"Even those of us who have walked away from this ideological insanity, still carry the trace poisons we were raised around." This hit home. I am a first generation immigrant and had the instinct to seek out American culture. Instead of a real culture, which you get from meeting real people, I got fed a pre-packaged corporate vision of America through pop culture and schools. I presumed that was just American culture. I now know that it is exactly as I've described it: a fabrication. And I know which path is the authentic path for me to take to engage with true American culture and at the very least give my future children a chance to not have to grapple with identity constantly and know exactly what kind of people they are expected to be from the get go. However, that pre-fabricated pop culture version of America is so pernicious, I feel that it has damaged my soul irreparably. The only time I feel at peace is at church. As soon as I leave those doors, I see the immensity of the task in front of me and what must be done and my normie brain just wants to go back to fantasy football, beer and wings and video games, the dreaded man cave. I have cultivated such trivial vice in my soul for so long it has made me weak; it is a toxin. And to this toxin, virtue is an antidote, but one that causes a violent revulsions when taken. I return to being slowly poisoned rather than face the future. On and on the loop goes. I pray that even if I never cure the poison in my blood, that it does not pass on to my children. Perhaps they will be a part of the future aristocracy that you speak of.
"I have cultivated such trivial vice in my shoulder for so long it has made me weak" - powerful and I'm right there with you. Hoping to save my children from as much of that toxin as is feasible while having been marinated most if my life.
Refreshing! I have never had the right words for what you describe, Red America not seeing the world as it is, no seeing our predicaments. Good stout hearts with dim eyes. Thank you for this.
I love your thoughts on the hicklib. Having been one myself at one point I know all too well how to map that path. One thing, though, that I would add: the fact that the right’s political and media organs are in the hands of people every bit as callow, un-trialed, and smarmy as the left, but lamer. This really pushes a lot of people away who have hopes of something substantial. I’m not a Bernie fan, but I’ll take a white-haired Jeremiah over some ken doll like Madison Cawthorn or Matt Gaetz.
Speaking as a Red American, and a Missourian specifically, maybe I can shed some light on why Red America sticks to old, incoherent talking points and dead ideologies. Red America intuitively senses that its had the rug swept out from underneath their ways of life. We don't know why, or how, but we're a salt-of-the-Earth people and we know that we've been scammed even if we were naïve enough to believe the Nigerian prince story in the first place. We were once the beating heart of a super power. Our factories supplied its arms and consumer goods. Our towns and cities supplied its soldiers. Our crops fed the world. Our natural resources birthed industries that made the world envious. Ours was a place of prideful humility. We knew that we were the beating heart of an empire even if those ignorant fools in East Coast universities and Washington DC didn't know it.
Then everything changed, and rapidly at that. The fall of the USSR, ironically, turned out to be our downfall. We never knew the day our hated enemy died, the day all of us prayed for fervently, would be the day we in turn were stabbed in the back. Red America was the sacrificial lamb used to birth the American Imperium. Suddenly the country didn't need us. The factories disappeared. The state didn't need as many soldiers anymore. Our crops still feed the world, but foreign corpos bought out the family farm in droves. When the factories disappeared, our natural resources were no longer needed. Our place at the heart of the empire was gone in an instant, and Red America has spent 30+ years nursing the most horrific case of whip lash imaginable. So we clung to what we knew: God, Country, and the Family, even as we grew poorer, weaker, and less relevant. Even as our world crumbled around us many throughout the 2000s and 2010s Red Staters still could not comprehend the fact that they had been replaced with something completely antithetical to their values.
I sense the beginnings of a change though. Trump, then COVID changed a lot of views on politics out here. I think many Red Staters are starting to get over their whip lash, but are now grappling with what that actually means. Red America will continue to cling to old talking points for comfort and safety for the meantime, even as they outgrow them
If a comment theorizing about why your people act the way you do makes you sick, you need to go and talk with your neighbors more often. There is nothing wrong with being a humble people of small means. Most people throughout history lived this way. Only egomaniacs and idiots spit on the little people for being the little people. Those same people keep society running.
Then you exist in an abstract cloud with no connection to the people who live across the street. This dooms any effort you make in the political realm. Your pride blinds you to the fact that you’re a single individual with little to no effect on the political realm. Your vote is near useless. Your voice is one among millions. Your mythologized “Aryan/European” ancestors have been reduced to fantasy instead of people. Revere the people in all their glory, small means included.
I think curtis yavin is silent for so long for one single reason: he figured it out and none of you (people i pay to read) did. Democracy/Republic is not normal. It is a transitory form of government that always decays into madness, before returning to monarchy/dictatorship. There is also another thing Curtis figured out: Most people are sheep. If the elites enforce a worldview, that is the worldview the society will operate by. There is no saving the republican or democrat. He is no even important politically. He is a peasant. What i hope more of y'all people i enjoy reading would do is focus on fishing for open minded possible soon to ve elites. Thats the entire point of the dissident writing community on a political level. Y'all won't fix the pesantry, but you can reach the nobles.
And what benefit is Trump or Elon Musk to your great nation besides looking edgy and cool?? You sound like the type that gets wet when someone spites the left, but does not consider the possibility that these "right wing" "heroes" are not doing anything to save you. Our should i say, to save us, since my country is a puppet of yours and every shit-lib movement that sprouts from California ends up here corrupting the minds and souls of our youth. Please stop exporting woke ideology and we will consider stop exporting job stealers. deal?
As for Monarchy vs Republic debate, there is none to be had. I have a better chance at convincing an ape than a person who lived his entire life in America that Monarchy is the natural form of human government. Oligarchy as the natural form is programmed into you from birth and until the US truly starts to collapse no one will question it's founding ideas.
PS: Read about Dred Scott case (1857) and you'll notice the US is not even following it's founding formula.
Some of the oldest texts in the world speak of rulers *serving* and genuinely *caring* for their people. Throughout the ages, people have energetically followed (and even died) for leaders that actually *love* and *lead.* Yet every civilization forgets about this noble and beautiful ideal eventually.
I'm glad, though, that this ideal can be revitalized at any point in time if we ourselves are brave and honorable, and teach these lessons to those we are given charge over, be it employees or children.
I had a conversation with a leftist co-worker. Unlike most, he is smart, dynamic, and a go-getter. The conversation moved to discussing a co-worker not present who is the most unpassable woman every conceived. Sorry dude, you're a great developer, but no woman. I could just sense the pain in the guy's voice as he used the "she" pronoun.
His main flaw is the fear of looking "low status", and will spout any nonsense to come across as one of the elite, and he will say insane platitudes to keep that status. It's all a performative act, and he would change his script in a moment if the social winds changed.
The right needs, far more than more principled bullet points, an aggressive and confident counterculture that is only implicitly reactionary. The Longhouse meme is the perfect resemblance of the enemy, with the shrew schoolmarms being the uncool enemy, and the smirking, joyful chads the good guys. This narrative is as American as apple pie, and screams "high status" culture.
Bukele is a prime example of an energetic, dynamic man who laughs as the scolds telling him he can't do X. Just look at the guy and the people opposing him and it's clear who people will viscerally congregate to. The Rightist will follow for his values, the leftist will conveniently forget what he believed yesterday and get on the train while it's still hip.
I want to be optimistic here, but I really am not seeing the rise of a new man in our current time. A new aristocracy has to come from the young generations, but are millenials and zoomers really what we are looking for?
Maybe things have to get much worse before such individuals arise.
This, your lovely essay, has me thinking about the dichotomy between numbness and pain. It seems that death--any death really, but namely the death of a global empire--does not occur without pain. Yet it seems there is a sort of numbness... which you seem to be describing... which is holding us in stasis. It is related to cowardice and having a "too small hearts." It seems that numbness, among the red as well as the blue, is somehow sought continually to counteract the pain... To avoid pain has become the objective. Yet this stands in the way of any true loyalty to any new aristocracy or new heroism. It is an abysmal situation. It prevents us even from finding "the grave to fall into." Without which there will be no resurrection.
What I see here is that the dichotomy is false. The counter to pain is not numbness. So, what is it?
Your writing points to something else required for leadership. I have my answers, but wonder what of yours? What is the "work" to be done?
One of the failures of red America, is it’s continued identification with the empire and not separate from it. I’ve been deconstructing that position for 7 years now, and that is the problem I see. Traditional, red America has hooked its identity up to its very enemy in its faith, politics, culture, and more. The uncoupling is not easy, but it needs to be done.
We are both apostates, you from blue America, and myself from red America. I find your criticism of red America being completely accurate.
Also, your writing is inspiring. I greatly appreciate it!
The solution I see cannot be discussed online. However we do not need a ruling class at all. We need to assert the power of a United States like the one the founders intended. Separation of business and state, term limits, stern penalties for receipt of money, opportunity or other perks to influence votes, an Article V convention of states.
I began to read the other comments after carefully reading this piece, which is well-written, clearly heartfelt and it exudes some agony. And it is simply wrong on several points. I don’t need to read more.
Americans may, generally, have an idea who is actually the enemy, at least on the red, conservative side. It is not the blue, liberal side. Few have placed blame where it belongs, on those who have so successfully amplified our differences that the chasm between is, likely, so wide and deep that it can no longer be bridged.
The Civil War Union’s strategy was to divide and then conquer the South. Dividing was the first priority, but it was physical division they sought. This is ideological and political divison, all the more devastating because even the victory of one side over the other can not end it.
The Germans orchestrated two world wars trying to assert their superiority and authority. Because one manipulating German engineer saw a means to conquer the primary cause of his country’s defeat, from within, could buy his way through its unprotected, corrupt and porous government using funds from the corporate powers that arose from it, because he could martial its media, corrupt and infiltrate the United Nations and harness its influence, and because that acquisition, the most influential, richest and militarily most powerful nation in the world, would enable his nation to at last bring the world into line, he has labored tirelessly at that for five decades.
The WEF website is full of articles lauding German leadership, German technology, German superiority. The ideals set forth are from corporate and financial and business types, not aristocrats. They have every intention of declaring international emergency, instituting UN control and then, through the partnership already brokered with the UN, step in front of all other authorities to “solve” the problems it has delibetately created.
"Even those of us who have walked away from this ideological insanity, still carry the trace poisons we were raised around." This hit home. I am a first generation immigrant and had the instinct to seek out American culture. Instead of a real culture, which you get from meeting real people, I got fed a pre-packaged corporate vision of America through pop culture and schools. I presumed that was just American culture. I now know that it is exactly as I've described it: a fabrication. And I know which path is the authentic path for me to take to engage with true American culture and at the very least give my future children a chance to not have to grapple with identity constantly and know exactly what kind of people they are expected to be from the get go. However, that pre-fabricated pop culture version of America is so pernicious, I feel that it has damaged my soul irreparably. The only time I feel at peace is at church. As soon as I leave those doors, I see the immensity of the task in front of me and what must be done and my normie brain just wants to go back to fantasy football, beer and wings and video games, the dreaded man cave. I have cultivated such trivial vice in my soul for so long it has made me weak; it is a toxin. And to this toxin, virtue is an antidote, but one that causes a violent revulsions when taken. I return to being slowly poisoned rather than face the future. On and on the loop goes. I pray that even if I never cure the poison in my blood, that it does not pass on to my children. Perhaps they will be a part of the future aristocracy that you speak of.
"I have cultivated such trivial vice in my shoulder for so long it has made me weak" - powerful and I'm right there with you. Hoping to save my children from as much of that toxin as is feasible while having been marinated most if my life.
Refreshing! I have never had the right words for what you describe, Red America not seeing the world as it is, no seeing our predicaments. Good stout hearts with dim eyes. Thank you for this.
I love your thoughts on the hicklib. Having been one myself at one point I know all too well how to map that path. One thing, though, that I would add: the fact that the right’s political and media organs are in the hands of people every bit as callow, un-trialed, and smarmy as the left, but lamer. This really pushes a lot of people away who have hopes of something substantial. I’m not a Bernie fan, but I’ll take a white-haired Jeremiah over some ken doll like Madison Cawthorn or Matt Gaetz.
Really love your work, Dave.
Speaking as a Red American, and a Missourian specifically, maybe I can shed some light on why Red America sticks to old, incoherent talking points and dead ideologies. Red America intuitively senses that its had the rug swept out from underneath their ways of life. We don't know why, or how, but we're a salt-of-the-Earth people and we know that we've been scammed even if we were naïve enough to believe the Nigerian prince story in the first place. We were once the beating heart of a super power. Our factories supplied its arms and consumer goods. Our towns and cities supplied its soldiers. Our crops fed the world. Our natural resources birthed industries that made the world envious. Ours was a place of prideful humility. We knew that we were the beating heart of an empire even if those ignorant fools in East Coast universities and Washington DC didn't know it.
Then everything changed, and rapidly at that. The fall of the USSR, ironically, turned out to be our downfall. We never knew the day our hated enemy died, the day all of us prayed for fervently, would be the day we in turn were stabbed in the back. Red America was the sacrificial lamb used to birth the American Imperium. Suddenly the country didn't need us. The factories disappeared. The state didn't need as many soldiers anymore. Our crops still feed the world, but foreign corpos bought out the family farm in droves. When the factories disappeared, our natural resources were no longer needed. Our place at the heart of the empire was gone in an instant, and Red America has spent 30+ years nursing the most horrific case of whip lash imaginable. So we clung to what we knew: God, Country, and the Family, even as we grew poorer, weaker, and less relevant. Even as our world crumbled around us many throughout the 2000s and 2010s Red Staters still could not comprehend the fact that they had been replaced with something completely antithetical to their values.
I sense the beginnings of a change though. Trump, then COVID changed a lot of views on politics out here. I think many Red Staters are starting to get over their whip lash, but are now grappling with what that actually means. Red America will continue to cling to old talking points for comfort and safety for the meantime, even as they outgrow them
If a comment theorizing about why your people act the way you do makes you sick, you need to go and talk with your neighbors more often. There is nothing wrong with being a humble people of small means. Most people throughout history lived this way. Only egomaniacs and idiots spit on the little people for being the little people. Those same people keep society running.
Then you exist in an abstract cloud with no connection to the people who live across the street. This dooms any effort you make in the political realm. Your pride blinds you to the fact that you’re a single individual with little to no effect on the political realm. Your vote is near useless. Your voice is one among millions. Your mythologized “Aryan/European” ancestors have been reduced to fantasy instead of people. Revere the people in all their glory, small means included.
I think curtis yavin is silent for so long for one single reason: he figured it out and none of you (people i pay to read) did. Democracy/Republic is not normal. It is a transitory form of government that always decays into madness, before returning to monarchy/dictatorship. There is also another thing Curtis figured out: Most people are sheep. If the elites enforce a worldview, that is the worldview the society will operate by. There is no saving the republican or democrat. He is no even important politically. He is a peasant. What i hope more of y'all people i enjoy reading would do is focus on fishing for open minded possible soon to ve elites. Thats the entire point of the dissident writing community on a political level. Y'all won't fix the pesantry, but you can reach the nobles.
And what benefit is Trump or Elon Musk to your great nation besides looking edgy and cool?? You sound like the type that gets wet when someone spites the left, but does not consider the possibility that these "right wing" "heroes" are not doing anything to save you. Our should i say, to save us, since my country is a puppet of yours and every shit-lib movement that sprouts from California ends up here corrupting the minds and souls of our youth. Please stop exporting woke ideology and we will consider stop exporting job stealers. deal?
As for Monarchy vs Republic debate, there is none to be had. I have a better chance at convincing an ape than a person who lived his entire life in America that Monarchy is the natural form of human government. Oligarchy as the natural form is programmed into you from birth and until the US truly starts to collapse no one will question it's founding ideas.
PS: Read about Dred Scott case (1857) and you'll notice the US is not even following it's founding formula.
Some of the oldest texts in the world speak of rulers *serving* and genuinely *caring* for their people. Throughout the ages, people have energetically followed (and even died) for leaders that actually *love* and *lead.* Yet every civilization forgets about this noble and beautiful ideal eventually.
I'm glad, though, that this ideal can be revitalized at any point in time if we ourselves are brave and honorable, and teach these lessons to those we are given charge over, be it employees or children.
I had a conversation with a leftist co-worker. Unlike most, he is smart, dynamic, and a go-getter. The conversation moved to discussing a co-worker not present who is the most unpassable woman every conceived. Sorry dude, you're a great developer, but no woman. I could just sense the pain in the guy's voice as he used the "she" pronoun.
His main flaw is the fear of looking "low status", and will spout any nonsense to come across as one of the elite, and he will say insane platitudes to keep that status. It's all a performative act, and he would change his script in a moment if the social winds changed.
The right needs, far more than more principled bullet points, an aggressive and confident counterculture that is only implicitly reactionary. The Longhouse meme is the perfect resemblance of the enemy, with the shrew schoolmarms being the uncool enemy, and the smirking, joyful chads the good guys. This narrative is as American as apple pie, and screams "high status" culture.
Bukele is a prime example of an energetic, dynamic man who laughs as the scolds telling him he can't do X. Just look at the guy and the people opposing him and it's clear who people will viscerally congregate to. The Rightist will follow for his values, the leftist will conveniently forget what he believed yesterday and get on the train while it's still hip.
I want to be optimistic here, but I really am not seeing the rise of a new man in our current time. A new aristocracy has to come from the young generations, but are millenials and zoomers really what we are looking for?
Maybe things have to get much worse before such individuals arise.
Thank you. I can dig it.
This, your lovely essay, has me thinking about the dichotomy between numbness and pain. It seems that death--any death really, but namely the death of a global empire--does not occur without pain. Yet it seems there is a sort of numbness... which you seem to be describing... which is holding us in stasis. It is related to cowardice and having a "too small hearts." It seems that numbness, among the red as well as the blue, is somehow sought continually to counteract the pain... To avoid pain has become the objective. Yet this stands in the way of any true loyalty to any new aristocracy or new heroism. It is an abysmal situation. It prevents us even from finding "the grave to fall into." Without which there will be no resurrection.
What I see here is that the dichotomy is false. The counter to pain is not numbness. So, what is it?
Your writing points to something else required for leadership. I have my answers, but wonder what of yours? What is the "work" to be done?
One of the failures of red America, is it’s continued identification with the empire and not separate from it. I’ve been deconstructing that position for 7 years now, and that is the problem I see. Traditional, red America has hooked its identity up to its very enemy in its faith, politics, culture, and more. The uncoupling is not easy, but it needs to be done.
We are both apostates, you from blue America, and myself from red America. I find your criticism of red America being completely accurate.
Also, your writing is inspiring. I greatly appreciate it!
I offer you a starting point. There are already 25 states of the required 34 on board, and a Herculean effort in process to stop it.
https://conventionofstates.com
The solution I see cannot be discussed online. However we do not need a ruling class at all. We need to assert the power of a United States like the one the founders intended. Separation of business and state, term limits, stern penalties for receipt of money, opportunity or other perks to influence votes, an Article V convention of states.
And election reforms.
I began to read the other comments after carefully reading this piece, which is well-written, clearly heartfelt and it exudes some agony. And it is simply wrong on several points. I don’t need to read more.
Americans may, generally, have an idea who is actually the enemy, at least on the red, conservative side. It is not the blue, liberal side. Few have placed blame where it belongs, on those who have so successfully amplified our differences that the chasm between is, likely, so wide and deep that it can no longer be bridged.
The Civil War Union’s strategy was to divide and then conquer the South. Dividing was the first priority, but it was physical division they sought. This is ideological and political divison, all the more devastating because even the victory of one side over the other can not end it.
The Germans orchestrated two world wars trying to assert their superiority and authority. Because one manipulating German engineer saw a means to conquer the primary cause of his country’s defeat, from within, could buy his way through its unprotected, corrupt and porous government using funds from the corporate powers that arose from it, because he could martial its media, corrupt and infiltrate the United Nations and harness its influence, and because that acquisition, the most influential, richest and militarily most powerful nation in the world, would enable his nation to at last bring the world into line, he has labored tirelessly at that for five decades.
The WEF website is full of articles lauding German leadership, German technology, German superiority. The ideals set forth are from corporate and financial and business types, not aristocrats. They have every intention of declaring international emergency, instituting UN control and then, through the partnership already brokered with the UN, step in front of all other authorities to “solve” the problems it has delibetately created.
Apparently, by your piece you are unaware.
Look and see for yourself.
https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/04/the-u-n-is-planning-to-seize-global-emergency-powers-with-bidens-support/
https://weforum.ent.box.com/s/rdlgipawkjxi2vdaidw8npbtyach2qbt
RFK Jr.
There I have my doubts, it is like proposing a Jewish Führer to make then NSDAP less antisemitic.