215 Comments

This is the right way to think. I'd like to see substack move away from "omg things suck so hard!" to "what are we going to do about it?" Thanks for pushing things in that direction.

Expand full comment
author

Empty bitching is what social media is for.

Expand full comment

Yes. But "what are we going to do about it?" is going to be a hard question to answer now that leftists control both political parties, the government, and not only all the public sector institutions but almost all of the private sector ones as well.

The Canadian truckers showed how a potentially effective grass-roots movement can rise up, and also how our rulers will strike back. But yes, it's time to actually fight back, if it's not already too late.

Expand full comment

Enough people growing a pair and acting in a way that sends a very clear message: Fuck off with your bullshit.

I attended a psychology related Webinar a few weeks back. A few hundred people with a sort of famous key speaker. All went well. There was a chat thread going. Suddenly this woke person turned. Apparently the speaker was a guest with Jordan Peterson in the past. The woke person demanded that the speaker publicly distance himself from Jordan now because Jordan is deemed transphobic. The speaker never addressed the topic and it wasn't part of what was talked about in Jordan's podcast. But, according to the woke person, he was guilty by association.

He kept on hassling the chat thread with his/her demands. The thread moderator ignored him. A few others kowtowed a bit. No-one wanted to stick a neck out but there was no applause for him either.

Then I had enough. I told him in respectful but clear words to "fuck off" and to stop politizicing a professional webinar. He kept on trying and I kept on telling him, politely and professionally, to fuck off. 99% didn't get involved which is not too bad, I suppose. While they are fucking cowards, at least they didn't play along with the bullshit or backstabbed me. Eventually the guy gave up.

This has to happen in millions of daily intereactions. People politely but firmly have to get to that point where they throw caution in the wind and decide: Fuck this bullshit. And say so. And push back. And channel their disgust and anger Iminto a steely reply free of any fear or guilt. There is no lack of opportunity. Grow a pair. It feels really good too.

Expand full comment
author

Good for you.

I strongly suspect this is happening all over the place already.

Expand full comment

Yes, people need to re-learn, and to be confident, in simply saying "no".

Expand full comment
author

No war is ever won in the first battle. Not the ones worth fighting at least.

Expand full comment

Start small -- plant a vegetable garden, kill Amazon and social media, and invest in a chest freezer or two. They are at war with self-sufficiency and health, so we fight them by embodying everything that they hate.

Expand full comment

That might work, until they come for our chest freezers.

Expand full comment
author

They can pry my cold dead fingers from the chest freezer in that case.

Expand full comment

Better figure out what to do if it stops working I suggest learning to pressure can and dry.

Actually this is a really good idea even if you don't worry about power infrastructure problems or irreplaceable appliances not working, preserving got me through a couple of unemployed periods, a major injury that kept me from working for 9 months, and Covid lockdowns.

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

In 1920s Mexico a communist dictator came to power and attempted to ban Catholicism, in Mexico, which went about as well as you’d think. The Mexican Catholic population boycotted the entire Mexican economy and within 2 days the economy collapsed. Take lessons from The Cristero War mi amigos.

Expand full comment
author

Extremely based.

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

The Cristero War was a brutal struggle that lasted 3 years, was won by mexican leftists with the help of Uncle Sam and catholics were persecuted another decade after the war. Not sure what is the lesson here.

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

That the nation wide boycott broke the Mexican economy in 48 hours.

Expand full comment

Conservatives have been spending all their energy for years obsessed with abortion--which any libertarian-inclined person should recognize is none of the state's business, regardless of how repugnant an individual may regard it--and let every layer of society become infused with nonsense backed by the big financial players.

Quite a savage own goal, and everyone is paying for it.

I haven't seen any meaningful outrage over BlackRock buying up housing stock in supposedly conservative Christian strongholds like Tennessee and turning them into rental properties and making it impossible for lower-middle-income people to buy *or* rent homes in attractive neighborhoods. A mass uprising against that would've been nice and very instructive.

Expand full comment
author

I agree, Blackrock's housing buyups are an emergency that requires immediate and widespread attention. They need to Delenda Ested for that alone.

Expand full comment

No political side has ever really taken housing needs seriously.

I was very fortunate to have grown up in one of those postwar coop developments in NYC that were built when land was cheap enough to allow for the kind of landscaping that gives kids plenty of green lawns to run around on. Almost all of our parents were children of immigrants and almost all of them had grown up in fragile economic circumstances. We had a decent middle-class life of stable and attractive housing though few families were headed by people in professions other than teaching. My mother escaped homelessnes after her divorce because she could afford to hang on to that apt. that had no debt and did have low maintenance charges, even though the first job she got afterwards was paying 80 cents an hour.

A philosophical devotion to market-rate housing ignores the reality that many people absolutely cannot afford what the economists' formula says they ought to. People may consider housing not a *right* but it sure is a necessity, and societies cannot be stable when many lower-income people can't live in safe clean neighborhoods. Their kids absolutely will grow up mentally ill when there aren't any trees on their blocks.

Expand full comment

> societies cannot be stable when many lower-income people can't live in safe clean neighborhoods.

The question you should be asking is why so many neighborhoods are neither safe nor clean.

Expand full comment

Often, as evidenced by metropolitan areas, the lowest-income peoples make their environments dirty and unsafe, whilst being provided ALL manners of welfare.

Expand full comment

I do not see our SELECTED representatives moving to do this...nor do I see the SEC moving to BAN blackrock from using BLACKMAIL to shatter a stock's price and tank the company so they can buy it cheap.

WE Are SO BEHIND THE 8 Ball, by the time smart people figure it out,..it is too late.

Expand full comment

> Conservatives have been spending all their energy for years obsessed with abortion

Abortion is what enabled hook up culture and the sexual revolution. It is not a distraction.

Expand full comment
author

An excellent point.

Expand full comment
Jun 1, 2023Liked by John Carter

Really the pill was what did that, read Mary Harrington for many words on this

Expand full comment
author

There's no contradiction there.

Expand full comment

The pill is also a problem.

Expand full comment

It's nobody's business but the woman's and it's not a procedure invented in modern times.

Expand full comment
author

Yet it's only in modern times that it was legalized, even celebrated, suggesting that until the last fifty years - the period of the decline and fall - society considered the existence of the next generation very much its business.

Expand full comment

Society makes everything its business, doesn't it? Until the Western Enlightenment there was little concept of freedom of conscience. The ruler was head of the established faith. I consider it a great improvement that one may be a heretic without getting burned for it.

I also consider it a great improvement that a woman's fertility is her own business and not that of her family or tribe.

But it's also true that in many older societies, women were extremely skilled in herbalism and how to induce menstruation if a woman was late in bleeding. Very early abortion--at the embryonic stage--is clearly preferable to abortion of a fetus. The demonization of such knowledge has made things worse, not better.

I don't think abortion is good. I think it is a necessary evil, or an evil necessity, to be permitted. I think that regardless of how or why a woman becomes pregnant, it's not the state's business to demand she then give birth. As most of those who read your writing would feel, women are not men and men are not women. The unique capacity of women to gestate gives women unique natural rights over their bodies.

Expand full comment
author

As usual, classical society had the right balance figured out. They shrugged at infanticide, but only for eugenic reasons; but at the same time, producing children was considered a public and religious duty.

By contrast, we murder our children mainly for convenience, and fail to reproduce ourselves because having children is a luxury lifestyle choice. With the result that our numbers and our human quality decline steadily.

Expand full comment

In my view you've got a seriously over-romanticized fever-dream view of classical society, which was great for the elites (not necessarily for their women though) and pretty lousy for everyone else.

Those children produced for society were a commodity. Their mothers were a commodity too.

Don't mistake me--I'm no feminist. I want a world that sees the value in men too. But as rough as these current times are, I'd rather be here, where I had the freedom to make my own choices for good or ill rather than being compelled to do as others would've wanted me to.

And didn't classical society of the highest thinkers whom you admire very much celebrate pederasty? That "masturbating into the rectums of others" as you quote was quite a mainstay of the educated classes. One had to have sex with women to make those commodity babies, but romantic fixations were so often towards pretty boys. Of course being used that way didn't leave them pretty for long, or they did that awful growing up thing, and new ones had to be acquired.

Life here on earth has always been and will always be filled with ugliness and all those great thinkers with their elegant mental constructions haven't really found any durable solutions to the problem.

Expand full comment

> It's nobody's business but the woman's

Public morals are society's business. Your grandparents and great-grandparents would have understood this.

> and it's not a procedure invented in modern times.

But, it was illegal or at least heavily stigmatized until modern times.

Expand full comment

Our grandparents' and great-grandparents' generations also saw plenty of women trying to and often succeeding in obtaining abortions.

Many things are stigmatized. Often wrongly. In a free society there will always be unresolvable tensions about that. Even in unfree societies people will think and act as they feel best for themselves, risking the costs. It's better to live in societies where personal bodily liberties are more respected than not.

Expand full comment

> It's better to live in societies where personal bodily liberties are more respected than not.

And yet here we are, and you can see the consequences of sexual libertinism all around you. Broken homes, people indulging and glorifying ever more deviant sexual behaviors in an effort to get the same empty feeling.

Expand full comment

Even women in stable committed relationships may have good reason to abort a pregnancy.

But it's nobody's business but the woman's, regardless of her status, to choose to keep or abort a pregnancy.

Expand full comment

I agree, and the same is true of trans people discretely transitioning. It's disappointing that the main things actually done in the pushback against the Woke, Vax-Covidian coup regime of censorship and interference in private matters has been more interference in private matters.

Expand full comment

Life is full of biological realities that often conflict with the desire of people to control other people's lives. Gestation is a unique state of being. It's not comparable to anything else. People often attack women's rights with false analogies because nothing is equivalent to the state and capability of gestation.

Sex-based and social rights are also different. In some cases a claimed social right may not conflict with sex-based rights. If a man wants to simulate the appearance of a woman and be granted the social acceptance of one, for personal comfort so long as that doesn't infringe on a woman's actual rights to safety, anyone's distaste at that may be considered their own problem.

But if the simulation then becomes a fiction protected by legal compulsion, we have a serious social problem.

Expand full comment

I agree with that too. I think trans and other LGBT+ people got just about everything they could reasonably ask for about ten years ago, under second Obama. Since then, especially with trans, the Woke agitators have been doing everything to pick fights in their name, which then lash back on the actual trans people.

Yes, people should be able to peacefully transition to an opposite-sex social standing if that is the one their brains are wired for. No, declaring oneself a woman does not buy access to women's locker rooms or membership on women's sports teams if one's body is substantially male.

No, one's pronouns are not a vanity plate. There are two personal third-person singular pronouns in English: one for male and one for female. It is polite to refer to a person by the one for the gender they identify as, but that needs to be earned from the speaker by regularly looking and behaving that way. "Misgendering" someone is not a crime. And if you are so in-between that you cannot make up your mind, then just accept whichever one people reckon you as when they talk about you. It's their conversation anyway, not yours.

No, public schools do not need a separate K-12 curriculum in "health," which includes sexuality, which includes LGBT lore. All of that, including "health," is a private matter to be left to the child and its family.

Expand full comment

It's true about everything in life that one demand will lead to the next. That's not a curable problem. Every society struggles with this.

It's always bad for men, for example, when women have more rights. A woman not dependent on marriage in order to have a good life will be more selective in mates. But why should a woman's freedom be sacrificed so undesirable men have better chances at having families?

It's only a fantasy that laws and contrived moral standards can repress the extremities of human nature. These are endless cycles. We can only hope to be born in good ones rather than bad. But no achieved period of stability ever lasts.

Expand full comment

"All the degeneracy that occurred before I started paying attention is natural and good, the the degeneracy since is clearly wrong."

Expand full comment

This is a massive derailment just like someone trying to force a speaker at a professional conference to renounce Jordan Peterson publicly.

However, abortion, like euthanasia, is murder. The only debate is at what point is it not murder, and if that distinction is based on specific physiological tests or if it is purely arbitrary political decision like a drinking age.

Expand full comment

It's killing, certainly, at any stage past the embryonic. But gestation is a unique state of being and the pregnant woman has rights over her body that supersede any imaginary rights the law may try to grant to the unborn child. It has no rights.

But the repugnancy of killing an unborn child once it's reached the stage of viability (which is still an imperfect determinant) make us give rights to the state it doesn't really have. I recognize my own hypocrisy in supporting a 20-week limit.

Expand full comment

Pretty words but supported by nothing but feels and loaded language.

Unless rights are held by all humans then they are due to no humans and are managed by whim and feelz. A woman has full rights over her own body but there is no right found or claimed anywhere to kill the child she is carrying.

let me repeat that: There. Is. No. Right. To. Kill.

Claiming a right to kill is based on nothing but the ability to kill and making others accede to the act. It is a wonderful first step to "humans are property" which has been such bane to humankind as long as there was labor to steal and the weak available to oppress and abuses.

Expand full comment
author

Far from there being no right, the ancient custom in Europe held that fathers had a duty to kill defective babies as a public service. Not a mother's right to choose, but a father's obligation to decide.

Expand full comment

The child before birth has no rights.

Expand full comment

> BlackRock buying up housing stock in supposedly conservative Christian strongholds like Tennessee and turning them into rental properties and making it impossible for lower-middle-income people to buy *or* rent homes in attractive neighborhoods.

Then who are they renting them to?

Expand full comment

People who can rent them at the newly-created market rate.

Expand full comment

So it looks like the fundamental problem is people of higher economic status moving in to Tennessee and pricing out the locals.

Expand full comment

Or forcing locals into rent-cost hardship and reducing their spending options for everything else.

Expand full comment

This is exactly what they are doing...all being done via BlackRock's AI, Aladdin....and Catherine Austin Fitts was the first to see it.

Now they are doing it to the biggest corporations/brands, so they can scoop up the stock at rock bottom prices...and then watch...the Crap will stop, the Company will rebound with the stock price, and those corporations that Black Rock etc own will wipe out all competition.

YOU WILL OWN NOTHING, and YOU WILL BE HAPPY/s.

Expand full comment
Jun 1, 2023Liked by John Carter

Abortion is one of those things that affects everyone, but they don't know it. It's where a lot of the cell lines for research, development and production come from. Some people then refuse the vaccinations and medicines that spring forth from these processes. At this time we have the added, expected problem of contaminated biologicals that are on the market. Think prions, cancer activating, viral and genetic elements, and long term adverse reactions. Providing for Informed Consent would be a good thing, right about now.

Expand full comment

In your opinion, would any libertarian-inclined person also recognize that charging people with murder is none of the state's business?

Expand full comment

The answer to your question is already found in this thread.

Expand full comment

I think even most libertarians favor the state intervening in the case of murder.

Yes the destruction of the housing market is terrible, but I suspect that its actual roots are the same eugenic, depopulation, authoritarian agenda as abortion, people tend to have more children and be more independent in their own homes. Your call is, 'Don't stab this hydra head stab that one.' maybe the lesson of the hydra is to go for root causes and not stab the multiplying heads?

Expand full comment

Great essay, John, thank you. I have, for a while now, been telling anyone who is willing to listen that the enemy class is neither inevitable nor invincible. They have been getting away with dismantling our civilisation only because they have never encountered any serious opposition. Or, indeed, any opposition at all.

The political right (and plain, old normies too) has been mesmerised by money-worship and individualism since the 1980s and that prevented any sort of push back except, occasionally, by brave but foolhardy individuals who had their lives ruined as a result. The reason the left triumph is because they are willing to organise and act as a collective. But, oh no, we can't do that because collective = communist.

We must organise and campaign against them with as much ferocity and relentlessness as the left used against us. No, greater ferocity. When they go low, we go even lower. No limits and no backing down. If they can change the received morality then so can we. Decency be damned and fairness is for losers. We cannot afford to lose any more.

To quote, or perhaps paraphrase, one of your founding fathers, we must hang together or we will surely hang separately.

Expand full comment

I think what is needed is a THIRD PARTY, not beholden to re--election or donor money, that brings up these issues ...BLACKROCK, VANGUARD AND STATE STREET. THEY OWN MAJOR Shares of most companies....and vote the STOCK in their capacity as agents for shareholders...and they ARE TOO BIG AND MUST BE BROKEN UP.

AND ALADDIN, their AI has to be taken down. NO company can use the data they have scooped up over the past 20 years and no COMPUTERS to hold the data.

Expand full comment

This is going to sound anti-woman but it's actually anti-domination.

I say ban HR departments because the only purpose they serve is to provide women C-Suite level jobs and a means by which to alter workspaces to accommodate their desires. When the workforce was primarily male and we didn't have HR Depts things worked just fine. The feminist revolution demanded women get entry to the predominantly male work force and once they got entry they then demanded those work spaces be changed to accommodate them. This is because this is female nature, to invade a space and take over. HR depts were cleverly created under the guise and excuse that such a dept was now needed to handle disputes; they knew from the very start that their entry to the previously all male workspace was going to be contentious as some men would resist the changes the women demanded.

Today no company can imagine letting go of its HR Dept but the fact is they don't need one, at least not as big and as powerful as it currently is and it would certainly be better off managed by men even gay men. With HR dept just barely large enough to handle things like new employee paperwork and background checks we'd stop having to put up with the unnecessary fluff that predominantly female run HR depts bring to a business like office birth day celebrations and wasteful and unnecessary behavioral training like anti-whiteness training. All of this non-sense exists in the corporate landscape because of female run HR depts. Women are social creatures and they force that onto everyone at the company when most would rather get a little more in their paycheck and have no company sponsored birthday parties. Make no mistake it is us men who are to blame for we allowed this to take root and grow. The male execs running things in the 50's should have said NO. Allowed women in to do a job that they were capable of (ie accounting, secretarial maybe even marketing) but an absolute NO to their demands for an HR Dept and or for the work space to change to make them feel better. Until that point in time no man was starting at a new job and demanding that anything change to accommodate his desires, he just rolled with whatever was the company culture.

Expand full comment
author

Fucking preach, brother. HR Delenda Est.

Expand full comment

I have to correct myself on something. The original creation of the HR Dept came about from a dispute at the National Cash Register corporation, before women entered the workspace. Thus HRT depts weren't created by women entering teh works[pace but reset into being something other then it's original intent. HR was about settling employee/employer disputes and not hosting quarterly birthday parties or other social events that cost $$ that could be going directly to employees instead and not to police what one says or has at their desk that the opposite sex might be offended by.

Expand full comment

Chick Fil A will soon become Chick Fil "B" and will go the way of other large corporations.

Chick Fil A will go down in flames, because of the attention they drew a few years ago. Remember when people started going there because Chick Fil A stood its ground during the gay marriage debacle? But those days are over. The company has undoubtedly been inundated with "plants" to bring it down.

Once you hire "an executive officer devoted to Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity" you've already conceded to the nonsense.

Expand full comment

I can sympathize a little with their predicament, as our financial system has the power to absolutely wreck good companies. What I would love is a DIE executive who understands her job is to make dumb diversity statements every month that no one reads, take the 300k salary, and do nothing else.

Even better, subtly encourage employees to take a multitude of silly alphabet identities or races on paper to make their demographics looks great, when in truth it's a bunch of white guys.

Make a bunch of shell NGO's with names like "LGBTs for Equality" that donates to our bad-thinkers online.

Most important, though, is to do this all with a straight face. Look like the most absurdly woke corporation that ever existed, while in reality being as hard right as you can get away with.

Expand full comment

The problem is a DEI executive is woke and the woke will not simply let things alone. They are like the nosey church lady who can't keep her nose out of others business, has to be in everything and influencing everything; controlling it. And best of all they fully believe they are helping make you a better person.

Expand full comment

That will never happen. The people who have the required college credentials to land the job are going to be completely brainwashed.

Also, it's doubtful that you can find anyone for DEI that isn't already known within the industry. It's a racket, that's how it works. You can only pick from the people that are available, and the available people are all "plants." There aren't any DEI executives that haven't been vetted by the system.

DEI executives aren't there to actually "do a job,. They're there to destroy whatever industry they are told to. Their orders come from outside the company.

https://ogre.substack.com/p/esg-scoring-what-you-need-to-know

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

It’s DIE......Diversity, Inclusion, Equity.

And these brands need to, indeed, die.

Expand full comment

If they take up the mantle of DIE, then they will indeed.

Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, is just a another form of fraud.

All of these "movements" are *not* grassroots. They are all coordinated, and backed by political interests who benefit from the downfall of the country.

Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, benefits those who have found a way to profit -- from "short selling" the United States of America.

Expand full comment

As long as they can't force people to spend their money on DEI embracing corporations than the corp executives will have to decide on which is the lesser loss, access to short term credit lines or their customer base. I said "as long as" because I fully believe that part of teh push to a Digital Bank Currency backed by the government is to control peoples purchases. The UK Exchequer has already publicly said how with a Bank Digital Currency they could greater control a citizens purchases under the guise of climate change control, carbon emissions and that BS. With that kind of currency companies with a higher ESG score could get lower carbon points so as to discourage someone from purchasing products from a non ESG friendly vendor because doing so costs more carbon credits. These bastards absolutely will try and do something like that.

Expand full comment

You're spot on! PayPal, and some banks were already limiting what people could by with their credit accounts (guns). Of course, it didn't go well, because people aren't so limited in where they can go. But that won't be the case with CBDC. They can limit you -- at the source. Which is definitely part of the plan.

The whole Great Reset is supposed to attack the citizenry from 50 different angles to limit where they can go. They want to coral people as far as they can before they implement force. If implement force too soon, they might actually cause a revolution. The idea is to put the squeeze on people until a revolution won't be a possibility. People will be too busy fighting over food.

That's where we are now.

Expand full comment
author

I also like IED.

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

Well they got rid of my favorite carrot-raisin salad AND the cole slaw, so there’s not much left to go there for. Can get a chicken sandwich somewhere else…

Expand full comment
author

Chick Fil A or Dick Fellate? 🤔

Expand full comment

Rule 15 from Rules for Radicals: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Focus on one or a few companies at a time. Omni-boycotts just diffuse our energy.

Expand full comment

Yes.

Alinsky's Rule #11 "Go Negative. If you push negative hard and deep long enough it will break through to the counterside."

Use memes, Substack posts, everything we can to hit the company hard and keep hitting them. Procter & Gamble is now back making money from Gillette. We should have made that brand permanently toxic.

Expand full comment
author

I don't think the culture war ready to go scorched earth at that point.

Expand full comment

No it wasn't. It was only after they went after peoples kids that enough moms were angered to then bring in enough husbands to also become angered to do something. Today in San Francisco Armenian people met pro-LGB activists at teh school grounds to protest the SF schools engaging in pride events and not allowing parents to remove their kids from participation. These idiot activist don't yet realize just how badly they screwed up by going after peoples kids.

Expand full comment
author

Yes. Which, if you read past the title, is exactly what I'm proposing.

Expand full comment

See my comment above...it won't teach the companies any lesson,...black rock will buy them up at fire sale prices and then they WILL TRULY OWN EVERYTHING . I doubt we will be happy.

Expand full comment

And what will Blackrock get? A failing brewery? There are new breweries and microbreweries being founded all the time.

Expand full comment

Breweries are really flexible, and can brew pretty much any recipe. Bud may fail, but the production facilities are there ready to take up any alternate brew. It might even be a boost for another brand that now has less competition and more market share. Might even be cheaper than a takeover.

Expand full comment
author

Blackrock can buy all the burnt out cinders it wants. Stop blackpilling.

Expand full comment

Blackrock currently managers around 8trillion so it does have considerable sway but you're right in that it can't protect or buy out every company that suffers like AB and Disney have been. What is more likely to happen is that BR will use that money and influence to get legislation passed that in some way helps out ESG friendly companies that are in a financial bind and they'll sneak it in as part of something important like the Defense Authorization Act or the budget.

Expand full comment
author

So the US government bankrupts itself a bit faster? Sweet.

Expand full comment

No I'm not talking about providing these companies any money but do something like implement some ESG related tax that's based on your ESG score. A tax that is percentage based on a companies sales. The higher you're score the lower the tax rate. Something like that would be a win-win for both BR and the Fed Gov and I would NOT put it past them to try something like this especially if BR is promising extra funding to their re-election campaign coffers.

Expand full comment

They can't buy companies that aren't shareholder-owned.

Expand full comment

There are very few large corporations that aren't publicly traded.

Expand full comment

> if you drink Bud Light you’re gay. Decades of conditioning notwithstanding, they don’t want to be gay. “That’s so gay” may not be so yesterday, but Bud Light is.

Conservatives forget that social battles are not won by facts and logic, but cool and uncool. Unfortunately, it's not that much different than High School cliques. Being rich nad being able to saturate the airwaves makes making something sound "cool" much easier, but fun little subversions like taking sodomy gear and making a mess out of checkout is free and fun.

Expand full comment
author

I dunno, in high school it wasn't necessarily the rich kids that had the monopoly on cool. The rebellious bad boys often came from the wrong side of the tracks. Money isn't everything when it comes to cultural cachet.

Expand full comment

Excellent post, John. The last part about the scum and filth at Blackrock is critically important, it is always better to cut the head off the snake, then just slash at one of its coils. If Blackrock can be beaten, the rest of the ESG trash will ultimately fall apart.

Expand full comment

BLACK ROCK cannot be beaten, because every damn politician is indebted to them for the money to get re-elected. Because what the problem IS is BLACKROCK, SS and VANGUARD.

These companies own everything already...they need to be ANTITRUSTED to death.

Expand full comment

I understand your anger, I share it. But we can't fall into the trap of thinking they are invulnerable. Then we won't feel motivation to do anything, so we fight on even if it feels hopeless.

Expand full comment

Also as Sun Tzu said, we need to know ourselves and our enemy. For example, since Blackrock has large political influence, we need to focus on tactics, like boycotts, that don't rely on the government, as opposed to anti-trust litigation which does.

Expand full comment
author

Exactly.

Expand full comment

I'd like to point out that your first paragraph contradicts your second.

Expand full comment

Well said, Eugine, well said! 👍🏻

Expand full comment
author

Utterly.

Expand full comment

No not every politician but they do have influence on many. That said if a politician see's its best to divest themselves of Blackrock because of negative association they will turn their backs on Blackrock unless Blackrock holds some kind of incriminating information lie perhaps a trip to Epstein's Island and I doubt BR has something like that on every elected person in DC. Many yes but not all and certainly not many at the state and lower levels. Blackrock has a lot of money but even Blackrock can't afford to control but just so many elected people.

Expand full comment

Exactly this. Make "Bud Light" a go-to boogeyman story that gets repeated in every Annual Marketing Strategy session for the next decade.

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

It should replace 'New Coke' as the favorite Biggest Business Blunder case study in Biz schools the world over!

Expand full comment
Jun 1, 2023Liked by John Carter

The sad thing is it won't, or at least not in the proper context. These liberal marketing pros have blinders on when it comes to interpreting phenomenon that doesn't fit their worldview. The lesson they'll take away from AB is that they didn't go gay enough.

Expand full comment

The zealots have their blinders on, but I don't think there are enough of them to keep this going when all somebody has to do is go "will this turn us into Bud Light?"

Expand full comment
author

We'll certainly see. If the zealots cling to influence they will merely act as accelerants for the flames.

Expand full comment
author

All the better. They'll keep fucking up and keep reaping the consequences.

Hollywood is rapidly making itself culturally irrelevant by the same means.

Expand full comment

Yep. Look at how Disney has woke it's way into a debt crisis. Disney is facing a 20-30 billion dollar bill for Hulu and it doesn't have but 3-6 weeks of operating cash on hand all because of non-profitable ventures for the last few years at teh box office and streaming. Even teh parks are finally starting to take a hit as people are going elsewhere in protest of Disney's Not So Secret Gay Agenda. Just 1 year ago Disney seemed unstoppable despite it's constant box office defeats so the tides can change quickly on even the strongest of companies.

I predict Disney will either have some mass asset sell-of to cover it's debts or it will seek some form of financial protection like re-organization.

Expand full comment
author

Most likely they'll sell Pixar (or Pixar's technology) to Apple.

Expand full comment

It would definitely be the smarter move. They also could consider selling off ESPN. Whether it's ESPN or PIXAR or something else most of what they have they have incorporated into their parks and that's going o be a legal hurdle in selling any of their propertys

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

Oh, yeah.... THIS I can do. Actually, I've been doing it for a while now, starting with... starting with... well, it's been maybe five years, memory fades. Start shoving woke in my face? You just lost a customer, forever.

Expand full comment
author

Same. I've been boycotting Gillette since like 2019.

Expand full comment

Need to boycott the bit mutual fund companies. Commissions are now extremely low. Roll your dice and buy individual stocks.

Or, better yet, use this wokeness as a golden opportunity. Don't just boycott. Compete!

https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-2-dont-just-boycott-compete

If you can get Real America on your side, you can now do business without the gigantic economies of scale of Corporate "America." Brew a local beer. Open up a general store.

Such a store does not to be as big as a Target to be useful. Curate instead of trying to stock every brand. Don't sell toys that break instantly. Don't sell cosmetics that alter your sex hormones. Don't sell dishwashers that won't dry your dishes. Don't sell "smart" appliances that spy on you. Don't sell a hoe that an out of shape 60 year old can break. Don't sell T shirts that feel like hair shirts. Don't sell plastic items that outgas noxious fumes. Find the niche that is in between the Whole Foods high end and the Dollar General crappe.

Expand full comment
author

>Don't sell toys that break instantly.

Don't sell *anything* that breaks instantly. Holy shit I am so sick of planned obsolescence. So are so many people I know.

Expand full comment

Or toys that just don't work at all.

The game Tip-It actually worked when I was a kid. It had a real wood rod on which a figure balanced on his nose at the top.

When I went to buy a copy for my kid, Tip-It was 100% plastic and utterly unplayable. The three stacks of weights had been replaced with triplets of weight stacks. Absolutely no way to complete the game.

Or take Hot Wheels. Originally, it was a SYSTEM. You could buy a set and do something with it. But if you bought more sets, the parts were interchangeable so you could get creative with your race layouts. The curves were banked so the cars maintained speed. Today's Hot Wheels are mainly standalone sets which don't play well with each other. They have ghosts of the old interchangeable system, but the curves are flat with high walls, so the cars lose all their momentum by scraping against the walls.

Or take the humble Slinky. When I was a kid, I could make a Slinky skip three steps at a time and make it down to the bottom. No can do with modern Slinkies. I think they shortened the Slinky. In order to get a working Slinky for my kid, I had to buy a four inch tall physics demo slinky like thing from Amazon. (A really long Slinky like spring makes a great demo for oscillation modes.)

And then there are badminton sets with loose strings and handle parts which fall apart trivially. You HAVE to go to Amazon to get a real Yonex racket if you don't want utter crappe.

----

If my current Rule 2 project succeeds, I might go into the toy business. Everything is digital because the analog stuff is crappe.

Expand full comment
author

Same principle extends to almost everything available in the consumer economy. Practically impossible to buy parts. Power tools are all battery-operated and shit, instead of running off of wall power. Appliances designed to break after a couple years, with no possibility of repair.

This is why I call our current state Potemkin Prosperity. It's the illusion of wealth.

Expand full comment

But don't diss battery powered power tools! I love my cordless drills. Dealing with wires is a royal PITA when building things.

Ditto for my cordless hedge trimmer and weed eater.

And for those who live in the mountains, a battery powered push mower has much to be said for it. Few, if any, small engines have oil pumps. They aren't supposed to be operated at more than a 15 degree incline.

Expand full comment

You sound like a greenie -- and that's a good thing.

Two reasons why many things are cheap and hard to repair:

1. Integrated circuits instead of mechanical switches or vacuum tubes.

2. The labor manufacturing most products is WAY cheaper than local labor.

Back when you had expensive American labor making things, it paid to repair them. It also paid to have more staff in retail stores to sell and guard the merchandise. Doing it yourself was also more competitive. They were still selling dress patterns and cloth in high end department stores when I was a kid.

In other words, ending subsidized outsourcing is congruent with the green desire to reuse and repair things.

Expand full comment

I love this—all of it. Burn the whole rotten thing down! Particularly loved the part about BlackRock—what does it produce, what important service does it provide, really? I think it’s much less powerful and much easier to take down than people imagine.

Expand full comment
author

That's exactly it. Not only BlackRock. The entire rotten sector is purely parasitic. There is only upside to eliminating it.

Expand full comment

Preach, brother!

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023·edited May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

"Word has gotten out to the average apolitical American: if you drink Bud Light you’re gay."

Or, in the immortal words of star-of-stage-and-screen, Troy McClure: "Gay? I wish!"

Also, great minds must think alike. I was about to propose just such a project on #skunkworks. You beat me to it, but there are still implementations to sort out.

Expand full comment
author

I'm not so much proposing a project - I think in this case that would be enormously presumptuous on my part, I'm not that influential - as articulating something that I think is already happening. And maybe, in so doing, giving it a bit more chance of manifesting.

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023·edited May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

Nevertheless, I think I see a way to both supercharge and refine the tactic to really put the fear of God in all those boardroom cretins (not to mention their asset managment liche-lords). As for getting it out there, it's not about our individual clout, but a matter of getting it into the right hands. Which I think I can do.

Expand full comment
author

I am intrigued.

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

I feel like Budweiser might just be totally finished. Like the whole brand. Nobody wants to be the butt of tranny jokes. And their attempts at “fixing” the marketing were just cynical and insulting. (“Throw ‘em a Harley and they’ll forget all about it, the morons.”) And the trannies are mad that Bud capitulated.

Expand full comment
author

Yep. Stick a fork in em, they're done.

Expand full comment
May 31, 2023Liked by John Carter

I recommend a simple process.

First, make it crystal clear that DEI and CRT and their ilk are all codewords to disguise their real purpose, which is Neoracism.

Second, draw a line in the sand that neoracism is evil and completely unacceptable, every bit as bad as naziism, or joining the KKK.

Then choose targeted companies and bring them to their needs, boycotting them until they eliminate their neoracist diversity coordinators.

We don’t need to bring down all companies, but someone needs to lead the charge to bring down at least the worst. This will force the whole herd to start getting in line.

Expand full comment
author

I dunno what's neo about it. Anyhow, truthful as it might be, it won't work. "Racist" is just an ethnic slur for white people and everyone implicitly knows this, which is why accusations of racism roll off their backs.

Expand full comment
founding

You are right that 'racist' is now an ethnic slur for white people. But letting it roll off our backs will not necessarily change much beyond its ability to paralyse people with anxiety.

Tracking changes in linguistic usage can be helpful. At least I find it so.

IMHO 'neo' is a good term to apply...if appropriate. It is always useful to re-examine language. The unexamined word is not simply unworthy (as is the unexamined life) but potentially dangerous.

Racism is a 19th c. French expression first coined to describe hatred of Jews on account of ethnicity rather than faith. It was a descriptive term (I don't know French so am open to advice on this), not necessarily a moral one and marked a decisive turning point in modern European history. 'Racism' self-consciously acknowledged that enmity once conceived in terms of belief (and theoretically resolvable by a change in belief) was re-forming itself around biomedical ideas concerning heredity. This proved fateful.

Later the expression racism was taken up in English. It is worth noting that English thinking on race in the 19th c. simply extended existing ideas about the lower classes to foreigners.

The key distinction between the innumerable racial/tribal enmities of the past and current usage is that today's convention is transparently constructed to convey moral certainty, personal hostility and political opposition to the designated subject, the real or imagined 'racist'. The novelty is conferred because the conventional usage operates within an unprecedented socio-cultural revolution in which most of the key players are turning on their own kind in a fit of collective self-torment, a kind of genomic iconoclasm that legitimises the deprioritisation of whites and, as we can see from the crime in New York, Chicago etc, even unprovoked assault.

Expand full comment
author

All true, but stripping the word of its emotional sting would go a long way towards immunizing the culture against its enemies. The right tried doing the "nuh-uh you're the racist!" tactic many years, to no avail - the left is quite inured to this charge, even having a redefinition (power plus prejudice) to fall back on. The tactic reinforces the frame that racism is the ultimate sin.

That's one reason the term 'anti-white' bothers them so much. It accurately diagnoses their auto-bigotry while not explicitly invoking the r-word. But just shrugging when called racist goes a long way towards draining the word of its weaponized utility.

Expand full comment
Jun 3, 2023Liked by John Carter

Thanks for the dialogue, JC. The reason I argue for the term "neoracist" is that it taps into the third rail nature of the "R" word and turns it back on those abusing it. In my book racism is judging a person by their race rather than their character. Somewhere along the way we have allowed the term to be redefined as "preferred races not doing as good or better on every measure imaginable" with "preferred" further defined as whatever groups the left wants to appeal to.

As anyone reading this blog knows, that means that racism now effectively means that we must discriminate to not discriminate. We must be racists (original def) to not be racists (current def).

By relabeling the term neoracism, I am trying to succinctly capture this dynamic in a word which turns our moral intuitions against this form of unfairness. Raising the standards to get accepted because someone is Asian, white, a male, a Christian, or heterosexual is wrong. Full fucking stop.

This is neoracism, and any company participating in this evil needs to be neutralized. Any media or corporate elite buying into neoracism needs to be shamed.

We need to take the high road, but use moral shaming against the neoracists ruining the world by discriminating against merit and equality in the pursuit of providing spoils to their members.

Expand full comment
author

Won't work. Like I said, it reinforces the premise that abstract "racism" is a bad thing (is it? Why?), and relies on the leftists accepting your definition (they won't). The word 'racist' itself is effectively useless, because there are so many definitions kicking around. You yourself had to write "in my book...." A leftist will just snicker, "wrong book".

This is why anti-white is much more effective. It's direct, specifying the specific people being targeted. It does not permit weaseling out of the accusation by redefinition. It is not abstract. And it does not reinforce the very frame of "racism is always the most evil thing ever" that the occupation government relies upon.

Expand full comment
founding

You are spot on. The only viable response to casual defamation is to refocus the attention on the aims of those who imagine themselves entitled to cancel others or worse. We all need tactics to counter the real-world threats.

One way to counter the power plus prejudice bullshit is to identify the existence of legal privilege (affirmative action etc) and put them on the defensive. People in possession of legally enforceable advantages are not disadvantaged and those without are not privileged.

Here in Australia we have reached comic-opera standards of absurdity over the status and recognition of indigenous people, a subject in which disadvantage and racism figure prominently. The old policy, long abandoned, of miscegnation and assimilation is now considered genocidal but no one who discusses Aborginial welfare ever acknowledges the fact that the actuarial tables reveal that the most effective way of reducing morbidity and extending life expectancy amongst indigenous females is to marry a white man.

Expand full comment
author

Having seen pictures of abo women I have questions about white men that would marry them.

The indigenous pandering has reached insane levels here, too, eg the ritual land acknowledgements. Had a hilarious interaction recently with a very woke female colleague who brought up the residential school mass graves. I pointed out that there was no evidence of mass graves, not a single body having been confirmed. This annoyed her of course but she shifted gears immediately and insisted that I must nevertheless agree that natives had been historically underrepresented. Which was both a non-sequiter (the hell does that have to do with genocide?) and a remarkable piece of goal-post shifting (we genocided them! Or didn't hire enough of them, which is almost as bad!) I didn't bother pointing out to her that the residential schools had themselves been an early example of precisely this attempt to achieve 'representation', which is ultimately what assimilation came down to.

I find it endlessly frustrating that these liberal women insist that all of us must partake in historical guilt for actions that were carried out by their ideological predecessors, and therefore accede to their present sociological meddling. The capacity of the AWFL for efficient self-deception is limitless.

Expand full comment
founding
Jun 3, 2023·edited Jun 3, 2023Liked by John Carter

Phenotypical variation is pretty extreme. A few years back I read an almumni magazine article on medical scholarships for indigenes...none of the recipients were distinguishable from the average English male or female. There is a very pale indigene doing a PhD in indigenous astrophysics at the moment. What can one say? There is a degree of absurdity at which commentary becomes pointless.

The interesting thing (from the perspective of HBD) is that genomic variation over time is going to disrupt settled assumptions. My father's de facto wife has a brother who married a part-indigenous woman whom I have never met. The kids have the advantages of very high IQ grandparents on his father's side and access to all the benefits due to a special class of disadvantage which they have never experienced. Both kids are taking advantage of this with gusto. By the time it becomes possible to discuss any of the absurdities and injustices inherent in this the new caste system will be firmly in place.

Expand full comment