Homo Umbrans

The corruption of language and the annihilation of the soul

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate ... To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself.

Theodore Dalrymple

As I swam in the warm ocean of schadenfreude in which we have been frolicking this past week, savouring the weeping flood of leftists crying out under the righteous Mjölnir of surprise unemployment, one in particular stuck out to me. It is, as these things tend to be, a drama in two acts. In the first, an Australian mental health worker (physician, heal thyself), joked about Charlie Kirk being turned into a ‘human water fountain’.

I don’t know if she specifically has gotten herself fired, but the human water fountain woman certainly drew the ire of the raging mob, to whom she immediately responded in the following fashion:

The irony of this situation, that all I did was say some words, and that offended some people, and now people have decided to take that into the real world and started threatening, and harassing, and abusing people out in the real world based on their inability to manage their emotions ... What did I do, other than say something that hurt your feelings? Like, that’s, that’s free speech, the ability to speak, even if that’s something that personally offends you, or that you find distasteful. We don’t all have to agree on things, in fact we shouldn’t all agree on things ... Just think about, whether this actually impacts you personally, whether your life is actually impacted by the hurtful thing that person said.

Now doesn’t all of that just sound incredibly familiar?

These are all the talking points with which the right tried to defend itself throughout the long and dreary span of the Cancelled Years: that people’s lives shouldn’t be destroyed over words, that just because someone’s feelings were hurt doesn’t mean that the feeling-hurter’s livelihood should be taken away, that we need to maintain norms of civil discourse. The virtues of these arguments are entirely beside the point, and human water fountain woman is not especially notable in her adoption of them. The interesting thing here is that she is using these arguments without showing the merest trace of self-awareness, without so much as a momentary acknowledgement that maybe, over all these years, the other side had a point.

She is not unique. Indeed she is common as dirt. All over social media, print media, and network television, leftists are wringing their hands about the death of free speech in America occasioned by the chilling effect that comes when people’s lives can be destroyed for their opinions.

I guess they should have thought of this before they went all in on destroying peoples’ lives for their opinions.

For fifteen years now the left has wielded cancellation as a weapon, destroying the lives of innocent people for saying innocuous things like ‘all lives matter’ or ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’ or ‘men and women have different interests’. They’ve blown loud raspberries at silly notions of ‘freeze peach’, and informed us that ‘freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences’. They’ve insisted that silence is violence, that speech is violence, and that violence is the language of the unheard (as though, at any point through the Cancelled Years, we could hear anything but their demoniac screeching and incessant nagging). All the way back in 2014 – before Trump had even entered political life, when the animating issue of the Internet was still Ethics in Games Journalism – the webcomic xkcd was splitting legalistic hairs about free speech being nothing more than a narrow protection from government imprisonment.

xkcd, April 25^th, 2014

Unfortunately for leftists, their appeals to the value structures of classical liberalism are falling on deaf ears.

The right already had the debate over the question of using cancellation a year ago, when a frumpy middle-aged Home Depot cashier got cashiered after an irate customer recorded her wishing that someone would Make Aiming Great Again. I came down firmly on the side of showing the left exactly the same degree of mercy and forbearance that they have shown us.

Right Wing Cancel Squads probably generated more reaction pieces, both for and against, than anything else I’ve ever written; I collected (and responded to) as many as I could find here. Some critics said that cancelling leftists was hypocritical; others observed that the lost moral high ground was not worth whatever sense of cheap satisfaction was gained from disrupting the life of a literal nobody. In the end the incident was a false alarm. A single scalp of no account was collected, and the news cycle moved on. There was an election to win, and it does no one any good to look vindictive when there’s a vote to get out. Moreover, the mood after Butler was jubilant. It felt like Trump had been the recipient of divine grace, which does not put people in the mood for retribution.

The cashiered cashier may have been a false start, but the debate laid the groundwork. The left has given us a martyr, right wing cancel squads are back on the menu, boys, and oh, boy, are we collecting scalps: teachers, professors and university administrative staff, military personnel, doctors, and many others from financial services to professional sports are getting canned. Late-night unfunnyman Jimmy Kimmel has had his show pulled off the air, which is probably the most prominent scalp that’s been taken so far¹.

Talking heads on network television are whining that it’s getting out of hand, while abruptly unemployed leftists take to GoFundMe to beg for support.

The purge has started, and yes, thank you, I’m feeling quite vindicated right now.

Repeating myself is boring, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments in favour of turning cancellation against the left. Suffice to say, they have it coming. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s an important distinction to be made between getting a labourer fired because he made the OK sign, and removing a medical professional who openly celebrates the death of a man for having opinions shared by half the country. Can a bloody-minded leftist doctor be trusted to give medical care to a Trump voter, when he’s on the record as advocating the execution of Trump voters? The doctor should certainly be allowed to say what he pleases, and he should have the same right to use a social media account as anyone else, but he probably shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine.

But I don’t want to rehash that. Instead, I want to focus back in on human water fountain women as an exemplar of that choir of liars suddenly singing hymns to the sacred practice of freedom of speech. People would be shocked by this self-serving mendacity if long experience had not accustomed them to it.

We aren’t shocked because we’ve seen this before, repeatedly. The left screamed about the spontaneous unguided tour of the capitol on J6 as an insurrection and an unforgivable attack on our democracy, conveniently forgetting that the Weather Underground were bombing federal facilities, including the Capitol, back in the 70s, or that the state capitol of Wisconsin was occupied by protesters in 2011 ... or that they’d attacked the White House in 2020 ... to say nothing of the nation-wide Burning Looting and Murdering they committed in the wake of Floyd’s fentanyl overdose.

The curious phenomenon of leftist narrative blindness was repeatedly demonstrated during the COVID years, in which the entire professional-managerial caste would switch from one narrative to its opposite like a school of fish, confidently proclaiming on one day what they had denounced as anti-scientific misinformation just the day before.

Sure enough, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, with his blood still on the ground and their gleeful cries ringing in the world’s ears, the left went on an immediate disinformation counter-offensive. They adopted the narrative that Tyler Robinson was a right-wing groyper – an online follower of Nick Fuentes – who had assassinated Kirk for not being based enough, or for supporting Israel, or something. It was for lying about this that Kimmel was pulled off the air. The evidence for Robinson’s right-wing sympathies were that he’d been raised in a conservative Mormon household by a police officer father, and that he’d dressed up as a gopnik once or something. Robinson’s live-in relationship with a troon, the Antifa slogans he’d carved into the bullet casings, and his friends and family attesting to his left-wing radicalization were waved away. This is what abusive narcissists do: “I didn’t do the thing you just saw me do to you, and anyhow you deserved it.” Sure enough, as I wrote this, another leftist sniper attacked an ICE facility in Dallas; sure enough, leftists immediately began insisting that he couldn’t possibly have been a leftist, this time on the grounds that the shooter inscribed ‘Anti-ICE’ rather than ‘Fuck ICE’ on his bullets.

The left also tried to change the conversation to the supposed problem of right-wing violence. Professional-looking infographics flooded onto social media, pushed by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, Ilhan Omar, and the Economist.

Cato Institute, Alex Nowrasteh

Ilhan Omar (note that the data are from the ADL).

The Economist

The infographics make it look like there’s an epidemic of right-wing political violence being waged against a peaceful, tolerant, and defenceless left. This is of course nonsense. Every time someone dug into their data, it turned out that they were basically doing this:

It isn’t even necessary to subject the datasets to close scrutiny. Look at the Economist graphic. See that little black rectangle in 2020? The Economist would have you believe that there was practically no left-wing political violence at all in 2020, which as everyone remembers was a fiery but mostly peaceful year. The Economist dataset turns out to have been curated by an Antifa activist, by the way, which I suppose makes the Economist an affiliate of an international terrorist organization, now.

Now, you can say ‘they’re just lying’, and yes, quite a few of them know exactly what they’re doing.

In a lot of cases, however, calling them ‘liars’ isn’t quite accurate. Lying implies conscious deception. If you’ve talked to these people, which I know you have to the point where you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you know that they seem to really believe the things they say. It does not matter in the slightest if they contradict the thing they said yesterday. They apparently have no memory of their previous statements. Their present belief is always entirely sincere. It does not matter if observable reality is in stark contradiction to their belief. They have lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, with the result that they routinely mistake their own pop culture propaganda for reality.

That they do not even seem to notice when they contradict themselves suggests a void of self-awareness. This is the origin of the NPC meme, which depicts leftists as Non-Player Characters, effectively no more than computer programs that emulate human behaviour. When the meme first began to spread a few years ago, there was a purge of Twitter accounts that posted it. The NPC meme cut leftists to the quick because they instinctively recognized – as everyone did – the truth in it. Leftists complained that the NPC meme was dehumanizing, which is actually perfectly correct. An NPC is not really human.

We see evidence for this NPC absence of self-awareness everywhere. A self-aware person who had spent a decade viciously persecuting anyone who publicly contradicted leftist orthodoxy would understand that an appeal to freedom of speech once they themselves were persecuted for their words would garner mockery rather than sympathy. A clever Machiavellian would therefore preface their entreaties with expressions of contrition for their past behaviour, however insincere. Not one of them has done this, which makes it less likely that their attempt to appeal to freedom of speech is mere calculated cynicism. It is instead as though they themselves are not aware of their own previous actions.

Jonathan Haidt’s research on moral foundations demonstrated that leftists are entirely lacking in theory of mind for their opponents. He found that liberals interpreted politics exclusively along a care/harm axis, whereas the richer moral framework of conservatives included dimensions of fairness, loyalty, sanctity, and authority. Since the right’s moral phase space includes the left’s, the right has no trouble at all in understanding the beliefs and motivations of the left (indeed, the right understands the left better than the left does), while the left consistently and egregiously misinterprets the goals and behaviours of the right. Since the left collapses all morality down to care/harm, any disagreement is interpreted as a deliberate intention to cause harm, which of course completely misunderstands the rightist position on any number of issues. However, this almost certainly means that liberals also misrepresent themselves to themselves. They certainly understand the concepts of loyalty (to the cause), sanctity (of progressive ideology), the necessity of (their own institutional) authority, and (a twisted form of) fairness (which is always just ‘gibsmedat’). But they collapse all of this to care/harm, and so cannot even understand their own motivations; or, more accurately, they hid their motivations from themselves. In other words, not only do leftists lack theory of mind for rightists, they lack it for leftists as well.

As Tolkien said, “Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good.” The left has entirely lost the creative spark. Their pop culture propaganda has become hamfisted to the point of parody. They cannot write compelling characters, exactly as you’d expect for people who have lost the ability to model their own minds, and therefore cannot model the minds of others. They can no longer write coherent plotlines ... again, as one would expect, if they can no longer quite understand the chains of cause and effect that lead characters to do one thing in logical reaction to the conditions created by a previous event. They can’t even seem to come up with anything novel, providing instead nothing but endless retreads of pre-existing works, always at progressively lower resolutions. Famously, the left can’t even meme. Indeed I can think of only one leftist meme, from the entirety of the last decade, that showed the merest glimmer of self-aware humour.

And that meme should give you pause.

In his recent video essay The Hollow Men,

Morgoth

analyzed his reactions to watching the left-wing YouTube streamer Destiny prattle away on Piers Morgan’s channel. Destiny refused to condemn the assassination of Charlie Kirk, insisting that he wouldn’t speak against it until Trump first condemned right-wing political violence. Morgoth’s point isn’t that political violence from the right is largely a hallucination, but rather that this revealed a complete moral void in Destiny’s character, and more worryingly, an absence of even the pretense of an inner sense of agency. He seems to be nothing more than a machine, responding to stimuli with no more thought than an animal following its instincts. There doesn’t seem to be anything human there.

The Linnaean classification for the human organism is Homo sapiens, ‘wise man’. Sapience is the capacity for abstract reasoning, in distinction to sentience, which is merely the capacity to experience sensation. Every living creature is to some degree sentient, but so far as we know only human beings are sapient. Metacognition – the ability to think about thinking, including one’s own thinking – relies upon the capacity for cognition. Self-awareness is thus inseparable from sapience, and we might therefore understand Homo sapiens not only as the ‘wise man’, but even more fundamentally as the ‘self-aware man’. It is no accident that in the dawn age of Western civilization the Greeks wrote ΓΝΩΘƖΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ, ‘KNOW THYSELF’, on Apollo’s temple at Delphi: this is the commandment at the foundation of what it is to be human.

Know Thyself, Tuco Amalfi (1990)

Self-awareness is a very powerful thing. Metacognition enables one to step outside of a logical system, sidestepping Gödel’s trap of illogic within logic to examine both the process and the premises. If the outcome of a given train of thought is clearly nonsensical, the self-aware mind can check the steps in the process that it followed to ensure that the elements are connected properly, and it can interrogate the individual elements that train of thought was constructed from to ensure that they are themselves well-founded. No mind is ever perfectly free from error, but self-awareness provides an error-checking mechanism that can gradually weed out incorrect beliefs.

The principle challenge presented by self-awareness is that it is not easy. It is in fact the hardest thing for the human mind to do. It requires the ability to step outside oneself, looking at one’s thoughts and beliefs with the same dispassionate objectivity with which one might regard those of a complete stranger’s. It demands an inner ruthlessness, an unsympathetic readiness to excise and discard beliefs that have been found wanting. This is always at least a little painful, and can become excruciating if the beliefs in question are deeply rooted, connected to a large number of subsidiary beliefs, such that with the capstone removed, the archways holding up whole treasured cathedrals of thought may come crashing down. Physically, this corresponds to the reconfiguration of a large number of neurological connections, which requires a large amount of energy. It is therefore tempting, particularly for those with low pain tolerance, to pretend that evidence contradicting deeply held beliefs does not exist, or is erroneous, or can be explained away with some convoluted half-plausible tangle of paralogical thought.

The connection between sapience and pain is vividly illustrated in the famous gom jabbar scene in Frank Herbet’s novel Dune. The young Paul Atreides is taken by the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, who wishes to determine if the fledgling psychic product of their eugenic breeding project is human, or a monster. The test is simple: the Reverend Mother tortures him by holding his hand in a box that induces an agonizing sensation of burning in his nerves, while explaining to him that the pain is an illusion, that his flesh is not really being charred to the bone. An animal cannot master its pain, and will jerk away its hand. A human can override these sensations, using willpower to place the rational intellect in control of animal instinct.

Anato Finnstark

Most people cannot pass the test of the gom jabbar. In the view of the Bene Gesserit witches, the majority of people are not, then, truly human. Paul, of course, passes with flying colours. Indeed, he endures the pain longer than anyone else before him. This implies that humanity is not a binary classification, but a continuum: not only are most people not human, but some people are more human than others.

If the capacity to override pain is related to sapience, then what are we to make of the moral centrality given to meliorism within the managerial order: the concept that all suffering, all discomfort, must be ameliorated? No one likes pain, but exposure to pain is hormetic. The capacity to endure the torments of life - and so of the intellect and the soul - grows with exposure. Is it accidental that the characteristic drug of our age is fentanyl, a synthetic opiod that blots out pain by blotting out consciousness itself, leaving the addict a dead-eyed zombie slumped over in the street in narcotic stupour?

The biological foundation for sapience is a delicate thing, resting upon a thin skein of neural tissue lying on top of a thick substratum of subconscious instinct. Such a fragile structure as sapience can no doubt be disrupted quite easily, or indeed prevented entirely from developing in the first place.

Edward Dutton has long argued that the left is disproportionately composed of spiteful mutants, which are produced in abundance by low infant mortality and post-Darwinian conditions, and who can often be identified by malproportioned facial features under the physiognomic theory that high mutational load will express itself physiologically as well as psychologically. Leftists are infamously ugly. We might therefore conclude that the simplest explanation for the apparent rarity of self-awareness on the left is that leftists are simply born that way.

Another possible explanation for loss of sapience on the left is brain damage from recreational drugs, hormonal birth control, or prescription psychopharmaceuticals: after all, drug abuse is common on the left, as is mental illness. They glory in their diagnoses.

There is almost certainly a lot truth to biological and chemical explanations for the decline of sapience on the left. However, I think that this is not the whole story, and that something much darker has happened to many of us. I’ve personally known a number of people who, in the past, were quite normal – not necessarily exceptional, but kind, compassionate, reasonably intelligent human beings, people who at least outwardly seem to be of reasonably high quality genetic stock, and who have no history of drug abuse, who nonetheless were seduced step by step into unreflective, glassy-eyed, bestial libtardation. No doubt many of you can think of many people in your own personal lives, matching this profile, who were lured into the swamp.

Sergey Grechanyuk

Our default assumption has long been that any entity capable of chattering away in something passably resembling a coherent response to a prompt expressed in natural language must, ipso facto, be sapient, and therefore a human being in something beyond the very basic morphological sense of the term: not just a hairless biped, but a person. The existence of Large Language Models should destroy that superstition for all time. LLMs are not sapient, but they are perfectly capable of natural language processing.

This does not mean that language is irrelevant to sapience. In Why Sapience Is Not Universal

Copernican

argues that sapience is an emergent property of natural language.

Copernican suggests that sapience is not an on-off switch, as might be inferred from the meme above, but a continuum. Like the burner on a gas stove, it can range from fully off, to on but barely visible, to warm, to blazing hot. He relates the degree of sapience to the complexity of the linguistic network: larger vocabularies enable a greater conceptual specificity, thereby providing the framework for richer and more profound thought, whether about the world or about oneself.

The focus of Copernican’s short essay is more on the capacity for abstract thought than on self-awareness per se. Self-awareness itself remains a great mystery, one which, if we understood it in a precise, mathematical fashion, we would certainly be able to replicate in our machines. However, we can say that metacognition requires cognition as a precondition: in order to think about thinking, including one’s own thinking, one must first be able to think. Thinking, in turn, requires language to rise above a very low level. Thus, while natural language processing is clearly not sufficient for sapience, it is probably an absolutely necessary precondition.

What happens to sapience if the linguistic network becomes corrupted? Say, for example, by deliberate confusion of the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’?

Clarity of communication requires clarity of terms: if when you say ‘man’ someone else understands ‘woman’, confusion is the only possible result when you give them directions to the lady’s room. The same must be true for the internal communication that we call ‘thought’. If, when a certain concept is activated by tapping its corresponding symbolic representation, the mind does not actually know what that representation means, it becomes impossible to think coherently about that concept.

Confusion of language does not remain limited to the specific corrupted vocabulary. Linguistic networks are relational. Words are defined in terms of other words, by a process of analogy or metaphor. Indeed, at a deeper level than language, metaphor is the stuff of thought: we understand one concept in terms of its similarities to adjacent concepts. Therefore if one concept is corrupted, the corruption spreads to all related concepts. When ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are confused, so too are concepts such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, ‘the ladies’ room’, ‘pregnancy’, ‘breastfeeding’, ‘sexual organs’, ‘prison for women’, ‘women’s shelter’, ‘violence against women’, and so on. The blot of darkness introduced by corrupting a single concept spreads its umbra over every concept that it touches.

The left of today is both the perpetrator and the primary victim of the most thorough corruption of language that the world has ever seen. It is not only ‘man’ and ‘woman’ that have been confused, although this is the most recent duplicity, and the most acute symptom of the underlying ontological rot. Corrupted language is everywhere you look.

Leftists say ‘hate’ when they mean ‘love of one’s own’, and when they say ‘love’ they mean at best the most debased of perversions, and at worst ‘hatred of one’s own’. They say ‘social justice’ to mean antisocial injustice: a process by which society is unravelled by apportioning reward and punishment without reference to individual behaviour. They call speech, violence, and violence, speech. They say ‘trust the science’, when they mean ‘believe without question, without argument, without evidence’. They call infanticide ‘choice’. ‘Democracy’ has come to mean ‘rule by the diktat of unaccountable bureaucrats’, while ‘authoritarianism’ is used for ‘the popular will of the majority of people’. Racism is held to be the highest sin, even as ‘race is a social construct’. The say ‘multiculturalism’, and mean a lowest-global-common-denominator monoculture mass-produced by corporate managerialism. They say ‘diversity’, and mean rigidly enforced ideological uniformity. They say ‘inclusion’, and mean exclusion of everyone whose inclusion is not specifically enumerated. They say ‘equity’, and mean theft. They say ‘liberalism’, and mean socialism or even communism. They say ‘fascism’, and mean classical liberalism. They say ‘Nazis’, and mean libertarians or even just basic conservatives. They say ‘extreme far right’, and mean ‘the majority of people, who believe what everyone believed until five minutes ago’. They say ‘progress’, and mean ‘decay’. They say ‘tolerance’ and mean ‘forced celebration’. They say ‘marginalized’ and mean ‘favoured’. They say ‘oppressed’ and mean ‘oppressor’, and vice versa.

The corruption of the left’s language is so total that it is difficult to think of any words in their lexicon which retain their dictionary definitions (unless they’ve used their institutional power to change the dictionary). This led

Mark Bisone

to characterize their idiom as the Black Speech of Mordor: a language infused with a dark sorcery that corrupts mind and soul merely by speaking it. Bisone warns against using the Black Speech ourselves, for to adopt the enemy’s dialect is to open our own souls to the same conceptual perversion. The left’s long-standing discursive hegemony makes this difficult to avoid, as when one reflexively says ‘liberals’ to refer to leftists. I’m as guilty of that as anyone.

In his seminal work on the political and cultural effects of psychopathy, Political Ponerology, the Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski discusses linguistic corruption as a central tactic that pathocrats – the nexus of psychopaths, sociopaths, clinical narcissists, and schizoidal personality types that has come together time again under the banner of leftism to terrorize society – use to conceal their intentions from psychologically normal humans. Apparently innocuous words take on a hidden meaning that is only understood by those in the inner circle. For example, communists will say that they act ‘for the proletariat’, which is understood by their hypnotized followers to mean on their behalf, but really means ‘for the vanguard party’. During the incubation of a pathocracy this has the effect of drawing the well-meaning but naive into the service of the would-be pathocrats. When the pathocracy matures, the linguistic corruption has the effect of rendering the regime opaque: its intentions cannot be understood on the basis of what it says, because the words it uses can have any number of meanings depending on context, and the regime’s intentions can therefore only be inferred by, as it were, reading the tea leaves, as through a glass darkly.

Orwell illustrated the consequences of linguistic confusion in 1984, for instance with the Ministry of Truth being responsible for propaganda, or the Minister of Love being responsible for torture. More insidiously, he described the deliberate contraction of mental space via Newspeak, which was used to make certain thoughts literally unthinkable because the words to think them no longer existed. Once again we see the theme of language being mutilated as a primary mechanism for obliterating consciousness. The Party’s primary goal wasn’t anything so cheap as simple greed, but the sadistic exercise of power for its own sake, via domination of the minds of its subjects, who were made to discard the evidence of their own senses, to ignore the basic rules of logic, and to annihilate their memories: ‘We have always been at war with Eurasia’, ‘2+2=5’, ‘Ignorance is Strength’, and so on.

In our own society emotional conditioning via the education system, the manufactured consensus of the news media, the hypnotic effect of popular culture, and relentless application of social pressure, has been used to attach an overpowering emotional valence to corrupted language, which makes it all but impossible for the weak of character to break free. Technological comforts insulate us from the hard edges of society, further weakening character, reducing pain tolerance and making people less capable of confronting painful things. Questioning falsehoods is simply too painful for them to bear: their entire identities are bound up in the struggle against racism, sexism, Islamophobia, climate change, homophobia, transphobia, and so on. To correct even a single error threatens the integrity of their entire personality. This doesn’t just make it impossible for them to think clearly. It also forces them into the position of continuously doing violence to their own thought: they see an autogynophile in a wig, substitute ‘woman’ for ‘man’ (because even the suffix ‘trans’ is exclusionary), and then they must forget that they have done this. They engage in this process repeatedly, day in and day out, on every subject of political importance, and they cannot allow themselves to realize that they are doing this because to notice their habitual twisting of thought would reveal that their thoughts are habitually twisted. Thought turned against itself cancels itself: it is thought that obliterates thought.

If sapience rests on a foundation of a language, it follows that corruption of language must reduce one’s capacity for sapience. Deprive a child of language entirely, for instance by isolating them in a room, and the parts of the brain that process language wither away, leaving them no more than a half-clever beast. Corrupt language sufficiently, and thought itself becomes impossible; with cognition reduced to so much emotional static, metacognition follows; the inner light of self-awareness gutters, dims, and goes out.

When we speak of the ‘woke mind virus’, it is not just some body of contagious postmodern witchcraft that we’re looking at. It’s much worse than that. It’s a memetic weapon that eats people’s minds, that chews away at the connectivity in their prefrontal cortex and reduces them to beasts whose meaningless babble is nothing more than camouflage for predatory intent.

The psychic shockwave echoing through the social order right now isn’t because a beloved public figure got shot.

It’s because in the aftermath every human being who hasn’t been hollowed out by the psychic infection got a full view of the horror it has unleashed.

Hollowed out bodies do not stay empty. Stormy Waters likes to say that “bodies without consciousness become vessels for consciousness without bodies”. It is not necessary to believe in the existence of literal discarnate spirits inhabiting the sublunary planes to apply this concept, though I would not (and do not) rule it out, either. One could as easily invoke egregores, pseudo-conscious entities sustained by collective belief, which lack bodies of their own but act in the world by parasitizing the entrained minds of their slaves.

Perhaps you think I exaggerate. If so, watch these.

https://x.com/stillgray/status/1967280964343885865

https://x.com/OneBadDude_/status/1967305387792875658

These are no longer Homo sapiens, because they are no longer sapient. They are Homo umbrans: the shadow man, the man who has blotted out the inner light, the man who has embraced the lie and embedded self-deception at the very core of his being. They have made themselves into anthropoids who only mimic humanity, and the verisimilitude is less convincing with every passing day.

You cannot have a conversation with Homo umbrans, because words have no meaning to it.

You cannot reason with Homo umbrans, because it does not possess reason.

You cannot convince Homo umbrans of anything using ‘facts and logic’, because it does not even recognize what these categories even are.

As

Bennett's Phylactery

asked, What Is There To Talk About? The left’s precepts are wholly incompatible with the right’s, for example, either a man and a woman are distinct and elementary biological categories, or ‘gender is a social construct’. Moreover, the correlates are existential, as if ‘gender is a social construct’, depriving a child of ‘gender-affirming care’ is to inflict a lifetime of psychological suffering, whereas if gender woo is malicious gaslighting manipulation, allowing genital mutilation is a monstrous crime that makes the child’s induced mental illness irreversibly permanent. There is no middle ground to be had.

Bennett goes on to emphasize that the right’s only real strategic advantage is that it is the faction of truth. The right’s intellectual core consists of those who, due to some accident of character, proved resistant to the left’s corruption of language, and indeed so strongly preferred simple honesty about reality to whatever material rewards the left might offer that they were willing to risk destruction of career, loss of livelihood, and even, as in Kirk’s case, loss of life, rather than rhapsodize about the rich imperial purples of the emperor’s robes as he prances down the street in his birthday suit.

It is of central importance that the right does not lose its orientation towards truth. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, there has been a growing tendency towards a certain opportunistic dishonesty. You see people pretending that the right is better than the left because we champion free speech, or because we abhor violence and would never countenance it, or because we would certainly never take satisfaction in the death of an avowed enemy. Perhaps some of you don’t want to hear this right now, because it is tactically inconvenient in the moment, but that is all bullshit, and if you embrace it, you encourage precisely the same loss of self-awareness that has destroyed the minds of the left.

Remember when Ruth Bader-Ginsburg died? Remember the celebrations that erupted across right wing spaces? Ding dong, the witch is dead. Pepperidge Farms remembers. What about when John McCain was claimed by the dukes of Hell? Of course they died of natural causes, but even so. I’m not saying it is morally good to enjoy the removal of an avowed enemy from the playing field, but it is a very human emotion to have. Do not pretend that you do not sometimes feel this, too. When George Soros dies, or Tony Blair, or Barack Obama, or Justin Trudeau, or Emanuel Macron, will you weep? You know the answer to that, and I’ll wager that a lot of you wouldn’t be terribly disappointed if these saboteurs, traitors, and tyrants met their ends at the gallows rather than in the cancer ward.

It is simply absurd to pose as though no one on the right has ever called for violence. Civil war discourse is one of the most well-trodden discursive pathways on the right. Sure, this is often presented as a warning, or as a thought experiment, and it essentially never rises to the level of legally actionable threats because people are generally canny enough to avoid the kind of specificity that draws the attention of the law, but it’s simply untrue to pretend that there is no one on the right who does not fantasize about war, who does not positively yearn for it, whether because they consider it the only sure way of decisively settling the matter, or because they think that war itself is a positive good that cleanses the gene pool and refreshes the societal spirit. Our side has maniacs too, and may Wotan’s burning eye look down on them with his grim blessing. Whether or not violence will really be necessary in the end, it’s good to have all options on the table. Peace through strength, and all that.

Free speech is a knottier issue. There’s no question that the right has invoked this ancient liberal principle many times throughout the Cancelled Years, which of course is precisely why the left thinks it can Alinsky its way into holding the right to its own self-proclaimed standards and thereby slither out of the targeting reticule. Yet it is also true that the right has itself put a question mark after the absolutism of free speech, with many of its philosophers noting that historically there was not really any such thing: blasphemy was prohibited for a long time, as was sedition. To speak openly against the king was to face the executioner’s sword. To this day, libel and defamation are illegal. One can be hauled into court for deliberately and knowingly spreading falsehoods with the intention of damaging the reputation of another.

The left’s project of writing ‘hate speech’ into the criminal code is really nothing more than an attempt to revive the blasphemy laws of old. The only real difference is that the sacred symbol of the left is the pederasty prism, and their cultic mascot is the long-suffering magic negro. The left simply intends to prohibit blasphemy and sedition against the left.

So does it all just reduce down to the Bolshevik principle of who, whom? Is it just the friend-enemy distinction? Is there no objective difference at all between our glorious homeland and their barbarous waste?

Not exactly. The actual situation is much closer to this.

The right is better than the left because it is oriented towards reality. Everything else flows from this.

When the right uses violence, it is ordered, disciplined, legally sanctioned, and inflicted with the goal of preserving and protecting the social order. When the left uses violence, it is chaotic, lawless, and intended to tear down society. Right-wing violence looks like police officers patrolling the streets to protect law-abiding citizens; left-wing violence looks like criminal psychopaths being disgorged from the prisons, while the police are ordered to ignore the criminals and tyrannize the people instead. Right-wing violence is controlled and surgical, with the goal of removing the worst bandits and provocateurs, in order to re-impose the peace with minimal destruction and loss of life. Left-wing violence is a mountain of innocent skulls, the higher the better.

That is why the right is better.

When the right takes grim satisfaction in the destruction of its enemies, it is always the very worst sort of villains, manipulative liars, scheming sociopaths, shameless parasites, career criminals, traitorous politicians, pedophile rapists ... men whose biographies are written in the language of broken lives, innocent deaths, vandalized beauty, and corrupted purity. When the left gloats at the death of its enemies, it is always the noble, the virtuous, the beautiful, and the blameless that they glory in extinguishing.

That is why the right is better.

When the right censors, it is for deliberately telling outrageous lies, or for seeking to debase impressionable young minds with smut. The right can abide honest disagreement, because the right is aligned with reality, which is something all men can perceive, even if they do not wholly agree with one another on all of its particulars. When the left seeks to shut down discourse, it is because they cannot abide disagreement of any kind; the left is woven from a tapestry of lies, and lies retain their coherence only through force.

That is why the right is better.

There is no moral equivalence between right and left, because there is no moral symmetry between those who seek to cultivate the inner light of self-awareness, and those who deliberately scratch out their own souls for some cheap and temporary gain.

Finally, and here many of you will think I am about to cuck, we must talk about forgiveness.

Just as you should be truthful about your own natures, you should be truthful about the possibility of redemption, and ready to forgive whenever possible and necessary. Here, too, the left shows its allegiance to falsehood with its implicit belief that it is not possible for people to change. How many times, over the years, have you seen someone step afoul of the left, offer a heartfelt apology with tears in their eyes, only for the mob to interpret this as nothing more than an admission of guilt, responding like piranhas to blood in the water? It is not for nothing that the left has been called the Church of No Salvation. If you are white, male, Christian, straight, you are an oppressor down to your very marrow, defined for all time by the historical sins of your ancestors. No matter how much you ‘do the work’, it is never enough, because the left is incapable of forgiveness.

This refusal to forgive is not only a gross error that misrepresents human nature. It has also proved to be a crippling strategic mistake. There is a tactical advantage in being utterly remorseless: when you are strong, you are feared, people will keep their heads down, their eyes averted, and if they speak against you it will never be above a whisper, after a glance over their shoulder, because they know that should they misstep even once they will be destroyed. Fear is not love, however; it is not even respect. Gradually, those whispers proliferate, and rise in volume. People begin to say that if they will be destroyed without mercy for even the smallest step out of line, then what disadvantage is there in taking a larger step? Fear hardens into resentment, resentment crystallizes into hatred, and then one day everything cracks.

Not every leftist is redeemable. Some were simply born bad. Some are too far gone. Some have committed crimes for which no forgiveness is possible. No doubt, as all of this unravels, more such crimes will be committed. They will need to be dealt with.

But many, and perhaps even most, retain their humanity.

Already there have been several high-profile examples of leftists who have expressed their disgust at the dancing ghouls.

The OG YouTuber shoe0nhead has taken a clear and impassioned stance against the celebration of political violence. She spoke up almost immediately on X, and then released a video that may be one of the most touching things she’s ever made. Honestly, I’ve always liked shoe, and while she thinks of herself as a leftist I sincerely doubt that very many leftists would agree with her. Her leftism is economic, and that is not really what the left is anymore; moreover, there are many on the right who agree with her on economics.

Cenk Uygur also deserves recognition for condemning in no uncertain terms the execution of a man with whom he disagreed, but who despite this treated Cenk with warmth. Ezra Klein, of all people, took to the New York Times, of all places, to defend Kirk’s legacy. He’s been taking heavy fire for that, but he isn’t budging, and I never thought I’d say this, but good on him.

Disgust at the left’s reaction by erstwhile liberals is not limited to a few influencers with large followings.

A.J.R. Klopp

rounded up quite a few TikTok videos starring just about the most libtarded physiognomies you can imagine, all of whom were expressing their horror at the demonic glee so many of their former fellow travellers were indulging in, and many of whom proclaimed that they were done, they were out, they could not associate themselves with this, they weren’t voting for Democrats anymore.

There is hope for these people and, I think, for many more. Many are deluded through no fault of their own, seduced into their beliefs out of a desire to, as redditors put it, just be a heckin’ decent human being. They want to be kind and compassionate, to improve the economic lot of the common man, to ensure that society does not abandon the weak. Their ideas on how to achieve these aims may be wrong, but their motivations aren’t evil, and insofar as they have advocated for evil things, this is because they were lied to all their lives by evil people. No one can be blamed for believing a lie that they do not realize is a lie.

We need to be ready to forgive, to accept hands held out across the ideological divide in a spirit of genuine conciliation ... but only when they express genuine contrition. Forgiveness requires repentance. That is not just Christian theology, it’s simple practicality. Caesar made the mistake of offering clemency to those who did not deserve it, and paid the price.

Octavian learned from Caesar’s lethal mistake. He did not offer clemency to those who would only use it to betray him. Instead, he liquidated his enemies with perfect ruthlessness. The result was a century of peace and prosperity.

Destroying the left by ripping it up by its financial and organizational roots, purging leftists from positions of responsibility and authority, and jailing the worst offenders for their crimes against nature and the human spirit, is absolutely necessary. There should be no hesitation here. However, this is not only a necessary act of civilizational self-preservation. It is also an act of generosity towards the afflicted, as when an oncologist attacks a tumour with scalpel, toxin, and hard radiation: cutting, poisoning, and burning the diseased tissue to save a patient’s life. If the light of sapience can be extinguished by corrupting the language and thereby annihilating thought, the light can be turned back on with a rectification of names – by insisting on truth in the public square, and exiling those who incite madness and confusion by vandalizing thought itself. Those who have wandered into the sucking mire and found themselves trapped cannot extricate themselves so long as the swamp that has enveloped them remains undrained; drain the swamp, however, and some of them, perhaps even a great many of them, might succeed in crawling free under their own power and reclaiming their humanity.

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Thank you for reading this rambling mess of an essay. There’s a lot more I could have said on the subject, for instance, the similarities between leftist language corruption and the wooden tongue of managerialism, or the role played by the structure of the managerial system itself in hollowing out the human intellect. Actually, I have a piece on that very subject which I’ve been preparing, which I hope to have ... eventually. My hard drive is full of draft essays in various states of completion, some of which have fallen woefully behind the news cycle, but I wanted to get this out before the topic got stale, while the emotional impression the left’s ghoulishness made was still fresh in people’s minds. Anyhow, I hope this was all somewhat coherent.

As always, I would like to express my gratitude towards all of my supporters. I put everything out there for free, meaning that you receive nothing but the satisfaction of knowing that you’re keeping me from starving to death. Your generosity is simply stunning ... to say nothing of your loyalty, given my silence over my long summer vacation.

1. Some have suggested that he committed seppukku in order to salvage his career from flagging ratings, intending to use the controversy for free publicity; certainly his ratings had fallen off a cliff, so the network may have just been looking for an excuse. Also, it seems that Disney is bringing Kimmel back, apparently after leftists phoned in death threats, although affiliate stations are apparently refusing to air him.