I tried reading a couple of the big “right wing dissident” Substackers that I used to be friendly with a couple of years ago; they are still utterly trapped in the level of culture war Current Thing dreck. My eyes quickly glazed over and I couldn’t read their content. Hundreds and hundreds of likes, comments and restacks perpost, of course. It feels like being in crazy world seeing the Current Thing change, the breathless hot takes disseminated, Nothing Ever Happening, and then a collective shrug, amnesia, and then jump to the next Current Thing, where the cycle repeats as the country and world circles the fucking toilet drain. These bloggers are really not far off from the Scott Ritters and Simplicius’s of the world, whose predictions are close to 100% wrong and yet they retain their astroturfed audiences ad infinitum, feeding goyslop hopium (never met) to their audiences forever. Prediction failure has no cost because the audience is consuming mood, not truth.

The form is the same on both the “left” and the “right”: rapid affective mobilization → performative certainty → mass engagement → total amnesia → repeat. This ecosystem must behave this way because it cannot slow down without losing relevance, it cannot integrate tragedy or failure without collapsing its audience’s morale, and i cannot move past culture war because culture war is the only arena where symbolic victory is cheap and endlessly renewable.

Oh well.