#273. Most productive Director of DEI

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🧵Threads of the Week 🧵

> Media critic explains why Daily Wire is in decline.

It’s been an open secret that The Daily Wire’s pre-COVID success was largely due to them winning over the Facebook boomercons by gaming the site’s algorithm and boosting their own presence through a puppet network of “news” accounts.

Facebook substantially altered their algorithm in 2021 and put DW at a disadvantage, which is why their subscriber count peaked that year and has fallen ever since

> Looksmaxxer tries oxtail.

woke up the next day with my feet hanging off the bed and a bump on my head from it hitting my bedframe. hopped out of bed in shock and slammed my forehead against the ceiling. i looked down at myself and screamed as i watched my legs growing and growing, gradually stretching me out like a spaghetti string

> St. Louisan encounters an FTM.

I go up to the counter and the staff persyn is some tiny little FTM with a whispy HRT beard and wide hips named Asher or one of those brooding cool guy names they always pick…

> Pervert responds to an active shooter.

The guatemalan busboy takes a tracer round to the sternum and violently falls limp onto the table and spills my dirty tito’s martini onto my 32/32 jeans. I’m assuming that will be comped. I assess the situation and identify the shooter. 23 year old transgender furry communist. No need to engage… this libtard will die of AIDS in less than 35 minutes. I throw the waitress over my shoulder and rush us both to safety toward the kitchen. Her armpit blesses me with a direct impact to my nose and upper lip. Her scent invigorates me. Ginger and turmeric smoothie this morning?

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

> Coddled Affluent Professional thinks DSA politics are a lifeboat for New York’s declining NGO set. Yes, the theater kids have rediscovered economic populism, but for them, not for icky construction workers.

Specifically what this involves is a more bespoke welfare state: they don’t want to live in housing projects or work administrative jobs in the DOE. They want $200k a year NGO jobs doing Good Things and for the city to seize housing from landlords in hipster neighborhoods so they can live there.

🎥A/V of the Week🎥

> Ante D Luvian uses his African voice in the workplace.

> A lot of people weighed in on the based(?) new b-movie Citizen Vigilante but we had to go with the best, Granite Mtn. Movie Club for the definitive review.

> We last checked in with Gildhelm when he was puncturing the myth of Zoomies returning to the pews. He’s got a fascinating new solo podcast with an episode tracing the history of vitalism and Darwin’s cultural impact.

> Christopher F. Rufo and Office Hours with Lomez discuss Balaji’s tiff with Roman Helmet Guy on their show, friendly but hard-hitting discussion about globalism and immigration.

📰Reads of the Week 📰

> Sensitive young men hear a lot about “The Trades” these days. The Appalachian Gorilla is here to dispel the romantic notions you may have about a life of skilled manual labor.

There are trades you go into to make money, and trades you go into for the passion. Passion, as we all know, never pays the bills. If you have not heard this, allow me to disabuse you of the idea that doing what you love will make the money follow. There are thousands of zombies who wanted to be musicians and actors, only to end up strung out in the gutter. Following your dreams tends to lead you into nightmares, so just make money. Life is so much easier with consistent or good money.

> The Reflecting Pool. Have you heard about the Reflecting Pool? I heard Drumpf overspent. I heard he hired his friend. I heard the algae blooms are back. I heard the ducks are dying. Kitten laments how TDS turns every mundane civic maintenance project into total culture war.

None of you knew the first thing about it a few weeks ago, but overnight you have developed expert-level opinions on algae treatments and domestic waterfowl toxins. The water color of the Lincoln memorial reflecting pool is a brainworm whose virulence is rivaled only by its utter triviality and stupidity. Not since “he crossed state lines” have I seen so many otherwise intelligent people incepted so thoroughly into parroting a set of opinions and talking points by a media blitz. It has pervaded the collective unconscious to a disturbing degree, creeping into conversations and contexts in which it has no place — asserting itself, Pavlovian, a neurotic tic of allegiance or defiance.

> At Compact, Ashley Frawley hypothesizes that the mental health conversation that we always are needing to have might actually be responsible for some of the mental illness out there.

Another reason government officials prefer to focus on mental health is that it suggests problems can be fixed without resolving fundamental social conflicts. For example, in its Comprehensive Approach to Mental Health, the European Union notes that “suicide rates among farmers are 20 per cent higher than the national average in certain member states.” This sad fact is why, the report continues, “support will be offered to strengthen their resilience.” One could be forgiven for forgetting that across Europe in 2023 and 2024, farmers drove tractors into capital cities protesting policies drawn up by distant EU bureaucrats that directly and severely impacted their livelihoods. The mental health framing ensures that questions like who gets what and who decides are taken out of the realm of politics and placed in the hands of technocrats.

> E.M. Evans celebrates an American fashion icon who dared to love his country for what it was, and what he dreamed it could be: Ralph Lauren.

America is not romantic because it is pure, it is romantic because it keeps insisting on beauty in places where beauty has no business being. It can be found in the tumbleweed dancing along a decrepit highway, an old tree resolutely growing in the worst neighborhood you’ve ever been to, and even somewhere in the holler with the toothless hillbillies when the trees start to turn from green to orange, yellow, and red.

> For Father’s Day, Alan Schmidt calls out the soft dads who just stand there and clap, thinking that abiding approval is all that’s required of fatherhood.

Modernity has tried to make the father superfluous, and they have done an astounding job. While the mother has seen this same corrosion in her relationship to her children, the father is seen as the bigger threat. In the quest for creating the perfect individualistic, de-racinated consumer, the father is seen as the impediment in creating a world bereft of natural hierarchies and responsibilities. The father, as head of the household, is the prime recipient of such attacks.

> Rob Henderson wonders why Michael Jackson hasn’t been canceled and shares insight how both aesthetic and moral signaling collide into mass reevaluations of an artist.

I was hanging out with some fellow graduate students at the University of Cambridge in 2019 when one suggested seeing the new Liam Neeson movie, “Cold Pursuit.” Another student, referring to an unflattering confession Mr. Neeson had recently made, replied, “No, he’s racist, remember?” The first student said, “I read online that people forgive him and he’s OK now.” He pulled out his phone to verify. A few minutes later we walked to the theater.

> Johann Kurtz notices that rich people give their kids more freedom because childhood independence now costs a lot of money. It requires more active parenting, better schools, safer neighborhoods — moats of money and faith too.

The childhood depicted in nostalgic media rested on a dense web of adults who knew each other, shared a rough moral sense, and could be relied upon to mind each other’s children. That web is now a feature of particular places (often expensive places) rather than a general inheritance, and discerning which places have kept it is of key importance for families hoping to raise agentic children with deep networks of trusted friends.

> Rafael A. Mangual looks at the rise of Darializa Avila Chevalier against the backdrop of young Dominican DSA members in New York and their based parents who really ain’t with all that commie shit.

She is Dominican by ancestry, but she came to the neighborhood as the white newcomers did—as an educated transplant—and her worldview was formed at Columbia and in the activist left rather than in the striving immigrant world that produced Espaillat. The upwardly mobile Dominican gentrifier is the figure who complicates the relationship between ethnicity and rootedness. She shares the established community’s ethnic origins and the newcomers’ ideological sensibilities.

> For the first time ever, robots are now the fuel of warfare. For The Palladium Letter, John Severini wonders what happens when you start throwing nuts and bolts into the meat grinder of battle instead of, well, meat.

The competitive pressures of the international system may end up rewarding those states that organize around a new social contract—one more representative of the source of the sovereign’s coercive power. Today, private firms are increasingly becoming the source of this power, with fractious public-private partnerships providing early evidence of this fact.

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

> When we first saw the words “Bodega Nationalism,” we knew we were experiencing a powerful coinage in a world where the natural connection of a people to a place can no longer be celebrated. Denzel Rust goes to a Knicks celebration and talks to people who think you have to be born in New Yawk to be an NYer, but to be an American? Just, pero like, get here, bro. Deadass.

The cop is amused. She smiles, nods, and laughs. They’re chopping it up. The way real New Yorkers do when they’re drinking iced cafecitos at the bodega. She’s not bothered by the white lady’s appeal to birthright nativism. In fact, she seems to agree. Deport the bandwagoners. Remigrate the transplants. No human is illegal unless they’re from Ohio.

> Keturah Hickman shares her experience growing up in the world of extreme homeschooling and explores its downsides in this controversial personal essay that has homeschool moms on the defensive, but you really get the sense that it’s just a mom trying to do right by her kids as best she can.

Motherhood is beautiful because of the sacrifices a mother must make for her children, but the extra expectations leveled on the modern homeschooled mother profit no one. Mothers needs ample time to weave and gossip — so many homeschooled mothers I know are like zombies, unable to create anything beautiful because they’re checked and overwhelmed. And yet, they grit through their days, dead-eyed, believing that homeschooling is the only moral option.

📜Lit of the Week📜

> One of the best (if not the best) columnists in the game has a new book out with Passage Press. Scott Greer’s Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America is out now. If you’re reading this you’ll probably want to buy this book.

Conservatism has completely transformed since I got involved in politics 13 years ago. In 2013, conservatives thought the future of the party lay with amnesty. It was controversial to even oppose illegal immigration, much less legal immigration. There was no debate over Israel; you had to support “our greatest ally” or face being purged. There was no tolerance for talk of anti-white racism or demographic replacement. Ronald Reagan was treated as a god that all Republicans must model themselves after. The big thinkers of the time imagined the Right becoming more diverse, more tolerant, more wonky, and less interested in cultural matters. It would be like Paul Ryan, not like the average Tea Partier.

🐦Tweets of the Week🐦

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

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