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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week I talked about Elon Musk’s AI-generated Wikipedia knockoff, which I didn’t actually expect we’d see for some months, if at all, given the too-great likelihood that he’d be too mercurial to follow through. I thought it would be like the political party he said he was putting together back in August because the GOP wasn’t fascist enough. But it’s here—the AI slopapedia, that is—and oh, buddy. I knew what I was expecting, and it _is_ what I was expecting, but also it’s _so much_ of that. Browsing Grokipedia isn’t fun the way that browsing Conservapedia is fun. I’m disappointed that it wasn’t written by Grok’s “MechaHitler” persona. Instead, what we got is something that pedestals all the obvious problems with trying to replace an encyclopedia edited by thousands of people with a single large language model. More than that, it highlights problems with trying to replace humans for this type of thing more generally. Every “article” on Grokipedia is a long and badly-structured stream of consciousness that just kind of dumps everything the AI can scrape off the internet about the topic in one wall of text. There are no pictures, there are no links. What a thrilling way to learn about fine art. Grok, being what I call a language calculator and other more influential people have more wittily called a stochastic parrot, doesn’t understand how the structure, presentation, and format of Wikipedia aids human understanding. Call it biased if you want, but it’s biased with diagrams and with visuals. We experience the world visually, but an AI does not. Wikipedia is assembled and structured by the same species that is its audience, who know what information, in what order, makes fluent sense. I’ve been accused of needing an editor, but brother, Grok _really_ fucking needs an editor. Maybe the most important thing preventing Grokipedia from becoming any kind of serious rival whatsoever is that it is really, _really_ boring to read. So today I’ve looked for the bits worth talking about so that you don’t have to. Put aside for a second the ideological social engineering motivations behind this gross project. The uselessness of LLMs in general and Grok in particular is that they don’t understand a lot of the basic nuances of language that human brains pick up quickly. Case in point: Grok doesn’t seem to understand homonyms. ### **Easily Confused by Linguistics** As I’m investigating what an “anti-woke” encyclopedia designed by the world’s foremost white nationalist looks like, one of the first words I looked up was, of course, “Race.” Grok suggested five articles, four of which were the exact topics you would expect to see on Elon Musk’s list of priorities, and the fifth was _RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, Season 8_. Sure Grok, why not The article simply titled Race is, again as you would expect, loaded with what I call Aporia slop. Aporia is even in the list of references. The conflict between Grok’s direct training by its white nationalist creators and the information it has been able to gather online is on display here through its mealy-mouthed defense of “race realism” and the Aporia world’s parallel science against the _real_ science. But I’m not going to get into that again since I did a few weeks ago. The fascinating thing is this: Grok fully conflated “race”—that is, the term used to categorize human beings—with the identically spelled and pronounced “race” that refers to “trying to get to a location more quickly than somebody else.” This is an egregious error for Grok to make, but one that is nevertheless fully sourced. It doesn’t have any capacity to reason and notice that there’s a giant gulf of missing information between how a _race_ came to be both a way of categorizing humans and a physical activity. It just “knows” from having scraped the internet that a race is both of those things and so both of those things are, in some way, the _same_ thing. But they’re not, because they’re not the same word. The fact that they sound the same is a linguistic accident of modern English being a patchwork of sounds from all over the world. “Race” as a human category has a Romantic root, coming from French, Spanish, and Italian. “Race” as a sport has a Germanic root, coming from Norse and Dutch. If it can make an error this massive in the fundamental definition of a word, then how riddled with errors might the rest of the damn thing be, in ways that are less easy for people to detect? If something is described as “light,” is Grok always going to know the difference between it being well illuminated, or not very heavy? ### **Obvious Backdoor Meddling** Hey, while we’re talking about race, let’s acknowledge the Roman Salute in the room. As I said last week Elon Musk considers _himself_ to be the center of truth in the universe, free of bias like only a fucking god could be. When he says he’s building Grok to be “maximally truth seeking” he really just means he wants it to consult him before answering. Literally—he programmed it to scan his tweets first before considering any other information. Any time it says something that deviates from what he believes is true, he says it’s been infected by legacy media and he puts it back in the shop for a lobotomy. He's also very racist. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 7-November ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

How would you write a completely unbiased encyclopedia article about the violence currently occurring in Gaza? I mean _completely_ unbiased. I want you to bracket off and ignore every opinion you have about it whatsoever. Not taking _anyone’s_ side. _Nobody_ is wrong or right. _Just the sterile facts_. What do you write? Well, you’ll probably want to begin by saying something like, on October 7th, 2023, a certain number of armed militants from the Gaza strip in Palestine invaded Israel and murdered a certain number of civilians. They also took a number of hostages back into Palestine, and then we get into Israel’s response to that attack. But you’re already being biased, here, on many points: People on one side will object to you calling the Palestinians “militants,” implying they are a legitimate military force, and will prefer “terrorists,” but that’s biased in the other direction. We will have to retreat to “men.” (I don’t _think_ there were any women among the assailants, but if there were, we will say “persons.”) People on the other side will object to you calling it an “invasion,” calling what they did “murder,” and the people they killed “civilians.” This is biased against those who see this as a legitimate military operation and see the Israelis as an occupying force. We can’t really call them “hostages” either, maybe everyone can agree on “captives.” So let’s say: On October 7th, 2023, a certain number of men entered Israel from Palestine and ended the lives of a certain number of individuals, and took a certain number captive, and then we can get into Israel’s retaliation. This is still biased, because it presents Palestine as the initial aggressor rather than it having been in response to pressures exerted upon it by Israel. But you can’t call Hamas’ actions on October 7th a retaliation, because you’re discounting the reasons Israel may have been exerting those pressures. We cannot write this article without starting it at least one hundred years ago, and now understand: I asked you to write an unbiased article about the present Gaza conflict and _we can’t even write an unbiased sentence about October 7 th, 2023_. It was a fool’s errand to begin with, framing this as a conflict between Israel and Palestine, because you can’t use those words either. A large number of people on one side don’t believe Palestine exists legitimately, and a large number on the other don’t believe Israel exists legitimately. I can’t continue this example without a lot of people getting mad at me, if they’re not already, but you get the idea. There’s no way to write this article and retain any amount of useful information whatsoever. A machine couldn’t do it. So let’s cut to the chase: Elon Musk wants to kill Wikipedia, because it’s biased. His beef with the online encyclopedia is longstanding and grows more intensified by the fact that it’s one of the few things he can’t control with brute force of capital. Musk lives in a world in which everything is for sale, including governments, but he _can’t_ buy Wikipedia—as a nonprofit it isn’t publicly traded. He’s tried looking at ways to choke off its income, but it relies on donations. Capitalism is the only weapon he has, so finally, he’s just decided to make his own, better, alternative and compete it to death. Have you tried shooting it with a gun? He doesn’t go much into what he thinks is wrong with Wikipedia but I’m almost certain I can guess. Wikipedia’s article about January 6 is titled “January 6 United States Capitol attack,” and begins like this: > On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump in an attempted self-coup, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep him in power by preventing a joint session of Congress from counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of then president-elect Joe Biden. The attack was unsuccessful in preventing the certification of the election results. According to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the incident, the attack was the culmination of a plan by Trump to overturn the election. The article about the Great Replacement starts like this: > The Great Replacement (French: _grand remplacement_), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory coined by French author Renaud Camus. Camus' theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. The article on climate change states clearly that it is driven by human activities. The Covid-19 article says that the virus came from bats or another related animal and theories of it being engineered by humans are unsupported by the evidence. The Gamergate article says it was a harassment campaign started as a right-wing backlash against feminism. You get the idea. Wikipedia is _woke_ , but only because the preponderance of evidence is woke, and Musk’s contention is that this means the bulk of evidence is, in fact, fake manufactured propaganda. His coming alternative, “Grokipedia,” will be written by Grok, his large language model AI, which will reform the entire corpus of human knowledge from a neutral point of view, objective, and free of bias. It was supposed to launch Monday October 20, but… So let’s get this right out of the way first: We all know that Elon Musk doesn’t want to build an unbiased Wikipedia, he wants to build a _very far-right_ Wikipedia. But that sort of is the crux of the issue: That, to him, _is_ unbiased. It’s why he consistently considers himself a centrist, or even a liberal, despite his politics being to the right of the majority of people—he thinks everything he believes is simply _correct_ , and to that end, unbiased, neutral, and objective. His worldview is the nucleus of truth, and everyone who disagrees with him on any issue is orbiting him on various different levels of wrong. This is true, to some extent, of all of us. ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Socrates is popularly regarded one of the wisest people in history, and it’s for the simple statement that “the wisest man knows that he knows nothing.” We can, and should, be conscious of our own biases. It’s an extraordinary feat of reasoning, an ability that we have—to fundamentally unpack ourselves—that makes me extremely skeptical about efforts toward “artificial general intelligence” (the name they came up with for what we used to just call AI, but now we have to discern it from dumb stochastic language models). By exercising this ability we prevent ourselves from becoming shrieking bigots like Elon Musk, who refuses to. But we also need to recognize that we can never _fully_ do this. We cannot see ourselves completely objectively, just as we can’t see 100% of our field of vision—there’s always, necessarily, a blind spot where the optic nerve comes out, and it needs to be there for vision to work at all. We all have some kind of strongly held belief, which we need to function, and we think it is the truth, _or else we wouldn’t believe it_. Those who have followed me for a long time know that I believe strongly in the existence of objective truths. It’s why I so thoroughly despise the project of the populist right to unmake the concept of truth and replace it with a sophist’s persuasion-centered epistemic model, which regards facts to be irrelevant if not obstacles to overcome. They are hostile to truth to the extent that people who fact-check are cast as villains and the enemies of free speech. That said, we can never _completely reach_ the truth. We can get closer to it, but we can’t touch it. It’s like a hyperbolic graph that infinitely approaches a point without reaching it. Everyone has their biases and you can’t just smash everyone’s opinion together and find the truth by finding the average. It just doesn't work that way. Hannah Arendt pointed out that there are different _types_ of truths in the world. There are things you can discern from first principles. Mathematics might be an example of a truth that we _can_ completely reach. But truths about events _can’t_ be discerned from first principles. They need to be assembled from various people’s opinions about what happened, as well as as many facts as we can find, and we will _never_ have all of them. Wikipedia _can’t_ eliminate bias, but it does as well as it possibly can through the only technique we have available to us to understand the world: _Broad consensus_. It isn’t perfect and it can’t be, but Grok’s attempt to do this will be much worse. First of all, I think it’s pretty clear that Elon Musk doesn’t really understand what large language model AI actually is or how it works. It cannot, as he claims, discover new technologies or new physics. It might be able to help human beings do these things! But it can’t reason, no matter how far you scale it up, because that’s not what it is or what it does. It doesn’t matter how fast you make a sportscar, how far you scale up its braking system and its suspension and its traction and its air conditioning and its radio, it will never take off and fly. That’s not what it is or what it does. Get in, loser, we're going to Mars somehow LLMs are like language calculators. They’ve been fed an unfathomable amount of text and, depending on how well they “understand” what you’re asking, they make a guess about what string of words would most likely follow as a response to that question. In attempting to build an unbiased encyclopedia, what Grok can _sort of_ do is roughly what Wikipedia editors do anyway, which is consume a lot of information and try to figure out what the broad consensus is. What it can do better than human beings is the sheer amount of information it can absorb—you’ll never find someone, no matter their expertise on the subject, who has read, let alone remembered, every book ever written about, for example, World War II. Grok plausibly could. What it _can’t_ do is weigh the reliability of any of that information. Absent outside interference, it will equally weigh award winning historian Sir Ian Kershaw with your cousin who self-published a book he wrote in two weeks that bafflingly calls Germany “Germania” and it’s uncertain whether he thinks that’s really what it’s called because he just kind of looks at you when you ask. Determining reliability of a source is a power that only human beings have, and of course, this is going to result in bias, and the bias is going to be more extreme depending on how well an individual is able to self-reflect and really unpack their own biases. I wouldn’t, for example, regard an essay on feminist theory to have any reliability if it was written by Andrew Tate. But there are others who wouldn’t regard an essay on feminist theory to have any reliability if it was written by a man. These two determinations are both biased, to different degrees. But a “Grokipedia” that wrote an article on feminist theory that consulted and equally weighed the authority of Andrew Tate and, say, Judith Butler, would be a fucking dog’s breakfast. It would be incomprehensible. "More like Simone de Beauv Where My Bitches At Yooooooooo" That’s the core of the problem. We may not be able to actually reach _the objective central truth_ about anything any more than we can land a spacecraft on the sun, but we can arrive at different distances from it. If we refine our methods, reflect on our biases, and work together with a lot of other reasonable people, then we might be able to land on Mercury. If we get a machine to eat all the opinions of everyone in the world and shit out the average, we’re going to land on Jupiter. You can’t improve an encyclopedia by replacing reasoned analysis of sources with probabilistic guesses. In order to get an LLM AI to weigh some people’s opinions higher than others, you have to program this into them from the outset. You need a human puppet master. This brings us back to Elon Musk, who believes the _vast majority_ of mainstream opinion on social topics is wrong, and who almost certainly would rate Andrew Tate’s knowledge about feminist theory as _more_ reliable than Judith Butler. And Musk is, of course, who will be teaching Grok about reliable sources. And he has already been doing this ever since he gave birth to the damn tortured thing. It was Musk who, in June, got so frustrated with Grok’s insistence on taking the mainstream consensus on “white genocide in South Africa” that he personally intervened to force it to declare that such a thing was really happening. He was caught out when, due to his incompetent implementation of this command, Grok started complaining about white genocide in every single interaction with the public. Musk, with his lower-than-normal ability to see the extreme bias in himself, will establish _his_ worldview as the truth that he wants it to aim toward. I predict it’s going to be an incredibly frustrating disaster for him as he tries to correct Grok on every assertion it tries to make that approaches the consensus on any issue. Imagine working as the sole editor of a Wikipedia-sized project and you feel like every page is riddled with errors. I think that “Grokipedia” will be subject to more recalls than the Cybertruck. But no matter the outcome here—whether it’s incoherent, broken, so liberal that it drives him insane, or so ridiculously fash that Tesla shares take another hit—one thing we can be sure about is how hilarious it’s going to be for the rest of us, not to mention how revealing. After all, the last time he told Grok to act more like him, it started referring to itself as “MechaHitler.” I can't imagine why. I am writing a whole-ass book about how toxic libertarianism and masculinity infected the early internet and now we have to deal with this sort of crap. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

As our technology has vastly overshot what resources we’re able to acquire with our meaty fingers alone, we’ve put stresses on our bodies that the slow pace of evolution hasn’t prepared us for. Or, in building our bodies for scarcity, we have been granted traits that make abundance detrimental. We crave sugar and salt because these are things that our bodies need, but we’re not physiologically capable of handling the vast amounts of it that we’ve made available to ourselves—requiring us to practice a _restraint_ against our natural tendencies. We weren’t built to spend very large amounts of time sedentary, in a seated position. We weren’t made for endless repetitive tasks that burn away the cartilage in our wrists and elbows. We weren’t meant to remember to “lift with our knees.” Our lungs didn’t develop to inhale smoke on purpose. One thing, I think, that is rarely mentioned along these same lines is that we are evolutionarily unprepared for the devastating psychological consequences of the internet. I'm not just talking about "skibidi toilet." It's worse, if you can believe it. I think that we can all agree that there is something terrible happening to the Western world, politically. In the United States 2011 primaries, Republican voters chose Mitt Romney as their candidate to challenge incumbent Barack Obama in the presidential election. Romney was a very moderate conservative in a line of Republican presidential candidates which had been growing more moderate since Reagan, a pattern unbroken whether the candidate was successful or not. Politics, in general, was cooling down. Just four years later, in 2015, the heat shot up very suddenly. An extremely right-wing populist television celebrity swept the Republican primaries, ahead of his closest rivals, who were all still to the right of Bush. Donald Trump narrowly lost re-election in 2020 but reclaimed it in 2024, _by moving even further to the right_. Now, things that would have been scandals _even within the GOP_ a decade ago are normal and commonplace. There are anonymous neo-Nazis running the government’s social media and trolling the country with groyper memes. Congressional staffers have swastikas hanging up in their offices. The GOP wants you to believe this is an "optical illusion." What the media isn't mentioning (understandably, due to the swastika distraction) are the "Ohio" memes also prominently displayed behind this guy, providing clues about how internet baked this shithead is. But we'll get to that soon. In 2015, Hillary Clinton made a massive, campaign-wounding faux pas when she commented that some of Donald Trump’s followers were a “basket of deplorables.” In 2025, the White House spokesperson matter-of-factly declares that all Democrats are criminals and terrorists. There is no media firestorm. Not a brush fire, not even a spark. > ‘Hamas Terrorists, Illegal Aliens, and Violent Criminals’: Trump Spox Karoline Leavitt Describes Democrats’ Base > > — #TuckFrump (@realtuckfrumper.bsky.social) 2025-10-16T18:53:07.000Z And then, of course, the literal President of the United States of America tweeted an AI generated video of himself in a crown, as America's king, piloting an aircraft, dumping... (heavy sigh)... dumping actual loads of wet feces on the American population. In any previous era, this would be posted by the opposition. Something has happened to a zeitgeist-altering number of people from the generation after mine and even the youngest of my own generation. People who are beginning to vote and beginning to enter government and lead companies. Just the other day, the group chats for a number of Young Republican groups was leaked to the media. Falsely labeled by the Vice President as “young kids,” like they’re high schoolers, these are in fact mid-20s to even early-30s men, who are leading the Republican membership drive among youth. They are tomorrow’s politicians, and some are already senators. In private they make Holocaust jokes and refer to black people as “watermelon people.” Referring to black football players, one remarked “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Those of you who read to the bottom of my articles know that I’m writing a book about this, and you can read excerpts of the draft here if you upgrade to a paid subscription, but here’s a taste of my Theory of Everything: The right-libertarian capture of the internet, the notion of it as a place where we can do or say literally anything that we feel like in anonymity, has turned it into a psychological torture chamber. Social media is making us less empathetic. It’s eating our humanity. ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: I’m a big free speech guy in the sense that I don’t think words and ideas should be punishable by law. I’m not a “free speech absolutist” in the sense that I don’t think that no community or private entity should be allowed to set and enforce their own standards. I think, actually, that “free speech absolutists” or those who style themselves as such _do not exist_. They can claim to exist, but almost always, what they really mean to say is “my views should be untouchable.” Elon Musk is the most famous example of a guy who was huge into free speech before he bought a social media company, after which he became one of the most censorial people on the planet. All those Twitter Files guys—Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss—have long histories of trying to censor people, often succeeding. Taibbi is _giddy_ with excitement when his enemies are censored. Shellenberger launches cancelling campaigns to get research shut down. Weiss started her career trying to get academics fired for their views. Musk once vowed that he would use his immense wealth to fund the legal campaign of anyone who was fired for something they posted on social media. Now he is leading the charge to get people fired for being insufficiently mournful of Charlie Kirk, shielding from suspension users who violate Twitter’s anti-doxing rules. Taibbi has said numerous times that free speech is a right-wing virtue that used to belong to the left until they dropped it as a tenet. This is illusory. The only reason that hardline speech freedom appears to be right-coded is because, when your beliefs are in the minority, you feel suppressed. The right dropped free speech like a hot rock the second Trump came to power again—and so did Taibbi. "No one is above the law," except, literally, Donald Trump, who the Supreme Court has ruled is above the law, and who illegally directed the Justice Department to indict Comey for a crime they couldn't find any evidence for -- what are we doing here, Matt? The suppression that people feel for noxious views comes from social stigma. Most of us have grown up as empathetic people and the better socialized we are, the more empathetic we are. We see other people as human, like ourselves, and when we say something that makes the people close to us upset, it’s like touching a hot stove. Yes, that can result in resentment. Yes, it can drive people into pockets of extremism. By and large, I do believe that, absent extreme external stresses, this effect moderates us. I do believe that growing diversity in the West is a great deal responsible for the gradual liberalization of the right that began to happen in the 20th century. When we grow up around a lot of different people and perceive them as human, our bigotries toward those people fade. Then the internet happened. Now when people say something that comes across as bigoted, and they get that shock of pain and resentment and bitterness, instead of going back out and participating in a community that will hammer the hatred out of them, they go to the internet. When everyone is anonymous, you can say whatever you want, because, crucially, you are not talking to human beings. You are talking to a computer. Some of us who spent our formative years before the internet tried to develop communities with the same types of communities that we had offline, with our own standards. Websites had forums, and the forums had codes of conduct. I was an administrator at _David Wong’s Pointless Waste of Time_ , which eventually became _Cracked_. We didn’t have Nazis on _PWoT_. If they appeared, we would just ban them. Nobody raised a massive fuss about that. Today, you can’t really run a large internet community without Nazis. If you try, you will find yourself hauled in front of a Senate inquiry. Because the internet evolved to serve a different kind of people. I don’t know what kind of person I would be today if, instead of _PWoT_ , I had landed on _Something Awful_ or, especially, _4Chan_. These were much more mean-spirited communities and the latter branched off from the former in response to _SA_ ’s erratic moderation. These were people who came to the internet to _escape_ social norms. If they had bigotries, they weren’t stuck in a world that would attempt, painfully, to smooth them out. They could retreat instead to a world that would instantly reaffirm them. Quick gratification—instant relief from the sting of touching that stove. At the risk of sounding “woke,” I’ll state the following fact: The earliest adopters of the internet—carried over from the bulletin boards that preceded it—were overwhelmingly white and male. Their culture seeded the internet at its beginning. The grievances they brought to this new anonymous digital world were the grievances of white men who have grievances. Those whose views, due to their unpopularity, made them feel suppressed, became extremely libertarian. They became—again, a misnomer—the “free speech absolutists.” These folks built their own communities with aspirations of total freedom—often with rules that restricted speech only according to its legality (no death threats, no child porn). These communities, chief among them 4Chan, became the dominant culture of the social internet. Communities with rules lost the Darwinian battle against communities with no rules. "Hey, look, we solved everything with our tech genius!" The _founders_ of these communities were not necessarily radically right-wing. Some of them were—mainly fringe offshoots from mainstream social media like _Gab_ , _Parler_ , _Rumble_ , and _Voat_ —but most were moderate, if right-leaning, libertarians, who thought “free speech absolutism” could legitimately work if they could engineer it properly. That they could sell a refuge from offline social norms, without anticipating the kinds of social harms that might arise from this project. Nevertheless, the result of this project keeps _resulting_ in radically right-wing platforms. I have a theory that, to humble-brag, went extremely viral on Substack back a couple of years ago during its “Nazi problem” controversy, and it’s that aggressively fringe right-wing views are a type of content, pornography is another, that I call “liquid content,” because it takes the shape of its container. People who don’t want to be around it simply leave and go elsewhere, allowing the liquid content to completely flow in fill up the platform. What I didn’t mention in that piece is that there are some people who inevitably stay on those platforms and dissolve in the liquid. Twitter is a platform that completely filled up with liquid content. It was accelerated by Elon Musk after he took it over, renamed it _X_ (which I refuse to say because it’s stupid), and removed all rules, but it was headed in that direction anyway. Twitter now has a comparable culture to _Gab_ , _Parler_ , or _Truth Social_ , all of which were clone platforms designed as far-right alternatives to it. Many people fled to alternatives such as _Threads_ or _Bluesky_. The former, a Mark Zuckerberg property, has since dropped its rules in capitulation to Trump, and is headed in that direction. The latter also doesn’t really have any rules that would prevent a far-right takeover and I suspect the only reason that hasn’t been attempted at scale is that they kind of like to keep it there as a curiosity. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get occasionally attacked and threatened by people who can’t stand that it exists. There are still people who remain on Elon’s Twitter, swimming in its baleful liquid, and many are becoming dissolved by it. Those who recognize who these two people are will get it. Those who don't--forget about it, you're better off. This really is the crux of our situation. There are a crazy number of people born in the early to mid 2000s who spent their entire lives pickling their brain in the jar of 4Chan, and the sites that sprouted from that culture. They are now becoming politically active adults. They don’t see everybody as a human being. Racism is skyrocketing because Nazism was a thing that went against social norms, so it became something you could joke about online, and then they dissolved in the jokes and they stopped being jokes. The news is just text on a screen, which is just memes. Trump drone-striking Venezuelan fishermen is Based. ICE and the military terrorizing people in the street is Epic. As this batch of 4Chan cookies is released into the governments of the world, the next batch is already being baked in Musk’s Twitter, and it is worse. I believe, if we wrestle Western society back from its trajectory, led by America, into fascism, we are going to struggle with the internet problem. Some countries, including Australia, that have detected the problem, are introducing laws to prevent children from accessing social media. I’m completely against this, for multiple reasons. Primarily: 1) I _am_ a free speech guy! I’m for the _legality_ of all speech, and this places a _legal_ barrier against all speech; 2) I’m a huge data privacy guy, and this is probably going to force me to hand over personal information to all the odious and evil techbros who control the internet to prove that I’m an adult; 3) _It won’t work!_ It won’t work, because the problem isn’t _children_. Adults are susceptible to this. It’s probably less effective, and slower, and the dynamic is different based on the type of personality, but the transformational effects rise up and filter down on all of us. People don’t remember this, but Elon Musk _used to be a moderate_. He baked in the Twitter oven for years before he was consumed by it, then purchased it to open the levees of bigotry wider, and then, ultimately, throw up a straight-arm salute and declare those who declare “Hitler was right” have “said the actual truth.” Image source Musk isn’t a crazy outlier. You can watch former political moderates, who spend too much time on Twitter or Rumble, dissolve grotesquely into fash-humping slop. I wrote, in August, about Glenn Greenwald’s worrying defense of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, and since then, Greenwald has further doubled down on normalizing Fuentes and speaking to him on friendly terms as a journalistic peer—a phenomenal reputation laundering effort that has since earned Fuentes an appearance on the _Red Scare_ podcast, another media enterprise that began ostensibly leftist but is becoming amenable to the far-right after spending too long in the too-online ecosphere. Like Joe Rogan. Like Tim Pool. Like Theo Von. For 25 years the idea has persisted that “online isn’t real life.” But online is real life. In many ways, online is more real life than real life. Online is in control of real life. People who felt wounded by objections to their bigotry, wounds inflicted by their empathy, fled to the internet, where they were told that empathy is a disease, one that can be cured with discipline. This mentality, baked in the internet’s oven, is now being birthed into what they used to call “meatspace.” Defeating Trumpism is only the first challenge—saving democracy long term will involve solving _Internetism_. What I’ve said in this article is not the entire story. There are other external pressures that have led to the rapid rise in far-right politics during the internet era, including 9/11, and, surprisingly, hippies. It’s all detailed in the book I’m writing on this subject. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: ### Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: 🔒 You Cannot Create an “Unbiased” WikipediaHow would you write a completely unbiased encyclopedia article about the violence currently occurring in Gaza? I mean completely unbiased. I want you to bracket off and ignore every opinion you have about it whatsoever. Not taking anyone’s side. Nobody is wrong or right. Just the sterile facts. WhatPlato Was a DickS Peter Davis

How would you write a completely unbiased encyclopedia article about the violence currently occurring in Gaza? I mean _completely_ unbiased. I want you to bracket off and ignore every opinion you have about it whatsoever. Not taking _anyone’s_ side. _Nobody_ is wrong or right. _Just the sterile facts_. What do you write? Well, you’ll probably want to begin by saying something like, on October 7th, 2023, a certain number of armed militants from the Gaza strip in Palestine invaded Israel and murdered a certain number of civilians. They also took a number of hostages back into Palestine, and then we get into Israel’s response to that attack. But you’re already being biased, here, on many points: People on one side will object to you calling the Palestinians “militants,” implying they are a legitimate military force, and will prefer “terrorists,” but that’s biased in the other direction. We will have to retreat to “men.” (I don’t _think_ there were any women among the assailants, but if there were, we will say “persons.”) People on the other side will object to you calling it an “invasion,” calling what they did “murder,” and the people they killed “civilians.” This is biased against those who see this as a legitimate military operation and see the Israelis as an occupying force. We can’t really call them “hostages” either, maybe everyone can agree on “captives.” So let’s say: On October 7th, 2023, a certain number of men entered Israel from Palestine and ended the lives of a certain number of individuals, and took a certain number captive, and then we can get into Israel’s retaliation. This is still biased, because it presents Palestine as the initial aggressor rather than it having been in response to pressures exerted upon it by Israel. But you can’t call Hamas’ actions on October 7th a retaliation, because you’re discounting the reasons Israel may have been exerting those pressures. We cannot write this article without starting it at least one hundred years ago, and now understand: I asked you to write an unbiased article about the present Gaza conflict and _we can’t even write an unbiased sentence about October 7 th, 2023_. It was a fool’s errand to begin with, framing this as a conflict between Israel and Palestine, because you can’t use those words either. A large number of people on one side don’t believe Palestine exists legitimately, and a large number on the other don’t believe Israel exists legitimately. I can’t continue this example without a lot of people getting mad at me, if they’re not already, but you get the idea. There’s no way to write this article and retain any amount of useful information whatsoever. A machine couldn’t do it. So let’s cut to the chase: Elon Musk wants to kill Wikipedia, because it’s biased. His beef with the online encyclopedia is longstanding and grows more intensified by the fact that it’s one of the few things he can’t control with brute force of capital. Musk lives in a world in which everything is for sale, including governments, but he _can’t_ buy Wikipedia—as a nonprofit it isn’t publicly traded. He’s tried looking at ways to choke off its income, but it relies on donations. Capitalism is the only weapon he has, so finally, he’s just decided to make his own, better, alternative and compete it to death. Have you tried shooting it with a gun? He doesn’t go much into what he thinks is wrong with Wikipedia but I’m almost certain I can guess. Wikipedia’s article about January 6 is titled “January 6 United States Capitol attack,” and begins like this: > On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump in an attempted self-coup, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep him in power by preventing a joint session of Congress from counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of then president-elect Joe Biden. The attack was unsuccessful in preventing the certification of the election results. According to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the incident, the attack was the culmination of a plan by Trump to overturn the election. The article about the Great Replacement starts like this: > The Great Replacement (French: _grand remplacement_), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory coined by French author Renaud Camus. Camus' theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. The article on climate change states clearly that it is driven by human activities. The Covid-19 article says that the virus came from bats or another related animal and theories of it being engineered by humans are unsupported by the evidence. The Gamergate article says it was a harassment campaign started as a right-wing backlash against feminism. You get the idea. Wikipedia is _woke_ , but only because the preponderance of evidence is woke, and Musk’s contention is that this means the bulk of evidence is, in fact, fake manufactured propaganda. His coming alternative, “Grokipedia,” will be written by Grok, his large language model AI, which will reform the entire corpus of human knowledge from a neutral point of view, objective, and free of bias. It was supposed to launch Monday October 20, but… So let’s get this right out of the way first: We all know that Elon Musk doesn’t want to build an unbiased Wikipedia, he wants to build a _very far-right_ Wikipedia. But that sort of is the crux of the issue: That, to him, _is_ unbiased. It’s why he consistently considers himself a centrist, or even a liberal, despite his politics being to the right of the majority of people—he thinks everything he believes is simply _correct_ , and to that end, unbiased, neutral, and objective. His worldview is the nucleus of truth, and everyone who disagrees with him on any issue is orbiting him on various different levels of wrong. This is true, to some extent, of all of us. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 31-October ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

So I’m going to talk about this book again. I wasn’t going to, because my whole thing was that I could review it accurately without ever reading it. But more has come to light since it was actually released, and that is that somebody _did_ read it. Namely, a popular YouTuber who has been posting video essays for a decade under the mononym “Shaun.” His video about _The War on Science_ is just over four hours long if you have that kind of time, and yes it did reaffirm most of my suspicions about it, but also, right toward the end, in the last half hour, Shaun discovers something that just hadn’t occurred to me at the time: In order to sell his soul out to the “anti-woke” science community, Lawrence Krauss has had to get into bed with some serious fucking ghouls. I’m talking, of course, about the skull-measurers. Pictured: modern groundbreaking science So I got a copy of the damn book. I make money from this newsletter so I can legally deduct it from my tax as research material. But this was a mistake already—I got scammed on this. The book I bought is _missing around a full third_ of the chapters that appear in the book that Shaun reviewed. _I have never seen this kind of bullshit before_. I had to re-check that I actually purchased the official book from the official Amazon page. I got the Kindle version, which I rarely do because I hate ebooks, but I don’t need this garbage taking up physical space in my house. Is that a thing, with ebooks? That sometimes you get a heavily redacted version of the paper edition? Has this ever happened to anyone? So yeah, see Shaun’s video if you want the long review—I am unable to review it myself because I don’t have the whole fucking book I paid for. I’ll mention at this point that Lawrence Krauss used to be an idol of mine back when I used to buy _New Scientist_ magazine every week and he would often appear as a columnist. Then he was credibly accused of a _lot_ of sexual misconduct and suddenly became this huge antifeminist, “anti-woke” guy, completely by coincidence, fighting against the supposed leftist takeover of science. Here’s the thing: When you try to pivot to the right on _science_ , _as a scientist_ , you run into some problems—namely that the science _agrees_ with the left on most of the topics that have been decided, for some reason, to be “political.” Sorry, the Covid vaccine pissed us off so we decided germ theory is political and now we have to put an ex-junkie nepobaby attention addict spineless compulsive liar former lawyer with no scientific training, knowledge, or basic understanding in charge of all medical science. I don’t mean there aren’t any right-wing scientists who are experts and correct in their field. Obviously you can be a field-leading expert on Planck’s quantum radiation law while also hating immigrants or whatever. It’s only within specific areas of sociopolitical overlap where right-wing scientists have to decide whether they’re going to side with the _science_ or dismiss it as conspiracy and align instead with a fringe that better describes what they prefer to be true about the world. Whenever you encounter “anti-woke” science, it inevitably falls into one or more of these four categories: - Rejection of climate science; - Rejection of vaccine science or germ theory in its entirety; - Rejection of gender theory; - Or, perhaps most insidious and also our topic today: **Pseudoscientific race bullshit**. ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. First off, what genuinely surprises me about this book—what little of it I’m able to read—is that it’s not just the one giant rant about transgenderism that I fully assumed it would be, There’s some of that in there, don’t get me wrong, but this is actually just an incredibly weak book that doesn’t even talk that much about _science_ at all. What it talks about is _universities_ , and how they’re overrun with social justice thought. Whole chapters are dedicated to how too many students and academics favor Palestine in the Israel conflict, and that has nothing to do with science whatsoever. This book is about cancel culture, whiny feminists, anti-Zionists, and sensitive SJWs. It’s a fucking anachronism from the _Gamergate_ years. But Krauss really had no choice but to assemble a weak book, because his position within the right-wing science world is weak. He _doesn’t_ reject climate science or vaccines. Being a (alleged! alleged!) _massive_ sex pest, his big thing is antifeminism, but he can’t do a whole book about that, so he has to cast a broader umbrella. Most of the book, therefore, is about spooky scary “DEI” in academia. I’ve written about the right-wing use of the term DUI before and how it’s just a dog whistle about _race_. It just objectively is. It's clear in this book that Krauss prefers to talk about _women_ rather than _race_. In the introduction to the book he writes: > Dubious postmodern notions regarding objective, evidence-based inquiry and epistemology, and, more recently, CSJ, while once restricted to fringe departments, have now become endemic, making their way into the mainstream, even in hard science curricula. Those hired under the banner that racism and sexism are rampant in academia tend to echo that in their research and teaching. As a result, the debate about scientific issues often becomes stifled. For example, the question of whether gender-based differences between fields reflect underlying sexism or simply deeper psychological or sociologically based differences in interests between the sexes cannot safely even be raised in numerous universities, as various academics who have lost their jobs or affiliations can attest. Here Krauss mentions directly the topic of _gender_ disparity within academia, and the various innate differences between the sexes that might account for this. He skims over the _racial_ disparity and quite deliberately dodges the implication of innate differences between _races_. I propose that this is because Lawrence Krauss, my once hero, is a coward. And not even the relatable type of coward. The relatable type of coward With DEI being such a transparently racist moral panic, it is likely not possible to assemble a book like this without tapping into the dark universe of Eugenics Substack. And the only reason I mention Substack here is because that’s where these guys live—not trying to re-litigate the whole Substack Nazi Problem thing, it’s just an objective reality. Throughout _The War on Science_ , across several essays on various topics, there are several citations to the work of one Bo Winegard. His research is cited, at least, in essays by Alan Sokal, Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman, and Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja. So a pretty prominent figure in the anti-woke science bucket. Who the hell is he? Bo Winegard is the executive editor of _Aporia_. A Substack joint. Aporia is a Substack that functions as more or less the hub of modern scientific racism. It’s operated by something called the _Human Diversity Foundation_ , which, after getting bad press and mainstream exposure as a consequence of a Hope Not Hate investigation, appears to have quietly changed its name recently to “Polygenic Scores LLC.” Whatever it’s called, this thing was started by self-described eugenicist and ethnonationalist Emil Kirkegaard, whose pseudoscience is such legendary bullshit that the only way he can get a paper published is to publish it in his own journals, which carry the aesthetic of proper journals enough to be commonly mistaken as legitimate by laypeople. These fake journals are published by _OpenPsych_ , which is owned by Kirkegaard. Kirkegaard also has a Substack, naturally. The HDF, Aporia, and OpenPsych are essentially the shared landscape in which the modern eugenics movement operates. It is an insidious, incestuous, pseudoscientific bundle of quackery that _mimics_ science. I like to call it scarecrow science. But it mimics science well enough that it can trick people who actually want to do their due diligence and back things up with what appears to be legitimate research, because it’s a very delectable cherry for cherry-pickers. Some of the contributors to Krauss’ _The War on Science_ are more nefarious than others. In any case, the Aporia universe has deeply, deeply infected the whole crop of intellectuals who want to be trendy and appear heterodox and anti-woke. Even if you’re careful to avoid getting any explicit white nationalists, if you scoop up any number of anti-woke scientists to write papers for you, you are _inevitably_ going to get a whole bunch of Aporia bullshit. I'm usually above memes, but Jerry Coyne (who I called Temu Richard Dawkins in my first piece about this book) shares a chapter with Luana Maroja, someone who I identified in that piece as kind of a proto-race scientist, and in fact, their chapter is actually a reprint of the exact article I linked that had led me to that conclusion. Their argument is that the fear of appearing racist is making it taboo to study genetics at all. Which is a fair point, if true! Unfortunately, they back this point up with a lot of Aporia bullshit. First, this is one of the multiple chapters that drops a Winegard reference. They say: > Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic. The word “apparently” is doing some heavy lifting here. Winegard was fired after a pattern of thinly veiled racism, including a tweet that suggested if white countries continually fail to recognize innate racial differences “I suspect our countries will be torn apart from the inside like a tree destroyed by parasites.” Pictured: Bo Winegard using his dogwhistle The real final straw was that Winegard published a paper that had to be retracted because he relied on debunked data from the notorious white nationalist race scientist Richard Lynn. Lynn was also the editor-in-chief of a race science journal called _Mankind Quarterly,_ founded in 1961 by a group called _the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics,_ and which is now published by the HDF as a sister publication to Aporia. Coyne and Maroja surely know all this. There is no reason but explicit deception to coyly suggest Winegard was fired for “merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups.” Later, Coyne and Maroja discuss some supposedly legitimate studies by fearless academics that have been done to address the question of how much IQ and life outcomes are affected by genetics, but they cite “Lasker et al. 2019.” This paper, Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability, is authored by Jordan Lasker, Bryan J. Pesta, John G. R. Fuerst, and—oh, look—Emil Kirkegaard. We know Kirkegaard, but let’s take a look at these other characters. Jordan Lasker is a white nationalist race scientist who writes online as “Crémieux.” He has a Substack, of course, and is also associated with Aporia, of course. According to unearthed comments from a former handle, he considered himself, at least at some point, a neo-Nazi. Bryan J. Pesta is employed by the Human Diversity Foundation and, according to conversations within the group overheard by Hope Not Hate, one of his roles is explicitly to massage the language of their more racist material to make it more palatable to mainstream academics—to people like Coyne and Maroja. Like Winegard, Pesta was also fired from an academic institution for writing a terribly researched bullshit article that failed basic academic standards. John G. R. Fuerst is a _Mankind Quarterly_ contributor who writes about the biological reality of race. The article these four chucklefucks collaborated on was published in MDPI, which is a predatory open access publisher that successfully pressured prominent academic librarian Jeffrey Beall to take down a widely consulted list of predatory publishers by harassing his employer. This is the _real_ war on science. Even when you dismiss the elephant in the room here—that Donald Trump’s turbofascist regime is waging a _very literal_ war on science from the right, a fact that has left Krauss sputtering and blubbering since the election—but predatory publishers and insidious pseudosciences that try to bash their way to credibility by dressing up in the clothing of science. The HDF investigations reveal a parasitic organization that takes advantage of your childish distaste of feminism, of pronouns, of overhearing people at Starbucks speaking in Spanish, and dangles tasty little morsels of _Bell Curve_ bullshit in front of you. Several of the authors featured in _The War on Science_ have featured either as guest contributors or podcast guests to Aporia, including one of its most popular and mainstream figures, Steven Pinker. According to HDF, this is a deliberate effort to create legitimacy by association. And yet anti-woke academics just keep snapping at that bait, snapping, snapping, snapping, because they’re sick of having to hear indigenous land acknowledgments or whatever. The HDF and its associated ventures are not a grass roots operation. They are well-funded, by their own giddy admission, by far-right Silicon Valley oligarchs like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Their agenda is malicious, and if the severe Aporia bullshit infection in _The War on Science_ is any indication, it’s effective. I’m sorry that she wasn’t into it, Dr. Krauss, but maybe you should grow up and see the real war. Hey, you know what else is well-funded by far-right Silicon Valley oligarchs? The current war against democracy, which I’m writing a book about. It's an analysis of how the internet, in merely its first 25 years of existence, has changed western culture and dragged it toward the far right. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: 🔒 How Free Speech Internet Culture Cooked Our BrainsAs our technology has vastly overshot what resources we’re able to acquire with our meaty fingers alone, we’ve put stresses on our bodies that the slow pace of evolution hasn’t prepared us for. Or, in building our bodies for scarcity, we have been granted traits that makePlato Was a DickS Peter Davis

As our technology has vastly overshot what resources we’re able to acquire with our meaty fingers alone, we’ve put stresses on our bodies that the slow pace of evolution hasn’t prepared us for. Or, in building our bodies for scarcity, we have been granted traits that make abundance detrimental. We crave sugar and salt because these are things that our bodies need, but we’re not physiologically capable of handling the vast amounts of it that we’ve made available to ourselves—requiring us to practice a _restraint_ against our natural tendencies. We weren’t built to spend very large amounts of time sedentary, in a seated position. We weren’t made for endless repetitive tasks that burn away the cartilage in our wrists and elbows. We weren’t meant to remember to “lift with our knees.” Our lungs didn’t develop to inhale smoke on purpose. One thing, I think, that is rarely mentioned along these same lines is that we are evolutionarily unprepared for the devastating psychological consequences of the internet. I'm not just talking about "skibidi toilet." It's worse, if you can believe it. I think that we can all agree that there is something terrible happening to the Western world, politically. In the United States 2011 primaries, Republican voters chose Mitt Romney as their candidate to challenge incumbent Barack Obama in the presidential election. Romney was a very moderate conservative in a line of Republican presidential candidates which had been growing more moderate since Reagan, a pattern unbroken whether the candidate was successful or not. Politics, in general, was cooling down. Just four years later, in 2015, the heat shot up very suddenly. An extremely right-wing populist television celebrity swept the Republican primaries, ahead of his closest rivals, who were all still to the right of Bush. Donald Trump narrowly lost re-election in 2020 but reclaimed it in 2024, _by moving even further to the right_. Now, things that would have been scandals _even within the GOP_ a decade ago are normal and commonplace. There are anonymous neo-Nazis running the government’s social media and trolling the country with groyper memes. Congressional staffers have swastikas hanging up in their offices. The GOP wants you to believe this is an "optical illusion." What the media isn't mentioning (understandably, due to the swastika distraction) are the "Ohio" memes also prominently displayed behind this guy, providing clues about how internet baked this shithead is. But we'll get to that soon. In 2015, Hillary Clinton made a massive, campaign-wounding faux pas when she commented that some of Donald Trump’s followers were a “basket of deplorables.” In 2025, the White House spokesperson matter-of-factly declares that all Democrats are criminals and terrorists. There is no media firestorm. Not a brush fire, not even a spark. > ‘Hamas Terrorists, Illegal Aliens, and Violent Criminals’: Trump Spox Karoline Leavitt Describes Democrats’ Base > > — #TuckFrump (@realtuckfrumper.bsky.social) 2025-10-16T18:53:07.000Z Something has happened to a zeitgeist-altering number of people from the generation after mine and even the youngest of my own generation. People who are beginning to vote and beginning to enter government and lead companies. Just the other day, the group chats for a number of Young Republican groups was leaked to the media. Falsely labeled by the Vice President as “young kids,” like they’re high schoolers, these are in fact mid-20s to even early-30s men, who are leading the Republican membership drive among youth. They are tomorrow’s politicians, and some are already senators. In private they make Holocaust jokes and refer to black people as “watermelon people.” Referring to black football players, one remarked “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Those of you who read to the bottom of my articles know that I’m writing a book about this, and you can read excerpts of the draft here if you upgrade to a paid subscription, but here’s a taste of my Theory of Everything: The right-libertarian capture of the internet, the notion of it as a place where we can do or say literally anything that we feel like in anonymity, has turned it into a psychological torture chamber. Social media is making us less empathetic. It’s eating our humanity. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 24-October ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Of all the slogans that were thrown about during the 2024 US election I think the one that frightened the Republicans the most was Kamala Harris’ threat that “we’re not going back.” What the right wants _more than anything_ is to go back. That’s what it is, at heart, to be right-wing. A fanatic, desperate, nostalgia. “This is what they took from you,” is the rallying cry, captioning a beach or a cheerleader or a Borders. For all their braying about facts and logic, they are hopelessly captured by the tyranny of their feelings. A feeling of perpetual loss driving everything they think and believe, chasing a past glory that, in many cases, they never personally experienced. Their slogans are never about improvement or development or progress, always about “going back.” Make America Great Again. Put things back the way they used to be, and keep them that way. The US Department of Homeland Security, on Twitter, shared a vision of what America will look like once all the immigrants are gone, Hilariously, it has been taken down due to a copyright strike, but here are some frames from it. It's a series of old media clips with the text across the middle reading "life after all the criminal aliens are deported." In short, it’s going to be the 1970s. Specifically, it’s going to be a mythical version of the 70s that was almost completely white, but for a few black people here and there who were allowed to assimilate. It’s always worth mentioning that the people running these social media accounts are recruited from the groyper movement and are vicious, sincere white supremacists. One of the snippets of multimedia they cut into their slideshow was a very obscure short-lived McDonald’s mascot who is much better known as Moon Man after he was co-opted by online neo-Nazis. They are explicitly aware of this. Modern technology has so greatly enabled the manufacture, distribution, and weaponization of nostalgia that it has enabled this feeling of loss to reach a critical mass. In the past it was television ads that sought to remind voters of the “good old days.” Now we can generate the 80s with AI and have fictional characters from the past literally tell you this is what we lost, and what we can have again: There’s no logic whatsoever to this grief and desperation that we can wind time back entire generations. How would that even work? Would we bring back Blockbuster and have it somehow coexist in the same time and space as Netflix? There’s no talk of a Butlerian Jihad here, nobody is saying we’ll get rid of technologies that already exist, just that we’re going to keep all that stuff but also, somehow, bring back an _aesthetic_. ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Despite the absurdity of that idea on its very face, the right have now determined to accomplish it through violence and a radical demolition of society. There are a lot of things that distinguish this American presidency from all the ones that came before (including Trump’s first term), but I think the clearest distinguishing feature is that many on the right feel like they have _won_ this time, and won _permanently_. I know that’s not an original observation, but I don’t think it’s really hit home for most people the extent to which many (most? Has anyone done a poll?) Republicans truly believe this was the final election. I think that they’d like to keep the norms of a democracy, in the sense that there will “be elections,” but the feeling is that they will just be the Republican primaries. Twitter is packed with wishlists about which members of Trump’s family and cabinet should be president for the next hundred years, and in what order. Ugh, Rubio? It should be very obvious from just a fundamental understanding of how reality works that this is impossible. Dynastic despotisms with sham elections exist, but Trump would have to get from here to there in just over three years—halve that if the Democratic party don’t fumble the ball at the midterms. (I give it about, fifty-fifty.) In a way, the speed and desperation with which they’re trying to achieve the impossible, their very own Thousand Year Reich, makes me more optimistic. The frogs notice that the pot is boiling. A slower and more calculated plan might have more success. One that isn’t driven by impatient, stupid people. I really feel that America is a type of country that’s really difficult to convert into an autocracy. That is my _feeling_ , mind you, as I’m not a political scholar, but we _are_ talking a lot about feelings today, and I have a high regard for liberal democracy as a robust institution. Fukuyama picked it as his end of history for a reason. Suddenly the music gets more intense and History’s life bar starts filling back up When you think about other sort of similar political arrangements that have slid into autocracy, there’s usually the weight of a broader context to consider. Russia was the world hub of the communist dictatorship experiment for most of the 20th Century—they tried to liberalize under Yeltsin, but then he passed the presidential torch to Putin, who just sort of… decided to keep it. Just a total Isildur move after cutting the Ring from Sauron’s finger. (Gorbachev doesn’t really deserve to be Sauron in this analogy though). I suppose you can think of Iran as a democracy that suddenly oopsed itself into dictatorship, but then that required a full-scale revolution made possible with no small amount of meddling from… the United States. Point is, with a solid just-over 200 years without a single presidential candidate contesting their loss at the ballot box (unless you count the notably non-bloodbath of Bush/Gore), right up until Trump’s tantrum at the Capitol you have an extremely solid basis for democracy and the rule of law that the Trump administration can’t make a highly successful effort to wreck, and certainly not overturn. But they will break as much as they possibly can, and as quickly as they can. As I’ve said before, this is a tantrum reaction—another emotional response. They think that they can break it enough, or in such a way, that they can keep some kind of very specific era of Americana alive forever. And somehow, despite the ostensible goal of reducing the size of government, they believe that the government _will be able to micromanage the minutiae of the entire national culture, forever_. Like when Trump intervened to stop Cracker Barrel changing its logo. Very serious time for this restaurant nobody visits, which very likely attempted to rebrand avoid going out of business, and will now go out of business. MAGA! Even RFK Jr’s idiotic pressure campaign to compel fast food restaurants to use beef tallow in their fries has no basis in “health,” but for a return to how fast food apparently used to taste. Nice food you got there. Pretty fast, I see. Would be a real shame if it turned out it... causes autism. They’ll want the government to do that for everything, now. Or establish some kind of cultural police, I guess, to keep anything from ever changing. I dunno, it sounds exhausting, futile, and pointless, to me. How anybody can see this as anything but a movement of emotional dysfunction is beyond me. You ask people what the root of their misery is and they’ll tell you it’s some nonsense like seeing black people on TV. This, of course, runs downstream from powerful and influential figures like Elon Musk who take advantage of these bad feelings you’re having about life not quite feeling as good as it used to, or as good as you’re _told_ it used to be, and telling you _who specifically_ is to blame for this. And it’s always the blacks, the Mexicans, the gays, the transgender people. Perhaps it’s a failure of the education system to teach about the realities of the bygone eras that the right wants to resurrect. Do you really want to go back to the housing market crash? You want to go back to the Bush era? To the Vietnam era, to rationing? To the century of endless wars, but at least Cracker Barrel had an actual barrel on the logo and McDonald’s still sold beef tallow fries? The Democratic party will be back in power. The Republicans can’t prevent the inexorable march of time. They might, however, regret some of the stuff they just broke. Hey by the way I’m writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era got entwined with this anti-wokeness crusade and wound up accelerating the Western world toward Trumpism, shattering the precarious right/left truce and deciding to burn it all down instead. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here: 🔒 Lawrence Krauss’ Race Science ProblemSo I’m going to talk about this book again. I wasn’t going to, because my whole thing was that I could review it accurately without ever reading it. But more has come to light since it was actually released, and that is that somebody did read it. Namely,Plato Was a DickS Peter Davis

So I’m going to talk about this book again. I wasn’t going to, because my whole thing was that I could review it accurately without ever reading it. But more has come to light since it was actually released, and that is that somebody _did_ read it. Namely, a popular YouTuber who has been posting video essays for a decade under the mononym “Shaun.” His video about _The War on Science_ is just over four hours long if you have that kind of time, and yes it did reaffirm most of my suspicions about it, but also, right toward the end, in the last half hour, Shaun discovers something that just hadn’t occurred to me at the time: In order to sell his soul out to the “anti-woke” science community, Lawrence Krauss has had to get into bed with some serious fucking ghouls. I’m talking, of course, about the skull-measurers. Pictured: modern groundbreaking science So I got a copy of the damn book. I make money from this newsletter so I can legally deduct it from my tax as research material. But this was a mistake already—I got scammed on this. The book I bought is _missing around a full third_ of the chapters that appear in the book that Shaun reviewed. _I have never seen this kind of bullshit before_. I had to re-check that I actually purchased the official book from the official Amazon page. I got the Kindle version, which I rarely do because I hate ebooks, but I don’t need this garbage taking up physical space in my house. Is that a thing, with ebooks? That sometimes you get a heavily redacted version of the paper edition? Has this ever happened to anyone? So yeah, see Shaun’s video if you want the long review—I am unable to review it myself because I don’t have the whole fucking book I paid for. I’ll mention at this point that Lawrence Krauss used to be an idol of mine back when I used to buy _New Scientist_ magazine every week and he would often appear as a columnist. Then he was credibly accused of a _lot_ of sexual misconduct and suddenly became this huge antifeminist, “anti-woke” guy, completely by coincidence, fighting against the supposed leftist takeover of science. Here’s the thing: When you try to pivot to the right on _science_ , _as a scientist_ , you run into some problems—namely that the science _agrees_ with the left on most of the topics that have been decided, for some reason, to be “political.” Sorry, the Covid vaccine pissed us off so we decided germ theory is political and now we have to put an ex-junkie nepobaby attention addict spineless compulsive liar former lawyer with no scientific training, knowledge, or basic understanding in charge of all medical science. I don’t mean there aren’t any right-wing scientists who are experts and correct in their field. Obviously you can be a field-leading expert on Planck’s quantum radiation law while also hating immigrants or whatever. It’s only within specific areas of sociopolitical overlap where right-wing scientists have to decide whether they’re going to side with the _science_ or dismiss it as conspiracy and align instead with a fringe that better describes what they prefer to be true about the world. Whenever you encounter “anti-woke” science, it inevitably falls into one or more of these four categories: - Rejection of climate science; - Rejection of vaccine science or germ theory in its entirety; - Rejection of gender theory; - Or, perhaps most insidious and also our topic today: **Pseudoscientific race bullshit**. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 17-October ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

As the Trump administration continues its full and unapologetic assault on the First Amendment the usual suspects are forced to admit through gritted teeth that maybe Trump and his people aren’t the free speech absolutists they pinky-promised that they were. This has triggered so many Substack essays as the centrist types who form the backbone of the site try to parse this out, and their fans scramble to them for guidance. Though it’s not exactly a reactionary shithole like Rumble, the Substack ecosystem finds itself filling some of that niche as its reputation grows like moss on the pillar of its performatively apolitical founders. Look around at its best performing talent and you can easily come to the conclusion that it’s something of a country club for cancelled writers; a cozy mix of “heterodox” thinkers, “dark web” intellectuals, and sex pests. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of good folks too, but they don’t tend to be strongly associated with the brand. They've got award-winning star of Native American literature Sherman Alexie! Don't look him up! Don't look him up!! Unsurprisingly, the typical framing of these essays is something like “the left went too far” and even though Trump is now acting like Pinochet, what choice did he really have? His actions are the inevitable rubber-band snapback from the dreaded “cancel culture” that heterodox thinkers and sex pests somehow endured for a harrowing five or six years during Obama. Bill Cosby, caught in the purgatory of whether he molested too many people, or too few, to become a Substack influencer. Now, to be clear, I don’t really support “cancel culture,” as much as people assume I must, as a bog-standard, non-“heterodox” progressive. But then, I’m not convinced that “cancel culture” is an actual thing so much as it is a series of individual events connected only thematically by the existence of social media giving lots of people faster access to news. Some things that come under the wide umbrella of “cancel culture” are just basic online harassment, while others are pretty understandable widespread denunciation of something legitimately shitty. In 2021, sci-fi author and video essayist Lindsay Ellis got dogpiled and “cancelled” on Twitter for an offhand remark about the Disney film _Raya and the Last Dragon_ feeling like a ripoff of the anime _Avatar: The Last Airbender_. I’m not so deep into anime that I understand even a fraction of what that was about, but I get the strong impression that the harassment Ellis endured was profoundly stupid and unfair and carried powerful _Gamergate_ undertones. So does it really make sense that we put this in the same category of events as when Louis C.K. was exposed for serially whipping out his dick and masturbating in front of unwitting female hotel room guests? Nevertheless, a lot of folks figure that what the Republicans are doing to America is all, if not justified, then _explainable_. If those women had just waited patiently for Louis to get his rocks off without making a fuss then we wouldn’t have the president putting late night hosts on terror watch lists for making fun of his hair. ## Noah Smith This is not Nate Silver, this is somebody else As recently as February the only thing I knew about Noah Smith is that his favorite word starts with an R, and he uses it like he breathes. This isn’t for lack of a vocabulary, but a performative thing, a virtue signal that people do to reassure that they’re not, like, woke or whatever. Noah first jumped at the opportunity to point the finger at Bluesky for all of this, with his piece “The Bluesky-ization of the American Left.” He is, of course, one of many writers of his type (Jesse Singal, Matt Yglesias, to name a couple) who _attempted_ to colonize Bluesky with “heterodox” views but couldn’t entrench themselves and now spend their time ranting about how Bluesky is simultaneously irrelevant and inconsequential but also it’s destroying America somehow. He liked this bit so much he quoted himself Noah’s thesis seems to be that cancellation and social ostracism is the… _purpose?_ of progressivism. That is, unlike centrists and liberals, and presumably conservatives, who enjoy robust debate, progressives just want to yell at people and get them fired and make them feel bad, and now since they’ve left Twitter and don’t have any liberals to cancel, they’re just sort of milling around in an ant spiral on Bluesky cancelling _each other_ until the platform blinks out from heat death. ## Sign up for Plato Was a Dick The S Peter Davis newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Noah’s relationship with “cancel culture” is a common one among these kinds of liberal or centrist _Atlantic_ contributor types who gained a foothold in media from being the Main Character on Twitter a few times: They need to keep denouncing it as a horrible and traumatic episode in western politics, while also downplaying it and reaffirming how easily it was defeated, while _also_ avoiding the topic of how tremendously they benefited from it. This piece is written as a postmortem of cancel culture as this pathetic dead thing that Bluesky is hanging onto white-knuckled in the hope that this is a phase and they can go back to getting racists fired instead of the more virtuous method of individually debating them all out of their hateful views. Through the course of describing how very ineffectual and pointless it was, he also manages to compare cancel culture variously to the French Terror, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Second Intifada. I could joke, but this is the literal header image he used. He posits that progressives became “addicted” to cancellation because it was _super effective_ , but he tries to have this cake and eat it by gloating about the fact that most of the people who were “cancelled” are now rich and famous because of it, most notably Bari Weiss. So… it wasn’t _actually_ effective, now was it, Noah? It was _never_ effective. This five or six year dictatorship of progressivism in what has otherwise been a fairly right-leaning culture never really existed, did it? Bari Weiss is an odd character to make the centerpiece of this argument to begin with—she _knew_ the star-making potential of being cancelled, which is why she tried so hard to get cancelled! And when it didn’t really happen, she just kind of pretended it did! It's likely that Noah Smith already had this piece in the pipeline before the Charlie Kirk shooting because it doesn’t mention any of that and is more of a companion piece to Nate Silver, with whom he shares more than his initials, and who I’ll get to next, don’t worry. Later Noah posted Without free speech, America is nothing, in which he rails against the Trump administration’s hypocrisy in using government pressure to censor private speech, something they all sharply condemned as recently as a few months ago. He attacks Trump for about a hundred words before he gets to the real culprits in this situation: Progressives and cancel culture. He even drops the “debanking” hysteria pushed by Marc Andreessen. His sources are (1) himself and (2) the fucking Heritage Foundation. > Why were the MAGA folks talking so passionately about freedom of speech? Because for years, conservatives felt as if that freedom was under attack by the progressive movement, and later by the Biden administration. > Since the mid-2010s, progressives on social media had tried to ruin the reputation and careers of people who said things they considered racist, transphobic, or otherwise problematic. Social media platforms were successfully pressured to “deplatform” various figures on the right, including Donald Trump himself after the January 6th attacks. Some rightists were even cut off from bank accounts and other essential services. So yeah, it was the poison of those deep Obama years what done it. After decades of Reaganism culminating in eight glorious years where you weren’t allowed to say the word “French,” the left finally did a little bit of pushback and the right got spooked! And you shouldn’t’ve done that, progressives! Now you’ve made them mad. You’ve made them _mean_ mad. I mean let’s face it, American (and, more broadly and maybe filtered down, Western) politics has leaned right forever and the spooky Obama years, which were evidently _traumatizing_ for the center and the right, were a blip. After the Red Scare and Reagan the Democrats only succeeded temporarily by moving to the right with Clinton’s Third Way. Obama was an experiment in liberalism that ended catastrophically. It’s likely that this right-wing grievance narrative does approach a _literal_ description of what’s going on, but rather than point out how super babyish it is for Republicans to reflect on this decade of mild pushback as though it was their own 40 years in the Wilderness, Noah kind of sides with them in a strange olive branch sentiment like every character in _The Matrix_ who tried to make a deal with the machines. Or, if you like, the sleazy guy from _Die Hard_ , who is actually much closer to who I picture when I imagine Noah Smith. “Donald— __bubby__ —I’m your white knight.” ## Nate Silver You're not going to believe me but I swear this is a separate guy. This is a whole different person. Don't you dare look up Ezra Klein, by the way, you'll just get more confused. The _other_ N.S. enjoys the fame of making _Time Magazine_ ’s 100 most influential people in the entire world list by correctly predicting an astonishing 49 out of 50 states’ electoral results in the 2008 federal election (he fucked up Indiana). The fact that his defining achievement remains nearly 20 years in the past is something I will let speak quietly in the corner by itself because I don’t really want to attack Nate on this point. I’ve never done anything that would make a _Time Magazine_ list. I did once throw a dart that embedded in the back of another dart but I don’t think everyone believes me and I don’t really blame them. Silver has _really_ had it in for Bluesky for a while, because he was really big on Twitter and got to be the main character a bunch of times but then Elon happened and all the progressives left and now it’s just a bunch of bots programmed to repeat the 14 words and this is Bluesky’s fault. Nate wrote a whole thing about a word he coined— _Blueskyism_ —which, much like “woke,” is a word the meaning of which he says is obvious and then fails to really be able to define at all. It seems, though, that it’s basically “dogpiling.” He does say that it predates the existence of Bluesky but estimates it was invented somewhere around 2019-2020. _Okay, champ_. Nate might be interested in the book I’m writing that details how it actually came about a tiny little bit earlier than that. Now, to be fair, he does specify that he’s talking about _progressive_ dogpiling, which is its own unique thing, apparently, even though every other characteristic he ascribes to it can every bit as easily describe, you know, _Gamergate_. ETHICS IN GAMING JOURNALISM Anyway, Nate has also weighed in on recent significant events in _holy fuck_ land. He correctly identifies that the Republicans were doing a cancel-cultury type of thing after 9/11 when you weren’t allowed to say the wrong thing about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but then he goes right back to talking about how crazy leftist cancel culture was back in 2020. But then he does something very strange: While taking care to dismiss allegations that Trump is authoritarian, he suggests that the right are basically just using the tools _that the left forged_ , and it’s the left’s fault for forging them in the first place. > Progressive cancel culture vultures. What did y’all think cancellation meant? Did you not realize the very tools and techniques you championed could be turned against you? Do you even have the object permanence of a goldfish? > Some years ago on Twitter, I questioned the tactics of progressive groups that were encouraging an advertiser boycott of Tucker Carlson’s show. I don’t care for Carlson at all. Still, it seemed likely to me that these strategies would eventually be turned against the left, as they had been in the past, while also discouraging corporations from placing ads against politically adjacent content of any kind, producing an equilibrium where there was less money flowing into the already-difficult economics of political news and commentary. > Boy, that did not go over well on Twitter. So this is the point in the essay when I’m trying and failing to come up with a less annoying phrase than “I told you so”. This is bizarre in at least a couple of ways. First of all, what exactly did the left invent in 2020 that enabled the right to do cancellations today that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do? They didn’t pass new laws, or amend the constitution. Trump doesn’t obey laws anyway, and the court says he doesn’t have to. Does Nate think that they’re consulting historical precedent? They just _do_ things. But more baffling, this is the same essay in which he starts out detailing how _the right started it_. It’s literally titled “The political mood feels like 9/11 again.” I’ll venture that’s _not even when_ they started it. Ever heard of McCarthy? Understandable oversight if you’re picturing this To the extent that leftist cancel culture was a thing, isn’t it just a case of the left temporarily picking up the tools that the right has used forever and were inevitably going to go right back to using _the very second_ they reclaimed the power to do so? That’s not entirely coherent but it’s more coherent than whatever Silver is trying to argue here. I will note that the complaints of both of the N.S.s seem to focus strangely around progressives being unfairly critical of Ezra Klein, who I’ve somehow avoided knowing almost anything about, despite the fact that, to hear how these guys fawn over him, he’s probably going to be the next Democratic president. You know, when the next presidential election is allowed to happen, in 2060. (Sorry Nate! Catastrophizing, I know—it was a joke.) ## Matt Taibbi Aaargh, no! No! Am I really doing this? Okay, look, I _thought_ I had a more robust piece without going here, but then Yglesias and Singal didn’t weigh in _at all_ and I can’t end this without a third act. So here we go: What does Matt Taibbi, free speech hypocrite, make of all this? Taibbi has a complicated thing going on with the Jimmy Kimmel situation because he likes Trump, agrees with him about the media, and wants all these shows to go away anyway. As time goes on, I begin to realize that his reputation as the big “free speech guy” is mostly just kind of a misreading of his anti-vaccine activism. In reality he’s spent a lot of time trying to shut down research into subjects he doesn’t like, and thinks SLAPP-suits (frivolous lawsuits that are unwinnable but designed to bankrupt or intimidate the target into silence via the cost and stress of the lawsuit itself) are a legitimate tactic to use against media outlets. Being a victim of “cancel culture” himself, (and yes, I am saying _victim_ , because I do think it was unfair—whether Matt likes it or not, and he probably _hates_ it, which is good, I am putting him in the Lindsay Ellis bucket here) and, as is common, being extremely rich and famous either in spite or because of it, Taibbi has a _massive_ hate on for the mainstream media. By mainstream I mean any media other than Substack newsletters, most of which he probably also hates. Still, he _has to_ dislike the speech crackdowns that accompanied Kirk’s assassination. From the claims by the administration talking heads he’s long defended that “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment, to the government attempting, and to a limited extent, succeeding to “jawbone” individual people off the air, all of this is exactly what he raged against in his most famous project that didn’t reference any kind of squid. So, how did he play this? Well, first of all he posted and reposted a bunch of _Twitter Files_ stuff about Twitter’s actions to moderate Charlie Kirk, which conclude mercifully with the determination that, although we can’t say the administrators of pre-2022 Twitter are _directly_ responsible for Kirk’s death, “the episodes do play a part in the overall story.” (?????) Uhhhh does... anyone know Jack Dorsey's whereabouts on that day? Then, an extremely brief “Note on Jimmy Kimmel,” who was suspended by Disney/ABC after an explicit threat by FCC chair Brendan Carr that directly violated the First Amendment. Taibbi’s note was mostly descriptive, taking Carr’s side due to his own blistering hatred of Kimmel, and lamenting that it’s simply _bad optics_ to violate 1A so flagrantly. Then, a couple of days later, an apoplectic short article about how Jimmy Kimmel fucking sucks, and the disappearance of his show would be no loss because of how much he fucking sucks, mentioning how Kimmel is pro-vaccine. Here he also supports Giraldo Rivera’s assertion that the First Amendment doesn’t cover hate speech (putting aside how wacky that is coming from Taibbi, it’s worth mentioning that nothing Kimmel said even remotely approaches hate speech). A younger and even less threatening Tom Hanks, if that's possible. Then, after he cooled down, a much more level-headed piece about how this isn’t good after all, but framed in a way that makes it obvious Matt is trying to avoid the Trump cancellation crosshairs, delicately portraying himself as a helpful advisor. He jokingly titled it “The Ultimate Reason Not to Censor,” and said reason is not because censorship is _bad_ , (all of your enemies indeed fucking suck, Mr. President, sir, and you are always correct, Mr. President, sir) but because censorship robs Taibbi of the satisfaction of the natural self-destruction of _all_ liberal media—the whole thing, all of it, which will occur within the next six months. And then, finally, a piece about how there’s really no free speech violations occurring under Trump that even approach the dystopia of the Obama and Biden years in which all of Matt’s anti-vax friends were silenced about Ivermectin. When I was a little kid I remember, in either kindergarten or very early primary school, being read a book about Five Chinese Brothers who each had a superpower. One of them could swallow the entire ocean, but only temporarily. In the story, he performs this task so that a fisherman can catch fish more easily, but the fisherman is a dumb asshole so he stays out in the seabed so long that the Chinese brother is forced to release the ocean and kill him. This book is probably cancelled now due to racism and woke, but I bring it up in the case of Matt Taibbi as I wonder how long it’s possible for a man of ostensible talent to carry such an unfathomable amount of water for a dumb asshole. Hey by the way I’m writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era got entwined with this anti-wokeness crusade and wound up accelerating the Western world toward Trumpism, shattering the precarious right/left truce and deciding to burn it all down instead. The working title is _How Geeks Ate the World_ and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:

Of all the slogans that were thrown about during the 2024 US election I think the one that frightened the Republicans the most was Kamala Harris’ threat that “we’re not going back.” What the right wants _more than anything_ is to go back. That’s what it is, at heart, to be right-wing. A fanatic, desperate, nostalgia. “This is what they took from you,” is the rallying cry, captioning a beach or a cheerleader or a Borders. For all their braying about facts and logic, they are hopelessly captured by the tyranny of their feelings. A feeling of perpetual loss driving everything they think and believe, chasing a past glory that, in many cases, they never personally experienced. Their slogans are never about improvement or development or progress, always about “going back.” Make America Great Again. Put things back the way they used to be, and keep them that way. According to the US Department of Homeland Security, via Twitter, this is what America is going to look like when all the foreigners are gone: > The future is bright. pic.twitter.com/fUS9Jvfl8G > > — Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 2, 2025 In short, it’s going to be the 1970s. Specifically, it’s going to be a mythical version of the 70s that was almost completely white, but for a few black people here and there who were allowed to assimilate. It’s always worth mentioning that the people running these social media accounts are recruited from the groyper movement and are vicious, sincere white supremacists. One of the snippets of multimedia they cut into their slideshow was a very obscure short-lived McDonald’s mascot who is much better known as Moon Man after he was co-opted by online neo-Nazis. They are explicitly aware of this. Modern technology has so greatly enabled the manufacture, distribution, and weaponization of nostalgia that it has enabled this feeling of loss to reach a critical mass. In the past it was television ads that sought to remind voters of the “good old days.” Now we can generate the 80s with AI and have fictional characters from the past literally tell you this is what we lost, and what we can have again: There’s no logic whatsoever to this grief and desperation that we can wind time back entire generations. How would that even work? Would we bring back Blockbuster and have it somehow coexist in the same time and space as Netflix? There’s no talk of a Butlerian Jihad here, nobody is saying we’ll get rid of technologies that already exist, just that we’re going to keep all that stuff but also, somehow, bring back an _aesthetic_. ### Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 10-October ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now