I know almost nothing about economics. I’m comfortable with this particular ignorance because professional economists seem to be on par with astrologists in terms of their ability to predict the future.
However, knowing nothing about economics, it seems reasonable to assume that dramatic changes in the economic environment will require an adjustment period. The safest path—the normal one—is to do nothing, take credit for prosperity and cast blame if there is a downturn. But if someone in a position of power makes big changes, we can rationally expect that it will take time for the market to “correct” or adapt.
It occurred to me recently that we are in a period of correction in the marketplace of ideas, because there has been a major change in the flow of information.
The Taboo Tank
Throughout the first two decades of this century, there was a kind of dissident awakening that happened mostly in the forbidden corners of the online world.
To use a word popularized in part by writer Steve Sailer, people—mostly men—started “noticing” that many narratives promoted by the establishment and the mainstream media didn’t match up with facts or the realities they were experiencing. Certain facts were true, or true with an asterisk, but it was “politically incorrect” and later “literally genocide” to write about them. These facts became known in many circles as “hate facts.”
If you said or wrote about or even suggested certain things, whether you were right or wrong and regardless of any qualifications or nuance in your comments, you could expect to be “cancelled.”
The first example that comes to mind is the case of James Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s double-helix structure in 1953. In 2007, he suggested that sub-Saharan Africans have genetically lower average intelligence than Europeans and that their lower IQs may make implementing certain European-style social policies less successful in Africa. Despite the fact that sub-Saharan Africans do actually score lower on IQ tests than Europeans, this created an outrage because of what it seemed to imply and the way it seemed to contradict the idea that humans were all the same and any disparity could be fixed with social policy. Watson—again, one of the men who discovered DNA—was pressured to retire from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007. When he was asked about it again in 2019 and was unrepentant, he was stripped of his honorary titles. Watson sold his Nobel Prize in 2014 as his career and finances collapsed under the backlash.
So, saying that sub-Saharan Africans score lower on IQ tests, even though it is true, would be considered a “hate fact.” Especially if you also suggest that intelligence is heritable, which it is, though it is also true that environmental factors impact measures of intelligence.
The world is full of “hate facts” that contradict, or seem to contradict, the “official” version of reality that has been presented through the media and educational institutions.
Whole online communities grew up around different collections of “hate facts” and what Roissy in D.C. (later Chateau Heartiste) called “pretty lies.” The manosphere and red pill communities examined the sexual marketplace, drawing on evolutionary psychology and sharing notes about women that undermined feminist ideology as well as “traditional” Christian just-so stories about female sexuality. There were “race realists” like Sailer who has been writing about “human biodiversity” for decades, presiding over all kinds of facts and statistics about race you’d never see in the mainstream media. I started writing for alternativeright.com as soon as it went live, and Richard Spencer’s aim at the time seemed to be to create a big tent for these groups of men who were questioning various mainstream narratives. One step to the right of the alt-right at that time were actual white nationalists, who were interested in “human biodiversity” as well as any and all “hate facts” associated with their mortal enemies—The Jews. Then there was the “Dark Enlightenment” or NRx, questioning the value of democracy and rationalism. This eventually morphed into the current philosophical trend of “post-rationalism.” Add to this forums like 4Chan and eventually Telegram, where men who didn’t want to be canceled typed bad words and shared their “hate facts” and “hate thoughts” anonymously.
However, this Venn diagram of online communities and their “hate ideas” were contained by the mainstream media. As social media became more powerful and prevalent, men who shared the “wrong” ideas were routinely banned, shadowbanned, or demonetized on every platform. When the mainstream media targeted the men who talked or wrote about forbidden ideas, the “bad men” were caricatured and clearly labeled as social pariahs.
Ask me how I know.
No one close to wealth or power wanted to be associated with them, and they were rendered nearly unemployable. Which was…the plan.
And everything was going according to the plan…until Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X.
The Free Speech Firehose
While many criticize Musk and point out areas where they claim X stifles free speech, X is probably about as free as speech gets right now—especially at the scale of a major social media platform with 611 million users.
Rumble plays a similar, albeit smaller, role in facilitating free speech, with 67 million users active monthly.
Together, the two of them released all of the pressurized “hate facts,” forbidden ideas, and conspiracies that the mainstream media and Big Tech had been containing in its taboo tank for years. Like drinking water from a firehose.
Before that point, you really had to go looking for the ideas in the taboo tank. They attracted a certain kind of person. Most people were happy to let the mainstream media curate their realities for them. The mainstream media burned its credibility during COVID-19, and many outlets were caught taking both orders and handouts from the government. Only clueless Boomers and dedicated NPCs trust the media now. The mainstream media is no longer able to effectively contain the ideas in the tank, so they are spreading via various influencers who are starving for provocative content.
I first noticed this when antisemitism appeared to go mainstream a few years ago. I did not have that on my bingo card at all. It seemed to start with the left, but then these “first-year white nationalist” arguments that I’d heard a thousand times online and in person started percolating through the accounts of fairly mainstream influencers on the right—some of whom I liked and respected.
In the words of Mugatu, I felt like I was taking crazy pills.
Whoremaster Dan Bilzerian is obsessed with the Jews now? What!?!?!
Many such cases.
Chris Rufo addressed the influencer aspect of this in a recent essay.
When Kanye West advertises a swastika t-shirt, it is not because he is signaling support for an organized neo-Nazi movement but because it symbolizes transgression and is bait for digital censorship, which would let him play the martyr. (West’s troubled mental state should not be discounted as a factor here, either.) Online, the narrative gets circulated through left-wing networks, which consider it useful for undermining support for Israel, and through right-wing networks, which find it helpful for building an audience.
[...]
The Internet rewards scandal, shock, and virality, and conspiracy theories enjoy burgeoning market demand. Candace Owens has never been more popular, turning each outrage and accusation into new views, followers, subscribers, and revenues.
I don’t believe that all of these influencers are cynical or just posting things for money and attention. “Hate facts” are facts, after all. Some conspiracy theories are vindicated hypotheses. Some forbidden arguments are very persuasive and worthy of consideration. Other arguments are totally out of touch with reality, but this isn’t always immediately obvious, especially when you’re surrounded by true believers egging you on. Many of these influencers may well believe what they are saying—at least right now.
People tend to move through arcs with these things.
For instance, it’s probably good for a young man to learn about the “red pill” concept of hypergamy. Women are not angels and they will use relationships with men to advance what they perceive to be their interests. However, some men internalize this to the extent that they decide all women are just rent-seeking whores. This isn’t entirely true or fair, and it’s not a healthy or productive belief for a young man to hold. A lot of men cycle out of the “red pill” subculture when they realize it has “black-pilled” them on women, but they are probably wiser for having explored the “red pill” ideas.
This is an example of what I mean by “correction.” Men, especially young men, tend to overcorrect dramatically. When they realize that one idea is wrong or built on falsehoods, they tend to swing hard in the opposite direction. It’s like when Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses leave the church and immediately become evangelical atheists or even Satanists. Some of them stay that way, but many eventually mellow out a little.
The extreme opposite of something bad isn't necessarily good or even better, but sometimes it takes a while to figure that out.
Corrections in the Marketplace of Ideas
I’m the kind of guy who wants to see what’s behind the curtain. If you tell me I’m not allowed to read something, I want to read it twice as much. But I have been moving through different groups of outsiders and collections of forbidden books and ideas my whole life. I’ve been in the “dissident right” taboo tank for almost 20 years.
I’ve had enough time to hear these ideas and process them and process various counterarguments as well. I’ve watched some ideas go through perennial cycles of popularity in the taboo tank. I’ve also had time to meet the people behind the ideas and their fans and personally assess them as human beings. I’ve had time to see what they do and how they behave—collectively and as individuals. Sometimes the negative media stereotypes are true. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes a guy gets involved with ideas to inhabit the negative stereotype because he likes it—because he’s a Satanist LARPing as a Crusader who thrives on the inversion of norms. Sometimes dissidents like being dissidents more than they care about any ideas at all. Sometimes, it’s a chicken-or-egg problem. And there are naturally exceptions to every rule.
I’ve gone through my arcs with a lot of the hate facts and forbidden ideas in the taboo tank. I’ve gone from “look at this shiny new truth” to dramatic overcorrection to achieving some kind of precarious balance that feels like wisdom—though I’m sure many would disagree. Balance is always precarious, and must be by definition. There’s always something new to be wrong about.
In the coming months and years, we’re going to watch the market react to various ideas from the taboo tank, overcorrect, and re-correct. This is a good thing, even though it will be incredibly tedious for those of us who have already gone through our own arcs.
The media protected Americans from information that would shatter its mythos. Now, people will be forced to reconcile what they have been told with what has actually been happening.
Right now, millions of Americans are thinking about America’s relationship with Israel critically for the first time. Unfortunately, it will lead many all the way to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and we won’t get all of them back. But most won’t go all the way down that rabbit hole, and America needs to have the Israel conversation.
There is also a sudden willingness to re-examine the narratives surrounding WW2, which has spread from X personalities and podcasters to Tucker Carlson.
I suspect the free speech firehose had something to do with America turning on transsexuals. The people in the taboo tank already knew all about the suicides, sterilizations, gross surgeries, mental instability, and the relationship between the trans movement, Marxism, and transhumanism. (I wrote about it a decade ago) But thanks in large part to X, the information blasted out of the tank and into the world.
Expect to see a reckoning of the books when it comes to gays. The media has been protecting them since the 1990s, perpetuating a mythic image of sassy but harmless Adams and Steves who were “born that way” and who just want to fall in love, get married, and decorate suburban homes like everyone else. It’s a hate fact that gays are shockingly promiscuous and that most of those “marriages” are completely “open” and always will be. A substantial amount of gays were sexually abused as children, and that may well have something to do with their sexuality, but that was way off-message. As a community, they also have a huge substance abuse problem. They do a lot of coke in addition to drugs you’ve probably never even heard of. If you think furries are crazy, wait till you find out about “pup play” and the whole secret menu of weird sex fetishes that the gay community has normalized under the umbrella of the Adam and Steve myth. It’s nasty. Finally, Americans—and gays—will have to address the fact that the gay liberation movement was basically a Marxist project from the beginning, and as with the trans phenomena, there are probably elements of social contagion and permissiveness that influenced their choice to remove themselves from the gene pool. That’ll be ugly and painful for many. But it’s also healthy, for gays and for everyone else. We weren’t “allowed” to talk about these things, but they’re on their way out of the taboo tank.
The media also protected blacks, and it helped blacks about as much as Black Lives Matter. That is to say, it made everything worse. Blacks have problems with drugs, crime, and fatherlessness in their communities that weren’t being addressed because talking about “hate facts” was “racist.” Pretending a problem isn’t there generally doesn’t fix it. Blacks aren’t going anywhere, and America would be better if they were doing better as a group. But real conversations have to happen to get to real solutions.
Ugly hate facts about the sexes, sex, race, and American history are going to come out. The rhetoric will get extreme, and then, hopefully, serious people will start hashing out serious solutions. Keeping all of these ideas bottled up in the taboo tank wasn’t creating any kind of progress. It was just protecting a narrative built on lies. And if you make decisions based on lies, they’re probably going to be bad decisions.
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