Reaction, Retaliation, Re:Generation

Delusions and Solutions Amidst Intergenerational Strife

By guest author Cody Bassett of Praxia.

“Violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.” I imagine most readers are keenly familiar with this quote. Though paraphrased as it is, the analysis of Heinlein seems to be a perennial fascination for the Right. Why this quote though? A quote whose inherent truth we all understand, yet most recoil at when announced for its implications in our current paradigm. Just as the nose of everyone’s favorite reindeer, one might even say it glows. That feeling is but one prong at the head of this article: “Reaction, Retaliation, and Re:Generation.”

Re:Generation

After years of calling ourselves reactionaries discussing new (though often rather ancient) and interesting ideas about governance, power, history, culture, and an expanding horizon of topics murmured about within our digital speakeasies contesting the status quo, we are nobodies whom no one is reacting to. Or so we thought. Our murmurs have not been mere whispers on the wind. We have caught the attention of a myriad of powerful men in society who aren’t just philosophizing about our ideas, but applying them. Some of these men belong to the so-called PayPal Mafia, which has garnered attention in recent months thanks to the help of Matthew Erikson, better known as “Kingpilled,” and his circuit on various dissident podcasts.

By this point, the ideas about the PayPal Mafia should be cemented well within everyone’s mind. These ideas should have offered us inspiration as to how exactly we can go about “taking the reins,” as the OGC’s debut national conference has been themed. However, while these various Gen-X techno-optimist elites contend for power at the passing of the Boomers and their white-knuckled grip on power, another generation is here whose ferocity is often discounted.

Many seem to have trouble understanding the Zoomer and where he fits in at any given place. To alter Don McLean’s words to fit this era: “There they were all in one place, a generation lost in cyberspace.” The Zoomer faces new issues that preceding generations and our elites have as little understanding of as they do of Gen-Z themselves. Many Zoomers now having been adults for years see nothing but Sisyphean goals laid before them for what was once a normal life. No house, property, wife, children, career, nation, community, religion, nothing. Each subsequent generation from the Boomers has received less and less in inheritances, whether financial, cultural, or institutional, leading to the Zoomers having nothing left by the time they are born, disconnected from any continuity of their civilizations.

Source: Minkin, Parker, Menasce Horowitz, and Aragão, “Parents, Young Adult Children and the Transition to Adulthood,” Pew Research Center, January 25, 2024.

Befitting that the final letter of the English alphabet should be designated to the generation that comes of age as the Boomers’ embodiment of the neoliberal “end of history” dissolves. They are wanderers overlooking a sea of eschatological escapes. Once he is here, the Zoomer only knows a post-9/11 world full of man-made horrors ever exceeding our comprehensions and unfettered access to all of them all at once via the Internet. This mind-altering digital ayahuasca trip we were collectively raised on stripped Gen-Z of all sense of normality.

While the Boomers were caught up in self-absorbed material decadence and Millennials entrenched in their thespian-theocracy of narcissistic moral inversions, it was Gen-X who inadvertently had done the most damage in alienating our connection to the world. Morgoth, in “The Year the Internet Stopped Laughing,” explained Gen-X’s sense of humor thus: “Nothing could be said in earnest or from the heart; the more serious somebody was, the more fun it was to laugh at them.”

From the era of Blackadder (1983–1989) came the Gen-Xer, for whom the concept of sincerity was all but eviscerated. Daria (1997–2002), whose titular character was “very cynical and a deadpan snarker,” enjoyed wide appeal among its target Gen-X audience. (This “Gen-X Daria” archetype is a theme that Academic Agent has often revisited in his own analyses.) Many of Gen-Z were raised by people with this kind of attitude, who idolized people like Mister Metokur whom the aforementioned Morgoth article was about. Now looking out over a cultural no-man’s-land, any attempt on the part of Zoomers to bridge the gaps in Western continuity or to build something from scratch so that they have something to center themselves around are cynically looked upon as nonsensical, dismissed as insincerely bouncing across the extremes of the political spectrum, interpreted as LARP, and laughed at with an overtone of discomfort.

So what else does the Zoomer do but laugh along and apologize? This is why many say Gen-Z cannot take anything seriously. I was personally confronted about this when all I could do was laugh when informed of friends exhibiting poor and concerning behaviors. After my friend who told me these things called me out, I had no coherent response then as I had never reflected seriously on it, but it is an observation that holds true for my generation. All we can do is laugh at the world, taking after those like Mister Metokur. We call it Clown World for a reason. But this is not because Gen-Z cannot take anything seriously. This other quote from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land puts it well: “I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much… because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.”

This may be true for everyone today, but unlike the Zoomer, older folks were laughing at the absurdity of the fringes of society departing from a cultural zenith of Western hegemony and in a time when confidence in our institutions was not questioned, at least nowhere near to the extent they have come to be exposed today. Clown World is the baseline for Gen-Z. The absurd has become sincere. And laughing at all manner of horror and tragedy is all that we have ever known. Well, when the Zoomer stops laughing, the world falls silent.

It has not been a matter of Zoomers being incapable of taking things seriously, but of older generations refusing to take Zoomers seriously. The arrested development of Zoomers, both physically and mentally, does make it understandably harder to do so, but in light of all that I’ve previously stated, that isn’t their fault, nor is it necessarily a weakness. There can be a cultivation of Gen-Z to be a truly magnificent generation of pioneers, movers, shakers, and even heroes if only sponsored by those older heads wiser and more skilled than us, with those of the PayPal Mafia being a far-off but aspirational example. However, we are due for a much darker future, as prior generations overlook the horrifying emerging sentiments welling up in the hearts of millions of disaffected young men seeking to collapse the societies they’ve come justifiably to resent. Those currently in control, citing this growing chaos and disaffection, would then crack down on a counterelite they know are attempting to rout them. That is why this article began with that famous quote; violence will be all that binds our civilizations together as well as the very pressure accelerating their collapse.

Retaliation

We all know that our regime runs on legitimacy — that is, “the right of a governing authority to rule and the acceptance of their rule by the subjects who they rule over,” as our Canadian friend Endeavour put it in his video essay Gun Ownership and Tyranny: A Follow-Up. As right as he was on many points of that issue, glaring flaws went unaddressed, with one of the issues being “legitimacy” itself. Legitimate authority ought to be recognized as possessing the right to use physical force when appropriate. However, when the regime is seen as illegitimate, this unspoken monopoly on violence is lost with it. As Francis Fukuyama put it: “All Governments… have their ups and downs; but only legitimate governments have this reserve to draw on in times of crisis.”

The regimes across the West refuse to employ this force in deporting or subduing populations who, although incompatible with us, live in our societies, while they in turn have used such coercion on us to force integration of these incompatible parts. In these United States we see that on the Southern border, in desegregation, in Black Lives Matter riots, in ethnic cabals, in criminal gangs, and even in the decision to leave the mentally ill to roam around freely. The regime goes so far as to defend trespassers under the guise of “squatters’ rights.”

Resistance to these indignities has placed Americans at bayonet point or subjected them to persecution under the fullest extent of the law, such as what happened to Daniel Penny, Kyle Rittenhouse, and more recently Adele Andaloro, the New York landlady arrested for alleged violations against a squatter. Over the past twenty years or so — from the forever-wars, to Trump’s 2016 election, to Covid-19, to the 2020 election, and more — these actions have greatly delegitimized local, state, and federal power. Such erosions upon regime legitimacy have left our rulers with little else besides the violence that they can project onto their own host nations, as seen, for instance, with the fallout of the Canadian Trucker Protests of 2022.

These examples have led many to the “solution” of accelerationism. Despite the metapolitical ground claimed by our movement in recent years, the outlook of many is far from the positive one we share, as Greg Johnson explained in his 2019 speech at the Scandza Forum, where he dismissed these sentiments outright off the heels of the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand. True as it may be that we here and beyond are working tirelessly, some overstretching ourselves beyond our capabilities to secure those points of victory against the regime, many will never hear of it and be swallowed by despair. As many flaws and costs exist within various forms of accelerationism, it is an appealing outlook for those who see no way out, not just on the Right but the Left as well. Richard Cloward and Frances Piven are examples who ultimately sought reform rather than retribution during the civil rights era of leftist accelerationism.

The times we now live in, however, are deeply seated in desires for retribution, exemplified in phenomena like those of the incel and the femoid. The idea of “my ideology will rise from the collapse of civilization” is one that has been memed and mocked and hasn’t been taken seriously as they are delusions set in contrast against the stark countenance of reality. That is the mistake that dissidents perpetually make, and one that I have set out to prevent everyone from committing again. Just as the SJWs were, and then incels, and anti-vaxxers, and on and on among dozens of examples until we get to Zoomers, they were not taken seriously until something happened. “But nothing ever happens!” That reassuring lie we love to exclaim. Even retroactively I see many of us struggle to grapple with the ground moving under our feet and still disregard what was absurd five years ago now having passed into our grim reality. How can we now look out over Zoomers and deride them for their seething anger, their sorrows, and their delusions and think nothing will happen?

The responses many of you might be thinking now range from the typical references to organized minorities of elites pulling these strings, to the state’s monopoly on violence deterring populations from stepping out of line, to how good things are going for us when some of our heaviest intellectual hitters are getting primetime television interviews. I have labored to expose the insufficiencies of each of those in addressing this issue, and there are plenty more holes I can poke in each, but for the sake of brevity, I must push on.

The climax of this all is that Gen-Z collectively is in a harrowing spot and full of delusions out in the far-flung vanguards for what will be the guiding principles of society, and they will be the ones to decide that as they carry the precedent of history. Those Gen-X elites I mentioned earlier will not save us on their own. In fact, many doubt that they can change much of anything, as it is in many ways too late for them, regardless of any dependance the regime may have on them financially, technologically, or just competently. Every great man of history was motivated by a delusion, dare we say a dream, that he fought the world for, and even his own self, in its achievement.

“Gen-X… dreamed of embracing a Neitzschean master morality in which they set new values but we did not find the bravery to act.” This is Carl Benjamin’s reflection in his video essay I Am Jack’s Spiritual Void. We can see very clearly the evidence of this, where some of the most notable Gen-Xers like Elon Musk or Joe Rogan, while massively successful materially, have little in the way of any spiritual or ideological grounding, making them normies at best. That is why when now faced with these grave societal malfunctions, they look more to us in helping them understand these issues. That is where the Zoomer departs from the Gen-Xer. They see a generation above them, similar as they are to each other, that was “strong enough to have it all, too weak to take it.” So now Zoomers see, through great effort and suffering, the will to forge short and dangerous lives as heroes opposed to long, safe lives in domestication. And it is through those dreams, those delusions, that they will see it through.

I have been referencing many sources of popular media because it is quintessential to the hyper-realities upon which the Zoomer world is built. From YouTubers, authors, musicians, directors, and so forth, Gen-Z was incubated in the romanticization of worlds that have never been, or were once real but are long since gone. We are left with the cruel irony of a cosmic joke at which we, as per usual, cannot help but laugh. Speaking of which, the film Joker projects the core of the Zoomer psyche onto the silver screen. A film about a mentally ill, disaffected, isolated man who could do nothing but laugh when it hurt. There is even a literal “day of the pillow,” where the vengeful son snuffs the life out of the devouring mother before his transformation into his Nietzschean self-actualization. We all know how that story ends — just as many others do, such as Falling Down, Blade Runner 2049, Boondock Saints, Se7en, and many more, not just in film, but in books, myths, anime, and even memes. These stories have marinated the minds of Zoomers from adolescence in righteous, violent indignation for a chance at self-sacrifice in opposition to systems that they see as ontologically evil, with a hope that they may be vindicated by those who survive them. This is delusional, but so is any man with the will to master reality; but some may dream of something as simple as a chance to see the stars without light pollution obscuring God’s Creation.

Some have already succumbed to the delusion. As of the writing of this article, no one has been caught after shooting up minor power relay stations in North Carolina back in 2022. This has not been an isolated event, either, as the Department of Homeland Security has released statements and guidance to law enforcement on the threat of U.S. infrastructure being targeted by domestic terrorists. It has even seen notable accelerationists like Brandon Russell, founder and leader of Atomwaffen Division, plotting and encouraging others to commit similar acts. Brandon Russell was, however, arrested for this, particularly because of the surveillance he was already under and how public he and his co-conspirator were in their schemes. That does not discount the possibility that there are smarter extremists to this extent who will keep a low profile even after committing whichever act of vindication they set out to do. Because like Russell, there exists a pantheon of martyrs and folk heroes hailed across halls of the Internet, mostly by Zoomers, who are not just romanticized fictions, but once-living legends who stand as examples of these dark fantasies made real. People like Richard Russell, Marvin Heemeyer, and Theodore Kaczynski. You might know each of them better as Sky King, Killdozer, and the Unabomber.

While most of these disaffected young men will never amount to much of a threat, there is a large enough pool of them who will make nuclear ripples in the wake of their harm. Beyond them, though, are the many disaffected youth today whose energies will not be used for industry, family, or even war as previous epochs did when faced with these problems. Even if some change is made now for the short term, or war is waged, these individuals will have lived most or all of their lives in distrust of the regime regardless of who is in charge and will resist and refuse service in a military for whose cause they will not die. That does not mean that there is no cause that they will die for, but it will be their own.

Though many men of this generation will contemplate suicide, that does not mean they will not try to go out in style, à la Richard “Sky King” Russell. A more vindictive bunch may not want to hurt anyone directly, but will still do damage in the process, with the full assortment of their skill and intellect at task to do so, such as Mr. Heemeyer. And others yet still, though smallest in number, will be even more ideologically possessed and disciplined than Mr. Kaczynski. This is the course many will take, running with ideas like those of Bronze Age Pervert’s piratical brotherhoods to horizons farther than he himself ever imagined. That is only if they see no other way out, and they are desperately combing through every flavor of radical prescription to find one. So we give them one.

Proaction, Not Reaction

Coming full circle from Edward Bernays, Andrew Bustamante — a “former” CIA operative — founded a company called EverydaySpy, which uses the training and tactics he gained from the CIA as self-help guides. When observed more closely, these skills are the same tools of social manipulation used in containment, and what we ought to use ourselves on our own radicals. The better we get at containment, the more likely we are to succeed. All of the groundwork I have laid out to explain Gen-Z and the circumstances in which we find ourselves have not been to black-pill you, but rather to show you how to till the fertile ground upon which we stand. Alongside Bustamante I was heavily inspired by Mike of Pol’s emphasis on the idea of antithetical businesses using the framework of the regime in a judo move against itself. So in combining these resources and perspectives, we can illuminate opportunities for those otherwise good men even in the darkest pits of modernity.

Allied Universal is America’s third-largest employer, outnumbered only by Walmart and Amazon, with roughly 800,000 employees. Most have probably never heard of Allied Universal but have certainly seen their personnel as badges, radios, crisp uniforms, and, at times, some aggressive-looking small arms tend to stand out in any situation. These are security officers and private police patrolling airports, malls, capital buildings, school campuses, and even gas stations as highlighted in the case of Andre Boyer, an ex-Philadelphia police officer turned private security guard, discussed in a series of Time articles (“Private Security Guards Are Replacing Police Across America,” “In the World of Private Security, There Aren’t Many Rules or Regulations,” and “The Problems Inside North America’s Largest Security Firm—and Third-Biggest Employer”).

As crises are manufactured by the regime, from competence to recruitment, vital sectors of our nation’s security are left hanging by a thread both domestically and internationally. The U.S. military isn’t the only institution that has had trouble recruiting men to fill its ranks. Police departments across the U.S. have had declining numbers of recruits as well as record numbers of retirees, highlighting the passing of the Boomers once more. With everything from the riots of racial animosity toward police, the pension bubble threatening to bankrupt cities like Dallas, Texas, at a price tag of $3.2 billion, and zealots occupying the deeper bureaucracies of the regime that neuter the capacity at which police can do their jobs, it is no wonder why men are not willing to put up with such a task. Even the few men who do occupy these necessary roles in our society are at risk of purges or being stonewalled from entry due to factors of regime paranoia around ideological opponents filling these uniforms or incentives to advertise job vacancies to DEI client classes. Being able to found and staff our own security firms will be a massive castle we can claim with not nearly as much effort needed as one may think.

Now this is where I must take a moment to state very explicitly that I am not encouraging violence, or disorder, or some armed rebellion LARPing as minutemen rallying the militia. Let my words not be misinterpreted. Everything I have said up to this point has been my analysis of trends I have been observing on the Web and on the ground. I hold no personal stake in making these data points prominent or giving informed predictions. I find them to be important, but so few voices discuss them. While it is a volatile subject, and one that comes with great risk when approached haphazardly, we cannot ignore the hazards in front of us. We have to know how to approach and disarm them, especially if there is no way to circumvent them. We cannot be paralyzed by fear from the psyop of the Fedopticon lest we become idle in the cage of our inhibitions.

Unlike the militia movements that are hotbeds for honeypots or otherwise clear containment for those incensed in a delusion of populism, security firms can and do work with the regime symbiotically. A professional, legal, and optically positive institution such as that gives us a vast breadth within which to maneuver. Where some will look out at certain organizations and take offense to their messaging and optics, a private security firm that looks almost identical to government law enforcement but runs as a legitimate business captures major ground in morale and legitimacy in the eyes of the average person and a counterelite in need of their services.

Calling back to Bustamante, he and other human intelligence insiders have described the acronym of SADRAT as the process of information-gathering or, in terms of his business, making a sale. The acronym stands for “Spot, Assess, Develop, Recruit, Handle, and Terminate.” Paired with another acronym RICE — “Reward, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego” — we can target and contain both hazards and customers. (These gatekeeping tactics are similar to but more advanced than those which I have heard expounded upon by Eso of the Beowulf Foundation.)

Utilizing these instruments, we can:

• Spot individuals who carry the attributes I described previously — young, deracinated men looking for martial roles they can fill and take pride in as a service to their communities.

• Assess their mental health, stability, motivations, aspirations, and willingness towards constructive versus destructive problem-solving.

• Develop a relationship. Make them feel listened to and understood even if it is only a one-way development. Our experience with the parasocial nature of the Internet should inform us on how to navigate that. Somewhere between the previous two steps is where we determine the force driving their actions (or potential actions) categorized in RICE and pull on the thread of ideology of which they will be mostly in alignment with us already.

• Recruit and Handle these new members in this new professional role.

• Terminate, if anything is to go awry. Disassociation may be as simple as redirecting them to less martial roles, but still within our networks so as to keep watchful eyes upon them.

To quell any hesitancy that might be stirring from the fire I am playing with in regard to essentially grooming disaffected Zoomers into becoming some private Jin-Roh, I ask whether it is better to leave these individuals alone in their dissolution and disillusionment, where they will eventually snap, or perhaps even be groomed by some less benevolent entities such as federal agents interested in orchestrating some event? We have the rhetorical and aesthetic appeal these men are looking for because we are grounded in truth, as Greg Johnson stated in his aforementioned speech. That messaging, aided by the social media savants and propagandists in our sphere, can spread far and wide to catch all the right attention. In the same breath, or sometimes in the same pixels, we wield the regime’s tactics against them, but more effectively, with a memetic power we alone hold. Presenting the idea to these individuals that an opportunity to LARP as modern knights guarding their fief is an incredibly powerful psychological tool at our disposal. We are not tricking these men into doing something bad or something they don’t want to do; rather, we are motivating them to facilitate things we all want, i.e., security, stability, and economy.

This model is multifaceted, not just as an elaborate method to put a cap on the virile outbursts of those adjacent to the dissident sphere. What happens when our friends who are currently in the military, the police, the tech sector, or elsewhere get purged or canceled? We ought to have real-economy solutions to that instead of relying on social media and the Sword of Damocles that comes with it. The transferable skills and versatility of the private security world is what has made firms like Allied Universal a globally renowned brand when factors of cyber security, surveillance systems, and even contracted fire watch are avenues we can go down. For the white-collar workers, “fire watch” is an OSHA-mandated procedure for any hot work or hazardous work in confined spaces that needs an outside observer monitoring workers, atmospheric levels, or emergency equipment as needed. This demonstrates that private security does not have to be guns and leather boots, but a synthesis of the expertise of everyone on a team. Lawyers, accountants, human resources, and more will all be necessary components to such projects, which is where firms like New Founding may act as a funnel and filter, putting all of our based brothers into careers in which they need not worry about being canceled. Finally, we should all know the vital role NGOs of all stripes hold when performing functions of the regime. Akin to the OGC itself in the sense of nonprofits, those exist in the security world as well. One organization in particular, Texas Defense Force Security, cropped up at the passing of Texas House Bill 3 requiring all schools to have some form of armed protection present on campus during operating times in the wake of the Uvalde shooting.

That last point is important, because as those weaknesses in recruitment and competence crumble the capabilities of public service and protection, it will fall on us to find ways to defend ourselves, our children, and our gatherings. Most of the time when we host any events, we defer to the government and its police for our safety and well-being, but we cannot assume that such an agreement can be relied upon if nefarious actors infiltrate these events. Even with the threat of civil suits filed against the state if such a thing were to happen and they refused to uphold those promises, the deposition of an allied political establishment, coercion from federal authorities, or just not having the staff available would result in our having to fend for ourselves. Having independent protection that we vetted — not just as serialized security, but our guys — gives us reassurance in the potential to handle such distasteful situations. On top of that, they will have various legal umbrellas that add a barrier of protection to them which preempts persecution from the regime should they be faced with circumstances like those of Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Penny.

Beyond that still are the manicured and peaceful private communities lauded by Stephen Carson (Radical Liberation) which would be complemented by a dedicated minority of committed men to the service of protecting those domestic communities. Such communities would avoid cases like that of the McCloskeys, who famously had to stand their ground when a BLM caravan invaded their private street in St. Louis. Looking back over cases like that of Ms. Andoloro in New York, vigilante mobs had formed in seeking out and persecuting those squatters who took advantage of her. This is a dangerous and borderline-criminal tactic, but one that these people are forming out of desperation, again, because reliance upon civil police is failing. And, as a last-minute addition to this article, an Assyrian Rite priest was stabbed (not fatally) by a Muslim teen in Australia. In a show of outrage the community broke the police line — there to protect the assailant — and cut his fingers off. Having people present to prevent what very well could have been a much worse situation? That seems already to match quite well with my words.

The Australian example is twofold: first, it displays the racial, religious, and ideological turmoil mounting in Western nations that are motivating factors behind those accelerationists and disaffected youth tempted by the prospect of engaging in lone-wolf acts of aggression; second, it shows the opportunity (or, rather, the necessity) of non-profit provisions of protection to our churches and their parishioners that organizations like Texas Defense Force Security provide. Being able to bring armed and professional intervention to communities facing these issues may be a winning strategy in the coming years, as neighborhoods in crime-infested cities have formed Facebook groups to coordinate and hire private security to patrol their neighborhoods. Meanwhile, in cities like Pittsburgh, the police are now just refusing to take calls altogether.

While the benefits here laid out are all well and good, the expenses and risks involved are not lost on me. Investing in and establishing a firm like this makes us antifragile, but the real protection and power comes from those PayPal Mafia and adjacent men looking for services to guard their properties, businesses, parties, etc. When the CEO of a Fortune 500 company cannot walk down the street to his corporate headquarters because of homeless drug addicts and gangs exchanging lead (as if Baz Luhrmann’s rendition of Romeo + Juliet came to life), he will feel driven to recreate the order of a society he once knew. If there already exists a group dedicated to that goal, then we’ve made a very profitable client and powerful ally. Add in a certain mutual aid fraternity that may use its networking and extremely high IQs to create drives and programs to ameliorate the issues of bums on the street, and those powerful and wealthy men may be even more inclined to invest in our companies, donate to our causes, or ask to start chapters themselves. But maybe that’s just another delusion.

Conclusion

We must embrace the ubiquitous violent passions of men, especially those in Gen-Z, and aim them in the direction of constructive pursuits. This will save them, and ourselves, from the ramifications of the instincts of lashing out in the face of hopelessness. For those unfamiliar, there is an interpretation of Matthew 5:5 (“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth”) that understands “the meek” as those who know how to use their swords but keep them sheathed. As keepers of our swords and our brothers, having the former sheathed and the latter out of trouble, what greater reins are there to take than those of the whole world? Yet the night approaches, and our brothers fear the dark. Wishing not to go gently into the good night of this epoch, they will rage at the dying of the light. So whom will we meet among the light of dawn?

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Thumbnail image: Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Ilya Repin, 1581