The Four Commandments of Reddit

How a website for geeks gave us totalizing societal libtardation

I attended a wedding a few years back. The vows were spoken in Klingon. A heavy metal band performed the wedding march. Taco trucks catered. I’ve also attended a Harry Potter wedding. Potter cocktails, Potter table decor, Potter photobooth. Dumbledore quote in the program. Apparently, Potter weddings are happening all the time.

This sort of thing is everywhere now. Lightsaber duels instead of a first dance. Rapped vows. In places like San Francisco you can find every flavor of ceremony, where very smart, very successful geeks dispense with the traditional in favor of whatever they feel like at the moment. And it’s not just weddings: So many mourners are spreading the ashes of deceased loved ones at Disney’s Haunted Mansion the park had to issue a formal prohibition. Kumail Nanjiani would like a Ninja Turtle at his funeral.

At these events, you often see a grandma off to the side, wincing in shame and bewilderment, observing an alien world with strange customs that appear to be mocking anything that her world once held sacred. She wouldn’t be able to articulate it this way, but she’s wondering something to the effect of: How did everything become so Reddit?

I’m walking down the street in a rural red-state farm town and see a t-shirt in the consignment shop that says, in big bold letters, “I LOVE MY GAY KID.”

Reddit.

I’m watching an Oscar-nominated movie about papal succession and the bad guy is a mean conservative while the hero is a… a heckin’ intersex man of color. I’m watching a popcorn horror flick and the killer turns out to be, not a satanic cult, but the evangelical Christian freaks doing satanic panic!

Reddit.

A guy tattoos himself to commemorate being the 100th person bedded by an internet-famous “sex worker.”

Reddit.

This pegleg anti-groping ad? I am become meme? Pokemon go to the polls? Queer summer camp? Sober rave hiking? Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s whole persona? The haka? The Ukraine? Real-life baby Groot? Mayor Pete shopping for Legos? Hanksgiving? Reddit.

“Oh, what’s the big deal? Isn’t this just harmless geeky fun?”

No. I refuse. It’s not harmless; it’s the most insidious and pervasive cultural force of our time. It’s corroding the bonds that hold society together. It destroyed a generation and shows no signs of stopping. You can’t escape it: everything is ugly and fat and dorky and trite and corny and satanic and fake and gay and soy and cringe. All mainstream culture is created by and for resentful geek losers. Everything sucks now and it’s because of Reddit.

“C’mon, isn’t it just a web forum for geeks? Why are you attributing all of society’s ills to some forum? And doesn’t it contain, like, a million different communities with opposing views?”

Yes, Reddit is a geek forum, and yes, it contains multitudes. But somehow, across all these communities, from r/knitting to /rWhoaThatsInteresting to r/ProgrammerHumor” to r/UpliftingNews, a distinct gestalt has taken prominence, on and off the site. The richest and most powerful people in the world are Reddit. The professional managerial class is Reddit. All of Western society runs on Redditism. The Redditor reigns supreme. This is, so far, the Reddit Century.

“WTF are you talking about? What is ‘the Redditor?’ Just someone who uses the website? Aren’t you overreacting a bit?”

No. The Redditor is an archetype that transcends the internet. He’s a self-loathing ex-gifted kid who indulges in childish consumption rather than face the duties and uncertainties of adulthood. He thumbs his nose at traditional authority, and makes that bratty rebelliousness his whole personality. Redditism is not just an aesthetic or a collection of fandoms, it’s an ideology, one that has been taken up and instrumentalized by the global elite against everything good. It animates a death cult that wants you dead first. It’s the end of the line.

The stakes are high. If the human race is to survive, we must ask alongside the poor grandmother at the Harry Potter wedding: “How did everything become so Reddit?”

We will learn through studying its laws, beginning with:

Commandment #4. Thou shalt let people enjoy things

It took two generations for the hippie ethic of “Do your own thing,” which for boomers meant getting laid and going on cool LSD motorcycle road trips, to devolve into “Let people enjoy things,” i.e. rotting at home with narcotizing consumption.

Want to spend every waking minute wrapped in your goon cave vape cloud until your dopamine receptors are sparking like a downed power line? Want to blow your 30s autistically speedrunning bargain bin video games that came out when you were 11? Want to turn the Walt Disney Corporation into your entire personality? Want to dress up like a dog and go to a No Holes Refused chemsex party in an abandoned warehouse? Want to lop off your dick and balls? Go for it. No gods, no masters.

Never kinkshame, fatshame, or inspire any shame ever. Shame is bad for you, and imposing shame is one of the few sins one could ever commit. We don’t shame, we normalize, we destigmatize. If you want something and you’re not hurting anybody else, it’s all good. Anything less than total validation is causing harm.

If adulthood is no longer something that you gradually achieve as you age and take on more responsibility, the Redditor instead may dip his toes into occasional “Adulting,” an ironic acknowledgement that he’d rather just be rotting in his race car bed.

Because the Redditor lacks any sort of moral lodestar, the only impulse that motivates him is an animal’s instinct to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. The Redditor wants to consume the product, live in the pod, and eat the bugs. He wants to go down to the BARCADE. He’ll toss out anything in his life that stands in the way of pleasure maximization. He’ll blow up his marriage, go “no contact” with his parents. “Enjoying things” is all he can bear to do.

One of the most popular subreddits is r/AmITheAsshole, where users debate everyday social etiquette. Husband keeps leaving the toilet seat up? Divorce. He’ll never respect you. Grandma wants hugs from her reluctant grandkids? Emotional manipulation. Go no contact. New boyfriend wants to get married within the year? Lovebombing. Dump him, girl! Every day, 24 million members are giving each other the worst possible advice, which usually amounts to taking the easy way out.

The Redditor’s values, such as they are, invert traditional morality, in reaction to perceived authority figures (God, church, Dad, Republicans, America etc.) regardless of how much power they actually hold over him. He is terrified of adulthood and resents the demands it places upon him. So he rejects the whole paradigm. And when you remind him of this sad fact by insisting that he grow up and be normal, he lashes out: “Don’t yuck my yum!”

What explains this shameless, petrified toad ensconced before you on his gamer chair throne, clouded in vape steam, mouth agape, surrounded by polyvinyl baubles? What arcane forces of history resulted in this blinking Last Man?

It’s a long story.

Before Reddit, there were forums. Before the “web,” you could host a bulletin board system, their precursor. There were boards about any topic you can think of, but because access was limited first to students and researchers and later to techy hobbyists, the topical focus of these boards skewed male and geeky. The forum moderator as a tyrannical autist archetype emerged from the reality that it took dedication and savvy to spin up and maintain a forum. Lone mods had no choice but to run them like fiefdoms. Forums developed their own unique cultures, etiquette, and interpersonal dramas. They remained the primary way for people to communicate around their interests until the rise of social networks in the mid-2000s, which put less emphasis on ideas and interests, and more on personalities.

Web forums were always a place for lonely weirdos and cranks to find each other. Flat earthers, furries, and fandoms of all stripes jumped online as soon as it was feasible. Something Awful, a forum where users bickered about geek and an emerging internet culture, launched in 1999. One weekly feature involved sharing deranged posts from obscure forums, like this one for people who habitually chew ice. Whoever you were, whatever you looked like, whatever weird shit you were into, you could find your people on a forum.

When Reddit came online in 2006, it was billed as “the front page of the internet.” It was, essentially, a way to share links and commentary, the best of which were aggregated onto the front page, often becoming viral sensations. You could “upvote” links and comments you liked, and “downvote” ones you didn’t. Reddit was an immediate hit, selling to Conde Nast for $20 million only a year after its founding.

The feature that made Reddit a dominant cultural force arrived in 2008. The “subreddit,” was introduced, allowing anyone to, with a few clicks, start up their own forum. That ice chewers forum? It’s now a subreddit with nearly 10,000 members.

Although these subreddits had their own unique subcultures depending on their mods and their focus, the site as a whole crystallized around internet and geek culture. A geeky voice, a geeky mindset. A posture toward the world and eventually, a distinct political orientation. Today, the modal Redditor’s politics overlap on every conceivable issue with the American Liberal Left. Which brings us to our next law:

Commandment #3. Thou shalt be a decent human

Would it kill you to just be decent? Wouldn't that pretty much solve the world’s problems, if you, dear rightist reader, could stop being such a dumpster fire garbage person? Don’t worry about who gets to decide what decency is, or what happens when people’s views on this conflict. Just…be nice. Be nice, like Sad Keanu. Be nice to doggos and kittehs, be nice to women and minorities and especially trans kids.

What we have here is essentially the Golden Rule, plucked from its Christian context – which is meant to explain what you are supposed to want “done unto you” – until all that’s left is consent. As long as any involved parties have affirmed consent (hopefully they won’t revoke it decades later), anything goes, even if it impoverishes people and robs them of their dignity and safety (sterilizing children, polyamory, letting bums shoot up on the subway).

The Redditor seeks to be rootless, raceless, drifting frictionlessly through life, every relationship reducible to a financial transaction. He is a global citizen, he has no connection or commitment to any place or people. He’s not a Texan or a Southerner or an American – he’s as loyal to Starfleet and the Rebel Alliance as to any of these obsolete categories.

Being a decent human comes naturally to the Redditor because he has no agency. Maybe growing up he “was bullied” or “was teased” – passive voice. Life happens to the Redditor, and not the other way around. He doesn’t want to approach women – he wants to be raped. Geeky men are no longer allowed to experience sexuality unless they’re “safe horny,” longing to “have their skull crushed” by a “muscle mommy” or to suffocate under the belly folds of a BBW.

The Redditor is like this because he hates and pities himself. This is the wellspring from which not only his sexuality but his entire politics flows. He naturally hates that he’s ugly or fat or short or socially awkward. What’s worse, he’s probably white and male, so he’s not even allowed to complain about any of this anymore. He’s got all this resentment and frustration, with nobody to point it at but himself. The only way out of this miserable situation is to rebrand himself as “one of the good ones” in hopes that someone – ideally a woman – will recognize him for it. He retargets his bile toward his own race, his sex, his country. He’s a white knight. A passive, sexless nice guy. A good liberal. An ally. Finally, a decent heckin’ human.

Geeks weren’t always like this. But to understand how they gradually adopted this stance, one must understand the psychology that shapes the social misfit’s place in the world.

The word “geek,” Scottish for “fool,” was originally appropriated by Americans to refer to deformed carnival freaks, and from there, to anyone with traits that deviate from the norm. A half-century later, the term was used to describe a young person who had traits that made him a social misfit. In the ‘80s, MTV produced comedic shorts starring Toby Radloff as a “Genuine Nerd.” Radloff appeared in thrift-store polyester to extoll the joys of eating cheap fast food and obsessing over B-horror movies. This obvious loser was unequivocally the butt of the joke.

By some heavenly benevolence, it turned out that the traits that made geeks inept at social games made some of them wizards at the technological systems that emerged in the back half of the 20th century: circuit boards, rocketry sets, chemistry kits and, eventually, keyboards and mice. Geeks embraced and mastered these solitary habits because they were good at systems, and computers and the Internet were the ultimate application of systems thinking. Bill Gates personified this new geek era. By the late 90s, it became something of a trope that one day the geek you’re shoving into a locker would be your boss. Fools, no longer.

The internet allowed these geeks to find one another. Early forums for Star Trek, video games, and Dungeons & Dragons thrived. Geeks lost themselves in labyrinthine systems of all kinds, whether it was building their own computers or developing intricate fan theories about Twin Peaks. Throughout the 90s, geek culture expanded massively, and much of this was due to geeks’ new addressability as a consumer demographic.

It was sometime around the release of the Star Wars prequels where you started to see t-shirts with old-school Nintendo controllers or Internet memes. Hot girls were wearing shirts like this, ironically embracing identity signifiers that would’ve previously repulsed them. Geeks were no longer told to get a life because everyone wanted their money.

By the 2000s, geekdom was a consumer identity. But it didn’t yet have a politics. That would take over 3,000 fiery deaths.

The most important event of the early ‘00s was in fact not the release of the Star Wars prequels but the 9/11 terror attacks. They changed everything, including geek culture. So-called “New Atheists,” an ascendant class of intellectuals with bestselling books proclaiming The End of Faith, quickly established their belief system as the reigning ideology of the web.

Whether it’s because they were smart, or because being smart was how they’d come to identify themselves, a dogmatic strain of atheism had always been present in geek and internet culture. As Scott Alexander writes:

My first forays onto the Internet were online bulletin boards about computer games. They would have a lot of little forums about various aspects of the games, plus two off-topic forums. One for discussion of atheism vs. religion. And the other for everything else. This was a common structure for websites in those days. You had to do it, or the atheism vs. religion discussions would take over everything.

Atheism appeals to geeks in part because its arguments rest on scientific and logical assertions that are difficult to grapple with if you’re not booksmart. It is a point of pride to be able to articulate these arguments and defeat one’s opponents in the arena of ideas. The geek sees these assertions as ideologically neutral. It’s what to believe if you’ve transcended superstition and emotional arguments. Atheism is what Spock would believe.

But many – not all, but many – geeks are atheists because it gives them an excuse to shit on their perceived intellectual inferiors. Debating online is about knowing lots of facts and deploying them with devastating wit. It’s not about changing hearts and minds with honest conversation so much as conquest, crushing and humiliating one’s opponent, browbeating him into submission. It’s about winning, taking territory, collecting allies, getting opponents banned, exterminating opposing views. Online debates never end with either party feeling like they learned something.

Often the real “opponents” are the authority figures under which the atheist strained in childhood. The dad who dragged them to Sunday School, the youth pastor who used logical fallacies in his sermon, the popular kids who teased them for being fat or ugly or unfashionable. The geek decided that if he can’t be popular, if he can’t climb the rope in gym class, he can at least be more rational. He can spend his days defeating them over and over, with facts and logic.

Gym class sucked, but on the internet, no one knows you're a fat, ugly, pizza-faced dog. Finally, here was a place where geeks could express themselves without someone ridiculing their doofy haircut. A marketplace of ideas.

Though the seedlings of New Atheism had been germinating online for many years, the 9-11 attacks gave a new generation of keyboard warriors, who would later be dubbed “Reddit atheists” due to their habit of engaging in heated debates there, a new confidence. The whole world was being sucked into a series of desert squabbles that, to them, were ultimately down to the superstitions of Christians, Jews and Muslims. They believed that if only we could believe in Science, instead of an imaginary Sky Daddy that wants you to annihilate your enemies, we could avoid the bloody conflict and economic turmoil and instead solve climate change, go to Mars or something worthwhile.

This perceived moral high ground made it a fun time to be an atheist. The “fundies” had taken over the White House. George W. Bush was cast as the born-again dumb jock, despite being an indisputably bright Yale and Harvard Business School grad. The geeks howled at his malapropisms, especially when they revealed a fuzzy understanding of technology. To this day you hear people referencing multiple “internets” or a Republican senator’s “series of tubes” (a completely reasonable metaphor for the internet that Jon Stewart and his lib cohort spent years mocking).

Meanwhile, the Democrats were gradually casting aside their working class base and rebranding as “the smarts party” to pander to an ascendant Professional Managerial Class. To be an atheist liberal in the ‘00s was to be smart; religious conservative, dumb. Zoomers will probably never fully understand how dominant this condescending brand of geeky godlessness was in the ‘00s, especially online. Remember the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

New Atheism peaked around the onset of social media, the ultimate Eternal September, when early Internet forum mods would grumble about the autumnal influx of freshman internet users who didn’t yet know the “netiquette.” No longer was the web a haven for seasoned debatelords. Facebook brought your churchgoing grandma online. It brought everybody online.

The internet experience changed. On social media, everyone knew you were a dog. Profiles gave many women the same social edge they possessed IRL, and they began to command the same sort of deference from geeks that they were accustomed to in physical spaces. It was around this time that “white knighting” (later known as “simping”) gained usage, referring to geeks who’d defend the honor of fair maidens in forum arguments, desperate to prove to women that they were not “that guy.” They were “nice.” Sophisticated and sensitive, unlike the rest of the troglodytes.

As girls infiltrated the internet, geeks cleaned themselves up. In the 00s, geeks still looked like shit. Look at this gallery of Something Awful users. You used to see truly abject autismo sysadmin types all the time at conventions and tech events. Balding, greasy, neckbearded, hunched creatures in Payless shoes: The standard geekwad loadout is almost a thing of the past. Today even sysadmins wear Allbirds. They grew proper beards and stopped wearing dragon shirts. Maybe Facebook forced these ill-shaped netizens to look in the mirror, maybe it was just digital proximity to women.

You also rarely encounter geeks who are total dicks these days. When was the last time a geek lorded his technical knowledge over you? The Nick Burnses of the world are basically extinct. To be a geek is to be a “nice guy.” Geeks adopted cuddlier, even submissive postures. They started doing the “soyface” in photos to project a nonthreatening aura. A face that says: I’m not going to hurt you and I have no expectations. I’m a big sexless puppy dog who’s just happy to be here. Rub my tummy?”

A good segue into our next commandment:

Commandment #2. Thou shalt read the room

The Redditor’s worst nightmare is inspiring an awkward party reaction. Of being “that guy.” Being “on the right side of history,” is his watchword. You must hold politics that align with Northrup Grumman and Exxon, and Trust the Science^TM that emerges from huge multinational pharmaceutical interests. The Science^TM is of course not the open study of the natural world but a set of morally-charged maxims passed down from regime institutions. It is a morality of consensus. The Science^TM is always settled, even when it flips. Remember when Covid was a chud-coded anti-Chinese conspiracy perpetuated by Drumpf, weeks before it was the Black Plague miraculously averted by the heroic Dr. Fauci? Remember when Putin sang for Goldie Hawn, Sharon Stone and other glitterati before he became literally Darth Vader?

The Redditor knows from childhood what it’s like to be excluded, and his biggest fear is to once again be cast into the darkness of social opprobrium. Therefore he seeks above all to conform to the pattern of his world.

Conformism is baked into Reddit’s design, as the factual accuracy of a post is immaterial – the only thing matters is upvotes and downvotes. Dissenting opinions are typically downvoted and discredited, often with inaccurate, biased, or sourceless claims, while popular opinions are upvoted all the way to the front page, gaining maximum exposure.

But conformity doesn’t come naturally to all geeks. The stubborn ones had to be culled.

After Bush, the New Atheists no longer had an obvious bête noire. Their crusade petered out because, in a sense, they had won. Scientific rationalism had won. Barack Obama promised a new techno-managerial state that would nudge us toward utopia. This was presented as the antidote to Bush’s backcountry jingoism. Obama trusted the science, hired the experts, and applied the correct policy solutions. Of course, in practice, Obama’s turn as president offered more of the same neocon blob. But he sounded smarter, and for liberals, that was what counted. He may have claimed to be a Christian, but everyone knew he was just pretending. In a rare rhetorical misstep, Obama exposed his antipathy toward America’s religious ruralites in his infamous “guns and religion” gaffe. The strident New Atheist could safely lay down his katana. The rationalists were in control.

The nail in the coffin for New Atheism may have been “Elevatorgate.” In 2011, a woman blogged about being sexually harassed in an elevator at a male-skewing atheist convention. Richard Dawkins belittled her in his notorious “Dear Muslima” open letter, arguing that Western feminists have it pretty good under liberalism compared to those living under Islam, and should chill out. Dawkins wanted atheists to keep their eyes on the prize, fighting superstition and religiosity in all its forms. He faced fierce backlash from ascendant feminists within his own camp.

The New Atheists would have to reckon with feminism as a strange bedfellow in their war on irrationality. They shared an enthusiasm for abortion, but that was about it. Elevatorgate marked the emergence of a new enthusiasm for “social justice” in geek circles, and Western culture more broadly. This “identity politics” would displace New Atheism as the dominant cultural reaction to conservatism and become the defining feature of liberal identity.

This transition came with some dissonance. After all, how could atheists despise the religious when so many of the faithful were poor persecuted Muslims, the ones your redneck dad hates? How could they continue to ridicule even Christianity, with those masses of faithful Mexicans huddled at America’s Southern border, and oppressed BIPOC folx praying to Jesus every night? Atheism had to go, and feminists would usher it out through the back door.

Feminists wanted cultural domination, but were far less interested in achieving that through debating the finer points of the Problem of Evil. The New Atheists would have to reckon with the reality that even though many were geeks accustomed to seeing themselves as born losers, they were actually a bunch of privileged white guys. That is, if they wanted to have the hint of a chance at getting laid at the next anime convention. They doffed their fedoras and stripped themselves of anything that had the whiff of masculinity until all that remained was beard oil and bacon (epic!). The Reddit Atheist receded into the shadows, and the Social Justice Warrior was born.

This shift laid bare the dark truth about New Atheism: It was always fueled more by resentment than by cold rationality or a commitment to scientific inquiry. Contempt for fundamentalism and superstition gave way easily to contempt for the Left’s new enemies: men, whiteness, straightness, privilege.

A few years later came Gamergate, an event that has been analyzed so meticulously elsewhere that I will pass over the details: A female game developer was accused by an ex of sleeping with a gaming journalist, influencing his reviews. The resulting social media brouhaha over industry sexism, harassment, free speech, and journalistic ethics came to dominate Reddit to the point where Gamergate discussion was inescapable, and mods and admins began censoring and shadowbanning accounts who criticized mainstream narratives.

In 2015, new Reddit CEO Ellen Pao institutionalized the new approach with a site-wide campaign under the pretext of stopping harassment. Pao’s censorship apparatus was widely copied across the web, and a new era of content moderation saw social media and editorial sites taking a more active role in censoring content. It’s not accurate to say that actual harassment was nonexistent, or that Reddit was explicitly banning people for being conservative, but right-leaning geeks got the message and began to walk away, toward greener pastures at Twitter and 4chan. While prior to Gamergate, Reddit users tended lean more civil libertarian, championing causes around free speech and technology (Free Snowden! Stop SOPA! Arab Spring! Ron Paul!), by the end of the 2010s, all of these had been replaced by a cornucopia of progressive idpol concerns like abortion, Black Lives Matter, and trans rights.

Tech wunderkind and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz is a good symbol of this transition. Aaron was a bright young “hacktivist” who co-invented RSS and the Creative Commons License. He was one of those “information wants to be free” geeks that you basically never hear about anymore. After illegally copying a bunch of journal articles from MIT, he faced seven years in prison. Instead of taking a plea deal which would’ve limited his prison time to six months, he took his own life. Back in 2013, Curtis Yarvin attributed Aaron’s suicide to an overdose of bluepills. Swartz’ cohort of true believing hacktivists didn’t actually believe in anything, and maybe that’s why they were powerless to stop the censorship regime that would develop over the next decade. Maybe it’s why many of them even cheered it on.

Elevatorgate, gamergate and related events would gradually push conservatives out of Reddit, exile them from mainstream geek culture, and cement Redditism as the prevailing geek religion.

And what does that religion believe? Finally, we come to the first and most foundational commandment in Redditism:

Commandment #1: Thou shalt believe in nothing

The Redditor is a materialist nihilist whose moral vacuum gives way to Current-Thingism, a fickle but fierce devotion to whatever happens to be institutionally approved right now. LOL nothing matters, everything is random, and we’re all just talking monkeys with magic skeletons flying through space doing epic bacon schmexytiems on a science rock.

The Redditor has contempt for heritage, ritual, tradition, and historical continuity. That’s stuff his mean parents made him do, and he doesn’t have to do it anymore. He can stay up all night eating candy and playing video games or whatever he wants. He can live in an eternal Panglossian present, which is always better than what came before (nobody in the ‘50s was happy). The past is slavery, it’s marital rape, it’s a morality so rigid and at times alien that it’s probably better to not even think about it.

You need to release your grip on anything transcendent or eternal and embrace the warm cocoon of the contingent. You need to constantly question basic civilizational assumptions and snippily disregard them. You should do whatever you can to undermine and denigrate anything your dad thinks is sacred with wholesome chungus vulgarity. “Wholesome chungus,” by the way, is the application of a cutesy veneer over things that would have previously been considered pathetic and disgusting, a way to force social acceptance of things that aren’t particularly acceptable. Sweet little old Betty White telling dick jokes? Wholesome Chungus. A husband celebrating the leftovers from his wife’s dates with other men? What a mature, wholesome chungus fellow. Your favorite kiddie character saying “trans rights”? A celebration of the disposal of yesterday’s assumed values.

The Redditor never met a trope he didn’t want to invert, or a tradition he didn’t want to transgress. Let the girl propose marriage. What if the Christ metaphor in Narnia was voiced by a woman? What if every fictional redhead was instead black? Let the morbidly obese woman be a billboard model – bonus points if she has a weird skin thing. Be gay, do crime! Say the cuss word. Call the president “Fuckface von Clownstick.” Give a best man speech so prurient that our poor hypothetical grandma has to get up and leave the room. You can always get a new dildo-juggling grandma. Wouldn’t that be epicsauce?

It's worth noting that these rules collapse under the weight of their internal contradictions. Believe in nothing...but houseless BIPOC transfolx are magic. Be a decent human...until it's time to punch a Republican nazi. Let people enjoy things… unless you’re enjoying anything made before 2013. Trust the science… unless it’s IQ statistics.

That’s because unlike a real religion, Redditism isn’t really a belief system. It’s a refutation of belief, a moral void filled by selfishness and novelty. It’s a luciferian negation of the good, the healthy, the beautiful, the natural. It must be actively opposed because the Redditor fundamentally wants to be annihilated, and he wants to take you out with him. He wants his skull (and yours) to be crushed by the thighs of the Great Muscle Mommy in his head.

We can understand the Redditor’s political predisposition as a response to a frustrating and confusing world that mostly wants to destroy geeky guys. Redditism is a posture of supplication in the face of a devouring liberalism: I don’t need or want a family, a connection to a place, a country or a genetic lineage. I do not need or want agency. I will give up my family, I will recite the sacred dogmas, I will eat the bugs, I will be a decent heckin’ human, I will live and die a perfect consumer who goes along with every new liberal demand, no matter how internally inconsistent, no matter how humiliating – just let me have my goon cave and my vape pen and I’ll do whatever you ask.

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Reddit gave us total social libtardation because Redditors are the ultimate creation of liberalism – endlessly pliable and thus handily instrumentalized via wall-to-wall cultural propaganda. Liberalism wants its subjects to be sedated, childless, spiritually inert, atomized, deracinated, and endlessly distracted by the parading novelty of the Current Thing. It does not want people who explore, create, break rules, and reproduce. It does not want people who have responsibilities, duties, a sense of solidarity, a sense of belonging in a specific place, or transcendent beliefs. That’s why it hates traditional families, traditional marriages, tradition itself. It sees any obligation to anything but hedonic consumption as a threat, which is why the Redditor has been tricked into thinking that obligation is his enemy, why he wants to be left alone to “just enjoy things.”

In 2025, Reddit is bigger than ever, and its worldview is dominant beyond the platform. Look at the people who run things now in government, media, and academia: pudgy middle-aged Tumblrinas with cat-eye glasses and technicolor undercuts fill the halls of bureaucracy. Barely-human dorks like Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are as gods among men. Total Reddit victory.

It is no longer acceptable for geeks to simply be geeks. They have to get with the program. No more engineering fellowships without virtue signalling. No more all-male video game studios. No more comics or movies without awkward, forced capitulations to diversity. Geek culture was eaten alive by social justice. From there, it kept eating at Big Tech, and eventually all of professional society. If you want to have a corporate job in the West, you’ve got to put on the Reddit mask and repeat the Reddit oaths. If you want to work for a FAANG company or a big consultancy or be anywhere near the levers of power, you’ve got to recite the libtard liturgies.

We’ve had decades of rule by mealymouthed geeks now, and all of pop culture bends to flatter the egos of geekwads. What do we have to show for it? Unbearable ugliness and chaos. But all is not lost. Because things have gotten so miserable, we may actually have a shot at killing Redditism over the next decade or so. Enough people are recognizing that it’s a dead end. Millennials are aging out of online discourse, and younger generations seem less inclined to spend their free time debating people online. Being the guy who knows all the facts and can make the best arguments is a diminishing superpower in a world of generative AI. If the disembodied space of online once felt like an agora of reason, it now feels like a crab bucket of grifters and bots. Maybe this is why IRL is making a comeback.

Young men do not want to live in the world that we’ve created for them, and young women do not want to have sex with the kind of men that thrive in such a world. They are looking for strong men who say what they mean without looking around the room for approval, and aren’t ashamed of what they are. Young people are done with Stephens Colbert, King, and Albini. The Wheatons and the Whedons. The snarky, snotty Seths, Kumails, and Pattons. The West Wing theater dorks who up till five minutes ago occupied all levels of our Reddit-ass government, along with academia and mainstream journalism and a decent chunk of the corporate world – this whole class of castrated libtard milquetoasts has already been banished to Bluesky, and with time, I believe we’ll kill it dead. It may take a decade, but they’re on the way out. I just can’t imagine a version of the 2040s where anyone gives a crap what Hank Green or John Scalzi has to say. I can’t imagine the children of adult Disney freaks carrying on the tradition in 20 years.

Replacing the Poindexters will be men of action and will – some good, some bad. In the long term, the future will be won by people who know what they want, and really want it, and the Redditor just can’t bring himself to figure that out. They want to be comfy in their cubbyhole, and they want to fling boogers at anyone who actually cares about anything that didn’t roll in on the pre-packaged Current Thing conveyor belt. It’s not a worldview that’s built to last, and after 25 years under its fat, greasy thumb, I’ll be glad to watch it die.

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Thanks for reading. If you’re new to the NRP, we typically don’t publish essays like this. Every week, we do a roundup of the best content coming out of the New Right sphere. That’s the NRP bread and butter — consider this one a rare and special treat.