Directions and Discourse

A letter to friends during Lent

Hello Friends,

Today, I am writing out some of my unorganized thoughts on the state of things at the beginning of spring this year.

As always, I am grateful beyond words for all of you who have supported my efforts here, especially since I so infrequently upload pay-walled content (at least outside of my podcast). I am looking for a way to ensure I properly acknowledge the people who have supported me and made my entire production here possible, although it’s still unclear what the best way to do this on SubStack is.

For whatever reason, in the months leading up to Lent every year, I invariably write a long schizo think-piece that reflects my thought process at the moment, without reference to current events or current controversies. These posts are always incredibly time-consuming, lengthy, and not nearly as popular as the other content on this blog, as one can probably guess from the metrics on my latest series, The Blessings of Babel (now just 2/3 complete!). With any luck, I should be finished with the series in another week and ready to return to my usual more topical, discourse-focused writing.

Speaking of discourse, this Lent, I have decided to get off of Xitter entirely, only periodically picking up DMs until Easter Sunday. Such a departure often makes writing harder, since, as a political blogger, riposting off of various current events is the easiest way to engage a reader and to ensure new articles connect with the zeitgeist and the themes that people feel are relevant.

Thought, particularly political thought, is fundamentally dialectic. Iron sharpens iron, and you need to get pushback from other thinkers to know that your ideas are good in any meaningful way. Discourse is essential for the political writing style, and no platform delivers discourse harder and faster than Xitter. Or perhaps I should say that no platform once delivered discourse better because there certainly isn’t much real discourse to be found online anymore.

I have been off Xitter for a week now. Still, honestly, this year, I don’t feel any absence, not even when it comes to writing on hot political issues or commenting on the latest controversy, because discourse is dead, almost everywhere.

Those of you who follow my podcast have heard me talk at length about the” death of discourse”, probably more than I should have. Discourse has been dying for the better part of a year now, just as the “vibe” has been shifting. But by the time 2025 rolled around, processes in motion finally came to completion, and we entered the new “vibe” with nary an active political issue genuinely being “discussed” in the public square.

I know the objections.

Dave, what do you mean we aren’t discussing politics in the public square? I turn on the television or watch my favorite political streamers on YouTube, and all they are talking about is politics. It’s just an unending stream of controversial takes!

Well, yes. But they aren’t engaging in real political discourse. Not in the ways that I think are genuine. For one, most modern controversies are absolutely fake. It’s just a series of issues that boil down to celebrity drama, war-room reporting on events out of our control, useless political grandstanding, or hysterical hyperbole for entertainment purposes.

Even when people talk about “real politics” online, the discussions are all internal to preset political movements. We don’t examine a thought process or attempt to take the measure of ideas. Rather, we tactically argue how we can advance a given ideological movement. Certainly, talking about practical political strategy is good, and I do my fair share, but this isn’t the generative “clash of ideas” that I used to love back in the early days of 2016.

On the other hand, maybe I am missing the real conversation. Perhaps, I am still stuck in the ways of the 2010s, fixated on the old categories of politics as the real controversies have gone elsewhere.

For example, it seems clear to many people in 2025 that the left vs. right distinction is no longer active in contemporary politics. While there is certainly a case to be made that these broad political categories are eternal historically, they are not the substance of what people are concerned about in 2025. Instead, it seems that more classical political conflicts have been replaced by generational struggles: arguments over gender, family formation, technology, and class division where the common sense perspectives of the 20th century clash with the developments of the 21st.

Superficially, at least, these generational beefs dominate on Xitter or SubStack, and writing about these hot topics always does well in terms of the algorithm. It stands to reason that it is these issues, where the Boomer Truth Regime conflicts with post-Millennial dejection, where the real discussion exists. Certainly, given all the energy and attention, these are the topics that people want to resolve through dialect. However, in my personal experience, I never see any resolution or even any real learning. The way these controversies are framed is fake and optimized for cathartically pleasing an audience rather than productively advancing their understanding of the world.

Case in point, for the last six months, I have run the gauntlet of liberal-boomer-con discourse on Benjamin Boyce’s channel with very little to show for it. Just in case you hadn’t gotten enough from the Wokal Distance debate in 2023, you can see me have the same conversation in 2024, then again with Neil Shenvi in 2025, and then once more with Joel Berry from the Babylon Bee for good measure.

These conversations always go the same way and end with the same problems for the liberal side. But if you are not interested in watching 10+ hours of debate (and you probably shouldn’t be), the discourse can inevitably be reduced to a short list of questions, which, in toto, the liberals have no good answers for.

Questions like:

If the founding fathers thought their system could only work for a moral and religious people, why do you think this system will work inside of our immoral and irreligious contemporary culture?

How do you intend to re-introduce morality and religion into the population without taking control of the educational system both in the secondary schools and the university system?

Does propaganda work to change people’s ideas? If so, are only secular people allowed to use the propaganda of the total state?

If Democracy is largely a question of demographics and block voting, then won’t any one group that focuses on individualism just be overpowered politically?

Why is it bad and “racist” to define collective identity, in part, by genetic heritage? Were the founding fathers racist because they saw their own identity as, in part, racial?

If different groups of people from around the world are not interchangeable, socially or politically, why do we think they will “assimilate” when they arrive in this country?

If we are going to have boundaries to our national identity based on creed, how will this be enforced? Are we just going to give everyone in the world a test to find out who the real Americans are? Don’t you think people might lie to gain entry? Are we going to kick out the natives who don’t follow the “liberal" creed?

I could keep on going. But I don’t see the point. Invariably, these questions don’t have any good answers from the liberal camp. But they don’t need to, because the conversation never progresses. Everyone forgets the conclusions they were forced into during a conversation. No attempt to update beliefs or understanding of the challenge is made, and people invariably return to their original position.

It’s not that I have some unrealistic expectations for political discussions. I know that belligerent parties don’t meet for rational conversations subsequently modifying their Bayesian priors and tabling all moral disagreements so that both parties can support the greater good. Still, at least at one point, discourse had a purpose and function, and honest conversations could change people’s minds across a long enough time frame. I have seen it happen many times.

Ideally, what tended to happen was that, as people clarified their position, they were forced to admit certain conclusions that, in turn, carried a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. Over time, the load would weigh on a thinker, and they would adjust their worldview accordingly.

This was certainly the process of my own intellectual development over the years, first walking away from atheism, and then liberalism, because the assertions these belief systems implied were not in keeping with what I saw in my life and what I believed at a deeper level. This was also the process that most young right-wingers followed when they took “the red pill”. We discarded our mainstream political beliefs over the long term because we just couldn’t reconcile them with the reality occurring every day, right in front of our noses. Belief systems can fail, and humans learn best from failure.

However, I don’t think that such learning is happening with the current late-stage liberal boomers.

When they deny the fact that propaganda works or that America is decidedly a post-Christian country, they don’t internalize their denial and then ask themselves later how a Christian America, totally immune from the impact of propaganda could produce a society that looks like the USA in 2025. When they assert that the United States has a purely credal identity and that this creed is based entirely on the Protestant Christian faith, it doesn’t stop them from later accepting bland liberal platitudes from atheists and non-Christians as the real basis for American identity. There doesn’t seem to be any learning, or even any intellectual pause, just a repetition of tropes in the same familiar patterns.

A similar disconnect happens within the perennial questions about dating and gender so popular online. Once you get past common sense advice for young men (and to a lesser extent young women) these types of controversies always get stuck in the same futile avenues. Fundamentally, the problem with modern dating and family formation derives from a set of asymmetrical incentives and behaviors between men and women that need to be handled at a systematic level. Furthermore, to the extent that this problem might be solved through democratic means, such a solution would require participation and sacrifice on the part of both men and women.

Everyone, at some level, understands this reality about both the crisis in gender relations and its necessary solutions. But no online discourse will ever bring such a solution closer to realization.

The reality is, even though both women and men love nothing more than to talk about the “gender war”, neither men nor women enjoy talking about it productively. For instance, most men who obsess about the “woman problem” tend to eschew the more profitable solutions of pursuing self-improvement or (critically) organizing collectively for productive political change. Whereas, conversely, the fairer sex, seems strangely allergic to addressing the problem realistically, always sliding back to the default feminist narrative of “men victimizing women” even if they acknowledge the unaddressed systematic issues driving the problem.

To be fair, we could talk forever about the mathematical realities of the gender wars online and the collapse of the dating world, we could create an endless number of diagrams and cute explanations about this reality as we see it, but no one ever internalizes the dynamics and takes another step forward in the discourse because there is no market for discourse, there is only a market for complaining and catharsis. There can’t be any growth because people don’t want growth, they want the same narrative repeated, so after every conversation on “liberalism”, “gender”, “politics” or “religion” we necessarily have to forget the things that we should have learned, “reset the chat-bot”, and then arrive at the conversation fresh the next day with our original positions and talking points.

The “Nothing Ever Happens” meme is correct, at least as it applies to discourse online.

For the last year, since the “vibe shift”, political conversations have arrived at an inescapable stand-still, less because the various political factions don’t know what to do, and more because they do know what to do, but also know that those next steps are difficult and contain little entertainment value online.

You can outline the examples from each of the various parties still active on the political scene in 2025.

The classical leftist socialists need to demonstrate that they aren’t fake, “fakeness” being the (justified) accusation that slowly discredited almost all progressive movements between 2015 and 2025. Sincere progressives must demonstrate that they can break from 20th-century anti-white revenge fantasies and self-destructive sexual degeneration. They need to engage with their critics. They need to work with real working-class people as they are and become invested in their communities. Perhaps start a commune?

The liberal boomer cons need to take ownership of their situation as it exists in 21st-century America which is definitively not returning to the culture and politics of the late 1980s anytime soon. Conservatives must come to terms with their losses, acknowledge the new realities for young people in the modern world, and assume some measure of responsibility for the collective interests that represent their values. You would think that the Trump revolution would have woken these types up, but some people still need to learn that the era of being beautiful losers is over. Comfortable boomer outrage slop is well past its expiration date.

Meanwhile, red-pill manosphere types need to do something that goes beyond complaining. I certainly wouldn’t be the only person who has remarked on how static this community has been, which, decades after taking the “red pill”, is still talking itself in circles, complaining about female hypergamy, with the seeming expectation that someone else (perhaps women?) will fix the problem. Of course, in theory, these complaints are supposedly in service of some second-order aim to pursue personal improvement or secure political power, but the other foot never seems to drop and many of these same guys are still revisiting the same complaints, ten years on. Pretty much anyone could create a list of things that they probably should do, but breaking this pattern would be the obvious first step.

Conversely, the post-right, post-leftist feminist types need to decide if they want to join a productive political conversation or just hand-wring over the sorry state of society. Granted, a lot of the grievances they discuss are real. But does engaging in grievance-centered politics fix anything? I am not saying that this group needs to take ownership of the problems that have occurred in the world of gender discourse, but would it be possible for the post-right feminists to be more solution-oriented, focus less on telling us how everything went wrong, and more on telling us a believable story about how someone could set things right.

And finally, to speak for myself and the various groups that I associate with, the realist political right needs to do more building across the board. We need to be spearheading organized collectives for the fostering of community, art, and political power. Certainly, we have been taking a lot of first steps, developing new organizations, starting conferences, art collectives, and even the beginnings of some intentional living arrangements. But so much more is needed, and I think few people have grasped the enormity of the task ahead of us.

And isn’t some similar challenge currently confronting Christians like myself? The challenge isn’t to simply defeat the modern heresy or remove useless Boomer-brained leaders intent on grounding the church in the politics of the 20th century. The real challenge is to build a church that can be worthy of the sacraments and to live an actual Christian life. This is a much more daunting challenge than even regime change because I have no idea what this would look like in the modern world.

For this reason, I have been drawn to the recent work of Paul Kingsnorth, especially his quite controversial takes about Christianity being fundamentally anti-civilization.

I know that many people have problems with Kingsnorth’s perspectives, specifically his feelings that Christians should not support the political aims of societal restoration, as necessary as that might seem in the modern world. And in many ways, I share in the critics’ skepticism towards Kingsnorth’s anti-political stance. We have all heard decades of insincere tirades against Christianity in politics made by bad-faith atheists. Moreover, there has been no shortage of theoretical Quaker Christian politics that never go further than denouncing right-wingers for their non-nice opinions and supporting the status quo liberal regime. Furthermore, on a personal level, I always had a particular aversion to Christian political quietism, especially when I hear it coming from people who haven’t joined a mendicant order or who aren’t already part of an anabaptist community.

Nevertheless, in the case of Kingsnorth, I can’t help sympathizing with his observation that our main focus should be on living a real Christian life, less on trying to recover civilizational artifacts that might already be dead. There is a core wisdom here that seems to be the only way out of the “death of discourse” in 2025. To rediscover life, we have to be more concerned with its ultimate end than in its mere continuation, and sometimes accepting death is part of the process of rebirth.

Can Christians turn their efforts to restoring civilization, rebuilding society, or fighting against forces of degeneration, even the degeneration of political discourse?

On some level certainly. Christians must always be building things and restoring the world around them in the image of Christ. Those things will include order, law, politics, and the tools of thought that go along with them. I suppose that constitutes restoring “Christian civilization”, and even “Christian discourse”, at some level. However, in all our efforts, there is a necessary ordering of intention,

Here I return to the heart of Kingsnorth’s feeling that the direction of Christian efforts should be fixated on the ends": the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Christians must treat our civilizational means as secondary. That’s always the problem with trying to “restore civilization”. We are trying to repair something that is fundamentally organic by tactically replacing its lost components. However, the mere application of technique cannot fix an entity that by its essential nature grows, as a second-order effect, from the pursuit of higher spiritual aims.

All Civilization is built on belief and belief must be built on Sainthood. But no one wants to do what is necessary to be a saint.

And isn’t some similar problem plaguing the world of discourse and content creation online?

We are all in the business of producing content, it’s how we get paid and how we earn a reputation for being a useful resource in the community. Of course, we try to make the content good and align it with our religious convictions, but this is a secondary motion following the overarching demand to create content, and in the end, it just becomes posts for the algorithm, slop for the slop mill, content for the content maw. This is a challenging reality considering I don’t know how to act on it, but one that I am thinking about, increasingly during this Lenten season.

Perhaps this signals a different direction in my approach to writing and video-making. I certainly feel like I have many things to say, but I want to make sure that I am saying the things that people need to hear. I want to have conversations, but I want to make sure that those are the conversations that matter. Content for the sake of driving social media engagement doesn’t make sense anymore, at least on the other side of the “vibe shift” we have experienced.

I can’t say what this means quite yet. Certainly, I have my projects in the dock which include developing more community-building resources, speaking at several upcoming events, and doing more writing. But there also seems to be a need for new directions, and I am very curious to hear from you, my readers, what you think is needed in these strange new days.

As always, I wish you and your kin many blessings during this Lenten season,

-D.G.