I came across this image on reddit today. The post was titled “Feeling of impending doom??” but the screenshot is from a comment on a youtube video.

I posted about the comment on Twitter and got very strong reactions. Many posters identified with this feeling and I want to discuss this.

Today in March of 2024 we’re in a particular moment of history. In the background the various slow-motion crises of our age have been steadily pitching up like an over-tuned violin string. Nothing extreme, just everything annoyingly sharp and a steadily rising whine. Rent is up. Wheeeeeeee. Groceries cost more. Eeeeeeiiii. Global warming. Eeeeeeeee. Israel Palestine. Eeeeeeeeeeeiiii. Terrorist attack in Russia. Eeeeeeeeeiiiiii. Trump is up in the polls. Eeeeeeeeiiiii. Can’t get a job. Eeeeeee.

Normies are on edge. Something is about to snap.

It’s not enough to unplug from social media. Some of these things, like Israel/Palestine are really (should be) nothingburgers, and of course the media apparatus is precisely designed to keep you locked in and constantly at a point of maximum excitement: this is going to provoke a lot of general background anxiety. But this is different. There are real looming problems that can’t be turned away from: decline in living standards, rise of crime. The slow collapse of the liberal world order. Airplanes falling out of the sky. Loneliness. These make a dark matter of occurrence that is all the more anxiety-producing because it can’t be well perceived or understood through typical media channels. They can only be experienced first-hand but vaguely and indirectly, like a titanic shift in current in the depths below placid waters.

So I don’t dismiss this feeling as age-related or as the consequence of social media addiction. There are deep cycles at work. And the feeling is widespread.

Add to this the coming election. I am not saying this anxiety is specifically about Trump; it is much larger than that. However, in these next few months the election will be the lens for these anxieties, in that it will gather and reflect and intensify them. It’s a one-way gate. This particular historical in-between moment is real.

In the period we occupy now, we are waiting. It seems that every factor has been precisely balanced to amplify the feeling of uncertainty. Trump could be arrested before the election, but he could also delay, deny, and appeal his way over the finish line. He could fined a billion dollars, but he could also cash out his multi-billion dollar twitter clone. He could again be locked out by an election fortification, or Biden’s unpopularity could sweep him into office with an un-cheatable margin. He could even win and sweep out his enemies from DC, or his second presidency could be another ineffectual tangle. Anything is still possible, and either outcome is extreme. The stakes are higher this time, we’re in late-game poker. The sky is lurid red.

Add to this a sense of bracing for COVID: The Sequel. Even normies understand in their hindbrains that the exceptions of the COVID crisis were linked to the election. What’s next in store for us as we gear up for 2024? We whisper: what could possibly be more exceptional than a pandemic? A war?

So everyone waits. There’s nothing to be done. In a few months we’ll be back in the flow of history, but right now, the winning move is to wait and see. Business leaders go on CNN and make some cautiously balanced statements about perhaps preparing for a Trump presidency. The fed remains ambiguous and non-committal. DC apparatchiks hold off on plans to move either inside or outside the beltway. RW twitter descends to bickering. The culture’s stuck.

It’s like some terribly anxious play where the party’s over and the guests are trapped, but the murderer hasn’t struck yet in Act 2 so there’s nothing more to do than pour another drink, watch the heat lightning, and pray for the storm. I am waiting too. For something is coming.

You might have noticed that I’ve been missing for the last few months. Essentially, I’ve taken on a new project that demands the majority of my free time. It’s not anything earth-changing, but for me personally, this is akin to slaying my Nemean lion. For now I have to keep this quest private, but I’m sure that one day I’ll be able to…

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This week I published a guest post with , who very kindly made his platform available for news about this important case. Head on over to Karlstack to read it there:

Karlstack

Twitter Poster Railroaded for Free Speech by Biden’s DOJ

If you’re familiar with the case of Douglass Mackey, you know that he was the man behind the famous pro-Trump account “Ricky Vaughn,” which was influential in the 2016 election. Mere days after Biden took office, he was charged by the DOJ with the crime of “election interference” for sharing memes online…

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3 years ago · 46 likes · 2 comments · Paulos

Last year I wrote a piece about Medusa. If you haven’t read it, it’s an exploration of the gorgon myth in relation to modern depictions of Medusa, and the implications for society this symbology represents.

I’ll reveal to you now though, that while it might seem like I was writing about ancient myth, I was really writing about the New York Times.

Think about a monster that:

• Does not possess any real power of its own, but mobilizes others by setting acceptable opinions

• Can freeze a target merely by centering it in its journalistic gaze

• Can ostracize, defame, or destroy

• Has extensive powers of surveillance

• Masks the power of others, presents a face for other interests

• Enjoys all these powers through accumulated prestige

So the Medusa myth was a device for understanding mechanisms of control in oligarchic societies legitimized by propaganda rather than capacity for force.

The media today is the Medusa. If you try to do anything notable outside the bounds of the longhouse; organize a local club, start a business, publish a blog, launch a political campaign, even post memes, you can be sure that once your project reaches a certain size you will have journalists knocking on your door. They might be employed by a media outlet or they might even be “freelance researchers” who make it their business to dox and harass those they disagree with. Once put on the target list, you can be followed up with by any busybodies who take their cue from the national news media. A profile piece for these people is an invitation to dig further, like being marked with “ATTACK” pheromones by the first few scout ants. Once on the target list, you can be sued, investigated and fined by local officials, or hauled before Congress, you can have people show up outside your house, and you can be arrested or even invaded.

As for the outright evil projected into the world by the media, insanities that no one could even contemplate unless they were hammered into people’s ears and eyeballs 24/7, consider that no social initiative of the last several decades could have been possible without their tireless efforts. For these people, their platform is just a means to propagandize the masses, nothing more. Their sins are so substantial that they actually make up the entire superstructure of that thing we’re fighting against, a lurching construct whose substance is entirely lies.

Taking Down A Monster

I want us to destroy the power of the media and put its head in a bag for our own use, the same way Perseus did to Medusa.

So how to resist something like this? You could use the power of the media against itself, like how Trump hacked their obsession with him into waves of free coverage, which he rode all the way to the Presidency. You could adopt anonymity and build networks that are resistant to scrutiny, in the way that many online communities operate. You could launch a moonshot legal project to try to get New York Times v. Sullivan overturned and finally make it easier to sue the media for libel, which as a result of this decision is uniquely difficult to do successfully. All of these are examples of interesting approaches to dealing with the media, but today we’re looking at the media’s lifeblood: advertising.

There’s so much f*ing advertising in the United States it’s unreal:

• Direct spending on ads topped $330 billion in 2022

• Advertising supported $7.1 trillion in sales activity in 2020

• 20% percent of total U.S. economic output is driven by ad spending

When you consider how much of the consumer economy is driven by sales of mass goods, these numbers start to make sense. Since the 50’s, the American consumer goods market has been all about MASS. Mass produced goods distributed in BIG supermarkets and sold through mass media like radio and TV with mass advertising, to a massive and wealthy public, the biggest market in the world bar none. Ad dollars were (and still are) the lifeblood that keeps the American economy pumping.

For many decades most of that massive river of ad dollars went directly to media: newspapers, radio and TV; they were the ones with the reach to propagandize the masses into buying products. Where before journalism had been rather seedy, characterized by sensationalism and muckraking (much like Con Inc. media today), the mainstream media was able to use this new wash of ad dollars to build eminent newsrooms that succeeded in earning the public’s trust. Meanwhile competing voices were nowhere to be heard: distribution was too costly, advertisers wouldn’t spend with small outlets, and in some cases inconvenient voices could simply be forced off the air. Life was good for big media. At the apex of their power they even unseated a President.

Then came the internet. The aughts saw the rise of Big Tech like Google and Facebook, which also made their money off of ads and actually managed to peel off a significant chunk of ad dollars away from legacy media, thereby earning their eternal enmity; which is why Mark Zuckerberg was hauled into Congress after the 2016 election, and Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for protection.

Since then, some media organizations like the New York Times have managed to build a subscription revenue base (in the future we’ll all be Substackers) but media revenues are still driven overwhelmingly by ad dollars. More than two-thirds (69%) of all domestic news revenue is still derived from advertising.

The NYT is uniquely prestigious, which allows it to win more subscriptions than other media institutions. Everyone else relies on ad dollars for the majority of revenue.

So here’s the circular media cycle: brands advertise in media outlets, those ads influence purchasing decisions and convince consumers to buy products from brands, and brands re-invest that money to launch new products and new ad campaigns, and the circle continues. There are ancillary flows as well: when brands spend on ads, they also they pay ad agencies to create campaigns. They spend on lobbying too.

This cycle can be interrupted in a number of ways. The recent Bud Light boycotts are a perfect example. Consumers, outraged over an ad, stopped buying from the Bud Light brand, thereby effectively destroying it. As of today, Bud Light ranks 15th among American beers, a precipitous fall from the top slot it enjoyed as the number one American beer brand as recently as six months ago.

While it seems that it’s sometimes possible to bring down a brand, it’s harder to do the same with media for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are many more brands than top media outlets, which gives big media enormous resiliency. Secondly, the media is much more influential than any one brand and has more capabilities; it can directly advocate for itself, boost supporters, and attack opponents, all with the appearance of objectivity. Just like with Perseus and Medusa, direct attacks are unlikely to be profitable.

Diverting a River

What if we could divert those ad dollars to us instead? In the case of a monster too powerful to approach head-on, the best strategy is to starve it. Not only would this build up our resources, it would deny the media ad dollars as well. As writing at The Carousel has so often pointed out, the American consumer base is fractured and ready to quit their old brands, they look for alternatives. 75 million people voted for Trump. How many more are health skeptics, homesteaders, crypto heads, “domestic extremists?” Anywhere there’s a fault line, that’s a consumer group that’s ready to drop out of the mainstream. We can sell to these people and take money away from our enemies.

Publications like Man’s World, Passage Press, IM 1776, and Revolver News are impressively successful alternative media projects. So too are the constellation of Substacks, and the small army of independent writers who write for pennies. These things are incredibly important: every view denied to mainstream media in favor of alt media hastens the decline of their influence. Our space, perhaps uniquely, gets a lot of views. A study I conducted of Twitter users (n = 103) found that just the survey respondents alone got 170 million collective views in one month.

But while dissident writers have managed to carve out a free conceptual space on the frontiers of the internet, it is not enough. This activity has to be translated into resource-gathering.

The scene needs to be supercharged with advertising. Ad dollars are the difference between a magazine that limps along with donations versus a magazine with explosive growth. Ad dollars let you reach larger markets, pay for quality, fund cool projects, hire your friends, and be independent.

We want to build media juggernauts, the giants of the new counter-culture, but we have to start with brands first. If mainstream brands won’t advertise with Man’s World, we simply need to create brands that will.

“There’s no reason why anyone in our sphere should be buying staples like paper towels, razors, or shampoo from Proctor & Gamble”

The consumer packaged goods market in the United States is hundreds of billions of dollars. People need to buy basic supplies on a recurring basis. There’s no reason why anyone in our sphere should be buying staples like paper towels, razors, or shampoo from Proctor & Gamble who hates us. All of these are relatively undifferentiated products that people only purchase because they are familiar with them, that is, they have formed para-social relations with the brands because of advertising, meaning they are perfect targets to be replaced by products from people in our sphere who can make better ads and better relationships with those people who are ready to drop out of the mainstream. We should be building those brands.

(Incidentally, the left is great at this; there’s a whole network of green alternative consumer brands that support legions of full-time activists with day jobs.)

Here’s a list of things that can be sold with advertising and easily shipped from anywhere:

• toothpaste

• soaps, shampoos

• skincare products

• pantry staples: salt, oil, baking soda, butter, and spices

• cleaning products: paper towels, bleach, sponges, sprays

• facial tissue, toilet paper

• cigarettes, tea, and coffee

• clothing

• diapers, wipes, baby products

• tanning oils

• scented candles

• razors and shaving creams

• over the counter medications like aspirin, burn balms, or medicinal teas

• cosmetics

As a new brand, the way to go about this is to take some mundane product and re-formulate it with better ingredients. The branding and messaging should be balanced between dissident signaling and mainstream appeal (Sol Brah is very good at this), allowing the product to get a head start in the dissident market but also have potential for growth in larger markets. The potential for these little brands is very large; there are dozens of multi-million dollar revenue brands launched around natural ingredients and a novel approach to connecting with a previously unaddressed identity market.

These brands will then buy advertising with aligned publications and complete the cycle. Publications will be able to quality control and ensure ads are beautiful to look at (beautiful ads only, no Con Inc. foot cream ad package buys here please). Ads will be content, people will looks forward to seeing them and be much more likely to buy from them because ideological affinity.

With the ad dollars, publications can pay for investigative journalism, and video, and even more ambitious projects. Over time, the whole assemblage will grow, attracting even more attention and dollars. More people will be able to make a full-time living in our space; they will be able to do more and better work, sending our memes into the world where they can grow and attract even larger markets.

The effect this will have on mainstream media over time will be considerable. Even if only a relatively small amount of revenue is peeled off (1-5% of hundreds of billions), it will sustain a comparatively much larger relative base of aligned media projects, because our dollars will stretch further: we aren’t weighted down by bloat.

If the sphere does manage to displace a brand from the market, or outright destroy a brand through direct memetic confrontation (as was the case with Bud Light), it will have outsize effect: because most of these companies are publicly traded, even small impacts to revenue can have large effects on share price, an instant feedback effect that can provoke quick shakeups at the management level.

Consequences

The goods news is that by several measures the news media is in already in decline. Newspapers are shutting down, radio listeners are declining, trust in the media falls every year, and every year there are fewer journalists. Even the premier organizations like the New York Times, which are growing, are forced to rely more on digital subscription revenue and compete with independent content creators on their own turf. This is actually wonderful news: as an individual creator you never had any hope of convincing Mercedes Benz to stop advertising with NYT, but as a Substacker you could plausibly convince dozens or even thousands of readers to cancel their NYT subscriptions in favor of your publication.

And because the NYT derives a lot of prestige from its ability to set the agenda for all other media orgs lower down on the prestige pyramid, even if we can’t affect NYT directly, by chipping away at the smaller media orgs we’ll be able to reduce its prestige. A bully never appears quite as strong when his friends are removed.

As the parallel economy grows, you’ll see strange disruptions. Non-premier organizations will continue to go bankrupt. Some of our own brands will unexpectedly take off. Imagine a world where Sol Scents is the #1 casual fragrance brand for young men in the United States, doing over $100 million a year in direct sales. Imagine the gyms he could build! The private ball-tanning rooms with open roofs! The parties!

Some of our publications will truly explode: Rolling Stone was just a counterculture rock mag once, there’s no reason why Man’s World can’t achieve a similar trajectory and become the new voice of the vitalist generation.

All this can be done: we have the people, we have the distribution channels, we have the $$$, and we have the will.

In summary the plan is:

1. Build and grow based brands selling simple consumer products with a focus on quality and identity connection / resonance

2. Based brands advertise in friendly media publications and gain new customers

3. Media publications grow in capability and influence

4. Media publications directly sponsor better art and contents

I want to call attention to a curious short story written by Giuseppe di Lampedusa which has to do with the relationship between a professor and a siren, a literal mermaid. If you know Lampedusa you are probably familiar with his singular and acclaimed novel, The Leopard, an introspective and melancholic exploration of the decline of a great Sicilian family and the eclipse of their exquisite tradition-bound world by the forces of progress. The novel is a massively eminent and haunting read, the culmination of a lifetime of literary immersion (Lampedusa spent his life reading but did not begin to write until just a few years before his death), and if you have not read it or watched the 1963 film adaption you really must, but today I want to explore his only other complete and much-lesser known work: “The Professor and the Siren,” which, despite numbering only a scant few dozen pages, in many ways is even more ambitious than his novel and emerges freshly relevant to the currents of online culture. “La Sirena,” as it was published in Italian, offers a story that plumbs the depths of Sicily’s lost pagan past to offer the promise of total, beautiful, and terrible transformation.

It’s also a summer story, replete with romance and longing and the sea. It has to do with impossible love, and men and the nature of women; it’s ideal for reading aloud to a lover in the post-coital languors of the early evening. If only for this reason alone you should read it, but of course there is much more to its lovely depths. Be warned, from here forward you can expect spoilers. Men, be further advised: once you read this story you might find yourself irrevocably mermaid-pilled, forever unsatisfied with earthly relations and possessed with a longing which only the sea can answer. Thus cautioned, we proceed.

Lampedusa was a prince. Born in 1896 as the heir to the Duke of Palma, he grew up in a world of palaces, with sprawling gardens, servants, visits from traveling nobles who anchored their yachts in the bay before Palermo in their tours about the Mediterranean, and most of all, literature, for Lampedusa was an only child. After the sad death of his sister he was raised entirely in the company of adults and spent long hours immersed in reading, a habit that came to define his life, first as a pastime, and then as the decline of his family became evident in his adulthood, as a passion and retreat from the diminishment they suffered as their holdings were broken up and their influence obsolesced over the course of decades. For this reason it is impossible to separate Lampedusa from his work; his great novel is an attempt to capture the fullness of the old traditions and the great characters of his fading aristocratic world and preserve them in literary form against the corrosive forces of modernity. The novel is unbearably beautiful but also melancholic: many contemporary critics, while recognizing its merits, accused it of hopelessness, of painting a beautiful picture of dignity amidst decline with no redeeming mechanism for redemption. In this, both the critics and Lampedusa can be forgiven: how would it be possible to conceive of the continuation of the old Sicilian aristocracy against the titanic forces of liberalism which swept the globe, and even bombed his childhood home? There’s just no possible way to imagine it, so Lampedusa paints the image of a proud noble, last of his line, who like Spengler’s soldier at Pompeii, ‘bravely follows his path to the destined end’ and so achieves the epitome of that old ideal of the Roman nobility: a good death, which is won not only for his character Don Fabrizio, but for Lampedusa himself in the act of making this final account of his life and class.

But while The Leopard is massive, fatalistic and final, The Siren is the little codicil that casts the prior testament in different light entirely, the quicksilver door that offers the possibility of escape. For if the Leopard is an attempt to reconcile the decline of the Christian aristocracy to modernity, The Siren encloses even this history by reaching directly to an even remoter pagan past which offers the hope of renewal.

For Lampedusa’s Siren is not a monster, she is a lover. She is half god and half beast, with nothing human about her, but explicitly carnal. She reveals to the young Professor not only in her words, but in her body, a knowledge of nature and the ancients which can only come through complete immersion and boundless, bottomless love, love to the point of death. She swims, she eats live fish only, she makes love and speaks in Attic poetry:

Lampedusa’s Siren is a marvelous character, a vortex of mythic vitality, union of high and low, of tidal feminine attractive force. Not for nothing did Lampedusa’s Professor swear off mortal women after his encounter with her. Lighea (for that is the Siren’s name) contains something of the promise that all women offer; an avenue to eternity, but distilled with ecstatic re-encounter with the spirit of the ancients and the swelling, romantic, insatiable wanderlust which manifests as love for the physical personification of the sea. Like the Ovidian gods, she is a conduit to metamorphosis. “What potions have I drunk of Siren tears?” asks Lampedusa’s Professor. In his encounter with her he undergoes a “sea-change / into something rich and strange.” To love her is to love life never-ending at the root of all things, to love adventure which is life’s expansion, to love love itself. In reading, you too might fall in love with her and become mermaid-pilled, and that is precisely Lampedusa’s design.

Like his novel The Leopard, which was rejected by publishers several times, even weeks before Lampedusa’s death, the success of his Siren story depends even more self-consciously on a final act of transmission. “Corbera,” says the elderly professor in the scene just before he tells his tale, “I need you.” Exactly like Lampedusa himself, the senatorial professor carries an old kind of knowledge, “a vital, almost carnal sense of classical antiquity” of which he must unburden himself before he can finally merge with his beloved classical world in a final act of extinguishment and transformation. The double recounting, first by the weary professor to his pupil Corbera, then by Corbera to we, the readers, accomplishes this transmission by presenting the Siren and all her enchantments to the world, opening the possibility that a new generation might fall in love with her and the world she represents; a lost portal re-opened through which the spirit of the ancient world can once again pour into the world.

Does all this seem familiar? Does it remind you of BAP? In reading the story, with its Professor, a towering eminence in the classics, do you imagine meeting BAP in some dingy bar while he leans forward and very seriously says “I mus tell you story of how I once had encounter (sexual) with a mermaid?” Would you laugh (and break the spell) or, like Corbera, would you believe?

For indeed, today we see in online spaces a Cambrian explosion of beings, a door to the ancient world opened by BAP but which now expands with tumultuous ferment in myriad expressions: history buffs, longing aesthetic posters, art girls, legions of statue pfps, poets, philosophers, futurist sculptors, solar bodybuilders, holy surfers.

This cavalcade surges through a new conceptual terrain on the open sweep of the internet. Our desires for exploration, for richness, for strangeness and ludicrous excesses are refracted through signifiers marking the entry into a younger more immediate existence. We sense that just out of reach, below the surface, another world awaits, and know that possibly if we allow ourselves to be carried along these channels of aesthetic and turbulent desire that maybe, in the strange heart of it all we might encounter something, some secret, that washes the old mundane tints out of our hearts and leaves us transformed.

What would Lampedusa say to all of this? Would he be gratified to see the words of his Don Fabrizio echoed through the timeline? “I must live a certain way.” I believe that, not without an expression of cynical bemusement, he would be delighted. His wish to live according to his traditions, his aesthetic sense, to remain true to his essential being in defiance of the world; this is our wish now. He shares our skepticism with all newly puffed up authorities: “Nothing has been revealed to them” he spits of contemporary classicists. Moreover, like the Professor needs Corbera to hear his story, the success of Lampedusa’s attempt depends on us to receive it. Therefore his final triumph is marked by our successful reception, not only in the sense of simply reading, but through our internalization and re-expression of his literature.

Then there is the call of the sea. There are certain accounts that dedicate themselves to a particularly sirenic aesthetic. Their posts are images of the ocean; waves and blowing foam, billowing sails, gauzy mists, disturbed waters, sprays, and luminous atmospheres charged with erotic potential. The women (and sometimes men) who people these images are wet, unencumbered, completely free and libidinous. They emerge directly from the water. What are they doing there? Merely swimming? How did they get there? Do they live on the boat? What do they eat? It doesn’t matter; they are elemental manifestations, their purpose is to entice but moreso to personify and signify the ocean itself and the romance of departure and journey. Like the Siren they present a template for a distinct kind of life in which the heavy, terrestrial associations of rootedness and fixity of form are cast away. They are the magnetic symbol that hovers on the horizon. On the open sea you can do anything you want, be anyone you want, go anywhere you want. The ocean is a place of change and motive forces, and through immersion in its imagery these aesthetic seekers invoke its transformative powers as well as open psychic distance from context-laden mundanity and scolding mandarinate influences.

BAP speak of this. In his article published in MANS WORLD magazine, “The Open Steppe of the Sea,” he makes the link between the open sea, which for the ancient Greeks was a sphere of exploration, conquest, and ultimate freedom, and the effect produced in the mentality and conceptual world of all descendant Western peoples. One does not simply push out into the infinity of the abyss and emerge unchanged. That sense of vastness, of willingness to contend with the infinite stamps the seafarer irrevocably, he will forever be unsatisfied with mere littoral waters just as the Professor was left bereft for most of his life, having already been made a citizen of a different world by Lighea’s kiss. Even further, the ocean, with unbound disposition, is constant variation; wind and tide and weather, the diversity of lands and peoples encountered along foreign shores, the currents that sometimes carry ships along or jumble them together: familiarity with all of these makes a mental character adept at flexibility and easy recombination of forms. The creativity of the West may well have been born at sea. Not for nothing was Odysseus, most cunning of the Greeks, a seafarer first and foremost.

Submersions

But we must go deeper.

What was Lampedusa seeking in the creation of his siren? It was the primordial root of all nobility: the undivided existence brimming with life, the spirit which is not just tenuously associated with the gods through custom or morality, but is actually a full and living expression of their existence, where the esthlos (the excellent, powerful, and good) vibrate at the power and immediacy of it.

This is how the early ancients experienced the world. In the Illiad, which is the fount of Western culture, we see men completely unhindered by self-doubt, undivided personalities who act with great impression on the world around them. They converse freely with the gods, and this gives their actions and emotions the vehemence of force.

As Julian Jaynes, the rebel investigator of early consciousness writes: “The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agammemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold, a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual fields.”

The theory that Jaynes puts forward is expansive and would constitute a sweeping re-understanding of human nature if it were widely accepted, but in essence he argues that consciousness as we moderns understand it, in which the individual is a mental world unto himself, with subjectivity, self-observation, and conscious manipulation of mental word-forms, is something that only arises after the development of language, and even then only after a long delay.

“How is this possible?” you might ask. “Isn’t consciousness necessary for intelligence?” Not so, Jaynes argues. He severs the act of judgement from consciousness through a series of thought experiments. Have you ever known exactly what to say, without knowing how you knew? Are you not more fluent when a few drinks have relieved your tongue from the observation of your conscious mind? In the midst of playing sports, wouldn’t you perhaps stumble if you let yourself think about what you were doing in the middle of your ecstatic drive to the goal?

Jaynes presents an existence, during the intervening period between the rise of human language and the laboriously-erected structures of reason, where the individual experienced suggestions and motive forces in the form of literal voices, interpreted as deities, in the way a schizophrenic might today. The normal experience of the individual was therefore pure immediacy and uninterrupted continuity, an eternal existence in the present without self-consciousness, while during times of stress or indecision the irresistible voices of motivation or insight would manifest. For those closest to the gods, then, the inner voice is pure inspiration, while for subordinates, their voice is merely a derivative of the great chieftains.

How would it be like to experience such a person? He would speak with decision and immediacy. He would not lie. His voice would carry the weight of authority and radiate divine integrity. Imagine some situation (which has happened constantly through history) in which a young military commander, in order to rally the troops, delivers a concise plan and then steps forward to expose himself to danger, contemptuous at even the most furious efforts of the enemy. Do you see how your mind is filled with his words of urging, how he grows in stature before your eyes? Do you see how the objections of recalcitrant elements melt away like sodden tissue, even in their own minds? Now his speech and affect inspire you, and hearts beating as one, you and your troop are stirred to action. You have internalized his words, assimilated them into your own consciousness, and are now “animated” by them.

Something of this experience conveys only an iota of the power and weight that words, and the mental apparition of words, could impress at the dawn of experience when they still had their newness.

[Achilles] is faster, sharper, bigger, brighter and more important than other men. He is more beautiful. He rides on deeper emotional currents … He is semi-divine and wholly precious. Other men cannot even aspire to be like him. At his most resplendent, men cannot even bear to look at him. He is just above and beyond.

- The Guardian

This immediacy in the sense of physical presence of the forceful encounter between persons, physical and verbal expressions of divine truth, and depth of personality is what characterized the ancient nobility at the dawn of it all. Their lack of self consciousness was not a flaw, but the connector to the great continuity of existence. “Indeed the Greeks saw time & history …. as a densely woven fabric of genealogies unfolding through spacetime, brilliantly exalted here and there by the favor of a god …” (CWU, twitter). While the individual had existence, he didn’t experience himself as such; he was conceptualized as a manifestation of a larger whole. Not even his desires and decisions were his own, these he always attributed to his gods.

We should therefore understand Lampedusa’s novel and his later siren story as constituting a first attempt, and then a second more urgent attempt, to convey the fullness of his aristocratic world-view, an apologia for the distinct cosmic vision that animates his dying class. In this light, we see how The Leopard is predicated on tradition as the differentiator and mechanism of access to historical continuity which is the mark of nobility: “the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was last to have any unusual memories,” he says of Fabrizio on his deathbed. Meanwhile, in The Professor and the Siren, Lampedusa, after his failures to publish his novel, reaches for stronger stuff. He gives us a direct revelation of divinity and the experience of it, in the sense of a theophany, when a god sheds his disguise and reveals to a mortal his true form, a dazzling display that always connotated serious consequences for the mortals who observed it.

With these things in mind we revisit Lighea. Her voice “overwhelms,” it possesses a “powerful immediacy.” She is “oblivious to wisdom” and, “any moral constraint whatsoever.” Nevertheless she is the “source of all culture, of all knowledge, of all ethics” and these things are expressed in her physicality and in her speech. When she justifies herself she says “I am everything because I am only the stream of life, free of accident. I am immortal because all deaths converge in me, … gathered in me they once again become life, not individual and particular but belonging to nature and thus free.” Now do you see what this means?

How opposed then, is Freud’s ego, the rational “executive” of the personality, to this mode of life? The consciousness, with its airy fantasies, self-justifications, and pretensions, its anxious modes of rumination and plodding analytic methodology, is the undisputed ruler of the modern personality. We are rational beings you see. We make decisions with spreadsheets.

But how we long to shake this consciousness off! We drink to stupefaction. We watch films to “carry us away” and suspend its action. We hope that its self-recriminations can stop for a moment so we can speak in public or approach a woman. We meditate to empty it. We take up exercises to “clear our heads” and perhaps outrun it. Sometimes we outright drug it into submission. At night we long to sleep, and extinguish it altogether.

In the realm of deliberation, there is no measure too extreme to relieve us of “conscious thinking.” To sit down and actively think about something is the hardest and most hateful task in the world; we outsource our thinking to machines, rubrics, checklists, doctors, experts, the media, the legislature. It often seems that we can only be happy when we can cease to think!

Then there is sex, which aside from victory in sports or combat, is the most immediate experience of all with its inescapable physicality; perhaps it is the last means, in a world where religious experience has been diminished, where the ego can be actually dissolved for the span of a few breathless moments. Not for nothing are Lampedusa’s Lighea as well as the sirens of the online aesthetic seekers charged with libidinal energy, for through these encounters can be glimpsed a portal back to the ecstatic unconscious world. The body, and specifically the beautiful body is therefore the entry point into this zone of transformation, as well as its fullest expression.

The story ends when Lampedusa’s professor finally throws himself into the sea to re-unite with his beloved Lighea and redeem her promise: “You are young and handsome. You should follow me into the sea now and escape sorrows and old age,” She says. “You would come to my home beneath enormous mountains of motionless dark water, where all is silent calm so innate that those possess it no longer even perceive it.” According to the psychological constructions that we have explored here, we can plainly see that the ego has extinguished itself, and so the Professor, shed of all his heady connotations, achieves final union with the inexhaustible primordial continuity represented by his lover.

In the story this metamorphosis is rendered ambiguously. The shockingly cynical coda, with its perfunctory and ugly description of the destruction of the last artifacts left by the Professor by Allied forces in WWII, does not suggest a successful transition. However, we the readers know that Corbera is not left with only a shard of pottery (which Lampedusa paints, winkingly, with the image of Odysseus’ feet tied to the mast), he is also the bearer of the Professor’s extraordinary tale, carrying with it the pregnant implications of transformation with regards to future readers. If we recall the scene earlier in the story when the Professor sneers at Odysseus’ attempts at preservation against the Siren’s charms, we know that “no one escapes.” Lampedusa, in leaving this little piece of pottery engraved with depiction of futile defense, is telling us he knows, with full aristocratic self-confidence, that we the readers, having heard the voice of the Siren, will likewise never escape, but be indelibly altered.

You march into the city to the sound of keening women, rose petals strewn before your feet, and the Eternal City opens before you.

You go to temple of Mars Ultor where your victorious arms will be laid, the heavy tramp of boots marks your progress to that great altar.

When you began your campaign, you were a youth, but well-trained in the disciplines of war.

The training-ground had taught you the skills of spear shield and sword, how many men can strike and defend and let loose a storm of javelins with one will, and advance to finish it with blades. This is sweat-work, blood-work, the grim work of the Legion, which you learned well.

On the eve of departure the Aquilifer gathered you by flaring torchlight for secret rites.

"I am proud of you. Rome is proud of you. Now you are truly the sons of Mars. Go! and be victorious."

Together with your squad-mates, you danced skillfully to drum and lute before the fires in the nights before you took to the long ships that lay at harbor below.

One maiden with bare feet danced for you in turn, and later that night you found yourselves together in the dewing fields beyond, beneath the full moon.

Now as you return you wonder if she has preserved your memory. For you are old now, weary in the joints and scarred from battle.

Nevertheless, after the passage through the triumphal gate, and the sacrifices, the crowd presses around you and crowns you with laurel, fills your helmet with wine.

She appears before you, eyes bright, arms full of flowers, and the memory of dust and blood of so many campaigns in foreign lands slips away like tears washed with cool water.

She whispers now, "You're home."

"Do you still believe in Rome?"

About a year ago, thiccoq on Twitter asked me if I would come on his show. At the time I wasn’t ready to do podcasts, so I told him I would need to think about it.

This week, I was finally ready. I’ve gotten other requests to go on people’s shows, but I wanted to go back to thiccoq. Through our initial discussions I knew that we’d get into some deep waters together; his questions as we exchanged DM’s were thoughtful and comprehensive, he was really seriously reading my work. Besides, he asked first.

As a new writer moments like these feel like stepping further into another world. When I write, I inhabit a private reality for a period of time while I commit some vision to paper. When I share it with the world, that vision has a chance to maybe grow and take on some firmer substance. Dreams held in common must be actively sustained if they are to survive. So when someone responds to a piece that I’ve written with a desire to explore, it’s like watching some doubtful expedition finally land on a firm surface. I can breathe a sigh of relief that my vision will be okay and even survive without me. I’m just beginning to experience this as a writer, so I’m intensely grateful to thiccoq for his interest, and the chance to mutually explore these dreams that no longer belong soley to me: now they belong to you, my readers.

Here’s the link to the discussion. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed having this wonderful conversation with thiccoq:

I know of a family in which there was a Mad Uncle:

In Asturias where the Cantabrian mountains tumble into the sea in a lovely red-tiled pile called Gijón, a mother pounded on the paneled door to the room belonging to her son, Carlos. It was two PM on a Saturday and the bees in the gardens outside were lazily bumbling home, already happily loaded with pollen and drunk from the nectar of a full morning’s work.

“CARLOS!”

BANG BANG BANG

“CARLOS. They’re waiting for you!”

BANG BANG BANG

“Carlos everyone is waiting for you. Adelina is waiting for you. What are you doing in there?”

The answer came back muffled:

“I TOLD you to leave me in PEACE!”

The mother threw up her hands in resignation. She had been at this for an hour, trying to dislodge her middle son, Carlos, thirty-two years of age, from the depths of his room. Across town, at the house of the parents of his most recent girlfriend, the party was well underway. The food had been served on silver platters and Adelina was desperate by now from giving excuses. But there was nothing to be done. Carlos was in one of his moods.

“Was he hung over?” you might ask. No. Truthfully for Carlos it was his custom to rise at late hours of the day. He was the beneficiary (or the victim) of not just the usual softness of a Spanish family for their sons, but a tolerance that descended to actual indulgence. He occupied a plush position given to him by his father in the family business, something indistinct that had to do occasionally with numbers. It was his habit to rise when he wanted to, apply cologne, jump into his SEAT 124 Sport and race to make a perfunctory appearance at the office. So his abstention, as frustrating as it was for his mother and father, was nothing out of the ordinary.

Now though the situation was very serious. They belonged to an enormously wealthy and distinguished family. Some months before Carlos had struck up a romance with the only daughter of another family, equally wealthy and equally distinguished. He was actually not much of a partygoer, but he was wolfishly charming, he had a way with women, and Adelina was completely smitten with him. In the blush of her twenty-four years of age she considered Carlos her first real, serious boyfriend.

So now in the close-knit society of upper-class Spain, la gente de bien, a closed world that had been defined with steady rhythms of uniformed servants, Misa en familia each Sunday, lunch at the Real Club Astur De Regatas, and Cuban bands playing Mirando al Mar softly in the evenings while the men smoked and the young girls gossiped in the powder room between dances, these families were eager to be convivial and bring their children together.

So Adelina’s family decided to throw a party for the young couple. You might ask if this was an engagement party: it was not. It wasn’t even a mercenary decision to hasten them along; Adelina’s parents liked to entertain and this would be a good excuse for a party in the early summer. It was a lovely season. Everyone was caught up with a kind of spirit of optimism now that the country was open to the world, even those industrialists, like Carlos’ father, who had benefitted so handsomely from the protections of the previous regime. The ships bearing Chinese goods that would later portend so much ruin for them were not even a blip on the horizon and every radio was blaring the anthems of youth and freedom of a new exuberant pop music.

So now Adelina was stuck at the party, making excuses: “He’s feeling unwell. He’s on the way. Carlos has been very busy lately,” and so on. It was in the fatigue of the late afternoon when Carlos finally arrived. The food had been retired and the drinks were being served and he was actually apologetic. He made his cheek kisses, all was forgiven, and when they were seated he turned to Adelina and with somewhat of a flourish, gave her a ring. Before you ask, no, it was not an engagement ring, but it was set with a large stone (an extravagant gesture) and the happy girl went about the party extending a delicate hand to show it off while everyone made their appreciative coos.

What happened next was so strange that we can only catch glimpses of it as Adelina described it to a friend of hers much later. Certainly the incident upended social relations in that corner of Asturias; it would be actual years before the two families would even speak again.

Here is what occurred:

After only an hour at the party Carlos took Adelina by the hand and told her “We’re going now.” His manner was brusque, annoyed. He led her out to his sports car waiting outside and for a moment her heart fluttered in her chest. He was going to propose!

It was not to be. As soon as she was in the car he sped off in a squeal of rubber and dust. He put his foot down and pointed the hood of the car up, up, up the curving mountain roads outside the city, one hand on the wheel, shifting up and down as he took the turns at breakneck speed. She gripped his arm, he laughed, she begged him to slow down as he dodged between trucks and oncoming traffic. The tumbled rocks among the verdant grasses below the cliffside road seemed terrifyingly close.

“Adelina, do you love me?”

“Yes!” She covered her eyes in fright. “I do Carlos!”

Carlos laughed uproariously, great careless peals of laughter that echoed over the sound of the screaming engine. Adelina felt sick.

“You don’t know what you’re saying Adelina. You’re just a little girl. Una niñata.”

When they reached the top of the mountain he screeched the SEAT 124 Sport to a halt, walked around the front of the car, opened the door, and motioned to her:

“Get out.”

“Why?” She asked. The wind from the sea was chilly up here.

“Get out of this car immediately you HIPPOPOTAMUS.”

So she got out and he left her stranded on top of the mountain holding her heels. It took her several hours to make her way down, arriving dusty and tear-stained to her family’s confusion. To this day Carlos has never given even a single word of explanation. The crowning insult was that she wasn’t even a fat girl by any means. To leave her stranded was insane, but to call her hippopotamus was completely unwarranted. It was simply an outrage.

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In the ruins of old America, the army of sensitive young men marches for love and glory.

The titans are awake in the season of roses. The TRILLION DOLLAR WARBAND embarks on a great crusade for love. Everything is surely wrecked but their hearts are strong. At their head go twelve men of power on twelve white horses.

(Is it true what they say, that the rivers flow with milk?)

At each city their ranks swell with flush-faced youth, bodies hardened by sun and steel, bearing vessels of purest spring water which upwells from fissures beneath the earth. They are gathered by the spring wind, the way is marked by petals and the music of stringed instruments. They make their shrines in grassy riverbanks and sun-lanced forest glens of mythic America, and the e-girls fall at their feet.

(Is it true, that the hills sing again, as they did in the beginning?)

The rumor of their purpose goes before them borne by starlings that swoop over the fields in the ecstasy of broad summer days1, they march for the consummation of great purpose, and nothing can stop the mass of them, not the censors, the ticket-takers and transcript makers, the nay-sayers nor their parent’s laments, as they throng the roads and hillsides in their millions.

(Is it true that we’ll be together forever?)

They march for the end. They march for the beginning. They march for the foundation of twelve Great Houses, which will be said to rule the world.

I’ve recently been playing around with Nuclear War Simulator which is exactly like it sounds: less a game and more a tool. Originally used by researchers at Princeton and the Pentagon, it’s now available on Steam. Here there are no points to win, only scenarios to run: each one terrifying in both scale and particulars. Did you know that today’s ICBMs carry up to ten warheads each? Each warhead, typically 30 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, can be independently targeted to strike a different city, or the same city if you really want to be sure the job is done. Russia has an arsenal of at least 400 such missiles in addition to nuclear weapons carried on bombers or submarines, for an estimated total of 5,977 warheads as of 2022. The United States has 5,428. All of these are available to you in Nuclear War Simulator, where you can push a button to launch them in great curving arcs over the Arctic Circle to rain down nuclear fire from the stratosphere on Russian and American cities below.

Once the bombs have dropped, you can run casualty simulations to see the death totals in fine-grained detail. There are myriad ways to die when getting nuked: instant radiation burns, crushed in falling buildings, burned in the good old-fashioned type of fires which would rage through the wreckage after being ignited by the heat of the blast, or death from radiation poisoning from lingering fallout carried on the wind. To make things terrifyingly personal, you can even place icons on the map representing friends and family and watch how they’d fare if positioned in a car, in a basement under a concrete building, or ominously “in the open.”

So obviously, in this day of heightened tension with Russia, when we learn through a zoomer whistleblower that US forces are significantly more engaged with fighting Russia in Ukraine than the public, and maybe even Congress, had been led to believe, I began (like many of us) to wonder in my idle moments whether my house was within the blast radius of a Russian bomb. There are various kinds of hypothetical scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons, including those in which the nations involved decide to target the enemy’s population centers instead of merely just their military forces. To get a sense of the greatest possible destruction, this MAX DEATH scenario was the one I chose to run. Results discussed below:

Summary:

• Plan: OPEN RISOP Countervalue + Counterforce 2021.06.01

• US fatalities: 71 Million

• 82% of US petroleum refining capability destroyed (3.2 million barrels / day remaining)

• 18% of electric power plant capacity destroyed (926,000 megawatt remaining)

• Top 50 seaports destroyed: 99% of US shipping capacity by tons destroyed

• All Class B (major commercial) airports destroyed

• Vast swathes of prime US farmland irradiated

• Soot in the stratosphere: 19 Tg (from US alone)

A war of this kind would instantly plunge the United States and Russia (and any other nations dragged into the conflict) into a world lit only by fire. Those left alive nearest any blasts could expect very little assistance: FEMA guidance calls for response teams to stay out of Dangerous Radiation Zones and leave survivors to shelter and evacuate as best they can under their own efforts. In addition to radiation, response teams could expect to contend with damaged infrastructure, roadways choked with disabled vehicles, knocked out power, and enormous fires as structures and fuel lines ignited. Most immediate efforts would therefore be limited to firefighting on the perimeter and camps to treat any survivors who managed to self-evacuate. The attack would last several hours or days, involving multiple rounds of exchange as the US and Russia exhausted missiles, then submarine-launched weapons, then finally cruise-type weapons launched from bombers as cleanup. By the end of it most cities would be left in smoking ruins and the US population would be reduced by 20%.

“At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards ... Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.” (Soviet cameraman, eyewitness to Tsar Bomba detonation)

One of the only ways to get a sense of what it would actually be like to experience something like this is to read the landmark piece written by John Hersey in The New Yorker in 1946. This article, which tells the story of Hiroshima bomb survivors in their own words, caused a sensation among the American public when it was first published by revealing for the first time the destructive power of the atom bomb.

Here’s a list of things that would be instantly wiped out or irreparably irradiated: museums full of art, famous buildings, historical artifacts, churches, communications hubs, bridges, roads, airports, rail infrastructure, data centers, water reservoirs, schools and universities, libraries, record archives, major news media offices, tens of millions of units of housing, running water, and the internet.

Survivors of WW2 describe how even if they managed to return home, the war displaced them twice: because their original towns were destroyed and rebuilt in unfamiliar configurations, the places where they’d made their lives had disappeared. Even if you managed to survive America would never be the same place again: the places you associate with America would literally be gone.

The Difficulties

After surviving the initial bombardment the real difficulties would set in. Currently in North America we use 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. With 80% of refinery capacity knocked out, the surviving government would face the difficult decision of how to allocate fuel. The needs would be pressing: power generation, response efforts, re-building critical infrastructure, and defense would all need be balanced against food production. In 1979 the US Senate commissioned a fascinating study involving a fictional scenario in which one US city survived and became a regional hub for refugees and reconstruction efforts. Somewhat optimistically they concluded that starvation could be held at bay temporarily, but hoarding and food conflicts would abound. Unscathed areas would be flooded with refugees and State governments, concerned primarily with the business of surviving, would be little capable of cooperation anywhere beyond their own borders. The challenges involved in organizing a largely displaced population without any use of organizing systems such as we have come to rely on like digital records, electronic payment systems, supply chain and delivery systems, or even the internet, would be enormous.

The economy would of course implode. The dollar would collapse in value. Most companies would be destroyed; even if not directly implicated the subsequent collapse in demand for goods and services of all kinds would render them irrelevant. The wholesale destruction of assets would cause a chain of defaults that would reverberate around the globe. Markets would be thrown into turmoil and prices of basic necessities like oil, repair parts, and foodstuffs would be basically unobtainable at any price, creating immediate incentives for conflict even in areas not directly affected.

Then there are darker predictions. “Nuclear famine” is the idea that fine soot propelled into the atmosphere in a large-scale nuclear conflict would obscure the sun for a number of years, causing plunging global temperatures and interfering with crop growth. Dismissed as alarmist fantasies during the Cold War, the subject of nuclear winter is now being examined by a new generation of researchers equipped with better data and computer models. A 2022 study published in Nature found that even 5 Tg of soot from burning cities, fuel stores, and forest fires would be enough to cause global famine. With so many nations dependent on food imports, even a modest disruption of crop production and shipping capability would have large effects. More extreme scenarios with more soot predict up to 5 billion lives lost from starvation. In the simulation I ran, which accounted for only destruction in the United States, soot totals were calculated to be at 20 Tg. With Russia included, soot totals could easily be at least double.

Aftermath

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains. And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

A war of this kind would bookend history, the most significant event since the birth of Christ. Certainly the only possible comparisons would be the inundation myths from pre-history, or apocalyptic scripture, putting it firmly on the plane of cosmic significance for all humanity. Every other calamity, including both World Wars, would be a mere footnote in comparison. How would our descendants understand this event? Would they see it as an accident? A chastisement? Who would they blame? What would the sense of dislocation be to experience apocalypse and still survive? What new myths would they make?

For while it is certain that one kind of world would pass away, humanity as a whole would live on. There are enough nations on earth that would survive relatively unscathed that rebuilding would be accomplished eventually. The world that emerged following such an event would be significantly humbled, but also hardened for having survived, and they would look forward with a new sense of resilience and readiness to face the challenges of rebuilding. A century after the dust settled, the pall of tragedy would begin to fade.

So in trying to understand what a post-war world would be like, I resolved to to not see it as an end, but as a beginning.

Brave New World

To understand what a post-nuclear world would look like, it’s helpful to understand who would be left out of the exchange. In the scenario of a war between the US and Russia, non-membership in NATO or lack of US alliance, as well as distance from Russia’s borders are factors likely to aid survival. Countries that don’t possess nukes are less likely to be targeted or drawn into regional exchanges: there is always the possibility that once the bombs started flying regional powers would use the war as an opportunity to attack each other. The new world leaders would therefore be those with intact industrial capacity and access to oil who managed to avoid an attack.

China, Japan, and India

If China, Japan, and India managed to avoid being involved in the war, they would emerge as the new world powers, marking the beginning of an Asian century. Likewise for Canada, if it survived, though I believe it likely that in a MAD scenario it would be targeted simply to hinder American reconstruction.

Besides these, the countries that would fare the best would be those with a large industrial base and population, internal oil reserves, high education, and high stability. Leading players would also be free from hostile neighbors who might take advantage of the chaos to launch an attack of their own, or who would fight with them for resources in the years following the war.

All surviving countries would have to contend with the collapse of the world economic system and the slowdown or halt of international trade. As long as there were ships, ports, and oil, trade could still theoretically occur but would probably be possible only on an ad-hoc emergency basis. Our current world shipping networks are designed to sustain certain levels of volume. After a war they would simply be unprofitable to operate, and without the U.S. Navy, would be subject to piracy. It would be possible to organize national convoys if agreements could be secured with other nations, but the reality is that trade would become infrequent, risky, and expensive. Even without a nuclear winter, the most food-dependent nations would likely face mass starvations.

In this world, one clear winner would be Australia. Its defensible island position, access to natural resources, and educated population would give it natural advantages in a post-war world. Indonesia would be a regional leader as well.

In the western hemisphere, Brazil would enjoy a new status as the largest, most industrialized nation. Mexico would come in close second, but would have the disadvantage of potentially being overrun with American refugees or otherwise drawn into reconstruction efforts on unfavorable terms.

Middle eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or UAE have the benefit of oil reserves but would probably not be able to avoid being drawn into conflicts that would compromise their ability to participate in world events.

Of the European countries, Spain would fare the best. It’s situated furthest from Russia’s borders and does not host American nuclear weapons (that we know of). With the exception of the U.S. naval base at Rota, it is unlikely to be targeted.

Beyond direct impacts, surviving nations would have to navigate a world completely unmoored from the organizing assumptions of the last several decades. Gone would be American military power and economic projection, which support today’s integrated global order. Concerns about markets, or climate change, or gender equality, or urbanization would become irrelevant compared to concerns for survival. An atmosphere of fear and uncertainty would dominate until some kind of peace was re-established. The specter of submarines still cruising beneath the waves, still at the command of zombie nations, would surely haunt every country on earth.

Fundamental Transformations

How would we understand the sudden void of the United States? It would be like kicking out the pillars of the earth. Inside the corpse of the fallen titan, new ways of life would be made.

On the level of demographics, the U.S. would be a different nation. With 71 million fatalities, most of them from urban areas, the power of cities would be shattered, maybe forever. The national balance of power would instantly shift to rural areas. Simply as a thought exercise, because in the event of a war elections would of course be suspended, perhaps indefinitely, consider that if you re-ran the 2020 election with the loss of the most populous cities Trump would have won with 56%. With this in mind, there is no one on earth who should be working harder to prevent a nuclear war than Democratic Party politicians:

Urbanity itself as a concept would be in doubt. Leaving aside the sudden destruction of the cities, all of society would prioritize dispersion over density in the interest of defense. Concentrations of people and embodied wealth would be seen as foolish, an invitation to attack, and a prospect to be greatly feared. Vulnerable coastal locations would likely be abandoned with exception of necessary port districts. Geographic capitals would be situated in the interior of the country, both for better proximity to new dispersed formations of small towns, and for better defense in depth from missile weapons.

National post-war priorities would have a profound effect on the beliefs of the people. The enormous and immediate needs for reconstruction, re-population, basic sustenance, and the restoration of order would set all other projects aside for decades. Those communities that survived would necessarily have adopted mindsets of toughness, resourcefulness, fecundity, and optimism for the future in the face of unimaginable difficulties. The people who survived the bombs a century after the destruction would be a profoundly different people than the ones who went in.

Then there is the form of government to consider. The United States government has a series of war plans called “Continuity of Government” that outline how the Federal government would ensure its survival in the event of a nuclear war. First architected in the 60’s, these plans called for a network of hardened sites where government officials would take shelter in the event of catastrophe. The principal locations are by now public knowledge, like Raven Rock in Pennsylvania, which is essentially a hollow mountain where DOD would take shelter, and Mt. Weather in Virginia, for the executive branch.

Many of these plans are still classified, but in essence the US governing apparatus would emerge from these shelters and impose a state of martial law ostensibly until order was restored. President Eisenhower, for example, planned to nationalize the various industries with hand-picked friends serving as plenipotent administrators for manufacturing, agriculture, and steel and petroleum production. The Postal Service would be tasked with registering the dead. The National Parks Service would run refugee camps. State-run banks would issue new currency. The Department of Agriculture would distribute rationed food. Secret legislation know as the Defense Resources Act was drafted that would lay out an entirely new structure and new roles for how the government would function during a national emergency, effectively suspending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is worth noting here that many of these structures can be assumed to still be active. Author Garret M. Graff, who wrote a fascinating exploration of the U.S. government’s continuity plans in his well-researched book Raven Rock describes how many of the documents he requested are still classified as state secrets. Moreover, the scope of these plans is not limited strictly to nuclear war; they could be theoretically be activated in the event of any “national emergency.”

These contingencies would essentially entail the end of the American democratic project. Although continuity plans always included an assumption that normal functioning would be restored at some indefinite point following a catastrophe, like those mainframe servers which can’t ever be turned off because of the uncertainty that they would function the same way again if turned back on, it is unlikely that our current procedural democracy could be rebooted if it were suspended for any period of time. The workings are simply too complex, and too many of the people, places, and procedures that sustain it would have been destroyed, and once power was concentrated in juntas there would too much incentive to ever relinquish it.

Regional governments would therefore find themselves in a vacuum of uncertainty. National coordination would be difficult and expensive: with damaged road networks, it could take weeks to travel across the continental US. Communications would be limited to radio transmissions made from centralized stations. Air travel would be restricted only to flights of highest priority associated with national defense. States would turn inward to focus on their own difficulties and life for most people would assume a smaller, more local, and much harsher character. Where before the trend had been towards homogenization, regional differentiation would set in again, and after a period of years most people would have greater loyalties to the places where they had managed to settle and find life than any national ideals. Conversely, it would also be the age of great migrations. Millions would take to the fields and roads in search of refuge. They would overwhelm towns and states and nations. Some would be peaceful, and many would not. There is no predicting what the world would look like once these wandering people settled.

Warnings

I remember reading an article once which examined the murderous policies of “liberalism,” and asked “where is the pile of skulls marking the end of this ideology?” Fascism had the camps, Soviet communism had the gulags, but liberalism: nothing. Despite endless war, despite rampant crime, abortion, the bio-horror of transgenderism, the smothering security state, and the outright assaults on the middle class perpetrated by our own governments, the iron prison that entraps us has never been managed to be infamed with these outrages. Maybe it would literally require a nuclear war for us to turn our collective backs on it. With hindsight the logic of the system would become clear: because the system depends on stoking resentments from client peoples, it must continually destroy the social fabric of every place it touches to make new clients. At the same time, the powers of the system become directed for the purposes of its most radical elements: State Department Spokesperson John Kirby recently insisted that “'LGBTQ rights' are 'core part' of Biden foreign policy.” Therefore we go to war for fictions which can accept no dispute lest they collapse: because they have no internal validity or correspondence to reality even the smallest criticism can puncture them entirely, so now we risk nuclear death for transgender rights in Ukraine. Any pocket of resistance anywhere in the world must be rooted out with force or the whole edifice will crumble. With this logic at play, peace is an impossibility and escalation upon escalation, to the point of crisis and total finality, is inevitable. We ask ourselves: when it comes time to launch the bombs will the honor be given to a tr00n? Or will Victoria Nuland insist that she gets to do it herself?

So this is the warning for our elites: America is large and populous nation blessed with abundant natural resources and defensible borders. We would suffer horribly in the event of a nuclear war, but we would survive. The ideology of the ruling class would not. Its present control is maintained only through the most strenuous manipulations of every factor of life. If the cities were destroyed, along with its client classes and mechanisms of coordination, something new and distinctly American would step into the vacuum, but it would not have any resemblance to the old discredited system. Therefore let’s work for peace before you get us all killed.

Soon, I see the first of them, moving as a mass as they crest a low ridge in their path up a low valley, the lead animals distinct while the herd behind blends into a forest of antlers on the move in a cloud of snorted vapor and powdered snow. With cream and tawny coats their stocky legs propelling them purposefully across the landscape. They stream towards us and around us, seemingly taking no notice of where we stand. I reach out and touch one, it nuzzles my hand briefly with a furry nose. I look into its large eyes, a surprising shade of deep blue, and it moves on.

We stand in place for an hour, watching the river of animals stream past us. I distinguish some with and without antlers, but cannot tell males from females. Looking ahead and behind, I see no end of the herd. I realize there must be easily hundreds of thousands of animals just among those I had already seen, and their numbers only seemed to augment the longer we stood.

The angel says, anticipating my questions: “Yes this herd of reindeer alone numbers some nine million animals. We could stand here for five hours longer and still not see the end of them. This herd itself is one of ten such herds that also populate this region, and these in turn are a fraction of the size of the great herds that range the open east.”

I stand in wonder, unable to respond as I comprehend the fecundity of life even in such a harsh and forbidding landscape.

I experience a shock of recognition. We are standing on the treeless plains of ice-age Europe. The epoch I infer from the size of these herds, for I know that these numbers would be impossible in my present age, but the geography I recognize I know not how. It is as if being lost as a small child and recognizing my mother at a distance from among a crowd, a pre-verbal discovery of connection which is felt as a leaping in the chest, and likewise to recognizing one's mother, I knew my origin to be tied up with this recognition.

As I drink this revelation I realize that I have felt no cold at all for the past several hours, despite being clad only in black shorts and running shoes.

Edit: March 5, 2024

I’ve decided to revert this to a free substack. I have some personal projects that are occupying my time such that I can’t write enough to justify charging for anything here. I hope to being able to write more by the end of this year. If you’d like to support, I appreciate your comments and shares. All the best, Paulos

Good morning,

I’ve decided to open this Substack to paid subscriptions, something I’ve been considering for quite a while.

Simply, we’ve reached the point where you, as my readership, and I, are ready for it. This newsletter has grown from what began as a small and happy diversion into a project where I derive an enormous amount of satisfaction, where more and more I find myself spending more of my time. I find myself thinking about Myth Pilot constantly, dreaming about what I can write for you. I want to go to that place, where I can live in Myth Pilot and open that door for you to visit too. I’m still a long way from being able to do that, but opening subscriptions is the next step in that journey.

At the same time, I know we’re ready because I’m now being asked by some of you for options for how to support. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.

For the time being the way I want to do this is that everything is free. If you are a free subscriber, you will get exactly everything that a paid subscriber does. I believe very strongly in giving content to the world, and I don’t yet feel like locking it away. If this thing grows to the point where I’m making my livelihood off Substack exclusively, that could change, but for now paid subscriptions will exist soley as a way to support the work I’m doing here.

Simply, if you like what I produce here, you are guaranteed to get more of it if you subscribe.

Where did we come from?

Myth Pilot began with strangeness. I had always been a wide reader but never a writer. One day over a year ago I found the Riace Bronzes and became instantly fascinated. These bronze statues were clearly more than decoration, they were the highly refined artifacts of a completely alien age, a mystery. I slipped through this crack and found a whole world on twitter and substack.

I have been a student of Bronze Age Pervert for many years, and inspired by him I embarked on an exploration of understanding. You see, BAP has an immersive method of analysis which has the unique aim of bringing his sources to life. His method has academic qualities but is nothing like the dead work you find in journals; it’s more like religious exegesis which aims to explicate for readers and lead them into greater appreciation and beyond. I thought to apply the same methods to understanding the Riaces. You can read the piece here and see if you find it successful.

Next came my piece on Perseus and the Gorgon, on the nature of monsters and how to slay them. Looking back on this piece, which explicitly identifies gorgon imagery with transgenderist programs of the kind that have only grown more topical and more powerful since its publishing, I count this as one of my most important for understanding our present situation. Many of you seemed to agree as well; the piece got 30,000 reads. I will definitely be revisiting these themes this year and explicating their meaning as they apply to life today.

Then there was my fiction. I wrote a “Masque of the Red Death” style dream-piece, NEMESIS, that was published in Expat press, featuring a beautiful model with a very strange dream about the Met Gala. You understand that no one can hold back the intrusions of MYTH that are coming into the world OK?

Last summer I published one of my favorite works ever, Our Private Kingdom, a love story. I poured so much of myself into this one. I wanted to tell a story that was true. I wanted to write something that was exactly as impactful for men as it would be for women. I’ll paraphrase some comments, not to congratulate myself, but to share with you some of the reactions: many many people told me it awakened dead memories of lost summer loves. Many told me they were moved to tears. Many have said they want to see it in film. Many said they found it sexy and beautiful and sad and raw. I store all these comments in the coffer of my heart like treasure, because in writing this I stirred memories, I shed tears, and I, just like you, desperately wanted to see something beautiful loosed into the world. We are in this together.

There’s much more. There were cultural plans, like Great House Plan, or the Community Notes guide. I am a big-picture guy and I bridge the gap between theory and reality. There’s the story of Ricky Vaughn, which I made into a twitter thread that got 14 million views and a reply from Elon Musk. You see we like to swing for the fences here.

They say you should “define a brand and focus.” They say this helps you find a niche and an audience. In the interest of doing that I think I do three things here:

• Fiction

• Cultural analysis / commentary

• Proposals

The through-line here is that in all cases I am trying to understand or directly bridge the gap between the following layers:

1. The layer of myth: where deepest, often invisible, wants are engendered and deepest questions are answered

2. The layer of theory: fundamental understandings about people and the world, also the layer of inchoate plans and strategy

3. The layer of action: actionable conclusions that lead to transformation in the real world when decided on and brought into being with people doing things

I am particularly interested in the myths that inspire great social movements.

I don’t have a succinct way to describe this “brand” for you. Maybe you can help me.

Where are we going?

I am going to keep writing vignettes. I have so many little stories to share with you, or even just reactions to a few paragraphs of whatever I’m reading. History, little fictions, extended thoughts, character sketches. There’s going to be a lot because these are easy and fun to write. Part of the intent here is to practice different aspects of the writing craft, for example to stage a dialogue, or to experiment with making different moods. As I get into these we might see recurring characters and a kind of serialization.

I am going to keep writing cultural commentary. Right now I have in mind a piece about the myth of Adam and Eve, and its implications for the body and relations between men and women. This one is burning me up inside to write for you, I was moved in this direction after the Covenant massacre. I think its important for me to write for you.

I am working on research for an analysis piece of the effects of nuclear war. The idea was that a post-war setting might be the background for a novel or series of stories. Now I am not sure if I want to use this idea in fiction, but I want to go through what a post-war world would like like in a rather rigorous way: which U.S. states would be most affected, what would be the reaction of different governments, which countries would be best positioned after such a war, etc.

I have several articles promised for various publications. Though most of these are just ideas discussed with editors, I am looking forward to getting these out in print.

So much more. I have an idea for a novel. I’m not going to start it soon, but it is out there for me. One day with your help I might go hunt it.

No, where are we REALLY going??

• This account stands for the overthrow of everything vicious, base, and ugly

• This account stands for personal loyalty

• This account stands for rewarding your friends and punishing enemies

• This account stands for the restoration of everything true, good, and beautiful

• This account stands for eternal life

• This account stands for the glorification of the world by noble men and women who participate continually in acts of co-creation with God that spill over like rivers to renew the face of the earth and sanctify it, making great love stories, great houses, making all of creation a temple fit for perfect sacrifice, continually and without end from age to age, every moment of every day for everyone everywhere beyond the stars a burning act of worship, world without end

• This account stands for TOTAL VICTORY

“What’s Captain Price up to?”

“You haven’t heard?”

It’s good to see my friend, now that he’s back. I was just passing through and thought to drop him a line. Now we are sucking down beers in a Fayetteville bar and tomorrow we might not speak again for another two years. This doesn’t diminish things. These irregular friendships are always as easy as slipping back into a warm pool.

“Well he got into some crazy shit in Afghanistan.”

“Yeah that sounds about right. Price was a beast during train-up.”

I am not exaggerating. Price’s turnaround of Charlie company was remarkable. Everyone knew Charlie was the worst in the brigade: low PT scores, constant turnover on NCOs, soldiers always fucking off and getting into trouble, a pile of CID investigations. A shit show.

Then Price took command and changed the program. He started with a PT test, examined the scores and fired all the underperforming NCOs from platoon sergeant on down. To his new hand-picked cadre he gave one mandate: “From now on we are winners. Do whatever you need to make us the best.”

So those guys would be out doing PT from six to ten AM every day, two hours of running and two hours of lifting. In the company bays he installed olympic rings and squat racks and put the names of top performers on the wall. Within three months they had the best PT scores of any company in the entire brigade. It was really something, they were beginning to win all the shoot competitions, their guys were dominating EIB. Captain Price renamed them Tiger Company and moved into training for deployment to Afghanistan.

“He was an asshole.”

“How do you mean. What happened?”

“It was wild, man. Every time we had the gym reserved fucking Charlie would be there first. You remember how Russo got so fed up that one day he threw hands? The colonel had to get involved. There was no reason for it, they were doing it just to piss us off. Fucking Charlie.” He is shaking his head but also smiling a little at the memory.

“Okay but what happened on deployment?”

Now he gets serious. “Dude, Price got relieved. He’s lucky they didn’t charge him.”

“How do you mean? What happened?”

“Dude, Price was running unauthorized missions. He had a hand-picked crew and they would go out past midnight, dozens and dozens of missions. These were serious operations, he had the freqs for the ODA detachment a few klicks away, and the SOAR guys for air cover.”

“Yeah but he was the commander right? Isn’t that what he was supposed to do, set the missions?”

“Dude I have no idea. All I know is there was a big investigation, there were JAGs fucking everywhere and getting statements from everyone for months. He hadn’t registered any of these, didn’t even radio them in to higher when he left the wire.”

“What was he doing out there?”

My friend now takes a pause. He opens a plastic tin of tobacco and settles a deft pinch inside his lower lip.

“Price wanted to kill Talibs OK? He was just doing his job, pushing the envelope.”

“There’s something more you’re not telling me.”

“OK, but this stays between us.” Now his demeanor is conspiratorial.

“Sure.”

“There are rumors. I’m tight with one of his closest guys, and he said it was like he was looking for something. Yeah they ran ops, ambushes, hits, but interrogations too. Search patterns.”

“What was he looking for?”

“I couldn’t tell you dude. He’s lucky none of his guys got hurt out there.”

I try to press him further but he settles back with the look of satisfaction of someone who has told an unsolvable riddle. Our conversation now drifts to family, girls we’re dating, plans for the future and other mundanities, and we say our goodbyes in the late of the evening, but the curious story of Captain Price stays with me for many days.

Twitter’s Community Notes feature is a powerful open-source moderation system. It’s like the secret final level of Twitter. This is a guide for how to access it, what it does and how to use it, and why every Twitter user who wishes to hold major public figures and media organizations accountable should be using it. As you’ll see it has powerful capabilities, but there are some rules you must learn if you wish to play. Bottom line: you should sign up for a Community Notes account if you are able to, and if you’re not, you should always rate good Community Notes, which you can always do as a regular Twitter user.

What is a Community Note?

A Community Note is a small block of text that appears beneath a tweet, above all other replies. Community Notes are submitted and chosen through an open-source process from anonymous contributors.

Here are some examples of community notes on tweets by politicians, media orgs, and others:

Here’s an example of a fact-checker from the Washington Post making a complaint about a Community Note appended to his original tweet. Notice how his complaint receives a follow-up Community Note providing additional context that addresses his claim!

As we can see, Community Notes (C Notes) give a powerful means for contextualizing statements from major public figures or media organizations which can often be inaccurate or inflammatory. Because they appear directly below Tweets, they have a major impact in shaping people’s response to how they perceive the information in the Tweet. They stand above the noise of regular comments, and can even appear on Tweets with comments turned off. Furthermore, they are approved through a democratic process that selects for neutrality and quality, so they carry the weight of the Twitter community behind them in a way that normal comments don’t.

How Do I Use Community Notes?

You can use Community Notes in one of two ways:

1. Sign up for a Community Notes account. Find the signup links here.

2. As a regular Twitter user, you can rate C Notes. Every time you rate a C Note, you help increase or decrease the likelihood that others will see the same C Note. You also improve or degrade the reputation of the account that wrote the C Note. Therefore you should always rate C Notes whether they are good or bad, using your honest opinion.

What is a Community Notes account?

Community Notes accounts are separate accounts linked to your Twitter with an anonymous ID. You have to apply for a C Note account. There are some account criteria:

1. Account must not have any recent Twitter rules violations

2. Account must be older than six months

3. Verify with a phone number from a trusted carrier

4. Not already associated with any other CN accounts

As you can see, there’s a higher bar for getting a C Note account than for regular Twitter. If you are on twitter anonymously, it might be best to set up or use an alternate account that is not involved in controversial activity.

It might take a few weeks to get approved, Twitter is going through a back-log of applicants and typically does them in batches. When you get approved you’ll be asked to select an anon ID which will be your identity within the Community Notes system.

OK I got my Community Notes account, now what?

Congrats, you’ve got your account. Now the fun begins.

Before C Notes get posted on Tweets, they go through a process where anonymous C Note accounts rate them for quality. This is not determined by simple majority. In order for C Notes to get published, they must be rated “Helpful” by contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. The system is designed to try to find neutral points of agreement between conflicting opinions.

To begin with, you will not be able to post C Notes, you will only be able to rate them. Twitter has a system where you must accrue reputation in order to post C Notes. You must accrue reputation (“Rating Impact”) a system that is essentially trying to select for good judgment. When you rate notes in the eval phase as “helpful” that later get voted “helpful” by Twitter users, you get more Rating Impact. If you rate a note helpful that later gets voted as unhelpful, your score decreases. So in order to accrue Rating Impact you need to able to correctly anticipate the judgment of the broader Twitter community.

With this in mind, here are some indicators of a good C Note:

• Cites high-quality sources

• Easy to understand

• Directly addresses the Tweet’s claim

• Provides important context

• Neutral or unbiased language

Once you accrue enough Rating Impact you will be allowed to write C Notes. When you see a Tweet, you’ll be able to open a C Note interface and write / submit your C Note.

If you have experience with editing Wikipedia, you can see the kind of tone you should be going for. You want to use a neutral “just the facts” voice, include citations, and in some cases you might want to use language that acknowledges an opposing perspective, particularly for high profile or controversial subjects. This will make it much more likely that a wider audience of people will rate your note as “helpful.”

What if I can’t get a Community Notes account?

Not to worry, you can still participate in an important way. If you see a Tweet that, in your opinion, needs a C Note, tag @CommunityNotes to flag it for review.

Next, when you see a C Note, you should always rate it. The more ratings the better. Remember that your rating directly improves the reputation of not only the writer but all the C Note accounts who evaluated it during the pre-publishing phase. Use your best judgement for your ratings, this will help improve the Community Notes system.

How does this help our efforts?

The mainstream media derives much of its power from its illusion of objectivity. Even when they print headlines that are inflammatory or designed to obfuscate the truth, they carry the weight of authority because for many decades they have been trusted as neutral fact-finders. Today, long after they have abandoned the practice of objectivity, they are still content to enjoy the benefits of the trust and authority associated with it. Therefore, in order to denude the media of its power, their biases and inaccuracies must be exposed wherever possible. Ideally there should be a Community Note on every single Tweet made by a MSM organization. This will degrade their reputation in the public sphere and put them on the defensive.

On a basic level, a broad application of this strategy would force MSM orgs to be more accurate, more circumspect and less inflammatory in their reporting. This will have salutary effects on public discourse. This is particularly vital as we go into another election cycle with the possibility of media-stoked violence. Community Notes could quite literally save some city from burning down the next time the media attempts to incite riots using false reporting.

A second effect would be that MSM orgs might call for the removal of the Community Notes feature, forcing them into further confrontations with Twitter. This would be a delicious irony when one considers that the precursor to Community Notes was Birdwatch, a moderation feature that journalists themselves strenuously advocated for.

This confrontation would be highly desirable because it would play out in the realm of public opinion. Another messy conflict with Twitter over moderation policy would demonstrate the MSM’s hypocrisy and sense of entitlement to the American public. They would be perceived as spoiled would-be tyrants attempting to seize back the levers of control, and they would be fighting from a position of weakness because they no longer have the privileged access to Twitter they enjoyed under the previous ownership.

A final scenario, which we might call our stretch goal or victory condition, might be that the MSM might decide to abandon Twitter entirely. Not only would this cut off an important channel of dissemination, but they would be forced to scale back their social media teams. With less organizational focus on Twitter, journalists would have less incentive to cultivate a Twitter presence. This would have a beneficial effect on general discourse, cut down on media doxxing, and allow for the growth of alternative media organizations.

Ultimately, this is a fight that the MSM would not be able to win, because there are few of them and many of us. They have a handful of enormously expensive and poorly defended accounts (see their troubles with impersonation as they refuse to pay for verification services), while anonymous Community Noters are many. The cost asymmetries, where MSM accounts have to defend successfully 100% of the time, while thousands of individual C Noters only have to be successful once, are such that if this effort is broad and sustained, the MSM cannot win.

To summarize the strategy, which I call 100% Community Notes Plan

1. Get as many friends as possible to use Community Notes

2. Use the Community Notes feature to CN as many MSM tweets as possible

3. Provoke the MSM into moderating its behavior, responding, or leaving

Hand of Fatima: Muslimgauze

There was an American soldier who had been deployed so often to Iraq he had taught himself Arabic and loved Baghdad as a lover. When the sun began its red descent and the birds chirped their chorus in the cool of the evening he would smoke a cigarette on the roof of the bombed out ministry building and regard her veiled in dust, the daughter of Babylon, bangled in lights from the windows of shabby high rises and the softer glow of orange street lights that were just beginning to come on. How lovely she was, with her scent of danger and the promise of battle in those labyrinthine streets.

Then he would go down and prepare his men: gas, weapons, lubricant, ammunition, radio fills, batteries and water, lists of coordinates and frequencies, maps. His truck and his men would be squared away. Everything checked. To these preparations he always brought a particular intensity characteristic of Puerto Rican NCOs. He was a dick. He was the best. And as his preparations fell into place his mood would shift from ass kicking mode into almost giddy anticipation. Soon they would be out, weapons red, loose in the streets of his beloved, his Baghdad.

On patrol he was legendary. He had a sixth sense for pathfinding. He could not be denied by any obstacle of the narrow city streets: shifting barricades, low wires, clogged traffic; all melted before him. The crack of gunfire was his stimulant, in those heated moments he grew to be ten feet tall, acquiring the aura of a much taller man, and it was many times that his power of decision saved the day.

On quiet days he was playful, even recklessly so. He would sometimes strike up conversation with young men riding motorcycles and within moments he’d be whipping a bike up and down the block popping wheelies. While the Yale-educated linguists in their ill-fitting helmets would stumble through their Arabic, he could speak to anyone on anything and make young girls smile, or he would learn bits of rumor over a few quick pulls of shisha outside a cafe. When his turn came for mid-tour leave he made a request to go into Baghdad. He was very serious about this, and earnestly explained that he would stay with friends in the Rusafa district, a request that was summarily denied. It was rumored that somehow he had an Iraqi girlfriend.

Upon redeploying to the United States he fell into a kind of indolence. The monotonies of garrison life weighed heavily on him. The “gangster way” versus the “Army way” of doing things would no longer be tolerated, so soldiering lost his interest. There was the plan to become a pilot, then a repo agent, then he mounted an uninsured 4x4 rental business. Once, when taking his wife to dinner for their anniversary he smashed his Dodge Charger into a deer on the highway. Against her screams, he wrapped the deer in a tarp and turned the car around to go home and skin it. Some men are just not suited for peace.

These stories were related to me by others, or maybe they were invented by me, a pastiche of fact and fiction.

Tits McGee

A friend of mine was a soldier deployed to Iraq in the aughts. One of his platoon’s missions was to escort State Department officials once a month to a fish farm several miles outside of Baghdad. The way it would work is that a State Dept. official would helicopter out from BIAP, hang around base for a few days, then they would truck out to the fish farm and pull security in the dust while the American and Iraqi officials would go inside and drink tea.

This mission was a great favorite with the soldiers because the particular State Department official assigned to the project was a young woman in her late twenties. She would come to their base in her “outside the wire” outfit: aviator sunglasses, khakis and the iconic tight polo shirt that had earned her her moniker. In front of her the guys would try to stay buttoned up but sometimes she’d be a little wicked and try to puncture this attitude of professionalism; teasing the LT about his haircut or playing music from her phone while waiting to LD. She wasn’t self-serious, she was pretty. She was fun.

So this touch of feminine lightness combined with the wonderful hilarity of a fish farm in the Iraqi desert gave the whole mission a festive air that made the dust and boredom worth it. The dust is important, because there was nothing else. The fish farm was entirely notional, a series of shallow-scraped trenches interrupting the monotonous expanse of hard-packed Iraqi earth and scrub that stretched from horizon to horizon.

Every month they would go visit, and every month the owners of the fish farm, a tribe distinguished by being the blessed recipients of the fabled suitcases full of cash, would serve tea and discuss, prevaricate and complain about: the need for earthmoving equipment, the inability to source gravel, the unreliability of local labor, the disappearance of the project’s lead engineer, and et cetera. Every month Tits McGee would listen and promise they were working on sending more equipment and more funds, a source of bottomless entertainment for everyone involved. “What excuse did they use this time?”

Some time later it became known to them that part of her diligences also involved visiting the company commander’s CHU all night, in the late evenings before and after each escort mission, which finally answered many questions about the State Department’s interest in the whole matter.

Douglass Mackey is the man behind the influential Twitter account “Ricky Vaughn.” In 2021 he was charged by the DOJ with election interference for posting satirical memes on Twitter. His trial begins today, March 13, 2023. He faces up to ten years in prison. If you have not been following the case, you can read more about it here.

Under the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, Mr. Mackey, at his peak during the 2016, had more influence than NBC, CNN, and the Colbert Report. He reached and energized millions. He had a talent for making politicians look foolish and for eviscerating journalists. President Trump was elected in part because of the groundswell he helped mobilize.

In 2018 he was doxxed and afterwards went to go live a quiet life in Florida away from the spotlight.

In 2021, mere days after Biden took office, Mr. Mackey was charged with election interference and arrested by the FBI.

He is accused of committing a crime for posting on Twitter. The DOJ alleges that he engaged in conspiracy to defraud people of their voting rights by posting satirical memes of the kind that are common around election-time. Specifically, he circulated images which suggested that one could vote by texting the word “Hillary” to a phone number, a mechanism so patently ridiculous that it couldn’t be taken at face value.

An example of a of another satirical tweet telling Republicans to ‘skip the lines’ and ‘vote on Wednesday’ posted the morning of the 2016 election:

Mr. Mackey is being charged under 18 U.S.C. § 241, a 100-year old law written to prosecute the KKK for violence that has never been extended before to speech, especially speech in a public forum. This has chilling implications. The U.S. government is now in the business of deciding what's a lie or what's satire. As the eminent First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh explains, there is no limit to how this law could be applied.

U.S.C. § 241 is also not limited to elections, it extends to anyone who 'conspires to deprive someone of their rights.' This means, under this new interpretation, that if you shared statistics about trans surgery regret, or COVID, or climate change, for example, in an effort to get a local school to disinvite a public speaker, and law enforcement decided that you lied or knowingly spread "false information," in order to deprive someone of their rights, you could be charged under the new interpretation of this law.

In short, the Biden DOJ is pulling out all the stops in an effort to crush a private citizen because he embarrassed them and helped President Trump get elected in 2016. This has implications for every American citizen. If this precedent is established, Federal law enforcement will be able to drag anyone to court based on an ill-defined and standard with unlimited scope. That’s basically game over for free speech.

How to Help

Donations

You can donate to Douglass Mackey’s legal defense using the link below. You can use popular donation platforms, send checks, donate crypto, or make a tax-deductible charitable donation. Raising funds is important because the DOJ has unlimited resources. A feature of legal battles in today’s America is that “the process is part of the punishment,” and even mounting a basic defense imposes ruinous costs on those involved. Please give generously.

Contact Congress

You should write and call your Congressional representative and ask to open a Congressional civil rights violation investigation on Douglass Mackey’s behalf. A template is provided below. You should write and call all of the following members of Congress (it’s better if this effort is focused). You do not have to be a constituent to send a letter, but if you are a constituent you should note it in your letter. In the interest of preserving your privacy it is worth noting that communications with Congressional representatives are private and exempt from FOIA requests.

1. Representative Jim Jordan (OH)

   1. 3121 West Elm Plaza Lima, OH 45805-2516 (202) 225-2676

2. Representative Matt Gaetz (FL)

   1. 226 South Palafox Place Pensacola, FL 32502 (202) 225-4136

3. Representative Andy Biggs (AZ)

   1. 2509 South Power Road Mesa, AZ 85209-6697 (202) 225-2635

4. Representative Paul Gosar (AZ)

   1. 122 North Cortez Street Prescott, AZ 86301 (202) 225-2315

5. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA)

   1. P.O. Box 1527 Rome, GA 30162 (202) 225-5211

6. Senator J.D. Vance (OH)

   1. B40C Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington DC 20510 (202) 224-3353

7. Senator Josh Hawley (MO)

   1. 115 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510 (202)-224-6154

8. Senator Ted Cruz (TX)

   1. 127A Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510 (202) 224-5922

Here is a template you can use to write to Congress:

Dear [Congressional Representative/Senator’s Name],

I am writing to bring to your attention a matter of great concern to me. It has come to my attention that Douglass Mackey, of West Palm Beach Florida, is currently being prosecuted by the Department of Justice for speech made on a public forum. This is a clear violation of his 1st Amendment rights, and I urge you to open a Congressional civil rights investigation on his behalf.

Freedom of speech is a fundamental right enshrined in our Constitution, and this case has chilling implications for the free speech of all American citizens. The DOJ has charged Mr. Mackey under 18 U.S.C. § 241, a law that has never been applied to prosecute speech made in a public forum before. If this dangerous precedent is established, there is no limit to how broadly this law could be applied. Federal law enforcement could arrest American citizens with impunity based on their speech, simply on the basis of whether un-elected officials determined that their speech was ‘knowingly false’ and that they had ‘conspired to deprive someone of their rights.’ This nebulous, unprecedented, and unenforceable standard would have virtually unlimited application, and would vastly open the scope for Federal law enforcement authorities to police the speech of private citizens.

Freedom of speech is a bedrock American value. From the adoption of the Bill of Rights, our principles of governance have set strict limits on the power of the government to regulate speech. It is deeply troubling that the DOJ now seeks to overstep these bounds by prosecuting Douglass Mackey for speech made on a public forum.

I am asking you to open an investigation into this matter and to ensure that Douglass Mackey’s civil rights are being protected. It is essential that we uphold the principles of free speech and prevent the chilling effect that this prosecution may have on others who wish to express their opinions publicly.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

Other Efforts

If you are connected to prominent personalities, especially those with large media platforms, please bring this issue to their attention. The DOJ has felt itself at liberty to move with impunity in this case in part because of lack of public attention. If prominent people can share Doug’s story, and the threats to free speech we all share by extension, the public can be made aware and more scrutiny will be applied to the case. You can share this post with them, or share this news article.

This case has critical implications for everyone who cares about free expression. It’s important that we band together to help Douglass Mackey win his case and secure justice. Mainstream media, technology companies, and un-elected officials in the Federal government are constantly looking to undermine the rights of American citizens to express themselves freely in public, especially on the internet. It is vital that we mount a strong defense now so we can shut down this particular effort forever.

Edit:

Several people have suggested that you can call local talk radio and ask them to cover the case. If you have the time, you should definitely try this. Be sure to tell them that it’s being discussed on Twitter and that the thread covering the discussion has more than 12 million views, and that Elon Musk has commented to the effect that the case is ‘concerning.’ You can use the letter to Congress template above as a talking points guide.

Back in May a piece of mine was featured in the Asylum from Pierian Spring. I want to publicize it here so you can read and enjoy, and so new readers can find links to all of my work in one place. Link to PDF below:

“Thoughts for a Vitalist Art Movement”

This is an art manifesto which has to do with how taste originates with the body and is carried forward to creative impulses. We must develop this bodily sense and creative spirit if we are to overcome the current cultural wasteland in which we find ourselves trapped.

I hope that as you read it you will find inspiration,

-Paulos