#257. Pristine theatrics

Welcome to the NRP. We are curating the best of those extremely-online extremists known as the "New Right."

🧵Threads of the Week 🧵

> It’s different this time, they’re saying. It won’t be like the Bush years. Trump just does things, and does them well. It’ll be in and out. You have to think beyond the Middle East, 7D chess style. They have information we don’t have. Plus, empire is good now. It always was. But on the other hand…it’s not like Bush declared “Let’s have ourselves a quagmire,“ at the outset of a decades-long conflict that is basically still ongoing, which maybe could’ve been completely avoided if we’d just locked down the country instead of invading/inviting the world. Maybe it’s the Jews, maybe the the world just needed Total Iranian Discombobulation. But these things tend to go sideways, to spiral out of control, and don’t we have bigger problems much closer to home, anyway? Wherever you land, never go Full Libtard.

> Steve Sailer looks at the despised, ubiquitous urban architectural blight known as the five-over-one.

Nobody came up with a picture in his mind’s eye of the 5-Over-1 building and said to himself, “YES, I want to build a building that looks like this!” This was just a cheap way to meet the new 1996 construction code.

> Apparently it wasn’t cable, it was regulation that killed network TV programming for kids. That’s why they stopped making cool cartoons about muscly pirates and started making lame shows about how Reading is FUN-damental.

Children’s cartoons prove that culture is, in large part, downstream from politics. Have you ever wondered where Fox Kids, 4Kids, WBKids, and all the competition in the children’s media market went?

> Why was that McDonalds CEO video so weird? Why are all companies run by people who could give a rat’s ass whether they’re selling hamburgers or life insurance or crude oil? Chivalry Guild explains it’s because we are ruled by gay robots who rise through managerial ranks because they’re good at maneuvering within huge organizations.

Getting out of our civilizational disaster requires us to understand how we got into it in the first place. Though he's not personally impressive, this type of guy claims to have a very important skill: managing colossal organizations. He's good at paperwork, corporate lingo, cya, credentialing, "best practices," focus group morality, and so on. As almost all American institutions got massive, these competencies were in higher demand; so this guy and others like him came to rule American society.

> You’ve seen the viral “Shape Store” clip. Is it a Bacchanalian purgatory early ‘00s hood blacks? Or an infernal post-scarcity hell of swag abundance?

The Shape Store is a Science Fiction displaying Post-Scarcity Negrodom. On surface level, it is Utopian. The Shape Store is plentiful, and they are often quite happily entertained by its pristine theatrics. But look closer at much of what is displayed.

And the 🏆Thread of the Week🏆 award goes to…

> Palmer Luckey lays out a pretty convincing case for defense contractors to be subordinated to elected leaders.

Do you believe in democracy? Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders, or corporate executives? Seemingly innocuous terms from the latter like "You cannot target innocent civilians" are actually moral minefields that lever differences of cultural tradition into massive control.

Who is a civilian and not? What makes them innocent or not? What does it mean for them to be a "target" vs collateral damage? Existing policy and law has very clear answers for these questions, but unelected corporations managing profits and PR will often have a very different answer.

✨Cool project of the Week✨

> Tysenberg is heroically generating AI-narrated audiobooks of the spiciest and least accessible actually-banned books.

There’s tons of books I’d like to read, but frankly, my attention span is too cooked to do so and even if Audible carries what I want, paying $20-$30+ for an audiobook is silly. That’s why I’m using ElevenLabs to build a library of AI-narrated RW audiobooks for under $5 a pop.

> The Freesaw made a big database of right-wing artists.

> Top Shelf Theology sent in his Yarvin-flavored grill-pilled bumper sticker.

🎥A/V of the Week🎥

> Catch NRP Editor Dudley Newright on Isaac Simpson’s Carousel podcast, using The Iran Situation as a springboard to ask, “What are we (the New Right) doing here?”

> Frasier Payne has been producing Chud-themed shorts at a frenetic pace since his Super Bowl snub. His latest may be his best ever.

> Ashley Frawley joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss the former’s piece on Epstein’s necrophiliac urge to apply weird science to the human, turning him into some lifeless mechanistic thing, so he can better have his way with it.

> These AI movie trailers are usually cringe slop but sometimes they win you over and you have to admit they are visually arresting, hilarious slop.

> Emily K. Sipiora and the gang talk with Alaric The Barbarian about his book and recent posting.

> Rebecca Hargraves and Devon Stack have started a new podcast about vigilante justice: Outlaws.

> Is Shia one of us, for real?

> In January, Glenn Beck sat down with an AI version of George Washington to get his advice on foreign entanglements. You won’t believe what happened next.

📰Reads of the Week 📰

> Sectionalism introduces a rogue’s gallery of Hitlerite archetypes haunting the edges of the e-right (and left), some of which even we had never even heard of.

Hitler is considered as something of a possessed man. He has completely replaced his ego with the collective unconscious of the German Volk, if not the Aryan race writ large. He has mantled the essence of the ancient Germanic god Wotan. In some ways, he had achieved the ideal state of Karma Yoga that is taught to Arjuna by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. The Hitlerian puts aside his passions and feelings entirely, simply doing his duty and following the ideal. They might even think that Hitler was an actual incarnation of Vishnu, who sacrificed himself to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga.

> Scott Greer rebukes regime critics who go so far as to encourage their friends to vote Dem or even wave an Iranian flag.

The best way to oppose foreign intervention is to present it in terms of American patriotism. You convince Americans to oppose these actions by telling them how it undermines the national interest, imposes negative costs on our citizens, and damages our national security. You don’t persuade them through declaring “Death to America” and crying over the ayatollah. Never cede American patriotism to your enemy. Liberals did that and now pay the price of the public viewing flag-waving as right-coded.

> Outgoing Misanthrope revisits ‘Nam, in particular the Tet Offensive, and finds that it wasn’t the defeat They wanted you to think it was. The war may have been a failure, but not a military one.

The Great Lie that is the popular perception of the Tet Offensive required a few key elements: a US military leadership unable or unwilling to see the battlefield through the eyes of their adversary; a well-connected, well functioning global network of communist propaganda and espionage; and an intelligence community compromised politically and distracted strategically. With these elements in place, the circumstances were set for journalists, editors, and pundits to create a narrative of defeat and run with it.

> Philip Reichert hails “dumb jock” Pete Hegseth’s transformation from Fox News firebrand to mastermind of daring raids and drastic trimming of the Pentagon’s bureaucratic bloat, proving credentialed snobs wrong. If you’re looking for persuasive plan-trusting, Junto’s got you covered.

On January 24, 2025, Mitch McConnell said the desire to be a change agent was not enough. Thirteen months later, the guy he refused to endorse has a record more impressive than nearly any Secretary of Defense in recent memory by the only metric that should matter—performance. The questions to ask are all simple: did the operations succeed, is his agenda substantive, and is the department more capable than when he arrived? The establishment has refused to ask these questions. It focuses on credentials and has substituted cultural objections for analytical ones when the credentialing argument proved insufficient.

> Imperial Twilight examines goth girl aesthetics, the final fortress of femininity. Dark lace and sharp eyeliner transforms the male gaze into reverence amid a culture that scorns any woman’s attempt to "be picked.”

Modern discourse is saturated with anxieties about and criticism of the “pick me”, who are women perceived as performing femininity in ways that seek male approval at the expense of other women. In plain English, it is being friendly and femme. We live in a society where women consistently say bikinis are not sexual, and that women are just wearing them for themselves. These gothic women seek to play to the dreaded male gaze. The “pick me” accusation is leveled at those who emphasize sweetness, submissiveness, or conventional attractiveness in ways read as ingratiating. It is practically a crime in 2020s America. The goth aesthetic disarms this accusation.

> Missed this one, but thanks to ringleader, who featured the author Winds Of Fate on his podcast this week, you get to experience a stunning work of schizoid Epstein personality analysis.

The people most capable of maintaining power rule. Their collusion and conspiracy is class solidarity. They posses in droves the ability to coerce others into doing roughly their wishes, so what they value are competent vassals. Operators. Those who have dealt with and integrated the vast majority of their inner turmoil, and ubiquitously pursue personal excellence. Those able to Achieve Objectives.

> Theophilus Chilton thinks we should simply let Trump cook.

The stock view of the Constitution is that it “was created to prevent anyone from getting too much power!” The actuality is that the Constitution was crafted, in part, to expand presidential power and create what was viewed at the time as a literally monarchical chief executive. Opponents of this described the proposed executive as “the foetus of monarchy.” Supporters often defended it on the basis that parliaments and congresses, if left unchecked by a strong executive whose interest was drawn from the body of the whole people, would themselves become the greatest threats to the liberties of the people.

And the 🏆Read of the Week🏆 award goes to…

> For the Old Glory Club, Memphissippi pens an essential defense of a cautious pessimism that’s honest about the circumstances we face without veering into blackpilling. A refreshing reflection in a time of clout-chasing and cynical spin.

What this current divide is primarily driven by is how much you complain about the Trump administration and to a lesser extent the Republican Party at large. At a fundamental level, I am not against Trump for ideological or personal reasons; I was supportive in the past and could be supportive again. I had a change of heart due to specific actions and policies. Others, however, have been hostile toward the administration since the campaign, and in their specific cases it has created a perverse incentive to take glee in the administration’s failures because of the personal clout and vindication they receive for their correct predictions.

> Dean W. Ball critiques the Trump admin’s hamfisted clash with Anthropic over AI redlines. DoW threatened to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” (a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries), a move the author criticizes as counterproductive, and an ominous signal of terminal decline.

I am not saying this incident “caused” any sort of republican death, nor am I saying it “ushered in a new era.” If this event contributed anything, it simply made the ongoing death more obvious and less deniable for me personally. I consider the events of the last week a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.

> Bennett's Phylactery is wondering why it is that tech billionaires and the conservative donor class alike seem allergic to power, giving free reign to Leftists who have no problem picking up their swords.

You will not be able to say, in the Judgment, “I was so afraid of doing my job wrong that I decided not to do it at all”. If we are called to protect our loved ones, then we are called to subdue their enemies (again, that’s what “protecting” means, if it means anything — “leave me alone” is a command).

📚Lit of the Week📚

> Michael Anton savages the latest book-length New Right explainer, wherein some dizzy broad goes to a bunch of conferences and dismisses the motivations of Trump supporters because they give her the ick.

> Read “Gamer,” a graphic novella from Frank Edward.

🐦Tweets of the Week🐦

All tweets can be found here.

And the 🏆Tweet of the Week🏆 awards go to…

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