In the confessional arms race spawned by the Protestant Reformation, there was an explosion of study in all things Near-Eastern, with the Bible as the keystone and stated purpose for the same. Protestant pastors were all compelled to learn Hebrew both to decipher the Bible (a practice that remains intact in many Christian denominations) and to understand some of the context of what they were studying. Out of this focus on the Bible and all its externalities grew the subject of Orientalism, which over time grew and took on a life of its own.

The German academy soon came to view the Bible as something of a shackle on their intellectual studies, and they sought to recontextualize it as simply one of many historical curiosities in the fascinating mélange of the Near East.

It is hard to overstate just how much the academy found the Orient fascinating and wanted to plumb its depths to the maximum degree possible. Fields like comparative studies, archeology, and others soon displaced a Bibliocentric view, even as Pastor remained the primary job for those engaged in Oriental Studies.

While higher criticism eradicated the remaining vestiges of Biblical orthodoxy in the German academy in the 19th century, America was a different story. This is not to say that the Bible did not face stiff assaults in America, where core doctrines like the incarnation, virgin birth, and others were disbelieved by learned and respected elders of mainline denominations. But these things tended to be a consequence of a general skepticism toward anything “unscientific” or thought to be miraculous rather than a rejection of the historicity of the Bible et al.

Prominent in this battle was the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” where three-time presidential hopeful and populist firebrand William Jennings Bryan agreed to a “debate” with Clarence Darrow, a suave demagogue who had previously bribed jurors in an attempt to protect anarchist terrorists.

Darrow trounced Bryan, and learned men chuckled at the crude fundamentalists who still made an attempt to teach truth based on what the Bible said about anything.

Somewhat contemporary with these events was the life of Edgar James Banks, the inspiration for countless fictional adventurers, the most famous being Indiana Jones. Banks was a diplomat fascinated by the idea of Biblical Archeology, and in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, he sought by any and all means to recover artifacts that might relate to the Bible and also to mount archeological expeditions to Near-Eastern sites to “prove” the historicity of the Bible.

Banks’s life deserves his own study, but for our purposes, we may note that his expeditions, the most famous of which was exploring Mount Ararat looking for the site of Noah’s Ark, were largely unsuccessful in their aims of “proving” Biblical Archeology. Banks retired to the orange groves to write books until 1945. Banks may be the most interesting, but he also represents the somewhat haphazard and amateur nature of Biblical Archeology up until that point. What came next would be a revolution.

William F. Albright was the oldest of six children born to Evangelical Methodist missionaries in Peru. Albright received his doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, one of the first American universities modeled on the German organization of universities. Like many in his day, he was schooled in the textual higher criticism used against the Bible, but unlike his contemporaries in the academy, he believed that the Bible’s accounts of Israelite history were largely accurate.

Albright was a polymath who was enormously well-versed in a great deal of subjects, and through his leadership as Director of the American School of Oriental Research, he brought scientific rigor to Biblical Archeology, creating in the process an independent field which survives to this day.

The “Albright School” of Biblical Archeology remains, despite its insurgency in an academy very hostile to Biblical anything, extremely influential inside and out. It is not an overstatement to say that, from an academic point of view, Albright created “Biblical Archeology” as a field of study.

The Albright School has done much to document what we might call the plausibility of the Bible, from the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls (which Albright himself presided over), to the documentation of Semitic peoples in Egypt, to the linguistic study of Biblical names. For instance, the names Moses, Aaron, and Phineas have Egyptian origin. Conversely, there are names of Semitic origin whose tombs have been discovered in Egypt, proving that foreigners could occupy ministerial positions.

There is a shell game scholars like Israel Finkelstein and Zahi Hawass (the most famous archeologists in Israel and Egypt, respectively) play, where they will state authoritatively that “there is no evidence for the Exodus narrative at all.” In one sense they are right: we do not have the documentation for the Exodus, the Conquest of Canaan, and the Davidic Kingdom that we do for, say, the Carolingians or even for the Romans. But these are apples and oranges. The absence of “smoking guns” is hardly proof that the Exodus did not happen, especially when taken with the literary fidelity of the Pentateuch. William G. Dever, himself quite critical of Albright and his School, has pointed out that the skepticism of these figures often borders on a wholesale destruction of methodological consistency, reducing the field to baseless speculation.

The reason Finkelstein and Hawass are as dogmatic as they are, and the reason controversy surrounds them, is that archeology always has political and historical implications. Were the Bible taken to provide a historical account of events like the Exodus, this obviously has significant implications in both Egypt and Israel, despite both of these nations being founded and led by nominally secular individuals.

Egypt would prefer to deny Exodus’s historicity for obvious reasons; in Israel’s case, the mainstream belief is that the Israelites were native to Canaan and never migrated into or conquered the land, at least not in the manner described by the Bible. That there are political reasons for these beliefs does not demonstrate that they are false, but it does offer an insight into the quizzical attitude of their proponents.

It is important to note that Albright and his School came about at the right time. The British Mandate in Palestine enabled a great deal of archeological research that would previously have been impossible due to the Ottoman bureaucracy, something Banks wrestled with extensively.

Exodus is merely one example — perhaps the most acrimonious, but certainly not unique in facing scholarly doubt of historical veracity. Despite prophecies of the death of Biblical Archeology, the field has advanced in vindicating the Bible’s historical plausibility with new evidence.

We may quickly forget that in living memory the Davidic Monarchy was seriously doubted by the “scholarly consensus,” particularly emanating from the Copenhagen School and figures like Thomas Thompson and Niels Lemche. As Thompson wrote in 1992:

It is out of the question that Saul, David, and Solomon, as described as kings in the Bible, could have existed. I think the biblical accounts are wonderful stories, invented at the time when Jerusalem was part of the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C.

A mere year later, the Tel Dan Stele was discovered, a stele fragment dated to the 9th century B.C., which bore the inscription House of David.

A scholarly theory was also put forward that if David was a real king, his reign was not significant. But this too was smashed in 2007. It was then that excavations had begun at the ruins of Khirbet Qeiyafa, a town near the location of David’s battle with Goliath. Archaeologists uncovered evidence that a significant administrative system developed during David’s reign. In a little over a decade, the load-bearing aspect of Julius Wellhausen’s doubt of Biblical veracity regarding the historical books was fatally undermined.

Archeology cannot “prove” the Bible. We know from Scripture itself that faith is a gift from God, and that its wisdom is foolishness to the world. That said, the history of Biblical Archeology is useful to us in a different way: it shows that the labor of the saints does not return void. Biblical Archeology has not and does not prove the Bible, but it does show how God humiliates the proud who believe they can disprove His Word.

The good news is that I got a job again. The flipside of that was that it required moving across the country. Completely uprooting oneself for zero job security except for the here and now. If you’ve been laid off more than once, you understand the fragility: you aren’t living on the edge exactly, but you get that nothing is certain anymore. For now, the job is as real as it can be, and the money hasn’t inflated away entirely; but within this poisoned chalice of life at an American tech company, a new evil lurks.

A.I.

I consider myself lucky. This company that I work for hasn’t gone completely as mad as some of the others you read about. We don’t have token-burning quotas to hit, but we certainly have to be using it. Of course no one is really sure how best to use it or what for, but those details are to be worked out through doing! I started off curious because I’d never really understood the allure of ChatGPT or its competitors before. After many months, I have to tell you that it’s basically a slightly better but more retarded search engine. That’s it.

Sure, some people will use it to write some code (it will have errors), others will use it to write emails (they will be long, verbose, and irritating to read, and may contain errors), others will use it to draft documents (inevitably these will contain errors), and still others will use it to create fun slide images for their PowerPoint presentations (that won’t contain errors but will look like they were designed by someone stuck in Web 2.0 design school).

There aren’t really any efficiency gains to be had, and a few recent examples of how colleagues have used A.I. have demonstrated this to me. I just had to endure a meeting from a senior leader. We’re talking an ex-Google type who pulls in probably 300–400k. A guy whose calendar is booked so full, it’s a wonder he can sit down to do any actual work. I know he’s actually pretty sharp, though, from conversing with him at happy hour; but even he is captured by the A.I. trap. This guy was showing us a presentation he had given and humblebragging about how he had used A.I. to help him: 15 iterations, he said it took — 15 iterations, and he still had to read it and check for hallucinations. That was just for the content of these slides (there were 14). He then spent more time finding an A.I. tool to make the slides for him. He seemed proud of himself. After all, he had wasted time and resources like never before to produce a slide deck and presentation content that a competent intern could have made. Our company, like many, has an internal templated slide deck formatted. It looks fine. It’s in the company colors and is functional. There is literally zero need to waste the time or money redesigning what we’ve already paid people to design, and most importantly, it creates a consistent design language across the company.

The obsession with slide decks is nothing new, either, I might add. Another senior leader made a joke during a presentation about how he had burned all his tokens by clicking “Beautify Slide” too many times. It looked hopelessly amateurish. This is the senior leadership, keep in mind, a level or two below the C-suite titles. The hype is everywhere, but you can’t speak out against it — oh, no, you are trapped in the room with these true believers, and it’s on a scale more intense than anything else I’ve seen in society. We all know what it is like not to be going along with Current Thing™ if you’re here reading this. We’ve learned to keep quiet at certain times when political topics come up, or, if we are brave, we know how to voice our opposition in a clever fashion to push back without opening the door to a witch hunt. With A.I., though, it’s different. Social or political issues are outside of your work life; many companies like this pay them lip service, and people just don’t bring up the topics as much as is made out. But the A.I. hype is now part of your job. You have to tell the Emperor how great his clothes are.

A.I. in the office represents a kind of great offloading effort that seems doomed to fail in the long run. It isn’t hard to see how we get from here to the society depicted in Idiocracy. You can instruct the chatbots to write your emails and produce your work, but you slowly stop thinking. Right now, people are still sharp enough to distrust the output, but that won’t last. People are inherently lazy and will default to the easy way out most of the time, especially when the incentives of the job push them to do so. A.I. promises that it can write the document faster based on some input, and so it is never that you are not giving direction, but your own thinking degrades. Perhaps you take the belief that this is all bullshit work (probably true) and so offloading this is fine — all the more time to write and post on Substack or X — but that isn’t how it works. In fact, we’re already all driven into the gym to try and get what they used to call “farm-boy strong.” What we do daily defines us, and if we offload our mental faculties entirely in one arena, they will suffer in another. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Companies and leadership don’t see that, though; they only see the hype and the insatiable need for short-term profitmaking.

There just isn’t that much that A.I. can do that you can’t already. The efficiency gains promised don’t seem to manifest themselves, either. I don’t see anything happening faster, and if I take what guys more senior than myself are telling me, they aren’t working any faster. I had to bite my tongue not to ask if he thought he would have produced the presentation faster just working as though A.I. didn’t exist. If doing his own research and writing would have been as quick as reviewing and correcting the A.I.’s. Ask any editor: it’s a harder, more thankless task than the actual writing itself most of the time. The last issue with A.I. that seems underdiscussed is its lack of precision and repeatability. Much of the modern world requires that. We need the same result to happen every time in the software that powers our airplanes. Not least because we’re diversifying our pilots!

Corporate America is still getting decidedly worse. We’re now dealing with the A.I. hypebeast, layoffs from greedy companies, and still continued H-1B visa fraud. A.I. represents the latest in the Ponzi scheme, but worst of all, there is simply no way to speak up against it inside the system. Truly, I feel like I’m going mad on a daily basis as people cook up insane justifications about this decidedly mediocre technology. No one wants to accept that the efficiency gains are all gone. We’re at a weird end of historical reality in the working world that people don’t want to accept. Maybe you think I’m a hater, a luddite, just rebelling against the status quo. That could be so, but I’m deep in the proverbial trenches of American tech, up close and personal. This wonder technology is far more impotent than it appears: its real promise, of course, is in empowering slop, but I think we all know that. The content online and offline will become more and more slop-like for as long as private equity subsidizes the cost of these models. Not only that, but we’ll have a new breed of lunatics unleashed. A.I. chat psychosis is both real and tragic. It’s convinced people to kill themselves and thus crosses into the spiritually evil territory.

There is some hope through all of this. Although I’m just another mostly cowardly corporate drone trying to hang on to the bag, I still attempt to speak up and challenge this insane A.I. dogma. I’m not alone, either. A.I.’s naturally pretty unpopular. Hard not to be when every CEO from an A.I. company is confidently predicting the end of white-collar work every 18 months in the same way our health class was constantly convinced it would only take two weeks to flatten the curve. This weird triumphalism makes no sense: like every person bathed in shitlibbery, they seem to struggle with second-order consequences. If every job is gone and automated, who exactly is going to be left paying your server bills? Complicated questions like this, of course, are never asked, because it’s really about a bait-and-switch. Get the public to buy the shares so that the investors can climb out of the hole. A.I. isn’t going anywhere, but a cynical CEO and the shareholder class still might lay you off again regardless.

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We have been told that America is coming to an end. Once President Newsom sweeps into power in 2028, it will be illegal to be straight, and shitposters will be herded into the gulags.

A storm is certainly coming. With many Republicans finally finding their balls and using every available legal avenue to shore up power, it is obvious that there will be no Kumbaya age of truth and reconciliation between red and blue America.

When you talk to normal red Americans who have never read Carl Schmitt, they have an instinctual understanding that a covert war is being waged against them from all angles. They also understand that failing to turn the tide of mass immigration will end our ability to control our own destiny.

If a storm is coming, we must fortify our shelters now. We will help our brothers elevate themselves into positions of authority in both the public and private sectors. We will build digital and physical infrastructure that cannot be destroyed by our enemies. We will build businesses that enrich ourselves and our allies, businesses that will never bend the knee to Leviathan.

Separately we would be considered hobbyists in our own respective interests; but a network of manufacturers, designers, artists, creators, musicians, editors, entrepreneurs, and legal experts all oriented toward common goals would be a powerful force. Moldbug’s Cathedral was built specifically in mind for resilience against enemy opposition. I propose that we build a Basilica. A Basilica is an honorary title given by the Pope to a church that has exceptional historical, spiritual, architectural, or liturgical importance. Our collection of institutions will work to honor our ancestors and the spirit of Western Civilization. Working together, we can render our enemies’ traditional legal and propaganda tools useless.

A group of ten thousand organized men can easily be a stronger force than one million people.

Those of us who can take risks should take risks.

Those of us who can build now should build now.

If no one takes risks or builds now, then we will not only become expatriates in our own nation, but our people will likely be ground down into dust by the onslaught of endless Third-World migration.

A common and valid concern among us is the potential social fallout if people in our personal lives discover what we actually believe. I will not advise that anyone try to “red-pill” his blue family or acquaintances. The demoralization and programming are so deeply ingrained in many of them that you will get nowhere. But I will say this: everyone who truly loves you will still love you even if it is revealed that you see the world differently from most people.

Our enemies often rely on institutional inertia alone to carry them. Their legitimacy and control of the situation rot on a daily basis. If the future belongs to those who show up, then it’s time for us to show up.

I build now because of my love for America, Americans, and my brothers. I cannot live any other way. I will fight and build and scratch and claw until my last breath.

I will help build an eternal White Boy Summer.

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Fine. Good. Let it burn a little.

Asking whether all this is “good” or “bad” already concedes the field. That is spectator talk. A development arrives, obviously real, obviously large, obviously rearranging the material landscape, and the only available response is to stand at a safe distance and render a verdict over it, as though history were a restaurant dish that can be sent back to the kitchen for being overcooked.

History offers no such service. The buildout is here. The compute is here. The models are here. The capital has already moved. The state will posture, the utilities will panic, the locals will object, the consultants will multiply, the debt will wobble, and the machines will keep arriving anyway. The operative question is simpler: How can these developments be used in our favor?

That question continues the prior argument.

The first piece in this series argued that there is no coherent national “scene” from which a political future can simply be recovered. The second argued that meaningful productive entry into much of American life has been enclosed by charters, licenses, inspection regimes, permitting timelines, zoning, compliance overhead, and incumbent protection. The practical effect is simple enough: there are a great many things one is constantly told to build, almost none of which one is actually permitted to build at meaningful scale.

So the next question was always going to be: Where, precisely, has the wall cracked?

Artificial intelligence is one answer, though in a narrower and more material sense than the usual chatter allows. Leave aside “start an AI company,” “prompt engineering,” and the usual parade of men with haunted eyes announcing the future of productivity from a stage made of LED panels and venture debt. The real opening is more concrete.

At the individual level, AI adoption has been almost frictionless. A writer, programmer, analyst, researcher, operator, or mediocre middle manager can sit down in front of a model and get immediate leverage. A single person can couple judgment to action very quickly. The machine drafts, searches, summarizes, compares, reformulates, translates, organizes. Even when it fails, it fails in a way that produces useful pressure on the user’s own thinking. The individual can use it because the individual can decide to use it.

The solitary user already possesses the one thing the enterprise withholds from itself: immediate discretion. He can decide that a draft is good enough, that an answer is useful enough, that the machine may be trusted for this small next move. He risks his own embarrassment, his own time, maybe his own job. The blast radius remains human-scale. The institution is haunted by scale. Every workflow touches another workflow. Every record mutates another record. Every convenience becomes precedent the moment it works twice.

Inside enterprise systems, the same tool suddenly meets jurisdiction. Value appears only when the model reaches from language into records, approvals, payment status, inventory, claims, scheduling, code deployment, procurement, maintenance logs. Every useful crossing touches a boundary someone already owns. The model hovers over the institution like a clerk without keys. It can see enough to tantalize and never enough to govern the thing.

That blockage only looks technical at first glance. For thirty years the valley has sold the same catechism: cybernetics, markets, countercultural incense, and the promise that history will sort itself out if enough tools are shipped. Product replaces politics. Choice among platforms replaces argument over ends. The pitch remains libertarian at the surface and managerial underneath. Everybody gets to feel emancipated while somebody else quietly fixes the permissions. The anti-state music still plays even when the whole performance depends on subsidies, research grants, procurement, easements, tax deals, grid upgrades, and friendly sovereign power.

The same mechanism leaves the rest of the economy feeling dead from the inside. The large firm is an accumulated political settlement among departments, vendors, databases, legal teams, compliance offices, procurement rules, internal empires, overlapping chains of custody, and managerial habits nobody entirely understands but everyone has learned not to disturb. A bureaucracy is a memory machine with stamps. The model enters a bureaucracy, not a frontier.

Once a model has been threaded into that environment, vocabulary hardens into infrastructure. “Approval,” “exception,” “customer,” “risk,” “ship,” “escalate,” “safe,” “authorized” cease to be descriptive terms. They become gates. Whoever fixes the schema fixes the range of admissible action. Legal, security, IT, procurement, compliance, HR, and middle management are fighting over operational meaning, over which actions will exist for the system at all. What looks like workflow design is often a machine-readable ordering of what can count within the firm.

Here lies the enterprise AI puzzle. Intelligence can be rented by the month. Agency must be granted by an institution that no longer trusts its own interior. Every serious use case therefore arrives as a jurisdictional dispute.

That dispute is rarely staged honestly. The official language is always narrower than the real conflict. One hears about governance, safety, change management, data quality, acceptable use, model risk. All real enough. Yet beneath those proper administrative nouns sits a cruder problem: no one wants to discover, in a way that can be audited later, how much of the institution still depends on undocumented habits, tolerated workarounds, personal memory, and people who know where the body is buried in a spreadsheet nobody was ever supposed to use as a system of record. AI is threatening partly because it is powerful, but more because it is illuminating. To make the model useful, the firm must expose itself to itself. That exposure can be more frightening than the model’s mistakes.

The result is predictable. Enterprise AI gets defanged into a sandbox. It assists, suggests, summarizes, decorates, drafts talking points, generates the sort of bloodless internal memo no human should have had to write in the first place. The line is drawn at action. Firms announce “AI integration” while carefully ensuring that nothing structurally important is permitted to happen. The Californian sermon promises liberation. The actual delivery mechanism is another layer of controlled access.

This should sound familiar, because it is the internal analogue of the external permission economy described in the previous essay. There, the barriers were charters, licenses, federal inspection, zoning, permitting, capital requirements, compliance architecture, and incumbent capture. Here, the barriers are permissions, audit rules, system fragmentation, liability exposure, vendor lock-in, records obligations, semantic drift between departments, and the fear of making legible just how little command the institution actually has over itself.

Same disease. Different scale. The old ideology promised that technology would dissolve politics into networks and markets. In practice it carried the fight over power deeper into the machine.

Spectator questions miss the point. The builder’s question is narrower and more serious: Where does this institutional friction generate a market that did not exist before?

Large institutions cannot simply hand authority to a model and hope for the best. If the AI misprices risk, violates a contract, leaks customer data, fabricates a compliance answer, discriminates in hiring, approves the wrong payment, miscites a policy, gives bad medical guidance, or writes a workflow change that later becomes evidence in litigation, someone must be responsible. Operationally. Legally. Financially.

This creates fear inside the enterprise, but fear is often just a market waiting to be named properly. The sales pitch around AI depends on a cultivated amnesia about institutions: every inherited procedure is treated as deadweight until the first bad output, the first bad trade, the first fabricated note, the first compliance failure, the first lawsuit. Then everybody rediscovers that old arrangements, however ugly, were carrying accountability somewhere in their wiring.

The new entrant can enter through the liability layer. He does not need to be the foundation-model company, own the whole enterprise software stack, or displace the incumbent’s core business. He makes AI action legible, auditable, reversible, permissioned, insurable, and limited to the domains where a human institution can actually tolerate delegated machine behavior.

That means audit trails. Review systems. Permission layers for agents. Escalation chains. Model-behavior logging. Risk-scored automation. Compliance wrappers. Chain-of-custody records for AI decisions. Warranty structures. Sector-specific deployment standards. Unglamorous work. Real work.

Liability does not merely slow AI adoption. Liability creates demand for an intermediary class capable of translating raw model capability into institutionally acceptable action.

This is where a great deal of stupid conversation dies. Men keep asking whether “the AI” will replace lawyers, claims adjusters, paralegals, compliance analysts, underwriters, schedulers, coders, case workers, procurement staff, as though historical change arrives by one object displacing one profession in a neat row of dominoes. What arrives first is a reorganization of supervision. Before a machine takes the chair, it changes who has to sign, who has to review, who owns the exception queue, who must explain a bad outcome to someone with subpoena power. The labor shift begins as a liability shift. That is one reason the implementation layer has room to exist.

Every large organization is a ruin pretending to be a system. Legacy software. Half-finished migrations. Custom databases nobody wants to document. SharePoint graveyards. Vendor APIs with ancient authentication schemes. Local spreadsheets functioning as shadow sovereigns over departments that officially deny their existence. Email chains standing in for process. Ticketing systems disconnected from records systems. Records systems disconnected from billing. Billing disconnected from operations. Operations disconnected from reality.

An AI system is only as useful as the systems it can safely touch. The implementation problem is straightforward to state: How do you build connective tissue between intelligence and institutional action without blowing a hole in records control, legal exposure, or operational continuity?

There sits the business.

The entrant who solves it is selling orchestration, translation, mapping, normalization, retrieval, connector architecture, workflow repair, and actionability. He is building the narrow bridge between a model that can reason and an institution that cannot move.

At this point ontology re-enters by the side door. The problem is not merely that one system cannot talk to another. The problem is that they do not agree on what the objects are. What one database calls a customer, another calls an account holder, another calls a party, another calls a user, another calls an entity, another calls a beneficiary; another silently splits into household, contact, legal person, device ID, tax record, and billing relationship. A workflow is not jammed only because the pipes are disconnected. It is jammed because the nouns are unstable. Any firm that can stabilize the nouns long enough for action to travel across them is doing more than integration work. It is imposing a temporary world inside the enterprise, a practical ontology of what exists there and what may be done to it. That is why these boring connective businesses can become strategically important so quickly.

This also explains why so many enterprise demos feel fraudulent. They present the machine as though it were floating above the firm in a layer of immaculate intelligence, untroubled by nomenclature, entitlement conflicts, stale records, duplicate entities, contradictory clocks, or the ordinary administrative ugliness through which large organizations actually know themselves. The ugly layer is the decisive one. Intelligence without alignment to records, permissions, and categories remains ornamental. The market opening lies where ornamental intelligence becomes boringly reliable enough to touch the file.

The opportunity sits here. The enclosed economy still makes frontal assault difficult. You are not just casually going to start a bank, replace a hospital chain, rebuild domestic manufacturing from a garage, or out-charter the chartered. The better path runs by adjacency. Leave the charter where it is and build the AI compliance, fraud-review, underwriting-support, document-processing, or back-office coordination layer the bank cannot construct without help. Leave the hospital chain where it is and build the workflow, records, scheduling, claims, triage, or liability-management layer it cannot safely improvise. Leave the factory floor where it is and build the procurement, inventory, maintenance, supplier-intelligence, or quality-control layer that lets actual productive intelligence touch operations. Leave the insurer in place and build the review, comparison, documentation, or exception-handling layer that lets machine reasoning operate inside a regulated environment without detonating it.

Adjacency has another advantage: it lets a small entrant accumulate the one thing incumbents can no longer fabricate on command: situated operational knowledge. The bank knows banking, yes, but often not its own process architecture except as inherited sediment. The hospital knows medicine, yes, but not necessarily where scheduling, claims, notes, billing, triage, consent, and follow-up break against each other in the daily weather of the place. A focused entrant working in the seam can learn the seam faster than the institution can relearn itself. That knowledge compounds. By the fifth or sixth deployment, the entrant has something much closer to a transportable method than a one-off service engagement. That is how a small intermediary becomes hard to dislodge.

Call it entry by adjacency rather than frontal assault. The cartel state is very good at preventing new actors from replacing incumbents directly. It is, at least for the moment, much worse at preventing new actors from becoming necessary to incumbents who can no longer metabolize change on their own.

There is the crack in the wall.

And it is historically unusual because the same complexity that protected incumbents for decades is now turning against them. For a long time, institutional sclerosis could function defensively. Slow processes, compliance overhead, vendor lock-in, internal complexity, fractured permissions, and bureaucratic obesity all worked as moats. New entrants were kept out because the terrain was too expensive, too slow, too opaque, or too regulated to cross cleanly.

AI changes the polarity of that complexity.

Now the incumbent’s moat is also a prison. He has the data, but not in usable form. He has the workflows, but not clearly mapped. He has the customers, but not the flexibility to reorganize around a new productive tool. He has software contracts, but not interconnection. He has compliance departments, but not liability architecture for AI action. He has budget, but not agency.

So for the first time in decades, the enclosed economy actually needs help from outside itself.

Read the hysteria around data centers carefully. The panic proves that the technology has reached the real economy. Once a thing starts demanding land, power, cooling, substations, permits, legal review, public resistance management, workflow redesign, liability structures, and new organizational forms, it has ceased to be a novelty. It has become an industrial fact.

The naïve observer sees friction and concludes failure. The more serious observer sees friction and asks where the bottlenecks will produce a new class of firms.

The social question returns here.

The relevant unit for this opening is probably a small group. Giant firms move too slowly. The isolated genius breaks too easily. The work described here requires trust, discretion, speed, technical competence, tolerance for ambiguity, and the ability to move inside broken institutions without becoming trapped in their brokenness. It requires people who can see a workflow, a records chain, a liability boundary, an access problem, a permissions map, and an implementation failure as one connected terrain rather than as separate departmental concerns.

That kind of action is usually taken by small groups before it is taken by large organizations. A few serious people who trust one another can often move through a frozen institution more effectively than a hundred internal stakeholders who do not. A compact group can stay close to the actual problem. It can identify the exposed gate, the unguarded supply line, the process nobody inside the castle understands anymore, and it can build exactly enough connective tissue to make the thing move.

This is one reason the club argument from the earlier essays returns with more force here than in most ordinary business writing. Enterprise software people love to pretend that talent is a market like wheat. Post the role, run the process, sort the candidates, grant the options, and capability arrives. Sometimes it does. More often, the decisive work requires preexisting trust of a kind no hiring funnel can manufacture quickly. Someone must be willing to let another man touch a sensitive workflow, map an ugly process, speak plainly about hidden dependencies, and fix a thing without using the occasion to build an empire of bullshit around it. That is not just technical trust. It is moral trust, or near enough.

The market recognizes this only after the fact. Then the language changes: founder-market fit, domain intimacy, embedded teams, technical depth, execution culture. A swamp of euphemism. What they are circling is older than venture capital: a compact formation of people who know one another’s strengths, keep confidence, distribute spoils in a way the group can bear, and retain enough shared memory to move fast without constant internal litigation. That is the startup form when it ceases to be theater.

Call it a startup if you need the modern word. I care more about the form. The form is older than venture capital and more durable than most corporations: a small, trust-bound body organized around competence, risk, shared upside, and repeated proof of reliability. No mass coalition. No national faction. No scene. A band.

The club form earns its keep here. The club is where operational trust accumulates before the market names the need. It is where men learn who can actually do what, who keeps confidence, who folds under pressure, who can explain a technical system without lying about its limits, who can enter a room full of institutional nonsense and come back with the one real lever. That kind of knowledge does not appear on a credentialing rubric. It accumulates through repeated contact.

The state can regulate a charter, a permit, a plant, a license, a filing, a securities offering, a payroll tax account. It has a harder time regulating the prior social technology out of which competent action emerges: a small body of people with shared interests, growing trust, operational memory, and enough seriousness to recognize when a wall has cracked.

Which returns us to the beginning.

“Data centers good or bad” is unserious because it treats a strategic development as a morality play. History does not require our approval. It requires that we notice where a channel has opened.

The model companies will do what they do. The utilities will do what they do. The state will do what it does worst. The incumbents will resist, posture, procure, delay, and eventually capitulate in the most expensive way available to them. None of that is our decision.

Our question is narrower. Where is intelligence trying to become action, being blocked by liability, interconnectivity, permissions, and institutional fear? What is the smallest competent formation that can enter that gap and make itself necessary? What can be built in the cracks before the cracks are paved over?

That question is worth asking now.

Look what time it is.

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Do I need to go here? I wish I did not need to go here, but I have come to the conclusion that one thing the American Right does not have is a knowledge-retention mechanism. We reinvent the wheel every two or three years for reasons I do not even want to get into here. But all of this “Patriotards” vs. “Hardboners” nonsense has reminded me that nobody remembers even the first principles.

The claim is often dismissed as rhetorical excess. “We live in a communist country” is the kind of thing someone says when he’s angry about property taxes or health insurance premiums, and it usually functions as an expression of frustration rather than a description of the economy. Fine. Let us investigate the claim anyway. I want to press it to its structural conclusion, because I think that the conclusion is eerily real, and because seeing it clearly changes how productive action is understood. Plus, it never hurts us to “get back to the basics.”

Our crucible is simple. Pick any productive sector outside of software, meaning any sector that requires physical inputs, material processes, capital equipment, or in Western alchemical terms the “transmutation” of matter, and try to enter it as a new actor. Not at the hobbyist level. Cringewalker can make biofuel bacteria with his mail-in kit and his Claude Code $20 plan for all eternity without denting the “enterprise” market. I am talking about entering an industry sector at the level of a business that employs people at meaningful wages and generates sufficient return to justify shouldering the risk on its own terms. Try this in finance. Try it in food production. Try it in manufacturing. Come back and tell us what you find.

All right, let’s drill down.

The banking question is maybe the easiest place to start, because the “numbers” tell the story most cleanly. From 2000 through 2009, American regulators chartered an average of 132 new banks per year, more than 1,300 in ten years. By early 2024, only 84 new banks had been chartered since 2010. Total. Roughly six per year, and there were stretches in there where the number flatlined at zero. The system did not stop producing new banks because Americans stopped wanting to get into banking. If anything, the opposite is true. It stopped because the barriers to entry were already severe before 2008 and became near-absolute afterward.1

Securing a banking charter in the United States now means clearing a serious threshold before a single transaction has been done, before there is one depositor, before a single account has been opened. Somewhere between $10 million and $30 million in paid-in capital is generally required, depending on the type of charter being sought and the regulators involved: the OCC for a national bank, a state banking commission for a state charter, the Fed for access to its systems, the FDIC for insured deposits, and insured deposits are the whole point. These are not neat sequential steps that can be optimized. They are overlapping approval processes run by separate agencies with separate priorities and separate clocks. The FDIC alone has a de novo handbook running to dozens of pages, complete with a section on how to demonstrate that a leadership team has sufficient banking experience to receive the charter that would give it banking experience.2

Under all of this sits the Basel framework for capital adequacy: international banking standards written by a committee drawn from the jurisdictions that already dominate global finance, implemented domestically by regulators who circulate through that same world, and structured so that larger institutions can hold capital against risk more efficiently than smaller ones. Scale is not an accidental byproduct of the compliance architecture. It is one of the things the architecture rewards.3

If the charter problem is routed around, if the attempt is to build something that moves money without technically being a bank, a different wall appears. Payment services require money transmitter licenses. There is no federal money transmitter license. There are 53 jurisdictions with separate licensing regimes: 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam. And 49 of the 50 states require a license; Montana is the lone holdout. The fixed costs of obtaining licenses across all 53 jurisdictions, just the state fees, the surety bonds, the applications, run between $250,000 and $350,000. Add legal counsel, compliance infrastructure, and the annual maintenance cost of holding those licenses, around $225,000 per year before transaction volume starts driving up bond requirements, and the figure is well over $1 million before a single dollar has been moved for a single customer. The compliance regime is the business model: for the law firms and compliance vendors who service it, a stream of fees; for everyone else, a wall.4

The fintech “solution” to all of this, presented with great enthusiasm at every conference and in every pitch deck, is: partner with a bank. Rent the charter. Build the product on top of someone else’s regulatory house. This is accurate, as far as it goes. Structurally, what it means is that every genuinely innovative entrant in financial services is a permanent tenant, dependent on an incumbent for the license that lets him operate, paying rent in the form of fees and data, and subject to eviction if the incumbent decides that the product is now something that it would prefer to build itself. The fintech “revolution” — nobody mention this — is a revolution that happens inside a house owned by Chase.5

Food production has a different texture to it, and in some ways a more visceral one, because what we are talking about is whether a person can raise an animal, slaughter it, and sell it to another person who wants to eat it. The answer, at any meaningful scale, is: not really.

The mechanism here is continuous federal inspection. Any facility that processes poultry or red meat for commercial sale, not for subsistence or personal use, requires a USDA inspector to be physically present during operating hours in the parts of the process that legally require inspection. This sounds like a reasonable food-safety measure. In practice, it means that the economics of small-scale meat processing are heavily controlled by whether federal inspection can be attracted, retained, scheduled, and absorbed at a throughput small plants often cannot make pay. As a result, the number of federally inspected livestock processing facilities declined sharply across the second half of the 20th century, and what we are left with is a processing infrastructure concentrated almost entirely in the hands of a few enormous operators: as of 2022, 12 federally inspected plants produced slightly under half of the country’s beef supply; 14 plants produced roughly 60% of its pork; 4 companies — Tyson, JBS, Cargill, National Beef — control approximately 85% of beef processing.6

Only 12 buildings produce half of America’s beef. Nothing like “competition” in the imagined sense produces this kind of consolidation. What produces it is a regulatory regime selecting for scale, then incumbents lobbying to preserve the conditions that favor them. The Biden administration, to its credit, recognized this and announced roughly $1 billion in programs meant to rebuild small and mid-size processing capacity. The program was contested, slow to disburse, and operated against the headwind of the very incumbents whose position depends on the infrastructure remaining what it is. You do not fix a moat with a bucket.7

If food is produced and sold without going through that processing apparatus, through cottage-food, direct-to-consumer, or farmers-market channels, most states will allow it up to a revenue cap that very often still lands in the low five figures. Subsistence, not a business. The moment the threshold is crossed that would make the operation worth doing, the moment it would support a hire, a building, a future, the compliance regime designed by the people already occupying the shelf space arrives. The moment of crossing that threshold is the moment the cartel reasserts itself. Smallness is permitted. Growth is not.8

Manufacturing is the sector where the regulatory problem compounds most visibly with the trade problem, and where the compounding has been most catastrophic for actual American communities. Between 2000 and 2010, the United States lost nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs, one of the largest and fastest sectoral collapses in the history of a developed economy. The “China shock” literature in economics estimates that Chinese import competition accounts for somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of those losses, which means the rest came from somewhere else: automation, yes, but also the accumulated weight of a compliance environment that made domestic manufacturing structurally more expensive than its foreign competitors, who did not operate under the same rules.9

On CEQ’s own government-wide data for the 2010s, the environmental permitting process for a new manufacturing facility involving emissions, chemical processes, or effluent discharge averaged 4.5 years from initiation to completion. The environmental impact statement itself averaged over 600 pages. In transportation and infrastructure work with a federal hook, agency-specific averages pushed past 7 years, and some reviews took a decade or more. Carrying costs, legal fees, and compliance staff accumulate for 4 to 7 years before the facility has produced a single unit of output. The competitor in Guangdong does not carry the same burden.10

This is the regulatory asymmetry sitting underneath the job-loss numbers. Chinese labor was cheaper, in the early 2000s dramatically so. But the total cost of operating in the United States, compliance costs, permitting timelines, environmental liability, land-use restrictions, OSHA requirements, and the labor premium made the landed cost of Chinese goods competitive even accounting for shipping, tariffs, and supply-chain risk. Chinese wages did not have to be matched in order to be undercut. It was enough to face a regulatory burden the competitor did not face.

Zoning is where this gets operationally concrete. Light industrial and heavy industrial land classifications, the land on which manufacturing actually happens, are a shrinking and politically contested category in many American municipalities. Real-estate pressure pushes that land toward logistics, retail, institutional, or residential conversion. Local governments like tax revenue that arrives without too much noise, smell, truck traffic, particulate, or organized neighborhood resistance. A manufacturing plant rarely offers them that. The result is that industrial land in many metro areas is being converted away at the margin, while genuinely new industrial land is designated only fitfully, if at all.11

What has been eliminated, specifically, is the middle. Large, legacy manufacturing operations with capital sunk over decades can absorb the compliance overhead. Very small artisan producers operate below the thresholds where the heaviest burden kicks in. What has been made essentially impossible is the factory employing 50 to 200 people, making something durable at a price that can compete with imports, selling it domestically. That entity, the backbone of American industrial capacity for most of the 20th century and the institutional base of the American working class, is not merely struggling; it has been progressively excluded from the possibility of existence by the intersection of compliance costs, land-use attrition, and regulatory asymmetry with producers operating outside the same regime. That this is treated as a natural fact of economic life, rather than a policy result, is itself a measure of how completely the apparatus has colonized the imagination of the people who write about it.

Software, at this point, appears to refute everything I have just said. In a narrow sense, it does. A software company can be started with a laptop, a credit card, and a willingness to forego sleep. The barriers to entry are near zero. Capital requirements are effectively zero for a first product. There is no EPA permit for a mobile application. The FDA does not inspect a codebase. OSHA does not care about a standup meeting. This is all true.

It is true because software occupied, for several decades, a regulatory gap. The product is not a “good” in the legal sense that triggers most commercial regulation. It produces no physical emissions. It does not employ workers in environments where they can be injured by machinery. It does not process food. It did not initially move money in the ways the existing financial-regulatory regime had been built to supervise. Software was, for a while, the one productive sector where the full weight of the apparatus had not yet landed.

That frontier is being fenced. GDPR established that software handling personal data is subject to comprehensive regulatory oversight. The SEC’s treatment of crypto established that software moving value is subject to financial regulation. The FDA’s guidance on software as a medical device established that software making clinical decisions requires certification. AI legislation in Europe is already law, and multiple jurisdictions are moving toward treating AI systems as regulated products. The apparatus is not slow to recognize an escape route. Give it a productive sector that slipped past the first time, and it will close the gap.12

More subtly, the winner-takes-all dynamics of software markets mean that what looks like dynamism is often a rapid consolidation process. The software frontier produced Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft as the de facto infrastructure of the digital economy within roughly 30 years. New software companies now largely operate within or beneath those five platforms, paying rent to them in the form of app-store fees, cloud margins, and advertising dependency. The frontier produced a new oligopoly faster than any prior sector. When the regulatory apparatus finishes closing around it, it will find the incumbents already entrenched and privately relieved.13

So, what is the name for this? The standard communist economy features state ownership of the means of production. Private property in the United States is real. The owner of a manufacturing plant owns it. The holder of a bank charter owns it. No state official comes to take the factory.

What the United States has instead is something more sophisticated and more durable: state control of entry into productive activity, combined with private capture of the profits once entry is permitted. The regulatory apparatus functions not as a production system but as a moat. It was designed, is maintained, and is periodically deepened by the incumbents it ostensibly regulates. They understood this early, which is why they supported the regulations, and they knew that the most durable competitive advantage is not innovation or efficiency but the exclusion of new competitors by administrative fiat. You do not need to be the best bank if no new banks are being chartered. You do not need to make better beef if the processing infrastructure required to bring a competitor’s beef to market does not exist.

Call it cartelism: licensed private monopoly, in which the state provides the enforcement mechanism and the incumbents provide the political support to sustain it. The vocabulary of capitalism is preserved: private property, free enterprise, competition, market. The substance has been replaced. What can be called a free market is not what functions as one. The entrepreneur who actually tries to build at meaningful scale discovers that every productive sector requires prior permission from a regulatory apparatus structurally disposed against granting it.

The comparison to communism holds in the one place that matters. In a communist economy, the state controls who produces what. In a cartel economy, incumbents control who competes with them, using the state as their instrument. The outcome is the same: entry into meaningful productive activity is controlled, and the control is exercised according to political rather than economic logic. The difference — and this is the part that should make a man angrier, not less — is that in communism the state captures the surplus. In cartelism, private incumbents capture the surplus while the coercive apparatus is provided at public expense. The losses are socialized. The gains are private. The barrier is maintained by everyone’s government on behalf of a small number of existing actors. This is, if pressed, the worse arrangement.

In 1971, George Stigler published “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” a short paper, the kind that ages well, with a thesis that was understood at the time as provocative and has since been confirmed so thoroughly that it now functions as baseline description rather than hypothesis. The thesis: regulation is not designed by the public to protect itself from industry; regulation is acquired by industry, designed by industry, and operated primarily for industry’s benefit. The regulatory agency begins as a check on the sector it governs and ends as its instrument. Stigler called this regulatory capture, won a Nobel Prize partly on the strength of that line of work, and then got to watch the next 50 years make his point for him.14

Mancur Olson, a decade later, took the argument further and wider, as seen in his thesis in The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982): stable societies accumulate what he called distributional coalitions, organized interest groups, industry associations, licensing boards, professional guilds, regulatory agencies populated by industry veterans, that are much better at capturing policy than they are at creating economic value. These coalitions exist to protect rents, which they do by erecting barriers that exclude new competitors, and they compound over time. The older and more stable the society, the more thoroughly its productive apparatus has been colonized by entities whose primary function is to prevent competition rather than conduct it. He called the result institutional sclerosis. His standard comparisons were postwar Germany and Japan, whose distributional coalitions had been shattered by military defeat, against countries like the United States and Britain, whose coalitions survived intact and kept accumulating weight.15

The United States has been stable for 80 years. We have had no structural disruption sufficient to clear the accumulated coalitions. What Olson predicted for societies in our position is very close to what we have. The financial industry does not need to compete for new charters because the chartering process is administered through institutions saturated with the financial industry’s own expertise, personnel, and assumptions. The four meat-processing conglomerates do not need to compete with small processors because the inspection and throughput infrastructure that would permit small processors to operate at scale has been allowed to wither under rules the large firms can absorb. The permitting timeline for a new manufacturing facility is not just bureaucratic sloth. It is also protection for the capital value of what already exists. Stigler’s capture and Olson’s sclerosis are the same process at different timescales, not two separate phenomena. Capture is what happens when a regulatory agency is colonized by a single industry over the course of a generation. Sclerosis is what happens when enough agencies have been captured over enough generations that the economy as a whole has lost the capacity for structural renewal. By the charter numbers and the processing numbers and the permitting timelines and the manufacturing job losses, we are well out toward the sclerotic end of that process.16

Which leaves a question almost more disorienting than the diagnosis itself: Why does no one act like it? The vocabulary of American entrepreneurial capitalism, the small manufacturer, the local bank, the family farm, the man who built something from nothing, remains entirely intact. Politicians of both parties campaign on it. Business schools teach it. The mythology of the self-made man is, if anything, more aggressively promoted now than it was 50 years ago, exactly as the structural conditions that once made it plausible were being dismantled. Koselleck’s distinction between Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation applies here in a more concrete register. When the Space of Experience no longer reliably generates a Horizon of Expectation, people substitute the memory of what was once possible for a genuine account of what is actually available. The expectation that a meaningful business can still be started in finance, food, or manufacturing is a relic, not a plan: the memory of a productive environment the regulatory apparatus has since foreclosed, preserved in the culture because the mythology is politically useful and the admission that it has become mythology is politically costly. The map is still being distributed. The territory it describes was rezoned decades ago.

The standard political response to this diagnosis, when it is made at all, is to propose deregulation. The regulatory apparatus is an ecosystem, not a garden to be pruned back by politicians with the right inclinations. The incumbents who depend on it have the resources, the political relationships, and the regulatory expertise to ensure that deregulatory efforts, when they succeed at all, succeed in ways that benefit the existing large players rather than enabling new entrants. You do not dismantle a moat by changing the sign on the gate.

What this means practically is specific. Any attempt to employ 50 people making something physical is going to run into every wall described above. Any attempt to build a bank, or a food-processing operation, or a manufacturing facility with an industrial footprint runs into entry requirements calibrated to keep new actors out. Terrain information, not despair. A mined field is not crossed because it ought to be crossable. The mines are mapped, and action is taken accordingly.

What is outside the effective reach of the cartel state is, specifically, what cannot be registered, inspected, licensed, or commodified in the standard sense. Relationships. Accumulated judgment about who can be trusted to do what under pressure. The capacity to organize effort around shared interests without going through a regulated structure to do it. The intellectual and cultural production that moves in registers the compliance apparatus was not designed to track: not because those things are economically marginal, but because the instruments of control are calibrated for physical goods, financial flows, and registered entities. What the club produces is none of those things. What it produces does not appear on a balance sheet and does not require a charter. It is, for exactly that reason, the one productive structure in this analysis that the cartel cannot capture by making the minimum capital requirement prohibitive.

In a landscape where meaningful productive entry has been foreclosed sector by sector, what accumulates freely is the kind of production that requires only judgment, trust, and repeated contact. The club form emerges here as a nucleus for exactly that reason. The economic terrain confirms it from the outside: the cartel state cannot capture what does not require a charter, cannot exclude what does not require a license, cannot foreclose what compounds through repeated contact rather than registered capital. The conditions make this more valuable than it appears.

Look what time it is.

Nichols has some notable entries in his catalog which showcase slices of Americana, such as Shotgun Stories (2007) and Mud (2012). The premise of The Bikeriders is loosely borrowed from a photo book by Danny Lyon, who followed the Outlaws Motorcycle Club from 1963 to 1967. The Bikeriders shows how an organism can form into a coherent movement that represents a genuine counterculture while expressing the devastating consequences when an organism is not gatekept from outsiders and bad actors, when the guard is let down, when a back-bench isn’t cultivated and developed, and when poison within the outfit is not dealt with and is instead allowed to permeate, resulting in death. The Bikeriders showcases the lifespan of a living thing, depicting the germination, ascendancy, corruption, and death of a living entity. A cautionary tale’s cautionary tale.

We the audience are shown different perspectives of the Vandals Motorcycle Club. One is that of the photographer himself, Danny Lyon (Mike Faist). Another is from Kathy (Jodie Comer), who is pulled into the orbit of the gang by Benny (Austin Butler). Kathy’s eyes come upon Benny, and she is so attracted and absorbed by his presence and attitude that she would not be able to stay away from him if the National Guard marched on her. Kathy speaks punitively of Benny, but it serves as comedy because of how primally attracted to him she is. Benny is a true outlaw. His motorcycle is a vehicle for his freedom, and his bike might as well be a part of his body. Riding is the only thing he truly loves — one of the few instances we see of any emotion from him is when he’s injured and told by a doctor that he may never ride again. Benny, while embodying the outlaw spirit, fits within the Vandals because he so embodies the spirit or Geist of the organism, standing outside the world 1960s America was offering. Kathy provides us with an outside, yet inside view of the group, detached yet connected. We see Kathy start to dress like the group. She begins to adopt some of its practices and coding. She adapts to it; the Vandals do not bend to her.

We also meet Johnny (Tom Hardy), the founder and leader of the Vandals. Johnny was inspired to create the Vandals after seeing Marlon Brando in the film The Wild One. The attraction and gravitational pull Johnny has to Brando’s character is similar to the attraction Kathy has to Benny — not sexually, of course, but as an embodiment of what his soul is craving. The Wild One serves as a representation of an outlaw tendency and free spirit that is only contained by the gang that Johnny creates. He had not seen this spirit represented until viewing the film, and once he has seen it, Johnny has his direction; there is no turning back.

While Johnny is clearly the alpha of the group, his leadership is challenged at times. When one of the Vandals wants to start a branch chapter in another town, Johnny refuses. When the member doesn’t relent, a fistfight ensues, which Johnny wins. Johnny then grants his fellow Vandal’s request to start the branch. When the fight is over, it is over, almost as though it did not occur, and the two remain brothers. This behavior is unconscionable to Materialist American society today. In an organic society, this is how men would settle things, but in a Liberal and therefore feminized one, this kind of behavior is not tolerated because the use of violence and force in any circumstance is “evil” and “immoral.” This fight serves not only to reassert Johnny’s authority as Sovereign, but also to prove that his brother/challenger will act and lead the new chapter. Order is maintained; the Hierarchy and Leadership are defined from this rite of passage custom. From here, the gang expands and begins to thrive with new chapters forming throughout the Midwest. But accompanying this growth are more threats, potential pitfalls, and dangers to the organism. Francis Parker Yockey expresses how the Feminized Liberal Paradigm corrupts natural masculine behavior and therefore cultural order:

The inexorable movement of Time, Destiny, History, the cruelty of accomplishment, sternness, heroism, sacrifice, superpersonal ideas — these are the enemy. Liberalism is an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity into femininity, from History to herd-grazing, from reality into herbivorous dreams, from Destiny into Happiness. Nietzsche, in his last and greatest work, designated the 18th century as the century of feminism, and immediately mentioned Rousseau, the leader of the mass-escape from Reality. Feminism itself — what is it but a means of feminizing man? If it makes women man-like, it does so only by transforming man first into a creature whose only concern is with his personal economics and his relation to “society,” i.e., a woman. “Society” is the element of woman, it is static and formal, its contests are purely personal, and are free from the possibility of heroism and violence. Conversation, not action; formality, not deeds. How different is the idea of rank used in connection with a social affair, from when it is applied on a battlefield! In the field, it is fate-laden; in the salon it is vain and pompous. A war is fought for control, social contests are inspired by feminine vanity and jealousy to show that one is “better” than someone else.

And yet what does Liberalism do ultimately to woman: it puts a uniform on her and calls her a “soldier.” This ridiculous performance but illustrates the eternal fact that History is masculine, that its stern demands cannot be evaded, that the fundamental realities cannot be renounced, even, by the most elaborate make-believe. Liberalistic tampering with sexual polarity only wreaks havoc on the souls of individuals, confusing and distorting them, but the man-woman and the woman-man it creates are both subject to the higher Destiny of History.1

We then meet a delinquent who is never named, just called “the Kid.” We are shown his horrid homelife in how his parents treat each other and neglect raising him, and “the Kid” unsurprisingly engages in criminal behavior. While stealing hubcaps and presumably also trying to break into cars with his crew of hoodlums, he sees the Vandals riding down the street and becomes transfixed. He feels a gravitational attraction to the gang, but for perverse and sinister reasons, he sees it as a vehicle to engage in more and greater criminal behavior. “The Kid” proceeds to challenge Johnny for entry into the club, but Johnny knows at an instinctual level that “the Kid” is a parasite who does not belong. Johnny asks him whether he would leave his friends to join the group, and he says yes, thus proving Johnny’s instincts correct. When Johnny denies “the Kid” entry, he retaliates by pulling a knife. Johnny beats him and tells him never to come back. Despite Johnny putting this threat down successfully, a sense of foreboding sets in for the rest of the film.

The threats continue to rise, and the character of the group begins to change. Drug use becomes regular and then prevalent, and other degenerate behavior seeps in gradually and then takes hold. This is punctuated by Kathy narrowly escaping gang rape by newer members of the Vandals, only to be saved at the last second by Johnny. Johnny knows that he’s lost control of the group; members have begun making their rules. It’s clear that this is not the same organism observed in its germination and ascendant phase; it has become something else and alien, Vandals in name only. Cockroach (Emory Cohen), one of the original Vandals, tells Johnny that he wants to leave due to the digression; we then see Johnny attempt to relinquish his leadership to Benny, who refuses the role. The parasite is now in control of the host. Francis Parker Yockey describes the compromise of an organism, which he terms Culture-parasitism:

Culture-parasitism arises in the same way that parasitism arises in politics. A parasite is simply a life-form which lives in or on the body of another life-form at its expense. It involves thus the direction of part of the energy of the host into a direction alien to its interest. This is quite inevitable: if the energy of an organism is being spent for something other than its own development, it is being wasted. Parasitism is inevitably harmful to the host. The harm increases in proportion to the growth and spreading of the parasite.

Any group which takes no part in the Culture-feeling, but which lives within the Culture-body, necessarily involves a loss to the Culture. Such groups form areas of anesthetic tissue, as it were, in the Culture body. Such a group, by standing outside the historical necessity, the Destiny of the Culture, inevitably militates against that Destiny. This phenomenon is in no way dependent on human will. The parasite is spiritually without, but physically within. The effects on the host-organism are deleterious both physically and spiritually.2

Johnny gets to a point where he is on an island by himself, the foreign parasite now surrounding and overwhelming him. He is the leader of the group, but in name only, as he lacks the power or will to assert the Sovereign authority over the club he himself created. Benny rejects another of Johnny’s offers for him to take over leadership. Benny skips town, abandoning the Vandals and Kathy. “The Kid,” now a member of the Milwaukee chapter and with a gang to back him up, returns to challenge Johnny’s leadership. They agree that it will be settled by a knife fight. Johnny pulls his knife, but the Kid proceeds to pull a gun and shoot Johnny dead. Johnny is then left abandoned. None of the Vandals present, even those who were in the organism from the beginning, do anything to help or save him; they all cowardly and traitorously toe the line of their new leader. Johnny’s inability to develop leaders to follow him results in his unceremonious demise, a critical aspect of leadership.

We are told at the end of the film that the Vandals are now committed to crime; it has become their raison d’être. The parasite has killed the host and is free to cause more damage with anything it comes across. The original mission of the group is lost forever and cannot come back again. History does not and cannot repeat. It is the record of fulfilled destinies; it is the relationship between the past and the present. Everything living inevitably passes from this plane of existence to another; each age and organism has its own history. The Vandals are lost because of the folly of their leadership. Leaders can be positive and negative; leaders attract attention and direct the will of a group to collective action, and reciprocally, the group responds to the leadership due to the strength of the leader’s personality and will. Both positive and negative leaders can inhabit a spirit, or Geist. A leader who loses control of the group, and therefore its spirit, is no longer a leader. Yockey explains for us the nature of this dynamic:

There are two techniques of leadership, both of which are indispensable: discipline, and persuasion. The first is based on confidence, faith, loyalty, duty-sense, good instincts. The second is addressed to the intellectual side, and adjusts itself to the characteristics of the person or population to whom it is directed. Both techniques use sanctions, whether penal, moral, economic, or social. In a period when the reorganizing and forming of huge masses is the leading action-problem, persuasion, or propaganda, is correspondingly necessary, for only an elite is capable of the highest discipline, and masses must be continually reconvinced.3

The Bikeriders depicts two main things. First, a cautionary tale: warnings, transgressions, and then a grim outcome. Lessons can be taken from what is depicted and then applied. The second is the full life cycle of an organism. For the Vandals, everything comes to an end, but all organisms have a Destiny. A specific Culture exists once and is never to return, but the same goes for individual men. Both have distinct and unique characteristics that make them what they are. These qualities then must be valued and protected mightily if they are to achieve their fullness of Destiny, if they are to achieve its organic place in History:

The total difference between the methods of human thinking represented by the central-ideas of Destiny on the one hand, and Causality on the other, was sharply accented for the reason that only one of them is adapted to the understanding of History. History is the record of fulfilled destinies — of Cultures, nations, religions, philosophies, sciences, mathematics, art-forms, great men. Only the feeling of empathy can understand these once-living souls from the bare records left. Causality is helpless here, for at every second a new fact is cast into the pool of Life, and from its point of impact, ever-widening circles of changes spread out. The subterranean facts are never written down, but every fact changes the course of the history of facts. The true understanding of any organism, whether a High Culture, a nation, or a man, is to see behind and underneath the facts of that existence the soul which is expressing itself by means of, and often in opposition to, the external happenings. Only so can one separate what is significant from what is unimportant.4

Also by Payload:

• “Multiculturalism Is a Pipedream”: A Review of Sidney Lumet’s Q&A (1990)

• “Calling Darwin’s Bluff”: A Review of Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004)

• “Requiem for the Enlightenment” — Homo Economicus, Part I: Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly (2012)

• “The Ego, The Enemy” — Homo Economicus, Part II: J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year (2014)

• “Sins of the Father” — Homo Economicus, Part III: Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)

• “The Best-Laid Plans” — Homo Economicus, Part IV: Michael Mann’s Thief (1981)

• “Lurking Under the Surface” — Homo Economicus, Part V: Paul Brickman’s Risky Business (1983)

• “Total Redditor Death” — Homo Economicus, Part VI: David Fincher’s The Killer (2023)

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Axios: https://axios-remote-fitness-coaching.kit.com/affiliate

Fox and Sons Coffee: https://www.foxnsons.com/

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Haberdasher: https://msvendrilloco.square.site/

Tall Men Books: https://www.tallmenbo…

Read more

Alp: https://alppouch.com/OGC

Axios: https://axios-remote-fitness-coaching.kit.com/affiliate

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Everywhere we go, things are bad. Not only are things bad; things are getting worse. “I wanna move to ___” is a common one — like we are all westward migrants cooking trash fire rat steaks in some abominable techno-future Steinbeck novel. That rejoinder again: “Well, I got some bad news.”

That’s a long intro to the point we have to make about us, the politics, the life, the culture of both America and ourselves as members of an organization that is decidedly not dedicated to political action or organizing.

In accordance with the unfortunate decomposition of American life, its political factions have similarly broken down. We often say “these circles” or “this scene,” or “around these parts.” Friends, look what time it is. There is nothing. There are no “these circles,” there is no “this scene,” and there is certainly nothing to be gotten from “this side of Twitter.” It is a mirage.

Two articles have recently appeared here, neither dismissible. Really a (so far) three-article series by our Brother Charlemagne, and another single installment by our Brother Kaiser. Both are members of this organization, writing from inside it — not voices we’re importing from an adjacent locale. One comes from a self-identified Patriot perspective, and is, as these things go, earnest — making a genuine plea for coalition between the “Patriot” and “Hardliner” camps. The other, a Hardliner, arrives at the debate from a structural direction: there is no Trump coalition, it never existed in any durable sense, and the “MAGA Civil War” is therefore a war over an inheritance that has not yet been established and may never be. Both are right about something real. Both are, in the end, looking in the wrong direction.

The Patriot author’s (Kaiser) strongest moment is a metaphor he cannot quite follow to its conclusion: “[T]here is not one crown in the gutter, but a million little crowns.” He means this as an argument for distributed, localized action — county GOPs, bureaucratic positioning, incremental work inside existing structures. He is, by his own account, a pragmatist. “Known variables, known entities, looking at the dynamics as they exist and working within them.” What he does not notice is that this metaphor has already conceded the central structural point: there is no unified political actor. There is no one crown from which authority radiates outward. There are only dispersed, local sites of possible action that must, somehow, accumulate into something.

This is not the metaphor of coalition-thinking. It is the metaphor of a man who understands, at some level, that the landscape has already been fragmented past the point where any single figure can come along and marshal it. Yet he will not follow the image where it leads, because without the national framework — the Trump project, the party machinery, the faction loyalties — the local action has no legible name. The million crowns must still be lifted in the service of something that can be called by a common name.

His confession about vulnerability is the most honest moment in the piece: “In our vulnerability, we can often end up rationalizing support for and working with Neocons.” This is a structural truth dressed as a personal failing. Proximity to power creates its own logic. The crown you pick up in the gutter will always be drawn toward alignment with the larger crown that has not yet fallen. Don’t mistake this for a character flaw of “Patriots”; it is what proximity does to expectation. Anyone working toward a larger goal assumes a horizon of those nearest to you in the factional order.

He also concedes, more than he recognizes, the stakes of the question we want to raise. Acknowledging what “Hardliners bring,” he writes: “[M]any of my favorite artistic pieces as they exist on the Right were made by Hardliners, and art has immense value. Hardliners need to make it clearer exactly what tangible value they bring to the table, because tangible value is what Patriots respond to.” There it is. Art is acknowledged, then immediately translated into political utility. Tangible value. The aesthetic and the theoretical are admitted through the servant’s entrance, on condition that they produce something measurable for the political project. This is not a coalition. It is a hiring arrangement.

The second article is more rigorous and more ruthless: “There is no Trump coalition. It simply doesn’t exist.” Charlemagne is right in that the Republican Party is the loyal opposition upon whom is lumped everything “required by the state, but would be unseemly if it were to happen under the auspices of the Democrats.” He is right that state-level Republican parties are the least guarded political apparatus available — “the widest channel through which the politics of the American people may be voiced.” He draws on Schmitt: “The purpose of politics is to destroy enemies.” He offers a taxonomy — Patriots, Hardliners, Maroons, Neocons — and ends with a warning: if the civil war continues, “the continuation of this pattern will necessarily result in absolute enmity and thus the need for one side to annihilate the other completely.”

This is different thinking from that of the first article. But different thinking about the same problem is still the same problem.

Note where the argument lands. After all the structural diagnosis, after the correct identification that the Trump mandate was “the least powerful tool in politics” and that the coalition window closes fast — the horizon the second author offers is this: “a coalition of the electorate and the necessary elites to assert at least a veto in the short term on the worst the enemies of America have planned for us.”

A veto on the worst. That is the positive vision, an essentially defensive crouch dressed in coalition language.

He identifies the missed moment himself: “The moment(s) at which that mandate was actionable was the time to bring that coalition into being as permanent fixture.” He states this as a lost opportunity. But it is actually a lesson about how horizons work, and he does not take the lesson.

Reinhart Koselleck, one of our favorite historians and a direct student of Carl Schmitt, in Futures Past makes a distinction we want to press directly into this debate. He distinguishes between the Space of Experience — the accumulated sediment of the past that informs present action, what has already been done and lived and organized — and the Horizon of Expectation — what lies ahead, the field of projected futures toward which present action orients itself.

Modernity, for Koselleck, is characterized by an ever-widening gap between these two. The Space of Experience can no longer reliably generate the Horizon of Expectation. What has been done does not tell you what to do next. The gap between them is where historical consciousness — and historical action — becomes possible or impossible.

Both of these articles are fighting over the Space of Experience. Who was loyal to whom. What Charlottesville meant. What the MAGA coalition actually was or failed to be. What Neocon entryism did to the project. Whether the Iran War is betrayal or tactic. What the Democrats have built and whether it can be replicated or countered. This is pure Space-of-Experience reasoning. It is a navigation by rearview mirror, made more sophisticated by adding additional mirrors at different angles.

The Patriot author’s vulnerability — proximity to Neocons, rationalization of accommodation — is precisely the phenomenon Koselleck describes: when the Space of Experience is the dominant frame, you start expecting what the people near you expect. Their horizon becomes your horizon. The coalition you are inside of has already determined what you can see. “Keep supporting the project” is not a Horizon of Expectation. It is an expectation frozen inside an existing configuration of experience.

The second author identifies the missed moment but cannot theorize it: the mandate was “actionable” at a specific window and was not acted on. A horizon, by definition, recedes as you approach it. The MAGA coalition as “permanent fixture” was not a horizon that could be reached and secured. It was an expectation — specific, historical, contingent — and like all expectations, it was only coherent from a particular temporal standpoint. Once the window closed, it became part of the Space of Experience, subject to retrospective interpretation, argument, blame, myth. This is where both pieces now live: arguing over what should have been done with an expectation that is now, definitionally, in the past.

This is why political positioning — Patriot, Hardliner, Maroon, Neocon — matters far less than it appears to at any given moment and conversely why membership in something like the OGC matters far more.

Positioning is a Space-of-Experience category. It tells you where you have been, what you have been loyal to, what enemies you have accumulated, and which alliances you have honored or broken. It describes your location within a set of inherited political coordinates. It tells you almost nothing about what your actual Horizon of Expectation is, because it cannot: the horizon is ahead, and the faction map is behind.

The operative questions are different. They are not strategic, in the grand-coalition sense. They are immediate.

What can you actually do right now?

Not What should the coalition do? Not What should Congress do? The President, the base, the Hardliner camp, the Patriot camp? Those are all displaced-agency questions — questions about what some other actor, at some other scale, should be doing with their mandate. The Patriot author is right in that “Patriots who have actually picked up a crown” know they “lie heavy.” The weight of the crown is exactly what clarifies the operative horizon. From where you actually stand, with what you actually hold, given the specific field of action available to you from that position: What is actionable?

Who, immediately, is proximal to your interests and needs?

Not Who shares your faction? Not Who is aligned with the national project? Proximity is not ideological. It is spatial, relational, institutional. The people who can actually help you are, almost always, near you. They may not use the right vocabulary. They may not have read the same World War II history. They may be irritatingly moderate or irritatingly intransigent. But they are there, and the horizon — the actual, operative horizon of what can be built — is constructed out of adjacencies, not out of allegiances to inherited political typologies.

The “million crowns in the gutter” metaphor wants to be this argument and cannot commit to it, because committing to it means releasing the national framework as the ultimate referent for local action. The Schmittian frame of the second article cannot be this argument, because Schmittian politics is organized around enemies — around what is not proximal, not local, not immediately actionable — and enemy-definition is the most Space-of-Experience-bound operation available to political thought. You know who your enemies are because of what has already happened.

Both pieces are written by men who are paying attention, but both are doing the same thing: trying to find a route back to a “Space of Experience” coherent enough to generate a forward-facing project. Trying to reorganize the accumulated past into a coalition that can project itself as a durable horizon.

Reinhart Koselleck would say that the widening gap between Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation is the condition, not the problem to be solved. It cannot be closed by finding the right coalition, the right taxonomy, the right rhetorical calibration between Hardliners and Patriots. It can only be inhabited — which means asking, without recourse to the inherited map, what you can actually do and who is actually next to you.

The introduction to our article said it plainly. There is no “these circles.” There is no “this scene.” These were Space-of-Experience categories — inherited communities of orientation, legible only within a political and cultural formation that has, in fact, dissolved. When they dissolve, the only available orientation is the horizon directly in front of you, built out of what is proximate and what is possible.

That is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of clarity. The horizon is not elsewhere. It is not behind the right coalition or through the right factional settlement. It is constituted, right now, by what you can do and who is standing near enough to do it with you.

This is where the constructive argument actually begins. Both pieces assume that the relevant unit of analysis is the national faction — Patriots, Hardliners, the MAGA electorate, “the necessary elites.” Neither considers that the relevant unit might be much smaller, and must be smaller first.

A tightly networked group — ten people, twenty, a church, a press, a fire company, a ward, an organization decidedly not dedicated to political action or organizing — operating with explicit clarity about its own interests is not a fallback position. It is the nucleus. It is the only entity capable of generating a coherent Space of Experience: a shared record of what was done, what was promised, what held and what did not, what worked and what failed and what failed differently the second time. This is not nostalgia. It is the raw material from which any genuine Horizon of Expectation is distilled.

The MAGA coalition failed, insofar as it ever was a coalition, precisely because it aggregated too fast, across interests too divergent, before any shared experiential ground had been established. Kaiser and Charlemagne do not fundamentally disagree on this point; they simply draw different tactical lessons from it. But the failure was not tactical. It was ontological. Patriots and Hardliners do not share a Space of Experience. They share a set of enemies and a flag. Enemies and flags are sufficient to produce a voting bloc, which both authors correctly identify as the least powerful instrument in politics. They are not sufficient to produce a Horizon. A horizon requires a we that knows itself in some depth: what it has built together, what it has honored and what it has broken, what it owes and is owed.

Koselleck’s point, pressed to its conclusion, is this: the Horizon is not independent of the Space. Forward projection from contested ground is difficult, if not impossible. The question is not what kind of grand coalition should be assembled but what has actually been built in common, what is actually shared, real and existing and from that specific experiential ground — what can be seen ahead.

The groups that will generate something durable — something that does not collapse back into factional war the moment the external enemy recedes or the cult of personality exits stage right — will be the ones that built their shared Space of Experience first. Small, tight, interest-coherent. Knowing precisely who they are for before deciding who they are against. The Horizon of Expectation they produce will not be a veto on the worst. It will be a positive account of what they are making, held by people who have reason to trust one another because they have done things together that were worth doing.

This is the nucleus. The coalition, if it ever comes, grows from here or not at all.

We are, already, one of these.

The OGC is not a political organization — the intro to this very piece establishes that, and it is worth treating as a structural fact rather than a disclaimer. The Agrarians at Vanderbilt were not a political organization. Johnson’s Literary Club was not a political organization. The Inklings — Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Barfield meeting in a pub in Oxford — were not a political organization. None of them set out to produce what they produced by becoming a faction. They set out to be in a room together, repeatedly, with people whose judgment they trusted, arguing about things that mattered to them. The Agrarians produced I’ll Take My Stand and a Southern literary tradition that is still the most serious regional counter-claim to the dominant culture. Johnson’s Club produced the literary life of 18th-century England. The Inklings produced the most widely read body of Christian imaginative literature of the 20th century. They did all of this because the room had density — shared interest, repeated contact, accumulated experience of what each person was actually capable of and what he actually stood for.

What the OGC has, and what neither Kaiser’s million-crowns project nor Charlemagne’s taxonomy can produce from the top down, is the precondition Koselleck identifies as non-negotiable: a we with actual shared experience. People who have been in the conversation long enough to know where the others stand — who has shown up, who has followed through, who thinks well under pressure and who folds, what this group of people, specifically, is capable of making together. That accumulated knowledge is a Space of Experience. It is not glamorous. It does not announce itself. But it is the only ground from which a genuine Horizon can be read — not spectated from a distance, not assembled from a faction map, but read from the inside by people who have earned the right to say we.

This is the argument for the club. Not as a vehicle for the grand coalition and not as a consolation prize for people who have given up on politics. As the form. The form that has always worked. The form that works precisely because it is not trying to be anything other than what it is: a group of people with actual shared interests, doing actual things together, building the only kind of experiential record from which a forward-looking horizon can be honestly distilled.

Look what time it is.

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I am an archetypal Patriot. I am vocal and vociferous in my support for Donald Trump and see him as the vessel by which we have achieved any of our tangible gains in this country. I am loyal to him and to his project, and very little could shake this or change this. I have an undying loyalty to America, to our people, to our foundations, to seeing a restoration of our great nation. However, I also do see value in many of the Hardliners, and I would like to see us put down arms against one another and work together in this project. In order to accomplish this, allow me to explain why I am a Patriot at my core.

Patriots often approach from what could be described as thinking inside the box. We look at the mechanisms of power as they currently exist, at the system as it is, and seek to work inside of it. We believe that you win by winning, that through making gains in the Republican Party and taking positions within and with enough held, we can direct the course of the country. I often say this: that there is not one crown in the gutter, but a million little crowns, and with enough Patriots reaching down and taking up these mantles, we can have our country again. What this looks like is working with likeminded Patriots through various organizations, working in coordinated efforts to seize things like county GOPs, influence or run for office at every level of government, take positions within the bureaucracy, the military, and other established positions, and work in a unified effort to unseat those who are unwilling to do that which is necessary within the GOP and to defeat the Left, whom we universally see as the foremost, primary, and tangible enemy in the United States.

The Republican Party is seen as the only mechanism to do so. For obvious reasons, we see an impossibility in infiltrating the Democratic Party, and we see third parties as an absolute dead end incapable of winning in our system which structurally only allows two, or perhaps one, to exist within it and run it. These are pragmatic choices, which is what the Patriots mindset is operating off of. Known variables, known entities, looking at the dynamics as they exist and working within them. That is unchangeable for us. I believe that this is an absolute necessity in order to accomplish everything, but we have vulnerabilities to us and things we often overlook.

In our vulnerability, we can often end up rationalizing support for and working with Neocons. Oftentimes, this will come because the Neocon, on occasion, supports and votes for that which we also want to see. But there is a danger in this, because Neocons ultimately wish to regain their control, excise Patriots as much as possible, and steer the direction of the ship themselves, which is detrimental to the Patriot. The Patriot, first and foremost, wants an America for Americans, by Americans. He wants to see mass deportations, he wants the Left crushed utterly, and he also wants to see foreign influence removed from our country. But because Neocons hold power and are nominally within the Party, they are often more tolerated than they should be.

And Patriots can overlook the value which Hardliners bring. What I see often in the best of Hardliners is a better ability to be outside of the box. Hardliners often have phenomenal artists, theorists, and philosophers which Patriots tend to lack in. They have a better ability to engage in things outside of the system as it is, to create parallel networks, or uncompromised, purer entities from the existing ones. Both kinds are useful in their own right, and I do not believe that one can necessarily succeed without the other. But how can there be a coalescence?

First, we need to understand how to form a coalition, and what a coalition is, for that matter. A coalition is not simply formed from general vibes between one nebulous entity and another. It requires concrete organizations to make actual pacts or efforts between each other in common cause, or barring an organization, must be done through specific individuals seen as thought leaders who can marshal particular support. Ideally, it would have one unified leader whom all look to, but this is not available to us at this time. Rather than seeking one out or waiting for one to arrive, we must work and build until such a figure emerges.

One thing which builds unity is common enemies. There was far greater unity in our camps under Biden than under Trump for exactly this reason. We both opposed his regime, the Left which domineered and supported terror against us through BLM and Antifa, who flooded our nation with hostile migrants, and who actively sought to crush resistance against them. The Left, too, holds their coalition quite strongly through this. They are unified in anti-Whiteness, bringing together nons and self-hating Whites under a shared mission to remake the country in their image. They still hold this coalition quite strongly. We, however, do not. We have fragmented severely, and much still stands in the way of rebuilding this.

I cannot speak for what prevents the Hardliner from coalescing with the Patriot, but I can speak for the Patriots’ side. There are three main concerns which the Patriot has with the Hardliner:

1. Rhetoric

Patriots don’t necessarily have issues with the ideas presented by Hardliners. We share many of the same goals and beliefs. But in terms of rhetoric, Hardliners are seen by some Patriots as being vague, needlessly incendiary, insulting, and self-defeating. This difference in rhetoric, more than anything, might be driving much of the friction. When setbacks and frustrations in the Admin’s efforts are met with cries of betrayal, of lashing out, of threatening to withhold support or of how theirs is burned entirely, Patriots generally believe that this overall diminishes our own ability to act, particularly when we are associated with this directly. It is widely believed that this poisons the willingness of those in power who are more in line to continue to fight and to be on-side. No one wants to go to the mat for people who will make fun of him or attack him when the chips are down.

2. Misunderstandings

Even many of the best of Hardliners — not only through their rhetoric, but also through their demands which are seen as unreasonable, or poor takes on current events — can sometimes be seen as ill-informed on realpolitik. Patriots would summarize Hardliners as holding an “Everyone should just ____” solution: Congress should do this, the President should do that, the people should do this, etc. It often seems as though little thought is given as to how these processes actually work, what barriers might exist, or why quick action isn’t being taken. Patriots understand all of this to be a highly complex and byzantine system with many interests, factors, and intersecting systems at play; that sometimes compromises simply have to be made in the interest of achieving anything, or else you just do not have the actual capital or ability to do what you might want to have done. Hardliners are perceived by some Patriots as armchair politicians, making calls and plays on a system they simply do not understand, especially in that there are risks in all of this.

Patriots, particularly those who have actually picked up a crown, know that even small ones lie heavy on the ones who hold them. Certain associations do just carry risk. They can lead to you being rendered a pariah, removed from all positions, excised from your goals. In a personal example of this, but without naming names so as not to draw more attention back to an older controversy, a Patriot who has actual pull within the Admin received an extensive and coordinated attack by bad actors for his own association with myself. But he was willing to stand by me and not disassociate, even though I had incurred him risk, because I would simply never attack or even critique him, and instead defend and stand by him as well and support his efforts. Had I opted instead to post publicly and trash him or name-call for some of his takes which I don’t agree with, I doubt he ever would’ve taken heat for me.

3. Worldview

In worldview, Hardliners and Patriots are far more similar than the rhetoric between our camps lets on. What gives Hardliners angst gives Patriots angst, too. Both of us are keenly aware of demographic trends, for example. The biggest difference is that Hardliners often believe or act as though there is a fix-everything switch that just isn’t being flipped. Patriots know that there is no one such flip which exists. Much as there are a million crowns in the gutter, there are also hundreds of little fix-everything switches that all have to be flipped before the problems are fixed. However, they cannot all be flipped at once, there are ones which are of greater priority, and there are those seeking to un-flip already-flipped switches. Triage is applied here: the ones most easily or most important to flip are flipped, and some are simply left aside until they can be addressed.

Hardliners are presumed to be simply talking about Based World. Patriots believe that we are actually building Based World, and that there are massive headwinds and forces arrayed against our doing so. It is not fast or easy to do it. It’s difficult, there are risks, there are failures, and there are hard-fought wins. This is what lies as well at one of the biggest issues Patriots have with Hardliners. We are working to accomplish these objectives through the means we have available to us. Hardliners are seen as not actually putting in the work, but simply critiquing from the sidelines, often leveled just as or more heavily at us than even at our shared opponents.

I am certain that the Hardliners have many critiques, many issues, many grievances with us; that on these matters, they have a different perspective. Perhaps some of these are uncharitable, or inaccurate. But this is accurate to what Patriots believe of Hardliners, and so it must be said, and must be acknowledged if any kind of dialogue or building is to occur.

And this dialogue should happen. Hardliners should clearly state, in charitable fashion, what their issues are, where they see value in us. And Hardliners must also show exactly what they bring to the table, because most Patriots don’t see the Hardliners as having value. I do; I’ve said as much, as just one example, that many of my favorite artistic pieces as they exist on the Right were made by Hardliners, and art has immense value. Hardliners need to make it clearer exactly what tangible value they bring to the table, because tangible value is what Patriots respond to.

In the actual work of building this coalition as well, there are concrete things which must happen. First, Patriots and Hardliners who hold an interest in actually doing this work must come together. Both must have representatives who can be seen as speaking for one side or the other. Then, deliberate dialogue must occur. Ideally, it is conducted in person, where it becomes most clear that one is speaking to another human being. If not that, then private video or voice calls can substitute where things are hashed out and worked on, once more by specific representatives, with moderators in case things get hot. Public dialogue and debate is also quite useful, particularly if conducted respectfully, as this gets a good gauge from the audience. Finally, in posting, in text, in articles like this, which is the most divorced from real human interaction, it must be conducted as much as possible and in good faith, with the goal of fostering dialogue respectfully, especially if very hot-button topics are addressed.

Finally, in organizations which already exist and claim both Patriots and Hardliners as members, care must be expressed for both sides. Jockeying for power is not a coalition. If one side is attempting to convert the other, that is not a coalition. If one side is shut out from power, that is not a coalition. A coalition has all parties represented within it, and there are compromises had, issues hashed out, and care taken not to disrupt the activities of one part or the other. For Patriots, sharing an organization with Hardliners carries worry, risk, fear that it will lead to loss by their association. Flippant dismissal of these risks simply inflames tensions. And at a certain point, Patriots will calculate that the risk of being in the organization is not worth the reward, and they will simply just leave, and no coalition will be had. That needs to be understood, taken quite seriously, and efforts made to prevent it, if we are to have any kind of working relationships. I believe we can succeed at this. Let’s put in the work to make it happen. I am inviting anyone who sees himself as a Hardliner to reach out to me, directly. I am happy to dialogue in whatever fashion you see fit, whether private or public, in DMs or in articles. Iron sharpens Iron. Let’s get to the grind.