“If you want to know what is going to happen in five years, you don’t look at the mainstream, you look at the fringe.”
—Steve Jobs
“A mind needs books like swords need a whetstone.”
—Tyrion Lannister
End of a Dying Empire
There is a spiritual emptiness to modern America, and the Western world as a whole. Europe, Canada, and Australia have mimicked our flaws.
The frontier is gone. So are the factories. Soon the shopping malls may fall by the sword of E-commerce.
We live in a culture that is petty and emasculated, a place of small dreams and bland ambitions. A culture of moralistic scolding, and joyless, puritanical mediocrity.
This is fertile ground for sins, crimes, and debts. Grotesque depravity dances across our screens. But the land is harsh for families, and ambitious young men. Their dreams are strangled early.
Our culture trains men to be failures, to be indecisive, broken and confused. Authority figures prepare men to be losers. Parents, teachers, films, commercial advertisements, and the news media guide children towards a future that no longer exists. They train their students for an economy that was sent overseas.
Then adults mock them for being lost.
It’s all so tiresome.
There’s no self-awareness among the elders. But in their defense, the world we live in is the compounded result of a thousand simultaneous, converging macroeconomic trends. I don’t expect an average adult to analyze the labor arbitrage of a global market, or to understand the deindustrialization of the American economy. I don’t expect them to understand how the architecture of cities and the suburbs isolate individual families. I don’t expect them to understand how the prevalence of SSRIs, amphetamines, and antipsychotics are contributing to the stress of ordinary life.
All of this is measurable, but it’s very fucking uncomfortable to contemplate.
None of these problems are easily solved.
The old enjoy pensions, security, medical insurance, and homes, and if they sometimes notice that their children suffer in a growing poverty that is spreading like a cancer across this once-proud nation, they close their eyes and think of something else.
Denial is less painful than to recognize the truth that they failed their children.
Even the sex on TV lacks a certain eroticism. The interactions between men and women are structured as pedantic morality plays. Men must atone for their lust, their clumsy desires. An unreciprocated erection is now a sin. Women must explore their sexuality, even if they do not seem to enjoy the sex itself, or admire the men they give their bodies to. Sex has become an assertion of power in the rootless pursuit of a vague, feminine self-actualization.
Because now to assume the role of the Chosen Girlboss is to do everything that men are despised for — a woman must become dangerous, powerful, criminal, sexual. She must masculinize herself.
She must conquer. She must be obscene. She must betray her husband in the arms of some penniless, frivolous lover. She must disrespect men to the point of humiliation, and further. She must dress in the cruel armor of the pantsuit and vandalize her delicate body with garish tattoos.
That is the new form of equality.
The ship of our culture drifts further into an ocean of darkness; a future of ugliness, depravity, and a denial of basic human nature.
Every year the reckoning draws closer.
For gravity cannot be ignored. All debts must someday come due. And God cannot be defied.
Young men should not succumb to despair. Their time is coming.
FrogTwitter
Stories have consumed my childhood, my career, my dreams, my ambitions. I will not dox myself — but suffice it to say, my life has been spent in the pursuit of art, aesthetics, and various degrees of photography, film, advertising, prose, and poetry.
From childhood I made a vow to myself — to dedicate my soul to the pursuit of excellence as a storyteller, to strive towards perfection, which remains ever distant. And I made that vow to God as well.
The conversations on FrogTwitter have been a joy to me.
Artistic communities provide the fertile soil and the network effects that culminate in epoch-defining icons.
When you read the biographies of famous artists, authors, and auteurs, you will discover how deeply their personal relationships impacted their art, and how much they learned from the counsel and criticism of their companions.
The friendship between J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
The friendship between George R. R. Martin and Roger Zelazny.
The guidance that Terry Pratchett provided Neil Gaiman.
The guidance that John Carpenter provided James Cameron.
And most of all, when I think of the frantic, insightful conversations of FrogTwitter, I am reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s years in Paris, when this young journalist was transformed into the voice of American masculinity by prolonged exposure to “the most interesting people in the world”. The Paris of 1923 was a city of grandiose hopes, primal romances, and frantic anxieties.
Hemingway was perched between WW1 and WW2, and there in that troubled crucible, his destiny was fashioned.
Today, FrogTwitter has collected “the most interesting people in the world”. And this subculture will produce similar icons.
Long have I lurked in the background, reading the work of the great minds of this community. The names of these speakers you already know — ZeroHPLovecraft, and Bronze Age Pervert, and MythPilot. Lomez, BreastMilkEnjoyer, MedGold, Doctor Baron Shytposter, Fischerking, EnochPowell, Dr. Benjamin Braddock, Eugyppius, EchoChamber, and CovfefeAnon.
These painted clowns who speak the dangerous ideas of our time, in all their forms. And a hundred other members of this fringe subculture.
I am amused to join the circus.
Without a doubt, FrogTwitter is a fringe subculture — but I do not say that as a slur, or a dismissal, as the establishment does. But as a term of technical analysis.
Great ideas arrive from the forgotten places.
Valuable weapons are forged in the minds of the autists, before these fearsome instruments are cast into iron and steel.
Dreamers are always mocked until they win. Then everyone loves a winner. And soon the doubters, the envious anklebiters who obstructed every step of the journey, suddenly develop amnesia. They demand gifts and favors from the outcasts who have become triumphant conquerors.
Human nature persists forever. Our virtues, our flaws, are always the same.
And that is why this regime is crumbling.
I recommend Paul Graham’s essay “The Power of the Marginal” to my frens.
Paul Graham explores in great detail why brilliant ideas seem dumb, and are doubted even by the geniuses who dream them into existence. He delineates the divide between productive and dysfunctional, corrupt industries, and how to play your hand in a dishonest regime. And he outlines the disadvantages of being an insider — the crushing pressure of conformity, the straitjacket of incentives that breeds predictability, as well as the time-consuming nature of visible status.
We are the rebellious outsiders today, banished to the edges of polite society, forced to speak in riddles and memes, but as Victor Hugo said, “No force on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”
Today is not yet our time.
You will know when we have won — when the Normies are repeating our ideas in daily, mundane conversations.
Victory is distant, but every day a new future draws nearer.
What lies ahead could result in a nightmare future, an awful, brutal prisonworld. Alternatively, this future could be a paradise of freedom, brotherhood, wisdom, and glittering beauty. Or the West might descend into a loose, disorganized wasteland of ghettos, gated compounds, militarized secret police, and feuding cartels prowling the burnt, blackened ruins of a collapsed republic with jeeps and motorcycles and whirring, buzzing drones swarming the polluted sky like locusts. And there are other, less probable timelines.
Our actions bear real weight, real consequences, even as we converse in this ridiculous fashion, hiding behind cartoon frogs and pictures of Japanese waifu.
This time is precious.
Now is the moment to build ourselves into the men we wish our fathers had been. We cannot fail our sons.
Today is the moment to dream, and build, and train, and plan for whatever sacrifice, whatever suffering, whatever savagery lies ahead.
Deus Vult.
The Happy Land of Hysterium
Another week, another hysteria.
How delightful.
I feel so grateful when I look at the television, and see a flabby, flaccid journalist foaming at the mouth, gibbering his insect hatred towards foreign countries he has never seen, begging the wonderful American military to carpet bomb some random city into desolation. A desperate sexual tension fills his eyes, begging for satisfaction, raging at the cameras with an incoherent, nihilistic hatred of his audience.
What a pleasure to listen to mature statesmen.
What a pleasure to be ruled by enlightened thinkers.
He is a humanist, an atheist, a feminist, you see. He is a Philosopher of EMPATHY. Oh yes, he is exquisitely compassionate. A gentleman of tender mercies and generosity. He has surpassed primitive religious superstitions, in exchange for gold-embossed credentials from an important school. He decimates foreign villages in the name of diversity, or gender equality, or human rights.
There’s always a new cause. Too important for anyone to question.
Bomb Now!
Bomb Today!
Ask questions later!
And tomorrow he will have forgotten the children who were bombed, and the bystanders that were mutilated, and the veterans who are ruined, and the cost of the war, and he will be squatting on some loathsome, televised panel of circus freaks, begging and raging and gibbering and panting with his neurotic eyes dilated from some illegal drug that well-connected freaks are never punished for acquiring. Only blackmailed by intelligence agencies.
It’s all so tiresome.
There is a feeling in the air now, that life has changed. Ordinary America is reaching its limits of pain tolerance, enduring a tremendous period of bankruptcy, sadness, loneliness, suffering, and tragedy that shows no signs of abating.
The supply chain is breaking down. Just-in-time manufacturing will become Just-A-Joke, soon enough. And the sanctions of this Ukrainian war will lead to the collapse of the petrodollar, ending America’s ability to trade worthless debt in exchange for real, physical products.
None of this is news to any frogs who have been paying attention.
But the normies will be surprised.
Already the normies are stressed, and soon that sublimated despair will turn to something more direct.
Something unpredictable is bound to happen, as unpredictable as the Covid paroxysms that lasted for two years, with all of the incoherence and contradictions that raged in the name of Trusting The Science!! And protecting our democracy.
Tribal chants, grunted and snarled.
We are living in the Happy Land of Hysterium. It’s an opulent carnival, full of media theatrics.
Enjoy the ride!
There is no light at the end of the tunnel. And the compliant, obedient, trusting minds of the loyal American citizens are beginning to crack beneath the strain of ten thousand accumulated humiliations.
I see it in the gym. I see it in the grocery store, the shopping mall, and my church. I see it at work, wherever that may be for a Billionaire Psycho who lapses into sprees of alcoholism, crime, profligacy, and brutality. Edison Blake is a busy man, an industrious lunatic who gambles his life against tigers, tarantulas, lions, jaguars, crocodiles, cobras, and the most fearsome predator of all — sluts!
Edison travels in weird places. Someone must please stop this lunatic, he’s out of control.
Men will literally wrestle tigers, tarantulas, and gold diggers instead of going to therapy.
And then there is the emergency heartbreak protocol, total repression of emotions through chaotic adventure.
Sometimes Edison Blake indulges himself with the rare treat of performing a foreign military coup on a private island. Special adventure. Once, after a painful breakup with a Ukrainian supermodel (well, an aspiring model, perhaps not a true professional despite her eagerness), this Billionaire Psycho and his fanatic legions performed an amphibious invasion of a beautiful locale among the Virgin Islands.
He enjoyed a lovely day learning a new culture, tasting fresh fruit, savoring the wind, chatting with tanned frens, and carrying out indiscriminate executions along the beach’s bloodstained sands, shoving his victims to their knees as they begged for mercy that they neither deserved nor received. Typical excursion of the idle rich. Nothing eventful.
Only later did the Billionaire Psycho learn that he had landed onto the wrong island, and through an innocent, honest mistake of misreading the ellipsoidal coordinate system (GCS), his legions had been running amok on Little Saint James, which meant that he had accidentally butchered one of the CIA’s most prestigious unit of pedophiles. These were elite rapists, trained in biochemical and psychological warfare with a million-dollar budget of premium Viagra — an irreplaceable collection of the nation’s best agents.
A true blow to the Arsenal of Democracy.
Edison Blake apologized profusely to the CIA, but that next quarter, his conglomerate lost a $200 million government contract to an inferior rival multinational.
But that’s a different story.
It’s all so tiresome.
There is a feeling in the air now, that life has changed.
Even in the library. I recognize the mood. People still obey the rules. But there is no enthusiasm, no urgency. They step forward like tired, exhausted mules at the end of a long day’s work, whipped beyond caring. Half-asleep. Numb. Pessimistic, and resigned to defeat.
Stressed out of their minds. But nervous, too nervous to express any kind of frustration.
What now?
What should we frogs do to renovate this Happy Land of Hysterium?
The answer has been clear to our circles for some time, and the hysteria of the Covid pandemic has only sharpened our gaze upon this barren, diseased world. Crowds of ordinary people do not care about truth, justice, honor, or even results.
What they care about is agreeing with authority, and receiving the blessing of the Powers Of The Day — safety, strength, money, sex, etc.. Or ritualized humiliations, bankruptcy, unemployment, barren daughters frittering in HR, and emasculation, if the authority decrees.
They will accept it, carrot or stick.
Logic means nothing. You can show a normie spreadsheets and graphs. The normie can stare at video proof of health authorities contradicting themselves… recommending masks, then warning against masks, then recommending masks again. Nothing changes. No lessons are learned. If the normie is inclined to believe authority figures, the Normie Citizen will stare at you with disinterested, glassy eyes and nod their head, then proceed to ignore you and pump their body full of experimental drugs.
Even to the point of paralysis and epileptic seizures, the obedient, trusting Normie will repeat his confession of religious faith, “This morning, I tested positive for COVID-19 and am currently experiencing mild symptoms. Grateful to be vaccinated, and for treatments like Paxlovid, praise be to the church of Pfizer, and for Moderna, who I have paid indulgences to spare my soul eternal damnation. I’m following health guidelines and will be isolating while I work remotely.”
It seems like a joke, at first.
Certainly there is some grim humor to be found here, as we frogs hide in plain sight among the robotic inmates of the Western asylum.
But this is not a joke — life is presenting us with a profound riddle. A psychological riddle.
The enigma of human nature.
We frogs are film noir detectives trapped inside a disturbing psychological thriller.
The question is: If logic, reason, evidence, and empiricism means nothing, then what does? What power does the normie respect?
The answer is: The Normie respects authority.
And so, the solution becomes obvious: We Frogs must claim our mantle as the new, improved authority figures. We must save the Normies from their gullible selves, all too prone to submerging their identity into a collective, self-defeating conformity. Normies reflexively embrace madness, as they parade their huddled lives off cliffs, thanking Pfizer and Moderna while they plunge obediently to their deaths.
When we win, the Normies will not thank us for saving them from themselves, and for ending this current era of merciless exploitation by a decentralized alliance of corporations, bureaucracy, pharmaceutical companies, and militarized secret police.
Rather, the Normies will never remember an era before the Frogs were in power.
This is the literal truth.
They remember nothing.
Examine the newspaper headlines of Napoleon Bonaparte’s return to Paris, when he escaped from the prison of the island of Elba. You will see precisely what I mean. At first, the newspapers were denouncing him, “The Corsican Ogre has landed at Cape Juan.”
Yet when Napoleon Bonaparte reached Paris, these same delusional newspapers were proudly, happily, cheerfully proclaiming, “His Imperial and Royal Majesty, yesterday evening, arrived at the Tuileries, amidst the joyful acclamations of his devoted and faithful subjects.”
Like Conan the Barbarian in the early stage of his adventures, we frogs have been barbarians, pirates, and outriders, but now we must claim the throne itself. We must become rightful kings, princes, crusaders, and samurai.
We will transcend.
Or at least, step astride the path towards crossing that distant Rubicon.
This is great stuff. Very few get it. The overproduction of elites that Turchin noted as the driver of cliodynamic cycles ... the coming churn of social chaos ... the necessity of a new, true elite ... it is only on the Dissident Right that young men have pursued the path, have heeded the call to Become Worthy.
Great work, fren.
I've resisted the urge to move over to Gab because of just how negative many of the posters are. Also, as you mentioned, this is a fringe subculture - one that I've spent a decade in myself. But now, I feel the need to branch off into different subcultures to gather fresh ideas and perspectives. Maybe it's worth checking back in to see how things have changed.
Because of the censorship, we've been ghettoized. This seems to have helped solidify the subculture at the expense of us being able to engage with wider audiences. The gap between us and normies continues to widen. It's almost as if we speak two different languages at this point. On the one hand, it's comfy. On the other hand, it's alienating.
Just sharing some of my thoughts. I enjoy your writing style. It's terse and doesn't feel the need to rely on overwrought prose. You come off as a writer confident enough in his own ideas that he doesn't need to embellish or bedazzle at the expense of clarity and emotional punch.