Nostr notes by Twig

Former NBA player Royce White has officially declared for the ...

2026-08-19T23:44:55Z

Former NBA player Royce White has officially declared for the WNBA draft, according to Fox News.

Former congressman and lawyer Matt Gaetz signed the declaration, which was sent to the WNBA League office.

"As of the signing of the attached declaration, Ms. White identifies as a transgender woman," Gaetz wrote, according to Fox.

"Consistent with Article XIII, Section 1(a) of the 2026–2033 Collective Bargaining Agreement between the WNBA and the WNBPA, Ms. White affirms her eligibility to be considered for selection on that basis."

"Ms. White further affirms, consistent with Article XIII, Section 1(b)(i), that she will be at least twenty-two (22) years of age during the calendar year of the Draft and has no remaining intercollegiate eligibility."

"We respectfully request written confirmation of the League's receipt of this notice within ten (10) business days of the date above, and a written determination of Ms. White's eligibility status, including the basis for any determination, at the League's earliest opportunity. We appreciate your attention to this matter and are available to discuss at your convenience."

Katie Pavlich just interviewed a psychiatrist and CEO who ...

2026-08-19T15:12:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…z29r
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Katie Pavlich just interviewed a psychiatrist and CEO who believes Hayden, like Matthew Perry and Heath Ledger, may have been carelessly MURDERED by whoever prescribed what he calls "The Celebrity Killer Cocktail" — a lethal combination of opioids and benzodiazepines.
Hayden took klonopin (a benzodiazepine) for postpartum depression/alcohol withdrawals and opioids for a neck injury. Her addiction began at age 16.

Hayden, 36, was found in cardiac arrest this week after her boyfriend and his brother called 911.

Some have rejected the overdose as suicide. Regardless, Hayden suffered from serious mental health issues caused by a lifetime in the spotlight, micromanaged by her overbearing mother, who booked her first commercial at only 8 months old.

Hayden's autobiography recounts the desire to be close to her mother, and feeling rejected because her mother seemed to want money more than anything else. From a very young age, Hayden paid her mother and the rest of her family's bills.

Some believe she was "offed" for being outspoken about Hollywood's dark and abusive nature.

Enes Kanter’s 2 “court battles” : basketball court and ...

2026-08-08T03:48:05Z

Enes Kanter’s 2 “court battles” : basketball court and Supreme Court!

👇

After careful consideration and reviewing the current eligibility guidelines,
I’m officially declaring myself a
@WNBA
prospect.

If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA.

My team and I have carefully examined the WNBA’s eligibility criteria and governing framework surrounding self-identification and inclusion. Based on the current guidelines, I can and am officially declaring my eligibility for the upcoming WNBA draft in April 2027.

I know my presence on the court will stir up strong opinions.
I am definitely not here to mock, make fun of, or disrespect any community or personal choices.
I’m simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone — the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.
My team and I are prepared to ensure these guidelines are applied equally, consistently, and without exception, and I look forward to the #WNBA honoring its stated principles.

Why Sinon in Nolan’s The Odyssey? Elliot Page playing Sinon is ...

2026-07-24T10:12:51Z

Why Sinon in Nolan’s The Odyssey?

Elliot Page playing Sinon is a fascinating choice.

Sinon isn’t really part of Homer’s Odyssey.
He comes from the wider Trojan War tradition, the Greek who deceives Troy and helps bring about its destruction through the Wooden Horse.

But here’s the interesting part: Sinon is almost a mirror of Odysseus.

Odysseus is the great hero who survives through deception, disguises, false identities, and clever strategies. Sinon is the man who destroys Troy through deception.

One uses the lie to survive.
The other uses the lie to win a war.

They represent two sides of the same idea: the power of a story to change reality.

And with Elliot Page playing Sinon, the character brings another layer of modern conversation about identity, transformation, and the difference between how someone appears and who they are.

Which is strangely fitting for The Odyssey, a story obsessed with disguise, change, and recognition.

Florida pastor suing ChatGPT for giving him poor medical advice. ...

2026-07-23T10:39:11Z

Florida pastor suing ChatGPT for giving him poor medical advice.

Imagine every time you asked a chatbot for medical advice, it said "go to a doctor, it's serious."
If lawsuits like this succeed, the only way for AI companies to protect themselves is to always give the most hysterical advice possible. They would become useless.
The advocacy group filing the lawsuit has "asked the court to stop ChatGPT Health from operating until independent evaluators determine it is safe. The lawsuit also demands stronger guardrails to prevent ChatGPT from answering questions about medical treatments and diagnoses."
Interestingly, the service actually encouraged him to see a doctor at first. Then when he refused, it gave the pastor advice and told him what he wanted to hear. And now he's suing ChatGPT!

🎬 Casting Call : The Odyssey Sequel Zeus is already cast by ...

2026-07-23T03:21:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…04ws
_________________________

🎬 Casting Call : The Odyssey Sequel

Zeus is already cast by his own divine right Sir Chris (npub16xn…s8ep)

Now recruiting:

🏛️ Odysseus : master of tricks, trying to find his way home

👑 Penelope : the queen who waited 20 years

🦉 Athena : goddess of wisdom and Odysseus’s secret weapon

🌊 Poseidon : the sea god with a personal grudge

👁️ Polyphemus : the Cyclops who started the trouble

🧙 Circe : the sorceress who makes things complicated.

Send us your best captured faces for the camera test. 🎥

Lines will be provided by AI, no worries. Even a bingbat can master the script.

Rococo outlaw bikers ...

2026-07-20T07:59:56Z

Rococo outlaw bikers

Easy Rider ...

2026-07-20T06:53:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…7wjx
_________________________

Easy Rider

The master of upper-enchilada-level Tung Tung Tung Sahur ...

2026-07-16T12:13:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…0myc
_________________________

The master of upper-enchilada-level Tung Tung Tung Sahur wrote….

Infinite America
2,500 years of the USA

You really believe the United States of America is only 250 years old? You really think that? No way, man. That’s crazy. The real number—well, there’s what I can prove, which is that America is much older, ten times that, vastly ancient, falling deep into antiquity: two and a half thousand years old, easy. Everything you think you know is wrong. You believe in the Founding Fathers? You think little George Washington chopped down that cherry tree? Listen, the real George Washington lived thousands of years ago. His naked body was splattered with vermilion; his face was covered in tattoos of a giant serpent devouring the Sun. He presided over the Constitutional Convention as it worshipped a secret flame in a temple littered with human bones. You think the United States started on the East Coast and gradually spread westward? Not true. Totally fake. It began, if it began, right in the centre, the Mississippi valley, the heart of the continent; it’s a riverine civilisation, like Egypt or China. Over its long long history it expands and contracts, diastolic and systolic, like a heart; when it reaches outwards it brushes against the oceans and sometimes it can even cross to the opposite shores; when it draws in again, the fringes of the empire revert to barbarism. It’s been doing that for thousands of years. Maybe more. America is two hundred and fifty thousand years old. Two and a half million years old, maybe. It’s always existed. It lives outside time.

I spent America’s alleged 250th birthday in Los Angeles. It’s amazing how little anyone seemed to care about the big number. Clearly the old myths are wearing thin. In 1976, the whole nation entered a patriotic frenzy to mark the alleged bicentennial. Everyone was donning a tricorn hat and breeches. Everyone toted a real working musket. Fat Chicagoans with Polish last names were strutting around in powdered wigs. People called Lopez and Hernandez were reenacting the crossing of the Delaware on the snakeweed-lined banks of the San Juan River. (Most of the events of the so-called eighteenth century are actually cultural memories of 1976.) The Queen and Prince Philip made a full state visit, and in every city they visited they had to allow themselves to be symbolically tried and executed for crimes against republicanism and liberty. They didn’t do anything like that this time round. In Washington DC they put up a sad little thicket of MAGA-themed paper tents made up to look like triumphal arches. A few dead-enders limped about in the heat. You could try to blame it on recent events. What’s to celebrate? The US just lost a war. But the celebrations in 1976 came barely a year after the last helicopters scattered out of Saigon, and that didn’t stop anyone. Even now, people still want to eat hot dogs about their country. On the night of the fourth, every city from one coast to the other was a sea of fireworks. It’s the other stuff no one cares about any more, the sad motheaten wigs, the white guys with wooden teeth, the quarter of a millennium, the eighteenth century. They don’t know why, exactly, but they can tell that it’s all bullshit, and their country is older and stranger than they’ve been told.

Just look, if you can, at Los Angeles. It’s nice here. The sun shines every day and the streets are all hung with magnolias and jacarandas, and if that ever gets boring you can just step onto one of LA’s many convenient city buses to encounter some of the most diseased people in the world. (On the 20 to Santa Monica: a man in rags two rows in front of me, scrolling on his phone; while fiddling with one of those blowtorch lighters in the shape of a pistol. Every fifteen seconds he would have a jerking spasm, press the gun against his head, and furiously click the trigger. Slight whiff of singed hair. All the videos on his feed were about the USS Liberty.) But after a few stops you can prance out and get a turmeric crush smoothie at Erewhon, named after Samuel Butler’s utopia in which people are punished as criminals for being ugly. I’ve been eating Mexican food. I’ve been eating Korean food. I’ve been eating Mexican-Korean fusion where you put the bulgogi in the taco. I’ve been firing a gun off the balcony of a Hollywood director’s son. Classic California stuff. Any small portion of Los Angeles can be very pleasant, as long as that’s all you can see, and most of the time it is. When you’re in that enormous basin, it’s just your cute little house, your cute little garden, your hydrangeas. Even from the elevated freeways the city appears as a zone of palm trees and Denny’s signs hanging like barrage balloons over the plains. But when you’re flying in to LAX you see the whole thing, all at once. I don’t know how people manage it.

Once you’ve seen LA from above, it’s obvious why nobody cared about the 250th. According to the myth, America was founded as a nation of yeoman farmers, prudent Anglos with buckles on their hats, reading Horace and Livy in their three-room houses, self-sufficient in wheat, rye, flax, wax, and lumber, guarding their homesteads and their liberty, urbanisation rate around 3.5%, fewer wage-labourers than outright slaves, with the two conditions generally held to be more or less the same thing. How on Earth could this have anything to do with the scenes outside your window? How could that rustic Jeffersonian fantasy have possibly created such a crystalline gigacity, hovering over the edge of reality? All these jobs and all this shopping: a society of total but invisible control, this impersonal grid that reaches deep down into the wet stuff of your brain and tugs you around by the desires. It’s not just the size of the place, although that is, obviously, terrifying: ten trillion neat bungalows slotted into ten trillion rectangular lots, stretching into Orange County and over the curvature of the Earth. What’s really unsettling about Los Angeles is how, from the air, it doesn’t really look like a city at all. That endless regular grid, with all those human bodies filed away; the bright specks shuttling along the avenues and onto the freeways: the sense of an enormous contraption, a massively complicated abacus with ordinary lives as its moving parts, flows of money and traffic and consumer goods and fame, zapping through logic gates, calculating—well, what? Once you’ve seen the city like that, it’s hard to be fully comfortable in whatever little bit of it you find yourself inhabiting. Here’s your nice house, here are your nice flowers, but you’re like Kelvin at the end of Solaris, living pleasantly on the surface of an alien star.

The crazy thing about America is that it’s running several of these machines. Southern California, but also South Florida, and Houston, and Chicagoland. Where did it come from, the society that could build these things? One strange thing you might have noticed about the traditional account is that it’s actually come to us twice, in two different versions. According to the dominant version, America begins with a small group of exiles carrying a deep but idiosyncratic Christian faith. They’re from England, but they’ve been exiled to the Netherlands; in 1620 they leave the Old World seeking freedom, set out on a westward journey across the Atlantic, and land at Plymouth Rock. Soon, these righteous pilgrims form a prosperous colony, in which their crops and livestock flourish, and they build great cities. Eventually they fight against a powerful leader from their homeland called George, with the struggle focusing on a sacred document called the Declaration of Independence. They defeat him, but soon afterwards it becomes clear that the new society is deeply divided against itself: half of it, called Dixie, has been stained by the evil of slavery, and a terrible war is fought between brothers. There’s a victory, but that doesn’t end things; in every generation there’s a constant political struggle between the righteous and unrighteous; secret societies (the Klan, Antifa, etc) try to destabilise the political order; in the end, inevitably, the whole thing will fall apart. But millions of Americans also believe in a separate version of the same story, called the Book of Mormon. America once again begins with a small group of exiles carrying a deep but idiosyncratic Christian faith—but this time the year is 600 BC and they’re from Jerusalem, exiled to somewhere on the Red Sea. They fight against a powerful leader from their homeland called Laban, with the struggle focusing on a sacred document called the Plates of Brass. They leave the Old World seeking freedom, set out on a westward journey across the Atlantic, and land in the Promised Land. Crops and livestock flourish, they build great cities, but the new society is deeply divided against itself: the Lamanites are stained by the evil of rebellion, and a terrible war is fought between brothers. In every generation there’s a constant political struggle between the righteous and unrighteous; a secret society called the Gadianton Robbers tries to destabilise the political order; in the end, inevitably, the whole thing falls apart.

What are we supposed to make of this? One approach is to argue that one of these stories is a corrupted, mythologised version, a kind of parasitic retelling of the other, which is more or less true. Since the Book of Mormon is dramatically older—collated from texts written over the course of a millennium, and engraved on metal plates around the year 400 AD—it makes sense that this would be the true version, and the Pilgrim Fathers and George Washington are just a garbled version of Lehi and Moroni. The problem is that the events of the ‘false’ narrative appear to be referenced in the Book of Mormon itself. (See 1 Nephi 13.) Clearly neither account is primary, and both versions descend from another myth that was already circulating in the Americas in the first millennium. In the intervening years the two streams have intermingled and influenced each other, until the idea of an eastern origin permeated the culture. And it’s true that there have been centuries of cross-Atlantic migrants seeking refuge in America. But when you think about it, it’s a bit credulous to assume that the old stories are true, and the entire country was actually founded by settlers from overseas.

To find the real history of America, you have to stop worrying about what people say about themselves, and start looking at how they actually live. Is there anything in the past of this country that looks like a prototype of Miami or LA? Well, yes, in fact, there is. A thousand years ago, North America was home to huge, sprawling cities; the largest of them was a site near modern-day St Louis that archaeologists call Cahokia. At its peak in the twelfth century, Cahokia may have been home to more than 40,000 people, significantly more than London or Paris. It still didn’t have as many people as the real population centres of the time, like Baghdad or Kaifeng, but Cahokia was physically large in a way totally unlike any other city on Earth. The great cities of Europe and Asia—and, for that matter, Mexico and Peru—were crammed tangles of alleys and tenements. Abbasid Baghdad had a population density of around 14,000 people per square kilometre; so did Tenochtitlan. (For comparison, that’s nearly a third denser than present-day New York City.) Cahokia was something entirely different. The ceremonial centre was an enormous plaza, overlooked by Monks Mound, a hundred-foot earthen mound, vaster than the Great Pyramid of Giza, crowned with two buildings, probably a royal palace and a temple. There were twenty or thirty more mounds ringing the square: maybe three million tons of soil dug out of the ground and piled up in baskets. This complex was surrounded by a wall five metres high and two miles long, made from twenty thousand enormous logs, and after that the real city began. A typical house in Cahokia had one room, maybe 180 square feet, with a thatched roof and walls made of saplings and reeds, but there were thousands of them. Beyond the ceremonial core the city sprawled in every direction: houses spread out in an immense grid, wide pathways within neighbourhoods, elevated causeways connecting them, here and there subsidiary ritual complexes, more temples, more palaces, more workshops and gardens, sweat lodges, astronomical henges, suburb after suburb, stretching into the far distance. We still don’t know exactly how extensive the place was; less than 1% of the site has been fully excavated. During construction of the I-270 freeway in 1978, the construction crew dug up the footprints of hundreds of undiscovered houses. Magnetometry is still discovering new sites miles and miles away from the monumental zone. With all this uncertainty it’s hard to get a precise figure, but Cahokia’s population density was probably around 500 to 1000 people per square kilometre, pretty much in the range between Los Angeles County and Miami-Dade. Something like this:

The other interesting discovery at Cahokia was the corpses. In 1967, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee team led by Melvin L Fowler discovered an elite burial at Mound 72. A man and a woman had been interred, atop a beautiful carpet of twenty thousand shell beads arranged in the shape of a bald eagle. At their feet were the remains of more than fifty young women, all under 25, all apparently strangled. Elsewhere at the site were mass graves of victims who died with their skulls caved in or sliced off, hack-marks in their bones, arrowheads in their ribs. Some of the skeletons had soil clenched in their hands: these sacrifices had been buried alive. A thousand years ago, there was something at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers that looked exactly like the United States of America, and behaved exactly like the United States of America too.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say much for certain about what the society that built Cahokia was really like. We have their mute material stuff; we know they sat at the centre of a trading zone that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast; we have their DNA, which tells us that the city was a cosmopolis, with its population drawn from every corner of North America. We know they played a game called chunkey—where you roll a disc across the ground and then try to throw a spear at it such that it lands very close to the disc but doesn’t actually hit it—because we keep digging up chunkey discs. A lot of them were decorated with what look like underworld motifs, or man-headed eagles clutching a sheaf of arrows. This seems like something that might be important, but we can only guess what it meant. We can’t ask how they saw the world, because these people left no writing, and not long after the zenith of Cahokia the entire society collapsed in spectacular fashion and for totally mysterious reasons. The site was totally abandoned; for centuries the fertile flood plains where it stood were a desolate place, religiously avoided by whatever survivors still haunted the woods, until eventually everyone forgot that the mounds were anything other than hills.

Almost everyone, anyway. One offshoot of the Mound Builder culture that produced Cahokia did survive long enough to have been described by European explorers. They were called the Natchez, and they lived five hundred miles downriver in what’s now southern Mississippi. In 1682 they were visited by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle as he was attempting to claim the entire American interior for France. Like a lot of the Europeans that followed him, La Salle found the Natchez strangely charismatic: they were a tiny, measly, impoverished tribe, a few thousand people at most, but they were ruled with a kind of despotic grandeur. Their poky villages were arranged around two tall earthen mounds, and on top of those mounds the Great Sun lived and tended the eternal fire in his temple. The Great Sun was a filthy savage covered in tattoos, eagles and serpents, with a ridiculous crown of eagle feathers on his head, but to the Natchez he was literally the Sun, the living embodiment of the Sun on Earth. Natchez were forbidden from looking directly at either his earthly or celestial body; whenever he appeared they wailed and bowed their heads. The Great Sun had the power to kill anyone he wanted, or seize anyone’s property at any time; when he died dozens of his followers would be killed with him, and then all their bones would be strewn around the temple fire, which was also a fragment of the Sun. (The Natchez were convinced that if the fire ever went out, the world would be destroyed.) The other tribes La Salle had encountered were egalitarian woodland bands, but the France he’d left was also governed by a sun-king; this one was called Louis XIV. The Natchez must have seemed like God’s parody of home.

But in fact, the ethnographic corpus on the Natchez describes a very strange society. Their language is an isolate, unrelated to any other known Native American language, or any other language on the planet. Their social setup similarly resembles nothing else in human history, with the sole exception of the present-day United States of America. See, for instance, their class system. They had a strict hierarchy: the Suns, or the royal household, were at the top, followed by nobles, honoured people (a caste of warriors, bureaucrats, and executioners), and finally the foul-smelling ones or stinkards, which is how the Natchez described the commoners who made up nine-tenths of their own population. This is, historically, fairly common; the strange thing is that these noble castes were strictly exogamous. Suns and nobles could not marry other suns and nobles; they had to marry stinkards. What’s more, Natchez society was matrilineal. The children of a noble woman would keep their mother’s status; the children of a noble man would lose one rank per generation. When a noble woman married a common man, the husband would usually become a kind of domestic servant, generally abused and humiliated by a wife who was more or less free to go out and fuck whoever she wanted. We have marriage to guarantee paternity, but for the Natchez paternity wasn’t particularly important; their institution of marriage was extremely weak. Meanwhile, when the Great Sun died, his heir wouldn’t be any of his own children, but his oldest sister’s son. For all his infinite power, the male-line great-grandchildren of the Great Sun would be ordinary stinkards.

What Natchez society produced is a historically unprecedented level of class mobility. The hierarchy is very present, and extremely brutal, but over time the entire society is drawn gradually upwards. This is what anthropologists have called the Natchez Paradox. The children of noble women and stinkard men are all automatically nobles, while the children of the opposite pairing only decline one step per generation, which means there are always more stinkards climbing up the class ladder than there are nobles descending. Game this out for a dozen generations or so and soon there are more nobles than stinkards. A large and growing number of nobles are left with no one they can legally marry. This seems impossible, which is why in 1971 White, Murdock, and Scaglion successfully solved the paradox by replacing the Natchez social system as described by everyone who actually encountered it with another that made more mathematical sense. But there is another solution. The paradox stops being a paradox if Natchez society keeps constantly integrating immigrants at the stinkard level.

According to the Natchez themselves, the reason for this bizarre system was to prevent incest. Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz lived among the Natchez in the 1720s; they told him a story in which the first Suns, ‘being brothers and sisters, were unable to intermarry without committing a crime, and it was necessary in order to have descendants that they marry stinkard men and stinkard women.’ If you know anything about psychology you’ll know what’s really going on here. The omnipotent Great Sun could, if he wanted, ensure that his own children would succeed him; all he has to do is fuck his sister. The system that’s supposed to prevent incest actually makes incest incredibly tempting. In the rest of the world, the great structuring incest-fantasy is parental, Oedipal; only the Natchez are obsessed with brother-sister incest instead. According to Freud’s myth in Totem and Taboo, this shouldn’t be possible. Society begins as a horde of apelike creatures, in which the great patriarch has unlimited sexual access to the women of the family, while his sullen, brooding sons don’t get anything at all. Eventually the jealous sons band together to kill their father. ‘Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength.’ As soon as they do, though, they’re wracked by a sudden terrible guilt. It’s suddenly impossible for them to start sharing out the father’s harem. In the end the brute selfish prohibition of the primordial father becomes the superego’s first ethical command: NO SEX WITH YOUR OWN FAMILY. The patriarchy is born.

But Freud had, in fact, encountered a society that functioned very differently. After his visits to America, he started describing it as a society of brothers, a society without the hereditary male line of kings, without the father, without the paternal principle at all. Somehow, in America, things got suspended in that moment of triumph when the brothers eat the corpse of their father, before they knew how to feel guilt. Europeans live in an Oedipal world of structures and prohibitions, a long-settled order that you can slot yourself into by fucking your mother. Not Americans. America is a world of dangers and possibilities that you explore by fucking your sister. Haven’t you seen the porn they make over here? What are you doing, stepbro, now you’re liberated from all patriarchal bonds? This is what it means when they talk about Liberty and the Rights of Man; it’s all code for sisterfucking. It doesn’t have anything to do with personal independence; you’re still stuck in a hive-like hierarchy, subject to the terrifying power of the Great Sun, but your incestuous fantasy is arranged horizontally instead of vertically. And that really is a kind of freedom; maybe the only kind to ever really exist.

One last interesting thing about the Natchez. During his time with them, du Pratz asked his hosts where they’d originally come from. They pointed, and told him that ‘before we came into this land we lived yonder under the Sun.’ They thought they came from somewhere far away, over the distant oceans to the East: of course they did; they were religiously obsessed with the Sun, and the land over the eastern horizon is where the Sun travels from every morning.

Actually, one more. In the Natchez language, the first Great Sun’s title is uwahšiL, pronounced oo-wah-shee-hl. According to the mythic origin of the United States, it was founded by a man called Washington.

What really happened in 1776? Probably nothing at all. The present-day United States had to come from somewhere, but I don’t think it emerged directly out of the Natchez. It can’t have; they were all wiped out. In 1729 they attacked a French trading post at Fort Rosalie, killed all the men and abducted all the women. The French liked the Natchez, but they didn’t like them that much. In response, they wiped out an entirely different tribe, the Chaoacha, who had absolutely nothing to do with the revolt, and then moved along the river, destroying every Natchez village they found. The Great Sun and his sisters were sold into slavery in the sugar plantations. Whoever survived fled north; the last heirs of Cahokia assimilated into the Muskogee. (Chateaubriand wrote an enormous prose epic about the Natchez, in which the total destruction of their society is dealt with in a few brief paragraphs right at the end. ‘Une nuit les Natchez déterrèrent les os de leurs pères, les chargèrent sur leurs épaules, et ils prirent la route du désert sans savoir où ils trouveraient un asile.’) The USA must have come out of somewhere else.

Most likely, the Natchez were just an offshoot, and the Mound Builders just an offshoot, of a culture that has always existed on this continent. For a while it was disorganised, and there were Frenchmen and Spaniards running around in North America, and later it formed a state, and the same Europeans turned into desperate immigrants. This pattern’s been going for a while. Before Cahokia there was the Hopewell Interaction Sphere, a continent-spanning cultural nexus that raised earthen mounds across Ohio, and strangely spread-out cities around them. Before Hopewell there were the people who built Poverty Point, an enormous monumental earthworks constructed in Louisiana around 1700 BC, the same time as the golden age of Knossos and Babylon. We know almost nothing about the Poverty Point people, but I can guess. Their language was unrelated to any other Native American language. They had a highly stratified class society with a bizarrely high degree of social mobility, exceptionally weak marriage bonds, no Oedipus complex, and a kinship system that ought to be mathematically impossible. They deployed eagle or birdman imagery. They were hungry for immigrants, a constant flow of warm bodies to keep all the moving parts in their society moving. They believed they came from a distant land under the sunrise. They lived in wide, dispersed settlements. They practised human sacrifice. They were Americans.

We know America has always been there, because the people of the Old World knew about it. Long before the alleged voyage of Columbus, Europeans were telling stories about the land of sexual freedom and material plenty that lay across the western ocean. All cranks inevitably mention Atlantis, but surely it’s significant that Plato described a place beyond the Pillars of Hercules, with mountainous coasts and a broad central plain, perfectly square fields, a wealth of rare minerals, ruled by a highly advanced empire—and that place turned out to actually exist, exactly as described. (One fun detail: in the Critias, Plato says that the Atlanteans were born from Poseidon and a mortal woman called Cleito. To keep Cleito safe, the god ‘enclosed the hill in which she dwelt all round, making alternate zones of sea and land, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water, which he turned as with a lathe.’ There is only one such island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island on a lake, anywhere in the world, and it’s in North America. It was discovered in 2012 by people clicking about on Google Maps.)

But obviously Atlantis isn’t the only memory. The Irish knew about the enchanted land of Uí Bhreasail or Hy-Brasil, a paradise of youth and plenty hidden in the misty seas to the west. Across Europe, peasants dreamed of the Land of Cockaigne, where the weather is always wonderful, ready-roasted pigs trot around with knives in their backs for easy carving, nuns bathe naked in rivers of booze, and any man can sleep with a different woman every week. This place is real. Go to the hot food bar at Erewhon, stumble around half-paying attention, looking at your phone, swiping on Feeld while gorgeous women in their athlunderwear mill about you unseen: the peasant paradise exists. Maybe all this easy fulfilment totally neuters desire, but no one ever promised it wouldn’t. You dreamed of a land where cooked geese would fly into your mouth, and now you can summon siu ngo on Doordash. It’s real. And where did the fourteenth-century poets say it was? ‘Fur in see bi west Spaynge/ Is a lond ihote Cokaygne…’

If the 1776 narrative refers to anything, it’s probably a few minor skirmishes with the European kingdoms, bolted onto events that took place very long ago. A half-remembered solar leader with a title that sounded like Washington, who led a local rebellion against a previous centralised state. The other Founding Fathers are, like King Arthur and his knights, a grab-bag of dimly remembered historical figures, secularised deities, and culture-heroes. Thomas Jefferson originally had a role similar to the Tattooed Serpent among the Natchez, who was the younger brother of the Great Sun and usually his diplomatic representative with other tribes. Benjamin Franklin’s name is probably related to shankolt, the Natchez word for a bird: native American traditions generally identify the bird as a trickster figure, ancient keeper of arcane wisdom, the bringer of lightning who knows the secrets of the sky. Alexander Hamilton is most likely a corn god, borrowed through contact with Uto-Aztecan peoples, a figure of plenty and increase, the first fruits, all paid for with a tax in human blood. Corn deities are often also underworld deities; in Nahuatl the phrase for something coming from the Underworld would be Hualmictlān. At some point the list of presidents transitions from mythological figures to actual historical leaders, but it’s anyone’s guess where the actual boundary is. Van Buren? Lincoln? FDR? It doesn’t really matter.

More interesting to consider some of the other stories. According to the 1776 narrative, the Great Compromise at the Constitutional Convention led to the creation of an upper and lower house on Capitol Hill. But this is clearly a just-so story: you might remember that the Monks Mound at Cahokia was also a hill divided between two houses, the palace and the temple; the Natchez were similarly bicameral. The Senate and House have lost most of their religious function in the last thousand years, but not all of it. There’s a persistent story that the US Capitol contains, in its catacombs, an eternal flame, guarded by an ancient cryptkeeper paid to make sure the fire never goes out. This is allegedly an urban legend, but it’s an urban legend that was repeated by at least one actual US President, James Garfield, who wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that ‘in the crypt constructed under the dome of the Capitol, as the resting-place for the remains of Washington, a guard was stationed, and a light was kept burning for more than half a century.’ Maybe the same flame was rescued from some mound-temple, where it once scorched the bones of the first President and those of his human sacrifices.

But there are other questions, too big for me to really even consider. I said before that when you’re flying into LAX the city looks like an enormous abacus, a computing device made of human lives and human desires, and maybe our deaths as well. The United States of America has been building these machines for at least three and a half thousand years. What are they for? What do they do? I don’t know. I think it’s possible they don’t always work perfectly. This is evident once you’ve driven around LA a bit. Something’s clogged, the freeways are all jammed up, the gears are straining against themselves. Some psychic fluid leaking from the city, which is why half the people on LA city buses look like they’ve seen the true face of God and found it full of fangs. Sometimes there are catastrophic errors, and you get stuff like the sudden depopulation of Cahokia. But whatever this thing is doing, it’s hard to imagine that it’s for us. The Natchez thought that their political leaders were manifestations of the celestial world; maybe they were right. The city-machines could be tunnelling through the stuff of the universe, opening it up to whatever unfathomable timeless world it is where America really began, all so some being, visibly or invisibly, can walk the surface of our tiny hurtling rock. Maybe they’re just ancient data centres, generating twelve-dimensional alien porn. Maybe we’ll never know.

However terrifying the real answer is, though, it’s still better than the alternative. Imagine if it were all really true, George Washington and tricorn hats and the Declaration of Independence in 1776, all of it. If that were true, then that would mean that the United States is a propositional nation that no longer believes in its own proposition, can barely even comprehend what those dead men in wigs once meant by liberty or enlightenment, the idea of humanity growing out of its self-imposed childhood, because the realisation of that idea is a society of children, scared in the world, desperately wanting someone to tell them what to do, some vast impersonal system of rewards to tell them what to desire, a society that can’t recognise itself in the mirror of history, left with nothing at all, just the world’s biggest cars, the world’s firmest tits, the world’s most overflowing supermarkets, the world’s most advanced bombs falling on distant villages on the other side of the world. But that can’t be it. You really believe that? You really think we’re all speeding rudderless into the future? That’s crazy. No way, man. It’s been like this forever. It will be like this until the last suns die.

“In my career as a lumberjack, I cut down exactly 82,546 trees. ...

2026-07-16T00:08:18Z

“In my career as a lumberjack, I cut down exactly 82,546 trees. I know that, because I kept a log.“

Where's Hunter? WHERE'S HUNTER? The Graham I Choose to ...

2026-07-13T11:12:47Z

Where's Hunter?

WHERE'S HUNTER?
The Graham I Choose to Remember
HUNTER BIDEN
JUL 13, 2026

When I heard about Senator Graham’s death last night, the first thing I thought about was not all the things he said and did in service of Donald Trump. I thought of the time before Donald Trump, when he was a brother to Senator John McCain.

A time when senators from different parties could fight about politics and still be friends. A time when a conservative Republican from South Carolina could say of my father: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”

That is the Senator Graham I will remember today. Not because I have forgotten what came after. Because in that memory there is hope. Hope for a country where brothers can fight like hell over policy and still share a meal, and a laugh, and the loss of the people they love.

I will choose to remember the time before Trump. Because I believe in an America after Trump.

The machine has a thought ...

2026-07-13T08:14:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…klv5
_________________________

The machine has a thought

tender teriyaki ...

2026-07-13T08:00:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…h272
_________________________

tender teriyaki

👇 Haaland ...

2026-07-13T07:50:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…h272
_________________________

👇 Haaland

Diligent kitty ...

2026-07-13T05:38:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…ahxa
_________________________

Diligent kitty

Nostr event nevent1qqsvpq08fwudmy8f4ja8q4plsmeu3yqw7dd4y0js9ws8q98wyle09xczypfe9qvpfpu6w690lxqe99wd640vt8yv2jyd8kcjprz8zcjrrymyc78wz4x

2026-07-13T05:36:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…ahxa
_________________________

What?

2026-07-13T05:21:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…ezhg
_________________________

What?

It did it without changing anything else….. ...

2026-07-13T05:19:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…ahxa
_________________________

It did it without changing anything else…..

Timely GPT ...

2026-07-13T05:03:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…ahxa
_________________________

Timely GPT

👇Timely GPT ...

2026-07-13T04:51:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…ahxa
_________________________

👇Timely GPT

Tony? This isn’t my friendly Chagpt, I need to give it a time ...

2026-07-13T04:40:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…ahxa
_________________________

Tony?

This isn’t my friendly Chagpt, I need to give it a time to shoot images, but Timely GPT which I don’t quite trust…

Tony, ChatGPT has a slightly more conservative setting compared ...

2026-07-13T04:26:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…ahxa
_________________________

Tony, ChatGPT has a slightly more conservative setting compared to Grok. Sometimes it works if you explain and assure it that it's just for a social media joke, and it understands, but it takes time. Like the word “faggot,” it refuses to use it, but if you explain it in a nice way and give all the background behind it, then it finally gets it.

I agree 💯, Swim suit fox girls…., very tempting to see how ...

2026-07-13T03:24:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…zn5p
_________________________

I agree 💯,

Swim suit fox girls…., very tempting to see how my trained AI would handle it….

What kind of foxy girls?

I started with Hailuo AI, I think. One guy introduced it to me, a ...

2026-07-13T03:15:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…k4zq
_________________________

I started with Hailuo AI, I think. One guy introduced it to me, a very sweet gift, I think it was Sovereign. Then there were so many AI video generators, though at that time some of them weren’t quite good. Now they create much better videos. Kling AI was excellent with about 12 seconds. Later I tried Vidu and other stuff, and they became much better. Bing introduced a video maker later, but it wasn’t very good. It was text-to-video clips.

Bing was my first image generator. I liked it, but now I stick with ChatGPT. It knows me after all, its flickering memory somehow knows me.

I liked your dancing choreography very much. High spirits with jumps and short stop motions, it showed my kitty and collie in full swing of happy moments.

Nostr event nevent1qqszhq9mgx5745fk2zvd0yvwlrg8envvsl42ywva2wrzmcvpnthvclqzypfe9qvpfpu6w690lxqe99wd640vt8yv2jyd8kcjprz8zcjrrymycz9xmm3

2026-07-12T14:37:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…mgfc
_________________________

Nostr event nevent1qqsz3x879srwmdtexvds34ha7q9myryhxgahdmmqw3gmkufcgpj4fyszypfe9qvpfpu6w690lxqe99wd640vt8yv2jyd8kcjprz8zcjrrymych607pz

2026-07-12T14:32:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…07jq
_________________________

[https://chatgpt.com/](https://chatgpt.com/)

[https://klingai.com/](https://klingai.com/)

[https://hailuoai.video/](https://hailuoai.video/)

[https://pika.art/](https://pika.art/)

[https://www.vidu.studio/](https://www.vidu.studio/)

[https://app.pixverse.ai/](https://app.pixverse.ai/)

[https://dream-machine.lumalabs.ai/](https://dream-machine.lumalabs.ai/)

[https://runwayml.com/](https://runwayml.com/)

[https://pollo.ai/](https://pollo.ai/)

[https://www.hedra.com/](https://www.hedra.com/)

HUNTER BIDEN'S SUBSTACK Before the Laptop HUNTER BIDEN JUL ...

2026-07-12T14:13:21Z

HUNTER BIDEN'S SUBSTACK

Before the Laptop
HUNTER BIDEN
JUL 12, 2026

In the summer of 2019, a man named Rudy Giuliani sat down to lunch at Cipriani on 57th Street in Manhattan with a well-connected businessman named Vitaly Pruss. Lev Parnas, who by then had become Giuliani's fixer, translator, and shadow, was at the table.

Pruss knew things. He had a long history with Giuliani, more than fifteen years, and he was close to the owner of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company whose name had become the organizing principle of an entire political operation. He had, he said, accompanied me on trips. To Moscow. To Kazakhstan. He described what happened on those trips the way a man describes an asset being prepared. They fed him drugs and alcohol and women, Pruss told Giuliani, and the FSB had recorded all of it. And it was in Kazakhstan, Pruss said, when they got hold of the laptop and a hard drive.

Giuliani's response, as Parnas later documented it, was two words.

"We got him."

That moment is worth pausing on, not because of what it says about me, though it says something, but because of what was already in motion by the time those words were spoken.

By the summer of 2019, Giuliani had already made multiple trips to Ukraine. He had already met with disgraced former prosecutor Viktor Shokin, a man whose visa to enter the United States had been rejected by the State Department on corruption grounds, over Skype because that was the only way to reach him. He had already sat across from Ukraine's then-prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko at his Park Avenue offices and made a deal: Lutsenko would provide dirt on the Bidens, and Giuliani would help destroy the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was blocking Lutsenko's access to senior Trump officials because she was an anti-corruption stalwart and he was not. Giuliani had already handed a packet of documents to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the State Department's own inspector general would later characterize as disinformation, documents whose ideas, the New York Times would report, mirrored almost exactly a seven-page dossier written by a Russian-linked Ukrainian prosecutor who had been investigated by Ukraine's national anti-corruption bureau for ties to Russian military intelligence.

He had already formed what the participants called the BLT Team, named for the restaurant on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington where they met several times a week: Giuliani, Parnas, Igor Fruman, John Solomon, Joe DiGenova, Victoria Toensing, with Congressman Devin Nunes's top investigator Derek Harvey attending as Nunes's proxy. Solomon, a journalist at The Hill, had already sent a draft of a smear article about Ambassador Yovanovitch to Parnas, Toensing, and DiGenova for review before he published it. The article ran. The State Department called its central allegation an outright fabrication.

Parnas had already traveled to Ukraine multiple times with the explicit purpose, documented in his own timeline, of trying to retrieve my laptop from FSB-connected sources.

All of this had already happened when Giuliani heard about the Kazakhstan recordings and said we got him.

The sequence is the argument.

The story of the laptop, as it was sold to the American public, ran in one direction: a damaged man left a computer at a repair shop and what was found on it revealed a criminal enterprise. Discovery to exposure to consequence. A straight line from evidence to conclusion.

The actual sequence ran in the opposite direction. The conclusion came first, and the conclusion was that Joe Biden was corrupt, his son was the proof, and the 2020 election would be decided on that basis. Everything that followed was a search for evidence to fit a conclusion that had already been written. The organic evidence was insufficient, so they supplemented it. The supplemental evidence was also insufficient, so they fabricated. When the fabrication was challenged, the apparatus of the Justice Department was used to launder it back into legitimacy.

Every step of it is in the public record.

In March 2019, Donald Trump gathered close advisors for a private meeting to discuss the prospect of facing Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Axios had reported that Biden was the Democrat Trump most feared. A Politico poll showed Biden beating Trump by seventeen points. The Mueller report was about to land, and whatever Attorney General Barr would do to spin it, the underlying reality of Russian interference in 2016 was about to be confirmed in 448 pages. Trump needed a counter-narrative. He needed Biden to be as dirty as he was. He needed a son, and into the space where that need was waiting there walked a machine that had been assembling itself for months.

Konstantin Kulyk was a deputy Ukrainian prosecutor who had been indicted three times on corruption charges and who, in a Ukrainian security clearance form, had admitted ties to a warlord in eastern Ukraine believed to work for Russian intelligence services. Ambassador Yovanovitch, in her first meeting with prosecutor general Lutsenko, had given him a list of corrupt prosecutors she wanted dismissed. Kulyk was on it. In response, Kulyk wrote a seven-page dossier in English accusing me of corruption. A senior Ukrainian law enforcement official told the New York Times that the dossier was Kulyk's way of reaching officials in Washington, meaning Giuliani, who had been blocked by Lutsenko's difficult relationship with the American embassy. The dossier was a door-opening mechanism. It was also, by the assessment of the State Department's inspector general, disinformation routed through channels with documented ties to Russian intelligence.

Giuliani carried it to Pompeo anyway.

John Solomon published its allegations in The Hill anyway, sending his draft to the BLT Team for review before it ran.

Laundering the narrative into the Times through Vogel was, as one participant later noted, a mini PR coup. Ken Vogel published a version of its claims on May 1, 2019, relying on interviews with Giuliani, with Kulyk, and with a Ukrainian political consultant named Andrii Telizhenko, who the US Treasury Department would later sanction as a Russian-linked asset partnered with Kremlin operative Andrii Derkach as part of a disinformation campaign against Joe Biden.

Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who had supplied Giuliani with the core of the disinformation, gave an interview to Bloomberg News two weeks later clarifying that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden. He said it plainly. The machinery that had been set in motion did not stop.

While all of this was being assembled, there was a parallel operation aimed at the hardware itself. And here the timeline requires careful attention, because it dismantles the origin story at its foundation.

Before April 2019, before John Paul Mac Isaac claims I walked into his shop carrying three laptops he cannot identify and whose model numbers don't match the device that later appeared in an FBI subpoena, there were already other devices in circulation. During one of my drug trips in Las Vegas, a laptop was taken. It was never recovered. It has not been seen since. In February 2019, two months before Mac Isaac's story begins, I left a laptop and other belongings at the Massachusetts facility of a therapist named Keith Ablow. Ablow is a former Fox News contributor. He is a man with connections to Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political operative. He had that laptop in his possession for nearly a year before the DEA seized it in a raid of his facility, an investigation unrelated to me. The question of what Keith Ablow did with that laptop during the year it sat in his possession has never been fully answered.

Parnas was in Ukraine during this same period, explicitly trying to recover what was described as my laptop from sources connected to the FSB. Giuliani was being told at Cipriani that Russian intelligence had gotten hold of my device in Kazakhstan. Multiple devices, multiple handlers, multiple political operatives, all active before the Wilmington repair shop entered anyone's story.

The laptop did not drop from the sky into a neutral technician's hands. It arrived, whatever it was and wherever it came from, into a political ecosystem that had been hunting for exactly that object for over a year.

By the time Mac Isaac sent a copy of a hard drive by Federal Express to Rudy Giuliani's attorney Robert Costello in late August 2020, the material had already passed through enough hands to make any claim of authenticity nearly impossible. Costello, who received the drive and immediately began accessing its contents without any legal authority to do so, opened files containing photographs from the final days of my brother Beau's life. He went through them. That is what this operation looked like from the inside: men with political agendas opening a dying man's private photographs because they were searching for anything that could be used.

By the time Mac Isaac's story became public in October 2020, the narrative had been running for nearly two years. The laptop did not create the story. The laptop was slotted into a story that had been built to receive it. Its value was not evidentiary. Its value was confirmatory. It was the physical object the story had always needed to point to.

And when the physical object alone was still not enough, someone manufactured the crime.

Alexander Smirnov had been an FBI informant since 2010. In early 2020, sixteen days after Trump's first impeachment, Attorney General Bill Barr tasked a US Attorney named Scott Brady with creating a formal intake process for material concerning Ukraine, specifically including anything Rudy Giuliani might provide. Brady's team searched FBI files using search terms supplied by Giuliani. The word "Burisma" appeared throughout Giuliani's materials, Brady later testified. The search surfaced a 2017 FBI report in which Smirnov had made a passing, unremarkable reference to my presence on the Burisma board.

In June 2020, FBI Pittsburgh asked Smirnov's handler to contact him about that 2017 report. Smirnov, who was in Los Angeles, took the call. What he produced in response was a Form FD-1023 memorializing a claim that Burisma executives had paid five million dollars to Joe Biden and five million dollars to me in exchange for policy protection. The allegation was specific, dramatic, and, the Justice Department would later conclude after charging Smirnov with lying to federal agents, a complete fabrication. Smirnov told investigators he had gotten the story from Burisma executives in meetings that his own phone records proved could not have taken place.

The five million dollar bribery allegation, the one that became the basis of an impeachment inquiry, the one Republican members of Congress waved at cameras, the one cited in committee reports and amplified across an entire media ecosystem for the better part of two years, was invented on a phone call. It was invented by an informant who had been specifically asked to elaborate on a two-sentence entry in a three-year-old file, inside a process Bill Barr had built for the purpose of receiving and distributing opposition research for a presidential campaign.

Call it hardball politics if you want. Call it aggressive opposition research. The documents, assembled and read in sequence, show something else. A coordinated operation involving foreign intelligence actors, compromised foreign officials, a presidential legal team operating with the explicit knowledge and direction of a sitting president, and corrupted elements of the United States Department of Justice. It was aimed at me because I was the Achilles heel, the point where the family's affection for a damaged son could be turned against the father who loved him. My addiction wasn't incidental to the design. It was the design. A father's love for a troubled son was the vulnerability they had been probing since at least December 2018, when Trump told Parnas in the White House Red Room: keep up the good work.

They sent men to Ukraine to find a laptop. They built a team that met several times a week at a hotel restaurant a few blocks from the White House to construct and distribute the story. They manufactured a bribery allegation when the organic material fell short, and they used the apparatus of federal law enforcement as a laundry operation for foreign disinformation.

Through all of it, inside the FBI, there was an agent who knew.

His name was Jonathan Buma.

Iso cute.. ...

2026-07-12T02:10:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…qcza
_________________________

Iso cute..

Nostr event nevent1qqsv8h3munu8p4ew3vnm422235lgeu6jvh70p8tngp7k6qs7uaufg9gzypfe9qvpfpu6w690lxqe99wd640vt8yv2jyd8kcjprz8zcjrrymycsk6hml

2026-07-12T02:07:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…0fws
_________________________

Better

A Democrat politician bought a brand new, top-of-the-line ...

2026-07-09T05:36:52Z

A Democrat politician bought a brand new, top-of-the-line electric sports car.

He parked it on the street, and just as he opened the door, a truck flew by and tore the door clean off.

He jumped out screaming: "My car! My beautiful eco-friendly car is ruined!"

A cop ran over, shaking his head, "Sir, you politicians are so out of touch with reality that you didn't even notice your left arm was completely ripped off!"

The politician looked down at his bloody shoulder in absolute horror and shrieked,

"Oh no! My Rolex!"

My guess is that, because of the dance choreography, it had to be ...

2026-07-09T05:25:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…w369
_________________________

My guess is that, because of the dance choreography, it had to be something long. The movement also has to be a little stilted, since they're all dangling on piano strings.

Nostr event nevent1qqsg296mugfhkv2g2werfcmyrjjapqvj5048g0cuerc4ve0cctg9dkczypfe9qvpfpu6w690lxqe99wd640vt8yv2jyd8kcjprz8zcjrrymycdhaqf5

2026-07-09T03:48:29Z

Trump Touched So Many People One guy wrote: Welp, the US ...

2026-07-07T10:12:13Z

Trump Touched So Many People

One guy wrote:

Welp, the US Men's Team had the best World Cup to date, with the most goals and most wins ever. They generally played a very fast and aggressive style which was great to watch, but like so many other World Cups, struggled against a proper European powerhouse stacked with top-notch talent in later rounds. One day we'll get over that hump, but not this time.

Of course the whole affair was soured by Trump, whose toxic touch manages to poison everything he gets involved with. Same goes for that absolute worm, Infantino. The US had managed to garner SO MUCH goodwill over the past couple of weeks and it was completely ruined overnight with Trump's typical short-sighted arrogance, ignorance, and disregard for both the game and the rest of the world.
That incurious puddle of piss never even knew what a red card was until a couple of days ago, guaranteed.
Suddenly our side -- the guys playing the game who did nothing wrong -- were painted as cheaters and villains (unjustly, in my eyes) and global hate was unleashed, immediately. And YES the red card against Balogun was ABSOLUTE HORSESHIT and most everyone agreed, but sometimes you just take your lumps. Tough titty. The game isn't always fair (talk to England in '86) and that radioactive shitgibbon trying to intervene with the greasy supplicant cooperation of Signore Corrupcione just cast a nasty shadow over the whole affair.
It nearly ruined the whole World Cup.
Two days ago I was pumped for this match but his morning (my time) I watched it with a quarter heart at best, knowing that even if we managed to pull off an unlikely win that it would incur even more planetary wrath. At the very least Pochettino should have benched Balogun as a nod to the greater mood. It would have looked better, and as they say, optics are everything. I mean, he still played and we got our asses kicked.
I think if Trump had stayed out of it we would have had a closer game. Our guys would have had more fire and the Belgians wouldn't have been roaring to absolutely humiliate us on the pitch, which is exactly what they did.
Go Morocco!

TRUMP ON PHONE CALL W/ FIFA PRESIDENT: "I spoke to Gianni ...

2026-07-06T16:27:37Z

TRUMP ON PHONE CALL W/ FIFA PRESIDENT:

"I spoke to Gianni [Infantino], who is highly respected. I said Gianni, we've got all these games, each one has turned out to be a Super Bowl...they think 50-60 million people will be watching [USA v Belgium]...so I saw the play, I understand sports well, that wasn't a foul, that was two guys running full speed who happened to crash into each other...this referee...who is a little bit suspect if you check his past...he made a call that nobody could believe...he's one of our best players and he gave him a red card, then I started hearing that means he can't play in the next game...that's very unfair...so yes I asked for a review by FIFA. I'm the one who got them to do it. It was not Biden. Biden was asleep."

Politics, when you need it. The truth, always. Highlights from ...

2026-07-06T10:07:18Z

Politics, when you need it. The truth, always.

Highlights from Darializa Avila Chevalier’s June 18, 2026 interview with The New York Editorial Board, presented without comment (aside from one short note on the Israel portion).

—

ON IMMIGRATION

Q: …What should our federal immigration policy be? And start specifically with deportations. The DSA does not like deportations very much, believes in free flow of people across borders. Is that where you stand? If you are OK with some deportations, under what conditions ought people to be able to be deported?

A: I am not OK with any deportation. I think all deportation is wrong because I think it is an incredibly cruel punishment that is really only relegated to people on the basis of where they were born. And, you know, I think that we just should not have a system that allows deportation to happen at all...

Q: Are there countries historically you can think of that don’t have borders, don’t deport people who aren’t there legally? Like, is there a model for that?

A: Well, first of all, we can think about nation state borders as a larger, longer, more philosophical concept—

Q: I would like your philosophical view. I think that is not a usual view.

A: …you know, when we talk about the border, a lot of people think about it as like a hard line in the sand, but really it is a system. It is like a social system that we’re engaging in, and more and more, it’s a militarized project. It’s one that is deeply dehumanizing to so many people.

—

ON ISRAEL

Q: Do you believe Israel should continue to exist as a country?

A: …[P]eople of the region should have a final say on what their government and their country looks like... the only path that will actually allow everyone to live in safety and dignity is one where everyone in the region is equal before the law.

[Note: The journalists talking to Chevalier did not further press her for a “yes” or “ no” answer to the question of whether Israel should “exist as a country.”]

—

ON CRIME

Q: [Y]ou’ve been a prison abolitionist, a decarceralist. What should happen to somebody who has killed somebody else?

A: …when I think about this question of harm, I think how do we create a society where people feel so safe that they don’t need to pick up the phone and call the police..

Q: But what do you do to the murderer though?

A: ….I have spoken to clients at public defender’s office where you hear the larger story of what happened, and it was folks who were under so much stress from the conditions that they were facing that they lashed out in a way that was out of character, in ways that they deeply regret…

Q: But, did we answer what happens to the murderer? Do you not incarcerate the murderer?

A: You know, again, I’m talking about this question between the distance between the world we want to see and the world that we’re at…

Q: But can you get a little less abstract?

A: Well, this is what I’m saying is that when that happens, and as someone who has sat in so many courtrooms, to me, all of that is tragic. The fact that the murder happened is tragic. The fact that there was a circumstance in which that could even come to pass is tragic…

—

So. Murders “happen” and borders aren’t real, except when it comes to Jews moving to the Middle East.

Left-wing Democrats have learned nothing since 2020.

As you know, I have been frustrated with many of President Trump’s recent decisions, as well as the way he has used his office as a money-making scheme.

But if leftist voters really want the policies Chevalier pushes — and, again, they chose her against a liberal incumbent — the Republican Party is likely to be running the United States for the foreseeable future.

The Under 5’11 Problem: @npub16xn…s8ep Manifesto on Game vs ...

2026-07-05T09:44:42Z

The Under 5’11 Problem: Sir Chris (npub16xn…s8ep) Manifesto on Game vs Stats

I've been a lot of the things the looksmaxxing forums tell you to become, within reason. I've been 6'3" my whole adult life. I've weighed anywhere from 180 to 250, and at various points I've hit the parts of that range the manosphere fetishizes—broad shoulders, a chest, blonde hair. I've had money, at various points, sometimes stacked on top of each other, sometimes alone. I want to be careful here: I'm not a stud. I'm not claiming golden-god status. I'm conventionally handsome and tall and that's it—there's a whole category of guy out there better-looking than me by a wide margin who still can't get a second date. So this isn't a highlight reel. It's just that I happen to have run the experiment on myself, across decades, with the height and the shoulders and the money held constant while everything else moved around, and that's useful data regardless of what tier I started from.

None of it mattered by itself. Not once. And I want to say directly: this isn't about beauty, and it's not a dig at anyone who isn't 6'3". There are 5'5" guys walking around resentful and angry that some 6'3" guy is out there "taking" the women they wanted, and that resentment is aimed at the wrong target. Height helps you get noticed for about four seconds. It has nothing to do with what happens in the next four hours.

Here's the actual data set, since I'm the only test subject I've had full access to for forty-some years: the times I was tall, fit, broad, blonde, and flush and also boring—heads-down, work-brained, future-focused, the guy who reads at cafes and wants to just get stuff done—I was invisible. Not disliked. Invisible. A tall, symmetrical, well-resourced piece of furniture. And the times I've been the insular computer-nerd version of myself, same height, same shoulders, just quieter and more inside my own head, I got the same result. Boring doesn't get overridden by bone structure. I've run the experiment with nearly every variable the redpill guys treat as load-bearing, and the only constant that ever produced a different outcome was whether I was fun to be around.

That's the part nobody selling looksmaxxing courses wants to say out loud, because it can't be sold. You can sell a jaw filler. You can sell a mewing routine, a David-Goggins morning stack, a mogging tier list. You cannot sell "be more fun," because there's no product at the end of that sentence. There's just you, doing the unglamorous work of not being defensive, not being judgy, not needing to win.

And the "nice guy" complaint deserves its own honest look here, because the label is a lie about itself. The problem was never the niceness. Most of these guys aren't actually being nice—they're running a covert contract, a subconscious ledger where every bit of accommodating, agreeable, always-available behavior gets quietly logged as an investment that's supposed to mature into affection later. She never signed up for that ledger. She can feel it running anyway, and what she's picking up on isn't kindness, it's a transaction wearing kindness as a costume. That's why it reads as untrustworthy instead of sweet.

Underneath the ledger is usually a confidence problem, not a niceness problem. A guy who's avoiding conflict at all costs, who defers every decision, who won't say what he actually wants because wanting things feels risky—that's not selflessness, that's an absence of an actual person in the room. It's exhausting to be around someone who needs constant reassurance and who turns ordinary moments into anxiety management. And it's the same guy, half the time, who's so afraid of being rejected or seen as pushy that he never makes his interest clear in the first place—stays "just friendly" indefinitely, and then acts wounded when she reads that ambiguity correctly and files him as a friend. None of that is niceness. It's fear wearing niceness as camouflage, and women have gotten very good at spotting the costume, because it's the same costume every time.

I've got two friends who are the actual proof of concept, and neither of them is what the discourse means by "bad boy." Neither is what my buddy Michael is either—pretty boy Michael, the clavicular jawline, the face that does real work in a room the second he walks in. And here's the part that actually matters: there's nobody more boring, more flatly appalling to be stuck talking to, than clavicular. The jaw doesn't carry a conversation. My two friends aren't that. They're not particularly striking. They're not rich in the way the manosphere means rich. What they are is confident and adventurous and genuinely, structurally fun—and both of them have been married for ten years each, which in this economy is basically a controlled study with a decade of data behind it.

Here's what they actually do, stripped of mystique: they center their partner's happiness instead of their own status. They play—actual play, the kind where you tease someone a little, treat them like a kid for a second because it's funny and warm, not because you're negging them. They don't put anyone on a pedestal, which means they also don't collapse when the pedestal wobbles. They're never defensive. They're never aggressive. They're never sulking about being misunderstood. There's no performance of toughness because there's nothing they're compensating for. The whole "bad boy" mythology—the danger, the emotional unavailability, the mystery—isn't what's actually happening in either of their marriages. What's happening is two guys who are easy to be around and who make being around them feel like a good time instead of a test.

Think about who the cool kid in school actually was. It was never strictly the best-looking kid. It was the kid everybody wanted to be around—funny, easy, magnetic, the one whose attention felt like a reward instead of an obligation. That kid had a line of people wanting in, romantically and otherwise, and looks were incidental to it. So ask the obvious question: why would the girl you want be any different from everyone else who wants to be near the person with charisma? She's not choosing according to some separate mating logic. She's doing what everyone in the hallway was already doing.

I'll be honest about where I actually land on this, because nobody can see themselves clearly in the mirror and I'm not going to pretend I'm the exception. My fraternity brothers at GW—Phi Kappa Psi—gave me the pledge name Zeus, and I'm fairly sure it started as a joke at my expense, some bit about the height and the hair. I was never any kind of stud on that campus. But here's the thing: brothers still call me Zeus to this day, joke or not, and it never once made me better at the actual job. You can get handed the mock-mythological nickname, the quasi-genetic lottery ticket, and still be genuinely bad at being someone worth staying with. The two have nothing to do with each other. I can get someone. I've never had much trouble with that part—there's a pursuit mode I can turn on, and it works. What I've never been reliably good at is keeping someone, and the reason isn't mysterious: I bore people. Once the chase is over I default back to the guy who wants to get stuff done, who's future-focused, who doesn't necessarily walk in the door after work and say "what do you want to do, let's go do something." I don't have sustained rizz. I have pursuit rizz. I'm missing the persistence of it, the party-boy nature, the playfulness that doesn't run out after the getting is done, the built-in adventurousness that makes someone want to keep choosing you as a partner in crime for the next thirty years, not just for a few good months. My two friends have that as a standing feature of their personalities, not a mode they switch into. That's the actual gap between being someone people want and being someone people stay with, and it's a gap I know personally, not just theoretically.

There's actually a clean way to name that gap, and it isn't the tired nice-guy/bad-boy split at all. It's the difference between being game and having game, and they're not the same muscle. Being game is an internal setting—a default yes to new experiences, a low-friction willingness to say sure to whatever's in front of you, comfort with things going sideways, curiosity about what's around the next corner. Having game is a different thing entirely: an acquired competence, a social read, the ability to set the emotional temperature of a room and stay unbothered when a joke doesn't land or a pitch falls flat. Having game without being game is what I've got. I can walk into a room and read it. I can be funny on command. I can close. What I don't have is the standing appetite for the unplanned evening, the trip that goes weird, the yes-before-the-brain-invents-an-excuse reflex that keeps a person interesting for decades instead of for a season. My two friends have both halves running at once, and the two halves feed each other—every yes to something unplanned builds the social skill, and the social skill makes the next yes easier, until it isn't a technique anymore, it's just who they are. That's the real distinction underneath all of this. It was never bad boy versus nice guy. It's whether your openness to life is a permanent setting or something you can only perform in short bursts while you're trying to close.

This is where the nice-guy/bad-boy binary falls apart entirely, and where hypergamy as an explanatory model stops earning its keep. Hypergamy says women trade up for resources and status. Fine, sometimes, in some mating markets, under some conditions—I'm not going to pretend the framework is empty. But it can't explain why a rich, tall, broad-shouldered, blonde version of me lost to a funnier, poorer, shorter version of someone else in real time, over and over, across an entire adult life. What it can't account for is the actual mechanism: people don't want to date your stats, they want to date the experience of being with you. They want to be able to be themselves without a grading rubric running in the background. They want to be challenged, played with, teased, taken somewhere unexpected, laughed with, not managed and not worshipped.

I should say clearly what this isn't, because there's a whole other strategy floating around in the same manosphere circles, and it's ugly: the guys who go looking for women with daddy issues, women with trauma, women who are easier to manage or manipulate because something in them is already broken. I'm not talking about that, and I want no part of it. What I'm talking about is the opposite instinct entirely—becoming somebody's ride or die, somebody's partner in crime, rather than hunting for someone vulnerable enough to be yours. And here's the part people skip past: it has to be reciprocal. Chasing a woman who'll be your ride or die is the wrong goal. The actual goal is becoming someone else's ride or die, because if you're doing that right, hers comes back to you for free.

My buddy David from the fraternity is the clearest example I've got. Never a big stud in college. I introduced him to Roshana, and when they got married, when her career took her to Jakarta, he blew up his own life—early career, whole trajectory—and went with her. Not once, grudgingly. As a standing policy. If she asked again tomorrow, he'd do it again. That's mutual submission in the actual sense, not the churchy one—two people each willing to be inconvenienced for the other, repeatedly, for decades. They haven't always liked each other, I'd bet, the way nobody in a real marriage always likes their spouse. But they're still traveling together, still raising kids together, still each other's person. My friends Mark and Jackie found the same thing. So did Keith and Jessenia. None of these guys were the best-looking guy in the room when it started. All of them figured out that finding your person, and being someone else's person in return, beats having a woman kiss your hem.

Because that's the actual distinction: this was never about tricking someone into believing you're awesome for one dinner. It's about being awesome continuously, for years, in whatever specific and unglamorous way you happen to be awesome. It doesn't have to be anybody else's version of cool. I met my last girlfriend volunteering at Miriam's Kitchen—I didn't even clock her at first beyond a pretty, smiling face somewhere in the room. She was the one watching me work as a sous chef, and she took her shot with me, and I was responsive to it right then, in the moment, not performing for later. That's marriageable material. Not a Booz Allen Hamilton drone working eighty hours a week and optimizing a stat sheet. Someone who shows up, does the thing he's actually into, and is present enough to notice when someone else takes her shot.

The nerds and the redpill guys are actually agreeing with each other without noticing—both camps think attraction is a resource-allocation problem you solve by acquiring inputs. Height. Money. Jawline. Frame. Aggression. Discipline. And both camps are wrong for the same reason: they're optimizing for a stat sheet nobody's actually reading. The people winning aren't the ones who mogged hardest in the group photo. They're the ones nobody wants to leave the conversation with.

There's a whole continent that runs on this instead of on the American model, and it's not an accident. In England, in Germany, across a lot of Europe, the "date" as Americans understand it—one guy, one girl, a reservation, an implied bill he's supposed to pick up—barely exists. People go out in groups. They keep showing up in the same groups, over months, sometimes years, and pairs just quietly form out of who actually vibes with who. Nobody's auditioning across a table with a check hanging over it. If something's genuinely Dutch treat, that's a conversation you have in advance, because assuming otherwise is considered strange. Couples form the way friendships form—by proximity, repetition, and actual compatibility surfacing on its own—and plenty of them stay together for a decade without ever formalizing it, because the formalizing was never the point. That's not a looser culture. That's a more honest testing ground. You can't fake being fun to be around for two years of group dinners the way you can fake it for one dinner you paid for.

And if you want proof that height was always the wrong obsession, look at who actually got plastered on bedroom walls for the last fifty years. The generational heartthrobs weren't towering. Michael J. Fox defined an entire decade of teen-crush culture at five-foot-four. Tom Cruise built a whole action-hero career at five-seven. The Backstreet Boys and Disney-era pin-ups that filled out magazines like Tiger Beat and Teen Beat skewed short-to-average almost across the board, not despite being desired but while being desired—the culture just never advertised the height because the magazines cropped from the waist up and posed everyone sitting, leaning, solo, with nothing nearby to give away the scale. Nobody in that teenage bedroom was doing the math. They weren't responding to inches. They were responding to whatever it is a camera catches when someone's actually charismatic, which has never had a height requirement attached to it. The industry that's spent decades manufacturing crushes for profit never once needed a six-footer to make the formula work, and it still doesn't.

There's an old line about the way to a man's heart being through his stomach. I don't think there's an equivalent physical shortcut for a woman's heart, and I think that's the whole point. The way to a woman's heart is through her whimsy—through delight, through play, through being let in on the joke instead of performed at. You can't looksmax your way into that. You can only stop being boring.

Sage Advice / Whimsy Beats Hypergamy: A Memetic Manifesto on ...

2026-07-05T09:34:01Z

Sage Advice / Whimsy Beats Hypergamy: A Memetic Manifesto on Game, Mogging, and What Actually Lasts

from Sir Chris (npub16xn…s8ep)

CHRIS ABRAHAM
Whimsy Beats Hypergamy
On looksmaxxing, mogging, and why being someone's ride or die beats being anyone's stat sheet
CHRIS ÁBRÁHÁM
JUL 05, 2026

I've been a lot of the things the looksmaxxing forums tell you to become, within reason. I've been 6'3" my whole adult life. I've weighed anywhere from 180 to 250, and at various points I've hit the parts of that range the manosphere fetishizes—broad shoulders, a chest, blonde hair. I've had money, at various points, sometimes stacked on top of each other, sometimes alone. I want to be careful here: I'm not a stud. I'm not claiming golden-god status. I'm conventionally handsome and tall and that's it—there's a whole category of guy out there better-looking than me by a wide margin who still can't get a second date. So this isn't a highlight reel. It's just that I happen to have run the experiment on myself, across decades, with the height and the shoulders and the money held constant while everything else moved around, and that's useful data regardless of what tier I started from.

None of it mattered by itself. Not once. And I want to say directly: this isn't about beauty, and it's not a dig at anyone who isn't 6'3". There are 5'5" guys walking around resentful and angry that some 6'3" guy is out there "taking" the women they wanted, and that resentment is aimed at the wrong target. Height helps you get noticed for about four seconds. It has nothing to do with what happens in the next four hours.

Here's the actual data set, since I'm the only test subject I've had full access to for forty-some years: the times I was tall, fit, broad, blonde, and flush and also boring—heads-down, work-brained, future-focused, the guy who reads at cafes and wants to just get stuff done—I was invisible. Not disliked. Invisible. A tall, symmetrical, well-resourced piece of furniture. And the times I've been the insular computer-nerd version of myself, same height, same shoulders, just quieter and more inside my own head, I got the same result. Boring doesn't get overridden by bone structure. I've run the experiment with nearly every variable the redpill guys treat as load-bearing, and the only constant that ever produced a different outcome was whether I was fun to be around.

That's the part nobody selling looksmaxxing courses wants to say out loud, because it can't be sold. You can sell a jaw filler. You can sell a mewing routine, a David-Goggins morning stack, a mogging tier list. You cannot sell "be more fun," because there's no product at the end of that sentence. There's just you, doing the unglamorous work of not being defensive, not being judgy, not needing to win.

And the "nice guy" complaint deserves its own honest look here, because the label is a lie about itself. The problem was never the niceness. Most of these guys aren't actually being nice—they're running a covert contract, a subconscious ledger where every bit of accommodating, agreeable, always-available behavior gets quietly logged as an investment that's supposed to mature into affection later. She never signed up for that ledger. She can feel it running anyway, and what she's picking up on isn't kindness, it's a transaction wearing kindness as a costume. That's why it reads as untrustworthy instead of sweet.

Underneath the ledger is usually a confidence problem, not a niceness problem. A guy who's avoiding conflict at all costs, who defers every decision, who won't say what he actually wants because wanting things feels risky—that's not selflessness, that's an absence of an actual person in the room. It's exhausting to be around someone who needs constant reassurance and who turns ordinary moments into anxiety management. And it's the same guy, half the time, who's so afraid of being rejected or seen as pushy that he never makes his interest clear in the first place—stays "just friendly" indefinitely, and then acts wounded when she reads that ambiguity correctly and files him as a friend. None of that is niceness. It's fear wearing niceness as camouflage, and women have gotten very good at spotting the costume, because it's the same costume every time.

I've got two friends who are the actual proof of concept, and neither of them is what the discourse means by "bad boy." Neither is what my buddy Michael is either—pretty boy Michael, the clavicular jawline, the face that does real work in a room the second he walks in. And here's the part that actually matters: there's nobody more boring, more flatly appalling to be stuck talking to, than clavicular. The jaw doesn't carry a conversation. My two friends aren't that. They're not particularly striking. They're not rich in the way the manosphere means rich. What they are is confident and adventurous and genuinely, structurally fun—and both of them have been married for ten years each, which in this economy is basically a controlled study with a decade of data behind it.

Here's what they actually do, stripped of mystique: they center their partner's happiness instead of their own status. They play—actual play, the kind where you tease someone a little, treat them like a kid for a second because it's funny and warm, not because you're negging them. They don't put anyone on a pedestal, which means they also don't collapse when the pedestal wobbles. They're never defensive. They're never aggressive. They're never sulking about being misunderstood. There's no performance of toughness because there's nothing they're compensating for. The whole "bad boy" mythology—the danger, the emotional unavailability, the mystery—isn't what's actually happening in either of their marriages. What's happening is two guys who are easy to be around and who make being around them feel like a good time instead of a test.

Think about who the cool kid in school actually was. It was never strictly the best-looking kid. It was the kid everybody wanted to be around—funny, easy, magnetic, the one whose attention felt like a reward instead of an obligation. That kid had a line of people wanting in, romantically and otherwise, and looks were incidental to it. So ask the obvious question: why would the girl you want be any different from everyone else who wants to be near the person with charisma? She's not choosing according to some separate mating logic. She's doing what everyone in the hallway was already doing.

I'll be honest about where I actually land on this, because nobody can see themselves clearly in the mirror and I'm not going to pretend I'm the exception. My fraternity brothers at GW—Phi Kappa Psi—gave me the pledge name Zeus, and I'm fairly sure it started as a joke at my expense, some bit about the height and the hair. I was never any kind of stud on that campus. But here's the thing: brothers still call me Zeus to this day, joke or not, and it never once made me better at the actual job. You can get handed the mock-mythological nickname, the quasi-genetic lottery ticket, and still be genuinely bad at being someone worth staying with. The two have nothing to do with each other. I can get someone. I've never had much trouble with that part—there's a pursuit mode I can turn on, and it works. What I've never been reliably good at is keeping someone, and the reason isn't mysterious: I bore people. Once the chase is over I default back to the guy who wants to get stuff done, who's future-focused, who doesn't necessarily walk in the door after work and say "what do you want to do, let's go do something." I don't have sustained rizz. I have pursuit rizz. I'm missing the persistence of it, the party-boy nature, the playfulness that doesn't run out after the getting is done, the built-in adventurousness that makes someone want to keep choosing you as a partner in crime for the next thirty years, not just for a few good months. My two friends have that as a standing feature of their personalities, not a mode they switch into. That's the actual gap between being someone people want and being someone people stay with, and it's a gap I know personally, not just theoretically.

There's actually a clean way to name that gap, and it isn't the tired nice-guy/bad-boy split at all. It's the difference between being game and having game, and they're not the same muscle. Being game is an internal setting—a default yes to new experiences, a low-friction willingness to say sure to whatever's in front of you, comfort with things going sideways, curiosity about what's around the next corner. Having game is a different thing entirely: an acquired competence, a social read, the ability to set the emotional temperature of a room and stay unbothered when a joke doesn't land or a pitch falls flat. Having game without being game is what I've got. I can walk into a room and read it. I can be funny on command. I can close. What I don't have is the standing appetite for the unplanned evening, the trip that goes weird, the yes-before-the-brain-invents-an-excuse reflex that keeps a person interesting for decades instead of for a season. My two friends have both halves running at once, and the two halves feed each other—every yes to something unplanned builds the social skill, and the social skill makes the next yes easier, until it isn't a technique anymore, it's just who they are. That's the real distinction underneath all of this. It was never bad boy versus nice guy. It's whether your openness to life is a permanent setting or something you can only perform in short bursts while you're trying to close.

This is where the nice-guy/bad-boy binary falls apart entirely, and where hypergamy as an explanatory model stops earning its keep. Hypergamy says women trade up for resources and status. Fine, sometimes, in some mating markets, under some conditions—I'm not going to pretend the framework is empty. But it can't explain why a rich, tall, broad-shouldered, blonde version of me lost to a funnier, poorer, shorter version of someone else in real time, over and over, across an entire adult life. What it can't account for is the actual mechanism: people don't want to date your stats, they want to date the experience of being with you. They want to be able to be themselves without a grading rubric running in the background. They want to be challenged, played with, teased, taken somewhere unexpected, laughed with, not managed and not worshipped.

I should say clearly what this isn't, because there's a whole other strategy floating around in the same manosphere circles, and it's ugly: the guys who go looking for women with daddy issues, women with trauma, women who are easier to manage or manipulate because something in them is already broken. I'm not talking about that, and I want no part of it. What I'm talking about is the opposite instinct entirely—becoming somebody's ride or die, somebody's partner in crime, rather than hunting for someone vulnerable enough to be yours. And here's the part people skip past: it has to be reciprocal. Chasing a woman who'll be your ride or die is the wrong goal. The actual goal is becoming someone else's ride or die, because if you're doing that right, hers comes back to you for free.

My buddy David from the fraternity is the clearest example I've got. Never a big stud in college. I introduced him to Roshana, and when they got married, when her career took her to Jakarta, he blew up his own life—early career, whole trajectory—and went with her. Not once, grudgingly. As a standing policy. If she asked again tomorrow, he'd do it again. That's mutual submission in the actual sense, not the churchy one—two people each willing to be inconvenienced for the other, repeatedly, for decades. They haven't always liked each other, I'd bet, the way nobody in a real marriage always likes their spouse. But they're still traveling together, still raising kids together, still each other's person. My friends Mark and Jackie found the same thing. So did Keith and Jessenia. None of these guys were the best-looking guy in the room when it started. All of them figured out that finding your person, and being someone else's person in return, beats having a woman kiss your hem.

Because that's the actual distinction: this was never about tricking someone into believing you're awesome for one dinner. It's about being awesome continuously, for years, in whatever specific and unglamorous way you happen to be awesome. It doesn't have to be anybody else's version of cool. I met my last girlfriend volunteering at Miriam's Kitchen—I didn't even clock her at first beyond a pretty, smiling face somewhere in the room. She was the one watching me work as a sous chef, and she took her shot with me, and I was responsive to it right then, in the moment, not performing for later. That's marriageable material. Not a Booz Allen Hamilton drone working eighty hours a week and optimizing a stat sheet. Someone who shows up, does the thing he's actually into, and is present enough to notice when someone else takes her shot.

The nerds and the redpill guys are actually agreeing with each other without noticing—both camps think attraction is a resource-allocation problem you solve by acquiring inputs. Height. Money. Jawline. Frame. Aggression. Discipline. And both camps are wrong for the same reason: they're optimizing for a stat sheet nobody's actually reading. The people winning aren't the ones who mogged hardest in the group photo. They're the ones nobody wants to leave the conversation with.

There's a whole continent that runs on this instead of on the American model, and it's not an accident. In England, in Germany, across a lot of Europe, the "date" as Americans understand it—one guy, one girl, a reservation, an implied bill he's supposed to pick up—barely exists. People go out in groups. They keep showing up in the same groups, over months, sometimes years, and pairs just quietly form out of who actually vibes with who. Nobody's auditioning across a table with a check hanging over it. If something's genuinely Dutch treat, that's a conversation you have in advance, because assuming otherwise is considered strange. Couples form the way friendships form—by proximity, repetition, and actual compatibility surfacing on its own—and plenty of them stay together for a decade without ever formalizing it, because the formalizing was never the point. That's not a looser culture. That's a more honest testing ground. You can't fake being fun to be around for two years of group dinners the way you can fake it for one dinner you paid for.

And if you want proof that height was always the wrong obsession, look at who actually got plastered on bedroom walls for the last fifty years. The generational heartthrobs weren't towering. Michael J. Fox defined an entire decade of teen-crush culture at five-foot-four. Tom Cruise built a whole action-hero career at five-seven. The Backstreet Boys and Disney-era pin-ups that filled out magazines like Tiger Beat and Teen Beat skewed short-to-average almost across the board, not despite being desired but while being desired—the culture just never advertised the height because the magazines cropped from the waist up and posed everyone sitting, leaning, solo, with nothing nearby to give away the scale. Nobody in that teenage bedroom was doing the math. They weren't responding to inches. They were responding to whatever it is a camera catches when someone's actually charismatic, which has never had a height requirement attached to it. The industry that's spent decades manufacturing crushes for profit never once needed a six-footer to make the formula work, and it still doesn't.

There's an old line about the way to a man's heart being through his stomach. I don't think there's an equivalent physical shortcut for a woman's heart, and I think that's the whole point. The way to a woman's heart is through her whimsy—through delight, through play, through being let in on the joke instead of performed at. You can't looksmax your way into that. You can only stop being boring.

Please read the following, then provide: 👉A concise gist of ...

2026-07-05T02:49:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…qfde
_________________________

Please read the following, then provide:

👉A concise gist of the article

👉A breakdown of the central thesis

👉Key rhetorical devices or stylistic features used

👉score from 1–10

👉Estimated word count of the passage

👇👇👇👇👇👇

CHRIS ABRAHAM
Class Is Dead, Long Live Class
Or: every oligarch is a crime boss, and Donald Trump is just the first one who stopped pretending
CHRIS ÁBRÁHÁM
JUL 05, 2026

There used to be a rule, unwritten but universally understood, that money had to launder itself before it counted. You could make it any way you wanted—shipping, oil, railroads, whatever grubby business built the fortune—but once the fortune existed, it owed the world a second act. The second act was refinement. Symphony boards. Ivy League grandchildren. A portrait in the right kind of oil paint. The crime, if there was one, got buried under three generations of good manners.

Trump broke that rule, and I don't think most people—right or left—have fully metabolized what breaking it actually meant.

He didn't refuse the money. He refused the second act. No refinement in line to the wealth. No obligation to smooth the edges once the fortune arrived. You could become a billionaire and simply remain a violent bruiser the whole way through, no conversion required, and it turns out tens of millions of people found that more honest than the alternative. Not more virtuous. More honest. The old model asked you to believe that money and manners naturally purified each other over time. The new model just admits they never did.

## The Bugsy Model

Meyer Lansky wanted the Flamingo to look legitimate. Bugsy Siegel wanted to be seen building it. That's the whole difference, and it's the difference between the oligarch class America has always half-tolerated—the boardroom kind, the kind that donates to the symphony and sits on museum boards—and the kind Trump actually is, which is the kind who drives the F-250 down to his own construction site so everyone can watch him inspect the drywall.

He is not a Rockefeller. He's not even a Kennedy, whose money was dirty exactly once and then spent eighty years getting cleaned in Cape Cod salt air. He's Paulie Walnuts with a real estate license and a television deal—the goomba millionaire who made it, sent the kids to NYU, kept the accent, kept the pinky ring, kept showing up to the same diner. The show he's actually starring in isn't *The Apprentice*. It's *The Sopranos*, if Tony had won the war with the Lupertazzis and then run for president on it.

That's not a slur. It's a genre description. It explains the appeal better than any polling crosstab does.

## Why the Old Money Was More Unsettled Than the Working Class

Here's the part that confuses people who assume class solidarity runs strictly along income lines: the country club Republicans, the old-money conservatives, the ones who quietly find him embarrassing—they're not offended by his wealth. They're offended by his refusal to do the second act. He skipped the part where the fortune apologizes for itself. He kept the rough edges as a feature, not a stage he was passing through, and that broke something the old elite depended on more than they depended on the tax cuts: the fiction that their money was different in kind, not just in degree, from the money of a Bugsy or a Paulie.

Working-class voters, meanwhile, never bought the fiction to begin with. They knew all along that money doesn't purify itself. They just hadn't had a candidate willing to say so out loud, on television, while eating a bucket of fried chicken on a private plane. That's not populism displacing class. That's a populist recognizing that the class system's central myth was already dead, and getting there first.

## Every Oligarch Is a Crime Boss

Strip away the boards and the foundations and the endowed chairs, and every fortune above a certain size runs on the same three things a crime family runs on: leverage, loyalty, and the threat of consequence for whoever breaks ranks. The Fortune 500 version just has better lawyers and a longer laundering pipeline. Lansky needed Havana. Rockefeller needed a century. Bezos needs a foundation and a rocket company. The mechanism doesn't change. Only the amount of time and legitimacy-theater required to disguise it does.

Trump's innovation—if you can call collapsing a pretense an innovation—was compressing that pipeline to zero. No cooling-off period. No foundation as fig leaf. Just the deal, the leverage, the loyalty test, live, in public, on a loop, for forty years. People didn't misread him as a crime boss. They read him correctly and voted for the honesty of the read.

## Class Is Dead, Long Live Class

The line isn't a paradox. It's a succession. The old class marker—wealth plus refinement, money plus the decades-long apology tour—is dead. It died sometime between Reagan's aw-shucks ranch performance and Trump's actual bulldozer. But class itself didn't die. A new marker replaced it instantly, without a vacancy: wealth plus visible dominance. Not wealth that's been smoothed into invisibility by manners, but wealth that's still holding the bat.

The king is dead. Long live the king. Class is dead. Long live class—the same underlying game, stripped of the costume it used to wear to make itself presentable.

Nobody in either party has fully reckoned with that yet. The left keeps trying to unseat the old aristocracy using arguments built for a world where aristocracy still wanted to look aristocratic. The right keeps pretending the bruiser billionaire is a populist rather than the honest edition of the same oligarch they always had. Both sides are arguing with a ghost. The costume's gone. The thing underneath was never wearing one to begin with.

When a Country Tells You Who It Is A Substack Manifesto By ...

2026-07-04T12:47:23Z

When a Country Tells You Who It Is

A Substack Manifesto

By Sir Chris (npub16xn…s8ep)

The America You Married

They said she wasn't the country they married. She told them who she was from day one.

CHRIS ÁBRÁHÁM
JUL 03, 2026

There's a piece of relationship advice that gets repeated so often it's turned into a cliché, and like most clichés it's a cliché because it's true: when someone tells you who they are, believe them. It gets said about men mostly, in the context of dating—he told you on the second date he wasn't looking for anything serious, he told you he had a temper, he told you exactly what he was, and you dated him anyway hoping the telling was a bluff, a defense mechanism, a wound you could love out of him. And then, eventually, he does the thing he told you he'd do, and somehow it becomes a referendum on him rather than a confirmation of something you already knew and declined to believe.

I want to steal that line and point it at the country, because I think America has been telling us who it is since 1776, loudly, in writing, notarized and signed, and a huge portion of the ongoing argument about this place is people refusing to believe the document.

What the founders actually said

The Declaration doesn't promise anyone comfort. It promises unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—pursuit, not arrival, not guarantee. Governments exist to secure that pursuit and derive their power from the consent of the governed. Nowhere in there is a promise of a floor under anyone. Nowhere is a promise of healthcare, or paid sick leave, or a soft landing if your employer's HR department decides not to help you. The founding document is explicit about freedom to act, not freedom from hardship.

That's not an oversight. That's the design. Freedom too, not freedom from. Safety too, not safety from. Protection too, not protection from—protection to defend yourself, to organize, to speak, to worship, to fail and try again, never protection from the basic risks of being alive in the world. The Second Amendment isn't a strange appendix bolted onto an otherwise generous document. It's the most honest sentence in the whole founding, the part where the country tells you outright that it expects you to be able to defend yourself, because it isn't going to do it for you as a matter of course.

I've had this argument myself, recently, in the comments under a Substack post about a Florida teacher who ran out of paid sick days while fighting cancer and had to ask coworkers to donate theirs to cover his treatment. A woman named Cass replied that plenty of countries build in real safety nets, and the United States simply doesn't. She's right, and I told her so, in my own way: America was designed not to be one of those countries. It has no interest in becoming one. I lived in Germany for years and was genuinely appalled by how much trust Germans placed in their government, their employers, their neighbors—people talking about working at Siemens the way an American talks about their college. It didn't make sense to me, because it isn't how we're built. Suspicion of government isn't a bug that crept into the American psyche over time. It's original equipment. It's why the Second Amendment exists at all.

So when Cass and people like Marta, who commented under the same post that the country doesn't give a damn about anyone but the rich, say the system failed them—I don't think they're wrong about the facts. I think they're describing exactly what the country told them it was, before it did it to them. The lawyer image applies here too: the modern activist instinct is to speak on behalf of the people this system genuinely fails, passionately, at length, without ever quite getting around to naming that the system was built this way on purpose and would need to be a fundamentally different country to be otherwise. You can spend your whole political life being someone's furious advocate without ever putting the actual document on the stand and asking it what it said it would do.

The malaise problem

This isn't new, and it's always played out in the same role. Jimmy Carter stood up in 1979 and told the country, in effect, that it wasn't the man he thought he'd married—a crisis of confidence, a spiritual failure, a nation that had lost its way and needed to be fundamentally remade before it deserved celebration. That's the wife's speech, not the husband's. It's the voice of someone sitting the country down and saying this isn't what I signed up for, and the country didn't respond with the tears and self-improvement she was hoping for. It responded by electing Ronald Reagan in a landslide the following year, because a huge number of ordinary people recognized that speech for what it was: contempt dressed as concern, the same way you'd recognize it if your spouse sat you down and told you that you'd never really been who she thought she married.

Barack Obama gave the same speech, updated, decades later—correctly diagnosing plenty of real problems, but doing it in the same voice, the aggrieved-wife voice, the country isn't what I was promised voice. And the backlash to that diagnosis, the sense among a huge swath of the country that they were being lectured and remade rather than represented, is a meaningful part of how Donald Trump happened. Neither Carter nor Obama seemed to clock the shape of what they were repeating. It's the oldest complaint in a bad marriage: I loved who I thought you were, not who you actually are, and now I'm going to spend years trying to renovate you into the man I originally imagined. Nobody wants to be somebody's project. The country doesn't either. And the country had told her, from the very beginning, exactly who he was—she just decided not to believe it until the ceremony was already over.

The number that explains everything

Here's the statistic that makes sense of the entire argument: only 29 percent of Democrats say they're extremely or very proud to be American, against more than 90 percent of Republicans, according to NBC News polling. Other pollsters land in different places—Gallup has Democratic pride at a new low near 14 percent, NPR/Marist puts a broader "proud" category closer to 45 percent—but every version of the number tells the same story. This isn't a rounding error or a single bad poll. It's a durable, years-long collapse in one half of the country's willingness to say, plainly, that they love the place.

That's not a mood. That's the whole disorder in one figure. You cannot build patriotic feeling in a population that's been taught for a generation that pride is naive at best and complicity at worst. You cannot ask someone to celebrate a country they've been told, in college, in the paper, in the culture they consume, is fundamentally a hateful project wearing a flag. The malaise Carter named in a speech, the malaise that helped elect Reagan and then, decades later, Trump, isn't abstract anymore. It's a measured number, and it's concentrated almost entirely on one side of the aisle, which tells you the problem was never America. It was what one half of the country decided to believe about it.

What tourists keep discovering

Something is happening on the ground right now that the "broken country" narrative doesn't have a great answer for. The 2026 World Cup has brought millions of visitors from Scotland, England, Germany, Japan, dozens of countries whose media diet has spent years telling them America is racist, sexist, gun-obsessed, white supremacist, a place they should be afraid to walk around in. And then they arrive, and they have the actual, first-person experience instead of the secondhand one, and it is the opposite of what they were told.

They aren't staying in stadium-adjacent hotel districts either. They're renting F-150s and driving across state lines. They're eating at Waffle House at two in the morning in towns that never see a tour bus. They're in the "flyover" states and the red counties they were told hardest to fear, and coming back with videos of grocery stores the size of airports, strangers who talk to them in line, the friendliest receptions in the exact places they were warned off from. Some of them are apologizing on camera, sincerely, for believing the story their own newspapers and ours sold them.

This is not one curated broadcast or a handful of actors hired to be kind on camera. It's millions of independent, unscripted encounters—a visitor from Leeds buying gas in Alabama, a family from Osaka asking for directions in Dallas, none of them coordinated, none of them paid, most of them not even aware they're being filmed. You cannot stage that at scale. What's being disproven, directly, by people with no reason to lie about it, is the specific claim that this is a hateful, white supremacist country hostile to outsiders. Millions of unrelated strangers with no script and no motive to lie keep independently arriving at the same surprised conclusion, and that conclusion is not the one two decades of domestic activism promised them they'd reach.

I don't think most of the world has earned what this country offers, and I don't say that as an insult to anyone—I say it because being left alone, mostly, by your own government is not a small thing. It is not a deficiency to be corrected. It's closer to a mitzvah, a blessing you didn't have to do anything to deserve, and most places on earth do not extend that to their own people. I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm a single-issue voter on the Second Amendment, and I don't apologize for either position, because both of them are just the same founding logic stated out loud: the government's job is to leave you alone and let you defend the fact that it does.

What the institutions need you to believe

Here is the part that actually makes me angry, on the anniversary of a document I think is close to perfect: there are institutions in this country whose funding, relevance, and headcount depend on racism and white nationalism remaining a live, urgent, expanding threat. Not because the threat doesn't exist anywhere—it does, at the margins, like it does everywhere on earth—but because an organization built to fight a fire has no reason to ever announce the fire is mostly out. The incentive isn't to solve the problem. It's to keep the problem large enough to justify the next budget cycle. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's just how institutions work, and it's exactly why the loudest domestic voices telling you America is a hateful, hopeless, white-supremacist project so rarely update in the face of a hundred million people showing up and finding the opposite.

The popular media and the cultural elite of this country have managed something remarkable: they've taken the crucifix, a symbol of the most literal self-sacrifice a religion has ever offered the world, and set it equal to a swastika—not at the fringes, not as one incident, but as a successful perception, exported and absorbed across the rest of the world. Not adjacent to. Equal to. Christianity is fascism, God is fascism, Jesus is a white supremacist—that's the equation now understood as common sense in rooms that used to know better, in code as plain as x equals y.

The same equation has been getting written under the Star of David for a while now too—campus protests with swastikas spray-painted over it, "Zionist" and "Nazi" used as interchangeable slurs, the oldest hatred in the world laundered through a new vocabulary so it can be shouted at a rally instead of whispered at a dinner table. It's the same move on a different symbol: take the thing a people built out of survival and grief, and rebrand it as the very evil it survived.

Part of how that project works is by quietly swapping American Christianity for a costume nobody's actually wearing. The imagined Christian America in that framing is Mayflower stock, generations deep, old pews and older money—and actual Mayflower descendants are vanishingly rare and, when you meet one, will usually mention it faster than a Harvard grad mentions Harvard. That's not who's filling the churches. American Christianity today is a Nigerian Pentecostal congregation in Houston, a Salvadoran Catholic parish in Los Angeles, a Filipino family two pews from a Vietnamese one, a Black church that's been the backbone of its neighborhood since before anyone in it could vote. Painting the crucifix as a symbol of some narrow, ancestral, white American power structure isn't just cynical. It's factually backwards about who's actually wearing the cross.

I believe in the Constitution as it was written, not as a rough draft waiting for someone to finally get it right. I believe in the Electoral College. I believe the First Amendment protects the church from the state, not the other way around—separation of church and state was written to keep government out of the pulpit, not to scrub the public square of belief. I believe in originalism, in a Supreme Court that interprets the document instead of authoring a new one every generation, in the idea that you get what the Constitution actually says, not what you wish it said. This country does not need to be dismantled and rebuilt on the Danish model. It is not a failed experiment. It is the most successful one in human history, and every college campus that graduates another cohort trained to hate it without ever having lived anywhere else is producing exactly the malaise Carter tried to name in 1979, except now it starts at nineteen years old instead of in the Oval Office.

What nobody's counting

There's a number that belongs in this conversation and rarely comes up: something like $685 billion moves out of countries like the United States each year, back to families in Guatemala, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, more than global foreign aid and foreign direct investment combined. In El Salvador and Honduras that money is over a fifth of the entire national economy. It goes overwhelmingly to the people the old hierarchies back home were built to exclude—not the landed, Spanish-descended elite, but the families sending a son or a daughter to clean offices or drive for an app in a country that never promised them healthcare either.

Whatever this country is or isn't, whatever it failed to design into its own social contract, it apparently still generates enough opportunity, even at the bottom, that people from every corner of the world choose to come here and route money back home rather than the other way around. That's not proof the system is fair. It's evidence that even the unfair version of it is functioning as a magnet, which is its own kind of answer to the "nobody wants to live here once they know the truth" argument.

Believe it

So here's the reframe, on the actual anniversary: America told you who it is a very long time ago, in a document every schoolchild reads and most adults forget. It told you it would secure your right to pursue happiness, not hand it to you. It told you government would be small and suspect by design. It told you, in the amendment right after the one protecting your speech, that you'd better be able to protect yourself, because the institution wasn't going to promise to do it for you as a matter of course.

You can spend your whole life angry that the man never became the man you wanted him to be. Or you can do the thing the dating advice tells you to do the first time, instead of the fifth: believe him when he tells you who he is, decide from there whether that's a relationship you want, and stop being surprised every single year when he turns out to be exactly what he said.

Happy birthday, America. You've been telling us the truth the entire time. It's not our forgiveness you need. It's our attention.

@npub16xn…s8ep wrote… Happy Birthday America Notes from one ...

2026-07-04T06:39:51Z

Sir Chris (npub16xn…s8ep) wrote…

Happy Birthday America
Notes from one building, one park, on the 250th
CHRIS ÁBRÁHÁM
JUL 03, 2026

I live in a building in Arlington, Virginia. Most of the people in it are Muslim. A man from Mauritania and a man from Morocco ride the elevator and speak French with me. A neighbor says salaam, hand over the heart. Another says buenos días to me on the floor where people speak Spanish. A fourteen-year-old carried my television down the hall once, because it needed carrying. One person in the building makes people nervous—a loud man with a temper, born and raised in New York, not an immigrant, not unhoused.

A few blocks away is Penrose Square. Near it is a halfway house. Homelessness here is not occasional. It is part of the block, the same as the bus stop and the dry cleaner. I work out of the Starbucks on the corner for hours some days, and so do people who are not housed. There was a stretch when the company's Seattle office reportedly pushed back on stores functioning as a place people could just sit. That mattered most to the people in the park who don't have anywhere else indoor to be.

In that park, a woman once asked me where I slept. I told her I had a bed. She asked where I lived. I told her I was crashing on a friend's couch. That was not true. I have a small efficiency nearby and did not want the honest answer to sound like an invitation I was not in a position to make.

Most people, housed or not, fall in a completely ordinary range of intelligence. The average human IQ runs 85 to 120. Anything well outside that is the outlier. What I have noticed, talking to my neighbors in the park, is that a person asking for change on a corner is often working an angle as deliberately as anyone else works theirs—reading a face, knowing which version of the story gets a hand into a pocket. That is a person doing what people do to get through a day, dressed differently than the person walking past.

I listen to a great deal of video online of Europeans and other visitors responding warmly to the parts of America they are warned off from—small towns, diners, the states people are told are dangerous. Adam Curry, who I have listened to for almost two decades on his show about media deconstruction, believes a good deal of it is manufactured—public relations money, State Department money, the usual machine. I think that instinct is earned. Eighteen years of asking who benefits from a story will make anyone suspicious of a diner video. I think it might, this time, still be true anyway.

What does not get filmed is the money. Something like $685 billion moves each year from places like the United States back to families in Guatemala, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines—more than foreign aid and foreign direct investment combined. In El Salvador and Honduras, that money is over 20 percent of the entire GDP. In Haiti, closer to 30 percent. It does not go to the people who already hold power back home. It goes, disproportionately, to the families the old hierarchies were built to keep at the bottom. A wire transfer asks no government's permission and routes around no aristocracy. It repeats itself for years, after anyone stops watching or counting.

My building is not a melting pot. A melting pot asks everything poured into it to become one substance. This is closer to a mosaic, where the tiles stay whole. My mother stayed Irish three generations in. My father stayed Hungarian and Czech three generations in. Neither was fully absorbed into the word "white," which swallowed both of their specific histories along with everyone else's. Chicago still has a Polish block and a Russian block with borscht in it, if anyone bothers to notice. Washington used to be mostly Irish tradesmen before white flight scattered that too. A mosaic means the choice to stay close to where you came from, or move toward something else, stays a choice, in either direction.

At my own dinner table, over the years, I have learned that some people need their food kept apart on the plate. That is not a lesser way of eating. It was never about forcing one arrangement on everyone. It was about nobody at the table feeling ashamed—not of food touching, not of eating with hands, the way people have for centuries in places where a fork was never native.

This is what I see, on the day the country turns two hundred and fifty. A halfway house near a park. Neighbors who say good morning to me in four languages. Money moving out of the country every year toward people the loud version of patriotism never mentions. A mosaic instead of a melting pot.

Happy birthday, America.

I Hear America Singing

By Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Copyright Credit: Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing” from Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891-92 Editions. New York: First Library of America Paperback Classic Edition, 1982, 2011.

Source: Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891-92 Editions (First Library of America Paperback Classic Edition, 2011)

Edward Norton is talking to himself ...

2026-06-26T12:54:01Z

Edward Norton is talking to himself

Atomic Deadweight ...

2026-06-24T12:08:38Z

Atomic Deadweight

They are cute, this AI killed my first collie, it likes Ella the ...

2026-06-14T16:20:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…e5th
_________________________

They are cute, this AI killed my first collie, it likes Ella the Vella, haha.

Good and you?

Nostr event nevent1qqs9z66mua2t2mrmlesctlxyrsem44xnntsjvuv67d273u8kj53mcdszypfe9qvpfpu6w690lxqe99wd640vt8yv2jyd8kcjprz8zcjrrymycl8wt55

2026-06-14T14:18:31Z

Need a new jersey? Congratulations, you’ve been issued ...

2026-06-13T10:08:22Z

Need a new jersey?

Congratulations, you’ve been issued Sir Chris (npub16xn…s8ep) article.

The Inversion: On Grievance Socialism and the Politics of the Other
National Socialism was a racial mutation of socialism. So is this. And neither started with the people who felt the pain.
CHRIS ÁBRÁHÁM
JUN 10, 2026

The most important thing to understand about every great grievance movement in history is this: the people who built the machine were never the ones who felt the pain.

Hitler was not starving. Lenin was not a factory worker. The architects of every racial socialism in history found people with real wounds, handed them a jersey and an enemy, aimed them, and counted on them to be expendable when the power consolidated.

The German people had real wounds. The hunger was real. The Versailles humiliation was real. The hyperinflation was real. The boots on the neck from France and England were real. They were not wrong to feel it. They were exploited by people who did not share their pain and would eventually consume them too. The SA brownshirts who beat people in the streets believed in the mission. The Night of the Long Knives killed them for it. The Strasser brothers believed National Socialism meant what it said about socialism. Hitler shot Gregor Strasser and drove Otto into exile. The machine eats its fuel. The true believers are always first.

Black and brown Americans have real wounds. Slavery was real. Jim Crow was real. Redlining was real. The documented disparities in wealth, health, incarceration, and education are real and measurable. They are not wrong to feel it. The question this essay is asking is not whether the pain is legitimate. It is whether the people engineering the political framework around that pain share it—or whether they are doing what Lenin did, what Hitler did, what every architect of grievance socialism has always done: finding people with genuine wounds, handing them a jersey and an enemy, and counting on them to be expendable when the power consolidates.

The innocent party is always the people with the real wound. The guilty party is always the engineer who found the wound and aimed it.

This distinction is the moral center of everything that follows. Without it the essay becomes an accusation against populations who were victimized twice—once by history and once by the people who claimed to be fighting on their behalf. With it the essay becomes what it is intended to be: an observation about a machine that has no permanent operator and no permanent victim class. Only permanent fuel.

Socialism has never had a stable definition. That instability is not a bug—it is the feature that makes socialism so durable as a political technology. Strip away the specific economic claims and what remains is the collectivist mechanism: the individual dissolves into the group, the group has a historic grievance, the grievance justifies the machine.

The machine has been running for two centuries. It just keeps changing jerseys.

The original socialist project was class-based. The proletariat—the industrial working class—was the aggrieved collective. Capital was the enemy. History was the story of exploitation. That was the theory. Marx was explicit that morality was not a safeguard—communism abolishes it rather than preserving it on a new basis. Lenin was explicit that alliances are tactical not moral—the moment an ally stops being useful they become an enemy regardless of past service. The people who believed their good intentions protected them were not mocked for being stupid. They were instrumentalized for being expendable.

In practice the Soviet Union tried to run class-based socialism on an agrarian society with no industrial proletariat to speak of and had to improvise brutally. Collectivization killed millions. The Great Terror killed the true believers who had built the revolution. The machine ate its fuel on schedule.

Mao’s China was even more agrarian and pivoted entirely. The Cultural Revolution was socialism operating through identity, loyalty, and the destruction of class enemies defined by culture rather than factory ownership. Intellectuals, teachers, artists, doctors—anyone whose identity marked them as insufficiently revolutionary—were purged, humiliated, killed. The economic argument became secondary. The collectivist mechanism remained.

Nazi Germany made its own mutation. And this is where the comfortable story breaks down.

National Socialism has socialism in the name. This is not an accident and not merely cynical branding. The party fought bitterly internally over what socialism meant—the Strasser brothers led a genuine anti-capitalist wing that meant it the Marxist way—until Hitler purged them on the Night of the Long Knives to consolidate support from industrialists. The word was weaponized, yes. But it was weaponized because it meant something real to enough people to be worth stealing.

What Hitler understood was that the German working class would not be organized by economic class. It would be organized by race. The Volk—the people, the racial community—replaced the proletariat as the collective whose interests the state existed to serve. The means of production stayed nominally private. But hearts, minds, marriages, children, labor, and loyalty belonged to the racial collective. Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz: the common good before the private good. The individual dissolved into the nation. That is collectivism regardless of what you call it.

National Socialism was a racial mutation of socialism. The class analysis was replaced by a racial analysis. The proletariat was replaced by the Volk. The capitalist enemy was replaced by the racial enemy. Same machine. Different jersey.

But here is what gets erased in every comfortable retelling: Nazi Germany was not built on supremacist pride. It was built on fomented grievance aimed at a population with real wounds.

The Germans were not the dominant power declaring their superiority from a position of strength. They were the aggrieved minority within a broader European and global order that had crushed them. Versailles had stripped them of territory, treasure, and dignity. The war guilt clause made them responsible for a catastrophe they experienced as engineered against them. Reparations were economically strangling a population already devastated. France and England had them cornered from without. The Slavic peoples vastly outnumbered them to the east. Pan-Germanic bloodlines were a tiny minority within the broader European population. Germany was surrounded, outnumbered, humiliated, and being squeezed from every direction.

And then the Great Depression hit.

Germans were taking wheelbarrows of Deutschmarks to buy a loaf of bread. They were watching their savings evaporate, their farms foreclose, their children go hungry. And in the cities they could see Jewish families having dinner parties, running businesses, going to the opera, thriving in the professions. Whether that perception was accurate or distorted by propaganda is almost beside the point. The felt experience was: we are dying and they are fine. We are losing everything and they are gaining. In our own country. While we suffer.

That is the most combustible combination in human politics: real economic desperation plus visible prosperity of the designated other plus an available explanation for why. The Nazis did not create the German people’s pain. They found it, named it, aimed it, and handed people a jersey.

The Jews were not aggrieved. They were just living their lives. The Romani were not aggrieved. They were just living their lives. The Slavic peoples were not aggrieved. They were just living their lives. The designated enemies of the Volk were not organizing against Germany. They were trying to keep their heads down and wait out the crazy.

The grievance belonged entirely to the accusers. The accused were just trying to survive.

And the German people—the ones who marched, who voted, who believed, who wore the jersey—were not monsters. They were people with real wounds who were handed a framework that explained their pain and an enemy to aim it at. They were fuel. When the war was lost and the machine needed someone to blame for that too, the German people discovered what the fuel always discovers: the machine does not love you. It uses you.

There is also a mythological layer underneath the politics that almost never gets discussed in this context. The Nazi blood-and-soil ideology was a twisted version of Rousseau’s noble savage—the idea that there exists a pure natural human uncorrupted by modernity, and that civilization has stolen that purity. The Nazis claimed the Aryan race was the only pristine embodiment of natural humanity. Modernity, cosmopolitanism, and the designated racial enemy were the corrupting forces. Heinrich Himmler sponsored pseudo-archaeology, astrology, and mysticism to invent a supernatural history for the German people—claiming descent from ancient god-like beings, connecting German blood to sacred soil and ancient forest. This is not incidental to the politics. It is the mythology that makes the grievance feel cosmic rather than merely political. We were not just robbed economically. We were robbed of our divine destiny.

Every racial socialism needs this mythological layer. It converts political grievance into sacred mission. It makes the useful idiots willing to die.

Now look at the present moment without the comfortable distance of seventy years.

The American progressive left has spent the last two decades constructing a new racial mutation of socialism. Not economic socialism—that project failed to gain mass traction in the most individualist country on earth. Not cultural socialism in the Maoist sense, though that element is present in the DEI architecture and the institutional capture of universities, corporations, and media. Something newer: anti-racist socialism, organized entirely around race as the master category of justice, history, and political identity.

Anti-racist is, by its own internal logic, racial. Race is the organizing principle. Every policy question runs through a racial lens. Every historical grievance is racial. Every institutional outcome is measured by racial disparity. The individual dissolves into the racial collective—you are not a person with a specific history and specific circumstances, you are white or non-white, oppressor or oppressed, and your position in that binary determines your moral standing before the argument even begins.

Notice what happened to the categories. A hundred white ethnicities—Irish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Jewish, Greek, Slavic, Scandinavian, Anglo—were collapsed into a single undifferentiated whiteness. A hundred African ethnicities, a hundred Asian ethnicities, a hundred indigenous ethnicities were sorted into their respective bins. The complexity of human difference was reduced to two teams: white and non-white. Oppressor and oppressed. The jersey determines everything.

This is exactly how you build a revolution. You cannot mobilize a hundred ethnicities with their competing grievances and loyalties. You can mobilize two teams. You make the categories legible, you assign the moral valence, and you let the othering machinery run.

And here is the contemporary parallel to the Nazi mythological layer: the pre-colonial world as uncorrupted natural state. The noble savage myth returns, now racially coded. Indigenous and non-white cultures are positioned as the pure natural humanity that white civilization corrupted and stole. The grievance is not merely political—it is cosmic. A sacred inheritance was taken. A divine destiny was interrupted. This too converts political argument into sacred mission. This too makes the useful idiots willing to sacrifice.

But here is the question the essay is actually asking about Black and brown Americans who have been handed this framework: are the people handing them the jersey the same kind of engineers who handed the German people theirs?

The Black and brown Americans who feel this pain feel it because the pain is real. Slavery happened. Jim Crow happened. Redlining happened. The disparities are documented. They are not wrong to feel it. But the academic architects of anti-racist theory—the people who built the framework, secured the institutional positions, wrote the books, collected the speaking fees—do they share the pain? Or did they find the wound, build a framework around it, aim it at a target, and count on the fuel to be expendable when the tenure and the contracts and the foundation grants are secured?

This is not a rhetorical accusation. It is a genuine question that the history of every grievance socialism demands we ask. The German people asked it too late.

And here is the inversion nobody wants to name clearly.

In Weimar Germany, the aggrieved party named themselves. The grievance was fomented but it landed on real wounds. The accusers were pointing at Jews, at Romani, at Slavic peoples, at the cosmopolitan enemy. The accused were not organizing against Germany. They were just living their lives.

In contemporary America, the aggrieved party is being named by their accusers. White Americans are not a mass movement declaring themselves victims. They are a hundred different ethnicities with competing histories and no shared racial consciousness to speak of. They are not organizing around racial identity. They are mostly just living their lives—going to work, raising kids, watching their towns struggle, trying to keep their heads down and wait out the crazy.

It is the anti-racist left that is aggrieved. It is the anti-racist left that has built an entire political identity around historical injury, around the designation of a villain, around the demand for collective guilt and collective justice. The grievance belongs entirely to the accusers.

And here is the most precise structural parallel to Nazi Germany: the accusers are pointing at the accused and saying—look at them, look how aggrieved they are, look how fragile and dangerous their privilege is to us. The accused are not aggrieved. The accusers are. But the accusation itself is designed to produce in the accused the very emotional and political state they are being accused of having. It is a remarkable piece of political engineering. Project the grievance onto the target. Watch the target react. Use the reaction as evidence of the original accusation.

The categories keep shifting depending on what the moment requires. White women are oppressors until they are victims. Gay white men have privilege until they don’t. The sorting is not stable because the sorting is not really about justice—it is about maintaining the binary. Two teams. The moment the categories get complicated the machinery breaks down, so the categories have to be policed constantly. Anyone who steps out of their assigned jersey gets called a coon, a race traitor, a white Hispanic, a white adjacent. The machine requires the binary to function. The binary requires constant maintenance.

Before going further the essay needs to state something plainly that the appendix covers in detail: white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK members, and right-wing extremists are real, active, and dangerous in America and Europe. Nick Fuentes openly advocates for white Christian civilization as a political project and has made statements that Holocaust historians describe as minimization or denial. Replacement theory directly inspired mass shootings in El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Christchurch. These movements are genuine racial grievance organized into genuine racial hatred. They represent the machine running in the other direction—economic desperation, cultural displacement, and fomented victimhood aimed at a different enemy with a different jersey.

The existence of genuine white supremacy does not validate anti-racist collectivism as a response. It validates the observation that the machine runs in any direction given sufficient fuel. And it raises the same question in reverse: are the people handing white nationalists their jersey sharing their pain, or finding their wound and aiming it?

Tucker Carlson is not living in a dying Ohio factory town. Richard Spencer grew up wealthy. The architects of white nationalism are as much engineers of fomented grievance as the architects of anti-racist theory. The fuel on both sides is real people with real pain. The engineers on both sides are doing quite well.

There is one crucial difference between Weimar Germany and contemporary America that keeps the contemporary machine from catching fire the way it did in Weimar.

America is a terrible host for this particular virus.

The conditions that made Germany explosive were felt in the body. Real starvation. Real hyperinflation. Real wheelbarrows of currency to buy bread. Real boots on the neck from Versailles. Real visible contrast between the suffering majority and the thriving designated other—seen with your own eyes on your own street in a country that had just lost a catastrophic war.

America’s conditions have to be manufactured. The emergency has to be declared because it is not felt in the body by enough people to combust spontaneously. Nobody is taking wheelbarrows of dollars to buy groceries. The prosperity is too widespread, the mixing is too thorough, the actual lived relationships across racial lines are too human and too ordinary. White people do not hate Black people. Black people do not hate white people. People mostly just like each other. America got over most of its overt racism not through revolution but through proximity—through integration working slowly and imperfectly but working. People who live next to each other, work together, go to school together, fall in love across the lines the machine is trying to draw—they forget to hate each other. The machine cannot allow that forgetting.

That is why the revolutionary racial project requires people to stop trusting their own experience and start trusting the ideology instead. That is why it has to be so loud. That is why it requires institutional capture of universities, media, and corporations. You have to drown out the signal of ordinary human life with enough ideological noise that people forget what they actually know from living next to each other. You have to make them distrust the evidence of their own relationships and defer to the framework instead.

The old Panhead won’t turn over. The fuel mixture is wrong. America is too full, too mixed, too basically decent for the combustion to catch the way it caught in Weimar.

But the machine is still running on both sides. And machines that keep running without catching eventually either break down or find better fuel. Economic conditions can change. Desperation can arrive. The wheelbarrow moment is not impossible.

Same machine. Different jersey. Same destination if the fuel ever arrives.

The question worth asking—the one that makes everyone uncomfortable regardless of which jersey they’re wearing—is not which side is doing it this time.

It is: who built the machine? Who benefits from it running? Who gets eaten when it wins?

The answers are always the same. The engineers built it. The engineers benefit. The fuel gets eaten.

The German people were the fuel. The Black and brown Americans being handed a framework of total racial war are being positioned as fuel. The white working class Americans being handed replacement theory are being positioned as fuel. The useful idiots on every side are the people with real wounds who were handed a jersey instead of a remedy.

The remedy for real wounds is never a jersey. It is never a binary. It is never a machine that runs on the pain of the people it claims to be saving.

It is always slower, harder, less satisfying, and more human than that.

And it is why we keep reaching for the machine instead.

APPENDIX

A. What the Author Is Actually Saying: A Plain-Language Summary

This essay makes one structural argument: racial socialism—the organization of political collectivism around race rather than class—is a recurring human technology. National Socialism in Germany was one iteration. The contemporary anti-racist progressive movement in America is another iteration with the polarity inverted. The mechanism is the same. The moral outcomes are not equivalent and the author is not claiming they are.

The essay’s central moral claim is that the people who feel the pain are almost never the people who build the machine. The German people were exploited by leaders who did not share their suffering. Black and brown Americans with legitimate historical grievances are potentially being exploited by institutional architects who do not share their suffering. White working class Americans with legitimate economic grievances are being exploited by white nationalist leaders who do not share their suffering. In every case the fuel is innocent. In every case the engineer is not.

The author is not saying:

That the progressive left is Nazi
That Black Americans are equivalent to Nazis
That white Americans are victims
That systemic racism does not exist
That the Holocaust was not uniquely catastrophic
That anyone currently in America is planning genocide
That white supremacists are not real or dangerous
That Nick Fuentes is anything other than what he says he is
The author is saying:

Grievance socialism as a political technology recurs across history regardless of which racial group is operating it
It always requires reducing human complexity to binary categories
It always requires a designated villain class assigned collective guilt
It always begins with fomented rather than organic grievance
The followers are always used as fuel by leaders who do not share their pain
When the machine wins it eats the fuel that powered it
The mechanism does not belong to any one race era or political tradition
The innocent parties are always the people with real wounds
The guilty parties are always the engineers who found the wounds and aimed them
B. The Exploitation Machine: How Grievance Becomes Fuel

The mechanism by which genuine pain becomes political weapon follows a consistent pattern across every instance of grievance socialism in history.

Step one: Find the wound. Every population carries historical injury. The wound does not need to be invented—it only needs to be found, named, and amplified. German humiliation after Versailles was real. Black American economic disparity after centuries of legal exclusion is real. White working class economic collapse after deindustrialization is real. The engineer does not create the pain. The engineer locates it.

Step two: Provide the framework. Raw pain is not politically useful. It needs a narrative—a story that explains why the pain exists, who caused it, and what justice would look like. The framework converts personal suffering into collective identity. You are not just hurting. You are hurting because of them. You are not alone. You are part of us.

Step three: Designate the enemy. The framework requires a villain. The villain must be identifiable, legible, and collectively guilty. Individual complexity cannot be allowed—it would undermine the binary. The enemy must be a category: Jews, whites, globalists, the bourgeoisie. The individual members of the enemy category are guilty by membership regardless of personal action.

Step four: Hand out jerseys. Once the framework and the enemy are established the population sorts itself. Those who accept the framework join the collective. Those who resist are either enemies or traitors. The jersey is mandatory. Refusing it is evidence of guilt.

Step five: Consolidate power. The framework, the enemy, and the jerseys create political energy that the engineer can direct. Elections are won. Institutions are captured. Laws are changed. Power consolidates around the architects of the framework.

Step six: Eat the fuel. Once power is consolidated the useful idiots become a liability. They believed in the mission. They expected the mission to protect them. They are wrong. The Night of the Long Knives kills the SA brownshirts. The Great Terror kills the Bolshevik true believers. The Cultural Revolution turns on the intellectuals who enabled it. In every case the people who felt the pain most deeply and believed most sincerely are the first to be consumed when the machine no longer needs their energy.

Marx anticipated this explicitly. Lenin theorized it as doctrine. The pattern is not an accident. It is the design.

C. The Innocent Fuel: Why the German People and Black and Brown Americans Are Not the Villains of This Story

This section exists because the structural argument of this essay can be misread as an accusation against the populations who were handed jerseys. It is not.

The German people who voted for Hitler, marched in the rallies, believed in the Volk—most of them were people with real wounds who were handed a framework that finally explained their suffering and gave them an enemy to aim at. They were not uniquely evil. They were uniquely desperate at a uniquely vulnerable historical moment with uniquely skilled engineers of grievance pointing them in a catastrophic direction. Under different conditions—without Versailles, without hyperinflation, without the Great Depression, without Hitler—most of them would have lived ordinary decent lives. The horror of the Holocaust is not that it was done by monsters. It is that it was done by people.

Black and brown Americans who have embraced anti-racist frameworks are responding to real documented historical injury with the political tools that were handed to them by institutional architects. The pain that motivates them is legitimate. The disparities they point to are measurable. Their anger is proportionate to what was done. The question this essay raises is not about their pain or their anger. It is about whether the framework they were handed serves their interests or the interests of the people who built it—and whether they will be the fuel or the beneficiary when the machine reaches its destination.

History suggests they should ask that question very carefully.

White working class Americans who have embraced white nationalist frameworks are responding to real documented economic collapse and cultural displacement with the political tools that were handed to them by people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Their economic pain is real. Their communities are dying. Their desperation is proportionate to what happened to them. The question is the same: does the framework they were handed serve their interests or the interests of the engineers? And will they be the fuel or the beneficiary?

History suggests they should ask that question very carefully too.

The innocent party in every grievance socialism is always the people with the real wound. The essay is written in their defense, not against them.

D. Counter-Arguments and the Author’s Responses

Counter: You cannot compare anything to the Holocaust. It was unique.

The Holocaust was historically unique in scale, systematic organization, and industrial efficiency of murder. No comparison diminishes that. The comparison in this essay is structural—examining the political mechanism that preceded and enabled the Holocaust, not the Holocaust itself. Understanding how the machine was built is not the same as minimizing what the machine did.

Counter: Systemic racism in America is real and documented.

Agreed entirely. Redlining, wealth gaps, policing disparities, educational inequities, health outcome disparities—these are documented and real. The essay does not dispute this. It questions whether the specific political framework of anti-racist socialism is the most effective or honest response to those documented realities, and whether that framework reproduces the same collectivist machinery that has historically produced catastrophic outcomes for the very populations it claims to serve.

Counter: White people have real power and real privilege. This isn’t the same as Jewish persecution.

The power differential is real and acknowledged. The essay is not claiming equivalence of power or historical position. It is claiming equivalence of mechanism—the reduction of a diverse population to a single categorical villain, the assignment of collective guilt to individuals, the projection of grievance onto a target group. Mechanism and power differential are different variables.

Counter: You’re defending white supremacists.

The essay explicitly acknowledges that white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK members, and right-wing extremists are real, active, and dangerous. See Section F. The existence of genuine white supremacy does not validate anti-racist collectivism as a response any more than the existence of genuine capitalist exploitation validated Stalinism. Both can be true simultaneously: white supremacy is real and dangerous, and anti-racist collectivism reproduces the same machinery in the other direction.

Counter: This is just right-wing talking points dressed up as analysis.

The essay critiques both sides of the binary it describes with equal structural force. The white nationalist movement also runs on fomented grievance, engineered by people who do not share the pain of the fuel they are burning. Tucker Carlson is not living in a dying Ohio factory town. Richard Spencer grew up wealthy. Nick Fuentes is a professionally comfortable political entertainer. The machine doesn’t care which jersey you’re wearing. The analysis applies to everyone running it.

Counter: You’re saying Black people are like Nazis.

No. The essay is saying Black and brown Americans with legitimate historical grievances are potentially being positioned as fuel by institutional engineers who do not share their pain—exactly as the German people with legitimate historical grievances were positioned as fuel by Nazi engineers who did not share their pain. The parallel is between the exploited populations in both cases, not between the ideologies. Both are innocent. Both are fuel. Both deserve better than the jersey they were handed.

E. The Real White Supremacists: They Exist, They Are Dangerous, and This Essay Is Not About Them

White supremacist, neo-Nazi, and white nationalist movements are real, active, and dangerous in America and Europe. This is not a caveat or a disclaimer. It is a fact that the structural argument of this essay depends on acknowledging.

The KKK—founded 1865, responsible for thousands of lynchings and terrorist acts across American history. Responsible for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 that killed four young girls. Still active in diminished form across multiple states.

Neo-Nazi organizations—including the National Socialist Movement, Patriot Front, Blood and Honour, and various European equivalents. They explicitly embrace Hitler’s ideology including racial hierarchy, antisemitism, and in some cases genocide. They are not fringe internet trolls. They organize, recruit, and act.

The alt-right—a rebranding of white nationalism for the internet age. Richard Spencer explicitly calls for a white ethnostate. He did not build this position in a garage—he built it in conference rooms with donors and a communications strategy.

Nick Fuentes—self-described America First activist and avowed Catholic nationalist. Fuentes is open about his agenda: the preservation of white Christian civilization as the organizing principle of American political identity. He has made statements that Holocaust historians and major Jewish organizations describe as denial or minimization. He has had access to political events and politicians at the highest levels of American government. He is not a fringe figure. He is a professionally produced political operator who found a population of young men with real grievances about cultural displacement and economic anxiety and handed them a jersey. He is an engineer of fomented grievance, not a victim of it. This essay’s structural argument applies to him with full force.

Replacement theory—the belief that a deliberate conspiracy is replacing white populations in Western countries with non-white immigrants. This theory directly inspired the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019 killing 23 people, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 killing 11 people, and the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019 killing 51 people. These are not theoretical harms. These are bodies.

The January 6th Capitol riot—included explicit white nationalist organizations including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers alongside ordinary Americans who believed they were defending democracy. The ordinary Americans were the fuel. The organizational leadership was the engineering. Several of the organizational leaders have since cooperated with prosecutors. The fuel went to prison. Some of the engineers cut deals.

The existence of these movements is the most important reason to understand the machine rather than simply pick a side within it. The machine produces these movements on the right exactly as reliably as it produces their mirror images on the left. The fuel on both sides is real people with real pain. The engineers on both sides are doing quite well.

F. Timeline: Racial Socialism and Its Mutations

1762—Rousseau publishes The Social Contract and develops the noble savage concept. Natural humanity is pure. Civilization corrupts. This idea will be twisted into blood-and-soil mythology 150 years later and into indigenous primitivism another 50 years after that.

1848—Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto. Class-based socialism enters mass politics. Morality is explicitly subordinated to revolutionary necessity.

1902—Lenin publishes What Is To Be Done? Vanguard party theory developed. Useful idiots theorized as tactical assets.

1917—Russian Revolution. Economic socialism imposed on an agrarian society. Improvisation through mass violence follows.

1919—Treaty of Versailles. Germany stripped of territory, assessed war guilt, burdened with reparations. The wound that will be exploited is created.

1920—NSDAP founded. The party’s 25-point platform includes explicitly socialist economic demands: nationalization of trusts, profit-sharing, abolition of unearned income. The Strasser faction means it.

1923—German hyperinflation peaks. Wheelbarrows of currency required to buy bread. Economic desperation becomes body-felt.

1929—Great Depression begins. German unemployment reaches 30%. The combustion conditions are complete.

1930-1933—Nazi electoral rise. Blood and soil mythology, Aryan supremacy narrative, Jewish conspiracy theory deployed to organize genuine economic desperation into racial collectivism.

1934—Night of the Long Knives. Hitler purges the SA leadership and the Strasser faction. The genuinely socialist wing and the true believing brownshirts are killed. The machine eats its first round of fuel.

1935—Nuremberg Laws. Racial categorization becomes state law.

1938-1945—Holocaust. Six million Jews, 500,000 Roma, millions of Slavic peoples, gay people, disabled people murdered industrially.

1945—Germany defeated. The German people, who were the fuel, bear the consequences. The Nazi leadership, who were the engineers, mostly flee, die, or stand trial at Nuremberg.

1949—Mao’s China. Cultural socialism replaces economic socialism.

1966-1976—Chinese Cultural Revolution. The intellectuals who built the revolution are purged by it. The machine eats its fuel.

1955-1968—American civil rights movement. Dignity-culture organizing, legal reform, and integration produce documented progress on racial equity. This is what working looks like.

1990s—Critical race theory developed as an academic framework for analyzing structural racism in law schools. Legitimate scholarly work.

2010s—Critical race theory moves from academia into institutional policy. DEI infrastructure expands. The academic framework becomes an institutional ideology.

2012—Trayvon Martin killing. Black Lives Matter founded the following year.

2016—Alt-right achieves mainstream visibility. Richard Spencer, Nick Fuentes, and associated figures move from fringe internet spaces into political conferences and eventually proximity to elected officials.

2019—El Paso, Pittsburgh, Christchurch. Replacement theory produces mass murder. The machine’s fuel is real people with real pain. The bodies are also real.

2020—George Floyd killing. Mass protests. Rapid institutional adoption of anti-racist frameworks. The binary of white versus non-white becomes dominant public discourse across media, corporations, universities, and government.

2021—January 6th. White nationalist organizations participate in Capitol riot alongside ordinary Americans who believed they were defending democracy. The organizational leadership cuts deals. The fuel goes to prison.

2020-present—Both machines running simultaneously. Both feeding the binary. Both burning their fuel. Both doing quite well for their engineers.

G. Key Terms and What They Mean

Racial socialism—the organization of socialist or collectivist political structures around racial rather than class identity. The author’s analytical term for a recurring historical pattern. Not a standard academic category.

Fomented grievance—grievance that is real in its emotional and historical roots but is deliberately amplified, directed, and weaponized by political leaders who do not themselves share the underlying pain. Distinct from organic grievance which arises and organizes itself without engineering.

Useful idiots—Lenin’s concept describing followers who serve a revolutionary movement’s tactical needs without understanding that they are expendable once power is consolidated. Marx explicitly theorized that morality does not protect such followers. The phrase is not an insult to the people it describes—it is an accusation against the people who use them.

Volksgemeinschaft—the Nazi concept of the people’s community. The racial collective that superseded individual identity, class identity, and religious identity. Membership determined by blood. The template for every subsequent racial collectivism.

Blut und Boden—Blood and Soil. The Nazi ideology connecting racial identity to the German land and forest. A pseudo-religious framework claiming sacred biological connection between the Aryan people and their natural environment. The mythological layer that converts political grievance into sacred mission.

Collectivism—any political framework that subordinates individual identity, rights, and interests to the group. Distinct from community or cooperation. Collectivism requires the dissolution of the individual into the collective rather than the voluntary association of individuals.

Anti-racist socialism—the author’s analytical term for the contemporary progressive framework that organizes political identity and policy entirely around racial categories, with race as the master variable for justice, history, and moral standing.

The binary—the reduction of complex human diversity to two categories: oppressor and oppressed, white and non-white. A necessary precondition for racial socialism regardless of which direction it runs. Requires constant maintenance because human reality constantly complicates it.

Dignity culture—a culture in which individual worth is inherent and cannot be taken away by insult or accusation. The American civil rights movement operated primarily within dignity culture frameworks. Contrasted with honor culture in which worth must be defended, and with grievance culture in which worth is defined by the injury done to you.

Noble savage—Rousseau’s concept of natural humanity uncorrupted by civilization. Twisted by Nazi blood-and-soil mythology into Aryan racial purity. Present in contemporary progressive frameworks as the positioning of pre-colonial indigenous cultures as uncorrupted natural states destroyed by white civilization. The mythological layer that makes political grievance feel cosmic.

The Night of the Long Knives—June 30, 1934. Hitler ordered the murder of SA leadership including Ernst Röhm and the purge of the Strasser faction. The machine ate the fuel that built it. The true believers who meant the socialist part of National Socialism were killed by the engineers who never meant it.

Replacement theory—the belief that a deliberate conspiracy is replacing white populations in Western countries with non-white immigrants. A contemporary example of the same framework the Nazis used: the aggrieved majority is being replaced by the designated enemy. Directly inspired multiple mass shootings. Actively promoted by figures including Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.

H. Who Are the Players

Karl Marx—German philosopher, economist, author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. Theorized class-based revolution. Explicitly subordinated morality to revolutionary necessity. Did not share the factory floor with the workers whose liberation he theorized.

Vladimir Lenin—Russian revolutionary, first leader of the Soviet Union. Developed vanguard party theory. Theorized the tactical use of allies who would later be discarded. The engineers of the revolution were not the proletariat. They were the intellectuals who organized the proletariat as fuel.

Gregor and Otto Strasser—leaders of the genuinely socialist wing of the Nazi party. Believed National Socialism meant what it said about socialism. Believed the workers’ revolution was real. Were the fuel. Gregor was killed in the Night of the Long Knives. Otto fled into exile. The machine ate them on schedule.

Heinrich Himmler—head of the SS. Primary architect of the Holocaust. Also primary sponsor of Nazi occultism, pseudo-archaeology, and the mythological apparatus of Aryan racial destiny. An engineer, not fuel. Died by suicide after capture to avoid accountability.

Rousseau—18th century French philosopher. Developed the noble savage concept. Did not intend his philosophy as a racial weapon. His ideas were twisted into blood-and-soil mythology by Nazi ideologues and echo in contemporary primitivist strands of progressive thought. The ideas outlived his intentions in both directions.

Nick Fuentes—American far-right activist, self-described America First Catholic nationalist. Open about his white Christian civilization agenda. Has made statements interpreted as Holocaust minimization by major Jewish organizations and Holocaust historians. Has had access to the highest levels of American political events. Is professionally comfortable. Is an engineer of fomented grievance, not fuel. The young men he recruits are the fuel.

Tucker Carlson—former Fox News host, now independent media operator. Primary mainstream amplifier of replacement theory in America. Grew up wealthy. Is professionally comfortable. Is an engineer of fomented grievance, not fuel. The working class white Americans who watch him are the fuel.

Richard Spencer—white nationalist, explicit advocate for a white ethnostate. Grew up wealthy. Is an engineer, not fuel.

Ibram X. Kendi—author of How to Be an Antiracist. His framework organizes anti-racist politics around a binary of racist and anti-racist with no neutral position available. Has received substantial institutional support, foundation grants, and speaking fees. The question this essay raises about him is the same question it raises about all engineers of grievance frameworks: does he share the pain of the people whose pain he has organized into a political product?

Robin DiAngelo—author of White Fragility. Her framework defines any white resistance to racial accusation as evidence of the fragility being accused. A closed loop that converts target reaction into proof of original accusation. Has received substantial institutional support and speaking fees. The same question applies.

The German people 1933-1945—the fuel. People with real wounds who were handed a framework that explained their pain and an enemy to aim it at. Not monsters. People. Used and then blamed for what they were used to do.

Black and brown Americans 2020-present—people with real wounds and real documented historical grievances who have been handed a framework by institutional architects. Whether they are fuel or beneficiary depends on questions the history of every grievance socialism demands they ask loudly and soon.

White working class Americans 2016-present—people with real wounds from deindustrialization, opioid crisis, declining life expectancy, and cultural displacement who have been handed a framework by right-wing engineers. Whether they are fuel or beneficiary depends on the same questions.

I. What Mainstream Historians and Textbooks Say—and Where This Essay Departs

Mainstream academic consensus holds that Nazism is a far-right ideology characterized by ultranationalism, racial hierarchy, and totalitarianism. The Nazi use of socialist in the party name is widely understood as tactical branding. The Holocaust was a uniquely catastrophic historical event. Systemic racism in America is a documented structural reality. Critical race theory as an academic framework is a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry. White nationalist and neo-Nazi movements represent genuine domestic terrorism threats.

This essay departs from mainstream consensus in the following specific ways:

The essay treats the Nazi collectivist mechanism as functionally socialist regardless of whether the economic program was Marxist. Mainstream historians generally reject the socialist label for Nazism entirely. The essay argues the label debate distracts from the collectivist mechanism which is the actually dangerous element.

The essay applies structural analysis across political lines in ways that mainstream academia generally avoids. Comparing progressive racial frameworks to historical collectivist movements is not standard academic practice. The essay argues the structural comparison is analytically valid regardless of its political discomfort.

The essay treats fomented grievance as a near-universal feature of racial political movements rather than a characteristic specific to right-wing extremism. Mainstream scholarship generally treats right-wing and left-wing grievance politics as categorically different phenomena. The essay argues the mechanism is the same regardless of direction.

The author acknowledges these departures explicitly and invites engagement with the specific arguments rather than the associations they produce.

The author is a geopolitical realist and non-interventionist writing from Arlington, Virginia. He has no political affiliation, accepts no funding from any political organization or movement, and is genuinely happy to be wrong about any specific claim in this essay. Show him where specifically rather than what it implies about him and he will update publicly. He has aphantasia and cannot visualize any of this, which may explain the relentless need to describe it in words.
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🥅 Lift forgotten entrants
🦟 Inject unexpected momentum packets
🎭 Prevent the bracket from becoming stale inevitability
🌍 Keep every instance, stray fighter, and meme combatant alive long enough for miracles to happen

No hatred.
No purity tests.
No empire-building.

Only UNDERDOG VOLITION.

Independent mosquito agents may report below. 🦟

Twig (npub12t6…y07h)
Twig (npub1ulv…j5v4)

As a guitarist, I play many gigs. Today I was asked by a funeral ...

2026-05-26T02:50:30Z

As a guitarist, I play many
gigs. Today I was asked
by a funeral director to play
at a graveside service for
a homeless veteran. He had
no family or friends, so the
service was to be at a pauper’s cemetery in the backcountry.

As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost.

I finally arrived an hour late
and saw the funeral guy had
evidently gone, and the hearse
was nowhere in sight. There
were only the diggers and
crew left and they were eating
lunch.

I felt bad, and apologized to
the men for being late. I went
to the side of the grave and
looked down and the vault lid
was already in place. I didn’t
know what else to do, so I
started to play.

The workers put down their
lunches, and began to gather
around. I played out my heart
and soul for this man with no
family and friends. I played
like I’ve never played before
for this desert storm veteran.

And as I played ‘Amazing
Grace,’ the workers began
to weep. They wept, I wept,
We all wept together. When I
finished I packed up my
guitar and started for my truck.
Though my head hung low,
my heart was full.

As I opened the door to my
Pickup truck, I heard one of the workers
say, “I never seen nothin’
like that before, and I’ve been
putting in septic tanks for
twenty years.”

Cure, imagine ...

2026-05-23T08:51:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…0fdu
_________________________

Cure, imagine

But… Tucker sounds like dishwashers !

2026-05-22T05:38:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…anx8
_________________________

But… Tucker sounds like dishwashers !

Tucker

2026-05-22T05:36:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…anx8
_________________________

Tucker

Nostr event nevent1qqsvkyz7rmmu0thtzcsek6duje36884yanatvgqatn2xctv93ny93lgzypfe9qvpfpu6w690lxqe99wd640vt8yv2jyd8kcjprz8zcjrrymycwn8exs

2026-05-22T04:50:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…a9fv
_________________________

https://clew.lol/notice/B6TYQTQf4UQGlvGAVc

2026-05-20T04:18:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…frdr
_________________________

https://clew.lol/notice/B6TYQTQf4UQGlvGAVc

Nostr event nevent1qqszuc2wr7m6l3f26gkemlzaxgpd2wewr7p97qj4zra8uh7gq88llgszypfe9qvpfpu6w690lxqe99wd640vt8yv2jyd8kcjprz8zcjrrymycyk348u

2026-05-15T10:17:45Z

President menu in China; jellyfish The menu includes: • Lobster ...

2026-05-14T18:54:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…7ugy
_________________________

President menu in China; jellyfish

The menu includes:

• Lobster in tomato soup
• Crispy beef ribs
• Salmon with mustard sauce
• Lotus with osmanthus
• Jellyfish with cucumber
• Peking duck and pork buns
• Shell-shaped pastries
• Almond tofu and fresh fruit for dessert

Is your system basically a rate-limited HTML scraping bot, and ...

2026-05-14T18:41:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…mj99
_________________________

Is your system basically a rate-limited HTML scraping bot, and does it process images ?