes out, not to engage in some sort of Ben Shapiro “whaddaboutism,” but to present an honest question. Put yourself in the shoes of the British Empire. The two regimes described above both invade Poland in September of 1939. You only declare war against one of them, and you end up allying yourself with the other. Which one do you choose?

On Preventing the Holocaust

But, none of the above arguments are really effective at piercing the emotional veil the Holocaust invokes. Since the Holocaust was the only genocide perpetrated by a right-wing government in the 20th century, it gets amplified and used as a bludgeon against any right-of-center movement in the West. Many rightoids fall into this rhetorical trap, because they instinctually want to downplay the Holocaust as a response. This is the wrong move. Not only because the Holocaust did happen, but also because it makes you seem like a Nazi sympathizer, which is not a particularly good look.

The more effective argument is to talk about how the Holocaust could have been prevented. This is actually easy to do. After all, the war was not fought because of the Holocaust, but rather, the Holocaust was perpetrated because of the war.

Let’s start with the basic fact that there were hardly any Jews living in actual Nazi Germany. From the preface of Snyder’s book:

Jews were fewer than one percent of the German population when Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and about one quarter of one percent by the beginning of the Second World War. During the first six years of Hitler’s rule, German Jews were allowed (in humiliating and impoverishing circumstances) to emigrate. Most of the German Jews who saw Hitler win elections in 1933 died of natural causes.

Timothy Snyder is not a Holocaust revisionist, by the way. In fact, he was one of the “experts” trotted out to dutifully castigate Darryl Cooper after his infamous Tucker Carlson interview. As the title would imply, his book Bloodlands is about mass deaths at the hands of both the Nazis and the Soviets. But, most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were living in Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, or Ukraine. If the war had not happened, they would never have fallen into the hands of Nazi Germany.

Note also that most of Germany’s Jewish population (75%) had emigrated prior to the outbreak of WWII. Hitler’s original solution to the “Jewish Question” was forced emigration. Now, this is certainly not ideal for a German Jew. Especially if the Nazis are confiscating all your valuables on the way out. But, it’s preferable to the gas chamber. Prior to the war, the Nazi plan involved deporting Jews to … Madagascar.

Madagascar, in other words, was a “solution” for a Jewish “problem” that had not yet really arisen. Grand deportation schemes made a kind of sense in 1938, when leading Nazis could still delude themselves that Poland might become a German satellite and join in an invasion of the Soviet Union. More than three million Jews lived in Poland, and Polish authorities had also investigated Madagascar as a site for their resettlement. Although Polish leaders envisioned no policies toward their national minorities (five million Ukrainians, three million Jews, one million Belarusians) that were remotely comparable to Soviet realities or Nazi plans, they did wish to reduce the size of the Jewish population by voluntary emigration. After the death of Polish dictator Jozef Pilsudski in 1935, his successors had taken on the position of the Polish nationalist right on this particular question, and had established a ruling party that was open only to ethnic Poles. In the late 1930s, the Polish state supported the aims of the right-wing or Revisionist Zionists in Poland, who wished to create a very large State of Israel in the British Mandate of Palestine - if necessary, by means of violence.

The Revisionist Zionists Synder mentions were led by Zeev Jabotinsky. He’s an interesting character, because Jabotinsky kind of agreed with some of Hitler’s criticisms of the Jewish Diaspora. He believed that the stereotype of the Jews as conniving, mercantile, and cosmopolitan stemmed from their lack of a homeland. He wanted to set up a state of Israel in order to implement a Jewish version of “Blood and Soil,” which he felt would rehabilitate his people.

He was also an early predictor of the Holocaust, as he witnessed rising anti-Semitism in Poland, he warned the Jewish community of the need to emigrate. In 1936, he came up with an “evacuation plan” calling for the removal of millions of Jews from the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe to Palestine. He even convinced the governments of Poland, Hungary, and Romania to agree to his proposals. His plan was, however, rejected by the Labor Zionists at the Zionist Organization. Despite this, Jabotinsky personally oversaw the smuggling of over 20,000 Eastern European Jews past the British blockade into Mandatory Palestine in the years leading up to WWII.

Once the war began, however, the British blockade of German shipping prevented the deportation of any Jews from German occupied territory, whether to Madagascar, Palestine, or anywhere else. Even then, Hitler tried to pawn his Jews off on the Soviet Union (before he broke the non-aggression pact), but Stalin declined. It was only in 1942, as the military situation was looking increasingly negative, that the “Final Solution” was formulated. As Adam Tooze, in his book Wages of Destruction, points out

This genocidal plan commanded such wide-ranging support because it concerned a practical issue, the importance of which, following Germany’s experience in World War I, was obvious to all: the need to secure the food supply of the German population, if necessary at the expense of the populations of the Soviet Union.

As we have discussed, the “bread-basket of the Ukraine” played a key role in all the various military-economic assessments of the Barbarossa campaign prepared over the winter of 1940-41. For Hitler, it was the key priority, to be achieved prior to any other military consideration, the importance of which was only reinforced by the alarming decline in the German grain stocks.

Tooze’s book is very interesting, if somewhat dry in places, because he traces the economic incentives that led ultimately to the Holocaust. He is still solidly in the camp of the Boomer Truth Regime, but his book is worth a read because it sheds light on the actual thought process going on within the Nazi government, rather than the traditional cartoonish super-villain framing.

And that’s fine, because remember, this article is not intended as a defense of Nazi atrocities. But, we have to ask ourselves if the Holocaust was inevitable, or if a different course of action on the part of the West could have led to a preferable outcome.

As Darryl Cooper told Scott Horton in a recent interview, if a crazy meth-addict is holding his family hostage, obviously he is the one who is ultimately responsible for his own actions. But, it is the job of the police to attempt to de-escalate the situation, not to ratchet up tension. Hitler obviously had a warped view of reality, but he believed that the aggressive posturing of the British Empire (as well as the Roosevelt administration) was a Jewish plot to instigate a war against the German people. Nowhere was this more clear than in his address to the German parliament in 1939.

I want to be a prophet once more today: if international finance Jewry in Europe and beyond should succeed once more in plunging the peoples of the world into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

We can’t know what an alternate timeline where Poland and Germany were able to negotiate a peaceful return of the Danzig might have looked like. Perhaps Germany (with the aid of Poland) may have attacked the USSR anyway. Hitler certainly made plenty of indications that this was his wish. But, perhaps his bruised ego would have been assuaged with the reconstitution of the pre-war German borders. Perhaps Nazi Germany would have followed a similar path to the Soviet Union: Like Stalin, Hitler would have eventually died. The Reich would have slowly moderated, as the USSR did from Khrushchev through Gorbachev. Perhaps National Socialism would have demonstrated itself to be an unworkable economic theory, and the Nazi state would have collapsed in on itself the way the Communist economy did in the late 80s.

It’s impossible to prove these counterfactuals. But, what we can say is that the Second World War was the worst calamity to befall humanity in recorded history. Rather than looking at this event and saying “Well, that worked out great. Let’s use it as a blueprint for solving every subsequent conflict from now on.” we should look at it and say “Wow, that was a catastrophe. Let’s never do that again!" It’s time to start treating WWII as history, rather than a Marvel movie.

As I’ve said in previous articles, I actually do feel sympathy towards Zelenskyy. Obviously, not to the extent that I would put his interests before my own. I’m not a retard or a Democrat. But, in the abstract, I understand that he is in a tough situation, representing a small, resource-rich country nestled between two world powers. (I’m not calling the EU a world power, but to the extent that they are our vassals, they fall under the category of “Greater America”). So, I don’t revel in his massive, unforced error, because his bungling will probably delay peace, which is a human tragedy for the people of Ukraine. So, what went wrong?

The first thing you will notice if you watch the full press conference (and not just the fun part at the end), is that, contrary to what you will hear over on Cringestack, Trump clearly didn’t show up to the meeting looking to shit on Zelenskyy. He is actually very, dare I say, Presidential. He makes it clear numerous times that his main concern is ending the war as quickly as possible. He congratulates Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian military on their performance, but he refrains from making any negative comments about Putin. At one point, he even tells a reporter “I want peace. What am I supposed to do, come out here and say ‘Oh Putin is a terrible guy’ and then go over there and say ‘Hi Vladimir, want to make a deal?’ It doesn’t work like that.”

Zelenskyy has no such compunctions. He immediately begins his remarks by calling Putin a terrorist and a war criminal. He pulls out pictures of Ukrainian POWs who were mistreated by the Russians and starts showing them to the cameras. Trump just sort of nods and says “yeah, that’s tough stuff,” but clearly Zelenskyy is counter-signaling him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Russia didn’t mistreat Ukrainian POWs. But, if you had a Russian diplomat in the Oval Office, he could bring you photos of Russian POWs who were mistreated as well, trust me. Both sides have engaged in confirmed war crimes. Bringing it up at the press conference doesn’t move the ball forward in terms of the peace negotiations.

Perhaps more importantly, Zelenskyy is explicitly naysaying Trump’s proposed ceasefire agreement. He does this several times, and Trump just sort of ignores him (until finally blowing up on him at the end). Why is he doing this?

I can’t know the inner workings of Zelenskyy’s brain, but in my attempt to “make it make sense,” the only thing I can think is that he was trying to improve his bargaining position using the only leverage he actually has - public opinion. He just hasn’t updated his firmware since 2023, when Western leaders were falling all over each other to suck his dick. He was still in “war propaganda” mode, employing “escalation” rhetoric, when we are in “de-escalation” mode here in the States now.

It’s clear that Zelenskyy doesn’t want a ceasefire. This seems crazy, considering he is losing. He claims it’s because he doesn’t believe Putin will honor the terms of the ceasefire, but if that’s the case, he could just use the ceasefire as an opportunity for his forces to rest and resupply. They are currently getting pushed back all across the front line, if there was even a temporary ceasefire it would give them time to dig in, and maybe even prepare a counter-offensive. In fact, many pro-Russian commentators have speculated that this was the only reason Ukraine agreed to the Istanbul peace talks back in 2022 - to pause the Russian advance and prepare for their big counteroffensive in Kharkiv and Kherson.

I think the reality is that Zelenskyy knows Putin would honor the ceasefire, and that a ceasefire means the end of the war, and the end of the war means solidifying Russian gains. He doesn’t want to cede that territory, and a ceasefire is the first step towards that inevitable reality. But, what is his alternative? Keep fighting the war? He’s only going to lose more territory. I admit I’m at a loss. Maybe he is hoping for a miracle, or maybe, in true Churchillian fashion, he is hoping to pull the United States in to save his ass. But he has to know that’s not going to happen, because a direct conflict between the US and Russia would lead to nuclear armageddon.

Whatever his motivation, arguing with Trump (and Vance) in front of the TV cameras was clearly the wrong move. Zelenskyy, like Trump, was a television star before he was a President. He understands the value of narrative control, and is very media savvy. Up to this point, he has been able to more or less run circles around the midwits and girlbosses of the EU’s bureaucratic oligarchy by making good use of the media landscape and public opinion. I think he underestimated Trump here. Many such cases. He thought that by counter-signaling him publicly, and repeating tired war propaganda talking points, he would whip up US public opinion against Putin, and force Trump to move more towards Ukraine.

In a sense, his plan actually worked. The Neoliberal shills are out in force, decrying Trump’s “bullying” tactics against our beleaguered allies in their hour of need. OMG, Trump is a Putin puppet! But, Zelenskyy forgot one thing: the Neoliberals are no longer in power. MSNBC can opine ad nauseam to their 12 remaining viewers, Trump is still President. The Republicans control the House and the Senate. DOGE is purging the faggots from the federal bureaucracy. The Ascendant Right is … well, ascending. Zelenskyy is “fighting the last war” as they say, appealing to the people who can no longer help him.

So what happens next?

Well, the sane and logical thing to do would be agree to the ceasefire. Yes, Russia will get everything they want. That’s what happens when you lose a war, your enemy gets what they want. For reference, ask the Palestinians.

What I am afraid will happen is that Zelenskyy will refuse to negotiate, get what weapons and funding he can from the EU, and continue the war. Why am I “afraid” of this? Well, I’m not really, I live in the United States, not Ukraine. I don’t really care if Russia ends up taking everything east of the Dnieper. But, as I said at the beginning of the article, I do feel bad for the Ukrainians (and the Russians) being killed in this war. So, remember that next time some self-righteous dipshit starts in about supporting Ukraine. What they are actually supporting is sending tens of thousands of Ukrainian conscripts on a suicide mission in an unwinnable war.