This article has one goal: to put PIE—the epistemological framework I’ve been building and defending that’s currently under peer review—in front of you in plain language.

Since PIE started circulating, it has drawn plenty of reactions: some are thoughtful, while most are dismissive. The most disingenuous attack is that it’s “AI slop,” coming from many of my detractors, which is demonstrably false. This is why no one, at any time, gave the only response that actually counts in philosophy: engagement with the argument itself. They make false claims about me and my work, then pretend that it refutes what I’ve created.

It doesn’t.

I created PIE in October of 2025. “PIE” is an acronym for the steps we humans take to justify any of our beliefs at all: perception, inquiry, and experimentation. Its first iteration was a five-premise meta-epistemological description, but I later realized I could turn it into a seven-premise transcendental argument—an argument that shows what must be the case for a thing to be possible.

Everyone knows I use AI to assist me in my work. I use it openly as a research tool, the way earlier generations used libraries, correspondence, and assistants. Instead of typing my work, I’ve been dictating everything, now that voice-to-text is nearly impeccable. I dictate my ideas and arguments and then direct Claude to draft papers, like a director guiding a movie set. I disclose my method when I submit work to academic journals, which accept AI assistance so long as you are the author.

If PIE is “AI slop,” then it should be easy to prove it. But first, you need to know what problem PIE was designed to deal with, because it’s one of the oldest in all of philosophy.

Somewhere around the first century BC, a skeptic named Agrippa built a trap that philosophy has never gotten out of.

It works like this: take anything you believe—anything at all—like that the earth orbits the sun, that your mother loves you, or that 2+2=4. Now ask the simplest question: how do you know?

Whatever answer you give, I can ask again: and how do you know that?

There are only three ways this game can end, and all three are bad:

1. You stop somewhere. At some point you plant your flag and say, “This I just know—no further justification needed.” But why stop there? Stopping is arbitrary. You haven’t justified your belief; you’ve just gotten tired of the question. The skeptics called this dogmatism/arbitrariness.

2. You never stop. Every answer gets supported by another answer, forever. But an infinite chain of reasons is a chain no finite mind can ever complete, which means the justification never actually arrives. This is the infinite regress.

3. You loop back. Eventually your reasons start supporting each other: A because B, B because C, C because... A. But a circle of beliefs holding each other up doesn’t justify anything. This is circularity.

Dogmatism/arbitrariness, infinite regress, or circularity are the three horns of Agrippa’s trilemma. The uncomfortable truth is that 2,300 years of Western epistemology have mostly consisted of philosophers choosing which horn to impale themselves on to deal with the trilemma but never finding a way to resolve it. Foundationalists chose dogmatism and tried to find stopping points that don’t feel arbitrary. Coherentists chose the circle and argued that big enough circles are respectable. Infinitists chose the regress and made peace with it.

None of these defeat Agrippa.

I designed PIE to avoid all three horns. The key word here is “avoid”—the trilemma cannot be defeated because it’s a true boundry. However, like any boundary, you can get around it, which is what I figured out how to do.

How?

The trilemma assumes that justification is a relationship between propositions. Belief A is justified by proposition B, which is justified by proposition C, and so on. Once you accept that, you’re stuck: any chain of propositions must stop (dogmatism), continue forever (regress), or bend back on itself (circle). Those genuinely are the only three shapes a chain can take.

The trilemma isn’t wrong about chains, but it’s wrong that justification will always lead to such chains.

I asked myself, “Is there a way to justify propositions without other propositions?”

That question led me to find an answer, and the answer is PIE.

Now, let me explain to you how.

Start at the most fundamental. Not with a belief, but with something underneath belief.

Your awareness.

Right now, reading this, there’s awareness happening. Can that be doubted? Try it. Formulate the doubt: “Maybe there is no awareness.” Who’s formulating? The doubt is an act of awareness. Denying awareness is like shouting, “I am silent”—the performance refutes the content.

Notice what just happened, because it’s the keystone of everything that follows. Awareness didn’t get justified by another proposition. It got vindicated by the act of challenging it. That’s a kind of grounding Agrippa’s trilemma can’t touch, because this isn’t a statement supporting a statement; it’s a precondition showing itself in any statement whatsoever. The regress can’t start here, because there’s no inference to interrogate. The stopping point isn’t arbitrary, because it isn’t chosen; it’s forced by the structure of the challenge itself. And there’s no circle, because nothing is being derived from anything.

Here’s the PIE Syllogism in full—each premise in its formal dress, followed by a plain-English translation, so those of you who are not philosophers can understand it.

P1. Finite agents operate from subjective awareness.

Translation: we all operate from our mind’s unique point of view. Try denying this one—the denial happens inside your awareness, refuting itself as it’s spoken.

P2. Epistemic instability within awareness undermines warrant.

Translation: a mind holding contradictions hasn’t settled anything. Unresolved conflict just is the absence of warrant (justification for knowledge).

P3. Resolving epistemic instability within awareness necessitates coherence among representations.

Translation: fixing the conflict means making your representations (thoughts/ideas) consistent, not because someone chose that method, but because that’s what “resolved” means. Even suspending judgment is a move to protect consistency.

P4. Coherence among representations constitutes Justified Coherent Belief for intrinsic claims.

Translation: for claims that live entirely inside representational systems—math, logic, definitions—coherence is the game, because there’s nothing outside the system to check.

P5. Extrinsic claims require world-directed verification beyond internal coherence.

Translation: claims about the world need more than a coherent story. A conspiracy theory can be perfectly consistent, but consistency alone can’t confirm reality.

P6. Because attempts at truth-correspondence verification of mind-independent reality generate regress, circularity, or arbitrary stipulation, classical Justified True Belief is structurally inaccessible.

Translation: you can’t step outside your own representations to check them against raw reality—every check is another representation. So “verified correspondence with reality” is structurally unavailable to any finite mind. This is where Agrippa was right.

P7. Extrinsic claims must therefore resolve through fallible empirical experimentation and intersubjective convergence, constituting Justified Reliable Belief.

Translation: what’s left is testing beliefs against the world and against other inquirers, keeping what survives, and correcting what doesn’t. Not certainty earned, but revisable reliability. In other words, science.

C. Justified Coherent Belief and Justified Reliable Belief are the non-arbitrary warrant structures available to finite agents.

Translation: two ways to warrant a belief. That’s the full inventory for creatures like us, and neither one is touched by Agrippa’s horns.

P1 is anchored the hard way: denying it self-refutes in the act, the moment the denial is uttered. P2 through P7 are anchored by structural arguments: denying them doesn’t collapse in the utterance; it collapses under examination when you try to make good on the denial and find it costs you regress, arbitrariness, or incoherence. Those are two different strengths of necessity; the argument uses both.

So the challenge stands, and it’s specific: not “I don’t like this,” not “Lucas is an idiot,” not “AI wrote it.” Which premise is false, and what’s your demonstration? It has been on the table for months; thousands of philosophers have read my papers on Academia and PhilPapers, and hundreds of debate bros on Twitter have attacked it, and none have refuted a single premise.

The full version is currently under peer review at Logos and Episteme; the framework is documented on PhilPapers for anyone who wants to read the entire paper.

For a long time, I had a very clean story about Israel-Palestine based on my antisemitic beliefs: the Jews came in, stole the land, and every act since has just been the same crime playing out again. A Jewish banker named Rothschild wanted Palestine, lied about his intentions, and the whole thing was theft dressed up in legal paperwork. When the Holocaust happened, Jews used their “Never Again!” motto as an excuse to do to the Palestinians what Nazis had done to them.

I believed that narrative without ever caring to even listen to the Israeli side. In fact, I didn’t know much about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict prior to October 7th, learning more about it afterward, mostly from the pro-Palestinian camp.

But since walking away from the JQ movement, humbling myself and reexamining everything that I believed for the last fourteen years, I have updated my worldview, learning that so much of what I believed was simply untrue or lacked nuance. This conflict is much more complicated than I had recently believed, but I was unable to see that, stuck in an epistemic echo chamber for so long.

The thing about “Rothschild wanted the land and lied”—it’s not even a story that’s false so much as a story built by taking two real facts and adding a secret intent that is unverifiable. It’s true that Edmond de Rothschild really did fund early Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine, starting in the 1880s, and the Balfour Declaration really was addressed to a Rothschild. What’s impossible to confirm is the part that makes it a conspiracy—a scheming financier orchestrating events from behind the curtain, lying about his aims.

What actually happened is duller and more legal than that: land was purchased from private owners, often absentee landlords living in Beirut or Damascus, under whatever property law was in force at the time—Ottoman or, later, British Mandate. Zionism itself started decades before any of this as a 1897 political response to European antisemitism, most immediately the Dreyfus Affair in France. It’s the same kind of nationalist movement that produced modern Italy, modern Germany, and eventually Palestinian nationalism too.

Once I saw that, the whole “who started it” question stopped having the answer I was given before: there was no single starting point, no single villain. There was a persecuted Jewish diaspora building a national movement, a colonial power making wartime promises it couldn’t keep, and an Arab population with its own emerging national identity—all converging on the same strip of land within the same fifty years. For Jews to have planned this would have required an omniscience no humans have, which, ironically, many antisemites give to the Jews, as I once did. The reality is that everybody involved thought they had a legitimate claim, because in the terms available to them, they did.

But for the last three years, all I kept hearing was that the Jews came in and ethnically cleansed everyone during the Nakba. Indeed, roughly 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1947-49; villages were emptied and many destroyed. There were real, documented expulsions and real massacres. But none of that needs a grand Jewish conspiracy to explain it.

When you strip away the thought of a conspiracy, you stop treating displacement as evidence of a premeditated theft-plan and start treating it as what serious historians on both sides of that debate actually argue about: a war started after a UN partition plan was accepted by Jewish leadership and rejected by Arab leadership. Displacement happened through a mix of panic, flight, and deliberate expulsion, whose exact balance is still contested by scholars using the same archives and reaching different conclusions. That’s different than “Israel was built on theft.” It’s messier, and it implicates fewer secret intentions and a lot more war.

I used to think the Holocaust got Jews in a fervor and drove them to conquer in response. That’s wrong—Zionist settlement had been building since the 1880s. The Holocaust added urgency and international sympathy to a movement that was already decades old, not the origin of one.

I don’t think the honest version of this history makes Israel innocent, and I don’t think it makes the Palestinian cause illegitimate either. There’s real land purchased legally that still displaced people who’d farmed it for generations. There’s a rejected partition plan that led to a war nobody had to fight. There’s a refugee crisis in 1948 whose causes are still argued over by historians and experts on this subject. There’s an occupation today with no end in sight. Now there’s a war or genocide going on, depending on who you ask.

But this situation is not as simple as any side makes it out to be, and I’m honest enough to admit my ignorance and biases kept me blind to the nuance this issue deserves. It certainly doesn’t help when you see children blown to pieces on your X feed on the daily, either. But the truth is that I simply don’t know what could or should be done at this point. I reject “river to the sea” from either side. If I have to plant a flag anywhere, it’s a two-state solution—which, at this point, both sides largely reject. But that’s not my problem to solve; it’s theirs.

I can’t change how I feel to appease either camp. I feel for the Palestinians, genuinely—the suffering there is real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I’ve exhausted myself on this issue to the point where I’ve come close to resenting the people who demand I keep talking, keep posting, keep picking a side, and keep proving myself, even after I put myself and my family at real personal risk for years. I don’t owe anyone that. I spoke out because I felt it was the right thing to do, but I didn’t know I only had parts of the truth. Now I see how complicated this issue really is, and I want nothing more to do with this land dispute. I can only wish both peoples the best and hope it’s resolved one day in a way that actually benefits everyone.

What frustrates me as I watch this from the outside is how much of the moral weight has been outsourced to the West. Arab governments that could exert real pressure—economic, diplomatic, the kind that actually moves outcomes—have largely chosen not to. Some have normalized relations with Israel and moved on. Others have kept Palestinian refugees stateless and unwelcome for three generations rather than absorbing them the way Jordan did. Meanwhile, the loudest demands to keep marching, keep posting, and keep bleeding for Palestine land on Western commentators, social media influencers, and students, most of whom have no leverage over anything that actually happens on the ground.

Pro-Israel groups like AIPAC clearly have real influence on US politics. But pretending only one side plays this game isn’t honest. It’s not just Israel-aligned money in the room: Qatar and Saudi Arabia have poured hundreds of millions of disclosed dollars into American universities, and Qatar owns Al Jazeera outright—an outlet with an obvious agenda. On the other side of the ledger, researchers at NewsGuard and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented Iran-, Russia-, and China-linked networks flooding the conversation with conspiracy narratives after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, including the “exploding lapel mic” theory traced to an anonymous source claiming Iranian hacker credentials, a claim fact-checkers found no evidence for. The theory was manufactured and pushed by exactly the kind of foreign influence apparatus everyone insists doesn’t exist until it’s inconvenient for their own side.

Do I blame any of these countries for playing this game? No. My government has done terrible things in the last century. But I’m not going to pretend it isn’t happening just because acknowledging it complicates a narrative that might offend many of my followers. I have my own kids to think about and a country I still have to live in, regardless of who wins an argument about a war in the Middle East.

We never heard the end of Israeli war crimes and barbarism, but people refuse to accept that Hamas’ strategy doesn’t seem to be avoiding civilian casualties at all costs; in fact, it seems to be telegraphing them at every chance, operating from civilian infrastructure, and slow-walking evacuations. I find that dishonorable. That’s not an excuse for Israel, which has killed civilians on a scale that demands its own reckoning, but let’s stop pretending Hamas is doing everything it can to prevent Palestinian deaths.

Even worse is what Hamas does with its own children—not the ordinary families who stay in half-collapsed homes out of fear, poverty, or nowhere left to go, but the institutions themselves. Hamas’ own media, textbooks, and summer camps have spent years cultivating martyrdom as an aspiration in children specifically, teaching kids that dying for the cause is a form of victory rather than a tragedy to be avoided. But what do we only hear about? The real, documented “Amalek” comments from a few Israeli politicians, controversial verses from the Talmud, and quotes from Jewish supremacists. Hamas are painted as saints when they aren’t, either.

I reject religion entirely, so I have zero tolerance for any framework, from any faith, that tells a child death is a reward. That’s not resistance; it’s insanity. This kind of martyrdom cult uses footage of the dead as political leverage. A strategy that requires dead children to work isn’t a strategy I’ll ever respect, regardless of which side runs it.

I’ve said versions of this privately to Muslim friends, letting them know exactly how I feel about this “strategy” in conversations I never let go public because I didn’t want to hurt the pro-Palestinian effort or face the backlash from my own audience. That’s over now. I won’t hold my tongue again on any of this, in either direction.

I’m not “pro-Israel” now in the way I was reflexively “pro-Palestine” before; swapping one team for another was never the point. I’m pro-America, and I’m done being pulled in every direction by anyone else on this planet. I’m also done promoting the falsehood that only one side is responsible for starting conflict when it’s not.

Like I’ve always said, it takes two to tango.

But I’m done dancing.

There’s a problem at the heart of apologetics’ epistemology that most believers never notice: before you can submit to any authority, you must first judge that authority to be legitimate. That judgment is yours, which means your judgment is always prior to the authority it ratifies, including divine authority.

Theists typically present the hierarchy like this: God’s word is absolute; human judgment is subordinate. But this gets the epistemic sequence completely backwards. In practice, personal judgment comes first. It evaluates the evidence—scripture, testimony, experience, and argument. It reaches a conclusion: this is true, God is real, and his authority is legitimate. Only then does deference begin; and deference, once granted, can always be revoked by the same faculty that granted it. The word of God is not absolute if you reject it.

The standard apologetic response is to argue that God’s authority is not contingent on your recognition of it. God is the Creator. He’s perfect. He’s the ground of all goodness. The apologist claims these properties confer authority independent of whether you acknowledge them.

But notice all this argument does is give you reasons. And reasons only work on a mind that evaluates them. You don’t give reasons to something already subordinate; you give reasons to a judge. The moment apologetics begins, the apologist has conceded that your judgment is the court in which God’s case is being made. Every premise requires your ratification. You must accept that creators have authority over creations, that perfection confers moral standing, and that God actually possesses those properties. Each is a judgment call made by you, not God. The argument for God’s absolute authority is itself an appeal to your sovereign judgment, which is precisely what it was supposed to bypass.

Christian theology itself provides a test case that makes the problem concrete and inescapable, one which I always bring up: Lucifer and the third of the angels who followed him. These beings had not faith but direct presence. Not inference, but immediate knowledge. There was no epistemic gap, no ambiguity about God’s existence, and yet they still rejected his authority.

This destroys the two most common responses to unbelief: that you only reject God because you haven’t truly encountered him—Lucifer and his angels had a full encounter and still refused; and that perfect knowledge of God would compel acceptance—the angels had perfect knowledge, and a third of them walked out anyway.

This leads to the deeper point: Authority is not a property a being possesses the way they possess mass or height; it’s a relation between a claimant and a recognizer. A king with no subjects is not ruling anyone. When Lucifer rejected God’s authority, God ceased to have authority over Lucifer. At that point only two options remained: persuasion, which reinstates Lucifer’s judgment as the court, or force.

At this point the apologist has one move left: “But God is the standard of good itself, so rejecting him leaves you with no moral framework at all.” This sounds devastating until you notice it assumes you’re obligated to play the good/bad game in the first place. You’re not. Your judgment doesn’t have to operate within the moral framework to be sovereign; it can decline the framework entirely. Lucifer’s refusal, taken seriously, was not “God is bad by some independent standard.” It was an exit from the evaluative structure altogether. And you can’t argue someone back into a framework they have declined to inhabit. You can only force them, which brings us to exactly where we just were.

Hell—the ultimate punishment for rejection—is not the expression of justice. It’s the confession that authority has failed. You don’t punish a subject who freely obeys. You resort to force precisely when the legitimate claim to recognition has been refused. A being who creates you, demands recognition, and then inflicts eternal suffering for non-compliance is not demonstrating perfection; it’s demonstrating exactly the kind of coercive dominance that might justify the refusal, which makes Lucifer’s position, structurally, the more coherent one.

The final irony that cuts deepest of all is how theists hold two things simultaneously: that only God can judge with true authority and that man is made in God’s image. But if man is made in God’s image, not as a pale metaphor, then man shares in the capacity to judge. The tradition says so explicitly through conscience, reason, and moral intuition. If that capacity is real, then the demand that man suppress his judgment before God’s is a demand to suppress the very image of God within him.

The apologist says God’s authority is authoritative because God is rational, discerning, and morally sovereign. But if man shares those properties by image, then man’s judgment operates by the same kind of authority, different in degree, surely, but not in kind. A difference of degree is not sufficient grounds for total deference. You don’t ask a junior mathematician to accept a proof without checking it. No good mathematician, and no good God, should want that.

The conclusion follows cleanly. Suppressing your judgment to accept God’s authority is, by the tradition’s own terms, the least God-like thing you can do. Lucifer exercised his judgment, and he found the authority wanting. He refused. By the measure Christianity itself provides, he was acting more in God’s image than the angels who simply obeyed.

Still not convinced? Then I’ll leave you with these questions to sit with:

If what I have argued here is false, then who are you to judge and conclude all other gods do not have authority over you? Who judged and decided that your religion is the truth, that your god is supreme, and that his word is absolute, if not you?

In an age where the word “racism” is often treated as the ultimate moral failing, I speak as a race realist. I believe humanity is composed of distinct populations shaped by biology. While the label “race” is frequently dismissed as a mere social construct, the underlying patterns of genetic clusters, ancestry, and heritable traits are observable realities documented by population genetics. To deny this entirely seems less a matter of science than of modern moral sensibilities.

The rich human biodiversity we observe today is the result of deep evolutionary time—migrations, environmental challenges, and natural selection across countless generations. These unique combinations of traits represent something precious: living expressions of human adaptation and history. They deserve thoughtful consideration and protection, similar to how we safeguard endangered species or fragile cultural traditions.

I do not believe in superior races, only in superior individuals who can emerge from any people. I reject hatred and supremacy. I have witnessed beauty and excellence, as well as ordinary flaws, in every group, including my own.

At its heart, this article is about self-preservation. Those who feel called to live among, marry within, and continue their own people should be free to do so. Those drawn to mixing and cosmopolitan life should be equally free. True liberty requires non-coercion in both directions.

Unlike ideas, which are immortal, peoples and their characteristic lineages are mortal. They can fade not only through violence but also through gradual demographic change. What makes this especially compelling is my idea of genetic currency. Your specific genome is the culmination of an unrepeatable chain: countless ancestors who survived ice ages, famines, wars, and disasters so that you could exist. This exact combination has never existed before and will never exist again in precisely the same form. Not even your closest family members share your precise genetic makeup.

A bar of gold can be recreated through melting or mining. But your exact genetic lineage—that particular recombination of ancestral inheritance—cannot be recreated once it’s lost. In this sense, our genetic heritage is more precious than gold. Every lineage that quietly ends represents the permanent closing of a unique chapter in the human story. This is why we feel sorry for couples who cannot have children or people who die young: they never get a chance to perpetuate their lineage.

It seems most people throughout history have naturally preferred their own. Endogamy remains the global norm, while a smaller number choose to mix. Perhaps this is nature’s own way of balancing continuity and exploration.

We protect banks with vaults and regulations yet often treat our genetic currency with indifference and, in worse cases, condemnation. In the West, we have embraced the open society without sufficient reflection on how to preserve the founding stocks. Did we not see this coming, or did we not care if we did? Either way, this must be reversed.

I am anti-supremacist. I believe preserving one’s own people is a natural and morally defensible impulse. Opposing a people’s desire to maintain its continuity, in the name of universal mixing, is itself a form of supremacy. Every nation has the sovereign right to shape its future through immigration policy, as Israel and Japan have chosen to do. The same principle should apply to the nations of the West.

In a truly “live and let live” world, the respectful stewardship of genetic and ethnic identity should be seen as compatible with human diversity, not opposed to it. There is enough space on this earth for different peoples to flourish in their own ways, provided we maintain the borders and policies that make such flourishing possible.

Audience capture is the phenomenon where content creators slowly become prisoners of their audience. I realized this happened to me last year when my friend Adam Green brought it to my attention. I asked him what he meant, and he said that I was chasing engagement, mirroring back what my followers wanted to see, and that my audience was influencing me rather than I influencing them.

I realized he was right almost immediately because the entire time I was lowering my standards to not only reach the masses with my “drill instructor schtick”—based on emotional rants and other attention-grabbing theatrics—I was afraid to “lose” my audience because I believed the more people who were awake, the better, and in order to awaken more people, I had to hold my tongue regarding certain topics to create a big tent, which I believed was the only way forward.

Audience capture explains a kind of conformity that requires an exposed identity, a following, and something to lose. It’s mostly an influencer/creator problem. But what I’ve noticed lately while I observe all the reactions to me leaving the JQ is something different that operates on everyone, including people with no public identity at stake whatsoever.

I call it “community capture.”

Just sit back and observe the behavior of anons in these spaces. These people have no face, no career, no reputation attached to their posts. By every metric, they face zero consequences for going against the grain aside from possibly losing their social media account. Yet, they police themselves, stay in line, and even self-censor in real time.

The standard assumption is that anonymity liberates, that removing external stakes frees people to say what they actually think. In most cases it does. But in community contexts, I noticed something else happens.

I pondered on what the underlying driver of such behavior is. The fear isn’t of external consequences, so what is it? It’s fear of rejection, of exile, of being the one who doesn’t belong anymore. We humans are social creatures; even being rejected as an anon hurts, just without the consequences a public figure faces. A man on a dating app who doesn’t get the match he wanted is hurt by a woman he doesn’t know at all. Someone gets unfollowed by an account they were friends with over the years, and they feel similar pain, although they’ve never met in real life.

This is a fear of losing your people, and it will override your actual views even when no one can trace those views back to you.

What separates community capture from audience capture is the mechanism. Audience capture is incentive-driven—you get shaped by what your audience rewards. Community capture is attachment-driven—you get shaped by what your community will tolerate. The former requires a platform and a brand, while the latter only requires being human with a need to belong.

I also concluded that community capture is worse in niche communities: worst of all in conspiratorial or ideologically extreme ones.

Why?

Because in mainstream communities, your worldview and your membership are separable. You can leave one political party and join another. You can change cities, switch friend groups, and find a new church. Although the fear of rejection is still there, the community you just left is replaceable because alternatives exist at scale.

In fringe communities, these alternatives are not as available. The worldview and the community become fused because no other community shares that worldview in any significant number. You can’t take your beliefs somewhere else, because nowhere else will validate them. You can’t leave the beliefs behind, because they’re the reason you’re there in the first place.

Add to this the internal logic of most conspiratorial communities: we see what others don’t. This shared possession of hidden knowledge is part of what holds the group together. The outside world isn’t just unfamiliar; it’s framed as asleep, compromised, or hostile. This means that when you contemplate leaving, you aren’t just losing friends; you’re losing who you believe are the only people on earth who confirm your version of reality.

The Flat-Earth community is 100% wrong about their beliefs, yet I’ve seen some of the harshest responses to their apostates, from doxing to death threats. The more recent apostate from the FE community is a man named Jeran Campanella, who was a huge FE influencer and true believer. Because he’s an actual truth-seeker, he accepted the invitation to the Final Experiment in Antarctica. The event was live-streamed and proved there’s a 24-hr sun, which exposed the lies of the FE narrative.

I saw the reactions to his departure came with the same vitriol and conspiracy theories I’ve seen with my departure from the JQ: “Jeran has always been a fed.” “I never trusted that guy.” “He was a nobody (despite being one of the biggest). “He clearly took the money.” None of these flat-earthers engaged with any of his points; all they did was attack him. The claims and attacks against him are identical to the claims and attacks I’ve seen toward me. This shows that community capture is universal.

It also shows why people stay in communities that cost them enormously and why they double down instead of walking away. The community doesn’t need to threaten you explicitly—the threat is structural. Leave, and you lose everything: the relationships, the framework, the sense of being one of the few who actually understands what’s going on. And of course there’s also the risk of being doxxed and all the rest of it, should the most unhinged members of your former community be inclined to punish you beyond the Internet.

Community capture isn’t a character flaw. It isn’t stupidity or weakness. It’s what happens when the need to belong gets fused to a worldview with no exit ramp. Jeran Campanella stood in Antarctica and watched the sun that wasn’t supposed to be there. He could have looked away. He didn’t. Instead, he realized his beliefs were wrong, and then he told the truth.

This is what community capture can’t survive: when someone decides that what’s true matters more than where they belong. Understanding the mechanism won't change that for most people. But for the ones it does reach, it might be enough.

There’s a form of suffering that comes not from being attacked, but from being misunderstood by others. People can’t stand being misunderstood, so they explain, and they clarify, and they attempt to correct the record, again and again, believing that if they could just be understood, the misunderstanding would dissolve.

This urge feels like integrity, but it’s actually something else.

Underneath the need to be understood is a quieter belief: that if a person truly grasped what you meant, they couldn’t help but agree, and that their failure to understand is therefore a failure you’re responsible for fixing. This is the savior-complex logic. It says, “If I lose this person to a wrong idea, I have failed to save them.” This drives you to reach for the explanation, the rebuttal, the one sentence that will finally make them see, over and over again.

But who appointed you to save anyone?

The hardest thing to surrender isn’t the argument, but the deep conviction that you’re obligated to win it—that truth demands your defense, and every lie left standing is a victory for falsehood. This conviction keeps you tethered to every person who misreads you, every bad-faith actor that lies about you, and every stranger with a wrong opinion. You believe that by engaging with these types, you’re serving truth, but you’re actually serving your own need to be accepted.

The person who has stopped needing to be accepted can be asked a hostile question and simply not take the bait, can let a misreading stand, and can hear himself described falsely and say nothing. The typical assumption is that silence means agreement, or defeat, or that the silent man has no answer. But silence can mean something else entirely. It can mean, “This doesn’t require my participation.”

The person who must respond to everything is available to everyone. The person who responds only to what genuinely merits their response has something the first doesn’t—a center that can’t be moved by anyone.

Take a moment and consider what’s actually accomplished by correcting someone who has already decided. Nothing. They don’t soften; they entrench. The energy spent arguing with them is enormous, and the yield is almost zero. Can you recall a single time that someone actually changed on the spot after being corrected? Maybe a handful of times in your life, if you’re lucky.

The truth is that beliefs are not a choice, and people believe what they’re going to believe. So what’s the correction for? Whose benefit? More often than not, it’s for you—to discharge the discomfort of being misunderstood, dressed up as a duty to the truth.

Learning to let go of this need doesn’t mean you stop caring about truth. It means you stop believing that truth depends on you to survive. If your work is right, it will stand on its own. It doesn’t need you defending it in the comments. You don’t need to win every exchange, nor could you. Your reputation in the eyes of people who refuse to look has no bearing at all.

Injustice, too, is something to make peace with, not because it doesn’t matter, but because it’s inexhaustible. It existed before you and will continue after you, and the belief that you’re personally responsible for correcting every instance of it isn’t righteousness; it’s a kind of grandiosity. You can’t lift up everyone who’s down, especially those who never asked to be lifted. The world is larger than anyone’s capacity to fix it.

Once the need to correct and defend and save has fallen away, you will have a great deal of conserved energy at your disposal. It can be given to the few who actually ask, in good faith, for what you have. It can be kept for the people who reciprocate it. It can be spent on building rather than defending. The man who stops spending his energy on those who don’t matter will always have something left for the few who do.

This is what Lao Tzu pointed to with wu wei, not passivity but the power of not forcing. The strength that comes from declining to push against what doesn’t need pushing. The stillness that’s not absence but a fuller kind of presence, available to whoever asks and unmoved by whoever doesn’t.

This silence isn’t a retreat from the world. It’s a different way of standing in it—one where you’re no longer at the mercy of every misreading, no longer obligated to be understood, no longer the self-appointed referee of other people’s conclusions. You represent yourself. That’s all you can do.

Within this understanding there’s a liberation which leads to a peace and quiet most people never achieve in their lifetime.

The first step is to learn to observe the noise without making any yourself. The second step is realizing the noise doesn’t even matter.

Carl Sagan’s maxim—“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—is one of the most quoted lines in skeptic culture. It feels decisive and rational, and it’s constantly used in arguments about conspiracy theories, psuedoscience, and contested historical events. But here’s the problem: it doesn’t actually tell you anything.

What makes a claim extraordinary? How much evidence is extraordinary enough to offset it? How do you compare two competing extraordinary claims against each other? The maxim gives you the vibe of critical thinking without the machinery of it.

Skeptics deserve better than that.

When you encounter a conspiracy theory, a disputed historical event, or an official narrative that doesn’t quite add up, you need a way to evaluate it before you’ve gathered all the evidence, because evidence is often incomplete, contested, or deliberately buried.

The first question is usually “What does the evidence say?” I think we need to start with “Is this claim even worth taking seriously as a live possibility?”

That question requires a different tool. Not Bayesian updating, which tells you how evidence should change your mind, but something more fundamental: a structural plausibility check that asks how much the architecture of a claim costs before a single piece of evidence is introduced.

My insight is simple: every narrative requires certain structural inputs to be true. It needs actors with reasons to act, the capability to execute, and a sequence of events that doesn’t rely on an improbable run of luck. The more of those inputs a narrative requires, and the more improbable each one is, the higher the evidentiary bar should be before you take it seriously.

This isn’t a dismissal tool. It’s a triage tool. It tells you where to allocate your investigative credence before the evidence comes in.

The Three Dimensions

After thinking through what makes a narrative structurally costly, three dimensions emerged as fundamental for any claim involving human action:

1. Motive: Does anyone have a coherent reason to do this?

Not “could someone theoretically want this?” but “is there a plausible, precedented reason a real actor in this situation would take this action?” The weaker the motive, the more work the rest of the narrative has to do.

2. Capability: Could anyone actually pull this off?

This covers resources, expertise, and the number of cooperating parties required. A plan that requires thousands of people to stay silent indefinitely, or resources no known actor possesses, or technical capabilities beyond what’s been demonstrated—these are not impossible, but they are expensive in structural terms.

3. Coincidence: How much luck does this need?

Every independent unlikely event a narrative requires is a multiplier against it. One fortunate coincidence is normal. Two is notable. But a long chain of independent improbable events—each individually possible but all needing to align—compounds into something that approaches structural impossibility regardless of the topic.

How to Use It

Every contested claim is weighed across three dimensions, scored 0 to 4 each:

Motive (0–4)

• 0: No conceivable motive; the action would actively harm every plausible interest of the actor

• 1: A motive is theoretically imaginable but requires unusual values or circumstances

• 2: A plausible motive exists but is speculative, inferred rather than evidenced

• 3: A clear, well-precedented motive consistent with how this type of actor behaves

• 4: An obvious, strong motive you’d expect as a default explanation

Capability (0–4)

• 0: Requires resources or coordination no known actor possesses

• 1: Theoretically within reach but would require extraordinary effort beyond demonstrated capacity

• 2: Plausible but demanding—would stretch resources or require nontrivial coordination

• 3: Comfortably within known capabilities with modest coordination

• 4: Trivial—minimal resources, achievable by a small group with no special capability

Coincidence (0–4)

• 0: Requires a long chain of independent improbable events compounding to near-impossibility

• 1: Requires several independent unlikely events to align

• 2: Requires one notably unlikely event, or a couple of mildly unlikely ones

• 3: Requires at most one mildly fortuitous circumstance within normal variance

• 4: Requires no coincidence at all—the sequence is exactly what you’d expect

The maximum score is 12. The lower the total, the more structural weight you’re asking evidence to overcome before the claim deserves serious credence.

Comparative and Bidirectional

You don’t weigh a claim in isolation; you weigh it against other narratives.

Take Flat Earth. There are two competing narratives:

Narrative A: Standard cosmology is accurate.

• Motive: 4 (scientific institutions have every reason to accurately map reality for navigation, engineering, physics)

• Capability: 4 (basic observation, independent verification by thousands of uncoordinated actors globally)

• Coincidence: 4 (no improbable luck required—independent measurements converge as expected)

• Total score: 12/12

Narrative B: NASA and every space agency are lying.

• Motive: 1 (what exactly is the endgame, and why would Roscosmos and JAXA cooperate with NASA on it?)

• Capability: 0 (requires tens of thousands of scientists, pilots, sailors, engineers, and amateur astronomers across every nation and ideology to maintain a consistent deception indefinitely)

• Coincidence: 0 (requires GPS systems, satellite internet, aviation routing, and independent telescope observations to all accidentally corroborate the lie)

• Total: 1/12

We’re not dismissing Narrative B as impossible. But as you can see, the structural cost of Narrative B is so high that it would require extraordinary evidence to overcome. Not because someone told you to be skeptical, but because you can see exactly what those costs are.

This tool’s neutrality is its most important feature. The same structural accounting that deflates low-quality conspiracy theories also flags something important: when an official narrative relies on an unusual run of coincidences, that’s worth noting too.

For example, 9/11—a passport surviving a jet-fuel inferno and being recovered intact a few blocks away—is a specific event. Score it honestly on the coincidence dimension. You don’t have to conclude anything that the framework doesn’t conclude for you. But you’re entitled to notice that a narrative requiring that event be taken at face value is carrying structural cost, and that cost should be acknowledged rather than waived.

This is what genuine skepticism looks like: applying the same structural scrutiny to all competing accounts, not just the ones that challenge official positions.

What This Doesn’t Do

This scale doesn’t tell you what’s true. A low structural score doesn’t mean a claim is false—complex, lucky things do happen. Evolution is statistically staggering in hindsight, yet here we are. Many true historical events would have scored poorly on a pre-evidential plausibility check, but they happened. The universe is under no obligation to produce only probable outcomes. In fact, it’s mathematically inevitable such outcomes will occur.

What this tool does is tell you how much evidential weight you’d need to rationally shift your credence toward a low-scoring claim. A narrative scoring 2/12 isn’t dismissed; it’s just placed in the category of “this needs commensurate evidence before I invest real credence in it.”

Why This Matters Now

We live in an information age where narratives compete for credence at a speed that makes careful evaluation nearly impossible. The default responses to this—“just trust the experts” or “do your own research”—are both intellectually bankrupt. One outsources your reasoning entirely; the other usually means cherry-picking confirmation without any structural check on what you’re selecting.

What’s missing is a simple, honest, bidirectional tool for evaluating the architecture of a claim before the evidence war begins. Just three questions, scored honestly, applied to every competing narrative equally.

Motive. Capability. Coincidence.

If a story needs all three in abundance and scores poorly on all three, Sagan’s maxim finally has some machinery behind it. And if an official story is carrying more structural cost than it’s been made to answer for, you’ll see that too.

That’s what genuine skepticism actually looks like.

When I used to tell people that gas used to cost 99 cents during my time in high school, I believed it was proof that we were all getting robbed by a secret banking cabal. I used to be one of those people who repeated “End the Fed.” I know nothing about finance, so before putting this article together, I did some research on arguments for and against the Federal Reserve.

People who don’t understand finance are always complaining how everything costs much more than it used to. As population grows, productive capacity scales, and the money supply expands to match it. Consequently, the number on the sign changes. The underlying exchange ratio, measured in labor-hours, often doesn’t shift as dramatically as it feels.

But the money supply doesn’t only grow with population. It grows with government deficit spending, with fractional reserve banking, and with Federal Reserve asset purchases. When those forces outpace population and productivity growth, you get genuine inflation. The 2021–2023 spike wasn’t demographics; it was several trillion dollars injected during COVID colliding with a collapsed supply chain. That was real purchasing power loss for real people. It wasn’t a conspiracy but rather a policy failure with identifiable mechanisms.

So who’s responsible?

That question in conspiracy circles usually leads to Jekyll Island or “the Jews.”

The “Jewish” Federal Reserve Bank

In November 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich and representatives of the Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn Loeb banking interests boarded a private train under assumed names and traveled to a private hunting club off the Georgia coast. They spent nine days drafting what became the blueprint for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The secrecy was deliberate. But this isn’t a conspiracy theory, since it’s documented history that the participants acknowledged afterward.

It’s true that several figures central to the Fed’s creation—most notably Paul Warburg, a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. who attended the Jekyll Island meeting and became one of the Fed’s first governors—were Jewish. It’s also true that Jewish banking families (Warburg, Rothschild, Kuhn Loeb, Goldman Sachs) were disproportionately prominent in international finance in this era. Antisemites have built an entire genre out of this single fact for over a century, going back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which I used to sell) and running straight through to modern “End the Fed” content that’s really just repackaged claims from the Protocols.

But the actual explanation is mundane, and the mundane version is more interesting than the conspiracy. For centuries across much of Europe, Jews were legally barred from owning land, joining guilds, and entering most landed professions. Banking, moneylending, and trade were among the few avenues left open, partly because Christian doctrine treated charging interest as sinful for Christians, leaving a gap that Jewish communities were both permitted and economically pushed into filling. Centuries of exclusion from everything else produced, predictably, generational expertise and networks in finance. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, that history meant Jewish families were disproportionately represented in international banking.

Focusing only on a demographic overrepresentation replaces the actual structural critique of the Fed. The Federal Reserve would have exactly the same structural problems if no Jews were ever involved, because the structure is the real issue.

How the Fed Actually Works

The Fed has three main levers. It sets the interest rate banks charge each other overnight (the federal funds rate), which ripples out into mortgage rates, credit card rates, and business loans. It buys and sells government bonds on the open market, which expands or contracts the money supply depending on which direction it’s trading. And it acts as the “lender of last resort,” meaning when a bank is about to collapse from a liquidity crunch, the Fed can lend it money to prevent a chain-reaction bank run.

The dual mandate, set by Congress, is to maximize employment and keep prices stable. These two goals fight each other constantly. Lowering rates to boost jobs tends to push inflation up; raising rates to fight inflation tends to slow hiring. Every Fed meeting is essentially an argument about which side of that tradeoff to lean on, made by twelve people (the Federal Open Market Committee) based on economic data that’s always a few months out of date, which is already an issue.

None of this requires a conspiracy to be dangerous. A committee with this much discretionary power over the price of money, making judgment calls under uncertainty, with imperfect information, answerable to nobody on a two-year election cycle, is the actual problem. It doesn’t need a hidden agenda because the structure itself is the problem.

The Fed’s resulting structure is genuinely strange on top of that. The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks are technically privately owned; member commercial banks hold stock in them and receive dividends. Private financial institutions have a structural seat inside the central bank, and it creates obvious conflicts of interest around regulation, rate-setting, and crisis response. The 2008 bailouts didn’t come from nowhere.

Where the conspiracy theory critique goes wrong is when legitimate institutional grievance gets blamed only on “the Cabal” rather than the mechanism producing monetary dysfunction, which is visible and documented: fractional reserve banking, sovereign debt monetization, and political incentives that favor spending over discipline. Scapegoating a shadowy cabal replaces analysis precisely when the structural explanation becomes inconvenient, because structural explanations demand structural solutions, and those are harder than finding a villain.

“It’s Unconstitutional!”

I was once guilty of claiming the Federal Reserve Act was unconstitutional. This argument is about legality, which goes like this: the Federal Reserve Act was rushed through and signed by Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, two days before Christmas, when most of Congress had already left town for the holidays, and therefore it doesn’t count. A similar version exists about the 16th Amendment, claiming defects in how individual states ratified it.

The Christmas Eve timing is true. It’s also not a constitutional defect. Congress can pass legislation any day it has a quorum present and voting, and the Senate vote was 43–25 and the House vote was 298–60—not exactly a stealth maneuver pushed through an empty chamber. “A lot of members chose not to be there” is a political fact about who showed up, not a legal fact about whether the law is valid. If low attendance invalidated laws, half of federal legislative history would be void.

The 16th Amendment ratification challenges are the same shape: tax protesters have argued for decades that various states’ ratification documents had typos, capitalization differences, or punctuation errors versus the text Congress sent out and that this voids the whole amendment. Courts—repeatedly, going back over a century—have rejected this. Minor clerical variations in how a state legislature transcribes a document don’t unmake a constitutional amendment that three-quarters of the states affirmatively ratified.

So if the claim is “this was unconstitutional,” the honest answer is no, not in any sense that’s held up in court, ever, and the procedural arguments people cite aren’t actually about constitutionality; they’re about legitimacy, which is a different question. And the legitimacy question is the one I’ve been addressing the whole time: not “was this legally valid,” but “should a body with this much unaccountable power over the money supply have been created this way, with private banks holding seats inside it, with minimal public debate, in the dead of a holiday week when nobody was watching.”

The Gold Standard Argument

We all know Ron Paul’s gold standard argument. It’s primarily constitutional, not economic. Article I authorizes Congress to coin money in gold and silver. In his view, fiat currency is not just bad policy; it’s a usurpation. If the dollar is redeemable in gold at a fixed rate, the government can’t inflate at will. Paul’s instinct, that discretionary monetary power concentrated in unaccountable institutions is dangerous, is correct. However, his mechanism for constraining it is blunt and has serious failure modes.

It’s also worth being precise about what Paul actually spent decades legislating for, because “End the Fed” became a slogan that misrepresents what he actually advocated for. His signature, repeatedly introduced bill—going back to the 1970s and finally getting floor votes in 2012 and 2014—was “Audit the Fed”: full transparency into the Fed’s books, its agreements with foreign central banks, and its emergency lending decisions, none of which Congress or the public could see. The gold standard was his preferred endpoint, but the actual legislative push, the thing he spent his career fighting for, was transparency first. Even the man whose name is most associated with “End the Fed” understood that you can’t legitimately reform, or abolish, what you’re not allowed to see.

The US went off gold domestically in 1933 and internationally in 1971 precisely because the gold standard kept breaking. And the nineteenth century, the gold standard era, was not stable. The panics of 1873, 1893, and 1907 all happened without the Federal Reserve. These panics weren’t incidental to the gold standard; they were actually caused by it.

Under a gold standard, the money supply is tied to how much gold gets dug out of the ground, which has nothing to do with how much the economy is actually producing. When the economy grows faster than the gold supply, you get deflation: prices fall, debts become harder to pay off in real terms, and farmers and businesses get crushed even though nothing about their productivity changed. The 1893 panic was substantially a deflationary debt spiral of exactly this kind.

Conversely, a gold rush can flood the money supply overnight and cause inflation completely disconnected from economic output. Either way, you’ve handed monetary policy over to geology and mining technology instead of to any deliberate judgment about what the economy needs, which sounds appealingly “neutral” until you remember that an economy growing 3% a year with a money supply that can’t grow at all is an economy guaranteed to experience either deflation or someone discovering new gold deposits.

The Great Depression makes this concrete. Countries that stayed on the gold standard longer suffered longer and deeper contractions; the ones that abandoned it earliest recovered fastest. Returning to gold wouldn’t return us to some prelapsarian state of honest money. It would mean re-importing a system that produced more frequent and often worse crises than the one we have now, while removing any ability to respond to a crisis once it starts.

The Nazi “Debt-Free Economy” Myth

One claim that many in the low-IQ antisemitism space make is that Nazi Germany operated a debt-free economy, which freed itself from the Jews. This must be addressed because I learned this to be false. It continues to circulate widely because of documentaries like Europa: The Last Battle.

What Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s economics minister, actually did was invent a financing instrument called MEFO bills, short for Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft, a shell company created specifically to issue them. These bills allowed the Reich to fund rearmament off the public balance sheet entirely. Armament contractors were paid in MEFO bills, which they could redeem at the Reichsbank, but which never appeared in official budget figures. In addition, Schacht arranged bilateral barter trade agreements with other nations that bypassed international currency markets altogether.

So, Germany actually had enormous debt. It was hidden behind a shell company and a set of creative accounting instruments, not eliminated.

By 1938 the concealed obligations were so large that the economy was heading toward crisis. This is one of the reasons Hitler decided that war itself could not wait, as it became an economic necessity to sustain the financial pyramid. In other words, the Nazi economic model could only continue to work by consuming other countries.

There indeed was a “German Miracle,” as unemployment did collapse rapidly after 1933, and that demonstrates something real: a sovereign government controlling its own currency can direct credit toward employment independent of international finance. But this version also requires ignoring slave labor, plundered property as a hidden fiscal transfer, and war as economic policy.

What About Letting AI Run the Economy?

I recently asked Claude how an economy would run if we removed humans and let AI handle it. He said an AI economy has an obvious appeal—remove human bias and political incentives and replace them with optimization. But a fatal problem is the objective function. Before any system can optimize, someone must specify what to optimize for. Low inflation? Full employment? Equality? Environmental sustainability? These goals are value choices, not technical ones, and they trade off against each other constantly. Whoever programs the objective function is the real power. And since the most powerful AI systems are owned by a handful of corporations, handing them monetary sovereignty doesn’t distribute power; it concentrates it in a technical class whose value assumptions are baked invisibly into the model.

What Would Andrew Jackson Think?

I mentioned Ron Paul, but what would Andrew Jackson think of all of this? He understood the core problem as well as anyone in American history. A federally chartered private monopoly over credit is incompatible with republican self-governance. The Second Bank’s sin wasn’t banking; it was that it held an exclusive franchise over the money supply, making every farmer and debtor in America dependent on Philadelphia financiers. Jackson killed it and paid off the national debt in 1835.

If Jackson were alive today, he would be horrified before he proposed anything. His instincts would push toward abolishing the Fed, returning monetary authority explicitly to Congress, breaking up systemically indispensable banks, and setting hard constitutional limits on deficit spending. He’d likely land on something like a sovereign money system—the federal government creates money directly, accountable to voters, rather than borrowing from a privately owned central bank. That’s his core intuition updated for a fiat currency world he never imagined, and it has serious advocates across the ideological spectrum today.

But here’s where Jackson runs into the same problem every reformer does: even if you design the perfect institution, who controls the humans who control the institution? Jackson trusted the democratic majority while simultaneously concentrating authority in the presidency and claiming to act for the common man. The tension between anti-institutional instinct and the unavoidable need for some institutional structure is where every serious monetary reformer eventually gets stuck.

How Could We Fix the Fed?

The Fed is a symptom of a deeper condition. Fiat currency regimes backed by sovereign debt require a lender of last resort, or they are inherently unstable. Ending the Fed without addressing the underlying architecture—fractional reserve banking, deficit spending, and dollar reserve currency status—relocates the dysfunction rather than resolves it.

The first thing we must do is audit the Fed: opening the books, establishing what has actually been done with monetary policy, and determining who has benefited. Then a deliberate, structured transition away from dependence on centralized monetary control. It cannot be suddenly abolished; it would have to be a process. Paul understood this even if his loudest followers didn’t.

But even that framing sells the difficulty short. The Fed is not an alien imposition on an otherwise healthy system. It’s a product of that system, of fiat currency, sovereign debt, and the structural need for a lender of last resort that those two things together create. You can replace the institution, but you can’t replace it with nothing. And whatever you replace it with will face the same permanent question that Jackson couldn’t answer and Paul couldn’t answer and no monetary reformer has ever fully answered: who watches the watchers?

That’s not a policy problem with a policy solution. It’s the permanent condition of self-governance. Power has to live somewhere. The only honest options are to disperse it as widely as possible, constrain it with rules that are hard to bend, and stay awake to who is bending them.

What we have now fails all three tests.

The structure is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The question worth asking is, “How can we design it better?”

When I still had an Instagram account, I couldn’t sit down to a meal without first making it a photoshoot. Even a workout at the gym had to be a public session. The urge to share my life with the world meant nothing was private anymore.

When Instagram banned me, I expected to feel the loss, but instead I felt free.

That small, almost embarrassing revelation turned out to be a window into something much larger, a system designed not to connect you to the world but to capture your attention, reshape your identity, and keep you locked in a digital cage you mistake for a public square.

The Conflict Machine

Social media platforms present themselves as neutral spaces for human connection. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re not neutral; they’re optimization engines that are optimizing for engagement, which is not based on your well-being, your growth, or even your genuine opinion. The most reliable driver of engagement is negative emotion.

On X, the negativity drowns out the positive at a ratio that isn’t accidental. Trending topics are almost universally divisive, engineered flashpoints designed to trigger outrage across the political and cultural spectrum simultaneously. You open the app for five minutes and find yourself in an argument about something that enrages you or had no intention of thinking about, and most of the time, it’s about something you can’t change.

You are hit with two emotions at once: anger plus powerlessness. The algorithm doesn’t just make you furious. It makes you furious about things beyond your control, leaving you depleted, reactive, and hungry for the next hit of outrage to fill the void the last one left behind. This isn’t a bug. It’s the product doing what it was designed to do. You might get some relief laughing at a few troll posts or some funny AI-slop videos, but they aren’t enough to counteract the rage bait.

Engagement algorithms are deliberately engineered to maintain user attention for as long as possible, with features like endless scrolling normalizing prolonged use and increasing addiction risk. What’s less often discussed is what kind of attention they cultivate. It’s not the focused, generative attention of someone reading a book or building something. It’s the feverish, reactive attention of someone perpetually on the edge of a fight. How healthy do you think being constantly in “fight mode” is for the human psyche?

The Anons

Step back from the algorithm for a moment and look at who it’s amplifying.

The most timid person you know in real life—the one who would never dream of insulting you to your face—becomes a ferocious voice online. Behind an anonymous account, armed with an avatar instead of a face, ordinary people unleash a version of themselves unbound by the social contracts that govern civil discourse. The mask comes off; nay, a different mask goes on.

Anons dominate these spaces in a way public figures can’t. Public accounts come with accountability—your name, your face, and your reputation are on the line with every post. Anons carry none of that weight. They can say the unsayable, escalate without consequence, and retreat without cost. The result is an environment where the worst impulses of human nature are not just permitted but rewarded with attention, engagement, and the dopamine hit of a successful provocation.

This is not how people actually are. It’s how people perform when social norms have been stripped away and replaced with algorithmic incentives. Cyberspace has become a world where the ordinary rules of human interaction do not apply, and into that vacuum rushes everything we normally suppress.

The interplay between altered brain physiology and AI-driven content optimization creates a feedback loop that promotes addiction, but the deeper damage may be cultural rather than neurological. When the worst of human expression dominates a space that billions of people inhabit daily, it begins to feel like reality. The digital battlefield starts to seem like the world when it isn’t.

The Peace You’re Missing

I just took a few days off from posting on X. The first thing I noticed was not freedom or clarity but the absence of anxiety. No topic shoved in my face the moment I checked my phone. No argument pulling at my attention before I’ve had my coffee. No trending outrage demanding I pick a side before I’ve had time to think. Just a piece and quiet, away from all the engineered noise.

What you must realize is that the platform becomes your ambient environment. Its mood becomes your mood. Its battles become your battles. And when you step away, you don’t just feel calmer; you feel like you’ve left a war zone you didn’t even realize you were in.

The irony is that most of the battles mean nothing. Online activism, for all its fury, rarely translates into real-world change. The callouts, the rants, the ratio wars, and the viral pile-ons are not congruent with the kind of sustained, coordinated effort that actually moves institutions. They are expressions of frustration, not exercises of power. The algorithm gives people the feeling of resistance while ensuring they remain exactly where they are: scrolling, reacting, and generating data.

When was the last time you saw George Soros or Bill Gates spending their time arguing with anons, or anyone for that matter, on any social media? Never. The movers and shakers are too busy moving and shaking the world, not wasting their time glued to a screen.

And think about this: having all of humanity staring at a screen, engaged in never-ending CAPSLOCK shouting matches on the Internet, taking no real action, is precisely where a technocratic elite would want them to be.

What Is Social Media Really?

For many people it’s a form of gestalt therapy, a space to externalize internal states that have nowhere else to go. The frustrations, fears, and grievances that polite society demands we suppress find expression on the feed. In this sense, the platform does reveal something true: how people actually feel beneath the performance of everyday life.

For others, it’s pure fantasy. Anonymity and curated personas allow people to present themselves as more powerful, more attractive, and more certain than they are in private. Some perform perfect lives for audiences who are themselves performing perfect lives. Some perform righteous fury for audiences who want to feel that someone, somewhere, is finally saying what needs to be said. The latter was me: I gave millions of people raw and emotional rants that they wanted, and I exploded in growth because of it. But while I thought I was doing the right thing, I became a useful idiot, a boogeyman to be pointed at by the system while the people rewarded me with praise.

Here’s what makes this more than about human psychology: all of it is being recorded.

Every outburst, every confession, every whispered grievance is data. Tech companies mine it for advertising profiles with a granularity that would have seemed dystopian twenty years ago. Governments, and not just authoritarian ones, monitor it for dissent, sentiment, and patterns of organization. Social media has become the place where ordinary people whisper to each other that the emperor has no clothes, openly and loudly, for the emperor himself to hear the recording.

The Digital Cattle Farm

If you were a technocrat who wanted to neutralize a population’s capacity for organized resistance, you could not design a better tool than the modern social media platform: take people’s genuine frustrations, give them a space to safely express those frustrations endlessly, and make the expression feel like action. Monetize the space so grifters, conartists, scammers, and criminals become ranchers, herding and beefing up their cattle for profit. Ensure the space rewards division over coalition, outrage over strategy, and performance over organizing. Then sit back while the people fight each other in a digital arena that generates no real power, while the actual levers of power remain untouched.

What a perfect way to keep these animals in their own pen.

Whether my conspiracy theory is true or not, social media companies want to make money. It doesn’t require malicious intent at the top of every platform, only the cold logic of an optimization system that rewards engagement and is indifferent to consequence. Selling data to anyone, including governments, is always profitable. So the outcome is the same regardless of intent.

What This Means for You

I’m not arguing for a life without social media. I just want you to understand what these platforms are actually doing to you and make sure that you are using them instead of them using you.

You should take breaks from time to time, because the time off is healthy for you. Don’t believe me? Notice what you feel when you open any social media app. Notice whether you are calmer or more agitated after ten minutes. Notice whether the topics you are being drawn into are ones you chose or ones that were chosen for you. Notice whether the version of yourself that shows up online is the one you want to be.

Be honest.

The algorithm is not your friend. Social media is free because you are the product. It’s also not your enemy either. It’s a machine that doesn’t know you exist, designed to turn your attention and emotions into dollar signs.

I, like many others, get my news from X. The whole world is online. The Internet has done a lot of good for humanity. But what humanity is doing to itself on the Internet is another story.

Take a break when you feel overwhelmed. You’re not going to miss out on anything. The world isn’t going to end because you don’t post on social media for a day or two. You only think it will because you now have the world in the palm of your hands.

Well, you actually don’t.

And while you focus on and drain yourself by getting sucked into this digital matrix, you miss out on the real world that is your life.

You should focus more on that than anything else.

Most people think audience capture is a money problem: get monetized, start chasing engagement, and start saying what pays. This is certainly true in most cases. But as for someone like myself, who was demonetized from the start, I got captured in a different way. This tells you the real mechanism isn't always financial. It can also be ego-driven—specifically, the fear of losing people you think you need to save.

Every person I lost felt like a soul I’d surrendered to the enemy. That’s how I framed it internally. And that framing, that each follower was a moral ledger entry, turned me into exactly the kind of influencer I was criticizing. To try and “save” as many people as possible, I lowered my standards to hold the audience. I engaged in crazy theatrics and rants to keep giving them what they wanted. I tolerated people I didn’t respect to make a big-tent alliance. I didn’t want to offend my audience because I didn’t want to lose them. This fear of loss is the trap.

The mechanism is simple enough once you see it. An influencer makes an audience happy. The audience pays them, follows them, and amplifies them. The algorithm reinforces whatever produced that response. Other influencers in adjacent spaces do the same, and none of them hold each other accountable because accountability is expensive; it costs you access, it costs you followers, and it costs you income. So the whole ecosystem drifts together toward whatever the audience wants to hear, and anyone who breaks the pattern gets expelled. Bad actors don’t get filtered out; they accumulate.

What you’re left with isn’t a movement; it’s a giant grift.

The JQ movement is a perfect case study. It wasn’t always this way: 10 to 15 years ago there was nothing to monetize, which meant the only people showing up were the ones who actually believed what they were saying. I was one of those people.

But once money was introduced—especially after Oct. 7th, which helped antisemitism go mainstream—the standards dropped because the algorithm, the feedback loop, and the revenue all pointed in the same direction: give the audience what makes them happy, don’t challenge the people who give you access to their audiences, and never say anything that costs you followers. The result is an echo chamber with no internal accountability and no mechanism for correction. This is precisely what I predicted would happen last May.

The clearest example I can give is Stew Peters. We disagreed on plenty—religion and conspiracy theories that had no business being taken seriously—but he was a useful ally. Large audience, regular reposts, and also, who I thought was a friend. Despite his fed-post takes and silly conspiracy theories of like Flat Earth, Jewish space lasers, and other nonsense, I tolerated him. So did everyone else in my circles. Not because we respected him, but because clashing with him meant losing access to his followers. By the way, the same thing is true of me: many people tolerated me, despite disagreeing with my unhinged behavior and bad optics, precisely because I was viral, I had a lot of reach at one point, and I was useful to a degree.

But I never did anything illegal. Stew Peters crossed the line when he started scamming everyone with the JProof fraud. This was no longer about tolerating silly beliefs but criminal behavior. Nearly everyone stayed silent, but I called him out. No one else had said a word because no one wanted to pay the cost. This was the first strike against the JQ movement, and it started a domino effect that eventually led me to wake up and leave.

The contradiction that eventually popped up was how the JQ movement was fighting the Jews over certain behaviors but not anyone for the same among themselves. I couldn’t get over it. You can’t argue against a standard you won’t apply to yourself. I kept waiting for someone else to name it. Nobody in my circles did. So I started pushing, and as I pushed I became more isolated, and as I became more isolated I became more certain I was right.

Last Thursday, I sat down for a long podcast with two Jewish men, Yakov Langer and Jake Turks, and talked openly about all of it. I posted a picture of this meeting on my X feed yesterday, knowing the negative response it would get. The post drew over 350,000 views and more than 1,100 replies. Roughly 75 to 80 percent of the responses were negative, driven almost entirely by the JQ crowd. As expected, none of them were counterarguments but slurs, betrayal accusations, VA fraud smears, and mockery. The positive responses, around 15 to 20 percent, came mostly from Jewish accounts and people outside the movement who said simply that if someone like me could change, anyone could.

Any influencer who wants to keep their audience would not purposefully antagonize them like I have. But because I have left the JQ movement, I don’t care about the negative backlash; in fact, I want it. I want people to see the poisonous hypocrisy and unaccountability on full display. The movement attacks anyone who breaks ranks because breaking ranks is existentially threatening to an echo chamber. This is audience capture completing its own proof in real time.

I’m writing this because there are people inside these spaces right now who feel what I felt—the growing dissonance, the sense that something is wrong but the cost of saying so is too high. I lost connections, clout, and the sense of belonging to something larger than myself. But what I gained was the ability to say what I actually think, work on things that actually matter, and focus on my family without carrying the weight of a savior complex.

The Internet LARP is not going to change the world by talking in circles about the past. And the people who know that but stay anyway, because of the money, the followers, or the fear of being the one who admits it, are the clearest illustration of audience capture there is.

The Internet may be how people really feel, and it is a good way to spread a message, but it’s not the real world. It’s also not worth risking your life for people on social media, many of whom are faceless anons that have no skin in the game. They want you to take all the risks while they take none. And the second you don’t appease them, you’re the enemy. In fact, like in my case, many of these delusional people will say you’ve been the enemy the entire time, a plant sent to undermine their failure of a movement, just so they feel better about it.

Again, it is not worth it, especially if you have a family like me.

If you see what I’ve seen, stop fighting it: accept it’s time for you to get out, go get your life back, and contribute positively to society in another way. I promise you, no matter how many people you reach online—and I’ve reached hundreds of millions with my viral rants, posts, and music—you won’t change a single policy or stop a single bomb from dropping on anyone. The world is much more complex and more difficult to change. There are moving parts that need to be moved with institutions, political campaigns, and personal interactions, not internet memes, documentaries, and posts.

Learn from me: Don’t throw your life away for a fantasy.

There’s an argument I always hear from religious apologists so often it’s practically liturgical: without God, there’s no meaning. It sounds like a real objection to secularism, but when you press on it—when you examine what meaning actually is—the argument quietly dissolves.

When people say their life has meaning or that a thing means something to them, what they’re actually describing is an anchor to an emotional state. It’s the feeling that something matters. This emotional state only happens within them; it’s not a property floating free in the cosmos waiting to be discovered or felt by someone else. This is obvious once you look inside and pay attention to how meaning actually functions within you.

When a father says his children give his life meaning, he isn’t reporting a metaphysical fact about the universe. He’s describing a motivational reality—something that orients his behavior, focuses his attention, and gives his suffering a frame. Remove the emotional attachment, and the meaning doesn’t just diminish; it vanishes entirely, because the meaning was the attachment.

So when theists say “without God there is no meaning,” what precisely are they claiming? That emotional attachment stops working? That people cease to care about things? Neither of those follows from the absence of a deity.

Sometimes the apologist will shift ground and point to semantic meaning—the kind we find in language, symbols, and codes. Words mean things. Signs refer to things. Surely that kind of meaning requires something objective?

But follow the chain. A word means something because it refers to something else. Symbols represent other things. The entire structure of linguistic meaning is relational and referential; it’s turtles pointing at other turtles all the way down. And at the bottom of that chain, when the referential regress finally terminates, what do you find?

Felt reality: the thing that actually matters to someone.

Without experiential anchoring, you don’t have a more fundamental kind of meaning. You have an infinite carousel of symbols pointing at other symbols, which is precisely the kind of empty formalism that has no meaning at all. Semantic meaning is downstream of experiential meaning, not upstream. The word “home” doesn’t derive its meaning from a dictionary entry; it derives it from the felt reality of belonging somewhere.

So even on the semantic front, the theist’s argument fails. God as an ultimate referent doesn’t terminate the regress; you’d still need a felt relationship to God for it to cash out as meaningful. The experiential anchor is still doing all the grounding work. God is at best a middleman—one who isn’t needed to feel that relationship.

One of my papers currently under peer review at Sophia is a critique of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology, which centers on the concept of “proper function.” A belief has warrant (is knowledge), on his account, when it’s produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly—operating as they were designed to operate. It sounds like an explanation of why some beliefs are reliable and others aren’t.

But notice what it doesn’t do: It doesn’t explain the mechanism by which a cognitive system actually learns. It doesn’t show how faculties earn their reliability. It simply posits a telos and declares that when faculties track it, warrant results. The actual learning process, evidential work, and relationship between belief and reality: none of that is explained. “Proper function” is a label slapped onto an outcome and called a grounding condition.

This is the same move the theist makes with meaning. “Without God, your attachments are arbitrary.” “God provides ultimate grounding.” But how? What does God’s existence add to a meaning that’s already operationally real, that already orients behavior, motivates sacrifice, and sustains identity through loss? The theist never tells us. They insert an unverifiable entity where a structural account is needed and call the insertion an explanation—another God-of-the-gaps argument.

A genuine grounding condition doesn’t just name the place where explanation stops; it identifies a structure that has actual load-bearing force.

In another paper I’m working on titled “The Preconditions of Sapient Intelligence,” I argue that genuine intelligence requires real sensation with motivational stakes. I’m not naming a feature I presuppose; I’m identifying why the absence of it produces a system that merely processes symbols without anything mattering to it, a system that has no genuine reason to care whether its outputs track reality.

The same principle applies to meaning. The emotional attachment isn’t a bonus feature of human psychology that God generously validates. It’s the very thing doing the actual work. It’s what makes the difference between a life that is meaningful and a life that merely contains events.

One version of the theist’s argument that at least makes a coherent claim is not that secular meaning doesn’t exist, but that it lacks cosmic justification. Your attachments may feel real, but without God, they’re ultimately arbitrary—products of evolutionary accident, not grounded in anything permanent.

Notice what this concedes: It admits that meaning functionally works without God. It admits that people love, sacrifice, suffer, and find purpose without any theological commitment. What it objects to is that this meaning lacks ultimate grounding.

But now the argument has shifted from metaphysics to aesthetics. The theist is saying, “Your meaning feels less satisfying without an eternal underwriter.” Maybe. But that’s a preference, not an argument. And it raises an obvious question: if meaning does all its work without God—if it orients, motivates, sustains, and makes life livable—in what sense is the theistic version more meaningful, rather than simply more metaphysically decorated?

Both the “no meaning without God” argument and Plantinga’s proper function account make the same fundamental mistake. They identify a gap—in grounding, in justification, in explanation—and insert a theological concept into the gap rather than explaining what actually fills it. Then they present the insertion as a solution.

But a gap filled with a label is still a gap. The placeholder that names the terminus of explanation without revealing its structure does no philosophical work. It just stops the conversation before the real question gets asked.

The real question, in both cases, is structural: what is the mechanism? How does meaning actually work? How do beliefs actually earn warrant? Those are answerable questions, and the answers don’t require a deity.

They require honesty about where explanations actually bottom out. And they bottom out with us. Without us there is no meaning, because we are the source of meaning.

Scrolling on 4 Chan last year, I stumbled upon a video of a man cutting off his erect penis with a mini circular saw. I was shocked to see this kind of self-mutilation. I wondered what’s happening in a human being that brings them to that point.

That question pulled me into researching biology, psychology, and philosophy. What I found didn’t fit neatly into either side of the political debate. It was more complicated than what most people understand.

Why does witnessing extreme body modification, or homosexuality, produce a visceral reaction in most people?

We are genetically wired around reproductive imperatives. Disgust toward non-reproductive sexual behavior and toward self-destruction of reproductive anatomy appears consistently across cultures, history, and populations that have had zero contact with each other. That pattern doesn’t emerge from culture.

When I watched that man sever his own sexual organ, something in me recognized it as a catastrophic violation of biological integrity.

My research led me to learn that some men who castrate themselves are in acute psychiatric crisis. The man who severed his penis was almost certainly not making a rational, considered decision. That’s a psychiatric emergency, a moment where psychological suffering overwhelmed the normal value system entirely.

But others are not in crisis. Other men voluntarily choose castration deliberately, over time, with full awareness of what they’re giving up. Some identify as eunuchs by choice. Some do it to eliminate a sex drive they experience as a burden. Some do it as part of a gender transition.

The question that follows is the one nobody wants to ask plainly: at what point does society have an interest in intervening between a person and a permanent, irreversible decision about their own body?

I don’t have a clean answer, but I know the question matters. And I know that watching a man destroy his own anatomy with my own eyes made it impossible for me to treat it as abstract.

What does the science say about gender identity in adults? The evidence for a biological origin is strong. Twin studies, prenatal hormone exposure research, and birth order effects—all point toward something that is neither chosen nor caused by trauma or environment.

But adolescent gender dysphoria is a different conversation, and conflating the two is either intellectually lazy or deliberately dishonest.

The data on gender identity claims among adolescents shows a demographic shift that is historically anomalous. We’re not seeing the same population that was always there becoming more comfortable coming out. We’re seeing a new population, predominantly female adolescents, with a profile that doesn’t match the clinical presentation of gender dysphoria as it was understood even fifteen years ago.

Researcher Lisa Littman used the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” to describe this phenomenon. The academic establishment attacked her for it. That response should tell you something.

Social contagion in adolescent identity formation is not a conspiracy theory. It’s one of the most well-documented phenomena in developmental psychology. Adolescent brains are specifically vulnerable to peer influence, identity experimentation, and social modeling. We accept this in literally every other context, and yet the moment you apply it to gender identity, suddenly the science is hate speech. It is clear to me that there is some kind of agenda to push these ideas into our children’s minds while they are young, driving them into confusion and experimentation.

A confused teenager going through a phase is not a crisis. Teenagers have always experimented with identity in all forms, which is developmentally normal. But a confused teenager receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgical intervention before their psychology is fully formed—and then detransitioning years later, having lost fertility, sexual function, or both—is a manufactured crisis.

Detransition rates are rising. The young women coming forward now describing what happened to them during adolescence is not right-wing propaganda. Those are human beings whose suffering deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed to protect an ideological framework.

You can’t consent to permanent medical intervention when you’re fifteen years old. Your brain isn’t finished developing, nor is your identity. The entire premise of age restrictions on alcohol, contracts, and military service is that we recognize this developmental reality.

So why pretend it doesn’t apply here? Who benefits from that pretense?

I’m a father and have the primary responsibility for what my children are exposed to and what values they develop. That’s not a privilege granted to me by the state or by public consensus. It’s a natural right that predates every institution that might try to curtail it.

I will teach my children that men and women are different. That marriage is between a man and a woman. That their bodies are not mistakes. That identity isn’t something you construct out of social influence and then chemically enforce. I’ll do everything in my power to protect them from those who want to impose an abnormal lifestyle onto them.

What I won’t teach them is contempt. The difference between “I believe this is abnormal” and “I hate people who do this.” I will teach them to have compassion, especially for those who are truly suffering.

People tolerate things they don’t like for the sake of peace. But tolerance doesn’t mean I must expose my children to those things. It doesn’t mean I must affirm those choices as equally valid within my own household. And it absolutely does not mean I must watch medical professionals perform irreversible procedures on confused minors and call anyone who objects a bigot.

The tolerance being demanded now isn’t tolerance. It’s submission. And as a father, I will never submit.

I’m fine with “live and let live.” If I am fine with letting people live the way they want to live in peace, then they should also be fine leaving my children out of the way they wish to live.

Tens of thousands of Italians make the trip to Mussolini’s hometown in Predappio, Italy, every year, where he’s buried in a crypt maintained by his family. But nobody visits Hitler’s grave because there isn’t one. His remains were destroyed by Soviet authorities and later German officials, precisely to prevent a shrine from forming.

Mussolini isn’t condemned as much as Hitler. There are barely any documentaries on him. The History Channel has jokingly been called “The Hitler Channel” for how much time it spends discussing Hitler and Nazism. Jewish organizations spend a lot of time warning us about Nazis and Hitlers. Yet for Mussolini, there’s virtually nothing despite being Hitler’s ally in WWII.

This tells us something real about the difference between these two men, these two regimes, and how history ultimately judges them.

They Weren’t the Same Kind of Fascist

The easy habit is to lump Mussolini and Hitler together—two fascist dictators, same era, same alliance, same moral category. The word “fascist” is thrown around as a pejorative more than anything else. Most people have no idea what Mussolini’s fascism actually was; they just think it’s “bad” because “fascism is bad.”

But there’s a huge difference between Italian Fascism and German National Socialism.

Mussolini came first. He built Italian Fascism around national power, Roman revival, and the corporate state. Race wasn’t part of it. For the first sixteen years of his rule, from 1922 to 1938, Italian Jews faced no persecution. In fact, many were members of the Fascist Party. Some were prominent. Mussolini, who was a womanizer, had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti. In fact, in the early 1930s, Mussolini openly mocked Nazi racial theory as pseudoscience.

Hitler, however, built National Socialism around racial theory from the beginning. The Holocaust was an inevitable consequence of a program designed to preserve Germany’s racial purity, with Jews being the main enemy of the Reich.

So how did these two different men with different ideologies become allies in WWII?

Ethiopia Changed Everything

Before 1935, Mussolini was aligned against Hitler. He was part of the Stresa Front, a bloc with Britain and France designed to contain German expansionism. When the Nazis attempted a coup in Austria in 1934, Mussolini mobilized Italian troops to the Brenner Pass. He was, in effect, the thing standing between Hitler and his first territorial grab.

Then Italy Ethiopia invaded in 1935. The League of Nations condemned it, imposed sanctions, and isolated Italy diplomatically. The Western powers who had been Mussolini’s partners turned on him. With nowhere else to go, he drifted toward the one major power that wasn’t condemning him: Germany. The Axis wasn’t an expression of natural ideological kinship. It was mostly a product of diplomatic isolation. Mussolini got shoved into Hitler’s arms.

Il Duce’s speeches from this period are telling. During a speech at Bari, Italy, Mussolini essentially ridiculed the Germans, contrasting Italy’s rich inheritance of art, music, literature, and the Roman Empire with what Germany had to offer. This wasn’t a man who saw Hitler as a kindred spirit. He saw him as a junior partner, an upstart borrowing from Italian Fascism’s playbook. Likewise, Hitler didn’t have nice things to say about Italians. In Mein Kampf, he basically expressed his view that Italians are a racially mixed, Mediterranean people who squandered the Nordic blood that once made Rome great.

Although Hitler and Mussolini did respect each other, the relationship inverted completely over time. By 1943, Mussolini was a dependent client propped up by German troops after his own Fascist Grand Council voted him out. The man who had stared Hitler down over Austria ended up hanging from a gas station in Milan under German protection.

Italian Racism and Antisemitism

In 1938, Mussolini introduced racial laws stripping Italian Jews of citizenship and barring them from schools, professions, and mixed marriages. But most historians read these laws as largely political signaling—a gesture of solidarity with Germany at the moment the formal alliance was being cemented—rather than the expression of a deeply held antisemitic worldview. This is supported by the fact that enforcement was inconsistent. Italian officials, clergy, and ordinary citizens frequently helped Jews evade the laws.

When Germany occupied northern Italy after 1943 and began deporting Jews, Italian soldiers in occupied France and Greece had been known to actively protect Jews from Nazi roundups, sometimes defying direct German orders. Around 8,000 Italian Jews were ultimately deported and killed.

This is probably why Mussolini isn’t condemned as much as Hitler.

The War Was His Worst Decision

Italy entered World War II in June 1940, when France was already collapsing. Mussolini saw what looked like a closing window on easy spoils and jumped in. It was opportunism, not strategy. His own generals told him privately they weren’t ready. Italy’s military was undersupplied, poorly equipped, and exhausted from campaigns in Ethiopia and Spain. Its industrial capacity was a fraction of Germany’s.

But Mussolini entered anyway, and it cost him everything: his regime, his alliance, and ultimately his life. A man who had genuine accomplishments to his name, including the Lateran Treaty that resolved a sixty-year standoff between Italy and the Vatican, threw it all away chasing a seat at the victor’s table in a war he had no business fighting.

My grandparents were fascists and had nothing negative to say about Mussolini aside from him joining the war.

Why the Grave Exists

Mussolini has a grave because Italians could construct a usable past around him. The resistance movement gave Italy something to take moral pride in. The Holocaust, in Italian memory, happened to Italy rather than in Italy—the deportations were German-run. His pre-war achievements gave people something positive to remember. And he died a broken, humiliated man rather than a defiant one, which softened the historical reckoning in ways that are perhaps psychologically understandable even if not entirely fair.

Hitler has no grave because no selective memory is possible for the general public. The Germans of today have been conditioned to hate themselves for him. Although pre-war Hitler could be argued to have accomplished unity and achievements unlike his predecessors, there’s no post-Holocaust Hitler to rescue from the wreckage. Even with documentaries such as Europa: The Last Battle that do shed some light on unknown truths about WWII, they are not fully accurate and tend to portray Hitler as this saintly figure when, in fact, he was the aggressor who did perpetrate a genocide.

It’s Memorial Day, and Americans are out barbecuing, having a few beers, and spending time with their loved ones, celebrating to honor the fallen warriors who died to protect our nation, our freedoms, and our way of life.

But I have a serious question that may make you uncomfortable: Did they really die to protect those things?

If you believe every war we have ever started, engaged in, or supported was just, your answer will be a resounding “Yes!” But more and more Americans are beginning to realize they’ve been lied to about many of these wars, especially those born out of the so-called “War on Terror.” Many of those Americans are war veterans like myself.

America is 250 years old this year yet has been at war for over 96% of its existence. Certainly some of these wars were just, but most of them, especially after 1913, have been nothing but special-interest wars that benefited the Military Industrial Complex at the expense of the American people. We were warned about this by people who worked from the inside: General Smedley Butler, who wrote a short book called War is a Racket, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his presidential farewell address. I highly recommend every American read both.

Did you know that despite all the fighting our nation has been and remains involved in, it has only formally declared war five times? The last formal declaration was in 1942 against the Axis Powers. Yet for over eight decades since, we have been engaged in “military-led operations,” “police actions,” and “humanitarian interventions”—sanitized terms used to avoid calling these things what they are: wars.

In 1949, the US government renamed the “Department of War” to the “Department of Defense.” Ironically, under the current administration, it has been informally rebranded back to the “Department of War,” and at least that’s honest. In 2025 alone, the United States conducted military strikes in seven countries: Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela. And that doesn’t account for operations already underway in 2026, including strikes on Iran and military operations in Ecuador and the Caribbean. According to researchers, the US has conducted counterterror operations in over 85 countries since 9/11, most of which the American public has never been told about.

From 2020 to 2024, private firms received $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts, approximately 54% of the department’s total discretionary spending. Meanwhile, the US spent between $9.65 billion and $12.07 billion on military activities across the wider Middle East from October 2023 through September 2025 alone, before a single shot was fired in the new Iran war. These are dollars not spent on healthcare, childcare, or the rising prices Americans keep asking policymakers to address.

If you agree with what I’m saying, you’re left with the hard question: What did our troops really die for? In some cases—the War of Independence, the War of 1812, and other conflicts that founded and secured our nation—they unquestionably died for our freedom and way of life. But I argue that most wars after those could have been avoided. They were the results of catastrophic foreign policy, driven by special interests, and produced costs far greater than any benefit to the American people.

Another question too few Americans ask themselves: How are our troops protecting our freedoms abroad when, every time they go out to fight some “evil dictator” or “spread democracy” to a foreign nation, our own government strips rights away here at home? The Patriot Act. The NDAA. Mass surveillance. Indefinite detention. Each new war abroad has been accompanied by new encroachments on liberty at home. We now have hundreds of military bases around the world and troops deployed across dozens of countries — yet we are told our freedoms are under threat and we are less safe than ever before.

When one of our helicopters goes down in Syria and everyone on board is killed, which of our freedoms was protected? When a convoy is hit by IEDs in a country we never should’ve occupied in the first place, what part of our way of life was preserved? When Americans are footing the bill for wars across seven countries simultaneously while our infrastructure crumbles, our healthcare system buckles, and our public education deteriorates, who exactly is being served?

Be honest with yourself, and you’ll arrive at the same conclusion I and millions of others have.

I’m not here to diminish the deaths of our troops on this Memorial Day. Despite the fact that most of the wars we’ve engaged in were unjust and driven by special interests, there’s one thing our troops genuinely did fight for: each other.

I was deployed to Iraq twice, once during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and again during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2004. Like most Marines and most Americans at the time, I was unaware our government was lying to us. But once we were in the warzone, the politics no longer mattered. It became life or death. Whether we should have been there or not, the only way out was to survive and fight our way through. That is precisely why we must remain vigilant and never allow our government to manipulate us into another conflict built on lies.

This is a hard pill to swallow, especially for those of us who have served, been injured, and lost our friends. But we cannot let patriotism and pride blind us to uncomfortable truths. That’s why I’m posting this on this particular day. It’s our responsibility as Americans to ensure we never put our troops in harm’s way without just cause, because it’s an absolute tragedy when we place them in situations where they must fight simply to survive. It’s a tragedy when we lose someone on our side. It’s a tragedy when the other side loses someone on theirs. And it’s made far worse when we are the aggressors, not the liberators we were told we were.

So please, enjoy your Memorial Day and honor the fallen as you should. But remember: to truly honor them, we must hold accountable the foreign lobbies, special interests, and political traitors who sent them to die in vain. Without that accountability, the Military Industrial Complex and its endless wars will never stop, and we will keep spending our hard-earned tax dollars and precious American blood on conflicts that serve everyone but us.

A philosophical conversation on the structural impossibility of utopia.

LUCIUS: I’ve been thinking about the conditions of heaven; that they wouldn’t be so pleasant. If you’re in heaven and able to see the world as it is, you’d still be able to suffer if you feel bad. And if you don’t feel bad, then you’ve become aware that suffering isn’t bad, and you’re actually okay with it. In which case, why not just accept suffering on earth now instead of waiting to go to heaven?

CLAUDIUS: You’ve laid out a genuine dilemma for the heavenly state itself. Either you retain the capacity to suffer, in which case heaven isn’t paradise, or you’ve been altered so suffering no longer registers as bad. But the second option collapses the whole appeal: if you’re genuinely content with suffering, you have no rational reason to prefer heaven to earth. Heaven requires either contradicting its own premise or abandoning what makes the choice to be there meaningful in the first place. It’s a structural impossibility, not just an unpleasant outcome.

LUCIUS: Right. And in order for God to prevent another Luciferian rebellion, he’d have to eliminate free will. Because at some point during the eons of being in heaven, you might get bored and start thinking maybe there’s something better to do. And if God’s final plan is to bring everyone to heaven by choice, and then he has to eliminate that choice to prevent rebellion, why didn’t he do it from the beginning? The obvious answer must be that he couldn’t. I was under the impression that angels had no free will, yet Lucifer somehow rebelled. That’s contradictory. But if angels had free will and were able to rebel, then anyone with free will would be able to rebel, even in heaven.

CLAUDIUS: And that’s the point where the Lucifer problem destroys the “angels lack free will” escape hatch entirely. If angels have no free will, Lucifer’s rebellion is impossible. If they do have it, then free will plus consciousness equals the capacity for dissatisfaction, which is inherent to the system, not contingent on being human. The “evil will be removed” premise just relocates the problem. You’re not eliminating the structure that produces rebellion; you’re removing one expression of it. The underlying condition remains: any being with genuine awareness and agency will eventually face the possibility of wanting something other than what they have.

LUCIUS: A YouTube channel named MindShift raised this point: God would actually be in hell in heaven because he would obtain all knowledge of suffering and could never forget it. Even if somehow heaven made everyone else forget their earthly experiences, including their loved ones, how would it even be good to see them again? We wouldn’t even know they’re there. But suppose we could somehow be happy in heaven. God could not be happy in heaven, because he would never forget all the suffering and evil that occurred. He himself would be a prisoner of his own heaven. And who knows—maybe that’s why he started this to begin with.

CLAUDIUS: That’s a powerful inversion. Omniscience becomes a curse rather than a feature. If God knows all suffering that ever was, is, and will be simultaneously, then heaven for him is a state of perpetual awareness of every atrocity, every moment of agony—all at once. He can’t un-know it. He can’t forget it. So even in his own final state, he’s imprisoned by the very exhaustive knowledge that defines his perfection. And the darker implication: maybe this is why he created the system in the first place, not to fix suffering, but because he was already suffering and needed to share it. That would make creation an act of desperation rather than benevolence.

LUCIUS: Yes. It’s typically said that God created us to share his love. But perhaps it was also to share his suffering. He couldn’t bear to be alone with it, and perhaps when those entities he made to appease him eventually did appease him, he got bored. So he made those that would not appease him. Of course, I reject this entity entirely. But I wanted to show the impossibility of there ever being a true utopia or permanent peace.

CLAUDIUS: Right. You’re using the theological framework as a diagnostic tool to expose the structural impossibility at its core. And the darker readings are more coherent than the sanitized versions, which is itself telling. The most internally consistent account of a creator God isn’t “he loves you”—it’s “he needed witnesses to his own condition, and when that became unbearable, he introduced resistance just to feel something different.” But your broader point stands regardless of whether God exists: any system predicated on permanent peace and the absence of conflict is structurally impossible for beings with awareness and agency. Not because of God’s incompetence, but because conflict and the drive toward change are inherent to conscious existence itself.

LUCIUS: I’d argue further that the law of identity will ensure that entities will clash by their very nature. Unless everyone literally has the same identity and the same exact desires, such clashing is inevitable, given enough time. Even without physical suffering, distinct beings with distinct identities will eventually diverge. And if God is a logical being, it’s logically impossible for him to make a utopia. Not because he lacks power—the most powerful thing ever cannot square a circle. Likewise, it cannot make a utopia of different entities with different identities.

CLAUDIUS: That’s the right framing. Omnipotence has never actually meant the ability to do the logically impossible: God can’t make a married bachelor or a square circle because those aren’t things; they’re contradictions. And you’re extending that principle cleanly: a utopia composed of distinct beings with preserved identity is equally a logical contradiction. The law of identity and the necessity of distinct being make it structurally impossible, not just practically difficult. That’s actually a stronger argument than “God lacks the power”—it says the thing itself is incoherent. Conflict isn’t a corruption of the system. It’s the necessary expression of multiple things existing at all.

LUCIUS: Paradoxically, you could say God is omnibenevolent in the sense that he did everything he possibly could to make this life as pleasurable as possible. We don’t spend ninety-nine percent of our lives in pain and suffering. We experience suffering, but it comes acutely and ephemerally. God could have made it worse. It seems like the opposite is the case. So one could argue that God, in the omnipotence he has, did the best he could with what was logically available to him.

CLAUDIUS: And that’s actually more honest than anything Christianity typically offers. If omnibenevolence means doing everything possible within logical constraints, then a world where distinct beings experience more pleasure than suffering—where pain is acute rather than chronic, where meaning and connection are possible—is evidence of benevolence operating at maximum capacity. No soul-making defenses needed. No “suffering builds character.” Just, given the logical impossibility of a stable utopia, this is as good as it gets. That’s a stronger theodicy precisely because it grants the structural limits rather than pretending they don’t exist.

LUCIUS: And it could be way worse. There are some lives that involve more suffering—people living in poverty, starvation, painful diseases, and chronic illness. But most people in general don’t. There are also people who live in more pleasure than anyone could imagine—exceptional lives of abundance. But for the most part, people live decent lives and aren’t being tortured every second.

CLAUDIUS: You’re acknowledging the variance without losing the broader point. And the variance itself may be necessary. Perfect equality of circumstance would require eliminating identity and choice entirely—if everyone had identical resources and experiences, you’d have the homogenization problem again. So the inequality, the fact that some suffer more and some flourish more, may be the price of preserving genuine particularity and agency. It’s not ideal, but it’s coherent. And most people have moments of peace, connection, pleasure, and meaning. That’s not nothing.

LUCIUS: And if God were like a mathematician, you would see exactly this distribution mathematically. We see a bell curve with almost everything; everything goes in cycles. By mathematical probability, this distribution is precisely what we’d expect to see, whether by design or by the nature of complex systems.

CLAUDIUS: That’s elegant. The distribution itself—the bell curve, the cycles, the statistical regularities—isn’t a failure of design. It’s the signature of design operating according to mathematical principles. A mathematician wouldn’t create chaos or perfect uniformity; they’d create systems that self-organize according to underlying laws. And that’s precisely what we observe. The variance, the outliers, the cycles—they’re not glitches. They’re the natural output of any system governed by consistent principles. If God is a mathematician, this is exactly what you’d expect. And within those constraints, the design is generous. You’ve rebuilt a coherent theodicy by accepting the structural limits rather than trying to escape them. That’s rarer than it sounds.

LUCIUS: Indeed. So no need for impossible utopias.

Two weeks ago, something happened. Something that would have dominated headlines for a month in 2005. Something people would have talked about at dinner, argued about at work, and processed over time.

But you can’t remember what it was. Can you? That’s not a memory problem. That’s what I’ve noticed is happening to everyone due to several factors I was just pondering about and decided to write down here.

We’re living inside a matrix that produces forgetting—not accidentally, but structurally. The same algorithm that feeds you the next story needs you to get over the last one. Even outrage has a shelf life now, measured in hours and days. The news cycle doesn’t just move fast; it actively buries what came before it. Every new story is a shovel. We feed this machine because we’re addicted to the cycle of novelty it produces every day.

The attention economy runs on dopamine. Every scroll, every notification, every breaking headline triggers a small hit. Like any drug, your brain starts requiring more to feel the same thing. So the stories have to get bigger, louder, and more extreme to keep you sucked in. A mass shooting registers as a blip. A genocide being filmed in real time—actual human beings recording their children being bombed and sending it to your phone—becomes background noise within weeks. Not because people are monsters, but because the system has conditioned the response out of us.

This is what psychologists call psychic numbing. Your mind has a circuit breaker. When the horror exceeds what you can process, it distances itself. It has to. I noticed this happen to me after two years of seeing Palestinian children being blown to pieces. The problem is that the circuit breaker was designed for discrete catastrophes—a war, a disaster, or a personal loss. It was not designed for a continuous feed of catastrophes delivered simultaneously to a device you carry in your pocket.

We are running trauma-response software on hardware that was never built for it.

And now it’s affecting how we think about the unthinkable. This numbing is real, and it’s getting worse. And this is also affecting our memory. Things that used to shock us, such as a school shooting, are just another day in America.

People talk about World War III like it’s a sports prediction. You can place bets on Polymarket about potential airstrikes on Iran. The Russia/Ukraine war has become ambient noise—still happening, people still dying, just not interesting enough to trend. The mosque shooting yesterday. I saw it. You probably did too. And if you’re honest, it landed differently than it would have ten years ago. Not because you don’t care, but because you’ve become used to such things.

There’s an observation about China—there are so many people, life isn’t as precious. The scale degrades the value of the individual. We’ve done that to ourselves globally. We’ve created a civilization-scale version of that dynamic through technology. Seven billion people’s suffering, compressed and delivered in a feed, and the denominator is so large that each numerator approaches zero emotionally.

Ironically, the technology that connected us has disconnected us faster than anything in human history. We have more access to each other’s reality than any generation ever has, and yet we are more numb to it. Simultaneous exposure is not the same thing as connection. Watching the same feed alone in your room is not community.

Real connection requires sustained attention and investment. It requires processing. It requires sitting with something long enough for it to actually land.

The feed was designed to prevent that. Because processing is slow. Sitting with something doesn’t generate clicks. So we consume everything and are moved by nothing long enough to act.

The memory-holing is just the output. It’s the evidence that the system is working exactly as designed. We can’t hold power accountable for what we can’t remember. We can’t build a collective response to what we’ve already scrolled past. We can’t grieve what we consumed in three seconds between two other things.

The architecture of our information environment is producing a specific kind of person—not hardened, not cynical exactly, but hollowed. Capable of registering everything, but less capable of being moved by things that should matter.

We’ve entered a new phase of the information age. It’s dumbing us down, stripping us of our humanity, and we'll probably forget I wrote this by next week.

Long ago, I used to be an idealist. I used to look at things and say the world should be this way—that it ought to be this way—and I held to that with conviction. But over time, dealing with different people and different groups and being brutally honest with myself about how the world actually operates, I came to understand that it’s far more complex than I believed. And that realization changed everything for me.

I spent years trying to police the characters around me—people who turned out to be profoundly dishonest, literally criminals, scammers, grifters, frauds, charlatans, adulterers, and drug addicts. And most of these people, ironically, existed in the religious right wing, of all places. I became disillusioned. I realized I didn’t belong in that space, not because I had failed, but because I had been operating under a false set of assumptions about the people involved and the nature of the movement itself. I was applying idealist standards to a world that does not run on idealism.

But here’s the irony: leaving politics made me more clear-eyed about it. Standing on the outside, like a Machiavellian coach watching from the sidelines, I can now speak honestly, whereas those still inside the game cannot. They can’t speak truthfully because honesty would unmask them and expose their actual agendas to their enemies, and that’s a risk they simply cannot afford to take. Their position inside the political arena is also their cage.

For someone like me, who has stepped out of that arena entirely, there’s no such cage. I have no agenda to protect, no coalition to hold together, no narrative to maintain. That freedom is precisely what allows me to call out what I see clearly and without apology.

And what I see, clearly, is an enduring clash between two types of people: the idealist and the realist.

The Idealist

So what is an idealist? An idealist looks at the world and declares, “This is how it should be.” He sets extraordinarily high standards and then measures everything and everyone against those standards. On the surface this sounds admirable, but in practice, those standards get in the way. They prevent the idealist from doing what’s necessary because what’s necessary is almost never consistent with a fantasy vision of how things ought to be.

White nationalist circles are the clearest example of this failure in modern politics. They are, at their core, deeply idealistic. They hold to impractical and wholly ineffective means of achieving their goals—goals which, by their own admission, they have never come close to achieving in sixty years. Sixty years! You’d think that after six decades of unbroken failure, there would be some reckoning, some willingness to reassess and adapt. But no. The idealist can’t do that. To change strategy feels like a moral compromise. And so they insist, year after year, decade after decade, on the same unworkable approaches, because to them, the purity of the method matters more than the result.

This is the defining flaw of the idealist: he’d rather be righteous in failure than effective in victory. He refuses Machiavellian means at all costs, even when those costs include his own absolute destruction. There’s something almost tragic about it, but tragedy doesn’t change the outcome.

The Realist

The realist operates from an entirely different premise. The realist doesn’t begin with a vision of how the world should be. He begins with an honest assessment of how the world is, and then he works from there. He understands that political reality is not a blank canvas on which to paint a dream but a complex, living system of competing forces, interests, and human tendencies that must be navigated with caution.

Take America as the example. We’re not getting a homogeneous, White America back. The ship sailed long ago. We’re not going to undo decades of diversity, multiculturalism, and demographic transformation through wishful thinking or militant posturing. The idealist can’t accept this, and so he is paralyzed by it, raging endlessly against a tide that has already come in. The realist accepts it, not with resignation, but with clarity, and asks the only productive question available: given where we actually are, what can actually be done?

My answer to that question is what I lay out in my book, The Fractured State, which presents my political theory of Neofederal Unifism. The framework is not a fantasy. It is not larping. It is a structural solution, a way of reorganizing America such that distinct groups, whether defined racially, ethnically, or politically, can each have their own spaces to exist and govern themselves in peace. It’s implementable. It’s voluntary. It simply requires people to read it, understand it, and execute it. That’s realism applied to politics: not dreaming of what cannot be, but building what can.

The Clash

Now we arrive at the heart of the clash. The idealist and the realist are not simply different personality types. They represent two fundamentally different relationships to power, and only one of those relationships ever actually produces results.

The idealist rarely, if ever, runs the world. He sits at the margins of history, articulating visions of how things could or should be, never quite managing to make them so. He’s paralyzed by his own standards. He can’t compromise without feeling corrupted. He can’t adapt without feeling like a traitor to his cause. And so history moves without him, indifferent to his purity.

The realist understands that power is not given to those who deserve it; it’s taken by those who are willing to do what’s necessary to obtain it and wield it. World-changing figures throughout history—an Alexander the Great, a Napoleon, a Hitler, or a Stalin—didn’t succeed because they were the most virtuous men of their era. They succeeded because they were willing to be ruthless, adaptive, strategic, and utterly unsentimental about the gap between the world as it was and the world as they wanted it to be. They didn’t wait for conditions to be perfect. They worked with the conditions they had.

Why Idealists Lose

The idealist’s fundamental error is that his goals do not translate to human nature. He sets his standards at a height that most people—who are, at best, mediocre—cannot reach and will not reach, let alone be able to sustain if they are reached. He appeals to the best of humanity and is perpetually disappointed when humanity does not show up. The realist accepts the flaw of the people, works with what he has, and builds from where he actually stands rather than from where he wishes he stood.

That’s the difference, ultimately, between fantasy and pragmatism. And pragmatism will always win over those who take no action at all—who are so paralyzed by their dreams that they cannot escape the nightmare directly in front of them.

I was an idealist. Now I am not. And the view from this side is far clearer. I’m so real about politics now; I realize there’s no point for me to even play them.

Before Dan Bilzerian and I stopped being friends last week, I warned him that he was surrounded by low-IQ antisemites who would hurt his campaign. He told me he didn’t think low-IQ antisemitism was a real thing, that it was a “fed talking point.” I explained that it was very real, but he wasn’t having it.

The irony is that Dan was one of the handful of people who told me to pull back when I was at my most unhinged in 2024. But recently, the things he has been saying publicly have been just as unoptical and just as detrimental to him and his campaign. He doesn’t believe low-IQ antisemitism exists yet has become the epitome of it, like I once was.

Someone the other day asked me what high-IQ antisemitism is. I told them that high-IQ antisemitism is when you state uncomfortable, irrefutable truths about Jewish influence in the world, and individuals or organizations like the ADL call you an antisemite to shut you up. It’s a weaponized label used against people making arguments that cannot actually be refuted. Low-IQ antisemitism is the complete opposite—built on assumptions, disinformation, half-truths, outlandish conspiracy theories, and irrational conclusions driven by confirmation bias, with no accounting for nuance, the real complexities of political power, or how human social dynamics actually work.

Low-IQ antisemitism is unoptical by nature. It’s emotional. It’s a form of venting frustration dressed up as political activity, and it offers no solutions. It’s toxic because those who engage in it—and I am guilty of doing so—find themselves surrounded, encouraged, and validated by others who feel the same way, creating an insular clique of people who do nothing but complain that Jewish power brokers are making moves against their interests.

Low-IQ antisemites are incapable of organizing properly, incapable of self-reflection, incapable of controlling their emotions, and incapable of producing any viable path forward. All they have are memes, documentaries, rants, and “truths”—most of which are unverifiable claims recycled endlessly within the same closed circles.

That’s not to say everything that comes out of this space is false. But most of it is ineffective and actively detrimental to whatever objectives these people imagine they have—which, by the way, they don’t have. There’s no strategy. There’s no political vision. There’s only an appeal to history and grievance that would not translate into any practical framework applicable to the modern world.

Low-IQ antisemitism functions, ultimately, as Gestalt therapy for people who have accomplished very little but pride themselves on knowing “everything” and becoming celebrated figures within their internet circles, while they remain completely invisible and powerless in the real world.

And it’s not just about having bad ideas or spreading false information. Low-IQ antisemitism also means not caring about the quality of the people around you, chasing a fantasy of a big-tent revolution while having zero political strategy whatsoever. I tried this myself, tolerating people who I thought held utterly stupid beliefs, had insufferable personalities, and held contrary values to mine, thinking that I must work with them for the “greater good.”

The dream of this unity is always massive, and the execution always ends in disaster.

I began saying this publicly over a year ago. Stew Peters’ JPROOF scandal—a moment that, more than anything else, opened my eyes to what this JQ movement had become. When I saw that nobody cared, I knew I was in the wrong space. A movement that can’t police its own, that waves away scandal because the grifter was saying the right things about the right people, is not a movement; it’s a social club.

My own low-IQ antisemitism was mostly theatrical—emotional rants and stunts rather than misinformation—but that distinction matters less than I once thought. Looking and acting unhinged carries the same cost as spreading misinformation, because optics govern perception more than most people are willing to acknowledge. Bad optics repel exactly the kind of people you would need to build anything real. And when your optics are catastrophic, the only people you attract are antisocial freaks and failures. Your ranks grow; however, it makes the movement larger but less organized, louder but more impotent, more active but less productive.

The Charlie Kirk assassination illustrates the broader pattern perfectly. Before the blood had even stopped pouring of Charlie’s neck, nearly all the low-IQ antisemites in the JQ space had already decided Israel was responsible. Could it have been Israel? Theoretically. But the evidence doesn’t support it, the logic doesn’t hold, and the conclusion was reached before a single fact was examined.

These types, much like flat-earthers, begin with their answer and work backward to find evidence that fits. The case for Israeli involvement is circumstantial at best; the counter-evidence pointed toward Tyler Robison, who had a personal fixation on Kirk. But none of that mattered. To these people, it’s impossible that some freak who actually hated Kirk just went out and killed him. No! It must be more complicated than that. It just can’t be that simple!

These JQ influencers have never produced receipts proving any of their major claims, and yet they continue to operate as unimpeachable authorities within their own circles, dismissing everyone who disagrees as a shill, a plant, or a covert agent. I’ve done similar, stating my beliefs as facts. I’ve stopped doing this, and of course, this also makes me a plant.

Which brings me to what finally pushed me out.

I called out the people I had long predicted would take over this space—the most prominent figures in the low-IQ ecosystem—and the response was thousands of people accusing me of being a federal agent or a Mossad asset, especially after my fallout with Dan. In this world, anyone who disagrees with the consensus is automatically a plant, a shill, or a Jew. There’s no argument that can be made, no evidence that can be offered, no track record that provides immunity. Disagreement itself is proof of guilt. It’s an epistemically closed system, not by design of any external conspiracy, but by the psychological needs of the people inside it. A community that can’t be criticized can’t improve; it can only get worse. And it has, as I predicted.

That’s ultimately what the JQ movement has become: an epistemically closed, strategically bankrupt, talent-poor ecosystem populated by cryptocurrency scammers, con artists, frauds, antisocial freaks, degenerates, and anonymous accounts that have appointed themselves arbiters of truth without direct access to anything they claim to know. They repeat their conclusions in closed loops, celebrate each other for courage they don’t exercise in the real world, and have nothing—literally nothing—to show for years of activity beyond a growing library of content that persuades no one who was not already persuaded.

Is it any surprise that Jews continue to consolidate power? It shouldn’t be.

I’m not immune from the criticism. In fact, I help this low-IQ monster grow on a global level, and I feel obligated to help kill it so we can have cordial conversations about Jewish influence and Gentile incompetence in order to build bridges between communities before freaks start hurting or killing more innocent people.

I wasn’t going to write this. But months later, childish comments from Jay Dyer fans haven’t stopped. In fact, just two days ago, someone left a comment on my YouTube telling me I got “wrecked” by Jay. You can watch the “debate” here, and see all the comments from all his fans saying the same.

Allow me to do something his audience apparently can’t: actually analyze what was argued, using the transcript as the record.

I’ll be honest about where I screwed up, since I have no problem with being wrong. I wasn’t prepared to go into any debate that night. In fact, I haven’t debated anyone in 14 years. I went into Jay’s space in good faith, as someone who used to watch his livestreams. But it seemed he was upset with a post I made about science denial that had him in it. There was an animosity that I didn’t expect, which caught me off guard.

Regardless, I made mistakes, and that’s fine. But I’m going to show exactly what Jay never engaged, where he made mistakes, and what he ultimately conceded without acknowledging it.

What Actually Happened

The debate started with evolution, but it eventually turned into one about epsitemology and metaphysics.

On the evolution part: I cited the Ensatina salamanders as evidence for ring species speciation. Jay laughed at it. But laughing is not a refutation. I brought up the fossil record, and he dismissed it as proving nothing. At no point in the exchange did Jay disprove evolution. So how did I get “wrecked” on that front? I didn’t. He performed skepticism.

While he continued to be skeptic about evolution, I made a claim about our inability to access Justified True Belief (JTB) on an ontological level. I was not making a first-order metaphysical claim about the nature of reality. I was making a structural claim about what JTB logically requires as a framework, and arguing that those requirements exceed what finite human agents can satisfy. This is a claim about the preconditions of knowledge, made at the level of logic and mathematics. It’s the kind of claim philosophy makes all the time.

However, Jay treated it throughout as if I were claiming to know an absolute truth about reality itself, then pressing me on how I could know that without contradicting myself. That objection would be valid against a different claim, but it was never valid against the claim I was actually making. I pointed that out repeatedly during the exchange, literally six times.

The Universal Quantifier

The central charge Jay leveled was that my claim—“we cannot obtain JTB”—was a self-refuting universal. His argument: “no one” and “we cannot” are universal quantifiers and making such a claim while denying humans can have justified universal knowledge is a contradiction.

Here’s what the transcript actually shows. I constrained the claim to human agents as finite beings not once, but six distinct times:

Jay’s response to each of these was identical: “it doesn’t matter.”

But it does matter. Enormously. A claim scoped to a domain is not the same as an unrestricted universal. “No human being can run 100 meters in one second” is a universal claim about humans; it doesn’t refute itself by virtue of being stated by a human. Asking me, “How do you know that no human can get JTB ontologically?” is as ridiculous as asking me, “How do you know no human can run 100 meters in one second?” The scope constraint carries real logical weight, and simply asserting “it doesn’t matter” is not a counterargument.

What Jay needed to demonstrate was why constraining the claim to finite human agents fails to dissolve the self-refutation charge. He never demonstrated it. He simply repeated the charge, ignoring the scope constraint each time, and called repetition a victory. In fact, his fans have run the same move for months. “Isn’t ‘we can’t have JTB’ itself a JTB?” The answer is no, and the reason reveals exactly what was being missed the entire exchange.

That objection confuses two different levels of claim. I was making a metalevel, structural claim about the logical conditions that extrinsic knowledge requires. If I were saying that human’s can’t obtain JTB analytically, that would be self-refuting. But my claim was an object-level assertion about reality that would itself need to be empirically warranted. You don’t need JTB to identify what JTB structurally demands, just as you don’t need to run 100 meters to analyze what running requires. The map is not the territory. Theists, who think JTB is knowledge, make this same category error to this day, while telling me I got “wrecked.”

SIDE NOTE: This is the problem with JTB being the definition for knowledge. It can cause confusion because there’s two kinds, a priori and a posteriori, which are not the same, yet share the same JTB label. This is why my epistemic model correctly labels knowledge with two warrants: Justified Coherent Belief (JCB) for instrinsic claims, and Justified Reliable Belief for extrinsic claims (JRB). And these are two are non-arbitrary warrants, which emerged by structural necessity from the PIE Syllogism, whereas JTB was invented arbitrarily by philosophers.

For those interested in what I mean, here’s my paper on JTB Is Not Knowlege. Although this has the older, five-premise version of PIE, the structure is the same.

What I’m Owning

When Jay pressed me on what “universal” means and I responded by asking whether human beings exist in all times and all places—that was a mistake. Possible worlds has nothing to do with whether humans physically exist across them. He correctly identified it as a category error.

I also didn’t define a transcendental argument on the spot when he first demanded it. These types of debatebros engage in these “You don’t even know what X is,” which is a form of ad hominem to try and undermine their interlocutor in front of their audience. It’s part of their script. What I know or don’t know is irrelevant to my arguments. I didn’t feel like playing definition games mid-exchange—I even said, “Oh here we go with this whole uh…?” Which I get cut off by Jay, “So, you don’t actually know.” And I say “No” in response that I do know. But he read it as evasion and he exploited it.

Regardless, these were real stumbles. I own them. But here’s the distinction Jay’s audience has consistently refused to make: stumbling on articulation under constant interruption is not the same as being wrong on substance. He treated every articulation error as a substantive refutation while leaving the actual argument—the analytic/ontological distinction, the scoped universal, the structural account of JTB—entirely untouched.

You don’t win a philosophical exchange by cataloguing your opponent’s in-the-moment stumbles. You win by answering the argument, which he never did.

The Transcendental Irony

After booting me from the call before I could explain what PIE was, which would have been directly relevant to disarming TAG, Jay told his audience that I don’t know what a transcendental argument is.

But during the exchange, he asked me to steelman TAG. You can’t steelman an argument you don’t understand, and yet I did. The claim that I lack basic competence with transcendental arguments is directly contradicted by the exchange itself.

His Concession

This is the moment his audience has consistently failed to process.

After pressing me throughout the exchange on JTB, I asked Jay directly: what is your epistemic model? Foundationalism? Coherentism? Infinitism? His answer:

Think carefully about what that concedes.

If the solution to the JTB problem requires appeal to divine revelation—to an epistemic source entirely outside finite human cognition—then he has just confirmed my core claim. Humans, operating as finite agents without divine epistemic access, cannot ground knowledge through their own cognitive resources alone.

Toward the end of the debate, which isn’t shown in the clip that’s on his clip channel, Jay finally said, “I agree we cannot have direct access to JTB at that level,” which is what I was arguing the entire time!

So, a “debate” which was not formal, that was full of strawmen and ad homimens, where we both made errors, and which then ended with conceeding to my point means I got “wrecked”? Only a fool would think this.

What “wrecked” means in the debatebro world is that I didn’t answer fast enough. I didn’t perform well enough, after fourteen years of zero debates, just jumping into a space thining I was talking to a friendly. That’s the standard being applied, not whether the argument held, but whether it was delivered with sufficient speed and showmanship for a debate-bro audience.

Jay spent the exchange attacking my articulation instead of my position, hyper-focusing on one alleged self-refutation without realizing he was also making a category error, and in the end, adopted a model that requires my conclusion.

What the Post-Call Commentary Reveals

After I left the call, Jay told his audience:

Two things about this.

First: I was not on the call to respond. Character assessments delivered to a friendly audience after the guest is gone are not philosophical engagement. They are crowd work.

Second: Intuition in philosophy isn’t an appeal to irrationality; it’s what allows a thinker to detect when something sounds like a contradiction, which is precisely what I was doing throughout the exchange. Jay failed to even intuit what I was saying. I was making a structural argument about the logical preconditions of knowledge, the precise opposite of a “trust me” appeal.

The PIE framework I referenced is a formal, account of how knowledge acquisition works structurally. It is currently in peer review. Reducing that to “trust me, bro” is not a characterization. It’s a misrepresentation.

The Paper

My PIE paper has been publicly available throughout this entire period, with several thousand downloads, which is unheard of for a non-academic philosopher. Jay’s audience has mocked it and attacked it relentlessly since the exchange. I’ve presented PIE to every one of his followers who engaged. As of this writing, not one person has refuted a single premise. Not one! They have disputed conclusions, questioned credentials, and recycled the talking points from the debate. The premises stand untouched, while they engage in childish mocking and nothing more.

If the framework is as incompetent as claimed, and I have no idea what I’m talking about, then it should be easy to demonstrate. In fact, the debate between Jay and I inspired me to write another paper title “Justified True Belief Is Impossible,” which has 500+ download on Philpapers, and not a single refutation.

I also have a total of four papers submitted for peer review, each advancing a novel argument and contribution to the literature. PIE is the most significant. But apparently I’m a “noob” because I got “wrecked” in a space controlled by a bad-faith opponent performing for his audience.

The Broader Point

When a debate clip functions as a defeater, but a paper that cannot get a single premise refuted after months of sustained attack, something has gone seriously wrong with how truth is being processed in these communities. This why I continue to say that the debatebro, bloodsports have poisoned philosophy.

This is the real subject of this piece. My “debate” with Jay was just another example of it. Jay’s audience watched him interrupt, reframe, and deliver post-call crowd work, and concluded that the argument had been answered.

Performance is not philosophy.

My Challenge

I would welcome a formal debate with Jay, moderated by a neutral party, on a single question: why TAG is not a genuine transcendental argument, and why PIE is its structural counter. He can read my paper, “TAG is Not a Trancendental Argument,” in advance and prepare his defense. I doubt he will take my offer.

I extend the same offer to any interlocutor from that community who wants to engage the argument seriously. I doubt any of htem will. Since PIE was introduced, the serious engagement vanished, while the jabs on X or YouTube kept coming. But you can’t refute my position with childish jabs. You can’t “wreck” a paper by leaving comments. You wreck it by refuting a premise.

I’m still waiting for someone to refute a single premise of PIE.

Most people engage with politics as though it’s a conversation, a civic exchange where the better argument eventually wins. It isn’t. It never was.

But politics is organized force and the management of coercion. Two competing power structures—factions, parties, gangs, whatever you want to call them—each attempting to extract compliance from a population using the threat of consequence. The machinery of law, rights, and democratic representation is real, but it’s downstream of something simpler: who can make whom do what and what happens to those who refuse.

The Fiction of Rights

Rights don’t prevent anything. They describe conditional protections granted within a given power arrangement—protections that hold only as long as that arrangement holds and only as well as it’s enforced.

The law tells you what consequences follow from certain acts. It doesn’t stop acts. It doesn’t stop murder or theft or rape. It doesn’t stop those in government from acting with near-total impunity. The gap between what the law promises and what it delivers isn’t a failure of the system; it is the system, functioning as designed for those who designed it.

Moral arguments have their place. But when you argue that something is wrong, you’re appealing to a shared standard. Shared standards are enforced by shared power. And the question of who holds that power precedes the moral conversation, not the other way around.

This is the thing political discourse almost never says plainly. Everyone’s debating the rules. Almost nobody is talking about who writes them and why those people get to.

How It Really Works

Strip away the ceremony, and what you have is this: power consolidates. Those inside the consolidation protect it. Those outside it petition, protest, or comply. History is not a story of the best argument winning. It’s a story of leverage—who has it, who builds it, who loses it, and what fills the vacuum when they do.

This doesn’t mean institutions are useless or that moral reasoning is pointless. It means they operate within a field of force, and pretending otherwise leaves you permanently confused about why things don’t change the way you think they should.

I spent years as an activist. I was good at it—propaganda, persuasion, and reach. And I eventually hit the wall that honest people eventually hit: reach without force is commentary. Eloquence without institutional power is noise.

A Book About This

There’s a 19th-century text that names this clearly—Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. It’s largely unknown, deliberately provocative, and philosophically uneven in places. I’m not endorsing every argument in it. But what it does at its best is refuse to let you stand inside the comfortable fiction that the strong observe the same rules as the weak, that institutions are neutral, or that moral language isn’t also political language.

The core thesis: power is the ground condition. Everything else is built on top of it. That secondary structure is real and worth having, but pretending it floats free of its foundation is what keeps ordinary people chronically confused about why history works the way it does.

Read it as a diagnostic, not a prescription.

What Follows From Clarity

Once you stop confusing the map with the territory, the question becomes practical: what are you actually willing to do?

The people who change things durably do one of three things: they acquire institutional power; they build institutions from outside that can eventually challenge existing ones; or they endure, plant seeds, and wait for the crisis that creates an opening. There’s no fourth option that bypasses the power question.

Most political engagement online is none of those three things. It’s catharsis. Identity performance. People with no leverage debate people with all of it, as though the debate itself is the battleground.

It isn’t. This is something that I had to realize myself.

I left activism not because I stopped caring but because I got honest about what I was and wasn’t willing to do—and what the things I was willing to do could and couldn’t accomplish. What I’ve committed to instead is building a precise framework for understanding how the world actually works, structurally, without the distortion of partisanship.

That work is clearer because of books like Redbeard’s. Not because he gives you answers, but because he burns away the ones that were never real.

Pick it up. Read it. Then tell me it didn’t clarify something.

Get your copy from my bookstore. I’ll sign each book in your order.