Yeah I gave basically the same pushback when I spoke with him and we had a fairly productive discussion about how feasible it is to e.g. get a white paper on Vance or DeSantis’s desk and the precise extent of what’s achievable under modern gridlock versus if we somehow locked down 60 senators for instance, as well as how to improve epistemic hygiene and avoid the discursive ghettos downstream of AWFL-driven status coding. They take all that seriously but are focused more on object-level improvements in domains where medium term realignment seems realistic.

Now they’re a lot more optimistic than I am for sure and just overall I’m a lot closer to you / the DR than them ideologically but I like them a lot specifically because they’re departing from what I see as the DR’s trademark failure mode (finding everything Tiresome) while staying heterodox / not punching right. Bringing startup energy to thinktanking and crowdsourcing ideas through an essay contest is quite cool and reminds me of what I loved about 2015.

Also if we’re wholly realistic about what it takes to make meaningful structural change so much is contingent either on the decisions of a few billionaires and high level pols or on increasingly unpredictable material conditions that most of what can be said has by you / BAP / Moldbug / others so in practice the choice is between A) writing fanfic about the Handmaid’s Putsch; B) going into freemasons mode; and C) trying to improve shit on the margins, and your calculus there is mostly downstream of how Worse is Better you are.

From what I can tell though the Boyd Institute is pursuing option C in about as full confluence with the sort of things our guys would ask of normie allies as is possible without compromising their own mission, and has also been effective at energizing people in heterodox spaces which itself is huge.

Yeah it’s been done before—there’s nothing new under the sun. Times change.

And being now quite a lot more aligned with you overall than I was in 2024 I’m telling you as a simple matter of propagandistic throughput that the world is better for TradCaths if the Boyd Institute succeeds.