On June 2, I published this article describing the project. The reception was amazing, and so after 1.5k views and nearly 200 responses later, we’re well equipped to answer all of your burning demographics questions about our little Chudstack community.

Thanks again to everyone who participated, and without further ado, here we go.

Racial Demographics

As you can see, 81.7% of respondents claimed to be White.1 Besides White respondents, we had:

• 14 Non-Whites

• 22 Half and halfs of various ethnicities

Gender Breakdown

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chudstack is a bit of sausage fest. 93.4% male, along with

• 11 females

• 2 troons

To be honest, I originally put the troon option on there as a joke, but the fact that there are two self-designated troons in our midst is a little bit concerning to me. I need someone to do some sleuthing and find them out.

Generation Breakdown

This was a fun one. As you can see, we’re overwhelmingly GenZ (represent), at about 81%. Besides GenZ, respondents included

• 32 Millennials

• 5 GenX

• 1 Boomer

As much as I hate Boomers I do have to respect whoever it is who was both born before 1965 and somehow reading my content. Shout-out to you Boomerwaffen.

Lurk or Post?

This was another fun one. At first, the poasters were dominant, but as the survey got shared around the lurkers slowly began to reveal themselves. I think this breakdown is about what should be expected, about 1 poster for every 2 lurkers. That ratio sounds about right to me.

Religion

From here on out the charts and responses become self-reported and so the results get a little messy. Bear with me. In no particular order, we had:

• 42 Catholics

• 17 Orthodox

• 44 Protestant (this was as granular as I was willing to go)

• 21 Pagan

• 44 Atheist/Agnostic

• 1 “christian but in like a hitler way where I support it as a baseline and say I’m christian to make my points more accessible but somewhat resent it for it’s tendency to lead to self-defeating moralfaggery”

• 2 Deists

• 3 Esoteric Hitlerists

• 1 Hitlerian NatSoc Mvrder Raypist

• 2 Jews

• 1 Mormon

• 1 Muslim

• 2 Spiritual but not religious

• A few others that are hard to categorize/too jokey to include

Country of Origin

Making this one a self-report was a mistake because people said all variants of Murica, USA, America, United States, etc. Very inconvenient for me. Shoutout to ChatGPT for doing the hard work of wading through all of that for me:

🇺🇸 United States 120

🇨🇦 Canada 16

🇩🇪 Germany 8

🇦🇺Australia 6

🇵🇱Poland 5

🇧🇷 Brazil 5

🇮🇹 Italy 3

🇿🇦 South Africa 3

🇷🇴 Romania 2

🇳🇱 Netherlands 2

🇨🇿 Czech Republic 2

🇬🇧 United Kingdom 1

🇭🇷 Croatia 1

🇮🇸 Iceland 1

🇬🇷 Greece 1

🇫🇷 France 1

🇪🇸 Spain 1

🇱🇹 Lithuania 1

🇦🇹 Austria 1

🇲🇽 Mexico 1

🇮🇱 Israel 1 (who are you)

🇵🇰 Pakistan 1

🇩🇰 Denmark 1

🇮🇪 Ireland 1

🇸🇪 Sweden 1

🇦🇷 Argentina 1

Balkans (unspecified) 1

Joke/fictional (Leafland, Agartha) 2

Unspecified/multiethnic/joking 2

Mixed-nationality responses 8

Ideological Breakdown

This was also a mess to interpret because people could self-describe, so here is the approximate breakdown.

Fascist/National Socialist 76 40.9%

Conservative/Right-wing 31 16.7%

Other/Idiosyncratic/Syncretic 19 10.2%

Monarchist 17 9.1%

Christian/Traditionalist 12 6.5%

Blank/No response 7 3.8%

Libertarian/Anarchist 6 3.2%

New Right/Reactionary 5 2.7%

Ethnonationalist/Racialist 5 2.7%

Unclear/No identifiable ideology 4 2.2%

Nationalist/Imperialist 2 1.1%

Racialist/Extremist 1 0.5%

Far Right/Hard Right 1 0.5%

TOTAL 186 100.0%

Favorite Substack Author

I’m not gonna @ all of these guys, you can look them up on your own.

Roxy — 24 votes

Sectionalism / Sectionalism Archive — 14 votes

Will Martin — 14 votes

John Carter — 9 votes

Med Gold — 6 votes

Plato Bodybuilder — 6 votes

Walt Bismarck — 6 votes

Gothic — 5 votes

Kaltenbrunner — 5 votes

Phisto — 5 votes

Unlambed II — 5 votes

Asmy — 4 votes

BAP / Bronze Age Pervert — 4 votes

Gildhelm — 4 votes

Layne Jackson — 3 votes

Meow — 3 votes

Pikachud — 3 votes

Aodhan Mac Mhaolain — 2 votes

Dark Age Sage — 2 votes

Dave Greene — 2 votes

Fortis Vita — 2 votes

Jason McGinty — 2 votes

Librarian of Celano — 2 votes

Luke Sardis — 2 votes

Mushkelji — 2 votes

Niggachu — 2 votes

Polk — 2 votes

Russell Walter — 2 votes

Tricky Cat — 2 votes

Me - 2 votes (thanks guys <3)

That’s all for this one. I hope you found this funny/entertaining/informative. I know I sure did.

Thanks again to everyone who shared around the original post and to everyone who participated. I might re-do the survey in a couple years if we’re all still kicking around on here.

If you have any ideas for good survey questions for the future, make sure to leave them in the comments below! This took a lot of work to compile, so I’d really appreciate it if you consider subscribing if you want more content like this.

Seriously though, someone needs to dox those troons…

gothic.

Why I Love Substack

Substack raises the virtual skull and bones pirate flag, punches you in the mouth, jerks you off, makes you laugh, cry, and frankly, sometimes it rapes you. But then without warning it flips the script and soothes you like a gentle spring breeze whispering through silk drapes in some forgotten Italian villa. Elegant poetry drops like rose petals, sensit…

Read more

5 months ago · 118 likes · 40 comments · gothic.

At this point, the “alt-right,” “dissident right,” “manosphere,” or whatever you want to call it has been around for quite some time, and has solidified itself as a definite internet sub-community, complete with its own heroes, villains, lore, and so on. While its heyday was probably back during 2015-2018 Twitter, however, at this point it’s kind of become a shadow of its former self and is overrun with grifters.

This thing we call Chudstack, while still relatively niche, has likewise grown into a bonafide community of its own. And, to its credit, it’s still niche enough that I don’t think it’s yet suffering from the grifting/fame-seeking problem plaguing the Twitter/X Right of today. It’s still small enough to be an actual community. After all, who here hasn’t been harrassed by Will Martin at some point for believing Something Good Could Ever Happen?

And so, I thought it would be fun to create a census to get a better idea of our demographic makeup. Thus, the Great Chudstack Census of 2026 was born. There’s a running joke that most White Nationalists on the internet are brown, so why not test to see how accurate that is? Or, how many of us are Christian vs pagan? There’s actually a lot of interesting questions it would be cool to know about this sphere.

The poll: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeVqCD_ZLw3PqOecQOYzQwSOw97AhboZ2uFMtJaEk9vxSWDDQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor

(If you’re scared of clicking the link see addendum below.)

DISCLAIMERS & LOGISTICS:

• If you’re at all affiliated with Chudstack, PLEASE fill out the form. The more people who do it, the better the results will be. If you’re a lurker (which I respect, that used to be me!), please still consider filling it out.

• The form is only 8 questions and will take less than two minutes to complete.

• Similarly, please be honest on the form. There’s really no reason for you to troll or make up answers. I have no way to enforce this, so all I can do is appeal to the better angels of your nature. But the results are better for everyone if you’re honest.

• The survey is on a Google form. I did some research and think this is the best way to collect results. If I did a poll or survey on Substack, it would require respondents to subscribe to me first. While I would appreciate anyone who does wish to subscribe, I wanted to keep it open to everyone because the more responses the better. Limiting it to just subscribers would probably just mean people wouldn’t answer.

• No, I am not a Fed. I realize this is kinda sus but I pinky promise I’m not gonna steal any of your information. The Google from doesn’t even ask for your email. This is purely for fun; I’m literally just some random guy. Even if I did want to dox you, there’s nothing really in the form that’s specific enough for me to be able to do that anyway.

Finally, and most importantly, if you think this is a fun project, SHARE IT! There’s definitely no way I have direct access to everyone in the sphere, but the results will be better the more people answer it. So help me get the word out because I want this to be as comprehensive a data set as possible.

Share

My plan is to leave the poll open for 1-2 months and see how many responses we can get. If this does well, I’m planning to post another article detailing the results. If you’re interested in seeing them, consider subscribing. I’ll probably also post some Notes before the main article if there are interesting trends that are starting to arise.

Subscribe now

Thanks everyone!

ADDENDUM:

If you are scared of clicking the link, you can also DM me your answers if you would like.

The questions are:
1. Are you White?

2. Gender

3. What Generation are you?

4. Do you primarily lurk or poast?

5. What religion are you?

6. What country are you from?

7. How would you describe your political ideology? (e.g., Conservative, Monarchist, Neo-nazi, Fascist, Republican, Catholic Integralist, etc.)

8. Favorite Chudstack writer/shitposter

Why this guy became the cornerstone of modern political philosophy is beyond me. He is credited with re-vitalizing the moribund field of political philosophy in the 70s with his titanic work “Justice as Fairness.” The reams of secondary literature he generated based on his theory of justice as fairness are genuinely probably uncountable.

But here’s the problem: his theories suck. They are not good. They are some of the worst examples of philosophical onanism and navel-gazing I’ve ever come across. “Theory-crafting” for the sake of theory-crafting.

This guy is a genuine chud.

And I do not use that word lightly.

The worst part isn’t even having to engage with his work as if he’s a serious philosopher. Nor is it having to “debate” the “nuances” of his complex ideas about “justice” and “fairness” and (blegh) “egalitarianism.”

The worst part is his goddamn prose is SO mind-numbingly boring it makes me want to… smash his face in with a hammer.

It was at this point I was considering putting an excerpt of his prose in here, you know, so you could get an idea of what I’m talking about. But then I thought, why would I subject you to that, dear reader? So just take my word for it. His prose is terrible.

And no, I am a serious intellectual capable of deep reading. I am not just mindraped by instagram reels and youtube videos. I can read philosophy if I want to. It’s just in this case, I don’t want to.

Checkmate liberal.

mlg dorito 360 no-scope REFUTING the veil of ignorance EPIC STYLE once and FOR ALL

I’m sure you are familiar with his veil of ignorance argument. You are also a serious academic, well-educated, yadda yadda, so you obviously know all this stuff.

So I’m just gonna explain it again and you can pretend you’re a woman who doesn’t know things and then get mad at me in the comments for mansplaining to you. How does that sound?

Ok so basically here’s the gist of justice as fairness:

“In the tradition of other social contract theories, Rawls’ ‘original position’ describes the conditions under which the fairest set of principles for governing a society would be agreed to. The original position argument imagines placing every member of a society behind a “veil of ignorance” which occludes every single personal characteristic—whether race, gender, wealth, class, intelligence, or anything else; this veil ensures that no one is able to appeal to those accidents of birth or circumstance when making decisions about the arrangement of society (11, 16). Such appeals are unfair and invalid for deciding how society should be run, because by arguing with them people are merely looking out for their own self-interest, not necessarily pursuing justice.”

As Rawls puts it, “Once we decide to look for a conception of justice that prevents the use of the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance as counters in a quest for political and economic advantage, we are led to these principles” (14).

Source: me. Yes, that is my own writing. I just block quoted my own writing. Like a boss #sigma male

The two principles of justice are as follows: first, the most extensive possible set of equal basic liberty rights that don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights; and then secondly the right for everyone to run for political office and any inequalities that do arise in society to be arranged such that they are to the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged.

And the reason why people would agree to these principles of justice, because they’re so fair, is because in a thought experiment that is what they would pick if they had to arrange society without knowing anything about what node in society they would eventually occupy.

Weakest critique: You can’t just astral project, enter the spirit realm, and do all your political deliberations there without regard for your own self-interests. So, the veil of ignorance is impossible and makes dumb metaphysical claims about your soul being separate from your body.

This is the weakest critique (I’ve seen others erroneously making it in some memes recently) because it assumes that Rawls is making a metaphysical claim when he really means the veil of ignorance as a thought experiment-type thing.

He’s not asserting anything about what “the probability you would be assigned Indian at birth” would be, as I’ve seen some memes strawman him. He’s not saying you were a soul floating in the aether before you got randomly assigned to your body at birth like other blank slatists claim. It’s purely a thought experiment.

THE REAL PROBLEM IS THAT THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT SUCKS.

His entire theory is built on these idealizations of the ideal human specimen, engaging in rationality and fair debate, joined with other rational actors as they seek to arrive at an equitable outcome for all.

But this is not what humans are, nor should our aim even be to arrange society based around the idealized conditions of what these 140 IQ Anglos would come up with if they were trying to rearrange society again from scratch.

Not only does this thought experiment lend itself to some troubling metaphysical assumptions about what the human being is (as evidenced by people mistakenly assuming that these are what Rawls himself asserted), but it also is just a terrible foundation for a political theory.

How the fuck are we supposed to instantiate these principles of justice in the world today? Like actually? And if it’s impossible to instantiate, which it is, well then, of what use is your pointless fucking theorycelling?

Rawls was the original autist.

The “ideal theorist”. I reject this line of thinking wholesale. Your theory of justice is cute and all but it has no bearing on reality. And it never could! You cannot just erase all historical contingencies and cultural norms and assumptions that created the world we live in today. Nor should you want to!

By the way, the veil of ignorance totally does sneak in all sorts of problematic metaphysical assumptions. It begs the question of liberalism right from the start.

What do I mean? Another Rawlsianism is he thinks it’s invalid to appeal to your own comprehensive conception of the good in public debate. In a reasonably democratic and pluralistic society, public debate should be only based around appeals to reason that everyone can independently assent to. He’s basically a big tent theorist where he wants to create an overlapping consensus that everyone can use their own reason to justify the principles of justice by.

If you cannot appeal to your comprehensive conception of the good (by this he means religion btw), then this begs the question that rational liberalism is the default worldview, and anything else is an irrational deviation we merely have to tolerate. The truth claims of the various religions of the world are not actually real and influential on people; rather, Reason is what should really determine conceptions of the good and the grounds of public debate.

Ok but what if I share a society with a retarded Muslim who thinks we should all be subject to Sharia law? How am I supposed to create a reasonable overlapping consensus with these people?

How is it even possible to do public debate without appealing to what you think the comprehensive conception of the good is? In the 70s you could assert this and become mega-famous, because we actually used to have shared cultural norms and assumptions, but as society has degraded into the pluralist (read: diverse) mess it is now, we can see these platitudes don’t make any sense.

Do we even want pluralism? Who said that is inherently a good thing? Why shouldn’t the state, as instituted by God to bear the sword against wrongdoers, enforce the good and the normal and the just against all the infidels and gay people? Why is pluralism better?

Rawls may have been a troon. The jury is still out.

I'm also receiving reports that John Rawls was a liberal. This can’t be… you mean this guy who created the worst fucking political theory of all time is a libtard? Impossible! There must be a mistake! Oh my biden…

Yeah anyway I think justice as fairness is stupid and I don’t like John Rawls.

Here’s the big idea: regardless of the actual, “objective” events of what happened on the streets of Minneapolis that day, what became more important was the attempt by both sides to control the narrative of what happened. And it was immediate, from both sides, to get their version of events to become the public consensus. But my main thesis is that public consensus on these “tragedies” or “based moments” is completely impossible in 2026.

LEFTIST VERSION

As best as I can tell, here’s what went down from a leftist perspective. There’s this single mother, a writer and poet by trade, with her cute little doggo in the backseat, stopped at this intersection in Minneapolis. She’s going about her day, maybe peacefully protesting ICE, which is perfectly within her rights to do as a free citizen of America, when these agents approach her car and start threatening her.

Now keep in mind that ICE is not a legitimate institution. In fact, it’s more akin to the Gestapo or the stormtroopers from Star Wars than it is to any legitimate democratic law enforcement. ICE has been kidnapping U.S. citizens, placing them in detention cells for months at a time, and even on some occasions deporting citizens. They’re also going around bullying and intimidating perfectly legal citizens, with the probable cause justification that their skin is brown. So ICE is also racist. At the same time, no human is illegal, and so even deporting “illegal” immigrants is a vast injustice because those people have just as much reason to be here as you or I.

Also, what the hell is ICE even doing in Minneapolis of all places? Supposedly they’re targeting a Somalian population, but as Hasan said, 90% of them are American citizens. This is just weaponization of the federal government by Trump against his enemies like Walz. Maybe I could understand deportations along the southern border, but Minnesota??? Get real.

So, here’s this hardworking, law-abiding single mother trying to stand up to the injustice of this fascistic force of evil, who understandably panics when she’s approached by these scary men in masks who are now trying to detain her for no reason. She reverses the car to try to get away, when all of a sudden one of the agents begins to open fire on her. Her wheels were literally pointed away from him when he fired, but not only did he fire ONE shot, which may have been justified, but THREE. There’s no reason for him to be magdumping on this innocent woman unless he wanted to kill her. Beyond that, you even hear him on video calling her a “fucking bitch” as she tried to flee.

And, as one of the onlookers remarks, “Dude, you just did a murder, for what?!”

This version of the story was the immediate, unanimous consensus of events from the Left. From politicians to journalists, this is what they pushed as the defining narrative.

THE RIGHT’S VERSION

I think I’ll just let JD Vance himself summarize it for me:

This is probably the best summation of the Right’s perspective: self-defense shooting, crazy harridan woman, fantasy world where she thinks she’s a Marvel superhero, FAFO, the Left has gone insane, etc etc.

THE POINT

I’m sure you all have already seen these for yourselves first hand. The point I want to make, using this as an illustrative example, is that these events don’t really matter on their own. You can choose to emphasize certain aspects of the story in order to either justify or decry it. But my question is… who are you trying to convince?

There’s this myth of the “moderate center” who has yet to make up their mind about these things. The intelligent, concerned citizen who just wants to do their duty and keep their country great. But the supposed existence of these people is a complete fabrication. There is no moderate center. It’s 2026. Everyone has already made up their minds.

The Right was gonna call this based and another female L no matter what the Left said about it. And the Left was gonna use this as a rallying cry and symbol to lambast ICE no matter what the Right thought about it. As we’ve seen the event has already been mythologized by both sides, but in completely contradictory ways. What actually happened, objectively, on the street, doesn’t matter at all. The symbolic meaning is all that matters. Everyone has their marching orders, and everyone is gonna stick to it.

So for me, all this arguing in the comments sections and trying to convince Leftists is just stupid and a waste of time. Yes, the memes are funny. But at this point it’s been like 10 years of this radical leftist bullshit. Anyone who still buys it is hopelessly propagandized and brainwashed. You’re not gonna get through to them. These people lived through the same events as you did— covid, the vaccine, Trump 1, Biden, Trump 2— but their conclusions were the exact opposite. They’re not gonna change their mind now, no matter how you frame the events or try to add details or context. It’s pure fantasy land.

The good news is, I think with the cutting of USAID the Left’s ability on an institutional level to control the narrative is completely dead. Others have argued this before so I won’t belabor it. There’s a world where this was George Floyd 2.0, but combined with the liberation of X I think any large scale movement like that is impossible. I’ll remind you, big conservative influencers and politicians at the time were speaking out against Derek Chauvin and the tragedy of that “senseless white supremacist murder” back in 2020. Thankfully, the vibe has shifted enough that those days of cuckoldry seem to be behind us.

So, my point is, all this arguing and struggling on both sides to control the narrative is pointless. The lines have already been drawn; the sides have already been taken. You know where you stand. They know where they stand. Nothing you say is gonna convince these people that everything they believe is a lie. So you can meme on them, and the memes were pretty funny, but I’m honestly just blackpilled on any chance that civil dialogue is gonna change anything.

And knowing this clown world, things are gonna continue like this for a while. I am skeptical that Something Will Happen, like a civil war or major political assassination or what have you. One way or another, things are gonna get resolved, but I can guarantee you it’s not gonna be done by words.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

So my Dad had heard about this game he wanted us to try called the Sims. He got it on his iPad his job gave him for us kids to try. Crucially I think we only had the game for two days, three days tops.

It was my turn to play the game one evening and so I was messing around on, it as one does. I don’t remember exactly what I was working on, but I do remember my older sister had explained the ‘WooHoo’ mechanic to me.

Now, I had a very sheltered childhood up to that point so I didn’t really understand the intricacies of what that mechanic was implying. All I knew was that the way to make two Sims fall in love with each other was to basically pick them up and like drag them across each other— basically rubbing one against the other. It’s a very pervy mechanic for a children’s game.

I think the point of that was to simulate intercourse? Whatever, I didn’t understand that at the time. I just knew it was a game mechanic.

Now it wasn’t easy to get two Sims in a committed relationship. It took a couple of rounds of ‘WooHooing,’ and the game would tell you how their relationship was progressing in stages.

I think you can see where this is going.

Basically there were two male characters and I had the bright idea to make them ‘WooHoo.’ I’m pretty sure it was an interracial couple as well to add even more insult to injury.

I remember thinking it wasn’t gonna work either. I was SHOCKED the game let me put them in a ‘budding relationship.’ Legitimately I thought I broke the game. And then the idea that there were these two guys in love with each other? I completely lost my shit. I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed that hard since. I was CRYING. I still chuckle to myself now, years later, remembering just how fucking funny I found the idea of these two video game men thinking they were in love with each other and holding hands and stuff.

So I was trying to make them ‘WooHoo’ more and I think I even got them to the ‘dating’ status which made me, of course, lose my shit even more.

When I was interrupted for dinner time. This is where my inability to contain myself got me in a bit of trouble. My Dad was trying to bless the meal before we ate but I couldn’t stop giggling to myself even during the prayer. This was ‘disrespectful’ so of course he had to ask why I was laughing, and so I explained it to him.

I thought it was all harmless. To my child mind, I had broken the game and revealed that the devs were idiots who didn’t know anything because they let this glitch get through where you could make two men fall in love. I had no category for this being a real thing.

My Christian father and mother predictably ‘chimped out’ about this, probably thinking that this Sims game was some demonic propaganda machine hellbent on oneshotting their children into turbo-lib leftistcels. So they immediately deleted the game and banned us from ever playing the Sims again, a ban that I imagine lasts to this day. They also didn’t explain the concept of gay people either (lol) so I had no idea why they chimped out so much until years later.

I haven’t played the Sims since.

Recently a very dear friend of mine tried to kill himself. Thankfully he failed and is still here with us.

For the longest time I couldn’t understand why someone would ever do that. Isn’t life itself so much better than death? Why would you ever seek to end it prematurely, especially since suicide sends you to Hell?

And yet there are countless stories like this. I have had multiple people in my life come to me and tell me they struggle with suicidal thoughts. Even otherwise happy-go-lucky family members.

I’m sure you have a similar story. Maybe you yourself have even wrestled with ideation. I won’t cite the statistics at you, but they’re not pretty. I’m not sure if the rates are going up, or are merely holding level, but I think anecdotally we can all agree that something is up.

Why is this?

I think there’s a strong case to be made that something about the ‘modern world’ is driving us to despair. You can call it the phones, social media, multicultural democracy, whatever— it’s hard to pin down on one thing. I think what is inarguable, however, is that modernity is really pretty dehumanizing. I think we all feel trapped by it in many ways… like a tiger in a zoo cage… BAP talks about this.

And if that is so, why not kill yourself to escape this hellish existence?

Augustine’s Response

This year I’ve been reading Augustine’s City of God. It’s a dense read, and I’m about halfway through so far. I think I would recommend it to everyone, if only for the fact that it’s a foundational text of the canon. If you want to be well-educated, you should at least be familiar with it. Anyways.

In book I of the City Augustine has a long treatise on suicide and the Christian response to it. I bring him up because of his influence on later Christian thought, and also because reading what he had to say in light of some of my recent thoughts on the subject I mentioned before really pricked my conscience. He represents the standard Christian response to suicide. If you want other classic examples of this doctrine, Dante placed the suicides in Hell in his Divine Comedy. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has a whole arc wrestling with his desire that the “Almighty had not fix’d his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!”

Now, to his credit, Augustine was acutely aware that one could suffer much indignity and evil in this world. The impetus to write City of God came on the heels of Rome, the eternal city, Roma invicta, having just been sacked for the first time in nearly 800 years. The barbarians had come in and ravaged the citizens. Rapes. Pillaging. Murder in the streets. It was not a pretty sight.

But for Augustine, there was no room in the Christian religion for suicide to ever be permissible. Not even to defend one’s honor could it be considered legitimate. He recognized the great indignity that the young women of Rome had suffered, and yet he urged them not to deal with it by killing themselves. “But is there a fear that even another’s lust may pollute the violated?” he writes. “Since purity is a virtue of the soul, and has for its companion virtue, the fortitude which will rather endure all ills than consent to evil; and since no one, however magnanimous and pure, has always the disposal of his own body, but can control only the consent and refusal of his will, what sane man can suppose that, if his body be seized and forcibly made use of to satisfy the lust of another, he thereby loses his purity?”

There does seem to be a certain logic to this. Still, it doesn’t erase the fact that your body was violated and you have to live with that indignity and slight to your reputation for the rest of your life… never mind if one was unlucky enough to have conceived a child from the barbarians. The real question here is, can a noble soul truly bear such a disgrace? Are there not things that are much worse than death?

One thinks of that idiotic viral hypothetical from last summer as an example of this— it went “would you rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear?” I must admit, while the women shrieking about rape were vastly overestimating the malice of the average man, I understand the deathly fear that must come with being a member the weaker sex and having your body violated like that with no recourse to defend yourself.

Here’s another passage for you to consider. It comes from Book I.22.

But they who have laid violent hands on themselves are perhaps to be admired for their greatness of soul, though they cannot be applauded for the soundness of their judgment. However, if you look at the matter more closely, you will scarcely call it greatness of soul, which prompts a man to kill himself rather than bear up against some hardships of fortune, or sins in which he is not implicated. Is it not rather proof of a feeble mind, to be unable to bear either the pains of bodily servitude or the foolish opinion of the vulgar? And is not that to be pronounced the greater mind, which rather faces than flees the ills of life, and which, in comparison of the light and purity of conscience, holds in small esteem the judgment of men, and specially of the vulgar, which is frequently involved in a mist of error?

Again, this is all very logical and beautiful in a certain light. But does it not maybe ever so slightly reek of massive cope? Many people are turned away from Christianity because of the problem of evil, or institutional corruption, or questions over free will. I think the doctrine of suicide is actually a sneakily difficult one to submit to.

There are of course, many instances where suicide is obviously wrong. And I hope no one reading this will take it to be me saying you should just go ahead and kill yourself. Far from it. I think you should value your life. It is a great gift, mind-blowingly contingent, that has been given to you. You should not idly throw it away because you are sad or something.

When it gets more difficult, however, is when I start to wonder whether or not we “keep calm & carry on” not from reasons of courage, but of cowardice. Are we really all on some moral crusade against the cosmos, in some grand Nietzschean chad “yes to life” adventure? Or are we more… mundane. Sterilized. Small-souled. All too often, I think we carry on in this life only because we fear “the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, [which] puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of…”

Let’s talk about slavery.

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BAP and Nobility

This is from BAP, writing in Bronze Age Mindset. You can consider him the “vitalist” “Nietzschean” (whatever those words means) response to Christianity. He says it better than I can:

That condition [of feeling trapped] is intolerable for the most noble animals, who choose death if necessary, or at least any way to escape no matter how painful. Many Caribs, trapped into slavery, died because they couldn’t endure this, some bit through their arms to escape their chains and endured any pain to escape captivity. Germanic mothers would kill infants when Roman legions closed in: Tacitus describe life of Germanic warrior, who lived his whole life dedicated to war and fame, never became a domestic! At Masada and at other times the Jews killed their own children to escape subjection, when they were still a noble people. Xenophon describes in Anabasis how mother with infant would jump off a cliff in the highlands of Urartu, to escape the advance of the Greek army: we see same videos in Japan in Okinawa, mother jump off cliff. Buddhist monks Vietnam self-immolated and brought great shame on the West. For this reason Nietzsche say, noble peoples do not endure slavery, they’re either free or they die out. There is no “adaptation” to slavery for some types of life. What is that people, who has chosen survival at any price? The price they paid was monstrous and such a people becomes monstrous and distorted if it accepts this. The distinction between master races and the rest is simple and true, Hegel said it, copying Heraclitus: those peoples who choose death rather than slavery or submission in a confrontation, that is a people of masters. There are many such in the world, not only among the Aryans, but also the Comanche, many of the Polynesians, the Japanese and many others. But animal of this kind refuses entrapment and subjection.

Imagine yourself on that slaver ship, shackled to the fellow stinking mass of human flesh. Who could bear this? Can you imagine Achilles willingly subjecting himself to this disgrace of his honor?

Imagine yourself in the city of Rome, the Visigoths approaching. How is it not a great and noble feat to escape their grasp at the very last moment, forever spoiling their attempts to dishonor you? Sure, your body may perish, but your untarnished memory lives on. How courageous this seems! How weak and cowardly, then, those who wish to subsist by any means necessary are!

Fundamentally I think this is the same debate as the one found as early as Plato’s Gorgias, the very beginnings of philosophy. Is it better to suffer evil than to do evil? Is it better to endure the slings and torments of subjugation, rather than going out on your own terms? Certainly there are things worse than death. But are those things worse than death at one’s own hand?

I look around at the world and I see people enslaved everywhere. Not ‘physically’ enslaved, but spiritually. Mentally. In all the ways that count.

We value life, yes. This is good. But I think we value it to a pathological degree. Others have written about this before, describing things like the cult of Safetyism. The modern view is that everyone should do whatever it takes to keep themselves safe. Domesticated. We don’t even like the death penalty for criminals who have committed murder or pedophilia. Can you cling to life too closely? I think so.

What myriad of small injustices we all bear without fighting back! The thousand little indignities we all have taken as merely the way life is, without any question of changing things, or of taking back our own destiny. Indeed, covid was a painfully clear example in recent memory of how most of the masses will go along with anything that those in authority tell them to. How most people are sheep to be led around. How ever prevalent that slave morality Nietzsche spoke of is, and how rare it is to meet a truly noble soul.

I think all of us, me included, are bugmen now.

Can a noble people suffer to be enslaved? Is it better to die with dignity than continue on as an animal? What have we lost in our commitment to staying alive at all costs?

Conclusion

I definitely don’t have a solution to any of this.

Like I said before, I think everybody can agree that modernity sucks. We all feel the oppressive smog of it, clawing at our throats. Yet we are also pacified. This started as a piece about suicide. But now the question I pose to you is, how much should we be willing to take? How much humiliation is worth suffering as long as we can say that at least we survived? All the struggle sessions. All the faggotry. All the insults, and degradations, and longhouses, and schoolmarms, and harridans, and rules, rules, rules… One can hardly stand it. We need the return of men who are LIONS!

Death is what gives life meaning. I think you should meditate on death often. And, maybe, consider what killing yourself would mean. Or rather, what being willing to live for something would mean. More than just bare animal survival. Once you have that, death becomes a lot less scary. You should, at the very least, never fear death.

I can’t answer for you if life is worth it. No one can. For now I’m bound to the standard Christian doctrine that suicide will send you to Hell. There are good reasons to believe this.

But I am at least now sympathetic to it. I am at least now not so sure that it is truly the greatest evil possible. I am not sure we have not given up all of our dignity and nobility to cling to a small and sordid life. I have been wrestling with this, and I want you to as well.

I want you to be free.

Can a noble people suffer to be enslaved? Can you?

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Ostensibly, the point of the debate was to discuss in good, clean faith and with the utmost charity to the other side the pros and cons of either the egalitarian or complementarian position, especially as it related to Church leadership.

(As an aside, I apologize to my non-Christian readers here, I love you all very much, but this is an article about Church government, and a bit of a long one at that. Despite this, I think you will still find it interesting and hopefully edifying, as we will get into all the questions that everyone actually cares about in here— women, the culture war, politics, etc. For that reason I hope you will stick around and give it a read.)

At the outset, I want to clarify that I do not write this to change anyone’s mind, whether they are egalitarian, which I believe is wrong wholesale and Biblically indefensible, or complementarian, a position I believe to be deeply misguided because its adherents are incapable of following through to its own logical conclusions (but more on that later).

In fact, much of what I say here will probably strike you as crazy or backwards or misogynistic or otherwise offensive. That is fine with me. I am more interested in breaking apart some idols you might have mentally assented to without realizing. You may find this essay preposterous at first, but if I do my job right it will slowly needle at you until one day you discover I am right.

Back to the setting that sparked this post— As I was listening to this debate between those who favored an egalitarian approach to gender roles, and those who argued for a complementarian one, the thought struck me that neither side was really debating what they thought they were.

That is to say, they had basically no hope of ever coming to a satisfying answer if they continued looking at it through their current lens. It was irresolvable in the way they had framed the question, namely “should women occupy roles in Church leadership, whether that be elder, deacon, or even pastor?”

The strange thing that kept happening was the conversation would shift to gender roles more broadly. That is, someone would bring up the issue of husbands and wives, and what it means for the woman to submit to her husband. These questions were universally agreed upon by the group to be good questions, but off-topic for the debate at hand. They were dealing only with women’s role in the church and by God they were going to stick to it, dammit.

But I disagreed that these questions were off-topic. The reason why they could get nowhere was because they, and you very likely, had formulated the wrong question. And it is impossible to get anywhere in such a debate as that until you are able to get to the right question, the point where the true disagreement was.

And this right question was clear to me, not as “What roles should women occupy in Church leadership,” but “what even are women?”

A question to which the well-trained complementarian will respond “a woman is an adult human female” and the well-propagandized egalitarian will respond “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman.”

These responses are all very cute and all, but I am not interested as much in the dictionary, ‘culture war’ definition of what men and women are, but their ontology, their basic nature, and the consequences of that basic nature for what roles they perform in society.

And as we will get into, the reason this debate could get nowhere was because both sides had the same exact definition of what a woman was. They could talk forever and it would continue to go in circles until someone could identify the true point of disagreement, a process in formal rhetoric known as “establishing stasis.”

The complementarians were unwittingly attempting to argue for their side from the position of an egalitarian, and thus had no hope of ever winning the argument.

The debaters had a few scholarly articles on hand to reference for the pros and cons of each position, as well as to see what the general “scholarly consensus” was on this issue. These papers were necessary because of the normie’s pathological desire to couch all of their ideas in an appeal to authority. The problem, for me at least, was that all of their articles were the blackest of coal.

So many academic articles are incredibly boring and sterile to read because in the interest of “professionalism” their authors are too afraid of offending anyone to actually say anything true or interesting. Any real punch or sting is drowned in qualifiers and “the other side is just as valid too”-isms. I say no to all this.

Let us look each other in the face. We are truth seekers, and we want the truth at any cost. So in that vein let us commence doing some theology with a hammer.

I. What is meant by egalitarianism and complementarianism

Before we continue it would be helpful to define what we mean by egalitarian and complementarian. I am not a huge fan of these terms, but since in these types of debates they are the terms everyone uses, I will stick with them here.

Egalitarianism is a fairly recent innovation in the church, and specifically Protestant circles, that holds that women are fully able to hold office and serve in positions of church leadership. The basic, fundamental claim of the egalitarian is that female pastors are valid. NT Wright is a famous example of an egalitarian. This movement is gaining traction, especially in more left-leaning Evangelical circles.

Complementarianism, then, is the more traditional position that men and women are equal but have different God-ordained roles. Thus the complementarian will say that women are no less spiritually equal than men, but God’s law has forbade them from exercising authority over men in the church.

And He did this for… reasons? The complementarians of today don’t really have a good reason for why God would forbid this, as we will get into.

What I hope to prove to you here is that the complementarian view is incredibly weak. It is almost completely defanged.

Indeed, in pretty much every Christian circle you would be hard pressed to find a hardline complementarian, or one who could really articulate any reason why egalitarianism is wrong other than just appealing to the Bible as authority, i.e. “Paul said so.”

But seeing as the other side is just as capable of doing this, it’s not a great defense. Of course, egalitarians have less honest and more construed ways of reading the Bible in favor of egalitarianism, but the fact is that both sides are capable of appealing to Scriptural precedent for their own position. I won’t get into those examples right now, because many others have done so already, including in those articles I referenced earlier. You can find most of them online very easily.

Egalitarians are some of the worst offenders in terms of the modern Biblical scholars’ tendency to torture the text and bring in extra-Scriptural “cultural/context clues” so that they can make it say the opposite of what was clearly intended. Even so, for the complementarians, they cannot even appeal to Paul’s words directly for an irrefutable argument. The egalitarians will turn around and quote Scripture right back at them, with the authority of their scholars saying the complementarians are interpreting it wrong.

This is why the complementarians will lose this debate, and on a long enough timeline quite resoundingly lose it indeed.

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II. Ecce Homo: Gays and the Fate of Complementarians

To me, the modern complementarian position represents a microcosm of the overall trend of conservatives in general, namely that they fail to conserve anything at all.

We can see the model for what will happen to the complementarians by looking to the homosexual debate.

For most of church history sodomy was universally agreed upon to be a sin and odiously contrary to the word of God. The Bible is basically 100% clear to anyone reading it honestly that sodomy is a sin.

But with the advent of the gay rights movement, the stance of the church shifted. And no, this change of tune was not limited solely to uber-Leftist churches that have since completely bent the knee to woke ideology.

Conservative churches also changed their tune. For the vast vast majority of evangelicals, being gay is no longer considered inherently sinful. You must realize that this is an incredibly new innovation in the church and how it views this sin.

Of course, there will always be those who remain faithful, who will hold the line. You can always find some people low in agreeableness who are willing to speak against the shibboleths of their time. But this number is both decreasing every year and already the minority position. It will only continue to get smaller.

Pew Research says that, “Among people who are religiously unaffiliated, a solid majority have supported same-sex marriage since 2004. Today, 79% of religious ‘nones’ say same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

“About two-thirds of white mainline Protestants (66%) now support same-sex marriage, as do a similar share of Catholics (61%).

“Support for same-sex marriage among white evangelical Protestants remains lower than it is among other religious groups. However, the share of white evangelical Protestants who support same-sex marriage has grown from 11% in 2004 to 29% today.”

I hate to bring in statistics like that as some sort of appeal to authority, but I invite you to consider anecdotally whether this rings true. And in my opinion, it very much does. The vast majority of people I talk to do not think there is anything wrong with being gay.

My point is that the mainstream belief of what homosexuality is, even in Christian circles, is completely new, ahistorical, and more motivated by the political climate of our time than what the Bible says.

Very few Christians will say homosexuality is sinful. An even slimmer, as in microscopic proportion, will say it is deserving of punishment. Why? Because we think it is mean to be “homophobic.” They think we are afraid of sodomy, rather than disgusted by it.

What this attitude towards sodomy proves is that for most Christians, it does not matter what the Bible actually says. They will eventually cow to the greater cultural zeitgeist. While regrettable, there’s not much use in trying to change this. So long as we live in a post-Christian world, most people’s morals will be anti-Christian. It is simply human nature. No one wants to be an outsider.

And therefore as our society gets more and more egalitarian, so will the church.

III. Complementarian in Name Only

Here we have reached the heart of the issue.

What I want to do here is to take what’s called a functionalist approach to understanding the complementarian position, so we can understand why it will lose.

I love how Zero HP Lovecraft defined it, so I will quote him here at length. “Functionalism is the idea that we should try to define objects in terms of the functions they perform rather than in terms of any particular constitution.

Often people have positive or negative associations to words which have nothing to do with the meaning of the word itself, which can make it impossible to think clearly about those words.

A functionalist approach tries to evade this problem by first acknowledging that the same word has different meanings to different people.

And second, by trying to look beyond the word in order to understand what it signifies in terms of behaviors or functions.”

So, functionally, what is the difference between the egalitarian and the complementarian?

And the answer, of course, is that there is none.

The modern conception of men and women is that they are, for all intents and purposes, basically the same.

We think women can serve in the military, they can vote, they can live independently, they can own property, they can dress like men, they can be the boss of men in corporate settings, they can be policemen, firemen, CEOs, diplomats, politicians, congressmen, the President—everything is open to them…but the ONE thing we disagree about is they can’t be pastors?

Our society is 99% egalitarian. Complementarians themselves are 99% egalitarian.

I am not even saying that an egalitarian society is a bad thing. But it does lead to a completely impossible position to hold if you want to be complementarian in the church.

If you are an egalitarian in all these other things, then what on what grounds can you protest female pastors? As our friend Egg Report wrote, “The ‘war’ metaphor equivalent would be letting your enemies dictate the terms of engagement, which moves are legal, which items you are allowed to use - As the keen reader of sun tzu that I know you are, you get the point.”

Contrast this with Paul’s worldview. His society was on the completely opposite end of the egalitarian/complementarian spectrum. In a world of obvious, quotidian, in-your-face hierarchies, in every aspect of life, is it really such a massive or world-shattering commandment to say wives should submit to their husbands, or that women are not permitted to teach? I would argue no. This is actually completely natural for Paul to say.

And if you want to argue against Paul, well, he’s not the only one who says this. The entire witness of the Bible is men in leadership, and women very decidedly not. Counter-examples such as Deborah, to me, seem more like exceptions that prove the rule (inasmuch as she in that story even had authority over men).

So the fact that this is even a valid debate we have to have shows just how different our cultural values are than Paul’s.

To Paul, the question of whether women can hold positions of church leadership is inconceivable. It’s a category error. It would be like asking, with complete earnestness, “can a square be round?” or “can women be husbands?”

So the fact that the so-called complementarians can hear that question, understand it, and engage with it, means they already have completely conceded their position. Once you assent that female clergy is a coherent concept— that is to say, once the proposition for women having authority over men ceases to be a logical paradox and instead is a matter of policy we could conceivably put into place— the debate is over.

Because what real argument do you have against it?

The way we live our lives is thoroughly egalitarian. So for complementarians to try to ‘hold the line’ against women leading in the church is just schizophrenic. You can’t eat your cake and have it too. The logical conclusion of modern liberal democracy, to which everyone in our society assents with resounding approval, is women pastors.

You have to realize this, internalize it, and struggle with it. It is actually the complementarians who are crazy here. Even though they’re technically “correct,” they will never win. Their position is insane. What is the difference between a female President and a female pastor? Why is one fine and the other forbidden? By what standard can you argue men and women are different, and must play different roles? You don’t even live that way yourself, so why should everyone else???

There is a certain kind of contingency to morals and worldviews that very few people A) realize and B) are willing to honestly contend with. Most people see the values of our liberal, democratic, post-war-consensus culture as basically self-evident.

Slavery is obviously evil. Diversity is obviously good. What they fail to realize, however, is that these ideas are actually not universally assented to, and indeed for most of human history have not been. We only feel this way because we have been propagandized to believe them since birth.

It was not manifestly obvious to Paul, as it is to us, that women deserve the right to vote. Or that they should run businesses, or own property, or so on and so forth.

Most of what you consider good or righteous or moral is not actually found in the Bible. Sure, in a post-Christian culture, many morals will have been informed by the Bible, but not all of them. And indeed there are many huge, irreconcilable divides between what our morals are and what the Bible considers righteous. Tolerance is not a virtue in the Bible, for example.

Neither is women with authority over men. In fact it is actually expressly forbidden, as a violation of natural law, but modernity has it everywhere.

Once the question is raised, and complementarians internally agree to its logical coherence and potential viability, the debate is over. They have no ground to stand on to bar women from ministry.

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IV. An Objection Raised and Answered

When I attempted, rather clumsily, to bring this up during the discussion, one girl, a self-proclaimed complementarian and “big fan of politics,” had an objection that stumped me at the time, and so I will give props to her for thinking of a good way to get around this. But ultimately I think it is still mental gymnastics and an untenable attempt to resolve this tension.

She said that when Paul is talking about women and their roles, he is explicitly talking about their roles in the church. Thus, to extrapolate his position on women in general society from his admonitions against women in church government is invalid.

I think this is a fair critique, but ultimately fails for this reason. Paul also talks about wives and the home elsewhere, and he extols the same principle there. And as I said before, the whole Bible is ‘patriarchal’ in the exact same way (to use a word corrupted by the feminists).

He also wasn’t living in a liberal democracy. The idea of women in the Senate (a word that is derived from the Latin word for old aristocratic men) was completely outside the realm of possibility. That’s 1900 years away from him. It is crazy to think he was implicitly assenting to women in positions of worldly leadership by being silent on it. No, he was silent on it because he would have never even dreamt of our radically egalitarian society.

And if all of that is not satisfactory, I will add that Isaiah 3:12 very clearly sees women in positions of worldly leadership as signs of punishment from God — “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.”

I propose a thought experiment for you, O complementarian.

Suppose you could drag St. Paul out of the first century and plop him down into 2025 America. What would he have to say about how we run things?

Would his only point of disagreement with us be that we sometimes let women preach? Try to put yourself in his shoes, think about how he viewed the world. Would this be his only problem with gender relations in contemporary America?

In fact, if most of you met St. Paul, you would have some pretty harsh words for him. You would find him hideously misogynistic and sexist.

If you actually read what he says in the epistles, and take away the context that it’s from the Bible so you have to believe it—if you read what he said and imagined any other man in the world saying it, you would lambast him as a raging misogynist and also probably an incel.

If your moral sensibilities have more in common with Oprah than the founder of your religion, the Last Apostle, the messenger to the Gentiles, that’s ok I guess, but you might want to start asking yourself some difficult questions.

And you’re welcome to call Paul wrong and evil and a hater of women. That would at least be consistent. But it would also mean rejecting the Bible.

So which position is it? Paul, or Oprah? Who, in your heart of hearts, do you actually agree with?

V. Nobody actually wants a complementarian society

In conclusion, I want to point out what really irked me about the whole debate, which is that nobody actually wants a complementarian society.

None of us would even want to go back to first century gender dynamics. We think they are completely barbaric. Women being the property of their husbands? No right to vote? Just being (what we cynical moderns would call) ‘baby factories’? First century Biblical views on women are very evil to us. Which makes sense.

And you, my dear chud who is reading this, do you actually want to go back to those dynamics either? Sure, it’s fun to talk about oppressing women. But in practice that’s a lot of responsibility for men. No more cheap & free premarital sex under the patriarchy.

Of course, no one seems to be that happy in our current setup. This is maybe a signal that women yearn to be oppressed. Some have argued this.

In my own case, I would prefer to have an educated wife. I want the future mother of my children to be smart, well-read, knowledgeable about the world.

Now maybe there’s an argument to be made that modern universities aren’t actually teaching them anything, that their psychology and women’s studies and education degrees, etc, are unserious and just there so woman can feel important. Maybe this is true. I’m sympathetic to that. Maybe gender-segregated schools are the solution, but I liked going to school with girls. Good for socializing.

Do we really want to live under the Taliban? I like my women free. I don’t want them wearing hijabs. That’s stupid. Muslims are idiots who worship a rock and hail the teachings of a pedophile as the Word of God. Are they the golden standard of how to treat women? I think not.

All these people online arguing for a reversion to the 1950s are doomed to fail. You can’t reverse the tech tree. A blackpill for you is that the Pill and women in the workforce are here to stay. We have to find our way to stay true to the Bible in this brave new world we’ve created.

Is there a middle ground here between full emancipation and full oppression? I don’t know.

I don’t think it’s too far to say we should repeal women’s suffrage. As I believe Zero HP Lovecraft once said, it took 100 years from the women’s suffrage movement for us to end up with the ‘male’ and ‘female’ party divide in politics. I really like the idea of each household getting one vote, which I feel is much closer to the original intent of democracy. And that way, you might could even have single women who own land voting. Seems fine with me, so long as you are a true citizen and you’re invested in the future of the country.

So, what’s the solution? Again, I don’t know. But the problem is very clear to me. Complementarians today are complementarian in name only. This is why they will lose. Modern society is 99% egalitarian, and so the natural fallout of that will be for female pastors to happen.

They have no argument against this. Appealing to the Bible will not work. No one cares what it says, as we saw from the example of homosexuality. In fact, they will twist it to say the exact opposite of what it says and everyone will cheer for it because that’s what the authorities tell them to do.

Do you want to go back to the worldview of Paul? Is he correct in his view of women? Most people, complementarians included, would say he is flat out wrong, even misogynistic. Are you willing to say, rubber meets the road, actual policy decision time, that he is correct?

Can we ever achieve a true “patriarchy” again, or is it lost forever, gone with the wind? Does anyone even really want that?

To the complementarians reading this, you should be more honest. Become egalitarian. Unless you are willing to go full ‘misogynistic,’ don’t go halfway. You must be hot or cold. You will at least be consistent as an egalitarian.

Meanwhile me and all the sexists and incels who ‘hate women’ will try to figure out a way to engineer a society that is actually pleasing to God and follows his designs. We will very likely never get any traction.

Look, I’m just asking questions.

I am a Christian myself, and deeply desire to see a great revival. I want to live in a Christian country. I want to see Christendom restored. But we need to take a long, hard look at ourselves and come to terms with the fact that what we have now is a dying religion losing all relevance. Sure, Congress (namely, the Republicans) pays lip service to Christianity, but do we fool ourselves that anyone up there really believes any of it? Sure, a lot of people claim to be Christian, or spiritual, or seek after God, but when rubber meets the road, how many of them would be willing to die for what they believe? How many are merely cultural Christians, for convenience’s sake? I would wager the vast vast majority lack true belief.

You can blame Nietzsche and the death of God. You can blame technology. You can blame transgenderism, traditionalism, modernism, globalism, innovation, progressivism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Boomers, young people—it doesn’t matter, everyone has their own pet theory for how we as a civilization let Christianity die. It really doesn’t matter though. We dropped the ball and we need to recognize that and find a solution.

What is Christianity today? There are two basic camps- what I call the trads and the hippies/“evangellyfish.” I have spent time among both and I am here to tell you that neither is the solution.

The Trads

If you’ve spent any time online in the tradosphere you know what phenomenon I’m referring to here. The worst though is when it spills over into real life, that is when it gets ugly.

“Noo bro you just have to convert to the One True Church, dude, please just convert, please just worship Mary bro… just one time pray the rosary bro, please, Mary is like, the Queen of Heaven dude you just have to adore her which doesn’t mean worship and is completely different, actually, bro… you have to submit to the Magisterium bro.. bro le cringe prots don’t even have any tradition dude… look at me chanting le heckin Latin mass dude I’m soooo trad right now…”

It’s sickening. Setting aside that most of ‘trad culture’ is just performative pandering for social media clicks, even then for the ‘true trads’ out there, the way forward for Christianity is not trying to wind the clock back to the 10th century as if everything was just fine and dandy back then. Humanity has always been basically the way it is now. Trying to go back to pre-technology Christianity is simply not possible. We have to find some way to integrate into the present. That does not mean abandoning Christianity completely, but it does mean that we all have to grow up a little and just quit LARPing, please.

And what is the ‘trad’ path, exactly? It’s just more rituals, more rules, more sacramentology, more rites, more holy orders, more saints, more gods, etc etc. It’s Pharisaical. The whole extra-Biblical edifice of Catholicism is exactly what Jesus was condemning in his time, with the Pharisees. Outwardly they presented as inordinately holy, with all their robes and tassels, while inwardly they were dead. They were neglecting the weightier things of the Law. Simply following more rules and dogmas and doctrines and “Pope said X and Y ex cathedra but not Z” does not equate to more holiness. Just because some guys did it 1500 years ago doesn’t mean it possessed the mandate the heaven.

I won’t go all the way to saying that Catholicism is not “true” or salvific Christianity or that it is Satanic or whatever. I will say that anyone who is honest must admit that Catholic teaching is not as infallible or unchanging as Catholics like to claim. The Reformation was a good thing, actually, to get rid of all the autistic theorycel-ing that the church had built up over the millenium and a half since Christ’s coming.

As a brief aside, the Ortho-bros are not exempt from this either. In fact I find them even cringier than the trad Catholic posters. At least the Catholics don’t abandon their Western identity. This new trend of young men converting to Orthodoxy is just that, a trend. It seems to me that it’s more often a political larp than that it comes from any sense of true religious feeling. Being Orthodox is ‘based,’ apparently. Fine. If your devout Protestant American great-grandfather saw you in that Eastern LARP he would either laugh at you or rend his clothes and weep.

God is not found in following religious dogmas. If that were the case, the Muslims would be the holiest people on Earth with all their fasting and ceremonies and harsh asceticism. But they are not, because God is not found in ‘being trad.’

The “Evangellyfish”

I don’t have a good title for these people. This category in my mind involves the Pentecostals, Non-denoms, Methodists, Episcopalians, some Anglicans, etc. This is more my own background and the sorts of churches I was raised in.

Anyone who has ever been to Bible summer camp can relate to this, I think. There’s a certain type of distinctly modern, distinctly American strain of Christianity that to my mind completely misses the point. On the one hand you have your wishy-washy, anything goes, progressive Christians. These are your female pastors, gay pride flags outside, BLM, vote Kamala, disgusting perversions of the faith. The less said about them the better. I think it is self-evident that these types of churches are almost the prototypical ‘wolf in sheep's clothing.’ They wear the conquered skinsuits of the religion they gutted. They will die out the quickest, as soon as their agéd Boomer congregations die out.

But on the other hand we have the smarmy, whimsical, “Jesus is my boyfriend” type of church. These are your non-denoms. “It’s just, like, a feeling, bro..” These types are dominant on college campuses. People love to “feel the Spirit move” in there, sway to the music, lift up their hands, just all around get lost in the sauce. I have tried to be a part of these but to me they’re just gross and weird. It seems clear to me that God is not a god of confusion or mindless adoration or shrieking and speaking in babbles. Creation tells me he’s more orderly than that. It’s also too self-aggrandizing. I feel like people “feel the Spirit move” just because they like the music and again want to appear religious to everyone else. It’s the same problem as the trads, just on the other side.

These are also your Bible study folx. They just love their Bible studies. This probably deserves a post of its own but I just have never understood the appeal. It’s just sitting around and talking about what the passage of the week “means to me.” Not once have I come away with a novel insight from anyone there. And I have sat through a loooooot of Bible studies. It’s funny no one has caught on that the initials for it are B.S.

Self-help and applications are not the point of the Bible. Why are people like this? I shudder at the thought of the exegetical contents of your typical female-led Bible study. Simply horrifying. “How can Jesus help me find a boyfriend?? <3”

Again, God isn’t found in smoke machines or electric guitars or sermons that are really thinly veiled motivational TED talks or love songs to my lover Jesus. It’s just weird and emasculating. Can you imagine a first century Christian seeing a megachurch? It’s not the same religion at all.

God is not found there, either.

A New Christianity

The point I am making here is that organized religion in its current form is not working. It is a whitewashed tomb.

I have two propositions.

1. We must remember the roots of Christianity, not the perversion it has become

We have forgotten that the first men who founded the very religion itself were the Jews and the pagans. There has been a renewed interest in the right wing in reviving paganism and worship of the ancestral gods. I am all for this. Why? Because that same socio-mythological worldview is exactly the fertile ground that gave rise to Christianity in the first place. Sometimes the way forward is also the way back. And we need to go wayyyy back.

I think this is why Christianity seems so de-fanged and weak and sissy today. This was the insight of Nietzsche, that humility is actually a sick and twisted form of pride.

You have to become a Greek. You must become a Roman. Not in the ethnic sense, but in the sense of you have to start seeing the world in the way he saw it. The gods are real. Do you believe this? You have a duty to win honor and glory and serve the gods. There is no such thing as separation of church and state. Everything you do has religious significance. This is the height of Greek and Roman culture, the fountainhead from whence Christianity sprung. The Greek-Christian synthesis is called Christianity.

Do I need to hedge these statements? I am all for small-o orthodoxy. I love the creeds. I love Church history. I love the Bible, in fact. But at a certain point these all become means in and of themselves. Studying the Bible just becomes something you do because you want to go to Heaven. Listening to the Pope or Pastor Bob is how we get our holiness points for the week. Go to Church on Sunday. Pray the rosary. Read your Bible every single day. Give 10% of your income to the church. It’s all rules, routines, and more rules.

I look at these as being like learning scales on the instrument. The point is never the rules for the sake of rules. This is what Jesus tried to teach the Pharisees about the Sabbath. “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath for Man.” All the religious creeds and rules are just in service to the end of aligning us more and more with God. That’s it. You are not saved by reading the Bible, or by listening to a great sermon, or going to church, or the Latin mass, or any of it.

In fact, I say —

2. STRIP IT ALL AWAY.

Let’s put our faith to the test, if we really believe it. Let’s see what can stand on its own two feet and what is merely man-made innovation. I think that every man must examine the Scriptures for himself and see what he finds there. Does God speak, or does He not? You must listen for yourself.

Church history is a guide, but it is not definitive. If you want to be truly scandalous, you could even say the Bible itself is only a guidebook to God. Is it wrong to say we, possessing the imago Dei, have authority over the Bible?

I’m just asking questions. A religion is only alive when it can have these debates. And we should be open to them. What new vitality could we find in this faith if we shuffle off these school-marmish coils of the settled orthodoxy of the 21st century?

God speaks to you already. It’s really not complicated. Ever heard of this thing called “general revelation?” Maybe I write a whole post on this, too. You could learn more true things about God by taking a walk through Nature than you could in listening to 500 BibleProject podcast episodes. Of course, we want to make it complicated for ourselves. We want the rules and statutes and dogmas. But at the end of the day it’s all faith. That’s only cliché because it’s true.

Faith is not abstract, either. It’s just trusting God that he will take care of you. That’s all it is. “Jesus, govern my life.” The rest is easy from there.

How to find God

From the moment I first saw this painting during an art appreciation class in eighth grade it has stuck with me. It is called “Winter Landscape with Church” and was painted by Caspar David Friedrich. It affected me on a very deep level, almost a pre-linguistic one, such that I still think about all these years since I first saw it. I am mesmerized by it (as an aside, Friedrich really was the Aryan ubermensch of art—he also gave us “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” among many other exquisite pieces I implore you to check out).

To the untrained eye it may seem like it is just a landscape, but Friedrich is actually making an argument here. And his argument is controversial because it offers an alternate view of religion that many might consider unorthodox. We can see that the lame and weary wanderer in the snow has cast aside his crutches, leaving them behind as he sits beneath a snow-capped tree. In the distance the tri-spired cathedral looms in the fog, too distant to reach in the night’s cold blizzard on foot. The man sitting under the rock is alone, out in the cold, away from the warm embrace of the Church. And then, suddenly, you realize that the wanderer is not merely sitting beneath a tree, but also a crucifix. For some reason, it is not immediately clear that there is a Man and a cross in the foliage. He sneaks up on you. I will never forget the moment I first saw him there, hanging on the tree. It is immensely comforting. And then this seemingly despairing painting becomes a depiction of hope, that Christ can be found even when you wander alone in the wilderness. And indeed, for Friedrich, he is not found in the shadowy cathedral in the background, but among the trees and the rocks and the snow, amidst our struggle and toil. The way the lame traveller sits contemplating Christ’s face, having cast aside his crutches, calls us to do the same.

Words fail to describe the beauty of this painting to me, but I hope I could at least gesture at what it means. I began this piece by saying that Christianity is dead. On its current trajectory it will only continue to decline. But I do not despair because of this. Christianity has come back from the brink before. I believe in a God who can raise things from the dead.

Do you have the courage to reforge a new path forward? The world cries out for a new Augustine, a new Luther, Calvin… You must be brave.

Christ is not found in religiosity. He is already within you.

And one last disclaimer, I’m gonna assume at least a working knowledge of the musical from you, dear reader. I don’t feel like rehashing the plot or giving character introductions. Just try to keep up if you haven’t seen the movie. I believe in you!

Things That Annoyed Me

First things first, let’s start with the things that I didn’t like. And boy, are there a lot.

I think this movie will age very poorly. Kinda like how a lot of the more recent Marvel movies fall apart on rewatches, with their awkward pausing for audience applause that doesn’t age well, I think once we move past this current cultural miasma of wokeness and all around worship of ugliness, a lot of the art design of this movie and choices they made will just end up looking very, very stupid in the future. Which is to say, this movie is very much a product of 2024 and the last fifteen or so years of culture war. From its messaging, costume design, casting, to even the music, all of it is just tiresomely gay and retarded. I love the Wizard of Oz. It’s a classic. It will stand the test of time. I’m not sure I can say the same about Wicked: Part I.

Munchkins

They completely butcher the Munchkins in this movie. For inexplicable reasons (read: liberalism) the Munchkins are no longer whimsical little midgets that sing funny songs about representing the Lollipop Guild. Instead, they suffer essentially the same fate as the Hobbits in Amazon’s butchery of a Silmarillion adaptation (which I have not watched, but have seen screenshots of). I read a ScreenRant article (ew) after I watched the movie to try to understand the baffling decision to make the Munchkins just regular people? They’re not short. Instead, they’re a multicultural, multi-ethnic conglomeration of normal sized people. A quote from the director I pulled from the ScreenRant article: “We wanted [Boq] to come from a culture, and so we were trying to reinvent what a Munchkin is. In our eyes, Munchkin was not a size. We built the Munchkinland look around him, in a weird way—like this red-haired, fair-skinned type of character.”

Ok, so they built the Munchkins around the actor who played Spongebob in the live-action Spongebob musical (yes, that is a thing that exists). Let’s see this Munchkin culture of red-haired, fair-skinned types of characters:

Yep. I’m seeing a lot of fair-skin here.

I literally face-planted as soon as I saw 2024's idea of a Munchkin for the first time at the theater. Never mind the race question—boy, Munchkinland sure must be getting a whole lot of immigrants in order to possess such a shockingly diverse population— but why aren’t the Munchkins midgets?? It’s literally part of the name! They’re no different than regular humans. Why are they called Munchkins? There are also regular human in this world. What makes them so special? Having dyed orange hair? Wearing funny colored clothes?
No. Get mogged, Wicked.

This is the first scene of the movie, btw. Strap yourself in, I’m just getting started.

Everything is Gay Now

This is a very gay movie. They rely on the super tired trope of the gay best friend to try to get some laughs. I was at a decently well-attended theater and at most all he got was pity chuckles. For background, the ‘popular’ character Glinda’s entourage consists of a fat woman and the gay Asian dude from SNL. And they’re the main comic relief from the movie.

The gay dude gets an inordinate amount of screentime as well for being essentially an OC. I don’t why the writers/director thought he was gonna be such a hit because every time I saw him I was just grossed out.

They also had a super annoying scene where Galinda is trying to flirt with gigachad and best character Fiyero when he first arrives at Shiz University. And Fiyero is trying to look at the bulletin board for announcements when the Gaysian SNL guy is in the way. So Fiyero basically seduces him?? to get him to move. Ummm, why is Fiyero a bisexual twink now??? I remember seeing the original musical as a kid and Fiyero was my favorite character. Here’s Norbert Leo Butz, the original Fiyero.

Here’s 2024’s.

He’s a twink now. And the guy who plays him is openly gay. Le sigh.

He also ruined my favorite song, Dancing Through Life. They kept making him seduce dudes in the choreography! Why they thought this was a good idea is beyond me. Once all the LGBTQ craziness finally dies down and we stop having all the gay stuff 24/7 this is another one of those things that is going to date this movie. Fiyero becoming this weird bisexual lover boy is just a pointlessly pandering decision that serves no one. It’s just one more example of our culture’s pathological aversion to normal straight dudes. Everything must be subverted. It’s so tiresome.

Ariana Glinda

Ariana Grande is good in this movie. I will give her that. I liked her songs. I just don’t think she’s Glinda. The reasons why I think that are very not PC so I will leave them to the reader to understand. I don’t know what ethnicity Ariana Grande is but she doesn’t feel spiritually like a true Glinda. Maybe she could be her sister Brinda or something, idk.

The Worst Scene in the Movie: The Ozdust Ballroom

This scene is the worst thing ever. It’s ugly to look at, it’s slow, it’s just so so wrong.

Glinda tries to humiliate Elphaba (the witch) by making her wear the pointed witch hat. They all go to the Ozdust ballroom and when she shows up the room goes dead silent as they all laugh and sneer at her. Then we are supposed to pity Elphaba because she’s such a helpless naïve green person! Um, no. She was an idiot for wearing the stupid hat and being such a moody bitch all the time and ruining the vibe of the party. Then we have to watch as the plot grinds to a halt for what feels like a solid ten minutes where she slowly realizes everyone hates her, then places the hat on the ground, then turns to leave, then stops, then does a weird and terribly ugly-to-look-at undulating “confidence” dance, then Glinda has to pity her, then she has to join in, then they both dance together the ugly “confidence” dance, then everyone is happy. This whole sequence is painfully slow. It’s also so unclear what’s even supposed to be happening. In the stage show it’s a quick, maybe two minute long sequence, while here it just drags. I would post it here but the movie just came out and no one has footage. But it is genuinely one of the worst scenes of a movie I’ve ever seen. Boring, confusing, bad messaging, poorly lit, it has it all.

Too Long

The movie is too damn long. I was getting restless at multiple points. “This could have been an email!” This is what happens when you drag a two hour stage musical into a 6 hour long duology. They add too much pointless junk that doesn’t need to be in there. Scenes linger too long. Scenes are added that don’t matter at all.

Elphaba, The Leading Lady

The leading actress is not likeable at all. She is not pleasant to look at. Her demeanor is not charming. Her character is annoying! She’s supposed to be the goody two-shoes, rules respecter, pointlessly marginalized racism victim. After all, the message of Wicked is basically just racism bad. That’s the whole subtext, which we will get to. But the actress is just so unlikeable. In Dancing Through Life, everyone is up and having fun dancing, enjoying life thanks to Fiyero. Then she’s just there like “hmmph I’m gonna go study outside where it’s quieter.” And we are supposed to identify with her side! No. That is not the Bronze Age Mindset. We are on the side of having fun, partying, seducing chicks (NOT dudes!), procrastinating homework, “fuck it, we ball”-ing. All schoolmarms like you will be deported, you can enjoy being green somewhere else. We and all the cool people will have fun dancing through life.

And I don’t know if it was just the sound-mixing, her singing/action choices, or what, but she sounded like absolute shit in The Wizard and I and I think we should all make fun of her for that.

The Messaging

Finally, we arrive at the main problem of the movie. Wicked is just fundamentally a very woke movie. Like I said above, the main message of the show is that Elphaba is unfairly marginalized because she is green and people are just le heckin racist for disliking her for being a different color. Of course, this leaves out the fact that Oz is remarkably multicultural. The Wizard of Oz, who I would argue is a stereotypical ‘White Savior/White Male ’ character, is here played by the Jewish Jeff Goldblum in this. The Munchkins are all brown and tall. Glinda is friends with a Gaysian. There are literal talking animals. There is no reason why people should be ‘racist’ against Elphaba for being green. That is, unless it’s just her awful personality that turns people off against her. Ah, maybe that’s it. Maybe she’s just a bad person, as represented by her dour physiognomy. Maybe her mom shouldn’t have conceived her by cheating on her husband. I don't know, I’m just asking questions here.

The sub-conflict of the movie is that the animals are losing their ability to speak. I saw some people try to argue that this is a movie about animal rights/abuse. I think that is missing the subtext. The animals, to me, represent the gay coalition. That is why the goat character is so fond of Elphaba, because he sees in her a fellow marginalized body. It is revealed near the end that it’s actually the Wizard who is somehow (I can’t remember details) making the animals revert to their more animalistic natures, including losing the ability to speak. His reason is that Oz is very divided right now and the best way to unite people is by turning them against a common enemy. Set aside the self-own of the implicit argument against multiculturalism, but can you see the subtext of this? The evil white man wants to marginalize all the helpless gay people! We have to stop him! Muh Social Justice!

Things I Actually Liked

This list is shorter, but I have to face it that I’m not a bona fide hater enough to offer no positives. It is an entertaining movie. I miss the technicolor dreamscape that is the original Wizard of Oz. Next to that, this one feels very washed out and unimaginative. The CGI is passable for the most part though.

Songs

I actually thought a lot of the music was pretty good. Granted, this one only had one original song and rest came from the score of the original. Still, I thought the music was good and the songs tended to get better as the movie went on. Highlights: Popular, Dancing Through Life, Loathing.

Funny Characters

I liked that the animal teacher was just an actual goat. He was CGI of course but he just looked funny. My brother leaned over and said, “That teacher is goated” which I thought was great.

In the stage show they’re all anthropomorphic humans wearing prosthetics, while in the movie— he’s just an actual goat walking around giving lectures. Honestly a vibe. I fuck with him heavily as the kids say.

Cameos

I also liked the song they added that gave Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth (queen) a chance to appear in the movie. I thought that was a sweet gesture. They then proceeded to steal the show for the five minutes they were on screen and brutally mog the current Elphaba and Glinda. Their chemistry, even in the brief cameo, was just miles better than their contemporary counterparts. I wish this movie could have been made like twenty years ago before they hit the wall because then I think it would have been much easier to look at overall.

Closing Thoughts

I’d probably give it a 5/10. While I fundamentally disagree with basically all of the presuppositions, worldview, and arguments of the writers and the movie itself, I can’t say I absolutely hated it. I had fun in spite of the messaging and bad casting and bland scenery. I just like musicals. They make me feel something. Although I did keep having the thought during the movie that it just made me want to watch a real musical like Les Mis (2012) again. I fiercely love that movie. Where Wicked is woke at every turn, Les Mis is one of the most Christian movies I’ve seen from mainstream Hollywood in the last decade plus. It’s a banger. The music is amazing and mogs Wicked in every way. If this review gets traction maybe I’ll write one for Les Mis as well.

The final good thing about this whole ordeal was that it gave us this absolute gem of a press conference moment— the “Holding Space” moment. Do I understand what is happening in this clip? Not really. What does it mean to ‘hold space’ for lyrics? I don’t know. Why does the witch actress act like she wrote the song? No clue. What the fuck is ‘queer media?’ Probably don’t want to know.

https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1gx714a/cynthia_erivos_response_to_fans_holding_space_for/

Side note— what is it with girls/women and forming these weird codependent friendships? In all these press tour moments Ariana and the Witch actress (idk her name…) have this really weird codependent, overly emotional relationship dynamic. I’ve seen it in girls I know irl and it’s clearly happening here. Super weird. They look super sickly and emaciated in the clip too. Wonder what’s up with that.

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The first scene of old Neetch’s seminal work of pseudo-philosophy, semi-poetry, semi-inane ramblings, semi-top 10 greatest tweet moments compilation is his protagonist Zarathustra waking up from his philosophical buddhist musings on the top of a holy mountain. This is what we nowadays would refer to as, “waking up from a long session of doomscrolling Xitter, formerly known as Twix.” Friedrich was really ahead of his time. You see, back in the old days they did not have black mirrors to Hell that they carried around in their pockets everywhere. But still people craved the sweet oblivion of doomscrolling. Nietzsche predicted the experience of reading esoteric philosophy on your iphone with this episode. Zarathustra could only mentally post his gems.

All good things come to an end, especially dopamine hits. So Zarathustra descends the mountain, saying he will “Go to the land down under,” (Australia mentioned) to reveal to the people below the coming of the “over” man. This is usually referred to in literary circles as wordplay and/or metaphor. 

And so who is the first person that our young hero should meet but a priest out in the woods? The priest is, of course, an old man. Because even in Friedrich’s time institutional religion, that is to say the Catholic Church, had decayed to a shadow of its former glory. Gone were the days of righteous wars against the Moslem infidel menace (ISIS). Gone were men of renown and fierce passion for the glory of the Lord. The church was already essentially in the form it is now—a politically correct, feminine, social club of gray-haired Boomers getting together to sing kumbaya. There was no fire of the Spirit present in such gatherings as just now today there is no passion present in our geriatric churches. Jesus is my boyfriend, I love hanging out with him so much. By what this priest says to Zarathustra we see a perfect glimpse into the Boomer mindset. It is manifestly obvious that what Nietszche was attempting to describe here is the pain of ‘waking up’ or ‘redpilling’ and trying to explain the way the world actually works to ignorant Boomers. 

The Boomer says he has left his home to seek his holy roots. What is the significance of Nietzsche placing this pivotal meeting in the woods, at the foot of the holy mountain? This is clearly an allusion to the opening setting of the Bible, a book you may have heard of. Mankind’s original habitat was in the Garden of Eden. These woods, the return to the wilderness, hearken back to our antediluvian home. The setting of this meeting represents the choice we all must make: whether we want to return to a state of Edenic, blissful ignorance, as the priest has, or whether we will instead go out into the world to spread the coming of the Ubermensch. This is the either/or. Either you can leave all the institutions your ancestors built, abandon them to be overrun by libs and communists and lizardpeople, or you can actually go out and retake what is rightfully yours. But more on that later.

The priest discourages Zarathustra from returning down the mountain to confront mankind (and womankind and womxnkind and xe/xirkind) with the coming of the Superman. Zarathustra in a classic liblarp move replies that he “loves humankind.” This is of course very Reddit of Zarathustra to say, but who can blame him. The point of saying this was so as not to offend any of the multitudes of women who enjoyed reading Nietzsche at the time and who still do so today. This is another great example of why we need to decenter masculinity and exalt queer voixes. Really, Nietzsche was quite progressive for his time.

And then the boomer priest in classic boomer cope reveals that he has left behind the world and all of its people, hiding out in a monastery in the woods, because he actually in fact loves mankind too much. “Did I not go into the woods and the wilderness because I loved mankind all too much?” He wants to leave his children and followers behind on their own because he is actually so benevolent that they deserve the chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Back in my day we could become a priest of the catholic church and still make a living. If you just worked harder you too could achieve Enlightenment and run away from all your responsibilities by retiring with your social security pension. But instead you’re just lazy.

And then, even more cynically he says, “Now I love God: human beings I do not love. Human beings are too imperfect a thing for me. Love for human beings would kill me.” This is ironic because this man is a priest. His entire purpose is to shepherd his congregation. But just as the libtard has a great abstract love for ‘humankind,’ while hating his neighbor the chuddy “literally Hitler” Drumpf voter, and simultaneously wanting to light himself on fire to protest for the cause of some random people group halfway across the globe (bet you forgot about that guy), the Boomer priest has loved mankind too much, all while actively ignoring the people of his flock he should most care for. ‘Virgin globalism enjoyer’ vs ‘Chad local community fan.’

“If, however, thou wilt give unto them, give them no more than an alms, and let them also beg for it!” he says. Here the boomer reveals his misanthropy as he wants all the young people to beg like a dog so he can be oh so benevolent to them and maybe part with a few dollars to help those poor suffering souls. I love young people. Zoomerthustra of course will have nothing to do with that because he is “not poor enough for that.” 

The boomer wants Zarathustra to preach to the animals. This is called PETA representation and animals are actually better than people. #Vegans. Nietzsche talks about this. BAP proved this in the year 2018. Why help out humanity when you can go talk to animals?

They depart from each other after that. The old man says all he does nowadays is sing songs to God, his god. It is not clear he has any personal relationship or personal experience with this deity. The old man asks what Zarathustra has come to reveal, but he does not answer. The priest is not ready to hear it. Zarathustra cannot reveal his knowledge to the blind old man. He doesn’t get us, all of us. The Boomer lacks the will to truly redpill, as he has chosen the childish bliss of retreatism. Many such cases.

‘When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!”’

What does it mean that God is dead? It means exactly what we see in the Boomer priest here. The man is a metaphor for the Church itself. He is old and decrepit, past his prime, hiding out in the woods in fear of mankind. Even today you will hear people say that the way we win the culture war is by retreating from all the institutions and starting a farmstead in the wilderness to have le epic based trad family. Nietzsche eviscerates this idea by proving through the scientific method that actually that sort of defeatist mindset is exactly how we lose. How Zarathustra preaches the Overman is by going out into the towns and villages of the bluepilled masses that he might redpill them not through his epic facts and logic but simply by mogging them in every conceivable way. Who needs logic and peer-reviewed research and citations when you can just pick up your interlocutor/opponent and throw him across the room. It is said that Plato aka “Jacked Gigachad” (it’s Greek, look it up) used to win arguments by standing up and flexing. Zarathustra holds so much influence over the cattle-like peoples he meets because he actually just lifts weights and they’re all beta peasants who don’t. We’re gonna do things to you that have never been done before. 

He is right to say that God is dead, as in fact God has been dead for generations now. Medieval man saw a gnome or elf hiding under every toadstool, nowadays we explain it away—“he was probably just a short guy.” When the unicorn seen by one or two witnesses becomes the horse with an arrow through its head, is when scientism and empiricism have taken over. Magic is not dead, we are merely blind to it. We have not the eyes to see. Sciencebros we flew too close to the sun. But this is not the natural state of man at all. I do not speak of some gay Rousseauian ‘state of nature’ theory, but rather the natural state of wonder every child possesses. We have to be indoctrinated into this worldview from a young age by necessity, constantly inundated with epic science and materialist and atheistic and Satanist propaganda to kill that little child in us that rightly can look up at the Moon and see that it is actually made of cheese. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. Zoomerthustra understood this. You can too. 

A Muse revealed all of this to me in a waking dream. Maybe she might have been a succubus, I’m not sure.

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I have a lot of thoughts on the world and this is gonna be my dumping ground for them. Hopefully some of you, my dear readers, will find them engaging. We keep it casual around here. I have a whole back-catalog of ideas and titles and random paragraphs to develop, which means that so as long as I find this entertaining I should be pretty regular with posting. Any engagement much appreciated. If you engage with me I will try to respond back. If you want to start a fight or whatever that’s fine too I don’t really care.  

How about a brief story, while you’re here, on how I arrived at my name. Vinalla. It has a certain ring to it, I think. Of course, the first thing that hopefully springs to your mind when you hear it is the word vanilla. This is because vanilla is the most right-wing flavor. I will not elaborate on this as others have already done so. But why vin-alla and not van-illa? Great question. It arose from an inside joke, from the time when one of my buddies used to work at an ice cream store. One day this Black couple came in and ordered some vanilla ice cream. So he took their order and began to make it. Now, English is his second language and so he sometimes mixes up sounds (though this was perhaps more of a ‘Freudian slip’). When he made them their ice cream he shouted out to the store, “Two vaniggas!” lol. They were not happy about that. This dude is possibly even more based than me. He also at the same job used to upcharge gay ‘couples’ who came in by adding extra toppings to the receipt that they hadn’t ordered just to scam them for being homosexuals. So that became my username for a bit until it was getting censored so I switched to vinagga but that didn’t flow as well hence the shift to vinalla. It is very layered. I am quite fond of it. 

I am literally J. Alfred Prufrock. I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all. I am one of the new American sincerity writers. I am Laocoön. I am Caesar. I am some random Zoomer. I am, like, literally Hitler.

This is schitzo neighborhood. NPCs keep moving.

This is my philosophy.

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