Know Your Enemy
Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria, and why are people celebratng Charlie Kirk's death?
Chapter 1: Angels and Demons
“What? The ‘land of the free?’ Whoever told you that is your enemy.”
— Zack de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine, “Know Your Enemy”
Whether we will ever know the true motives and circumstances surrounding the reported assassination of Turning Point co-founder and conservative author-activist Charlie Kirk,1 many of our fellow citizens have rushed to make their feelings on the event abundantly clear.
For some, largely Republicans, that has meant turning to social media to mourn Kirk’s untimely death and express condolences to his friends, family, and fellow supporters.
For others, largely Democrats,2 that has meant something decidedly different.
For many Democrats, Kirk’s murder has marked a time of smug, schadenfreude-filled celebration.
As is often the case, before we can catch our collective breaths and even begin to investigate—let alone process—a breaking story, the social/mass-mediamobile has careened off toward the next story. And that next story, in turn, is often about the inchoate reactions to the previous, incipient story, cobbled together from recursive, Matryoshka media reporting on media reporting and hastily copypasted posts from specious, spurious anonymous accounts and unnamed sources surreptitiously serving as foundational attributions upon which to construct our gilded altar to that omnimportant egregore: “What-Everyone-Is-Saying.”
So, with Charlie Kirk’s memorial still close in our cultural rear-view mirror and the investigation around his newly apprehended, alleged assassin ongoing, we have already long since moved on to the reaction-to-the-reaction phase of our modern, Bizarro World Kubler-Ross model. That may seem rather fast, but in reality, we could just as easily have skipped ahead to this phase before Kirk had even been shot, like the Red Queen shouting in agony about her injured finger before she eventually goes on to prick it on her brooch.
“That accounts for the bleeding, you see,” she said to Alice with a smile. “Now you understand the way things happen here.”
“But why don't you scream now?” Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.
“Why, I've done all the screaming already,” said the Queen. “What would be the good of having it all over again?”
Except, unlike the Red Queen, we never stop screaming.
No one needed time. The reactions, while perhaps not scripted per se, were 100% predictable. Most of the population has settled in to their roles and dug in their heels. The discovery phase of this interminable societal trial has ended, but there are no defense attorneys here, only dueling prosecutors. One (not I) might go so far as to say, metaphorically, of course, that battle lines have been drawn. You know your team. And you know your enemy.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
— Maya Angelou
DoG runs an excellent Substack that I encourage people to follow. It was thanks to him that I came across the image above:3 people celebrating and capitalisming capitalizing on the cold-blooded murder of a man in public, in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of hundreds and countless more watching online. Including his wife and children. A man they’d never met. A husband, a father. And by most accounts I’ve heard (for what precious little that is worth) a rather good one. A God-fearing, tax-paying American citizen. Not some petty thug. Not some megalomoniacal murderer-rapist.4 At worst, a guy. A guy with some contentious political opinions and a bit of clout. To be fair, it is a bit disingenuous of me to frame it that way, but you get the point. More on this later.
I empathize with the repugnance many feel when witnessing people, their fellow citizens, celebrating such a vile and craven act of murder.5 It certainly seems demonic. Yet, looking at that post, a thought-butterfly flitted into my mind (as happens on rare occasions).
People need to understand that though there is certainly a contingent of people in that cadre who genuinely love to see suffering, death, and degradation, there is a subset that is so thoroughly brainwashed that they truly believe that their opposition, i.e., us and people like Kirk or really anyone outside of their cult is actively advocating and directly responsible for the most horrible atrocities in the world as they conceive it: bigotry, fascism (against them), violence (against them), spread of pestilence and ignorance, every -ism, every -phobia… all up to and including attempting “to put blacks back in chains” (to paraphrase Biden), turning women into breeding slaves from The Handmaid’s Tale, and—perhaps most pertinent to this latest horror—LitEraL tRAnz GeNOCiDe! Their media and political archons and their hermetically sealed echo chambers all affirm this for them and exacerbate their pathology. They think they are good, the Rebel Alliance (everything is Star Wars to them) fighting evil, #Resisting the Empire. How many people cheered when the Emperor got tossed down (yet another) ventilation shaft at the end of Jedi, after all?
In a way, this makes these people more dangerous than mere devils, because these people—like some holy crusader killing infidels in the name of their God—get to experience that rare and heady juxtaposition of oft exclusive sensations: the visceral thrill of transgression and cruelty combined with the assuaging assurance of virtue and “community” affirmation.
“But, Apollo,” you say, “that’s insane.”
Doesn’t matter. Sure it’s insane, but many of them actually believe it. They have showed us this time and time again.
Yes, some of this contingent are “demonic” in so much that they actually revel in the destruction of joy, of innocence, of liberty, of all the things we may point to as “good.” They may be the overwhelming majority; they may be a vicious, vociferous minority. I won’t venture a guess as to the ratio, but I don’t dismiss their existence.6
Halloween is one of my favorite films of all time, and the great Dr. Loomis is carved on my Mt. Rushmore of Physicians (along with Dr. Doom, Dr. Rockso, and Dr. Venkman). As such, I believe in the possibility of demons and that some people may be “purely and simply... evil.”
Regardless, make no mistake, many of the people rejoicing really feel virtuous, feel like the “good guys” and view the public execution of those with differing political views with elation, as many might regard the old “time travel to kill Hitler” trope.
Or celebrate it like many Americans did when we “bagged” bin Laden.
Or even as a sane person might view the execution of someone who harmed or murdered their own family members.
I’d wager many of my readers who are aghast at the ghastly response to Kirk’s death have celebrated death in some way or another. You may have been cheering the assassination of evil foreign enemies, like Adolf Hitler,7 or Osama bin Laden, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. You may have been thrilling to films like The Crow or Taken, where our hero cuts a bloody swathe through an army of evil criminals who wronged him and his loved ones.
I also wager some readers will be quick to take me to task on both points:
“The first list of examples were evil people—dictators, terrorists—who were responsible for acts of unspeakable violence,” you say. “They weren’t a God-fearing, law-abiding citizen. It’s a retarded comparison.”
I see your point—I just wrote it here—though I will note we all know there are people who will argue with that, too, like our friends at The Washington Post who praised al-Baghdadi as “an austere religious scholar” or the younger generations sparking the recent surge in solidarity with bin Laden’s decades-old missive. Monsters like Hitler, bin Laden, Stalin, Sam Harris, Mao, Pol Pot… these guys had a lot of followers.8 A lot. We wouldn’t know about these jokers if they hadn’t. Did all of their supporters think they were “the baddies” and consciously embrace and revel in that role?“The second list of examples are from movies,” you say. “Movies aren’t real. It’s a retarded comparison.”
You’re right. That’s why I’m not making a one-to-one comparison. I love horror films, like Halloween, Hellraiser, and Psycho, and I would never want to witness anything like that in real life.9 However, as thoroughly as I reject censorship of media or overbroad conclusions about its causal relationship to behavior, I would not deny that we can—at times—glean insights about people from their reactions to media, nor deny that people’s views can be impacted by it. Look at the embarrassment of media references in this very article. Furthermore, now, perhaps more than ever, the line between reality and fantasy is being erased. One need only look at the interminable, insufferable insistence by both Democrats and Republicans to shoehorn every single real-world event into a handful of neatly arranged Star Wars tropes.10
For the Newmanoids and Mind Gadflies, I’ve seen your points. In case you somehow still missed mine: I am not comparing Kirk to some genocidal dictator. I am not saying people who enjoy violent films are violent. I think both ideas are insane. But, at least some of the people cheering his death do view him that way, and some do view themselves as self-insert heroes in a world that is tantamount to a cosplay fanfic of their favorite film franchise.
I’m interested in why.
Remember: many of the DemDems11 who are reveling in Charlie Kirk’s murder and the misery it has unleashed are the same people then rushing to Reddit to paste the same old bromide about how, for those dastardly Pubbykins, “the cruelty is the point.” This seems like designer thought-engineering going on here or an egregore of a scope, size, and power so vast as to be near-incomprehensible, impossible to apprehend with our minds’ eyes.
Again, I am not saying this is a logical or defensible view. Observation is neither advocacy nor denunciation. I am saying the view exists. And, to at least some degree, I think grappling with that may prove helpful in our attempts to address this virulent, insidious phenomenon.
After all, as the old adage goes: know your enemy.
Chapter 2: Cats and Dogs
Remember when I said earlier that I was being a bit coy in describing Kirk as essentially “a guy with some views and a bit of clout?”
Well, here’s why. It is a bit like saying chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, a man whose words changed the course of history, was “just some guy”… if the statement is viewed through a Leftoid lens. The image pasted above shows just one of the hundreds of threads that popped up overnight where Team Leftoid Hivemind could huddle up and synchronize hot takes and talking points, arming itself for the next battle in America’s interminable “culture war.” Think my Goebbels analogy is a bit hyperbolic? The name of the subreddit referenced there is “March Against Nazis.”
The “demonic” portion of the revelers may indeed be consciously looking for excuses to sate their bloodlust, but there are certainly many who are convinced they are the righteous amalgam of Indiana Jones, Hellboy, and Captain America punching away at a nation of Nazis in the hope that they can save the world before the Fourth Reich claims the trans Instagram influencers, the iPhones, the Starbucks, Disney+, the Eras Blu-Rays, and everything good and noble in this world. The Woke imagine they are whirling dervishes of “Nazi punching” justice, but back in reality they are spinning their heads around vomiting filth everywhere. They imagine they are Captain America, but in the end—back on Earth—they are really Captain Howdy.
And that is to say nothing of what is going on subconsciously.
To even begin to plumb those depths, people would have to brave a moment of terrifying introspection and ask themselves some exceedingly uncomfortable questions.
Maybe your sinking discomfort while looking at the skulls on your uniform is far more reasonable than you want to admit.
“They’re the skulls of your enemies!”
“Maybe… but,” to quote a wise man, “is that how it comes across? It doesn’t say next to the skull, you know, ‘Yeah, we killed him, but trust us: this guy was horrid.’”
This gets to one of the most challenging issues at the heart of this matter. Who are we really, and who is our enemy? Not to put to fine an ontological point on it, but… what is real? This may seem like pointless shoegazing and listless philosophizing, but this ain’t your grandpappy’s politics. We aren’t just arguing about which decimal to round-off the tax rates anymore, bucko. Part of the current problem is that we have been going about these political discussions assuming that “the other side” is just jerks or imbeciles or even demons, when—while not discounting the aforementioned groups—we are living in a nation where large swathes of people do not exist in the same fundamental reality as their fellow citizens. I cannot overstate this. We are not simply interpreting some things differently or making disparate value assessments: our words do not mean the same things; we are not living in the same realities. At least not conceptually, and some readers will likely want to remind me here—fairly—that reality has a nasty habit of asserting itself in time, regardless of what anyone may think.12
I explored how we got to this point in greater length in a separate article, should anyone be curious.
The key takeaways for this particular research are as follows:
In some cases, if you entertained the external worldview of “the other side,” you would agree with their behavior. You would act similarly.
In other cases, even if you viewed the external world identically to your enemy, you still would not behave as they do because you have fundamentally different internal principles and premises that would guide you down a different path.
Yes, these are some yuge “ifs,” but they illuminate a notable distinction between unique phenomena. There is a difference between disagreement over circumstances and disagreement over principles. I refer to this type of thought experiment as “lens swapping.”13 Sometimes it behooves us to “put on the glasses” of others, to “see” what they are seeing, if only to test the validity of your own “views.” And, if nothing else, to know your enemy.
I attempted to analogize this in one of my more popular notes, linked below:
Let us look at another simple example to make sure I’ve adequately overbelabored this point, pulverized this dead horse into paste.
Let’s say we have two people: Cat Lady Cathy and Dog Dude Doug.14 Cat Lady Cathy loves cats but hates dogs. (She was badly bitten by one as a child; don’t you judge her!) Dog Dude Doug loves dogs but hates cats. (He was badly scratched by one as a child; don’t you judge him!) Now, let’s run them both through four different “physical” scenarios to demonstrate what is at play “psychologically” here:
Scenario 1) Cathy > correctly see a cat > feels happy
Scenario 2) Cathy > looks at a dog but incorrectly believes it is a cat due to bad eyesight > feels happy
Scenario 3) Cathy > correctly sees a dog > feels scared
Scenario 4) Cathy > looks at a cat but incorrectly believes it is a dog due to bad eyesight > feels scared
I think you see where this is going…15
Scenario 1) Doug > correctly see a cat > feels scared
Scenario 2) Doug > looks at a dog but incorrectly believes it is a cat due to bad eyesight > feels scared
Scenario 3) Doug > correctly sees a dog > feels happy
Scenario 4) Doug > looks at a cat but incorrectly believes it is a dog due to bad eyesight > feels happy
What we look at it is not always what we see. However, that is due to faulty vision.
If we just glance over to see Cathy and Doug both smiling, we might assume they see a cat and a dog respectively (Scenario 1 for Cathy. Scenario 3 for Doug.). Yet, that might not be true.
They both could actually be looking at a cat, but due to poor vision, Doug believes it is a dog. (Scenario 1 for Cathy. Scenario 4 for Doug.)
If we look over and see Doug cowering in terror, we might assume he sees a scary cat.
And he would be seeing a cat, but he might actually be looking at a dog that he has mistaken for a cat. Without understanding this, we might assume that Doug is scared of dogs. If we were also scared of dogs, we might even run away based solely on Doug’s reaction without checking for ourselves to determine what he was really looking at, what was really there.
So, yes, Democrats are Cat Ladies and Republicans are Dog Dudes, that’s the analogy. I’m half-kidding. The point is that there are two major variables at play here:
Phase 1) Ascertainment: based on the person’s perception, i.e., are they looking at a cat or a dog
Phase 2) Contextualization: based the person’s premises, i.e., are cats and dogs nice or scary.
Ascertainment can be incorrect or correct. It is binary. It is either a cat or a dog in reality. There is a right answer.16
Contextualiztion is subjective to a large degree. How one feels about cats and dogs based on a more nebulous combination of innate, personal predilections and acquired experiences.
These two phases culminate in the formation of a phenomenon I have termed “Situational Certitude.”17 As a nerd very cool guy, I have always visualized this like the spherical grids that emerge from, and quickly surround, the protagonists in Japanese game company Square’s18 masterpieces Parasite Eve and Vagrant Story.
We all generate our own Situational Certitude Spheres (aka: “Sit-Cert Sphere”) around ourselves. Imagine them being constructed from varying degrees of glass and mirrors. Some clear. Some dark. The “light” of information from the external world will be—to varying degrees—refracted or reflected upon striking these shells, and thus will be—to varying degrees—distorted upon reaching us at the ego-centric core of these reality constructs, if it is able to penetrate it at all. Within that sphere, everything has its own physics, its own geometry. Things that would be insanity to people outside appear as metaphysical certainties inside the sphere we have generated in that situated moment.
Astute nerds students of popular culture may liken Sit-Cert Spheres to the A.T. Fields of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and I would heartily endorse such a corollary as the emotional equivalent, or companion to, the more intellectually rooted Sit-Cert Spheres. Others may draw comparisons to the Reality Marbles of the Fate franchise, and I would again agree. In some ways, it also invokes the ancient city of R’lyeh where Great Cthulhu is perfectly at home amid the same non-Euclidian geometry that shatters the minds off any poor human who finds herself trapped amid its cyclopean impossibilities. This may all seem rather dire when it comes to sharing genuine interactions with our fellow humans or even to any notion of connecting to an external reality at all. Much like the poor sailor who fell into a convex structure on the shores of R’lyeh in Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, it may appear hopeless for one person to even function within someone else’s Sit-Cert Sphere. And, perhaps most terrifying of all, if someone gets trapped in their own sphere, and its glass becomes smudged and its mirrors cracked, how can they accurately see what lies outside? How can they course correct? How can you break free from a prison of your own construction, one where the very laws of physics and geometry are so corrupted that they are useless at best and deceptively detrimental at worst? How can you escape from a world where nothing is what it seems and even motion itself doesn’t work as expected, like Alice and the Red Queen running nowhere?
It is not easy.
However, one possible solution is “tethering.” This requires a person to connect with—or “tether” to—someone whose opinion they value and whose intentions they trust during a phase where they believe they share a relatively accurate and healthy calibration. Then, in times of conflict or confusion, they can use the tether they anchored to their trusted reality rock to attempt to metaphorically pull themselves out of their flawed Sit-Cert Sphere. It may look to them like they are heading in the wrong direction, or even nowhere at all, but if they close their eyes and keep pulling, if they trust, if they persevere, they will find themselves outside of their corrupted Sit-Cert Sphere and in brighter, clearer environs.19
This is a much larger topic to explored in its own articles, but I introduce its basic tenets here simply to provide another possible aid in grappling with these theories. Fret not, it will make another appearance before this is all over, Ludo.
I posit that all of this can be applied to our collective mindscape and our individual mental acuity both in the creation of, and subsequent actions from, our respective Sit-Cert Spheres. Some people are highly perspicacious, boasting 20/20 mental vision20 when identifying objects in mindspace. A charlatan, a sage, a paradox, an efficient system, injustice, an honest person, friendly advice, a backhanded compliment, greed, a golden opportunity, a scam… they can recognize these abstractions quickly and clearly with their third eye, as it were. Other people may have distorted vision. They may be near-sighted or far-sighted; their third eye may have an astigmatism or a cataract.21 Maybe some other object is blocking the view from where they are standing, or they are simply looking at it from a different perspective, seeing a different “side” of the thing. Maybe someone gave them the wrong third-eyewear prescription on purpose or told them to look in the wrong place.22 They may see a blur instead of a clear line between a lie and the truth. They may have to squint to distinguish between friend and foe, see a helping hand as an incoming blow, mistake oppression for security, conformity for community, view a destructive practice as a means to salvation…
People need to agree upon what they are seeing in the first place. After that, they would need to understand the predelictions and experiences of entirely different human beings when trying to understand why they are behaving the way they are in response to that external stimuli. And, yes, make no mistake, even if one is able to accomplish a high level of understanding of all of that, it still does not mean they will reach a proportionally high level of agreement. However, there is value in the knowledge itself, if only—in case you missed the leitmotif—to know your enemy.
This “lens swapping” exercise highlights two questions facing us:
Who has the correct view of reality?
Does it matter?
Now, let’s bring back our pal Cat Lady Cathy for one more quick experiment, this time with a final twist.
Cathy > thinks she sees a dog > feels scared > shoots whatever it was she saw
This helps us answer our second question above in the affirmative.
Yes, it matters.
The correct view of reality matters to Cathy because, though she may have been fine with shooting a scary dog, if her reality perception was skewed and she had mistaken her beloved cat, Schrödinger, for a scary dog causing her to open fire, then she would have been devastated. (Don’t worry, Cathy is a bad shot—being a Democrat—and she missed Schrödinger anyway. The cat is fine.)
So, we actually have three levels of interaction, three phases, taking place here:
[Subject] > Phase 1: Ascertainment > Phase 2: Contextualization > Phase 3: Reaction
Much of this may seem rudimentary when thinking of our physical processes. However, it is important to keep in mind that I am employing those simple analogies to elucidate what is occurring mentally and breaking this often near-instantaneous process down into its constituent steps because an enormous amount of impactful data is being processed at each specific phase. Most people today are arguing with people across phases, from the assumption that everyone is seeing the world they do within their own unique sphere of Situational Certitude. They are arguing with people at Phase 3 without understanding that their reality construction diverged at earlier phases.23 That is to say, if they are cognizant of this sequence at all, they are assuming that their enemies have had similar results through Phase 1 and Phase 2 and are thus acting inexplicably, aberrantly, often abhorrently, in Phase 3. After all, they saw the same thing and had the same experiences, and they wouldn’t behave that way!
“It just doesn’t make sense,” I often hear people say. However, everything “makes sense” if you can calibrate to the appropriate reality frame to recreate its specific set of internal logic-physics and emotion-geometry.
There is a distinct possibility that other people have had completely different early phases that have lead them to their eventual reaction, and that if both parties “lens swapped” into each other’s Phase 3 configurations (i.e, Sit-Cert Spheres) they would end up with carrying out the same reactions.
Starting with just Phase 1: Ascertainment is far more difficult than it may seem, and essentially devolves into a messy epistemological quandary quite quickly. Why do people believe what they believe? And, one thing that I highly recommend establishing firsthand if one does engage in such discussions, what—specifically—would they require to change their minds? In our postmodern, propagandized cultocracy, epistemology is everything. This is why many online “debates” play out like the old card game War, with each person taking turns playing their “Trusted Source Card,” only to have it dismissed as fake news by their opponent, or “trumped”24 by some superseding consideration, back and forth, going nowhere, until everyone is out of cards and goes about their day angrier and more frustrated for the effort.
A massive reason for this is what I call “The Poisoned Well Problem.” It refers to how most people only get their information from a specific source25—only drink from a specific well—and thus if that well gets “poisoned” by bad information or bad actors, then they are in real trouble. Properly exploring this theory would require at least an entire article of its own, though, so for now I just wanted to make people aware of it because we are discussing epistemology.
Take the the Reddit Hivemind’s litany of Kirk’s sins that I shared earlier. I know enough about the topic to dismiss most of the points rather quickly, but for the average Joe or Joette, just trying to establish how much of that is real is an enormous task. They would have to find valid sources and then see how much of it was taken out of context, or deceptively framed, or edited, or meant to be humorous, etc…. And even then they are still going largely off of public-facing comments and appearances, which rarely tell the whole story, and may, in fact, tell internally inconsistent stories as we are still compiling puzzle pieces and, to quote Jonathon Nolan, “Every man is a mob.” People are complicated and often express contradictory sentiments and present different facets of themselves at different times and in different contexts. It is hard to see the big picture, “the whole elephant.”
Chapter 3: Cognito-Elephants
“We miss more in one second than we’ll see in our whole lives.”
— Anonymous, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, “When You Die You’re Dead” (Demo Version)
We can only see so much at one time, and often if we focus on one thing it is to the exclusion of everything else. Physically, this means that a man staring at, say, one velociraptor through his scope might be completely oblivious to the “clever girl” sneaking up right next to him. Mentally, this means that if we focus all of our research and mental focus on one aspect of a story, staring at one facet of an individual, we are naturally going to lose resolution in other areas until they become completely invisible to us intellectually. We only have but so much time, but so large a field of view, and but one place at a time where we can direct our gaze.26
For all of the amazing new ideas I am tossing out here, this one is far from novel. It basically alludes to the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant.
For those who aren’t familiar with it and don’t like clicking hyperlinks, it is the tale of several blind villagers all feeling various parts of an elephant, each incorrectly assuming the animal to be something different depening on which particular part they have within reach. The man who grabs the elephant’s trunk thinks it is a snake. The man who grabs the leg thinks it is a tree. And so on and so forth. Eventually, some wisenheimer ableist who was no doubt giggling at the poor blind guys the whole time, chimes in to let them know that they are each right in their own way,27 but that all of those things are actually part of a single, larger creature called an “elephant.” Much laughter ensues, fade to credits.
This is a fantastic story, and one that I have long held explains an enormous amount of arguments. Before we can even begin to discuss how we should feel about a thing, let alone behave or legislate, we have to agree on what that thing is. We have to see it clearly, and—just like in the physical world—that takes into account not only clarity of vision, but distance and positioning, and it is worth noting that on the mental plane, “distance” can be measured temporally.
All of this makes for an extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming process that increases propotionally and seemingly exponentially in relation to one’s pursuit of precision and in their quest for completeness.
I suspect the usual suspects are flying into the comments right now.
Some will shriek, “It’s not hard at all, bigot! Charlie Kirk hated Blacks! And women… whatever that is, but anyway! He said to stone all the gay people and denied trans people even fucking exist! Sorry if advocating LITERAL GENOCIDE isn’t enough ‘evidence’ for you mouth-breathing, MAGAtard yokels, but you are just beyond help. Truth is you probably love Kirk BECAUSE you’re a white cispremacist just like him and got off on his hate-filled tirades. You should be put in camps or worse; I swear, the cruelty is the point with you RepubliKKKans.”
Ohers will snort, “It’s not hard at all, libtard! Charlie Kirk loved Jesus and America! He was a devout Christian and loving father and husband who literally sacrificed his life defending the ideals of what’s left of this once-proud nation from a full-scale socialist takeover while SHITLIB losers like you squander those freedoms to pontificate a buncha useless trash from the safety of your laptop wondering—oh, GEE WHIZ—how good a guy was Charlie really, while homicidal Neo-Marxist lunatics are rigging elections, pissing on the Constitution, and literally murdering us in broad daylight! Don’t think you won’t be the first in front of the firing squad if your Demonrat tankie pals do ever take over, you pinko moron.”
While I appreciate their respective passion,28 I would humbly submit both DemDem shriekers and Pubbykin snorters are missing my larger points. Namely, that there are people who genuinely believe both of these things because they live in completely different realities, and it is worth investigating why that is because we appear to be stuck together in this country, at least for the time being. Also, I would respectfully refer them back to the top of this article (one billion words ago), when I stressed that I am less interested in litigating The People’s Case for/against Charlie Kirk than I am in using events surrounding his murder to examine larger cultural, and deeper psycho-social, phenomena.
Take our cognito-pachyderm29 example. The blind DemDem shrieker above grabs one part of the “trans” thought-elephant—maybe its penis a video about a “trans” person being beaten—and the blind Pubbykin snorter grabs another part of the trans thought-elephant (Pubbkyins love elephants.)—maybe a video of a “trans” pervert in a girls’ locker room.
People do this with Charlie Kirk’s persona. They do it with Christianity. They do it with police brutality. They do it with vaccines. They do it with everything, grabbing clips and quips and arguing over what they’re holding. So, when they look at Kirk, or Floyd, or Harris, or Trump, or you, or me, or the person in the mirror… some people honestly see a demon. Some people honestly see an angel.
Yet, there is a difference between speaking honestly and telling the truth.
Even if we are blessed with sight, able to see what we’re holding, to see what is standing if front of us, how do we use that vision?
Do we focus on the personal, the granular, the microscopic? Do we stare at one part of the elephant? Do we cut it apart, place it under a microscope, listen only to the sound of the various lenses below, clicking into place one after another? Closer: zoom in to the skin. Closer: zoom in to the cells. Closer: zoom in to the atoms.30
Do we stare at the vignette and the emotions it conjures within us?
Do we focus on the principle, the aggregate, the macroscopic? Do we stare at the whole elephant? Do we board a helicopter, survey it from above, listen only to the sound of the propeller above, whirling around and around? Further: zoom out to the herd. Further: zoom out to the forest. Further: zoom out to the nation.31
Do we stare at the data and the certainty it engineers within us?
Who has the capacity to see an object at its highest resolution at any level, let alone all levels at once, as itself, as constituted of smaller parts, as constituting part of a larger object? And if such a person existed, could they also correctly interpret and contextualize what they see; could they act accordingly?
Chapter 4: Bates’s Razor
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by lunacy.”
— Bates’s Razor
Some of our disagreements are rooted in deep, epistemological differences and distortions that go unconveyed or unrecognized causing us to eventually display seemingly incomprehensible behavior when later viewed acontextually.
That person may even appear willfully evil, but they may just be woefully confused.
To put it more bluntly: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by lunacy.”
I dub this “Bates’s Razor,” in a nod to the abused and overused “Hanlon’s Razor”… and to the most iconic son of the Silver Screen, Pscyho’s Norman Bates, a man who clearly meant well32—and dearly loved his mother33—but ended up making some rather unfortunate life choices. Was Norman evil… or just mad? After all, “we all go a little mad sometimes.”
“Does it matter?”
Especially when Norman looked this fabulous in a dress! Some people wouldn’t be caught dead cross-dressing, but others would kill for a figure like that. Maybe we should be less concerned with his razor and more concerned with his knife.
For the people who still think I’m being a bit of a drag drama queen when hammering that our problems start on—and must be addressed on—the ontological and epistemological levels, I’d draw their attention to everyone’s favorite topic, and an excellent icebreaker at cocktail parties, in fact, the very topic Charlie Kirk was debating when he was murdered: “transgenderism.”
Before we cannonball in though, let me be clear: I have zero issue if someone is gay, lesbian, or bi-sexual. I don’t care if a guy likes “feminine things,” or feels “feminine,” or enjoys looking or acting “feminine.” I don’t care if a lady likes “masculine things,” of feels “masculine,” or enjoys looking or acting “masculine.” I don’t care. It is all fine by me. Putting aside my larger dissertation about the Archetypal Masculine and Feminine vis-à-vis societal manifestations and Shadow forms for a later date, let’s just take an easy example. I have loved Kurt Cobain and Nirvana since I was in high school, so if this 1993 Mademoiselle photo shoot gets your panties in a bunch, you can skip ahead to the comments section and get started on insulting me.
For those of you still with me, I’d point out that this isn’t 1993 anymore, and I fear my fellow “Progressives”—barreling along in their brakeless convertible—have “progressed” themselves right off a cliff, just as I described in this article linked here. Tacking a “T” onto the “LGB” was a calculated ideological smuggling operation, as evidenced by the subsequent “I" and “A” and “+” that have quickly been added to that crowded acronymic shipping container in order to surreptitiously transport them together wholesale into people’s minds once activists realized the “LGB” box was getting rubber-stamped at the conceptual customs office without anyone really bothering to check inside anymore.
Currently, one group of Americans has come to believe in what I call the “Woke Sacrament of Transubstantiation:” that men can actually become women. Some well-intentioned people don’t really believe that, but support “trans rights” in the simple sense that they don’t want to see people bullied, think a lot of gender stereotypes are dumb, and don’t want a bunch of ancient, authoritarian, self-righteous, sexually repressed, Puritanical Republicans telling them what to do.
And I largely agree with that part, except for the fact that a great deal of modern “transgenderism” involves hyperfixating on societally manufactured “gender roles” and stereotypes in a way that only reinforces them (“I like dresses, so I must be a giiiirl!”) as opposed to challenging them like the bands of my [sonic] youth. (“Yeah, I like dresses, and I’m a guy. So what? Fuck you.”)
See the difference?
Regardless, I’ve got some bad news: a lot of people in Democratonia really do believe that:
men can become women (or vice versa, wouldn’t want to be sexist)
… and any number of similarly obvious impossibilities. Some of them don’t believe in the idea of men and women at all. What they do believe is that they have the right—nay!—the moral obligation to force you, legally, to contort your reality and comport your speech as much as necessary to maintain that belief.
And that is insane.
People need to really sit with this for a moment, especially because in today’s world the second even the scent of such a sentiment is detected by the ever-vigilant Woke bloodhounds, the entire pack has pounced upon you, snarling and howling so loudly they drown out everything else as they rend and tear your words—those awful words!—your credibility, your humanity.
It. Is. Insane.
Not like "Haha! You so crazy!’ kind of insane. Like Norman Bates kind of insane.34 One of the most fundamental rules of nature, if not reality itself, that everyone knew until about five years ago was that men and women are different. It’s up there with 2 + 2 = 4 and the sky being blue.
“Time, time is not on my side because the way I am.
Gotta gotta now, got to find the reason why a woman ain't a man.”
— Scotty Weiland, Stone Temple Pilots, “Army Ants”
And yet, it is such a foundational lie to a certain subset of the population that even a human female (read: woman) now-Supreme Court justice, Jumanji Jackson, was terrified to answer a related question, despite the fact that not only did she absolutely know the answer, but so did every child across the world.
In fact, like Saul on the road to Damascus, Jumanji seems to have had a miraculous epiphany sometime after her confirmation.35 The party of “women’s rights” can’t figure out what a woman is.
This is insane. This should not be happening. Something is egregiously wrong here. No one should accept this; no one should support it. If you do, you’ve gone mad. At least, a little mad. Perhaps partially mad. It is possible—I’d guess common, maybe even necessary—to have bubbles of effervescent insanity floating within the vast oceans of our otherwise calm, coherent consciousnesses.
I know. It’s not nice to say mad people are mad. It makes people mad. But, refusing to state these things got us into this mess. Look, I don’t have anything against crazy people. Speaking of sacraments, for you “goddamn communist heathens” who may be unaware, the Catholic Sacrament of Transubstantiation asserts that an unleavened wafer and wine can be miracled into the actual flesh and blood of Christ… while retaining the physical characteristics of bread and wine. What a happy “accident!”
That’s insane.
Even assuming for a moment that the character of “Jesus Christ” was ever a flesh-and-blood person to begin with, that’s certifiable. I love you Catholic guys and gals dearly (and you guys and gals who don’t conform to socially engineered gender stereotypes, too, for that matter), but it is what it is. No need for people to get all indignant about it.
“Oh!” shrieks the Wokester. “So, you wouldn’t be mad if someone called you mad, you cishet asshat!?”
No. No, I would not. And—lest you think I’m judging from upon high here—I am mad. Mad as hell, actually.
“Why,” like the Red Queen, “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”
If you’ve read this far and still aren’t convinced that I’m mad as a hatter, then I don’t know what to tell you. Keep reading? Or, thanks… I guess? Either way, a very merry unbirthday to you!
In many ways, our world is made of miracles, and I am often amazed how our culture has convinced us of the “mundanity of the miraculous.”
Make no mistake: it’s a mad world. Most everyone’s mad here. Thank God for that, thank goodness for the mad, as it would be dreadfully boring otherwise.
So then, you might wonder, “Does it matter?”
Yes, it matters.
First off, it matters because there are classes of “insanity.” In fact, we are asking a terrible lot of that one little word. It is quite possible that this tiny thought package is being tasked with containing far too many things. It reminds me of the wonderful conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
Challenging conventional wisdom, whether it be the Sadducees or the Science™, for example, may be a kind of madness. As Winston mused in Orwell’s (literally) 1984:
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
This is one type of “lunatic,” though as Orwell is suggesting, even in as extreme a case as “a minority of one” among a nation of millions, that individual may still be the only sane person alive, in so much as they have properly ascertained the shape of an (at least pseudo-) objective reality.36 You can’t ratio reality.
Then, there is the lunacy of the true “trans” believer. It is categorically different. This doublethink defiance of logic is more profound than even the axiomatic violations Orwell again gives us ample example of in (literally) 1984, most famously 2 + 2 = 5. This is a contradiction in a tautological sense, e.g., “This triangle has four sides,” or, in our case: A man is a woman. A man gives birth. A woman has a penis.37 Various logical fallacies and linguistic smokescreens are deployed in meager defense of this insanity, but they are easily dispersed by cracking a window in the echo chamber and allowing in a gentle, intellectual breeze.
In fact, even the lunacy of the Catholics’ cannibalistic assertion that bread and wine turn into flesh and blood (while still tasting delicious, I might add, and looking a lot like and bread and wine under the microscope) is far more reasonable contextually as their Sit-Cert Sphere or reality framework allows for miracles, to which they attribute transubstantiation. The religious crowd could just be benefitting from the fact that they pre-loaded their lunacy into their world view so they can handwave whatever they want later, whereas the Materialist crowd chose the more rigorous reality framework overall initially, but is now stuck with a single paradox-mote in their mind’s eye. Or they could be right. Just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and just because you are a “lunatic,” doesn’t mean you’re wrong.
After all…
However , the Woke Cult’s slavish devotion to “Teh sCienCE!©” does not allow for divine indulgence. They have checkmated themselves—tautologically and within the contours of their own Sit-Cert Sphere—which is why we see their desperate, futile attempts to assimilate and corrupt government, academic, and scientific institutions, when really they just need to be institutionalized.
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
— God, Galatians 3:28, The Bible
“OK, sure, but again, why do you care if people believe some silly things?” you ask. “It doesn’t affect you! We all go a little mad sometimes. What does it hurt to be nice, to just use the language we tell you to use, to just indulge people in a little make believe? Even if—possibly—it may not be exactly 100% true, if it makes them feel better, does it matter?”
Yes, it matters.
It shouldn’t. I really wish it didn’t, but here we are.
I am sure many people mean well, but it matters when an entire generation of adults abdicate basic responsibilities and children are abandoned to lord (of the flies) over their own emotionally stunted, intellectually impaired parents. Or worse, molded by their parents into a chic new accessory to show off at the cocktail party to fill their otherwise drab and driftless lives. Or worse, sacrificed for more profits for Big Pharma and the medical-industrial complex. Or worst of all—and I am not saying this is most people—to be groomed, indoctrinated, and sexualized by nefarious actors years before they can even conceptualize what sex is.
Yes, it matters.
Our own little pet delusions may be adorable and harmless enough to us, alone, in the comfort of our padded cells, but when we give those delusions a gun and a megaphone—along with the full power of the State, including its Orwellian propaganda and censorship apparatus—and then turn them loose on our fellow citizens, they aren’t quite so cute anymore.38
When that happens, our delusions can harm real people. They can get people killed.
“… For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
— God, Ephesians 6:12, “The Bible"
Some people who are cavalier regarding the death of flesh-and-blood people like Charlie Kirk seem far more concerned with the death of their delusions.
In a fascinating way, the Woke are correct to shriek that their enemies are committing “trans genocide.” Not because a single flesh-and-blood human being will perish,39 but because if the gun and the megaphone are wrestled away from their delusion, then that artificially fortified fantasy will be eradicated from the mainstream consciousness, perish like a vampire in the searing light of truth. Without rigging the game, they cannot win.
We are not attempting to banish their tulpa through censorship; the “trans lobby” is attempting to conjure it through censorship. They believe their right to free speech is trammeled if they can’t unilaterally wield the full power of government and multinational monopolies40 to evangelize their religion and silence all infidels. They fight so fiercely because what they struggle to defend from extinction never existed in the first place. In a way, that was its strength, “and the less real it became, the stronger it got.”
If you believed in imaginary dragons, and someone convinced you that dragons were never real, did they kill all the dragons? If someone woke you from a dream, did they commit genocide on everyone inhabiting that dreamscape? If a theocracy that mandated the worship of a false god was toppled, did you commit deicide?
If a disorder manifested in the afflicted as the belief that they are actually X-Men with mutant abilities, and you helped disabuse them of this delusion, or prevented them from attempting to have adamantium grafted to their skeleton, and they went on to live normal (if perhaps somewhat less exciting) lives, then did you now commit a mutant genocide on par with Cassandra Nova?41
In a way, yes.
There are “no more mutants.”
But, then again, there never were. The Woke Cultist is attempting to transubstantiate delusion and desire into flesh and blood.
It is in this sense that Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles [in]famously declared that we should “eradicate transgenderism.”
“Transgenderism” not “transgenders.” It is the extirpation of a fallacious ideology from public policy and the pop cult consciousness, not the enacting of violence against other human beings. But, then again, what are we if not our “identities?”
We “killed” belief, acceptance, celebration, and—by far most importantly—State-sponsored promulgation and compulsion of the concept in the populace. The recovered trans-muties are still alive and kicking. They are healthier for it. It was a “genocide” against an imaginary classification and linguistic rebranding in which people had invested their entire sense of self. Some parents in California will be distraught at not being able to send their trans-Wolvie kids to whatever Kaiser Permanente’s version of the Weapon X Prgoram would look like, but they’ll get over it by the third mimosa. For the adults themselves, I’m inclined to say let ‘em give it a go, but there is that whole “Hippocratic Oath” problem, and they should probably seek help with their Sit-Cert Sphere before they seek help removing their genitals. But, hey, life is a highway, you go and ride it your way. Regardless, we’d still all be branded Cameron Hodge if we didn't loudly and publicly “affirm” at all times that each of those people deserved a scholarship to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.
None of this is to say we should prevent adults from cosplaying Old Man Logan or be mean to them if they do. Just don’t ask me to believe you are really the White Queen when you look like the Blob. Speaking of Emma, don’t try to mind control me, and make me see, think, or say what you want me to say. And don’t try to argue we need to go full berserker barrage and “snikty snikt” body parts off of kids to “affirm their mutation” and threaten to send the Brotherhood of Evil mutants after me if I won’t.
For people who just think we all could try to be a bit nicer, less judgmental, and more understanding as we embrace the beautifully diverse tapestry of humanity, I agree. Many people with gender dysphoria are wonderful,42 or otherwise “perfectly normal,” and just want to live their lives without imposing on anyone. On a personal level of interaction, I’m nice to everyone and am generally happy to call people whatever they like. (That may not be obvious from the last few paragraphs making fun of trannies—or using the word “trannies”—but I just love a good X-tended X-Men metaphor.)
Now, of course, there are people who will reject everything I just said about “transgenderism.” We could go back and forth for longer than Logan has walked this Earth because for us to disagree about something so fundamental there are enormous differences in what we are seeing at Phase 1 and how we are filtering it at Phase 2 of our reality calibrations. Our Sit-Cert Spheres are radically different. Trying to address Phase 3 behaviors in a vacuum is an exercise in futility.
To some degree, we may think the other is deceived, ignorant, insane, or outright evil. This is increasingly true for larger and larger portions of our society. At this point, it’s like trying to herd cats or trying to make Cat Lady Cathy and Dog Dude Doug move in together, get married, and choose a single pet. Perhaps our nation has grown too large, too diverse ideologically,43 and we are desperately trying make dogs and cats live together, which we all know—thanks to Dr. Peter Venkman44—is mass hysteria.
Chapter 5: Democracy Manifest
I said I was interested in why people would celebrate Kirk’s death. Were they evil? Were they stupid? Were they right? Or were they just mad as hatters? And does it really matter when the result is stabbing people in the shower or shooting people in public?
“Does it matter?”
Yes, it matters.
I’m sure many people are reiterating now what they thought the first time they read that: “Who. The fuck. Cares.”
Even if you were one of the people celebrating Kirk’s death, you probably feel the same when you think of those dastardly Bible-thumping bigots and ammosexual hypocrites rushing to Boomerbook to virtue-signal their vapid “tHouGhTS and PrAYeRs” to their imaginary Sky Daddy every time one of their fellow MAGAts ends up on the wrong side of all their pathetic, pathological, Confederate-cosplay “Molon Labe”-ing and Civil War dog whistling.
“Who cares!” you snort/shriek. “Why is fire hot? Why do crazy people do crazy things? Why are some people born stupid? Or just plain evil? Who the hell knows, and who the hell cares!? I just want those maniacs far, far away fro—”
Aha.
Now do you see it? This is why I care. This is another way in which, yes, it matters. It is getting harder and harder to get away from people.
“You’re in high school again.”
— Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, “School”
Remember high school? Remember how much it sucked? I mean, for you, of course, not me. I spent the entire time banging prom queens and collecting letterman jackets,45 but you are reading Substack, so you were clearly a nerd. Remember being forced to spend most of your life trapped in a building, in a room, with a bunch of people who you hated and who hated you?
It can be hard for adults to remember what life is like before they graduate high school. In some ways, your physical world, your social world, is so small and constrained in school. Until you start inching closer to senior year, you just kind of assume that’s the way it is… everywhere… forever. It always has been. Every day, there is your crush (So dreamy!) sitting a few rows over again; there is your other nerdy super cool popular friend distractedly doodling away again; there is the bully demanding your tots again. If you were lucky, you found yourself plunked into salubrious social waters, but for many kids “the wonder years” are spent darting from corner to corner of that tiny, toxic aquarium.
Then, you graduate.
Even if go on to some form of “higher” education—you dumb bastard—it isn’t the same. You can leave. People whose presences were, only months ago, metaphysical certitudes in your life had vanished completely.
Well, I’ve got some bad news. To quote the embodiment of my high school experience (along with Preston from Can’t Hardly Wait) Kurt Cobain: “You’re in high school again.” And this time, there’s “no recess.”
This is a big problem with the current Democrats. They are obsessed with larger, more powerful, more centralized federal government, and thus, by extension, diminishing states’ and municipalities’ autonomy and ability to create spaces that best suit the individual wishes of their constituents.
What is one of the most common reasons I’ve heard from Democrats in real life?
“Well,” they explain. “We have to do that because otherwise the retarded, evil, racist omniphobe Republican states will “put blacks back in chains” turn women into breeding slaves from The Handmaid’s Tale, and commit LitEraL tRAnz GeNOCiDe!”
Our Democrat superiors see themselves as enlightened elites charged with ruling over a nation of dangerous, deplorable imbeciles.
To save our Sacred, Secular Democracy©, of course.
If only the Founding Fathers46 of the United States of America had foreseen this problem and made sure the fledgling nation was not a “pure” democracy and instead a constitutional federal republic where individual states would be given broad ability to govern as they saw fit and in a manner best representing their specific demographics only restricted by a small, select number of overriding principles that would be enshrined at the federal level as inalienable, God-granted rights that no element of government could ever violate.
Oh, wait, they totes did.
Anyone looking to learn more about the problems with democracy as a political system would do well to read Christopher Cook’s excellent Substack assiduously analyzing that topic. He does a far better and far more in-depth job than I could ever manage, even if this far-too-long article was twice as far-too-long.
And read Plato.
And the Founding Fathers.
And, I contend, the problem is less about this particular system or that economic model: socialism or capitalism, democracy or communism, and so forth and so on. The problem is consent, and its concomitant consideration of scale. We can debate the relative merits of this system and that model for another few millennia, but ultimately the issue is whether people are properly informed and free to sign the “social contract” of their choosing—or to decline those offers altogether. As scale and complexity increases, consent becomes more difficult. At the current size of the United States government, it has long since become impossible to garner consent from everyone living within the Leviathan, within the belly of the beast. Most people have simply been part of the Machine, been evangelized of its glorious virtues, for so long that they consent by default with little consideration. They cannot conceptualize an alternative. And many of those who can, and who may wish to decline the Aristocracy’s gracious offer to take part in the Machine’s operation, simply have no where to go. They are trapped, and bad things can happen when people get locked in together.
Tying people together in some social Gordian Knot is a dangerous enterprise. We are constantly being told that all we need to do is come together and compromise. Those are perfectly fine suggestions that can have value and success at smaller scales, but many times when the people speak of “compromise” what they mean is capitulation. What happens when two groups of people become so diametrically opposed on an ontological level that they can neither tolerate nor relate to “their enemy?”
One group could go some place else. Solves the problem; it’s a big world. Yet, what if neither side is either willing or able to leave?
This is a topic I explored in the article below, vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Spoilers: things may not end the way you’d like.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago”
All the way back in my introductory sentence, I used the phrase “our fellow citizens.” Some inside baseball:47 I wanted to remove that Americentric wording and instead use the more universal phrasing “many Americans” to acknowledge my brilliant and attractive readers across the world; however, in this case I felt the need to keep that parochially assumptive language.
“Why,” you ask?
To answer that, let me tell you a brief story.
When I was on a holiday in Cambodia,48 I spent some time visiting the Choeung Ek “Killing Fields” memorial and the Tuol Sleng museum. The prior houses the famous collection of skulls from the thousands of people murdered under the Khmer Rouge in the mid-to-late 70s; the latter was a high school that Pol Pot’s regime had hastily converted into a “detention center,” Security Prison 21 (S-21), where communist loyalists tortured and killed their fellow countrymen, women, and children, before it was converted once more, this time into a museum of its own atrocities after the Khmer Rouge was driven from the area by Vietnamese forces around 1979.
It is impossible to even begin to describe the overwhelming emotions that assail a visitor to these places, but one sentiment that consistently bled through the exhibits and the placards, one that seeped through conversations I had had with locals at bars and cafes,49 a deep wound in their cultural psyche, was that it was their own fellow countrymen perpetrating these horrors on them. It was their neighbors, their friends, maybe even their own family members. It was not some neatly delineated and easily reviled “other.” Not some odd-looking foreign invaders shouting in a strange tongue, as had been the case before in the region. Hell, there was no love lost between the Cambodians and the Vietnamese historically (to put it mildly), and yet the Vietnamese were in some ways responsible for the liberation of the Cambodians from, well, Cambodians.50
No, they knew their enemy, and it was them. Their “fellow citizens.” Torturing and killing them.
It was the person they saw smiling at the market every day—before the hysteria carved a bitter, bloody gash through the heart of their nation and the hearts of its people. And, sometimes, it was the same person they saw at the market again, after the hysteria had died down—but the bloodstained school rooms, mass graves, and empty cribs remained.
“It can’t happen here.”
“Oh yeah? Take a look around at the cities and the towns.”
— Clint Mansell, Pop Will Eat Itself, “Ich Bin Ein Auslander”
Hell came to Cambodia. It can arrive anywhere. It can arrive here.
The “amnesty” apparatchiks want us to forget the horrors of the devastating lockdown era a scant few years ago.
“Maybe some mistakes were made,” Big Brother states with a mix of condescension and poorly feigned concern. “Sure, we stole your liberty and your career, maimed and killed your family, traumatized and lobotomized your children… but—hey!—remember Hanlon’s Razor? We weren’t evil, we were just dumb! We were moving at the speed of science, after all. Trust the experts, amirite? Heh heh. Whew. Yup. Even though you have been proven correct about everything after we pilloried you as a verminous imbecile and monster, aaaaand everything we said has been proven a pack of ruinous lies, whadya say we just call it a wash, eh, old pal? Let bygones be bygones, and let’s just forget about the whole thing.”
I haven’t forgotten. I won’t.
I also won’t relitigate the entire disgraceful operation. If you aren’t aware of the research of people like Milligan and Zimbardo, then read up. If you don’t know about the larger psy-op that took place more recently, then I’ve a suggestion to keep you all occupied:51
Give that a read. It will catch you up to speed. The role language and media plays in all of this cannot be overstated. As Humpty Dumpty asked, “Which is to be master?” Also, read any of the exceptional Substacks that have been chronicling the mass hysteria far better than I have for years now: Screaming into the void., Dee Dee, Dr Mike Yeadon… and whoever else you find. Don’t trust me: read it all; do your own research.
I bring this up to remind people that just like Cambodians woke up one day to find that their fellow countrymen had a rifle pointed at them, that can happen here.
It happened to Charlie Kirk.
It can happen to any of us in an instant if a certain subset of our sleeper cell society is activated by “The Woman at the Podium” or “The Man on the Television.” Look at how many Tom Parson’s daughters and Pavlik Morozovs here in “The Land of the Free”52 reported neighbors, family, and friends to the Ministry of Love for not doing their part for Big Brother, for not wearing harmful masks and locking themselves in their homes.
For the greater good, of course.
Look at how politicians in major metropolises, like the execrable Kathy Hochul, desperately fought off lawsuits so they could arbitrarily toss us in camps “super happy fun time detention spas.”
It can happen here, and—especially if you live in a Democrat stronghold like a major metropolis—a horrifying percentage of people you walk past any given day would have been fine seeing you and your family forcibly incarcerated in one of those “super happy fun time detention spas.”
“Nearly half of Democrats, 45%, said they favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get the COVID-19 shots. The majority polled, 71%, oppose the idea.”
Evil… or just plain crazy? I’d like to invoke Bates’s Razor here, but I am not so sure.
Some readers may groan when I bring up things like “transgenderism” and “Covid mass hysteria.”
“Good gravy,” they say, sighing. “Haven’t we heard enough about this stuff already!? Why is he still going on about it?”
I am still going on about these things because these things are still going on.
Even now, plenty of Democrats are bristling at the assertion that there is anything wrong with sending non-compliant, disease-spreading, grandma-killing science-deniers to camps “super happy fun time detention spas.” That 45% didn’t go away. They may seem to have slunk sullenly back to the shadows, like a sad Stanford student who had his baton taken away, but they are still here, smiling at you at the market. Sitting next to you on the train. Waving at the water cooler.
As I stated in a spectacular, earlier article:
The media has convinced a sizable portion of the proles that Donald Trump [and, by extension, anyone who votes for him] is—with no sliver of irony or hyperbole—Adolf Hitler, the Devil, and, of course, an existential threat to Our Sacred Secular Democracy©. This has severely impaired some people’s cognitive ability and emotional stability. It even seems to have driven people to violence, including suicide, murder, and multiple assassination attempts.
And then they blame Charlie Kirk’s death on MAGA… and Charlie Kirk.
Is there any blame left for people like Harvey Dent Award-winner Howard Stern, along with his studio of useful idiots and audience of lobotomized lemmings? He actually posted this video thinking it supported his sadistic, narcissitic, condescending, mysophobic lunacy during the lockdowns when it does the exact opposite. Unlike the bleating sheep cowering behind conformity, convenience, and “company policy,” everyone in this video who opposed the mask mandate has been completely vindicated.
Think they wouldn’t let you die, if not outright kill you, if they were told to? If it was “company policy” or “the new normal?” If they were scared enough or angry enough? If they could get away with it, let alone if they would get praised for it? Then I suggest you read the room, and then take a moment to re-read people like Milligan and Zimbardo.
And Jimmy Kimmel.
That would kill people. Policies like this did kill people. Innocent people. Fellow citizens. Plain and simple. Party-puppet Jimmy Kimmel has been spreading lies and normalizing celebrating the death of “heretics” long before his latest, flippant remarks about Charlie Kirk’s murder earned him a brief paid vacation and a honorary Junior Woodchuck “Free Speech Martyr” badge from the global-corpolitical53 hegemon responsible for giving a megaphone to unpopular monkeys like him while censoring vital voices the people actually want to hear.
Triggered Branch Covidians are, even now, furiously looping in their mind: “Disease spread, big danger! Science prove! Vax stop spread, save lives! No vax mean no stop spread, people die! Especially hospital people! No choose get vax, then choose kill people! So no hospital for no vax! This save lives! Greater good! Greater good! Me good boy too!” without registering a single thing I wrote earlier about examining early phase Sit-Cert Sphere scaffolding construction.54
And, yes, they talk (and think) like Ringo Starr in Candy.
Their trusty “Trusted Source” said it; it feels good to believe; it “makes sense” if you don’t think about it; and so off they go, rolling downhill locked in their Sit-Cert Sphere like a hamster in its ball.
Some of these people had subtle, secret smiles creep across their faces when they heard “aNti-VaxXEr” Charlie Kirk was murdered. Worse yet, some of them celebrated, en masse, publicly, online and at the bar. They cheered when an unarmed woman with different political views bled out in a stairwell in the “The People’s House,” or when any of those loathsome “aNti-VaxXErs” died, or when a father-of-two who voted like you was publicly executed on stage at a college debate event.
“I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun.”
— Charles “Chuck D” Dickens, writing in a letter to “The Times” regarding the public executions of Marie and Frederick Manning in 1849
They wanted a public execution. Just like Charlie Kirk.
The above image links to a “There was an attempt…” Reddit post and embedded video where Reddit Hivemind Kiosks55 bask in the glorious “gotcha” of finding a clip where Kirk discusses the idea of public executions… for criminals convicted of offenses like treason or pedophilia, which Redditors dub “his political opposition.”
The Hivemind’s premise? Since “there was an attempt” by Kirk to advocate for public execution in the case of convicted traitors and pedos, with some children being able to watch, then it is poetic justice—some kind of cosmic kismet—that he himself was executed in public in front of his children.56
Seriously, that is their “gotcha.”
Fascinatingly, the Hivemind seems to equate Kirk’s “political opposition” with convicted traitors and pedos—an assertion that is as flattering for Kirk as it is incriminating for the oppositional Hivemind—without any sense of irony or self-awareness. You can almost hear them salivating at any cognito-crumb that would allow them to justify the murder of their “political opposition,” which is everyone they don’t like that morning.
The post has over 10,000 “upvotes” and 800 comments largely mocking Kirk and celebrating that, in the oft-echoed words of “infinityetc:”
If you don’t believe it is truly that bad, you can read it for yourself here, but I’ll tell you right now: aside offering Exhibit 1,415,826,203 proving Reddit is the hereto undocumented tenth ring of Hell, the only thing worthwhile there is watching Pobo’s expressions throughout the entire linked segment of Kirk’s show, which is pure comic gold, Jerry. The Reddit post itself is just one grain of sand in a vast shore of self-same Shitlib digital regurgitations.
Yes, unlike apparently everyone commenting, I did watch the linked segment. Kirk does not advocate for the extrajudicial public execution of political opponents. He did float the idea of executions for people convicted of treason, a crime that can legally be punishable with death. Except to the simplest or most biased of minds, the shallowest of surface-level thinkers, there is no clever “gotcha” or irony in contrasting the legal ideas he discussed with the illegal actions of which he was a victim.
Truth be told, I’m sure at least some of the people commenting did watch the clip, yet their takeaway was still essentially that Kirk “brought it on himself.”
All as they rush to join in the orgiastic glee of Kirk’s death and the suffering of those evil Republicans. After all, for dastardly Republians, the cruelty is the point, so it’s anti-cruel (like Antifa and Antiracist Baby!) to be cruel to them! I ain’t fer it I again’ it! Popper’s Paradox or whatevs I’m totes punchin’ Nazis over here!
Hence they default back to that glorious double-defense defining our modern milieu: “But YOU did it first!” and “But YOU do it too!”
Chapter 6: Apathy for the Devil
The Leftoid/Wokester/Liberal Hivemind57 has spent years gleefully censoring and slandering countless people with reckless impunity, destroying people’s reputations and lives with the full backing of the Democrat archons and government agencies, the social media reality engines, the mainstream media-industrial complex, and the rampaging mob of their fellow maenads. These Junior Woodchuck Judge Dredds have relished operating as judge, jury, and executioner of any suspected phobist58 caught in their gaze. They chanted “Freedom of speech, not reach!” and “Freedom of speech, but not from consequences!” as they spit that saccharine-sweet socialism from their mouths and raced to to lick their tongues raw on the boots of billion-dollar social media megacorps and mainstream media monoliths crushing the civil rights of anyone who they disliked under the guise of “private industry” all while obviously operating as a de facto State gestapo allowing the Party to sidestep the irksome unconstitutionality of more directly silencing any wrongthinkers.
They destroyed their victims with no concern for the severity or even validity of their “crimes,” the notion of “due process,” or the impact of the “verdicts.” Not the slightest hint of empathy or humanity, shame or regret. Quite the opposite, they grew more strident, more manic with each new pelt they acquired and each new reveler who joined their ranks.
It is among the most hideous displays of anti-humanity that I have ever witnessed in person. This is why I wrote a series of articles detailing how Wokeness was the very embodiment of the infamous “Anti-Life Equation” from DC Comics.
They love “Cancel Culture.”
When exploring student attitudes by political ideology and by gender, we find significant differences. Liberal students, female students, and students with gender of unknown/other are generally less tolerant of different viewpoints than other students. In comparing students with different political ideologies, liberal students are more in favor of withdrawing speaker invitations, more in favor of dropping readings and discussion topics that make students feel uncomfortable, and more in favor of reporting professors and other students who say something deemed offensive in comparison to conservative students. Female students and those with gender of unknown/other are also more in favor of disinviting campus speakers, dropping readings and class discussion topics that make students feel uncomfortable, and reporting professors and other students that are deemed offensive in comparison to male students.
— John Bitzan, Ph.D., 2024 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey
“Freedom of speech: not freedom from consequences,” the Woke swarm shrieked as it ravaged the countryside like locusts.
Like many things the Wokesters seize upon (then mangle until it becomes unrecognizable), there is a kernel of truth here.
It is true that people aren’t required to ignore what you say or like your views. Everyone—including private businesses, employers, universities—is free to factor these things in when deciding how to relate to you, if at all. There are consequences.
However, there is the small matter of proportionality. Not all consequences are created equal.
I always hated the slogan “Freedom of speech, not from consequences!” when used by the Wokesters.
Partly because I knew—as they are proving right now—that as with all principles: they don’t actually believe it. They hide behind principles, behind our adherence to them, in order to weaponize our compassion and exploit our honor. They count on that appeal to principle staying our hand long enough for them to spit in our faces and run off to defile their next victim.
Partly because I knew that they used that vague, overbroad bromide to justify any arbitrary punishment they should see fit to unilaterally administer, while also being free to do whatever they want without consequence.
Partly because I knew their binary worldview meant that they would allow no nuance: any consequence would be the same as all consequence viewed within the dark and distorted sphere of their Situational Certitude. They would use that slogan to justify responding to the most trivial act with the cruelest torment as though that was as natural as Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
“CoNsEQquENCes,” they shriek, as they clasp old grudges like Gollum with his “precious” and dig through digital dumpsters hoping to exhume some long-buried impropriety they can redeem for social credit and karma from the Hivemind.
Like in the case of Mimi Groves.
I had been working on a more succinct summary of her story, but while researching it I became convinced that Logan “Wolverine” Dougherty (from the excellent free speech organization, FIRE) did such a beautiful job of detailing these events that it would benefit the reader most to simply present an excerpt from his report below:
As a 15-year-old high school freshman in 2016, Groves sent a three-second Snapchat video to a friend letting them know she had just gotten her learner’s permit. In the video, Groves looked into the camera and announced, “I can drive, niggah.”
Years later, while sitting in his senior history class, [Jimmy] Galligan received a notification on his phone. It was a link to the years-old video. He alerted teachers and administrators, but they took no action against Groves. Angered, Galligan held on to the video and waited, later telling a reporter with The New York Times, “I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word.”
Groves, now a senior and varsity cheer captain, had always dreamed of cheering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In the spring, her dream had finally come true, and she and her parents celebrated with cake and orange balloons — the university’s official color.
One month later and almost 1,000 miles away, police detained George Floyd, a black man, on suspicion of passing a counterfeit bill. Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, pinned Floyd face-down on the ground while kneeling against his neck for over nine minutes. By the time paramedics arrived, Floyd was dead.
As protests erupted across the nation, Groves took to social media to express her support for the Black Lives Matter movement, calling upon others to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something.” She received a response from an unrecognized user, “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word.”
Shortly thereafter, Groves received urgent calls from her friends, alerting her that her name was all over social media. Galligan had released the video.
While the University of Tennessee soon received hundreds of calls to revoke Groves’ admissions offer, Groves had received messages of her own on social media, with some allegedly threatening violence should she step foot on campus. In a conversation with an admissions officer, Groves and her parents were told, “They’re angry, and they want to see some action.”
Groves received an ultimatum: withdraw or have her admissions offer rescinded. She withdrew. Her mother later said of the incident, “We just needed it to stop, so we withdrew her… They rushed to judgment and unfortunately it’s going to affect her for the rest of her life.”
[…]
A friend of Groves, who is black, told a reporter with The New York Times that Groves had personally apologized to her for the video long before it spread online. She defended Groves on social media, stating, “We’re supposed to educate people, not ruin their lives all because you want to feel a sense of empowerment.”
Galligan had a different perspective, telling that same reporter, “If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened. I’m going to remind myself, you started something. You taught someone a lesson.”
— Logan Dougherty, Shifting Winds: Students Under Fire, 2020-2024. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
“I’m going to remind myself… You taught someone a lesson.”
Did Galligan know Groves had already apologized to friends “long before” the video spread? Would he have cared?
“I will save you tomorrow... from yourself I will save you.”
— Abigail Williams, Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”
Ironic.59 Had Groves never posted support for BLM online, would Galligan have ever pulled the trigger on his plan for vengeance her salvation? In the end, was her ruin to be her reward for “doing better,” for “doing the work,” for expressing racial solidarity? What “lesson” was being taught exactly?
The New York Times60 solemnly declared Mimi’s destruction “a reckoning.” For as much as the Woke mob and Galligan are culpable for what occurred, one must not neglect, and cannot overstate, the role of the media, and the ultimate responsibility that lies with the institutions, such as the University of Tennessee, and their craven or ideologically corrupted administrators who are quick to kowtow to the Salemite mob. Quick to offer them up the “public executions” they demand.
This is the tale of all Woke Witch Hunts. It is as easy to point the finger at Abigail Williams as it was for Abigail to point her finger at Elizabeth Proctor. Much like Galligan and Groves, she was young and emotional. But what of Reverend Parris?
Reports state Galligan had reached out to school officials years earlier to address bullying and racism. (I found no indication Groves was implicated in that, nor that she was the one who sent Galligan the years-old video of her.) The school didn’t do anything to help. When it was their jobs, but it didn’t come with front-page headlines or Twitter tempests. What of the churches, universities, the institutions, the parents, what of the adults who are supposed to be bulwarks against these things? What is their excuse for failing the youth entrusted to their care, and then facilitating and fueling these frenzies when they flare up, incinerating a young woman’s life in a flash, capitulating to a mob that was already racing to find its next sacrifice?
What is their excuse for allowing these inquisitions to be taken too far?
If you point out to these people that they’ve taken an inquisition too far, and then you later try to hold them the least bit accountable for some egregious thing they’ve said, they’ll shriek that you are a hypocrite.
“I tHouGhT yoU NO BEliEve iN CoNsEQquENCes!? LUL!1!” they say.
Well, Wokesters, I’ve got some bad news.
One of the consequences of punching completely innocent fellow citizens who may have slightly different opinions or “lived experiences” than you “LiTerAL nAziS!” in the face is that those “LiTerAL nAziS” may eventually decide to punch you back. So, it is rather rich to see the Suprised-Pika-Pearl-Clutching of all of the Wokesters when Conservatives began dragging them through the digital streets for cheering Charlie Kirk’s death, recording their social media posts, reporting them to their universities and employers, calling for them to be censored or punished.
Conservatives aren’t doing this because you sang along to a popular rap song in high school; they are doing this because you are publicly posting—now, as an adult, in the workforce—that you think someone like them being murdered in front of his wife and children was “well deserved.”
I’m reminded of one of the Woke’s favorite slogans: “When someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
And this isn’t even “equality,” as I have made abundantly clear. This Hivemind remains overwhelmingly the aggressor, the oppressor, to use a favorite term of theirs. Yet still, the Woke were so accustomed to having the keys to the cultural kingdom and to gleefully wielding the baton with caprice and impunity that even the slightest clapback sends them spiraling into full-blown victim-mode catastrophizing, as they tend to do when any disturbance threatens their dominance.
These are the same people who cried that they were being “repressed” when they couldn’t talk to kindergarteners about sex in public elementary schools, even as they fought to ban books that challenged their “trans” ideology and pushed laws to enforce it.
A chilling example of this is how the puritanical Woke Mind Virus infected even the highest echelons of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an organization designed to protect free speech even under some of the most extreme circumstances as I described in length here.
This infection is catalogued in the following excerpt from an open letter to the Wall Street Journal from another Abigail, Abigail Shrier, whose book IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters was the target of an intense witch hunt led by the Woke Salemite mob and championed by some truly terrifying individuals and institutions.
“Abigail Shrier’s book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans,” Chase Strangio, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy director for transgender justice, tweeted Friday. “I think of all the times & ways I was told my transness wasn’t real & the daily toll it takes. We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again.” Then: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
You read that right: Some in today’s ACLU favor book banning. Grace Lavery, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, went further, tweeting: “I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.”
This is where leftist extremism, encouraged by cowardly corporations, leads. The market—that is, readers—should determine what booksellers carry. My book was consistently No. 1 in several categories on Amazon based on sales. But the online giant, under pressure from extremists, refused to allow my publisher to advertise “Irreversible Damage” on the site.
At a time when independent bookstores are nearly extinct, chain bookstores are endangered, and Americans’ movement outside their homes is constrained by a pandemic, a handful of online retailers have outsize influence over the ideas to which we have access. And those ideas are being winnowed in one direction.
Robin DiAngelo’s book, “White Fragility,” which falsely accuses millions of Americans of being inalterably racist, is for sale at Target.com, no matter how many Americans it might offend. It should be. The notion that civil society required a marketplace of ideas was something liberals once believed—especially those who worked at the ACLU, or taught at Berkeley.
“Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”61
“I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.”
Those are the words of a high-ranking officer the once-principled ACLU and an English professor at the once-prestigious University of California, Berkley. This is what those institutions look like subsumed by the frothing Woke mob. They worship the fascist amalgam of government and industry wielding that combined might to crush their opposition. They love Big Brother. They love censorship. They need censorship. They need it to maintain control. They need it to power the Machine projecting their delusions into the minds of their cultists, onto screen of reality, because deep down they know that they are not real, that they can never truly transubstantiate them into flesh and blood. And so the Machine must grind on lest they face the agony, rage, and bitter tears they know await them at the Golgotha of all Delusions.
This is lunacy. This is religious fanaticism.
The list of odious censorship operations run under the Biden Regime, much to the delight of the lunatic mob who will deny it occurred, is interminable. They conspired and colluded to promote lies and lunatics while suppressing truth and actual experts who were desperately sounding the alarms about everything from “transanity” to the poison injections to election fraud to the proxy war in Ukraine to Hunter Biden’s laptop to the very censorship operation itself…
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) “says he regrets caving to White House pressure."
A report shows Biden Administration pushed to censor books and social media.
And, of course, we have the excellent work of Subtack’s own Matt Taibbi in “The Twitter Files,” linked below:
And this isn’t even counting the less “vulgar displays of power” when the oppressive miasma of ideological conformity—the same one that hung like a pall over Pol Pot’s Cambodia—and the lure of affirmation, virtue, and implied rewards, along with the ever-present fear of reprisal, more than sufficed in motivating people to act in accordance with the well-known will of the Party even without a gestapo agent knocking on their door.
And this was after the Democrat Party and its social media underlings had conspired to carry out a de facto coup dragging Donald Trump, at the time the sitting President of the United States, off every platform they could under the glaringly false pretense that he had “incited an insurrection” and that it was too dangerous to platform unhinged conspiracy theories that could undermine confidence in America’s sacred and secure electio—oh, wait never mind that’s totes fine now.
The sheer enormity of the censorship and propaganda campaign that took place during the last several years, and is surely continuing today, is absolutely staggering. We are living on Planet Hollywood. As I said a long, long time ago in a paragraph far, far away: it seems like designer thought-engineering going on here or an egregore of a scope, size, and power so vast as to be near-incomprehensible, impossible to apprehend with our minds’ eyes.
A friend recently joked about how some “takes” are so bad you just go to sleep. The opinions are so astonishingly deranged, that your mind basically gives up, throws in the towel, shuts down, “blue screens” when trying to interface with them. Like the mad geometry of the sunken city of R’lyeh, a sane man simply cannot exist there. Such is the notion of a Democrat complaining about censorship. It is so catastrophically insane that I am always reminded of this line from Destiny 2.
“Status: Calamitous.”
Chapter 7: No Laughing Matter
It is is not the authoritarian hand of Big Brother that threatens to knock Kimmel from his ill-gotten pedestal; it is the authoritarian hand of Big Brother that keeps him there.
“The right wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob.”
— Matthew Dowd, pundit fired for suggesting Kirk was responsible for his own murder
You know what is not funny?
Jimmy Kimmel.
You know what is funny?
The idea that Jimmy Kimmel—millionaire darling of Hollywood and Liberal elites—is a “martyr for free speech” when he receives a performative, slap-on-the-wrist suspension before immediately returning a triumphant hero despite never being funny, spending years only repeating “Trump! Amirite!?” to NPC audience clapter, cratering ratings,62 and alienating over half of his potential viewers every night.
Not funny “haha,” funny like Stephen Colbert.
By the way, think I’m joking about Kimmel and his ilk only doing “Trump! Amirite!?” clapter in front of a live, braindead audience of circus seals trained to clap on command for years? Here is a random screencap I took a while back of the clips on Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s YouTube channel, in order, with zero edits from me. I mercifully cut the the image around #40 just for space and time constraints, but it goes on like this for as far as the eye can see. If you like, you can run the same experiment yourself with Kimmel, or Colbert, or Oliver, or Meyers… or any of those modular mouthpieces, those parasites masquerading as “hosts.”
According to the BBC:
“This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this,” Kimmel said to whoops from his studio audience.
After playing a clip of Trump ridiculing his low ratings, the host pointed out that the row had brought huge attention to his comeback, and sent back some ridicule in return.
“He tried his best to cancel me,” Kimmel said. “Instead he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly.63 He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”
The host added: “A government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American,” before repeating for emphasis: “That’s anti-American.”
If, in Jimmy Kimmel’s own words, President Donald J. Trump—as the sitting president having decisively won the popular vote and the electoral college and with a Republican majority in Congress and a cabinet of his own cronies—truly had “tried his best to cancel” a talentless, wildly divisive, no-account, ratings-cratering, third-rate hack like Kimmel and still failed miserably to do so, then why, exactly, on God’s green Earth, are we supposed to believe that that same Donald Trump is the terrifying, malevolent, omnipotent, Hitlerian God-Emperor of the Fascist Fourth Reich whom Kimmel and his ilk have told us threatens all of existence on a molecular level?
The dude can’t even get Jimmy Kimmel fired!
Oh, that’s right: it is definitely not because Kimmel’s entire spiel is textbook DARVO gaslighting and projection, and Kimmel, his controllers, and his fans are the Empire. It must be because plucky Jimmy Skywalker channeled the Force of the #Resistance to defeat Emperor Trump! Of course, how could I forget? You have to love an underdog! “Great shot, Jimmy! That was one-in-a-million!”
Some of the other stuff Jedi Jimmy said sounds nice, too.
Where was his concern for American ideals when he was peddling propaganda and calling for his fellow citizens to be denied healthcare? Where were was that push to release the Bill Clinton Epstein files when a Democrat was in office? Where was that concern for free speech when other comedians with different politics were actually being canceled?
If any of those questions stump you, please allow me to reiterate an earlier point: Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t have any principles. He doesn’t care about any of those things he said.
At all.
He only cares about Jimmy and the Hivemind.64
It is just like when Stephen Colbert pretended to be an snarly satirist speaking truth-to-power while at Bush’s press dinner, only to roll over like a trained poodle when he had a similar opportunity with Obama. You can read all about that in this article:
Where were Jimmy and Steve when a herd of rabid Wokesters forced a venue to cancel Dave Chapelle’s sold-out show at the last minute because he made jokes and stated facts?
“bUt ChapElLE StiLL dO ShoWs BiiiGG monEy SO NOt CanCelED DuH!” I can hear someone shrieking from across Cyberspace. You are missing the point. However, as this article has gone to great lengths to illustrate, me trying to cut through the hull of your cognitive dissonance and pull you to the shores of sanity would require a great deal of time and energy. And if you are a True Believer in the Cult of Wokeness, the truth is: you don’t care anyway. You aren’t actually concerned with whether or not someone was “canceled enough;” it’s that your cult programming is overriding your mind, and you’re just throwing out distractions disguised as qualifiers so you can escape the perceived pain of your Sit-Cert Sphere shattering and the expected effort required to reconstruct it afterward.
Every bad-faith riposte from a cultist is merely tantamount to a scared squid squirting a cloud of ink at you so that it can escape.
Case in point: Graham Linehan. The man who wrote one of the funniest skits mocking racism (and those disgusting, gay, womanizing, job-stealing GREEKS!) of all time.
He lost his career, his friends, his marriage… he has been censored and silenced, suffered immense, catastrophic harm for relatively anodyne jokes and for stating obvious facts, i.e., men are not women. Is that “canceled enough?” Did Jimmy and Steve defend Linehan?65
Here the cultist either really digs in and says, “BuT hE StiLl aLivE LoOk U liNked viDEo He finE,” but more likely they will move the goalpost and switch to the argument of, “WeLl, suRe, HE diD fAce SOooOOOomE cONSeQueNCES, but HE DESERVED IT!” (Their typing improves when they get serious at the end there.)
This is sick, and it is insane. But, it does allude to an underlying truth: at the end of the day, a lot of it comes down how we each measure what someone “deserves.”
I have no problem with people making fun of Trump, I do it quite a bit and am actually rather proud of my Trump impression, but what we are seeing with these TV programs is pathological. There is something deeply wrong here. Kimmel does not even tell jokes. He smirks while insulting over half of the American voters. His expression is less a jovial smile and more akin to the “fear grimace” monkeys make when anxious or trying to be intimidating. Some say you “smile with your eyes,” but look at Kimmel when he is telling one of his “jokes.” Do you see joy, love, humor, the kind of twinkle that always shone in Norm MacDonald’s eyes? Or do you see the Devil’s eyes?
Johnny Carson, David Letterman, a lot of the the “late-night” guys I grew up with (and earlier) did political jokes, but their forays into political humor were more sporadic, light-hearted, and notably they would lampoon Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike. All manner of viewer could tune in, unwind, and enjoy a little levity after a long day at work.
Because, unlike Kimmel, those guys were funny.
If you are going to make a politically incorrect joke—especially one that could cost you your job—for the love of Satan, at least make it funny. Perhaps most pathetic thing of all is that even the supposed “jokes” these Democrat cultists are making are neither funny nor edgy. No surprise from a cult whose “comedic” icons are Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.
Most of the “jokes” I’ve seen surrounding this tragedy are just dumb or mean. They often remind me of the leering edge lords loading up the eight-millionth “What was the last thing that went through Kurt Cobain’s head?” joke after Kurt’s suicide. So daring! So clever!
If you want to see how a true enlightened master crafts the impossible, forbidden joke, then you need look no further than the late, great Gilbert Gottfried’s legendary appearance at the roast of Hugh Hefner mere days after September 11. Yes, September 11, 2001.
And when that bombs—no pun intended—you better be ready to immediately follow that up with the most iconic rendition of the infamous “Aristocrats” bit of all time, [WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC LANGUAGE!] and win the entire audience back faster than Building 7’s preplanned free fall.
If you can’t do that—and, spoilers, you can’t—then probably best to leave it alone. I would also be remiss not to point out some other factors that really separate a true comedian’s comedian, a consummate professional with a brilliant mind and a one-of-a-kind delivery like Gottfried, versus an obsequious, talentless, pathethic, dime-a-dozen husk of a human being like Kimmel.
As Gottfried himself alludes to in that first video (the relatively safe one), that was “just how his mind works” and he “wanted to address the elephant in the room.” Both of those are such important points. Gottfried was a born comedian: his brain just naturally looked at things differently, turning them around, taking them apart, trying to find unexpected angles and reconfigurations that would surprise or even shock people, but ultimately that would make them laugh. Why? Well, undoubtedly in part because it was his nature and the compulsion to see just how far he could push it, but I believe it was also because true comedians like him want to see people happy. They want to grab that cognito-elephant in the room that has everyone frightened and nervous, and ride it around like a maniac in order to show people that it’s not so scary. That they can get over it, get past it. Laugh at it. Maybe they want to challenge themselves to see if they can conquer even more dangerous cognito-beasts. Make people laugh at even the world’s most menacing topics.
That won’t always work. It may be something people wish you could dial down sometimes, something that even the comedians themselves wish they could dial down a bit, but—as Gottfried himself said—”it’s just how [their] minds work.” It may look like malice or malevolence to the humorless scolds of the world; it may even backfire horribly with people who just aren’t resonating with it at that moment; but it is born from good intentions.
None of that applies to Jimmy Kimmel.
I am tempted to add another “We are not the same” Gus meme here, but I shall resist the urge.
I do not call for Kimmel to be censored, but we all know there is a non-zero chance that his years of incessantly programming viewers to believe Trump and anyone who supports him are evil, existential threats to all life on Earth has fueled the kind of hysteria that can drive the more susceptible cultists to violence. And yet, Kimmel has the audacity to get on stage after that actually occurs, after a person in the group he has demonized for years is murdered, and waste no time exploiting that very tragedy to further demonize the group that is being targeted for assassinations. A group that is over half of the electorate! All when his job is to tell jokes and talk to actresses about their new rom-coms.
If Kimmel wasn’t being propped up by the Party, wasn’t willing to be their lapdog, then he would have never been hired in the first place. He certainly wouldn’t get any support from the Right, as he spends every waking moment attacking them. He also wouldn’t get any support from the Left, either, if they had any principles. After all, they reveled in the “reckoning” of a middle-class teenager having her life destroyed for the mistake of having once said “nigga.” Kimmel is a millionaire whose “claims to fame” were playing third-fiddle on a show about girls on trampolines66 and doing a full black-face “impression” of Karl Malone.
The “Progressive” Wokesters are celebrating Charlie Kirk literally being murdered for his speech because, in their deranged minds, he committed the cardinal sins of misogyny and racism, while they are simultaneously claiming it is the end of Free Speech© if the clown shown above faces a brief suspension from his failed television show because he immediately weaponized Kirk’s death to score easy political layups. If you are going to cosplay as “The Mailman” himself, you should at least be able to hit some mid-range jumpers.
It is is not the authoritarian hand of Big Brother that threatens to knock Kimmel from his ill-gotten pedestal; it is the authoritarian hand of Big Brother that keeps him there.
Chapter 7: I SEE YOU.
Censorship is like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. It can grant immense, intoxicating power, but one of the consequences of wielding the One Ring is that now Sauron can see you. You cannot hide. And simply being in its presence allows Sauron to begin calling to you and corroding your very soul.
As Sam stood there, even though the Ring was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor... Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason.
— J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Return of the King”
It is not something to be trifled with, and if it is used in “such times” as these, it must be torn from the wielder as soon as possible and yeeted into the searing fires of Mt. Doom, for few can withstand its corrupting influence for long.
That goes for you, too, Conservatives.
Lest I be accused of being a hypocrite,67 I have been very clear and consistent in denouncing the Woke Right as well. I wrote the following all the way back in 2023. I have reposted it in Notes since then, and I will include it here, as well, because I stand by every word, and it serves a warning regarding the ongoing hunt for Red October people posting about Charlie Kirk
I am forever grateful to my pals on the right for the acceptance and goodwill they showed this cantankerous contrarian after he had been demonized, denounced, and excommunicated from the Ever-Enlightened Church of Loving Liberalism for having the audacity to question if we were really sure that race hustlers, warmongers, and Big Pharma had our best interests at heart… and if men could spontaneously become women like a Jurassic Park T-Rex.
And that is why I must say, as a friend, I see the Right getting that gleam in its eye again when it comes to this Israel-Palestine thing.
Many of the same people who rightly railed against Leftoids wielding the Ring of Sauron to brand all opposition dangerous, phoberific, racist, hate speechers that must be fired, expelled, canceled, and preferably tossed in the gulag, now find themselves within reach of the Ring again… and the temptation is great. Whispering the magic word “anti-Semitism” lets them wield that terrible power for their own ends.
Of course, of course, it’s justified this time. It’s justified when we use the Ring. After all, you’re either with us, or you’re with the turrrrrists! Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Some Righties are relishing this opportunity to have their turn with the baton, their chance to grab a pitchfork and light a torch, to “punch a Commie” or two, figuratively, of course.
There is a difference between objecting to punching in principle and objecting to your face being punched in practice. And as the Wokesters love to remind people, there is a difference between “punching up” and “punching down.” The Woke have enjoyed “punching down” for quite a while now, and if they had any principles, they would welcome the beleaguered-of-late Conservatives doing a little “punching up” for a change.
But some Conservatives may already be a bit punch-drunk and already trying to go full Torquemada (Never go full Torquemada!) in tracking down and reporting not only people seriously wishing death on Republicans, but also everyone who made an off-color joke about Kirk or expressed their God-given right to dislike the man. These things are not equivalent, and Kirk himself would have opposed anyone using his death as an excuse to censor others. The One Ring always tempts you to use it more.
Are all we doomed to decline further and further into an inverted panopticon of Parson’s daughters and Pavlik Morozovs eternally Spider-Man-pointing at each other to the infinite amusement of the Aristocracy?
And, lest we lose all perspective, Kirk himself was no stranger to “politically incorrect” jokes or “gallows humor.”
“Is that too soon? I’m sorry. Maybe you shouldn’t kill Jews! Stupid Muslims.”
— Charlie Kirk
If that clip was the only part of the cognito-elephant that someone otherwise unfamiliar with Kirk had grabbed, what would they think about him? What if they were your Muslim coworker? And what if they saw you chuckling at that clip in the breakroom at work? Or noticed you retweeted it?
And, if your response is “GoOd! GO hOmE TurRrriST DeSe ColORs doN’t RUN! mUzLiMS BAD IzLaM sCaRy ShAReEF LaW dOn’t LiKE it!1!” then, listen, while I appreciate your Clash reference at the end there, and I don’t like Ilhan Omar either, that ain’t it, boss. Put the FOX News down for one minute.
I have made plenty of poor-taste jokes in my life—in this article!—and I am sure I will make many more inappropriate jokes before bedtime. I am rarely serious and my humor is more gallows than Tyburn Tree, so let me be the first to say “Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.”
However, I draw a line between making a joke, even if crass or politically incorrect, and seriously celebrating murder. In some ways, that seems like an easy distinction; in others contexts today, I have to concede it may not be so obvious.
Also, I am penning polemics on Substack. I am not posting to my office Teams chat or my family Facebook group. If I was posting there, I would alter my content accordingly, though as we see from cases like Mimi Groves, even that is a hopelessly naïve endeavor nowadays. If you send anything to anyone, then you’ve sent it to the world.
The best advice—the one piece of advice that would actually solve ALL of this—comes from the great Herm Edwards. If we could all just manage to heed his sage counsel, we could all pop the blue pill and go back to the good old days when we were blissfully ignorant to the devastating reality that our family, friends, and coworkers were all retarded psychopaths who hated us.68
Take it away, Coach!
“Don’t press send!”
— Herm Edwards
I’m writing this, so obviously I am incapable of taking Coach’s, or my own, advice.
I hope Conservatives and MAGA leadership will be able to take their own advice from the distant past of three years ago when they rightly railed against “cancel culture” and onerous “hate speech” laws. I am proud to say that—at least on this front—I have indeed been consistent. Much like my boy Tucker, I have called out the Trump administration and offered my words of caution to Conservatives several times, like in this brilliant note below:
So, like Sauron, I’ve got my eye on you, too, Pubbykins.
All of that said, the current Conservative reactions to the deluge of dehumanizing vitriol that postmodernity drowns them in daily is nowhere near what we’ve seen—and continue to see—from Liberals. Comparing the coordinated and devastatingly effective censorship and “cancel culture” campaigns under the last Democrat administration to Conservatives complaining about people mocking their murder is like comparing Great Cthulhu to the calamari appetizer at Red Lobster.
They are not equivalent, and the sight of terrified Wokesters and Shitlibs trying to hide behind paper-thin “gotchas,” false equivalencies, and protean appeals to moral and ethical consistency is risible.
I’m reminded of the Right’s only notable #Resistance movement of the last decade, when their slipshod Bud Light fratboycott managed to “crater” Bud Light sales following the redneck beer brand’s woebegone collab with devil-eyed, transvestite TikToker Dylan Mulvaney. Despite being kicked off by a “frisky” Kid Rock with his viral video shooting cans of the swill, and having a significant impact on sales initially, the movement lost momentum almost immediately as Kid Rock and other right-wing “thought leaders,” like pituitary retard Dana White, quickly called off the dogs and went back to dry-humping Transheuser-Busch’s leg again. And even that brief period was just virtue-signaling for clicks as Kid Rock never stopped drinking the stuff or serving it at his bar.
“Oh no! Crappy Bud Light—the Jimmy Kimmel of beers—is only the second best-selling beer in the nation now! Must be a lotta trannies still downing that dogwater. And the company that owns it still has the #1 top-selling beer in the country!69 You sure did show them who’s boss, Conservatives! The ‘Culture War’ is over, Jethro! Let’s bring our boys home.”
Remember: the Democrats dragged Donald Trump off of every major platform and news outlet when he was the sitting president of the United States. Donald Trump can’t drag Jimmy Kimmel off of a late-night show when he is the sitting president of the United States. The Democrats have “long marched” into chokepoints of power in academia and media “imagnieering” centers—particularly those that mold young minds—and subverted them with a monomaniacal drive and efficiency that Republicans can scarcely comprehend. Look at Disney, look at Hollywood, look at Big Tech,70 look at our universities and Ivy League institutions.71
Despite being a party of dogs, trying to get Pubbykins to coordinate anything for long can be a lot like herding cats. Part of this is temperament: feminine, collective, commie Left versus masculine, individualist, libertarian Right, but that is far, far too facile an explanation. Proper explication requires me to write a whole other article book. For now, just note this current batch of Pubbykins lacks that killer instinct the modern DemDems have, both literally and figuratively. I find this quite tragic, because I am happy to see more ideological diversity and less bloodlust in the Pubby Puppy Party (except for Miss Lindsey), but unfortunately for them, much like Mimi Groves, their reward for “doing better” and “doing the work” is simply to be murdered in the streets, literally and figuratively, by feral, Leftoid maenads. What the Left lacks in principles, they make up for in passion. If someone challenges the Left’s values today, if the Hivemind cannot assimilate it, then it will instantly launch a relentless, well coordinated “annihilation wave” against its enemy. It could be a young girl who said the wrong word, it could a political analyst with the wrong views, it could a company with the wrong mascot, it could a president with the wrong party.
Despite my predilection for playing Devil’s advocate, I have grown to disdain the effete, ennui-laden “enlightened centrist,” an appellation I myself have worn and may well wear again. In their Icarian attempts to show how far they have ascended above the petty tribalism of the day, they float off, untethered, evanescing into the ether. It feels soooo much better than having to get their dainty hands dirty down in the icky muck and mire of choice and consequence where things have meaning and people can be saved. My Their haughty, “too-cool-for-school” routine grows tiresome when it is just an ostentatious excuse to give up, or an ego-defense to maintain their ersatz sense of superiority. All too often it seems, they are either too insecure to care, too spineless to take a stance, too lazy to do real research, or too obsessed with feeling smart. Sometimes they are simply so insulated from the repercussions of an issue that they feel comfortable playing the sagacious soccer mom, sending both arguing children to their rooms for a timeout even if one kid just shot the other one in the neck. Sure, one kid was laughing as he shot his brother and watched him bleed out on the front lawn, but the dying son may have said a bad word once, so I guess we’ll call it even. It is so complicated, after all! Who could possibly untie this Gordian Knot!? Anyway, everyone knows that only jejune peasants take sides, darling.
There is no truth, no proportionality or nuance, only equally valid opinions.
The self-appointed “Keepers of the Scales,” they rush to add little cubes of “Whatabouts!” and “Bothsides!” to the scales, changing their respective densities as required to assuage their obsessive-compulsive need to make the scales look balanced, to preen over their affected ability to do so.
They shirk responsibility from the sidelines and disavow all mental faculties with a shrug.72 They garb their cowardice in faux-sophistication, but they have no courage, no conviction. They float in a lotus position amid an infinite, directionless void of null-value opinions: timid, inert, useless, a self-satisfied Sling Blade grin permanently plastered on their faces.
“Yeah, well, like, both sides are bad, maaaaaan. I mean, it’s aaaaall the same.”
Sure. All bad, all the same, Uniparty, secret societies, NWO, political theater, fake elections, tribalism, divide-and-conquer, 5D chess with the Nephilizard people… I get it, I’m with all that and then some… but again, there is the small matter of proportionality. Cthulhu vs. the calamari. In the here and now. The Democrat Party is much, much worse than the Republican Party. By a flyover-country mile. That may be damning with faint praise, but I shall repeat: the Democrats literally cannot say what a woman is while campaigning on “women’s rights” and teaching little girls that if they take “puberty blockers” they can grow up to be men. They are actual lunatics. This is disqualifying. I can’t believe this is even a conversation or that I have to type this. Repeatedly.
However, lest I be accused of hyperfixating on “one part of the elephant:” there is also the aforementioned censorship, agitprop, violations of 1A, violations of 2A, medical tyranny, open border, crime, riots, massive taxes, controlled economic demolition to facilitate globalism, baby murder, failed education system, poison food, collusion with Big Pharma, warmongering… it’s so bad that the Democrats pulled the coveted Dick “Halliburton” Cheney endorsement away from the Republicans. This is not even a debate. At least the Republicans still have Rand Paul. Certainly, the Uniparty Pubbykins share some of those sins, but they aren’t actively pushing an anti-human, America-last agenda (except for Miss Lindsey) while encouraging and celebrating the murder of fellow Americans. And it is not only what they’re not doing, but also what they are: MAHA, repatriating industry, tariffs, border security, public safety, leaving or reducing involvement with groups like the WHO, merit-based recruitment/hiring/admissions, Title IX… not perfect, nothing is, but these are good.
You may not want to ride in the elevator with a smarmy tax-cheat who looks like he just bought the Goon Docks, but the stairs are closed, and the only other elevator has Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs in it. Unless you want to spend the next few days—your last few days—“putting the lotion in the basket,” then you’re just going to have to put up with the smell of overpriced cologne and hair gel and listen to a couple stories about yachts.
You may not want to have dinner with any murderers, but if your only choices are steak pizzaiola at the Sopranos’ household or barbecue with Leatherface and his family—fuggedaboutit—you pick the Sopranos ten times outta ten! Yes, you should probably learn to cook so you aren’t in this predicament come next week, but right now, it’s time to pass that parmesan, paisano.
We cannot topple the Illuminati this month,73 but we can try to diminish the power of the worst, most dangerous people kicking our asses right now, right here, while increasing our strength and rolling the dice on select individuals and groups who at least might not all be Hydra agents. It beats washing down a bottle of blackpills with a bottle of Black Label and calling it a day, congratulating yourself on being so much smarter than those fools still fighting (for you too), losing a fight they might win if you joined.
That said, friend of humanity, Philip K. Dick, warned: “To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. Whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.”
Might that be the game? The Imperial Leviathan, the Demiurge, Roko’s Basilisk… tulpas, egregores, gods powered by belief, by attention, by “engagement.” I do see the “enlightened” case for “disengagement.”
“Destiny is a game, is it not?” as Kain asks in the clip below. Perhaps, to borrow a line from War Games, “the only winning move is not to play.” Not to press “Send.”
Then again, perhaps such restraint merely relinquishes the reins of reality to a deranged empire eternally, to “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Is that a risk you’re willing to take?
The value of “lens swapping,” “tethering,” “Situational Certitude,” and all of these thought-tools is in adding perspective, experiences, emotions, information that you can bring back to your core self for integration, expansion, refinement. They are tools, not toys. You should be careful when using them. If used improperly, you can get stuck in someone else’s Sit-Cert Sphere, find yourself trapped a liminal space, or even lost in the interstitial spaces between spheres. You can become “lost in a maze of moral relativism.”
Unanimity of thought could be as deleterious to the body of Humanity as unanimity of cells would be the body of a human. Differences will remain, but without some cohesion death is inevitable.74 This is an open invitation for everyone to walk a mile in someone else’s mind. We may have more in common than some might expect, especially given my somewhat, ahem, vituperative tone in this specific article. I have done yeoman’s work to present some alternative explanations for human behavior. If you think that is an absurd boast given how much mockery I’ve piled on Wokesters in particular, then that is kind of the point.
It has gotten that bad. They have gotten that bad.
As blunt as I may have been when explaining their various faults, and how they may have acquired them, remember: the competing theory is that they are actual demons.
I’d say I’m being downright diplomatic. To pull another paragraph from my previously referenced article:
The sinister, authoritarian urge lurks inside the hearts of all men. I endeavor to oppose censors whether they are waving a holy book or a rainbow flag, and I am happy to find common cause with other liberty-loving people whether they are carrying a holy book or a rainbow flag.
Yes, this confuses some people, particularly those who are more accustomed to partisanship than principles.
Yet, as principled as I am, I am also pragmatic.
If you go into a boxing match expecting Marquis of Queensbury rules,75 but you find your opponent is coating their handwraps with broken glass like in Kickboxer, then you now have a dilemma on your hands. You can stick to your pugilistic principles, and likely get Mortal Kombat fatalitied, or you can glass-up and go.
Principles matter, choices reverberate, actions outlast, and few outcomes are truly fait accomplis. So, look… 76
I grew up admiring the ethical code of heroes like Captain America, Batman, or even Jackie Chan in films like Who Am I? These guys would fight just as hard to keep their opponents alive as they would to subdue them. They would battle just as hard externally to stop the baddies as they did internally to stop themselves from becoming “the baddies.” From becoming the thing they hate.77
As always, Chris Rock said it best:
… we can’t give a fuck about them! We just gotta do our own thing.
Can’t go, ‘Oh, they fucked up, we can be fucked up!’ That’s ign’ant!”
But, that doesn’t mean the good guys can’t keep the moral high ground and still kick some ass when the situation calls for it. Figuratively, of course.
So good on the Republicans the Miscellaneous Alliance for fighting back against this insanity. Figuratively, of course.
And, while we’re keeping it real for a minute, Conservatives, let me borrow another phrase from the man himself: “Please, cut the shit, OK?”
Listen, I’ve spent plenty of time on conservative message boards. Hell, I used to pay actual money to be a Daily Wire subscriber,78 a harrowing tale you can read more about here:
So, you can’t fool me, Pubbykins. I know the score, and I spilled the beans in the following note:
You guys and gals regularly say some vile, insane, and frankly rather unchristian things. Things that I doubt you’d be very happy for Karen in HR to read in an email, let alone for ol’ Father McGruder to read aloud in church.
For example, who could forget gracious displays like this from our compassionate conservative pals following another highly publicized death with political implications:
And I know Pubbykins will rush to riposte:
And I know DemsDems will run to reply:
I know. Because I know my enemy. All of them, though they are really all just one thing. The same thing. Have you figured out what it is yet?79 Mad respect to my boy “chillymost7” there for that sick ratio, bro, but as an enormous fan of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, I must say: “carygrant48” has a point.
Take a gander at the following post from the brilliant Keyser Söze Kaizen Asiedu:
Or this one from the great Brandon Tatum, who also showed up in another article of mine:
And longtime readers will know I couldn’t miss this opportunity to share a video from one of Kirk’s longtime friends and (shorttime) fellow Turning Point USA members, my beloved Candace Owens (So dreamy!):
Hmph. That doesn’t sound racist.
Then, why do people think Kirk hated black people, a “fact” that they are using to justify their revelry? Check a “Liberal” website or just ask one in real life: they will likely tell you that these black people shown here are shills, dupes, coons, and Uncle Toms. Or worse. Very progressive and inclusive!80
But, maybe they’re right: Kirk was a terrible person, so they are cheering his murder.
Who has the correct view of reality?
Does it matter?
In this most recent context, the answer to Question #2 is finally, “No.”
No, it doesn’t matter.
Even if I underwent the same Phase 1 and Phase 2 processes as a Wokester and arrived at the conclusion that, "Yup, that Charlie Kirk was one bad hombre!” I still would not wish death on him.
Even if he was anti-me-ist.
Even… if he was Sam Harris.
I’ll simply posit that perhaps we would all do well to listen to God, also known as Morgan Freeman, and to take a page from a living saint in my book, Daryl Davis.
I’m not saying everyone has to do what Daryl does, or even that everyone can do what an angelic buddha warrior legend (and marvelous musician) like Daryl does, particularly when he is interacting with some of the most demented, dangerous people and one of most disgusting, destructive ideologies on Earth. But it certainly does offer an interesting contrast to the immediate reaction of many people today—Left, Right, and Center—when they encounter someone with whom they even mildly disagree. I have dubbed this reaction: “the Richter Response.”
And even if Charlie Kirk got caught trying to pass a fake twenty, whimpering as he took his last, ragged breaths pinned face down by a glass-eyed cop on a filthy Minneapolis street, I would not rejoice at his death then either.
There is something profoundly sick festering in this nation. You can call it “evil.” You can call it “hate.” You can hate it, if you like, but I believe we should strive to love the sinner, even if we hate the sin.
“Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum.”
— St. Augustine, “Letter 211”
One intriguing reason for the immediate berserker barrage Wokesters devolve into the second you point out that people with gender dysphoria are crazy in the coconut81 may be that they place no intrinsic value on human life and have no ethical or moral framework for embracing imperfection as the default state of humanity. In this way, Christianity—and certain other older cults religions—has an advantage over upstart cults like Wokeism: it assigns a fundamental value to all humanity. It also teaches us that we live in a “fallen,” postlapsarian world where all humanity is flawed right out the proverbial gate, naughty by nature, if you will. Perfection is impossible here. And it tells us that—even now—there is hope, that we can stumble and still pick up our cross anew. That we can all be redeemed. Hip hop hooray for that.
Like Kanye (and Jesus) taught us, we should love everyone. So, sure, you are stark-raving mad, but I don’t think that nullifies your basic humanity. “I think it’s kind of funny; I think it’s kind of sad,” but I don’t think it means you should be bullied, harassed, or—God forbid—harmed.
Wokesters, I fear, have no such compunction, and I think part of their panic when someone points out their imperfections is them projecting their own anti-values on their “enemies.” They have no reason to grant another human intrinsic value; they have no reason to grant a fellow person forgiveness. If the Woke thought you were crazy, flawed, “fallen,” somehow out of lockstep with their ironclad orthodoxy, why wouldn’t you be dead in their eyes? Why wouldn’t they cheer if you died?
Hell, even with Scriptural and doctrinal reasons to extend a figurative olive branch to their fellow sinners, look how badly some Christians screw this up. Some are perfectly content to go about bashing the living beJesus out of people, up to and including some truly heinous acts. (Never go full Torquemada!82) So, clearly, Solzhenitsyn was right when he observed:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.
It is up to every human, all humanity, to walk that line as best they can. It can be difficult on the best of days. It can be nigh-impossible when we are constantly being told to fear and hate each other.
Chapter 8: You Have No Power Over Me.
“Whoever told you that is your enemy.”
— Zack de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine, “Know Your Enemy”
Many moons ago when I began this Substack journey I repurposed an extremely unpopular Facebook post I had made pointing out that our mockingbird media has been running two-minutes hate on loop for years. The MSM has been relentlessly pulverizing the minds of its viewers until they are now little more than Hivemind Kiosks rebroadcasting whatever program is sent their way.
State-controlled social media alternates between trapping us with false friends in dopamine-flooded echo chambers and pitting us against endless bot-farm enemies in adrenaline-drenched thunderdomes.
Perhaps, we could all just get along if (another yuge “if”) we were not being intentionally divided, deceived, turned against each other.
Perhaps, we should have listened to a certain former-KGB agent when he informed us—multiple times, in great detail, in “prafectly clear English,” and easily comprehensible presentations—exactly how the then-USSR and other foreign adversaries of the United States were actively operating on the modern battlefield of ideas to weaponize the U.S.’s own unique cultural, economic, and political idiosyncrasies against itself in order to fracture and implode the nation from within by fomenting precisely the kind of insanity and internecine strife currently inundating our every waking moment.
But, we didn’t listen, and it has only gotten worse. (Or was that all part of some larger game of 5D chess?)
Maybe the real enemy isn’t your neighbor, or coworker, or family member. Maybe it is whatever éminence gris83 has been working to distort what we see, to traumatize us, to control us. Maybe it is the puppeteer pulling the strings, pouring the same rote recitations of the Party’s lobotomizing pablum from the mouths of hollowed-out dummies like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. Maybe it is the person who convinced you that should revel in death and the misery of your neighbors.
Before you rush online to celebrate a man’s murder, maybe you should know damn sure you are “seeing” clearly: seeing him, seeing yourself, seeing reality.
After all, it’s important to know your enemies.
This gets to a far less common interpretation of the phrase “know your enemy.” Commonly used (including throughout this article) to mean that one should understand the mindset, nature, and capabilities of their established foe, in a larger, deeper sense, it can serve as a warning be sure you properly identify your real enemy in the first place, i.e., know who your true enemy is. You may believe someone is your enemy, but are you sure they are the real threat? That you haven’t been deceived?
“Yes, I know my enemies. They're the teachers who taught me to fight me.”
— Zack de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine, “Know Your Enemy”
Our reality grids are constructed for us long before we are aware that they exist. Partly, they are built from our natures and our experiences of Nature. Partly, they are built from parents, teachers, friends, lovers, media… all adjust the angles and alter the materials of this sphere of certitude in which we find ourselves situated. This may be innocuous; it may be helpful; it may even be necessary.
But, at times, it can be calamitous. Malicious people, powers, principalities, and perhaps even parts of ourselves can conspire to willfully distort our vision. This Aristocracy, wretches and kings, can capture us in our own minds, lead us to thoughts and behaviors that are misaligned with our true selves.
The magnificent film Labyrinth gifts us one of the best examples in cinema of Situational Certitude, and how to break out. I described the process of tethering earlier. However, as Sarah shows us here, there is another option.
Sometimes we just have to trust that quiet voice, that faint feeling, somewhere deep inside of ourselves that whispers: “Something is wrong.” We may not have heard it for years. We may have been taught to ignore it, even to fight it. And our enemy may even have learned to speak in its voice. There may not be guarantees, an easy list of steps to take or boxes to check. You may just have to run, and push, and struggle against your own feelings and thoughts, the illusory masquerading as the immutable. You may have to shatter the looking glass at the end of Everything and somehow find faith that you will survive on the other side. That you will make it through.
You may have to defeat the very reality in which you are imprisoned, to confront the Demiurge84 itself and state unequivocally: “You have no power over me.”
Could it be that the Aristocracy are driving we foolish children and desperate peasants mad so that we will sacrifice other foolish children and desperate peasants in fleeting, ultimately futile attempts to assuage the constant, unbearable pain, rage, and indignation that pervades us, and contains us, grinding all around us, every second, inside of this massive, labyrinthine Machine that the Aristocracy created, maintains, and benefits from?
Could it be that the Aristocracy has had us trapped inside this Machine, Demiurge-like, for so long that we cannot conceive of life outside of it; that the Machine is so vast that we cannot even begin to see it? That our inability to do these things only enflames our agonies on a groping, primal, subconscious level where we sense the profundity of our failure, hurling us against our fellow prisoners with renewed desperation, consternation, loathing the other prisoners even more for our inability to comprehend, heaping ever more of our ever-increasing fear, frustration, and hatred upon them because they are there, they exist, they can be seen, they can be reached, they can be hurt, because we can transfer for one horrible second all of our misery and confusion onto them, into them, before the blinding, deafening, howling pain rises again like a dark phoenix from the smoldering ashes of our latest sacrifice?
Her eyes filled with tears, then blood, then flames, now charred and hollow, but still staring asking, “Why?”
Begging for an answer. “What good came of this? Who was saved?”
But we are already gone. Racing to find the next sacrifice, chasing that glorious moment of numbness we feel when their screams crescendo into the same indistinguishable cries that echo through our minds, waking or sleeping. Knowing that the world is racing to do the same to us if we rest for one instant, slip one time, as the smoke of a million pyres rises up and churns the pistons of the Engine at the heart of the Machine, and the leviathan lurches forward, ever forward, and the Aristocrats look on from their pristine screens, and smile.
Well, they’ve got to kill what we found.
Well, they’ve got to hate what they fear.
Well, they’ve got to make it go away.
Well, they’ve got to make it disappear.
— Crybaby Trent Reznor is Nine Inch Nails, “We’re in this Together”
If people found themselves alerting the authorities because their neighbor had a birthday party for their child during lockdowns, or calling for their coworkers to be fired because they disagreed with their politics, or even—God help them—celebrating death and despair, then either their mental vision has been distorted or they have suffered some terrible combination of programming and trauma85 to drag them into such tenebrific Situational Certitude.
Maybe it’s Hanlon’s Razor. Maybe it’s Bates’s Razor. Maybe they are just fixated on one small point on the canvas. Maybe someone pointed them toward one particular pixel on the screen.
There is another explanation, one that I would be a fool to entirely discount, but one that I have been desperately working to dispel throughout this entire article: that a person could be “purely and simply... evil.” A “demon,” as some might put it.
I don’t want to believe that about anyone. Even Sam Harris.
We are stuck in here together, and the world has witnessed too many atrocities that can occur when a certain portion of a population is told their fellow citizens are the enemy and handed a number to a call, a baton to swing, and a metastasizing sense of certainty.
Whether madness or evil, by hook or by crook, I want to think we can improve, not to rise against each other, but to rise above petty differences and pernicious programming.
I want to believe that by excavating the buried psychological foundations that undergird the physical actions we take on the sunlit surface of society we can sharpen our mental sight, draft more accurate maps of reality, and better understand others and ourselves.
I want to believe that we can reclaim our minds from Queen Media and King Mob, from an invisible Aristocracy that casts a long shadow over us all.
I want to believe that, as Solzhenitsyn stated, “even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
I want to believe that even demons can be redeemed.
~ Fin86
[Usual disclaimer: All images, video, audio, and linked media are the property of their respective creators and are only referenced as “fair use” for educational, commentary, and/or satirical purposes. Nothing in this article is serious. The opinions herein not only do not represent those of Substack or anyone referenced, they do not represent those of the author. I don’t mean any of it; it is all a joke. Have a nice day.]
Continuing my time-honored tradition of inserting jarring and longwinded, yet relatively unimportant, footnotes far too early into my writing, I wanted to state for the record that, luckily for me, what really happened with/to Kirk and why is largely irrelevant to my article. There are plenty of other articles out there arguing about that. Martyr, monster, hero, patsy, patriot, crisis actor… makes little difference for this little article (not zero, though, because I do assume a basic onotological scaffolding for the sake of analysis, but that can easily be broken down after our cognition expedition has concluded) because we are looking at the underlying psycho-social phenomena related to events like this. This could all be Truman Show theater, but what matters is people are acting in ways that impact us all based on what they believe occurred. As Maya Angelou’s advised: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
If you are looking for affirmation or argument about Kirk in particular, there are endless other places where you will be better served, and I wish you well.
In a way, it is a glorious testament to the brilliance of my “evergreen” writing using current events as a dry dock from which to launch our nautitcal voyage into the murky depths of the human soul (as opposed to dog souls, which are pellucid and wonderful). In another way, it is a craven cop-out so I can avoid taking a hard stance on what actually occurred and possibly offendi—I mean, hey! Wow! Look at the time! Whew. Well, that’s enough peeking behind the curtain, eh? And let’s be honest, ultimately you are always going to offend people somehow. It’s like that wonderfully shrill poetic Rush lyric, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!” Some people will be offended by your attempt to not be offensive, you milquetoast fence-sitter! So, to quote the legendary Kendrick Lamar, Drakeslayer and Rapper Par Excellence: “I'll make them niggas mad, yeah, somebody gotta do it.” Sometimes, you just have to yell “MUSTAAAAARRRRD!” and yeet thyself into the fray, even if it does seem “crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious.”
… good thing nobody reads these footnotes. This is one of the chief reasons I hate writing: there is just too much to say.
Please note my phrasing: I am not saying that most Democrats are publicly rejoicing; I am saying that most of the people publicly rejoicing are Democrats. These are not equivalent. Many Democrats are very fine people and are naturally horrified at both Kirk’s murder and the ghoulish ecstasy of some of their party-mates. In fairness, I also cannot discount the possibility that some of the accounts celebrating Kirk’s death are general trolls or perhaps even right-leaning individuals posing as Leftoids in order to stoke the flames. Democrats, please, please, note how hard I am trying here—and really throughout this entire article—to play apologist for you. To give you the benefit of the doubt. This comes despite you being, ahem, “slightly discourteous to me recently.” You’re welcome.
But, let me be clear, this isn’t all some confabulation of the dreaded “right-wing conspiracy outrage machine.” There absolutely are a non-trivial amount of Leftoids openly reveling in Kirk’s murder. It is not just anonymous Redditors, though Reddit is absolutely inundated with posts in that vein. It is verified accounts online and people I know in person. A lot of them. Too many.
… I sure am glad people always check the footnotes.
That photo is indeed real, too, though no one should turn their ire toward the perky gal in the picture as her pose there appears to be merely a stock placeholder for whatever shirt they’re trying to sell. Fascinatingly, the site selling those shirts seems to be playing 4D chess on both sides of the board by selling both shirts mocking Kirk and shirts mourning him.
As in: someone who is both a murderer and a rapist, not someone who exclusively rapes murderers. Though I do hear that is a thing in prison.
And such an undemocratic act, at that! I thought Democrats loved democracy. Just like Antifa: it’s right there in the name, right, Don!?
We know Jeffrey Epstein existed, so clearly evil is real. He also didn’t kill himself.
For all the nonagenarians in the crowd tonight! Are you ready to rock, Royal Pine Mews!? I can’t hear you!
“Don’t forget to subscibe and smash that like button!”
Well, I mean—under better circumstances—I wouldn’t kick Janet Leigh out of the shower if you catch my drift, eh, fellas? Amirite or amirite!? Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more!
This is a good place to make a couple of disclaimers for people who are new to my Substack. Please note that in many cases you can swap “Democrat Party” with “Uniparty” if it helps diffuse your cognitive dissonance, and when I mention “the Party” I am usually referencing the concept from 1984 as it applies to our current Deep State/Elites/Swamp/NWO… again, whatever term works for you. It just so happens that while the Republicans were the face of this “principality” during, say, G-Dubs’s Regime, the Democrat Party—officially endorsed by G-Dubs and Darth Cheney—with Biden and Harris were the face of it most recently. Yes, this is positing that there is at least a sliver of independence from said “principality” in the MAGA movement and the nascent Populist movement across the political spectrum as of late, a notion with which I know some will disagree.
A huge and constant thanks to the inimitable The Starfire Codes for adding “Pubbykins” and “DemDems” to her delightful “Perplexicon.” If you aren’t reading everything she publishes, you are Substacking wrong. I went back through my own notes to try and find the initial reference, and—as anyone who has tried to use Substack’s Notes feature for anything besides sharing ephemeral memes and arguing with bots (Mea culpa!) will know—that was an exercise in frustration and futility. But, thanks to Demi’s sedulous and selfless cataloging of the various digital shenanigans (Shenanigators forever) we get up to here, I was able pull that hyperlinked article for each term, ya know, for the three people living under rocks (maybe even the same rock) who haven’t been religiously reading my random shitposts morsels of wisdom on Notes over the years.
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I’ll forego my usual metaphysical, Neville Goddard discussions for the sake of brevity. Yes, I had the audacity to use the word “brevity” in an article this byzantine and verbose.
Yes, it is basically just “steelmanning,” but no one gets their name in textbooks without repackaging some old stuff with cool new terms.
No, not the Chris Christie kinda “dawgs,” or DoG, the great Substacker I mentioned. The actual animals, Man’s best friend.
… unless you have bad eyesight.
Again, putting aside my metaphysical beliefs here for the sake of argument. And, yes, this section is eerily similar to the “Repackaging” section of my Do Your Own Research article. Coincidence? I. Think. Not!
Absolute gold!
See also: “The Square Principle” in my critically acclaimed Guardians of the Galaxy deep dive.
Yes, this is a dangerous line of thought, as it can lead to a “right-think” and “wrong-think” Orwellian schema, which if you’ve read any of my other articles you know is the last thing I want to establish. However, I do not think it must lead there if followed with a bit of prudence and judiciousness. And, yes, I know the next snark-remark is to chortle, “Good luck with that,” but that attitude makes virtually all such endeavors non-starters. Another mitigating factor is that my intent here is not to dictate (and certainly not use the force of the State to mandate) how people should view an object, that is to say, how they should feel about it. Instead, the suggestion is that it may be possible to have higher or lower degrees of fidelity in the identification stage of mental objects, understanding that it will almost immediately then be subjected to genetic and experiential bias filters. If we want to have effective interpersonal communication, let alone a functioning society, I’d contend that initial stage, however fleeting, is of the absolutely utmost importance.
“… and murals with metaphors!” — Zack de la Rocha
All that fluoride may have left their third eye blind :/
This could also be a work of art, literature, or music, a religious or philosophical text, even their own journaling, etc….
“A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” to use a phrase modern audiences will understand.
Not that Wokesters would ever use that term.
And, no, watching CNN, MSNBC, and NPR is not “drinking from three different wells” because they draw water from the same poisoned aquifer.
Especially the dreaded “MALE GAZE!”
Translation: they were all wrong.
Yes, this is an oblique SCP reference.
This is why I coined “DemDems” and “Pubbykins.”
This is weaponized adroitly by the Party. An interesting example is “linguistic foci,” like the word “felon” regarding Trump. The Democrat leadership understood that if they spammed enough lawfare in their feudal jurisdictions to technically be able to apply the label “felon,” then it would be an extremely powerful gazelock for their flock. The cultists would be unable to see how the verdict was passed, to examine its meanings, its validity, to consider how their archons may have been just as guilty or more… like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, the Party has pried open their eyes and locked their head in place staring at the word “FELON” emblazoned on the screen. I know people whose only reason for voting for Kamala Harris was, and I quote, “Trump is a felon.” It works. It is similar to forcing someone to stare a single pixel on an enormous monitor.
“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Marion Crane: “I meant well”
Norman Bates: “People always mean well.”
Norman Bates: “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
Part of me wants to say, “Like DSM-kind of insane,” but I get that invoking that book, and modern psychology in general, brings its own set of problems.
There is a “scales of justice” and “scales from his eyes” joke here somewhere, but I’m too tired to piece it together. Bonus points if you figure it out and put in the comments.
I do not dismiss an alternative reading that would hold there is no objective reality in any meaningful sense outside of our minds, or—far more chillingly—outside of the collective, outside of the Party, and that Winston’s fear is not only that he could be wrong about a belief, but that he could be wrong about belief.
You were quite brave to click that one, eh, bruv?
They look more like a game of GTA played by a manic 13-year-old boy who just rifled through four Monster energy drinks and a pack of donuts. And, for the record, you can rest assured that I would fight against a theocracy forcing people to believe in transubstantiation, too.
Yes, I know the trans lobby vehemently disagrees with this and is champing at the bit to play their “Trust Source Trump Cards” (There’s that awful word again!) to prove to me that euphemistic “gender-affirming care” saves lives and drastically reduces otherwise inevitable suicides if teenagers aren’t allowed to “transition,” and the incidence of which is only so high in the first place because of the myopic, cruel, and hateful stigmas that disgusting transphobes like me perpetuate against the ennobled trans community. As I say in the article, this is where the card game of War takes place, and I mention myriad sources to support why I am correct, like this one, which the trans lobbyist dismisses, and then sends me a link to The Trevor Project, which I dismiss, and the entire process described over the course of this article plays out proving the very points I am making.
“They don’t have to burn the books they just remove ‘em!” — Zack de la Rocha
I know my beloved Grant Morrison (So dreamy!) wrote that excellent arc, and that he considers himself some combination of non-binary, trans, fifth-dimensional machine elf, or Lord-knows-what else any given day. That is a whole other story. I’m referencing his comic to make this joke anyway. If he want’s to discuss the topic, he is one of the only people who, I think, would actually have something interesting to say on it, as unlike many otherwise boring AF “trans” people who adopt the moniker to serve as an ersatz personality, being “trans” is the least interesting thing about ol’ Grant. I’d go so far as to guess we’d agree that (and this is a different article for a different day, so I can’t really get into it here), basically, the modern “transanity” craze—while in some ways a simple, overdue/over-correction of overly strict, societally constructed, often religiously rooted and spiritually impedimental gender roles and sexual norms enflamed by motivated political actors (or archons, to borrow a term from The Invisibles) and memetically spreading like wildfire through populations with either absent or impaired ontological immune systems—is both an erroneous conflation of the archetypal Masculine/Feminine with the biological Male/Female and a localized, psycho-social misapprehension/expression of our larger “transition” into the Kali Yuga/Age of Aquarius dissolution of “higher” iteration conceptual delineations that facilitate “physical” experience in our simulated, holographic dyad construct increasingly contrasting with consciousnesses at the level of the underlying monad substrate, which is—indeed—genderless. That, and some boys like dresses and/or other boys. Some girls like baseball and/or other girls. And I say, “Good on ‘em!”
And you thought I was just being conciliatory when I said I was mad too, didn’t ya? ;)
As are many people with body dysmorphia, schizophrenia, “AUD,” depression…
I saw you about to get triggered by that “diverse” there, racists and Wokesters.
Mt. Rushmore!
Surely the origin story of every guy who writes rambling screeds on Substack
Let this be a final reminder that I am assuming a certain, relatively conventional reality scaffolding for the sake of argument throughout this article.
The American pastime!
Do you really need to click that know what I linked? ;)
As well as with my good friend, Sonthu, whose family had fled their homeland of Cambodia to come to the U.S., and who was one of the wisest, kindest, funniest, most generous people I’ve ever known. Rest in peace, my friend.
Though not a scholar in the history and politics of the region, I do know enough to understand that even the little I typed here for context is still hotly debated. From what role the French played in protecting “Indochina” from its hostile neighbors at the behest of the Cambodian king a century earlier, to the role of the CPV in facilitating the CPK’s rise to power in the first place, to the degree to which the CPV and the PKR deserve credit for deposing the CPK… I readily concede it is an enormous topic, and one that far exceeds the time I have to properly explore in the context of this article.
“Learn to swim.” — Maynard James Keenan
“Whoever told you that is your enemy.” — Zack de la Rocha
Portmanteau of “corporate” and “political.” You’re welcome.
The amount of erroneous, foundational assumptions that constitute the Democrat “logic chain” here would require a whole seperate article to explicate. Luckily, I linked to some people earlier who also cover this particular topic far more comprehensively than I do. Even if you read that Democrat rationale and agreed with all of it, and thus think I must be the one who is crazy/stupid/brainwashed/evil, the larger points—like the flowers—are still standing. Whether transanity or Covidmania, transphobia or Science-denial, we are not having surface-level disagreements here. We have fundamentally different views of reality that would require an extarodinary amount of time and effort from all parties to begin addressing, if any common ground could even be found at this point on these topics. And assuming one side is flat out wrong, then let’s be honest: it could require years of serious, Patty Hearst-level cult deprogramming to rehabilitate them. (Scary sounding, I know.) Is it possible we could put these particular topics aside and at least peaceably coexist?
Saved by The Starfire Codes’s “Perplexicon” again!
There seems to be mixed reporting as to whether or not Kirk’s children we present at the event that day.
Whatever phylogeny you prefer :)
In case I haven’t defined this elesewhere (I can’t find it in “The Perplexicon” ha!), a “phobist” is a catch-all term for the enemy of the Wokesters, someone who is—surely—some combination of homophobe, transphobe, and Islamaphobe, along with racist, misogynist, capitalist, and a few others I am forgetting. Who can keep track of them all!? No one, certainly not the Wokesters, which is why I just refer to their targets as “phobists” to make it more manageable.
Don’t ya think?
“A former newspaper.” Thanks, Klavan.
“Chase Strangio” has to be one of the most “trans” names of all time, and it would actually be a perfect with my earlier X-Men analogy as a name for a joke character on one of the C-list teams. Dr. Strangio also looks just as insane as you would expect, and says things that are just as insane as you would expect.
For people who still think I am joking or exaggerating about how insane these people are, from Wikipedia: “Strangio has described himself as ‘a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution.’ He has called civil marriage ‘a fundamentally violent institution.’ Strangio disagrees with the idea that transgender women could be born with a male body, saying there is no such thing as a ‘male body’ and that ‘A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.’”
See below.
Don’t even try to cite the one-off spike in ratings of his “return” episode, because his ratings immediately fell of a cliff again when the people who tuned in out of carnival curiosity were quickly reminded how disgusting and anti-funny Kimmel was and tuned right back out again. Seriously. Just take the L.
Great band name. Make a great opener for Jimmy Eat World.
“He IrISH nO UsA DuMDUM so iT NO cOunt, DuRR!!!”
By far his best work btw
This is why I have long referred to social media as a “Psycho Mantis Simulator.”
Two things: we can argue about shifting sales chart placements month-to-month, ”Are they second… or thiiiiird…?" but you get the point. Bud Light is still a huge brand; Transheuser-Busch/InBev is still dominant in that market. Also, don’t pound your chest about how many billions Bud lost or the stock dip percentage or any other “big number shiny!” stat that makes the Cons feel like they did somehting or make the Libs scared so they attack harder. That is change in the couch cushions for global megacorps. A tax write-off. They tanked it, like Frank the Tank, and kept on rollin’. Most Conservatives kept drinking Bud Light anyway; other just ended up buy a different beer from the same company. To quote a wise man: “SAD!”
Dear God, if you think pointing at Elon Musk somehow negates the overwhelming Liberal bias in Big Tech then we’ve got a lot of work to do, fren. You can start here.
Yes, Trump is cracking down on speech critical of Israel on campuses. I think that is horrible, and I have called that out repeatedly. The issue of Israel is somewhat unique, and the larger point stands.
I dub this “Enlightened Resignation.” While writing this passage, I couldn’t help but feel a certain kinship with Teddy and his rousing battle hymn to humanity, “The Man in the Arena.”
“Well, not with that attitude, you can’t!”
Putting aside my “Theory of Societal Mitosis” for a different day.
A delightful term I admit to learning from Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles
No, this is not Rock’s actual quote, but you get the idea.
You don’t really need to click that to know what I linked, do you? ;)
Told you I was mad as a hatter.
Bonus points to the person in the back who yelled, “Brevity!” I see you.
Where is Jimmy Galligan when you need him!?
I know the Woke mobsters got the DSM changed in 2022. Orwellian language manipulation and institutional capture doesn’t change my perspective. I know that homosexuality was categorized as a mental illness there, too, until 1972, and, yes, I think that was nuts, but—as discussed in Chapter 4—I do not equate some guy thinking dudes are hot (I mean, c’mon, have you seen Cillian Murphy!? Have you gazed into his ice-blue eyes, his diamond-cut cheekbones? So dreamy!) with the current notion of “T-Rex Transgenderism,” nor do I think rightly removing one item from that book provides blanket validation for wrongly removing whatever other item may be convenient down the line. Plus, there are other problems with the DSM.
I know some people have suggested that his family were “converso.” Just let me have my Torquemada joke, OK?
Drink!
… even if the Demiurge is as hot as David Bowie. (So dreamy!)
To quote the young prophetess:
Continuing my time-honored tradition of pouring in some rambling consciousness stream at the end of already excruciatingly long articles, I wanted to give you one last peek behind the curtain.
I don’t like this article.
I didn’t even “like” it myself; go and check the cute little heart counter. Yeah, I could have told you that upfront, but then you wouldn’t have read it. (Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone btw.) I almost gave up on it a dozen times. There is just too much to say. I feel like if I can get a glimpse of “the whole elephant,” it is just takes too much to properly describe it in its entirety to “the blind.” And every time I start to focus on the ear or the trunk or the leg, they each demand so much attention individually that even I start to lose “the whole elephant” myself. I usually feel compelled to write articles when I know exactly what I want to say and can make the point so perfectly, so well sourced and logically laid out, that it is an impregnable concept stronghold. For example, my articles on topics like 1A, 2A, Social Justice, Pride Month, and the war on research are unassailable. Anyone with an ounce of honesty and intellect would agree with me after reading them. I mean, seriously, anyone but the most debased moron, the most hideous, demented monstrosity or shambolic rube (basically Sam Harris) would have to 100% agree with every sacrosanct word.
This time… not so much. It is possible that some people finding nits to pick are not all that hideous and demented. There are arguments I myself am not sold on, partial points that could be better explained, nuance that isn’t conveyed, misunderstandings that could be fomented, angles that aren’t covered, some “sides” that are given too much weight while others float off into the ether… there are too many cracks where the Newmanoids and Mind Gadflies can squirm through.
But, there is some good stuff in here, too. Some diamonds in the rough. Bates’s Razor? Cognito-Elephants? Situational Certitude? The Richer Response? Mocking Jimmy Kimmel? Kickboxer AND Labyrinth refences!? C’mon, those are pure gold, Jerry! At least I stuck the landing with what college textbooks for years to come will undoubtedly refer to as “The Aristocrats’ Machine” passage. (That even ties back to the seemingly unrelated Gottfried section.) Point being: after chiseling away for a while, I did start to see the shape of the thing.
Most importantly, I love the Muses, and they were kind enough to entrust me with these tiny, glass-winged inspirations, so I owe it to those delightful nymphs to see that these fragile little birds take flight. I sometimes liken the writing process to being a defense attorney for your client-concepts. Once they come to you, even if you are, ahem, not entirely convinced of their innocence, you still owe it to your client-concepts to provide them with the best possible defense. To give it your all. It’s your job, your responsibility. By the time I got done defending some of these ideas, I still didn’t believe them. Some I believed less than when I started looking into their cases. Some made me sympathetic to the prosecution. But, regardless, I did my best. I’ll leave it to the court to decide the rest.
Plus, hey, you get what you pay for! (Except for the ever-gracious leithian who deserves a bonus Talking Heads, Domo-kun, Cthulhu Jeep, Lord of the Rings themed article for her kind encouragement.) So, I figured, “What the hey? SHIP IT!” and hopefully its coarse exterior and jagged edges will at least prove thought-provoking for those of you kind enough to give it a read. If nothing else, it will serve as a “thought-piñata,” something people can beat and break apart for cognito-treats (Cog-Neato! Treats™ “Kid-tested. Mother-approved.”).
For the person about to limp in with “Yeah, you’re right. This article sucked lol. I didn’t pay a penny, and I still want my money back!” I appreciate the engagement. For the person about to point out that it is too long and confusing (It is.), click here for my response.
I wish I could give “trophies” or “achievements,” like on PSN or Xbox Live, to anyone who actually clicked on every link in one of my articles. I can’t. So for the five people who even clicked a few and got a chuckle: cheers, mate!🏆
[Edit: I’ve gone back reread the article several times now, including touching up a few sections that irked me, and good news: I’m liking it more and more. Definitely worth people’s time.]
… good thing nobody reads these footnotes.
You've REALLY got to cut down on those energy drinks, friend. This chain-of-consciousness rap would be more effective if posted as half a dozen different articles. Of course, I face the reality that everything in time and space is speeding towards entropy; so I try not to hate the demons and demon-inspired bastards who celebrate murder. But I do. And I am proud of that hatred. They are scum.
Quite an epic discussion, my friend. I definitely can't address it all, but as your token leftist commenter, I do want to weigh in a little on this, as my own thoughts about it have taken some time to crystallize.
But I think what strikes me most is that the reaction of everyone to Kirk's death seems like continuing proof that we as a people just can't be normal about anything. The chronic online-ness of American politics and culture incentivize the most extreme reactions and then amplifying those reactions to stoke the emotional flames of others. In saner times, a public profile murder on this level might force us to step back and lower the temperature a little. But of course the immediate American reaction to this, if we're all being honest, is most people just sort of hoping the killer wasn't on their side of the aisle.
And then the killer turned out to be someone who was chronically online, whose politics are murky and ambiguous, which almost became sort of a Rorschach test for what people wanted him to be. Is he a radical trans furry antifa? Is he a groyper? I don't know. My own personal theory, which you may take with a grain of salt, is that this new breed of shooter is less inclined to politics than simply escalation and memefication of violence due to constant media and online exposure. We've seen in the past some would-be assassins and schizophrenic types can become obsessed with media personalities and strike out in ways that frankly don't make sense. I think our endless exposure to "news" is only making this worse.
Now as for the rest of us, again, I think in the past, if something like this had happened, it would be easier to just be normal about it. If you have to say something, you say something consoling, or if you don't have anything nice to say, you just don't say anything at all. Certainly in private, some people may have made some tasteless jokes, but they wouldn't go on record with them. I may not have cared for Kirk's views and I may not like what I perceive people like him contributing to in modern discourse, but that's a far cry from reveling in his death. And while I won't say I think everyone on the left was doing this, in the depth and breadth of the internet, yeah, you're going to get some who are. A step down from that is people who were simply eager to drag out ugly things he said immediately. And while I think it's fair enough to be honest about someone's record, dude's body wasn't cold yet. A tiny amount of respect is not a crazy thing to consider. Now, lest you assume I'm only going to bash one side here, I'll also say that there were also people on the right who seemed outright eager to use this as a rallying cry for some sort of civil war/national divorce/purge. And down from them, you had people immediately trying to make him the MLK of the right or whatever (you're even seeing some states trying to pass laws about forcing universities to name streets after him) and trying to deplatform anyone who wasn't sufficiently sad about it.
So like I said, nobody can just be normal about this. It's sad when anyone gets killed, and clearly Kirk was someone who meant a lot to a lot of people. The truth is, there isn't any need to have a hot take about this, or anything like this, really. Let the people who cared for him grieve in peace, even if you don't like him, and if he meant something to you, try to follow in that example rather than becoming more radical and angry and alienated from your fellows. It's probably ironic after writing so much, but we're probably all just better off shutting up for a second.