• 2003: ‘No Blood For Oil.’
• 2013: ‘The 99% vs the 1%’
• 2023: ‘Date Me, Bigot, Or I’ll Have You Cancelled.’

I think its worth having a brief but honest reckoning of where this process of degeneration actually came from.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of President Obama’s fear of Occupy Wall Street and how most of those pick-me gifted kid nerds that made up his administration quite possibly saw it as the most threatening challenge they faced. Occupy was the one and only time the Millennial generation had a chance at doing something effective and meaningful at the structural level, but it went nowhere in terms of actual change. What is undeniable is that there was a conscious pivot away from left wing activism that prioritized class and economics and into activism that prioritized culture, identity politics, individual frailty, and victimhood after the failure of Occupy. Whether the state and Fortune 500 companies had something to do with this, I do not know. But they certainly benefited from it. And once they saw they benefited they switched to outright supporting this pivot to ‘social justice’ at an institutional level in an attempt that has at least partially succeeded at making this the defining ideology of the professional managerial class today.

After Occupy was the hermetically sealed lunatic asylum known as Tumblr banning porn, driving most of its mentally unstable coomer audience into twitter, where they could demand safe spaces on a site known for being a public free for all. Because journalists, those bastions of intellectual rigor and critical thought, get their entire world view from twitter, this led journalists to add to their already lengthy list of stenography-related iniquities by adopting this apparently tumblrified culture. Soon all of social media was dominated by censorious and ostensibly left-wing scolds attempting to re-enact The Tipper Gore Experience for a new generation.

Nothing in this conventional narrative is wrong, but its timing is all off. It is missing a critical ingredient. Namely, that the rise of puritanical hysteria in media and nerd sectors of society predates the Great Tumblr Migration by at least five years. Kony 2012 and Upworthy came first, and failed spectacularly. People back then could still mock the low-information activist openly as a common position. Yet the bizarre spectacle of younger people and more left wing people becoming more and more pro-censorship, pro-safteyism, and evangelical continued on anyway even before the events attributed to it later.

I believe I have the missing piece to this timeline. Though it requires citing things I no longer have links and screencaps of.

Late 2000s and early 2010s Facebook was the best of the mainstream social media sites. It was very freewheeling and easy to separate into more private and public spheres. Nowadays, the website is a hellscape of badly targeted ads, ranting cable news-addled Boomers, and an algorithm that will bury interesting posts from people you actually know in favor of half forgotten acquaintances from decades ago sharing pictures of their poorly prepared food and mewling children. A kind of Millennial-Xer version of ‘Bless This Home’ knitting hanging in an Iowa kitchen. But back then it was actually fun to use.

It had a dark side though. Well, probably more than one. But one I, to my great misfortune, became aware of personally in the wake of post-occupy disillusionment with Obungler and the libs: Leftbook.

I never got sucked in directly myself. But I knew enough people who did. All of a sudden I had all these friends of friends with anime girl ushanka avatars who would shriek at anyone and everyone who deviated from whatever the ever-shifting dream cosmos of the day was. People, including myself, were accused of being ‘self-hating racists’ by people who were entirely white. Cancellation campaigns raged across public groups for the tiniest slights with zero pushback considering the echo chamber like culture that reigned. Rumors became facts in the minds of true believers. Meaningless power struggles broke out over zero stakes. None of these people seemed to live anywhere but online. Most of them, I suspect, were agoraphobic losers rotting away in some kind of hoarder-home whose only chance at ever feeling the tiniest bit of power in their life was through internal policing by serving as a kind of Red Guard for postmodern gender theory and the 1619 Project. The reddit neckbeard but on Facebook.

Some specific memories: There was a Portuguese lunatic of ever-alternating pseudonyms who clearly wanted to start his own cult who constantly postured as the most morally pure person in the world and a ‘philosopher king’. Australian Catholic-Leftist furries, activist groups that had ‘matriarchal coups’ to remove males from moderator positions en masse, and my personal least favorite of them all: A sociopathic Manchester University anime girl avatar sporting student who worked for years to amass some kind of online clout through endless slander of others only to ghost the entire internet one day after what I presume was one too many witch hunts gone too far finally brought the knives out. I would be informed later that this person’s radicalization had occurred after being booted from multiple safe for work anime forums for spamming hentai constantly.

Real Savonarola hours up in here.

No one without a direct window into this was aware of it really. It was self-contained. It either disappeared from FB or I blocked (or, more likely knowing me, antagonized others into blocking) most of the people taking part in it so I came not to see it anymore. But it really spawned what became mainstream online left-activist culture in the past few years. The timing is just a bit too perfect of a fit. Considering their love of extremely cringey nomme de guerres, I wonder how many of the random reply guys and schitzoposters you see out there on other more trafficked websites today are these people in their new form. They are the missing link in the timeline of how the Anglo-left went from the least bad faction in society to people I wouldn’t trust to change a lightbulb.

A culture of weakness and frailty begets performative virtue signaling based on victimhood. The concept of slave morality made manifest. While such people exist among all stripes of life, when they are the ones demanding to be the protagonists of human civilization it becomes even more hilarious. The advocates for violent revolution and direct action unable to go outside, cook their own food, live without amazon, and quaking in fear from words spoken to them or written on a page. They remind me of the Max Boot neocons but for domestic policy. Chickenhawks of the revolution that will never come.

The irony is that the governments these people admire would have committed them to asylums by force. And in many cases, rightfully so. Its interesting to note how much of this could have been contained if not for Reaganism and the deinstitutionalization of society in the 80s and 90s. There may have been a lot of abuse and neglect in the old asylum system, but it was undoubtedly a superior option to letting these desperate and unhinged types of people roam around public transportation, public parks, and now the internet. Foreign visitors to the U.S. in the past used to marvel how there were no random psychos everywhere like in other cities. Now those psychos rule the discourse. And in so doing, they give ammunition to a right wing backlash far more than they contribute to anything constructive. It turns out the Lumpens were politically engaged after all. At least the past political lolcows like Frances E Dec were funny.

I still have very left of center views on economic redistribution, class inequality, the need for a secular state, and the importance of environmentalism in our future. I am thoroughly Turchinpilled. But never in a million years would I claim to be ‘left-wing’ so long as I live in an Anglo-country. Political factions are not determined by Platonic ideals but rather by how something manifests in reality in a practical sense. And the Anglo-Left of today are the children of Leftbook, who are in turn the children of Increase Mather and Judith Butler as channeled through an amount of mental illness so large it really should be its own anthropological subset. They exist only to turn real life into their sad little fear-soaked internet presences. In the end they want nothing but for everyone to be as maladjusted and miserable as they are.

At least we can be assured that for all the irritation and deleterious impact of their presence when culturally pandered to, they will never amount to anything when it comes to hard power. Having concrete goals and wielding hard power, I’m sure, is ableist.