Of late from the Imperial Capital comes news of a setback; our President seems to have made an embarrassing political misstep. The consequences remain unclear, but seem as likely as not to be temporary and not very hard to recover from. The exact details are, for my purposes, beside the point – when you read this in a few weeks, or months, or years, the incident will be old news and probably forgotten. My object is not to look at this event itself, but the reaction to it, and why it bodes ill for we who cannot afford to lose.

The reasonable reaction to hearing about all this might have involved public expressions of disappointment. It might have involved legitimate, measured criticism – the President has made some real mistakes, he’s done some things with which I seriously disagree, and by no means am I saying that he should be beyond reproach. But all too often, it has involved “blackpilling” – hysterical, screechy proclamations that Trump has “cucked” and we have all been betrayed, along with mopey, effeminate whining about how all hope is lost. This has even crossed into the bizarre suggestion that the pro-white right would be better off supporting a Samoan hard leftist because she has been mildly critical of expansionist foreign policy, and a Chinese socialist, apparently because the white race will be rendered far better prepared to face its future as a despised minority in what were once its homelands by becoming hopelessly dependent on government welfare.

As for me, I am perfectly satisfied with Donald Trump’s performance as President. Unlike those who breathlessly proclaimed him “God-Emperor” three years ago with the exact same fervor with which they now denounce him as a traitor, a “Boomer”, a “cuck”, and a villain, I approached Trump with low expectations, which he has consistently met or exceeded. I never expected that he would be the solution to all of our problems; merely that he would buy us some time while we prepared for what is coming. Since that seems to be approximately what is happening, I see little reason to be despondent. Here I think some important factors separating me from the blackpillers are at play.

One is that many of the blackpillers had never been seriously involved in politics until Trump piqued their interest in 2016, whereas I have been following politics since I was a teenager in the mid-1980s. The “God-Emperor” talk reflected their unrealistic expectations of what a single political figure – even in the highest elected office in the government – might actually be able to accomplish. The President isn’t Sulla marching through the Colline Gate with an army at his back – he has to deal with political opponents (including opposition within his own party), the courts, the bureaucracy, and endless institutional inertia, and can’t simply order a Centurion to cut the throat of anyone who doesn’t like it. My own observation of modern political history (here meaning, roughly, the post-FDR era) tells me that even presidencies that are considered successful generally get about a third of what the candidate promised before he took office done. This holds true of both parties – Barack Obama got very little passed in his eight years in office, especially considering that his one signature achievement, Obamacare, bore little resemblance to the much more ambitious government takeover of healthcare that he had in mind, and that his supporters expected, when he was on the campaign trail. The bottom line is that politicians – left, right, and center – always promise more than they can really deliver. Whether it’s intentional or merely reflects the candidates’ own honest underestimation of the difficulty of getting anything done in Washington is immaterial. It’s been that way for ages, and it will continue to be that way for as long as the current system stands.

Related to this is a deep naïveté on the part of the blackpillers about how the political game is played and what needs to be said and done in order to get even the third or so of his agenda that a President can get through enacted. This may seem odd when describing people who take such joy in the edgy nihilism that blackpilling offers. Yet one anonymous critic on the My Posting Career forums got things exactly right when he noted:

“The dissident right’s ‘plan’ all along was that someone like Trump would seize power and fix everything while they cheered along from Twitter and racist podcasts. As outsiders they never had the first clue what was necessary to wield real political power, or really how serious the situation truly was. No friends, no skin in the game, no experience with real life, way too much internet exposure… They would rather have a politician they dislike but feel emotionally disengaged from, because this leaves their comfortable pathologies undisturbed. If they were not losers they would have some focus in their lives other than the internet and Trump, and would be more sanguine even in this period of chaos. I have yet to see a man with a family blackpill like a morose child, but I have long ago lost count of the permanent singletons and divorced crybabies who have done so”.

In short, the alt-right spends too much time inside its online echo chambers, where it has come to believe in the Super Saiyan theory of politics – that any political fight can be won if only one gets really, really, REALLY angry about it. This political tone-deafness has led the alt-right to disaster after disaster, such as “Heilgate” and the infamous Charlottesville rally, from which they have consistently refused to learn a damn thing. Evidence of it was also seen in their hostile reaction to the President’s 2019 State of the Union address, in which nice things said about legal immigrants, Holocaust survivors, WWII veterans, and working women were among the many normie-friendly platitudes that are completely uncontroversial outside of alt-right echo chambers, and which helped lead to a 78% approval rating for the speech among the general public. Here our anonymous MPC writer continues:

“Trump has made references to legal immigration going back to the campaign; you can believe what you want about his actual thoughts on legal immigration, but in any case Trump is grossly outnumbered and needs some room to maneuver. What Trump could do if he had control of every party organ is an academic question. Perhaps he would still be in favor of it. But it doesn’t matter because he has to have something with which to perform feints and other maneuvers that get him closer to other goals. And legal immigration might be a patch of territory he has to cede in order to win a larger battle… One might also mordantly note that the screams about legal immigration followed Trump’s maneuvering on the wall construction, which we were ALWAYS told by the blackpillers was the real enchilada, the only thing that mattered.”

The upshot is that the blackpillers of the alt-right have been losers at the political game for decades because they don’t know how to play it, or even seem to see why they should have to. They consistently overestimate both their numbers and their intelligence, and even if they didn’t, they would still lack any understanding whatsoever of why anyone in that position should need to employ virtues like diplomacy, patience, or restraint. They don’t grasp the importance of slowly building and shrewdly spending political capital, and they effectively place their desire to be edgy over their desire to actually get anything done. A fine example of this is Ann Coulter, a shrill, impetuous moron whose inability to self-censor or employ any tact whatsoever led her to lose the ear of the President and any of the precious influence she might at one point have had on him and that might have helped her preferred policies to become reality. This is how habitual losers operate. To quote our MPC author again:

“The dissident right’s feelings about Trump reflect its own unacceptable feelings about itself: that it has largely been a failure, that it doesn’t understand what is going on, and that it has no access to real power… Naturally they resent the only politician who has done anything on their behalf. If you’ve ever come across this sort of failure in real life, you know the type: the minute you try to help him with anything, his resentment toward you builds until it reaches a meltdown. This is because the effort to help him exposes his personal flaws and threatens him with responsibility for his own failure… It pours from their bitter, derisive rhetoric about Trump, who has made the mistake of going to battle – literally risking his life and fortune, if you know anything about our establishment – on behalf of these losers.”

Those who can, do to the best of their ability – often stumbling along the way. Those who can’t, critique – offering endless bitter complaints and Monday morning quarterback suggestions about what could have been done better. But the problem with any culture of critique, and blackpillers certainly count as one, is that they do nothing to prove themselves worthy of power. People know this instinctively, which is why nobody is very enthusiastic about giving power to those who offer nothing but critique. And this, in turn, is why power plays by cultures of critique always end up either in them being crushed, or in them taking power by default during a period of chaos, followed by an era marked both by extreme tyranny and tragicomic incompetence. When I have pointed this out to blackpillers, I have often been told (particularly when it came to the Yang Gang/Clown World memes currently fashionable in their circles) that I “wasn’t getting the joke”. But I’m not here to joke, and we have no need of unseriousness from those who would style themselves leaders of our movement and our people. To survive what is to come, we must become strong and worthy. With that will come a renewal of dignity, self-respect, and ultimately, hope. But we will achieve none of it by begging our current elites for scraps from their table (something that, since they hate us and want us dead, would be suicidal anyway). Neither will we achieve it with despair, which is a sin for a reason. Nor either will we achieve it with snarky joking or ironic nihilism. None of these things help us, and I am tired of having my time wasted with them.

I have also often been told by blackpillers that I am not facing reality. Quite the contrary, I believe it is the blackpillers who have consistently failed to be realistic about the nature of the situation we find ourselves in and what will be necessary to get through it. They tell themselves that Trump has “cucked” because that is the easy, comforting thing to believe. It means that they can lay the blame for the fact that our problems aren’t getting solved on one man who they can imagine failed because he just didn’t try hard enough. That allows them to continue to deny the terrible truths before us: that our entire corrupt, sclerotic, rusty late-imperial system is beyond saving, that one man can’t make a difference no matter how much he wants to, and that we’re not voting our way out of this, so we’d all better start preparing for what comes next.

In this, I do have some small measure of sympathy for them. Someone once described conservatism as the desire to have the world always be as it was when you were ten years old. I was ten in 1983, growing up in a Great American Suburb right when the Reagan era was hitting its stride. People born too young to remember those times for themselves just can’t imagine how different – and how much better – things were then. I wish they really could be like that again – a couple of minor tweaks aside, if you offered me the chance to live in an eternal 1983, I’d take it in a heartbeat. But I know that can never happen. As great as it was while it lated, we can tread that path but once.

By directing their blame and anger at Trump – the one figure in the entire system who has ever genuinely tried to help them – the blackpillers allow themselves the hope of believing that if they just elect some mythical non-cuck someday, the system can be saved and the world can go back to being normal, like it was when they were ten years old. What this shows us is that, far from being the edgy radicals that they want to believe they are, the blackpillers are still just normies at heart, whose disillusionment still hasn’t shaken them enough to stop holding on to the normiest of goals. Even the so-called accelerationists believe that if they can only cause a big enough crisis, the facade of Modernity will crack and shatter, revealing – like a game show host opening Door #1 to display a fabulous prize – blessed normalcy hidden just behind it. Of course, beyond the fact that throughout history unimaginable ruin has been caused by people who took risks on horrendously stupid ideas because they just couldn’t imagine that things could possibly get worse than they already were, and that if we really do reach a point of collapse nobody will follow the leadership of anyone who they believe contributed to making things worse, there’s the fact that the prize they seek cannot be granted to them – not by Donald Trump, nor by anybody else.

To borrow a phrase from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Trump movement is indeed a bus that we should be prepared to get off of when we reach our destination. But we’re not even close to our destination, nobody seems to have a more realistic plan for getting there in the foreseeable future, and only a fool gets off a bus in the middle of nowhere, miles away from whatever it is they’re trying to reach.

In short, all of the hysterical fools who are blackpilled on Trump are victims of their own lack of perspective and realism. Trump is on balance a positive force, but he was never going to be able to bring back normalcy on his own. The blackpillers thought it would be as simple as voting for the right guy, and then they could then go back to being normies, worried only about their lawns and how the local Little League team was doing. So they elected Trump; now a couple of years into his presidency, they look around and see that we still have problems, and this fills them with anger and frustration. So they direct all of that at Trump, telling themselves and anyone within earshot that the reason things aren’t back to normal must be that he is a cuck or a fool. But the harsh truth is that he’s neither. He wouldn’t get anything more done if he got angrier, or made more strident speeches, or were any more dedicated to our ideals than he already is. The real problem is that this is as much as the current system will allow him – or anyone else in his position – to accomplish. Trump was the best the system could do and its last hope. But by now it has to be obvious to anyone who isn’t fooling themselves that the system cannot be saved, and entirely other options must be explored. I’m sorry, I sincerely wish I could tell you all different, but we’re never going back to normal, and things will never again be the way they were when you were a kid. So what’s the plan now?

The truth is, the blackpillers don’t have a plan. Nor do they seem very interested in devoting their energy to coming up with one or implementing it. Complaining is easy; planning is hard, and doing is even harder. Many deny that hard times are coming at all; not because deep down they really believe it, but because acknowledging that it’s coming and preparing for it would require effort and initiative, and they’d rather just sit on their asses indulging in fantasies that some politician will come along and save them – maybe by smiting their enemies, or maybe by handing them a welfare check. This is only partly explained by them being delusional. The other important element to this is that deep down they just don’t have the stomach for a long, hard fight. They are not happy warriors; they are normies in wolves’ clothing. When the going gets tough, they retreat to the internet to post clown memes and beg a Chinese socialist for a handout. Whether they honestly believe that a system that hates them and wants them dead will actually pay them $1000 a month to sit in their basements and post Nazi memes on social media is anyone’s guess. But if they do end up getting it, I suppose it will at least be enough to lay in bed reminiscing about the good old days, fantasizing that Nu-Hitler is coming to the rescue, and waiting to share in the fate of the Boers – which is all they seem to be willing or able to do.

So to the blackpillers I say: You have proven that you can’t lead and you can’t follow, so get the hell out of the way. Stop poisoning the well with your mopey, pointless doom and gloom; let men with chests and a measure of vision come to the fore. And to the rest of you – and to myself – I issue this challenge: Tell me your plan. Give me your answers. Keep in mind that a useful idea can be either big-picture or personal. It’s useful to tell me how to build a functional society for our people when the opportunity comes, but it’s also useful to tell me how an individual, a family, or a small community survives what lies between now and when we establish it. As for me, for now, it means that that not only do I speak up, but I armed up, left Silicon Valley after 25 years of living there, and am headed for a homogenous small town in a red state. My progress in becoming more prepared and my thoughts on what a better, more sustainable society would look like are things that I plan on sharing in this space. So continue to check in, dear reader, as I contribute what I can to the cause.