One of the curious things about this reality is the difficulty of understanding and judging scope. For example, maybe there’s a hundred like-minded English language dissident writers out there, if I’m being generous and taking into account my very limited vantage point of the writers out there. From what I see it’s actually much smaller than a hundred. Political commentators are almost universally grifters surfing the wave of the Current Thing.

Yet there are billions of English speakers out there. Shouldn’t this scene - shouldn’t any of these ultra niche scenes? - be far bigger than they are? After all, the Current Thing seems to be a defining feature of this age, everyone talks about it and thinks about it and is animated by it. Yet that’s where it ends for almost everyone, pigs forcefed at the trough of shill marionetted influencers and media.

Or looking at scope from another angle: there’s a tremendous amount of depression and despair out there, lots and lots of mentally unstable people out there, poor and struggling and almost homeless. Yet political violence is basically zero, while suicides/overdose rates are very high. A guy like Luigi Mangione is maybe one in a billion? One would think more of these desperate people would be driven to political violence, but it’s basically zero.

Human psychology is both interesting and strange.