#266. Lapsed stoic

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

Welcome to the NRP. We are curating the “New Right” discourse. It’s like a magazine with the best right-wing commentary from around the web: The most interesting threads and essays, spiciest podcast episodes, hilarious tweets, memes and more, thoughtfully curated and delivered to your inbox every week.

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🧵Threads of the Week 🧵

> Here’s the most concise walkthrough of the ‘creedal nation’ meme you’ll see.

"America is a creedal nation!"

"Okay, can we test people to see if they believe in the creed before letting them in?"

"No, that's racist."

"Then can we kick them out if they don't believe in the creed?"

"No, that's denying them due process and their constitutional rights."

"Can I see a copy of this creed?"

"Nope, no one can agree on exactly what it is. We think it has something to do with the declaration of independence, though."

> You gotta hold libtards’ hands when explaining anything to them.

I have found that you can really get away with quite a lot just by adopting a particular affect when talking to liberals about controversial topics. The most important thing, the thing everything hinges on, is that they have to be convinced that you’re basically just like them, a good person just like them, not somebody on the other side. You have to hedge a lot, sprinkle your language full of, “to be sure” and other qualifiers. You don’t want to be too direct. If something is too controversial, then you want to signal convincingly that it brings you no pleasure to report it, that you’re not saying you like it.

> Is “crops will rot in the fields” just a convenient excuse to import more cheap labor?

There are crops, such as these California strawberries, for which the dominant cost is labor-intensive harvesting, vs the planting and growing which is mechanized. Over-planting, then, gives growers a kind of option on future labor costs. When the harvest time market reaches equilibrium and the marginal picking crew is too expensive, operators point to the uneconomical remainder of the speculative investment as an unforeseen moral tragedy of an acute labor shortage causing a waste of precious food that was so near to the finish line.

> Marcus Pittman analyzes the Daily Wire layoffs.

Bentkey went straight to the parent and forgot the kid entirely. The gap between what they sold, what kids wanted, and what they actually delivered is genuinely embarrassing when you put it side by side. They became the Netflix at Home Meme.

> They’re telling high schoolers that people died because Reagan ignored AIDS, but it didn’t actually be like that.

The opposite is true; AIDS became the most researched disease in human history within a few years, and gay orgs strenuously fought measures that might have stopped it…

Gays were eventually bailed out of the consequences of their own behavior by extraordinary amounts of public research (mostly conducted and paid for by non-gays) plus expensive and continuing public funding of medicine for them (PrEP).

> You can’t parody Alex Jones.

Alex is a force of nature, a guy so uniquely in touch with experiencing everything he encounters but fallible, as all humans are, at putting it together. His relentless search for meaning is not different from the lifestyles that many of us information-obsessive posters and chatters live — but he’s clearly a once in a generation talent at generating word streams that convey passion, if not coherence.

> Meet the rich (but not too rich) podcaster who wants to…eat the rich (not him).

So bung us a tenner, or a grand, or whatever you can spare. Go on, means-test yourself, pay your bit. It’s for the greater good, innit. I’m tellin’ ya, if we don’t tax the rich proper – an’ by rich I mean anyone who’s got more than me right now – then you lot are proper screwed.

No hope, no future, just more Deliveroo gigs an’ Netflix on the electric that’s about to get cut off. But me? I’m the voice of the voiceless. I’m the one who escaped the matrix an’ came back to tell ya the door’s locked now...

> Sensitive young man has a library encounter.

Awful librarian bitch at the local bookstore (perfect double D bust) was apoplectic and had a complete meltdown when I asked her if their banned books section included Camp of the Saints. “No… we don’t carry that. Isn’t that the racist Nazi book?” Her scowl reveals her septum piercing. My hand briefly hovers over my concealed carry Ruger .357 before I snap out of my gamer rage.

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

> The big discourse item this week was the Ryan Holiday crashout. Mr. Stoicism flipped out on Ivanka Trump (hmm yes very stoic) for not disavowing her father, and a clip of Ryan interviewing some totebag woman surfaced, wherein they discuss how to inculcate morality in children in the absence of ancient, transcendent truths: Socratic analysis of the Four Gospels of Ted Lasso. Also here is a pretty funny retelling of Ryan’s whole arc.

🎥A/V of the Week🎥

> We don’t post a lot of Twitter space recordings, since there’s always a lot of confusing cross talk, technical difficulties, and had-to-be-there in-jokes that reward live listening. The best of these are unquestionably The Night Owls. Fortunately for us, one half of this duo, Nightmare Vision, is now recording solo podcasts. This episode deals with the history of positive thinking, the uniquely American strain of spirituality influenced by New Age and occult movements, which would inspire powerful capitalists like our current president.

> Scott Greer settles it: Stop trying to make the Right-Left alliance happen. It’s not going to happen.

> Sometimes life gets very real, very fast. Arthur in California’s dad died and he’s processing it as best a sensitive young man can.

📰Reads of the Week 📰

> Katherine Dee proves once again why she’s the only internet culture journo worth reading in this Tablet piece about the realities of online extremism. It’s not the edgelord teenagers joking around on Twitter, it’s the sophisticated and highly networked digital grooming and blackmail rings that represent the real threat.

What bothers me, then and now, is the posture of the researchers and the journalists who study [online extremism]. For over a decade, the online right has been treated as one thing—one very dangerous thing. But it is many things, as diverse as the Amazon rainforest, running from patriotic MAGA moms posting inflammatory Facebook statuses to reactionary bloggers arguing for corporate neo-monarchs, to self-identified white nationalists, and now, to anyone who’s to the right of a columnist at The Nation or who posts the word “retard” on social media.

And the ones who get monitored, the people who end up on watchlists and extremist profiles, to the ruin of their livelihoods and reputations, are often not the ones who need watching.

> We referred to the latest would-be Trump assassin as “Reddit” last week, and now Jenny Holland is back with a different angle: He’s LinkedIn. She analyzes his manifesto line by line and finds similarities with the banal drivel you hear among empty corporate suits trying to shoehorn profundity into their careerism. That such a milquetoast could go to such extreme measures should chill us all.

Cole is an excellent encapsulation of where I think a lot of young, well-educated, American liberal extremists are: they have the emotional maturity and moral reasoning of very young children, but they are fluent in the bureaucratic, professional, project-management language (also therapeutic language) of adults.

They are so trapped in their own fog that they cannot see past their own nose. Much like the middle class white girls who love to knit and crochet but also love Hamas, it is jarring. It’s artificial. It’s like watching a badly programmed robot try to be human-like.

I’m surprised he didn’t sign off his murder manifesto with something like ‘Ok, so hopefully that’s all clear and you guys can support me in murdering the president. No worries if not!’

> Alan Schmidt pwns libertarians in this history lesson about the Vikings’ Danegeld racket. The most airtight high-trust rules-based order doesn’t stand a chance against a persistent parasite.

Bad actors will always find a way to worm into the organization. Maybe they’ll infiltrate the roads commission and build a little fiefdom. If you want your pothole repaired, get ready to make nice with them. In the beginning the demand might be minor, maybe a special favor or tickets to an exclusive event. As these interactions become normalized, other agencies are forced to pay their own tribute. Their funding spirals upward as less work gets done. The money forms a patronage class that can agitate other agencies and infiltrate those as well. Soon the entire bureaucracy becomes rotten. Roads aren’t being built, and the entire organization seems to exist to appease the worthless parasites. The bad actors that originally entered to exploit resources now have a little kingdom of their own to defend, built off pirating those trying to earn an honest living. The police now exist to extract wealth from the productive while doing nothing for public safety. The entire government apparatus becomes an extortionist racket as the productive members are milked as tax-cattle to fund their enemies.

> William M Briggs demonstrates how experts come to depend on an endless supply of victims for which to advocate. The result: a proliferation of calamities.

The trick is easy. Look into any organized activity and find plaints of how Victims are being especially harmed by whatever it is you’re looking in to, or that Victims need more of whatever it is, or that Victims aren’t being sufficiently considered in the thing. Victims are always to be found. And whenever they are, the need for Experts grows.

This is why whenever we hear the world is about to end (again), such as because of “climate change”, the headlines all end with some form of the cliched joke “Victims Hardest Hit.”

> Lamprey Milt tries his luck at explaining the U.S.’s semi-regulated, billion-dollar gambling industrial complex. Young men who thought they’d been fleeced of all their wool lose last additional bit of wool they didn’t even know they still had.

In the U.S., we have a quasi-libertarian view of money. Basically, if the harm isn’t physical, then it’s okay. “No one forced you to download the app, own it, take responsibility for your actions”. Easy to take such a John Wayne Bootstraptism view, but when you are 20 years old with feelings of despair and your favorite athlete is endorsed by DraftKings, coupled with sports media blending stats and history with betting, what outcome do you expect?

> Copernican is wondering what the 2020s’ defining aesthetic will be, coining “Digital Neon” to describe a hyper-real retro-futurism rising from the ashes of flat corpo-authoritarian blandness.

This decade’s aesthetic is reflective of the Gilded Age bifurcation (1920s) and also economic depression (1930s). A fashwave and synthwave aesthetic (1980s), but amplified by AI and artificial production. We seek authenticity when culture has grown inauthentic by assumption. We reject the corporate goy-slop globo-homo sludge that dominated the corporate world through the 2010s…

Cultural instability produced brilliant new artistic works. At the same time, AI is still discernible, distinguishable from real video and photography. Thus, it seems that the 2020s will be aesthetically remembered for that not-quite-real vibe in music and art. Many of the best AI artists lean into unrealism as a feature rather than a bug. Using bolder styles. Realism isn’t the point. Visual fidelity takes a seat behind the metaphysical core of the work. Each frame is proximally loaded with associative incidental meaning.

> The Old Glory Club has been producing an essential ongoing series on the subject of coalition-building and inter-party squabbling on the Right in an attempt to hold this damn thing together. Patriot? Hardliner? Plan-truster? Blackpiller? This latest piece urges readers to drop the faction framing. That’s just looking for someone else to save you. Instead, look for allies and start just doing things.

Positioning is a Space-of-Experience category. It tells you where you have been, what you have been loyal to, what enemies you have accumulated, and which alliances you have honored or broken. It describes your location within a set of inherited political coordinates. It tells you almost nothing about what your actual Horizon of Expectation is, because it cannot: the horizon is ahead, and the faction map is behind.

The operative questions are different. They are not strategic, in the grand-coalition sense. They are immediate.

What can you actually do right now?

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

> LA mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt wrote (or had ghostwritten) this surprisingly contemplative Easter essay about the decline of his native Los Angeles and the spiritual malaise at the heart of the fertility crisis. Not bad for a reality TV star.

The parallel to Jesus’ original warning is perhaps uncomfortable but necessary. The Roman siege of 70 A.D. ushered in starvation that drove mothers to cannibalism and children died in the streets. The barren were, in a macabre sense, spared the worst grief. In 21st century Los Angeles, the horror is slower, more diffuse; more like a spiritual and civic entropy. It is the slow erosion of the belief that our best days aren’t yet behind us. When women who once dreamed of nurseries now whisper, “I don’t want to watch my kid grow up in this,” they are echoing the ancient lament whether or not they know their scripture.

> High-skilled Asian-American is autistic enough to acknowledge the corrosive nature of high-skilled Asian immigration. Lap Gong poses a mass migration hypothetical and walks through its charming first blushes and its later harms, when assimilation gives way to entitlement. But mostly, it’s not harmful, it’s just, well, different. Highly compelling prose, for an autist.

In time, the native Irish gradually resign themselves to being lectured by the most sanctimonious superiors at work. Their resentment at no longer feeling comfortable in their old neighborhoods, at seeing their children condescended to by the most insufferable overachieving fifteen-year-olds, and at being disdained by their more cosmopolitan peers curdles into silent resignation.

Many self-segregate, move further into the country, and speak in code. It’s an uneasy cold peace that makes everyone a little more miserable.

> κατακαῖον wrote something this week that Dave Greene brought to our attention. It was paywalled so we can’t poast it, but it led to our discovery of this other recent essay on avoiding the eternal maidenhood trap. It’s a solid primer on biological realities for young ladies navigating modern dating hell, and a warning to beware stories that ignore them.

Watch any movie: it is the maiden who features center-stage. It used to be that she would always be youthful; plausibly unmarried in spite of her good looks. Now we have maidens of all ages: middle-aged women and post-menopausal women and single mothers back on the dating market.

Mothers are conspicuously absent or unimportant. They represent constraint and obligation, and tend to feature as well-meaning antagonists trying to clip the wings of the maiden-character. Sometimes they’re supporting characters who conveniently die right before the third act so that other people are able to develop their full potential as human beings.²⁴ We may have sentimental attachments to her, but she serves as an uncomfortable rebuke to the maiden’s desire to live her high-risk, low-obligation lifestyle.

📜Lit of the Week📜

> We love when The Bizarchives recommends the best examples of a subgenre because there’s just so much pulp out there. Here he introduces five essential Japanese horror comic artists.

> Rohan Ghostwind does something that to our knowledge, has never been done before: bringing together Warhammer and Jane Austen.

> Ghost of Arthur Powell releases a new edition of his Horizons of Iron poetry collection, now with 10 additional poems.

> J. Burden interviews dissident author Philip Voodoo about his newish military thriller Blood Memory.

> You’ve seen a few of his essays here; Prester John Andrews is now writing fantasy fiction.

> Christopher Brunet savages Elise Stefanik’s new book about the Claudine Gay affair.

> Richard Greenhorn pits Nicholas Nickelby against Holden Caulfield in an attempt to redefine literary heroism.

> Cascade Frontier reviews “White Knights and Reviling Wives,” a great last-minute mother’s day gift!

🐦Tweets of the Week🐦

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

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