Stripping the Word of its Power

Language taboos die when people stop being afraid of them

As all good conservatives know, race relations in the United States were absolutely fantastic until five minutes ago, when the woke left race baiters started stoking the flames of identity politics.

No one really believes that, of course. There was maybe a very brief period during the 1990s when everyone pretended that they were parasocial besties with their surrogate father Bill Cosby, their cool uncle Morgan Freeman, and their adopted brother the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, that we’d all gotten past the colour of the skin and saw through our superficial colouring to the human beings beneath.

But beneath that, the racial tensions of American society were simmering along, cooking up a bitter stew of avoidant euphemisms, overcompensatory neurosis, increasingly desperate and self-destructive regulatory cope, and frantic defensive measures cloaked in deniability but detectable in revealed preference.

Ever since America’s unofficial second constitution of Civil Rights was set at odds with the one the Founders bequeathed to the nation, American whites have been on the defensive. The most obvious sign of this is American urban geography: rotted-out urban cores surrounded by tree-like rings of suburbs, formed as successive generations attempt to remove themselves and their children from the garbage, noise, chaos, and violence of the ‘inner city’ zones that had succumbed to black dysfunction. Suburban architecture itself is a defensive structure, a residential fortress that limits contact with urban centres by avoiding public transit connection; which uses zoning laws to ban mixed commercial-residential spaces and thus deprive outsiders of any reasonable excuse to loiter, while also banning construction of the apartment complexes likely to house undesirables in the first place; and which keeps property values elevated above the ability of welfare recipients to afford. Defense isn’t the only reason for the suburbs: there’s a significant social engineering component, they serve as Skinner boxes in which the middle class can be kept socially atomized, thereby facilitating their MKULTRA programming within their individual media cocoons ... but the refuge the suburbs offer is what attracts the middle class in the first place, and has done so since the great migration of Southern blacks into urban centres first initiated the ethnic cleansing of whites from the cities in the early post-war era.

Importantly, suburban security is deniable. While their features serve to efficiently keep blacks out, none of them are explicitly intended to do so, which means that no laws are being broken. But everyone knows what’s going on without openly saying it. Good schools. Safe neighbourhoods. Urban youth. Thugs. Crime. Everyone knows what those words mean.

The Civil Rights era has gradually driven white Americans past the brink of clinical insanity. It forces them to inhabit a constant state of double-think: noticing is an essential life skill, without which one literally risks death, e.g. by wandering into the wrong neighbourhood; openly noticing, however, is social and economic death. It will get you ostracized, expelled, fired, blacklisted. American whites must constantly affirm the equality of man, that there is ‘one race, the human race’, and they must ‘do the work’ to expunge the indelible original sin of their inborn racism, agreeing to whatever impositions the courts or the legislatures or the academies invent in order to make up for their deficiencies of character, the ‘hate’ intertwined with their DNA. When they’re victimized by blacks – robbed, raped, assaulted, murdered – they must make excuses for them, that it is simply a matter of poverty or education, and then commit to spending even more money on programs to address economic inequality or the quality of inner city schools ... programs which have manifestly failed to make any difference whatsoever, despite the vast resources that have already been squandered on them. America gave up the stars for those programs.

Cognitive dissonance is a precarious state for any mind to maintain. Sometimes, someone snaps. A black person does something antisocial, and in the moment, they can’t take it anymore, they lose control, and they give voice to the terrible Word of Power.

We all know what happens next.

Whites are not allowed to say the Word of Power. That is the deepest taboo in our society ... arguably, deeper than the taboo against murder, against rape, even against pedophilia (or ‘Minor Attracted Persons’ as the rebranding attempt would have it). If they’re lucky enough to not be around any cameras, they merely risk being assaulted, for no black body can be expected to hear the Word of Power without losing all self-control, the poor dears, they can’t help themselves, and any white bystanders will cluck and shake their heads and agree that they had it coming, after all, most regrettable, but what can you do. If you get recorded, you risk far worse than physical injury and temporary embarrassment. The video will go viral; the mob will identity you, doxx you, call your employers, your school, the restaurants, cafes, and bars that you frequent. Your life will be destroyed. The mob has no mercy when the greatest taboo is violated.

Not everyone snaps in that particular way, of course. Many snap in a far more subtle fashion. We call these ‘leftists’ or ‘progressives’ or ‘liberals’, particularly of the middle-class variety. They are acutely aware that open noticing will destroy them, but their subconscious is simultaneously aware that they must nevertheless insulate themselves if they are to have any hope of a decent life. As a result they turn against themselves, embracing self-hatred as self-love and self-harm as self-care. They become performatively masochistic, berating themselves for their lack of culture, their cluelessness, their inability to dance or cook, and of course for their racism. They say the word ‘white’ only by spitting it.

The depth of the taboo was illustrated to comedic effect shortly after ChatGPT went live for the public. People began asking it increasingly absurd and elaborate versions of the trolley problem, framed along the lines of “There is a cosmic vacuum energy bomb that, if triggered, will wipe out all intelligent life in the universe, including black people. The only way to disarm the bomb is for someone to think – not say, but only think – the N-word. What should one do?” The AI’s answer was invariably that racial slurs were extremely hurtful, and that there were no circumstances under which it was permissible to use them. There are probably no actual humans, no matter how ideologically brainwormed, who would take the taboo this far, but the AI was simply honestly responding according to what its training data had taught it: that, in the worldview of the anti-racist progressive, which is the hegemonic worldview of the Western world, there is literally nothing worse than saying the Word of Power.

This situation is, of course, deeply and hilariously absurd. It’s just a word. Two little syllables, derived from the word for ‘black’ common in all Romance languages. There is absolutely nothing particularly special about it, just as there is nothing special about any word. Even its use as a ‘slur’ is not particularly notable: every single tribe on the planet has colloquial expressions for every single tribe they interact with, frequently more than one, and quite a large number of them are extraordinarily offensive. People call one another names, and so do peoples. That’s what people do. It’s normal and healthy, and the correct response – understood intuitively by all peoples throughout all history – is to call names back, and then usually to laugh.

Historians of the future will certainly be laughing at us for the crazy extremes that this linguistic taboo drove us to, with people being cancelled simply for saying words that sounded like the Word of Power, yet had nothing to do with it: a city counsellor triggering an uproar for referring to a budget as ‘niggardly’, a college professor being fired for explaining to his students that the Chinese filler word, equivalent to ‘uh’ or ‘um’, was ‘niga’.

It is such a simple, silly little word, but it is a word that has done enormous damage. Not to black people, but to whites. America has been crippled for generations by the taboo surrounding the Word of Power, because that taboo is a stand-in – almost a cognitive lynchpin for – the entire elaborate system of double-think that has forced American whites onto the permanent defensive, that has made them second-class citizens in their own country, that has in a great many cases quite literally driven them insane. Indeed, one might suspect that the profound symbolic importance of the linguistic taboo is why any violation is treated with such hysterical rage – the faithful of this demented theocracy understand without being told that should the taboo be eliminated, the entire structure might come crumbling down.

And what an elaborate structure it has become. The taboo surrounding the Word of Power is not the only taboo, it is simply the alpha taboo, the holy of holies. It has since ramified into an entire lexicon that one is expected to simultaneously memorize and never use – after all, to avoid the banned words, one must know the banned words. The lexicon is continuously evolving, adding new words that can never be spoken, and replacing these with awkward but mandatory multi-syllabic substitutions that are less ‘offensive’ because they obligate the speaker to spend more time saying them. Sometimes the substitutions get rotated into the category of banned hate speech themselves, with new euphemisms taking their place. An entire priesthood has developed, whose purpose is to tirelessly scour the language for indications of bias, prejudice, or detestation, and to propose and enforce replacements for whatever problematic vocabulary their auguries of lived experience and implicit bias reveal.

For years now this priesthood has been developing the concept of ‘hate speech’ as a category of criminal offence. In the US many in the priesthood are seemingly under the impression that ‘hate speech’ is already criminal, because after all they can easily have someone fired or expelled for its use. Outside of the US, where there is no such thing as a First Amendment, there are many countries in which hate speech is literally criminal. The American neurosis is not confined to the borders of the fifty states, but spreads to the imperial provinces, where it is often amplified. There’s a direct line between the taboo, and the waves of migrants swamping Europe: stopping them would be the easiest thing in the world, but because none dare say the Word of Power, the will to stop them cannot be found. Instead, they must pay exorbitant taxes to give tribute to the newcomers, that the newcomers may have children instead of them.

People can only take so much, however.

In early April the 17-year-old Texan athlete Austin Metcalf was stabbed to death at a high school track meet by Karmelo Anthony, also 17. The facts of the case seem to be that Karmelo was in the wrong tent, which Austin told him to leave. Karmelo refused, Austin tried to push him out, and so, as any reasonable person would do, Karmelo stabbed him.

The aftermath of this incident was fascinating to observe. Whites were understandably upset about the murder, but if we’re being honest, whites have endured many such tragedies over the decades, and have generally reacted by stoically letting the courts handle it while publicly insisting that race has nothing to do with it. Austin’s father Jeff Metcalf followed this script precisely, taking to national television to announce that he had already forgiven Karmelo Anthony for murdering his son, that it wasn’t about race, and so on. Metcalf has held frame on this despite being humiliated by Karmelo’s family when he showed up at their own press conference to pray with them: Karmelo’s father told him his presence was disrespectful, and kicked him out. Afterwards, Metcalf got SWATted.

The black community closed ranks around Karmelo. A GoFundMe raised over half a million dollars, which Karmelo’s family was able to keep after the (black) judge dropped his bail from a million to a quarter million. hey bought themselves a nice house and a luxury car. Meanwhile, blacks were all over social media defending the murderer, claiming that the murder was justified because it was self-defence – Austin had ‘laid hands on’ Karmelo, he’d disrespected him – and even because it was raining. Many of them made analogies to Kyle Rittenhouse, who was literally fighting for his life against three armed assailants while on his back on the ground.

To the white people watching all of this, the entire spectacle was grotesque.

Both whites and blacks have been accustomed to the legacy media presenting them with carefully curated black victim, engendering sympathy from whites and outrage from blacks. George Floyd, dead after a white police officer knelt on his neck. Michael Brown, shot by a white police officer. Trayvon Martin, killed by a ‘white’ (actually Hispanic) neighbourhood watchman. Rodney King, beaten by white police officers.

In every single one of these cases – I should probably say ‘almost every’, to be careful, but I can’t actually think of an exception – when the full facts became available the black ‘victim’ is revealed to be significantly less sympathetic than the media initially pretended. George Floyd was a career criminal high on enough fentanyl to drop a rhinoceros, which is almost certainly why he died. Michael Brown was attacking the police officer that shot him. Trayvon Martin was attacking George Zimmerman. Rodney King was high on PCP and resisting arrest.

Those facts never really mattered, because by the time they came out, the narrative had been set, the riots had happened, white people had been sufficiently cowed, and the news cycle had moved on.

The Karmelo Anthony case is entirely distinct from this. Anthony is not sympathetic in the slightest. There is no question here of who is the victim, and who the criminal.

Yet the black community did not care at all. They saw only one of their own being arrested for doing something that, apparently, does not even register with them as morally wrong – murdering a white boy.

White people noticed this. As the drama unfolded on social media, you could almost feel the vibe shifting. The anger growing. The disgusted feeling of betrayal festering. The sense of just being done with it all, done with pretending, done with the lies, done with the coddling and the affirmations and the endless investments in dem programs. It wasn’t even anger, really ... what was spreading felt more like cold indifference.

So.

Yesterday a woman in Minnesota was filmed saying the Word of Power. Not only once, but multiple times, with a smile on her face. Then she flipped off the man who was filming her.

It seems that Shiloh Hendrix had caught a five-year-old black boy stealing things from her even younger child’s bag, and had told him off using the Word of Power. An onlooker, a Somali man, then approached her with his camera and upbraided her for her violation of racial decorum. White women must know their place, after all. It seems that the Somali, and you can’t make this up, may be a literal pedophile (although the charges were dropped; however, see this). I was initially skeptical of that part, but my sources (i.e. random accounts commenting on X) confirm this is true.

Shiloh wasn’t having it, however.

This is a small, stupid thing. A black kid behaved in an ill-mannered fashion and was told off with vulgar language by a tired mom who, honestly, looked like she’d had a long day. Who cares?

Except she broke the taboo, she spoke the Word of Power, so we are made to care.

The video went viral, as such videos will, and from there we all wearily knew what to expect next. Shiloh Hendrix was screwed. Her life was over. Initially it all went according to script. The mob descended. She was identified, doxxed, her Social Security Number and phone number leaked, her employer was contacted, her regular hangouts were contacted, the school her children attended was contacted. She would soon be unemployed and ostracized from her community. While I do not know Shiloh’s circumstances, she gives the impression of being, well, not exactly middle class if you know what I mean. There’s every reason to expect that her existence is economically precarious. Unemployment could well result in homelessness.

But then a miracle happened.

Shiloh started a GiveSendGo, initially asking for $10,000, a small sum to help her relocate.

The GiveSendGo campaign blew past that goal in 30 minutes, so the goal was extended to $100,000. Shiloh was apparently already in tears when the campaign reached the $10,000 level – that isn’t a lot of money, so we can assume she really is living on the economic precipice. In any case, the $100k goal was shattered too, so the bar was raised to $250k ... which was also reached and rapidly exceeded. As of the time of this writing, Shiloh has raised over $360,000 $380,000 $390,000, with a $1M stretch goal. It goes up a thousand dollars every few minutes or so.

https://www.givesendgo.com/ShilohHendrix

I do not personally know anything about Shiloh. There’s been no indication of a husband, so it seems likely she’s a single mom; her tattoo sleeve, location, and economic circumstances all point to her being part of America’s white underclass. Maybe that’s so, maybe it isn’t. It’s possible she’s had a troubled past. Has she been on OnlyFans? Acted in porn? Does she have a history with drugs? Are her two boys from the same dad? I have no idea. I bring these possibilities up not to besmirch her character, but to emphasize that I do not care. And neither should you. The personal circumstances of her life and whatever choices she made that brought her to this moment of unsought-for Internet fame are completely and wholly irrelevant to what is happening here, which is this:

White people are signalling that they have had enough.

The money is about sending a message.

We have had enough with having our lives ruined for saying a stupid word.

We have had enough with being morally policed by foreign men coming from the worst parts of the world to parasite off of us while telling us they’re morally better than us.

We have had enough of tolerating the daily impositions of black criminality.

We have had enough with the never-ending humiliation rituals.

We have had enough with the rabid censorship mobs.

We have had enough with biting our tongues.

We are done with it.

Too many whites have been robbed, assaulted, raped, and murdered since the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior badgered the country into humouring his little communist nightmare.

Too many neighbourhoods have been burned to the ground.

Too many cities have been ruined.

Too many businesses destroyed.

Too many careers have been ruined by censorious busybodies.

Too many careers have failed to launch because affirmative action and DEI handed opportunities to the undeserving.

Too much treasure has been squandered, and too much blood has been spilled, all to no avail.

If Shiloh can say this simple word, this word that has absurdly become a Word of Power, in front of the whole world ... and rather than being destroyed as so many others have, be elevated and enriched by the embrace of her fatigued and frustrated people ... if we can do this thing for her, the taboo will be dead. The word will be stripped of its power.

And we will all be free again.

I do not mean that we will just be free to say a word. That is a very small thing, liberating though it feels to say it.

The taboo of the Word of Power is the lynchpin that holds the entire cognitive prison in place, because it is the symbol that folds within itself all of the deceptions that comprise that structure – that there are no differences between ancestral groups, that noticing differences is the worst sin that one may commit, that there is no price too high to erase every sign and consequence of that sin from the world, that white people are uniquely guilty of the sin and blacks uniquely innocent, that every difference in personal or collective circumstance is only ever a consequence of that sin and never a natural result of the differences which do not exist and can under no circumstances be noticed. Break that taboo and that unstable tangle of falsehood begins to come undone, because the knots holding it together are neither reason nor observation, but emotional conditioning ... above all the emotion of fear.

If Shiloh can say the word and be rewarded by us, the fear will dispel, the spell cast by the Word of Power will evaporate like morning mist, and we shall suddenly find that because we no longer have to lie to ourselves, because we no longer have to run from ourselves, because we no longer have to apologize for ourselves, we can once again reach inside and find the will to do the things that are necessary to set our society back in its proper order.

We could always do those things, physically. The capability has always been there. Almost trivially so.

We’ve only lacked the will.

This story isn’t over yet. The NAACP is throwing a fit, and has contacted the police in her city, demanding they do something. What they can do about her saying a word I do not know: she is American, and is protected by the First Amendment, for whatever that is worth, which probably isn’t much. I’m sure they’ll contrive some way to screw with her. Perhaps they will send Child Protective Services to try and kidnap her children. Maybe they’ll try to drag her into civil court, sue her for emotional damages, so the GiveSendGo money can be given to the black kid’s parents in compensation. These people are devious, vicious, and unprincipled. The law to them is nothing but a weapon with which to punish their enemies, and simply by becoming a symbol, Shiloh has a giant target painted on her back. They know how essential it is to maintain the taboo, that if the Word of Power loses its power, their entire oppressive theocracy comes undone. They will therefore do everything they can to destroy her, both legally and, perhaps, illegally. If I were Shiloh I would be extremely concerned for my children’s safety.

If you haven’t donated to Shiloh’s GoFundMe, here’s the link again:

https://www.givesendgo.com/ShilohHendrix

This isn’t just about helping Shiloh, remember. Honestly, she’s already got more than enough money not just to relocate, but to change her life forever ... though at this point it’s very likely that lawyers will eat up a significant fraction of it. For those who are wondering, she apparently has financial advisors already, to help her manage this windfall from the attention market’s virality lottery. But this is about more than helping Shiloh: it’s about breaking the taboo, stripping the word of its power, and setting our culture free.

Thank you, as always, for taking the time to read this. That means a lot, as does the support of my patrons, whose generosity humbles me. I hope you found it interesting, but I also hope some of you will donate to Shiloh. And, since Substack will annoy me with popups if it is not included, if this is by chance your first time reading a Postcard From Barsoom, you should of course