Dec 23, 2023·edited Dec 23, 2023Liked by Sam Devlin
There are some good ideas here, but also some common bad ones, that I see a lot in this sphere:
- The 'elite theory' thing pushed recently by a bunch of big Twitter accounts never really gets argued out. The current elite is rotted through, and the regime has made it clear that it will not make the 'mistake' of allowing competent people into power anywhere. The Ivies will take "Jazz" Jennings, but not some random White kid with good grades, even if he has no dangerous political indicators. The generals are incompetent and uncharismatic because to be otherwise would make them a coup risk. There is no assembly of useful elites in the halls of power that just need a big twitter account to generously accept a role as their eminence grise in exchange for a lifetime sinecure for him and his friends.
- The idea that institutions need to be filled by right wing bureaucrats has long been recited by National Review writers - "We need to build a bench!". But that's wrong, righties have never built a bench, and we've been in power plenty of times. That role doesn't appeal to right-wingers, and fundamentally transforming the American right winger such that new middle schoolers discovering /pol/ will start considering a D.C. career pipeline would take long enough to be a meaningless endeavor, even if it were possible. If the positions need to be filled, they can be filled the same way early American presidents filled cabinet positions - with trusted friends and allies who have no real qualifications. If we don't have a 'bench' for a given obscure department, a savvy right-wing president can randomly sample his primary campaign volunteers. This is covered well in the second half of the article, the conflict should be ironed out somehow. Capable young right-wingers are rarely motivated by long magazine articles, frequently motivated by funny greentexts, and every effective RW action has been built from the bottom up rather than the top down - rightie grunts are intelligent enough to organize themselves, so long as the forces sabotaging this are mitigated.
- The idea that local power is useless because of legal precedents is incoherent, as far as I can tell. It doesn't really get justified at all. Of course, you can argue the legality of a county or state going farther than the feds on immigration, but the law, as has become undeniably clear over the past eight years, is just a piece of paper. The only thing that controls whether you can do something is whether someone else is willing to stop you, and I don't think anyone who exclusively plays by the rules can win in current year. Even the Left, whose 'long march' took place against the kind of enemy that would actually allow one, used violence, corruption, and blatant cheating at every opportunity, counting on the fact that they'd be able to avoid or survive any consequences that their enemies might impose. The reason that Red State governorships are the most heavily-policed positions in the nation is that, if even one of them were to go to someone genuinely good, it could be the end of the leftist project in America. When it comes down to it, the regime does not have the cojones to stop a Rubicon-crosser in an executive position.
- Greer and Mystery Grove are mentioned by name here, so I should take the opportunity to make a controversial statement. They are both heavily-promoted, they know who to flatter in The Groupchat, but I don't think any capable people actually like them - they recommend the opposite of what Ricky Vaughn, the only *good* right-wing online organizer of our time - actually did. Anyone that spends every waking moment disparaging their political base is either stupid or malicious - stupid because they're revealing themselves as unserious about actually taking power if they insult or marginalize their side's "grunts", and malicious because a large account that does nothing but viciously, loudly attempt to quash any hint of comradery, shared mythos, or hope in the room is very obviously a burden rather than an asset. Moreover, I find it a bit odd that Greer's appearance on Twitter coincided with a near-weekly specially-written Twitter trend outlining his latest argument in the sidebar. The people running the censorship apparatus understood long before that point that doing that just makes whoever's being targeted more popular and more influential, and the way to get rid of *effective* opponents is to ban them from social media and never talk about them again. A lot of people popped up around the same time he did, with around the same attitude towards the political base that Ricky so effectively engaged with, and the same degree of uncharacteristic 'I can't believe it's not promotion' from the media apparatus. I'm not generally conspiratorial, but something feels very off about these people. Especially given Mystery Grove's earlier "I'm leaving and anyone who comes back under my name definitely isn't me!" meltdown.
Emblematic of all of this is the presence of a lot of twitter screencaps by middle-aged guys who spend a lot of time in groupchats, but no 4chan caps from the edgy teenagers and wild-eyed neets who, for all their strangeness, were culturally competent. In 2016, it was the opposite - anyone with a username understood that his role was to be a cheerleader for the anons (a lot of people use that term wrong now) who do the actual thinking. I don't like to sound harsh, and I'm largely attacking the trend in rhetoric from big accounts that have exploded in self-importance rather than this article in particular, which is a lot more grounded than those accounts - any successful strategy must acknowledge that ordinary righties are much more suited to being the 'elite' than anyone actively making a play for that position; that the elite cannot be co-opted or populated with our own cadre of underemployed PhDs, but must be removed so that a new one can rise naturally in its place.
That said, this article does a good job of pointing out that Trump did a lot of what people asked of him. He was and is by far the best we're going to get. His pivot from "the people running the show are idiots, but they'll understand once I start fixing things that this is in everyone's interest" to "the people running the show are evil, and need to be expunged from the halls of power" is meaningful - there will be no peace offering this time. It's always good to highlight recent bouts of competence and effectiveness from our side, and far too few people are doing this. A few random people looking around the country for local and state-level officials who are doing something right, spreading it out around our corners of the internet, making it accessible, could do a lot.
One thing that's of exceptional interest is how all of this plays out in the context of election fraud. The idea that his current team is better than ever sounds reasonable - much of the establishment presence slithered over to DeSantis when they considered it plausible that they might be able to replace Trump, and I doubt they'll be allowed back in. Still, as far as I can tell, the only path to success in the face of a fraudulent election was to simply refuse to leave, and cross the Rubicon (as so many have put it). The "most conservative in history" Supreme Court has made it clear that only two members have anything but contempt for the American people and their lone representative, and I do not believe the narrative some have offered that tweaking the parameters of Trump's legal argument would have meaningfully changed the outcome of that. Without incumbency, and the legitimacy that entails, a rubicon-crossing is a lot harder to pull off, especially now that every martial institution has been thoroughly purged of both the patriotic and the competent.
Great article as usual, I would like to add in that it seems to me that upcoming Supreme Court cases seem to directly affect the effectiveness of the tools “the administrative state” uses often. For example Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo could overturn the chevron deference which could make Federal agencies go through Congress for new regulations and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America which could fuck over liberal bureaucrats funding
The shift in Trump's rhetoric is an excellent and encouraging observation.
There are some good ideas here, but also some common bad ones, that I see a lot in this sphere:
- The 'elite theory' thing pushed recently by a bunch of big Twitter accounts never really gets argued out. The current elite is rotted through, and the regime has made it clear that it will not make the 'mistake' of allowing competent people into power anywhere. The Ivies will take "Jazz" Jennings, but not some random White kid with good grades, even if he has no dangerous political indicators. The generals are incompetent and uncharismatic because to be otherwise would make them a coup risk. There is no assembly of useful elites in the halls of power that just need a big twitter account to generously accept a role as their eminence grise in exchange for a lifetime sinecure for him and his friends.
- The idea that institutions need to be filled by right wing bureaucrats has long been recited by National Review writers - "We need to build a bench!". But that's wrong, righties have never built a bench, and we've been in power plenty of times. That role doesn't appeal to right-wingers, and fundamentally transforming the American right winger such that new middle schoolers discovering /pol/ will start considering a D.C. career pipeline would take long enough to be a meaningless endeavor, even if it were possible. If the positions need to be filled, they can be filled the same way early American presidents filled cabinet positions - with trusted friends and allies who have no real qualifications. If we don't have a 'bench' for a given obscure department, a savvy right-wing president can randomly sample his primary campaign volunteers. This is covered well in the second half of the article, the conflict should be ironed out somehow. Capable young right-wingers are rarely motivated by long magazine articles, frequently motivated by funny greentexts, and every effective RW action has been built from the bottom up rather than the top down - rightie grunts are intelligent enough to organize themselves, so long as the forces sabotaging this are mitigated.
- The idea that local power is useless because of legal precedents is incoherent, as far as I can tell. It doesn't really get justified at all. Of course, you can argue the legality of a county or state going farther than the feds on immigration, but the law, as has become undeniably clear over the past eight years, is just a piece of paper. The only thing that controls whether you can do something is whether someone else is willing to stop you, and I don't think anyone who exclusively plays by the rules can win in current year. Even the Left, whose 'long march' took place against the kind of enemy that would actually allow one, used violence, corruption, and blatant cheating at every opportunity, counting on the fact that they'd be able to avoid or survive any consequences that their enemies might impose. The reason that Red State governorships are the most heavily-policed positions in the nation is that, if even one of them were to go to someone genuinely good, it could be the end of the leftist project in America. When it comes down to it, the regime does not have the cojones to stop a Rubicon-crosser in an executive position.
- Greer and Mystery Grove are mentioned by name here, so I should take the opportunity to make a controversial statement. They are both heavily-promoted, they know who to flatter in The Groupchat, but I don't think any capable people actually like them - they recommend the opposite of what Ricky Vaughn, the only *good* right-wing online organizer of our time - actually did. Anyone that spends every waking moment disparaging their political base is either stupid or malicious - stupid because they're revealing themselves as unserious about actually taking power if they insult or marginalize their side's "grunts", and malicious because a large account that does nothing but viciously, loudly attempt to quash any hint of comradery, shared mythos, or hope in the room is very obviously a burden rather than an asset. Moreover, I find it a bit odd that Greer's appearance on Twitter coincided with a near-weekly specially-written Twitter trend outlining his latest argument in the sidebar. The people running the censorship apparatus understood long before that point that doing that just makes whoever's being targeted more popular and more influential, and the way to get rid of *effective* opponents is to ban them from social media and never talk about them again. A lot of people popped up around the same time he did, with around the same attitude towards the political base that Ricky so effectively engaged with, and the same degree of uncharacteristic 'I can't believe it's not promotion' from the media apparatus. I'm not generally conspiratorial, but something feels very off about these people. Especially given Mystery Grove's earlier "I'm leaving and anyone who comes back under my name definitely isn't me!" meltdown.
Emblematic of all of this is the presence of a lot of twitter screencaps by middle-aged guys who spend a lot of time in groupchats, but no 4chan caps from the edgy teenagers and wild-eyed neets who, for all their strangeness, were culturally competent. In 2016, it was the opposite - anyone with a username understood that his role was to be a cheerleader for the anons (a lot of people use that term wrong now) who do the actual thinking. I don't like to sound harsh, and I'm largely attacking the trend in rhetoric from big accounts that have exploded in self-importance rather than this article in particular, which is a lot more grounded than those accounts - any successful strategy must acknowledge that ordinary righties are much more suited to being the 'elite' than anyone actively making a play for that position; that the elite cannot be co-opted or populated with our own cadre of underemployed PhDs, but must be removed so that a new one can rise naturally in its place.
That said, this article does a good job of pointing out that Trump did a lot of what people asked of him. He was and is by far the best we're going to get. His pivot from "the people running the show are idiots, but they'll understand once I start fixing things that this is in everyone's interest" to "the people running the show are evil, and need to be expunged from the halls of power" is meaningful - there will be no peace offering this time. It's always good to highlight recent bouts of competence and effectiveness from our side, and far too few people are doing this. A few random people looking around the country for local and state-level officials who are doing something right, spreading it out around our corners of the internet, making it accessible, could do a lot.
One thing that's of exceptional interest is how all of this plays out in the context of election fraud. The idea that his current team is better than ever sounds reasonable - much of the establishment presence slithered over to DeSantis when they considered it plausible that they might be able to replace Trump, and I doubt they'll be allowed back in. Still, as far as I can tell, the only path to success in the face of a fraudulent election was to simply refuse to leave, and cross the Rubicon (as so many have put it). The "most conservative in history" Supreme Court has made it clear that only two members have anything but contempt for the American people and their lone representative, and I do not believe the narrative some have offered that tweaking the parameters of Trump's legal argument would have meaningfully changed the outcome of that. Without incumbency, and the legitimacy that entails, a rubicon-crossing is a lot harder to pull off, especially now that every martial institution has been thoroughly purged of both the patriotic and the competent.
Great article, but "localism is a dead meme" can't square with "we need cells and cells and cells within cells."
Thats exactly what localism is. You're talking about the same thing.
Great article as usual, I would like to add in that it seems to me that upcoming Supreme Court cases seem to directly affect the effectiveness of the tools “the administrative state” uses often. For example Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo could overturn the chevron deference which could make Federal agencies go through Congress for new regulations and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America which could fuck over liberal bureaucrats funding
Leftists really do just paste essays onto images and call it a meme.