How Online Movements Are Infiltrated and Subverted
An analysis of how movement subversion operates, as relevant today as it was in November, 2016 when I originally uploaded it, shortly before Internet Bumfights (aka Internet Bloodsports) became the hot, new thing. Hopefully I can deftly avoid being popular enough to get caught in anymore of this gangland crossfire in the future.
If I could add one thing to this video, given what I've learned over the past few years, it would be this: Don't join movements! If it's anything more complex than a customer loyalty card, the movement will inevitably metastasize into something you didn't sign up for, but you're now smeared with their reputation, like it or not.
In this video, I want to talk about how online movements are infiltrated, how new ideas, new subcultures are co-opted to become part of the establishment narrative, how they become impotent, how they become just another waste of energy out there that serves as nothing more than a distraction from what's really going on.
And to introduce this, I'm going to begin from a personal perspective, which will make sense by the end of the video, because there's so much going on out there.
So many different people, so many different groups, you have all the different chans, the anons, more than any one of us can keep track of.
But I can keep track of what I'm seeing, what's been going on in my little corner of the internet.
And I am absolutely certain that many, many others are having the exact same experience.
So all of this starts with those groups who have decided to stand up and make declare me an enemy, which is actually rather curious if you think about it.
On my channel, I tend to criticize ideas, not people.
I don't engage in the sort of mudslinging that's popular out there.
Very seldom will I go after a specific individual.
Usually, I'm critiquing their ideas, I'm critiquing their movements, pointing out the flaws in them.
And for doing so, I have a lot of people who really, really hate what I do, even though I've never gone after them specifically.
Now, the list of quote-unquote enemies, because I mean, calling them enemies is just so utterly absurd in the one sense, and yet these people really have a chip on their shoulder at the same time.
The list could be very long.
MIGTOW, feminists, atheist cult, porn addicts, PUAs, the esoteric trumpers, neolibertarians, on and on and on.
But in this video, I'm going to focus particularly upon three groups, all of whom hate me, and yet all of whom hate one another.
And that's really the most significant data point.
I'm talking about the SJWs, the Gamer Cucks, that is, the names that took over Gamergate and declared that it won when it clearly lost, and the anime Nazis, those members of the alt-right who just want to viciously spew hatred and tend to have quite sick addictions to pornography and celebration of Nazi dom when they would never be allowed in the Nazi party.
They would have been kicked out of it immediately.
So the SJWs, the Gamercucks, and the anime Nazis.
Now I picked these three because of something that just recently came to my attention.
Some of the insults being flung in my direction and how they migrate between these groups.
Now the first example of this was the how many skulls.
Now as you know I used to have a memento mori in the background of my videos and for some reason back in the winter of 2015 the SJWs glommed on to this and started sending me these tweets saying how many skulls.
Weird insults, not particularly, you know, didn't really arouse any anger, but when you get a hundred, it's kind of annoying, a hundred people tweeting at you.
So the how many skulls?
It starts with the SJWs.
Six months later, the gamer cucks start sending me the exact same line.
Starting with Shu on Head and her little circle of friends, they're all sending me the exact same insult as the SJWs were.
They're alleged enemies.
Now, what's been happening is the anime Nazis have started sending me some tweet or some message about Davis Arini says his girlfriend left him to go to Burning Man to sleep with hippies, so he hates women.
This started coming from the anime Nazi Neats, but it recently got picked up by the gamer cucks.
Now keep in mind, the gamer cucks allegedly hate me because I'm some sort of right-wing theocrat, god-believing, whatever.
They've gone from hating SJWs to hating the right-wing, the traditional justice warriors, and that's what they call me.
And that's what they would call the anime Nazis.
The anime Nazis are what they claim I am, and yet they've picked up the anime Nazi insult to sling at me, which of course it doesn't insult me at all, but it wins points with their audience.
So SJWs, gamer cucks, and anime Nazis, there's some sort of, even though all these three groups are utterly opposed to one another, there's lines of communication going on between them that they probably aren't even consciously aware of.
So this is the context of this video, and we'll get back to that at the end.
For now, let's talk about what's going on with this.
What's going on with the culture war?
Because the culture war, this left versus right, this online battle between feminists and MRAs, between Gamergate and SJWs, this is largely a proxy war.
It is largely a distraction.
Most of it doesn't matter at all.
While we're arguing over this nonsense, the people that actually pull the strings are getting away with murder.
So first of all, at best, at best, this culture war is a rearguard action.
Now, some of you might have heard what the professor Jordan B. Peterson, a guy I truly, a man I truly admire, has been dealing with over at University of Toronto, where a group of SJWs are trying to silence him for daring to speak frankly on things.
Now this, yes, this is a fight worth fighting, okay?
Defending the right to free speech on college campuses, this is something worth fighting, but it's a rearguard action.
Okay, every so often, the SJWs, the radical left, they go and attack an individual or an institution, and we have to muster our forces to go fight them.
But that's not a victory.
Okay, when you win that battle, that's not a strategic victory because we just wasted a whole bunch of time defending mister Peterson or defending a man that was falsely accused of rape or defending whatever.
This is a waste of resources for us, and we have very limited resources compared to the other side, which is massively organized and massively funded.
We'll get back to that shortly.
Now, despite this being a rearguard action, one thing that you'll notice with these online movements is that this rearguard behavior, this arguing with feminists, tends to dominate.
The largest voices out there, the most popular voices out there, are engaged in a constant, meaningless battle.
And what you wind up with is both sides against the middle.
For example, take MRAs versus feminists.
One of the big points of contention between the men's rights activists and the feminists is on divorce and child custody.
They are fighting over this, and yet both of them assume the egalitarian narrative which was used to destroy the nuclear family, which was used to destroy relations between the sexes.
So up until now, we've had the feminists getting what they want.
No-fault divorce, presumed child custody going towards the woman, the maintenance payments towards the woman, even though she divorced for no reason, etc.
So women have been empowered by the government.
You know, their power was given to them from somewhere else, from somebody else, at the expense of men.
The MRAs, meanwhile, are demanding more rights for men, but they're not demanding an elimination of egalitarianism.
What they wind up demanding, for the most part, is more government.
So the solution.
So the government came in and empowered feminists.
MRAs are now demanding that the government come empower them.
The end result, even if men wind up being better off, comparatively, the end result is more government and less autonomy.
Another example, the Gamer Cucks versus the SJWs.
Now, throughout Gamergate, we saw it initially, initially it was opposed to the SJW infiltration of primarily the gaming media, but also the gaming industry.
Opposition to the SJWs trying to subvert what people want by inserting their narrative.
Then it degraded into ethics in games journalism.
An autistic, if we can just have these rules, then everything will be okay.
Which is, of course, nonsense.
If you have rules but no culture, then you have no rules at all.
Rules can always be subverted.
And then finally, it degraded into the traditional values warriors, the people that have been fighting feminism long before Gamergate came around, that these people are just as bad as the SJWs.
And so now the Gamer Cucks and the SJWs, they post videos every single day.
There's a new video up, you know, This Week in Stupid, or look at this stupid feminist, look at this.
And people watch the video, they, you know, donate to the Patreons, they get the advertising Benjamins from YouTube.
They make a nice hefty profit attacking this feminist.
Meanwhile, the feminists are working for major publications of their own.
And so they're getting paychecks to put out this ridiculous ideology.
And so you have both these sides fighting against each other, and yet nothing is being accomplished.
People come away from watching This Week and Stupid, and they feel superior.
They feel that they're smarter than these feminists, but the feminists are still receiving government grants to do artwork with period blood.
Nothing has changed.
You've wasted your time, and there's a small number of people making a profit off of it while everybody else is being distracted from the realities of what's going on behind the scenes.
I think it's worth considering Dwight D. Eisenhower, his speech on the military-industrial complex from 1961.
Three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment.
Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.
We recognize the imperative need for this development.
Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved.
So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The core of what Eisenhower was getting at is that when military and industry become a complex, when they become inseparable from one another, meshed together, you have this machine that's accountable to nobody, that wants war for the sake of war, and in fact never wants to win the war.
It wants an ongoing, low-intensity conflict for the sake of its profit, for the sake of its simple logic of how it operates.
The military-industrial complex isn't about winning wars, it's about constantly having a war.
It's the logic of empire, and that is what we are seeing currently with this culture war.
Now, who is it?
What sort of people?
What sort of people have been on the bleeding edge of this for a long time now?
Who is on our side?
What sort of people are not engaged in the low-intensity culture war?
But who is actually pushing the boundaries, pushing a new narrative?
Well, I'm just going to give you a few of them that stand out most significantly to me because they're all friends of mine.
And there's many more that you could point to.
But in particular, we've got Aaron Clary.
The man's a brilliant financier.
He worked in banking, and he told banks how they could make money, but nobody listened to him.
And he's since become a successful writer that drives around on his motorcycle, ballroom dancing, climbing mountains, and doing whatever he wants in life.
We've got Rouche V. You know, this guy was a microbiologist working in DC, and he had a small game blog until some feminists got a hold of him, outed him, got him fired from his job, and so he went and completely reinvented his life as becoming a travel writer and a game guru.
And then he goes and completely reinvents that.
And now he's talking about sustaining Western civilization.
He's a very accomplished man who's done a lot with his life and is doing it successfully.
You've got Quintus Curtius.
Okay, this guy, he's an attorney, and he's an ex-Marine Corps officer, I believe.
You know, another accomplished individual.
Adam Piggett, globe trotting adventurer and author.
You know, I did the audio book for Pushing Rubber Downhill.
Great book, great smack in the head to wake you up and just very entertaining.
Guy lives a successful life.
Vox Day, author, game developer, countercultural organizer.
All these people.
And of course, you know, myself.
Seven years as an infantry soldier.
I've worked in industries I had no training for, but I've managed to master them.
I've done a lot with my life.
I've accomplished stuff.
And, you know, sending me a cheesy insult about skulls isn't going to hurt my feelings.
The sort of people that are on this bleeding edge, who aren't engaged in the low-level conflict, you know, the Gamergate conflict, the atheist cult conflict, the people that are actually on the bleeding edge and have always been on the bleeding edge are all accomplished people in their own right.
The common themes, there's three points, three things that you can say about all these people.
First, the largest attitude is get off my lawn.
You know, myself, all these guys, we want to do our thing, and we're not really interested in forcing anybody else to do our thing just because we like it.
To the extent that we're interested in society as a whole, it's because of the obvious negative externalities that are being pushed.
You know, the current state of affairs is pushing it, it's destroying people, and those wrecked human beings wind up having a lot of negatives on our own lives.
But largely, it's an individualistic, how do I live a successful life?
How do I live the life I want to live?
Get off my lawn, leave me alone so I can do my own thing.
The second is there's a lot of diversity of thought.
Okay, there's a lot of different people in these groups, and there's a lot of disagreement on things.
And yet our disagreements that we use to sharpen our own ideas, we're not hostile.
We don't all need to believe the exact same thing.
And finally, there's the accomplishment I noted.
All of these people that are on the bleeding edge are accomplished human beings who don't feel a need to prove themselves, who don't need the love and adoration of masses.
They're all happy with who they are already.
Now, let's consider the other side.
You know, both like the SJWs, the Gamer Cucks, and the anime Nazis.
Over there, we see narcissism.
We see egoism.
We see a desperate need of approval.
So if we contrast the three points I laid out for our side, if you're even going to call it a side, because we're really just all individuals that try and create good content, that try and advance philosophical thought.
On their side, you see an emphasis of community over the individual.
Now, the strange creature known as QQ did a great video about this, on Gamergate specifically, on how they feel compelled.
There's this compulsion to take over every group.
Any group that doesn't conform, they exclude.
And that's what they did to GG Revolt, which was one of the last bastions of actual Gamergate thought over on the chance.
They feel a need to either dominate it through their own policies or exclude it.
So there's this sense of community, you know, sort of like Hillary Clinton saying that it takes a village, ergo, the village is going to be superior to the individual.
These people need to dominate every single thing they're a part of.
You know, whether it's Gamergate doing that, the Gamer Cucks taking over all of Gamergate, or if it's the anime Nazis who can't grow a full beard yet, but are saying who's right wing and who isn't right wing and trying to ban anybody that they don't like, or if it's the SJWs, you know, getting you fired from your job for not adhering to their belief system.
They all need to own the communities.
No free thought, no individualism.
The next is the conformity of thought.
Now this is related to the community, okay, but this is more about how each individual member behaves.
Every group, they need to affirm, they need to affirm the belief system of the whole thing.
You need to be an atheist.
In fact, for all of these groups, they tend to embrace atheism or some sort of trite paganism.
Anybody that does not completely agree, they eject.
You are not allowed to question.
You're allowed to have a little pissy argument where your egos get in the way, but there's no intellectual discussion going on whatsoever.
And finally, whereas we have a whole bunch of people that are actually accomplished in life, these people, to a T, are losers.
These are people that have accomplished nothing in life.
All they have is their projected idealized self which they put on the internet.
You see, we have a generation of narcissists.
Okay, this entire generation, they have been denied any sense of accomplishment.
In this culture where everybody gets a trophy, nobody actually gets to determine, they don't get to try and fail, and then try again and succeed.
When everybody gets a trophy, there is no accomplishment.
There is no self-respect.
They have nothing in their own lives they can look back on and say, yeah, I did that thing.
I accomplished something.
I know I've got some grit.
I've got some metal.
They have nothing.
They're losers.
Okay, they've skated by on their looks, on student loans, on the dole.
These people are no great thinkers, but they are desperate to be recognized as such.
It's the classic Facebook thing, where people will go out in public, not for the sake of enjoying themselves.
They will go out just so they can take photos of themselves and post it on Facebook, so they have this externalized, idealized version of themselves, the public version of themselves, where they're cool and popular and smart and better dressed, but their internal life is completely void.
It's completely empty.
These are the people making up the bulk of the online movements.
And this is already, all on its own, this is a recipe for disaster.
This has been explored before.
Take the classic issue with democracy is concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.
The classic example is activists versus entrepreneurs.
Okay, entrepreneurs are very, very busy running their own business.
They are so busy, they do not have much time to get involved with politics.
Whereas the activist is a loser.
They have no job, they have no accomplishments in life, they're receiving public funding, whether it's through the university or through the dole or some interested organization to go cause trouble.
And so the activist can always go and cause more trouble than the people that actually work for a living because they're busy working.
We see it with Wikipedia.
Okay, the SJWs have managed to dominate Wikipedia because they are obsessed.
They have nothing but free time and they have this strong compulsion.
Okay, these people not only have free time, they have this compulsive need to be recognized because they've never accomplished anything.
If you've accomplished something with your life, if you've been in the military, if you've run a business, if you were on high school sports teams, whatever, you don't feel this compulsive need for strangers on the internet to celebrate how smart you are.
You know you're smart.
If you're a loser, however, you will work harder than the entrepreneur just to satiate your ego.
Think of the salesman, the tragedy of the commons that you get in sales.
If you're a good, honest salesman that makes sure customers get the right product, that isn't going to just shove whatever on the marketplace, that actually cares, that actually thinks, that actually works, absent a dominant culture that rewards good behavior and punishes bad, you are not going to sell as much as the scam artist flim flam man, the guy that will shove anything and anything on the customer for the sake of his commission.
So already, already we have a major problem because a lot of people are narcissists.
Narcissism is the dominant trend in our culture right now.
And so the narcissist that goes online will be able to do things faster and easier and get a larger audience than somebody that actually cares.
So already, we have a recipe for disaster here, but it gets even worse.
It should be absolutely clear by now that there is a global conspiracy to keep the population asleep and addicted.
They want you addicted to sex.
They want you addicted to consumerism, to manufacturing an identity by going and shopping at hot topic.
They want you reliant upon the government.
They want the government to regulate and delineate all your behaviors, governments and HR departments.
They want you to be desperate for mommy and daddy to tell you what to do and take care of you.
They want you irresponsible and juvenile.
There is a large regression towards an irresponsible teenager sort of behavior throughout our culture, our media, our marketplace, all of it.
Look at the sort of movies that are popular.
Okay, grown adults are going to go see Marvel movies.
You know, look at it with the fashion industry.
You know, people are wearing utterly ugly, overpriced clothing, or they're dressed like bums.
And look at it with the media.
Okay, the media is there to make you feel intelligent as opposed to actually having you discipline yourself to go learn what's going on.
Now, I say this is a conspiracy, but it isn't so much a formal conspiracy as a confluence of interests.
It's the logic of empire.
The people involved in this conspiracy, a lot of them hate one another.
Okay, we've got Saudi oil money in it.
We've got international corporations.
We've got socialists like George Soros.
We've got power brokers and bankers.
And their tool is marketing.
Marketing, where the technology of Edward Bernays, where you take the individual, you do a psychological analysis, identifying what is missing in their lives, and then you create a product, an external validation that addresses that sense of inadequacy.
So if it's a mother that is working, you know, you take the eggs out of the pancake batter so she has to put her own eggs in.
That validates her sense of I'm not paying enough attention to my kids.
So instead of paying attention to her kids, she goes and puts eggs in the pancake batter.
If you've got people that feel they're not popular enough, that they're isolated, that they have no community, that there's no extended family or church they belong to, you tell them that buy a pair of Levi's and you'll be popular.
So they go and buy Levi's instead of developing meaningful relationships.
This is how our society is organized.
This is the social technology we are using.
We want people asleep, addicted.
We want them consuming.
We want them paying taxes.
There's no push to have a strong society.
Everybody should just be useful to the powers that be.
And because of this, because there's so much of a push to keep people juvenile to keep them asleep, there's a huge push to own the culture.
Okay, there's no secret of this anymore.
It's really coming out in this election, that there's no money to be made in journalism.
Journalism quad journalism is not profitable.
It gets huge investment from these financial interests that want to keep people asleep.
And we've seen the paid trolls appearing here and there to sow dissension.
You know, whether it's Hillary paying people to try and start violence at Donald Trump rallies, or if it's people pretending to be conservatives leaving anonymous comments attacking Donald Trump, you know, or if it's as overt as the fact that most of the media is owned by a very small number of people who have an agenda.
There is a huge amount of subversion of the message.
We also have Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, okay, the gatekeepers of information on the internet.
These people are part of the same ideology.
And so if all of that's happening, what makes you think that they're not also trying to infiltrate movements like Gamergate, like the alt-right, like the SJWs?
While we know the SJWs are bought and paid for, what makes you think they're not trying to take over our sides as well?
Now, to be clear about something, I am not saying that the leaders of the gamer cucks, you know, I am not saying that these people themselves are paid chills.
I don't think most, or if any of them are.
They're useful idiots.
Okay, they are narcissists desperately in need for approval who can easily be influenced.
It's the layer immediately below them.
It is the popular commenters, Twitter accounts, all of which are anonymous, but which are popular and have the ear of these people at the top.
Okay, the leaders of the gamer cucks, they just desperately want attention.
And so if you give them attention, if you're a prolific tweeter, you will have their ear.
And this, this, I believe, is why these same stupid insults are traversing boundaries that they should not have traversed.
This is why the gamer cucks are embracing the exact same lines as the SJWs and as the anime Nazis.
They're enemies.
And yet the people right below the surface, these are the paid shills.
They are the ones paid to disrupt the movements, to sow dissension, to feed into snark and egoism and narcissism, so that these movements stay impotent, so that they stay as nothing more than a bunch of morons slinging insults over the internet.
So what can we do to stop them?
How do we fight against this many tentacled monster that has its tentacles into everything?
What are we supposed to do?
Well, take note of Tyler Durden's words in Fight Club.
Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived.
I see all this detention, and I see squam.
The middle children of history, man.
No purpose or place.
We have no great war, no great depression.
Our great war is a spiritual war.
Our great depression is our lives.
This is a spiritual war.
They want us asleep.
They want us drugged up.
They want us addicted.
They want us to ignore what's going on.
The way we fight against that is by living righteous and successful lives, is by opening our eyes, tearing the scales from our eyes, seeing reality for what it is, and living in the best way possible.
Second, we need to realize that success comes through challenging your preconceptions.
Anybody that's successful is always looking for a critique.
They're always looking for somebody to tell them what they did wrong, what mistake they made.
Now, the great challenge is finding a critique worth listening to, because if you're trying to do anything new, everyone in Sundry will come and tell you you're doing it wrong.
But the actual successful person is always second guessing themselves, always trying to figure out what they could have done better, versus constantly trying to affirm what you're already doing.
Don't seek out rationalizations for your mistakes.
So many people do that.
They will rationalize their errors and blame it upon the world, blame it upon other people, what have you.
Instead, take control of yourself.
Challenge your preconceptions, expand your knowledge base.
Next, once you've done that, if you've challenged your ideas and you have better ideas, next you take action.
You bootstrap yourself.
You engage in self-empowerment.
Not relying upon the government to take care of you, not relying upon others to give you agency, but taking your own agency.
You take action and you act with sincerity.
And once you begin acting in your own life, this will lead to acting with others.
And this is the final point.
We start building a new society.
We start building a new normal, an organic, healthy, and righteous civilization.
Partly, we do this through the philosophical, through political theory, through theology, reaffirming those ancient truths that have been forgotten.
We also do it through forming real-world tribes and communities.
So, the way we fight them, we fight them by living righteously.
We do that by challenging our conceptions, then using those new ideas to go employ it in the real world, go live the change that we want to see.
And when we start living it, we start building that new society.
And I'd just like to finish this off by reminding all of you that we are the majority.
It doesn't seem like that sometimes.
Certainly not online.
It seems like we are constantly fighting against people who ought to be our allies.
And it's really frustrating.
All these groups would rather snipe at one another than align on what they agree upon.
Now, in my case, Gamergate is rather personal.
I certainly poured a lot of my heart and soul into that movie.
But, you know, Gamergate isn't the first time this has happened to me.
It's time and time again, this is what happens to online movements.
You know, Matt Forney noted, we've lived through this several times before, that something that was a great idea got taken over by the narcissists.
And in the online world, the narcissists and the swindlers prosper because they can never be held accountable.
The online YouTube star, they say what people want to hear.
They affirm people's preconceptions.
They affirm their delusions.
And they're hiding their own failures and pathéity behind carefully constructed online persona that they hold up.
If they tried doing what they do in real life, somebody would both them in the nose for acting like the spoiled brat they are.
Online, they can get away with it.
Offline, they can't.
And in the offline world, people are far more receptive to the man who walks the talk.
So remember what Yoda said about the dark side.
Is the dark side stronger?
No.
What the fishier motion back to.
If you want to build an online empire, ego and snark are the way to do it.
You'll get 10,000 followers overnight if you go around insulting people and pretending to be smarter than other people.
But if you want to actually change the world, and not just get a whole bunch of pats on the back on the internet, you need to settle in for the long haul.
