Alternative Monetary Systems

 3. Alternative Monetary Systems  For a state to say that it cannot realise its objectives 

 because there is no money

is the same as saying that one cannot build roads 

 because there are no kilometres.

Ezra Pound63  

There are, to put it mildly, very different opinions on how the monetary system should be reformed. Some even think that money in itself is an evil and for that reason want to abolish the monetary system altogether. The focus of this third chapter is to show different aspects of alternative monetary systems, which can differ depending on how a specific system is designed. At least seven such aspects, listed on the following page, can be distinguished.

1) Control. Who has control over the creation of money? What agenda are those in control serving? What principles are consequently applied in regulating the monetary system and the monetary supply?

2) Reserves. Should the banking system be based on fractional or full reserves? This is indirectly connected to the first aspect because fractional reserve banking means banks can create money when they issue loans. Full reserve banking means that banks cannot lend money without the permission of the depositor and thus cannot create money by granting credit.

3) Convertibility. Should a currency be tied to, for example, gold? Should it be a fiat currency, which is not tied to a certain quantity of a specific good or service?

4) The interest mechanism. Should the interest mechanism keep the same role it has today? Should all interest be viewed as usury? Should it be something in-between, for example by making the process under which new money is issued interest-free?

5) Integrity and transparency. Should the aim of a currency be to monitor all transactions or to maximise personal integrity and make anonymous transactions possible? Is the banking and monetary system easy to understand for the public and thus transparent from the point of view of scrutiny?

6) Monoculture or multiculture. Should one strive to have a single currency in a society or should there be monetary diversity on a global and national level?

7) Goal function. The goal function refers to the aggregate purpose (whether it is articulated or not) of a certain monetary and banking system. All of the above mentioned aspects are based on the goal function for what a certain system strives to accomplish and can be adapted to the specific conditions in a specific society.

3.1 Control  

The control of the banking and monetary system can be centralised to a single institution or distributed among several institutions. The most basic aspect of this control is regulation of money supply, including its creation and destruction. John Maynard Keynes argued that inflow of new money does not cause a general rise of the price level as long as there is untapped production capacity because of low purchasing power. However, Keynes did not put as much focus on how such influx would come about. There is a crucial difference between money being issued as interest-bearing debt to commercial agents, as is the case today, compared with an institution issuing it by buying goods and services on behalf of the public without commercial banks as intermediaries. The inventor Thomas Edison was perhaps an unexpected advocate public reform according to this principle, notably in an interview with The New York Times in December 1921: 

If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who directly contribute to [society] in some useful way. … It is absurd to say our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people.64  

There is reason to suppose that the most central public projects can be financed by spending new money into circulation, rather than lending it into circulation as is done today. Even if the purchasing power is already maximised, and new money thereby causes a general rise in the price level instead of increasing productivity, one might accept a minor annual rise in the general price level, of for example two per cent, as a form of indirect taxation. Certain investments can potentially also give returns that can be recirculated into the economy, whereupon it is paid back — for example, a new energy plant that charges a fee for electricity. Such investments consequently do not affect the monetary supply over the whole process.

An alternative way to spend currency into circulation by public purchases is so-called social credit, formulated in C. H. Douglas’ Social Credit of 192465  , which suggests that the state issues new currency directly into citizens’ wallets as a form of basic income. In certain contexts, currency spent into circulation through the public budget is referred to as ‘Greenbacks’, named after the special form of dollars with a green backside that were issued by Abraham Lincoln’s administration to finance the Union forces in the American Civil War.66   An example of a monetary system in which the state spends money into circulation, rather than first borrowing and then spending it into circulation like today, can be found even further back in history. Tally sticks operated as legal tender in medieval England. The tallies were decorated pieces of wood broken into two matching parts. One half was spent into circulation by the royal power and was accepted as tax payment. As all pieces were broken in a unique way, the tallies were hard to counterfeit and fraud was detected at the latest when the tally was returned to the issuer. The tally currency functioned as means of exchange until a gold standard succeeded it after the introduction of the Bank of England in 1694.67   According to Thorold Rogers, a 19th century economist and historian from Oxford, by the end of the 15th century an ordinary peasant or worker in England could provide food for his family for a year by working between 10 and 15 weeks.68   Such a number indicates that the economic system of the time functioned well for the broader public, which should be possible to ascribe at least partly to the tally currency.

The hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic between 1920 and 1923 has been used as a warning of why it is not a good idea for the state to control the money machine. However, Hjalmar Schacht, director of the Reichsbank in the Weimar Republic between 1923 and 1931, and in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939, testified about aspects of the German economy in those periods that are generally not mentioned in modern textbooks. In his book The Magic of Money, published three years before his death in 1970, Schacht mentions that loans granted by the Reichsbank for private speculation in the early 1920s were a contributing factor to the runaway inflation.69   Furthermore, Schachts offers a complementary explanation to how following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Germany was able to recover from economic ruin and mass unemployment in such a short time and become Europe’s leading industrial nation, with full employment. The economic recovery in 1930s Germany is especially spectacular considering that it took place during the Great Depression, a time in which the rest of the world suffered severe economic hardship. Some point towards the discontinued payments of the war indemnities imposed under the Treaty of Versailles as a contributing factor while others have supposed that it was made possible by the confiscation of Jewish-owned assets. Foreign investment and support from the Bank for International Settlements have also been mentioned as possible variables in the equation. According to Schacht, the primary factor was the implementation of the MEFO bills that the state, in cooperation with the Reichsbank, started to inject into the economy soon after Hitler’s takeover:

The MEFO system was a noteworthy example of the fact that it is possible to make up for a lack of capital by means of credit without any risk of engendering an inflation that causes price rises. [...] The English economist J. M. Keynes has dealt with the problem theoretically, and the MEFO transactions proved the practical applicability of such an idea.70  

Schacht describes the design of the MEFO system as follows:

The system worked in the following way: a company with a paid-up capital of one million marks was formed. A quarter of the capital was subscribed by each of the four firms Siemens, A. G. Gutehoffunungshiitte, Rheinstahl and Krupps. Suppliers who fulfilled state orders drew up bills of exchange for their goods, and these bills were accepted by the company [as payment]. This company was given the registered title of Metallforschungsgesellschaft (Metal Research Company, ‘MEFO’ for short), and for this reason the bills drawn on it were called MEFO bills. The Reich guaranteed all obligations entered into by MEFO, and thus also guaranteed the MEFO bills in full. […]

One other aspect was even more unusual. The Reichsbank undertook to accept all MEFO bills at all times, irrespective of their size, number, and due date, and change them into money. The bills were discounted at a uniform rate of four per cent. By these means the MEFO bills were almost given the character of money, and interest-carrying money at that. Banks, savings banks, and firms could hold them in their safes exactly as if they were cash.71  

With these words, Schacht recognised the success of the MEFO bills. At the same time, in the final years of his leadership, he did not want to advance the system in the way that the highest state leadership wished for. Schacht claims that this was the reason why he was forced to abandon his post in January 1939.72   In Mein Kampf (1925) it appears Hitler had strong personal opinions on banking and monetary policy. In chapter 8, titled Beginnings of My Political Activity, Hitler writes that the monetary question became part of his political platform as early as 1919, thanks to a Gottfried Feder:

When listening to Gottfried Feder’s first lecture about the breaking of the tyranny of interest, I knew immediately that the question involved was a theoretical truth that would reach enormous importance for the German people’s future. [...] Germany’s development already stood before my eyes too clearly for me not to know that the hardest battle had to be fought, not against hostile nations, but rather against international capital. […] The fight against international finance and loan capital has become the most important point in the program of the German nation’s fight for its independence and freedom.73  

Along with Anton Drexler, Feder was one of the Nazi Party’s earliest key personalities. As its leading economic ideologue, Feder formulated, among other things, the party’s plans for the decisive elections in 1932 and 1933. Besides the anti-Semitic features, the party programme states of its economic principle on page 30: ‘Finance shall exist for the benefit of the state; the financial magnates shall not form a state within the state. Hence our aim to break the thraldom of interest.’ In more concrete terms, it is advocated that the state should abolish its debts to the great financial houses, issue interest-free currency to finance public projects and establish a bank in order to grant interest-free loans for business development.74   Schacht, who was not a National Socialist, opposed several of these reforms and also seems to have managed to ward them off during his leadership. Schacht writes in The Magic of Money:

National Socialist agitation under the leadership of Gottfried Feder was directed in great fury against private banking and against the entire currency system. Nationalisation of the banks, liberation from the bondage of interest, the introduction of a state ‘Feder’ giro money, these were the catchphrases by which an end was to be made to our monetary and banking economy. I had to try to steer Hitler away from these destructive conceptions.75  

Schacht’s statement, together with his background in the international financial sector, makes it seem curious that upon the National Socialists taking power Feder only got a marginal position in the new government while Schacht was appointed president of the Reichsbank and minister of economics. Even though Schacht’s MEFO bills saved the country in the short-term they were emitted, if Schacht’s description is correct, as an interest-bearing debt according to principles that are very similar to the dynamics of the modern monetary system. One of several possible explanations for the appointment of Schacht rather than Feder is his earlier experience and that it was part of alliance building with industrial interests, among which Schacht was far more popular than the more populistically-focused Feder. Despite the tragedies that this epoch brought with it, one can conclude that it constitutes a remarkable chapter in monetary history that shines further light on the great political drama that has surrounded the control of the banking and monetary system.

Options for reforms intended to raise awareness of money power as a central social instrument of power include acknowledging it as a fourth independent power alongside the legislative, executive and judicial, and introducing general elections for a chief executive or a board of governors to oversee this power. One might also emphasise that money power does not necessarily have to be a public institution. It can also be controlled by a non-profit organisation or commons trusts, according to Peter Barnes’ description in Capitalism 3.0.76   The Wikimedia Foundation is one example of how such commons trusts can be used, in that case to manage the non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia. Theoretically, it is possible to build a currency commons using the same principle. Local Exchange Trading Systems, or LETS, offer many examples of how such currency commons can be designed on a local level. LETS first developed in the 1980s in Courtenay, Canada — a town blighted by an unemployment level of around 40 per cent. Having noticeably improved the situation, the local population embraced the new currency and it has since spread over the whole world in many variations.77   The name of a specific currency can vary and LETS is just a common denominator for the basic idea of constructing a currency commons under local, regional, national or potentially even under global control. A business-to-business variation of a LETS-like system is the Swiss currency WIR, which has operated on a national level in parallel with conventional currency and has helped stabilise the Swiss economy since 1934.

According to a study from 2010, the WIR was used by 16 per cent of all Swiss companies.78   A typical LETS scheme gives every person in a currency commons (geographical or with another common denominator for its users) the right to a certain amount of interest-free credit, which they can use to buy goods and services. For example, a person can go to the hairdresser and agree to pay, let’s say, €5 and L15. The customer’s LETS account is then debited with -L15 while the hairdresser is credited +L15 for the service. In this moment, new money gets created. The amount of credit every person is allowed to create, and the rules applied to grant credit, can be designed freely depending on the needs and goals of the society in question.

3.2 Reserves  In order for money creation to be shifted from private to public or other common control, the current system based on fractional reserves must be reformed into a system based on what is called full reserves. Fractional reserve banking also makes the system vulnerable. This is because problematic situations can arise if a certain amount of depositors decide to withdraw their money from the bank or cannot meet their loan obligations. The International Monetary Fund counts the number of financial crises between 1970 and 2010 at 425, which splits as 145 banking crises, 208 currency crises and 72 national debt crises.79   Of these, at least the banking crises are interlinked with the fragility built into systems based on fractional reserves.

Regarding financial stability, it is also worth mentioning the big insurance companies. When the financial crisis of 2008 set in, it was not only banks that needed extra support to avoid collapse. Big insurance companies such as AIG were also in need of rescue packages, in large part because of Credit Default Swaps (CDS), which in the aftermath of the crisis became known as financial weapons of mass destruction. In practice, CDS is an equivalent in the insurance business of fractional reserve banking, in the sense that they originate from insurance companies making far greater commitments than they can carry out in times of financial crisis.

A reform designed to prevent such financial crises is the Chicago Plan, which was presented as early as 1933 at the University of Chicago. Its authors took inspiration from Frederick Soddy’s work in an attempt to reform the American economy during the Great Depression. IMF economist Michael Kumhof, mentioned in the second chapter, is among those who have brought up the plan in a modernised version.80   In general terms, the Chicago plan entails a transition to the system many people mistakenly believe is already in place — that banks can only lend money they get from deposits. After such a reform, lending would demand the permission of the depositor, which means the depositor cannot demand the money back while the money is lent out for the simple reason that both lender and borrower are very aware that the money is lent out. With such a reform, bank runs would no longer be a potential problem as all the money available on the customer’s account, in a system based on full reserves, must always be in the bank. Another consequence of this reform is that depositors can more easily control the ways in which their money is used. Under the Chicago Plan seigniorage, which is the profit from creating new money, would be transferred from commercial banks to the public. The proposal by Chicago-inspired IMF economists has a strong resemblance to a proposal by British think-tank Positive Money.81  

Positive Money’s vision includes a transition to full reserves by distinguishing deposit accounts, in which money is simply stored, and accounts for lending and investment. Furthermore, the proposal advocates, among other things, allowing money creation to be controlled by an independent and democratically elected committee, which would decide on the amount of money to be added into the economy while the government would be responsible for the spending of the money. Such a system differs from the current central banking system in that new money is injected into the real economy first, rather than today’s entry via mortgage loans and purchasing various security papers on the financial markets, which only indirectly stimulates the real economy. These measures aim to decrease the risk of housing market bubbles and stimulate employment more effectively.

Soddy’s suggestion on how a transition to full reserves could be implemented without causing financial meltdown, which is the danger if the process is handled carelessly, was to let banks lend new money from the state bank to cover their reserve deficits. With this maneuver, the banks would retain their liquidity without having to recall loans and public debt would be decreased, settled or turn into a demand. Viewed in the context of fractional versus full reserves, the Single Resolution Mechanism under which the European Banking Union’s member countries have a collective responsibility to rescue failing banks is thus a solution focusing on the symptoms and not on the underlying causes of the current instability of the financial system.

(...)

3.4 The Interest Mechanism  

An old story tells of a Persian emperor who was so excited about the new game of chess that he offered to grant its inventor any wish. The inventor was a very clever mathematician and asked for one grain for the first square on the board, two grains for the second and a doubling amount on each of the remaining squares. The emperor was at first very happy at the apparent modesty of the mathematician, until he realised that this exponential growth would demand that he gave him more grain than was available in the whole world, only to satisfy the amount of grain asked for in the last square.

Perhaps it is such exponential dynamics on compound interest that led Aristotle and the prophets of the old Middle East to clearly articulate how one is supposed to use and lend money in accordance with the higher natural order.

It is stated in the Koran that trade is not contrary to God’s will. However, interest (referred to as usury) is categorically condemned:

Those who eat usury (Riba) will not stand (on the Day of Resurrection) except like the standing of a person beaten by Satan leading him to insanity. That is because they say ‘Trading is only like usury,’ whereas Allah has permitted trading and forbidden usury. So whosoever receives an admonition from his Lord and stops eating usury shall not be punished for the past; his case is for Allah (to judge); but whoever returns to usury, such are the dwellers of the Fire — they will abide therein.86  

In the Old Testament, Deuteronomy presents a markedly different approach that shows the perspective on loans and interest as mechanisms of social control is very old:

For the Lord your God will bless you, as he promised you, and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow, and you shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you. [...]

You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but you may not charge your brother interest, that the Lord your God may bless you in all that you undertake in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.87  

With such diametrically opposed take-off points as those above, it’s understandable that the interest issue has been a contributing factor to tensions between the Abrahamic religions. Jesus was, at least based on the New Testament, not as explicit in this regard as were Moses and Muhammad. Nevertheless, one might note that the only time Jesus is said to have been violent was when he drove the money changers out of the temple and accused them of having made it into a den of robbers.88 This Biblical episode might have been a contributing ideological factor to the temporary restrictions regarding interest applied by the Catholic Church.

A general moral objection to interest is that it provides a profit for the creditor without production of a good or service. The systemic challenge for an interest-free banking and monetary system, as is advocated by the Koran, is to find functioning substitutes to the advantages of interest such as incentives to lend money and repay loans. JAK Member bank in Sweden has developed its own solution to this by demanding a certain amount of saving before, during and after the borrowing period as a counter-performance to the granting of credit. The monthly costs of the loan are about the same as the costs of an ordinary bank loan but the difference is that a borrower at JAK, after paying off the loan, has saved a considerable amount of capital they can then freely dispose of. Besides completely interest-free models such as JAK, there are other modern alternatives for reforming the role of the interest mechanism in the societal order. Ellen Brown suggests that interest should finance the costs of the public and uses a vivid fiction to illustrate this:

The Wicked Witch of the West rules over a dark fiefdom with a single private bank owned by the Witch. The bank issues and lends all the money in the realm, charging an interest rate of 10 per cent. The Witch prints 100 witch-dollars, lends them to her constituents and demands 110 back. The people don’t have the extra 10, so the Witch creates 10 more on her books and lends them as well. The money supply must continually increase to cover the interest, which winds up in the Witch’s private coffers. She gets progressively richer, as the people slip further into debt. She uses her accumulated profits to buy things she wants. She is particularly fond of little thatched houses and shops, of which she has an increasingly large collection. To fund the operations of her fiefdom, she taxes the people heavily, adding to their financial burdens.

Glinda the Good Witch of the South runs her realm in a more people-friendly way. All of the money in the land is issued and lent by a ‘people’s bank’ operated for their benefit. She begins by creating 110 people’s-dollars. She lends 100 of these dollars at 10 per cent interest and spends the extra 10 dollars into the community on schemes designed to improve the general welfare — things such as pensions for retirees, social services, infrastructure, education and research and development. The $110 circulates in the community and comes back to the people’s bank as principal and interest on its loans. Glinda again lends $100 of this money into the community and spends the other $10 on public schemes, supplying the interest for the next round of loans while providing the people with jobs and benefits. For many years, she just recycles the same $110, without creating new money. [...] Best of all, taxes are unknown in the realm.89  

An example of a government owning its own commercial bank, with the possibility to grant credit and use interest income for public purposes, is the Bank of North Dakota, which has been active in the state of the same name since 1919. A political objection to public ownership of banks (or other types of ownership such as commons trusts) is that it is a type of socialism or communism not suited to a modern market economy. However, if interest profits are used to fully or partly replace taxation, one can argue that there is also a capitalistic aspect that is as essential as the socialistic aspect of public ownership of banks. One can also conclude that concepts such as socialism and capitalism are not always used in a consistent manner in the political debate. One example of this is that buy-ups financed by the public can be referred to as ‘socialistic threats’ while bailouts financed in exactly the same way (e.g. during and after the financial crisis of 2008) can be referred to as ‘a prerequisite for capitalism’. An alternative to both buy-ups and bailouts is to issue future rescue packages to failing financial institutions as loan packages and thereby compensate the public with an interest-bearing claim on the banks in question.

The Chicago Plan and the reform proposals by Positive Money mentioned in chapter 3.2, under which money is created only by a public institution while a commercial bank would still be allowed to lend against interest, are in this context more moderate alternatives that can possibly lessen the negative effects of interest on a macro level.

When discussing interest mechanism reform, we must finally mention demurrage fees, which may be viewed as a form of negative interest. Demurrage is not negative interest in the sense that one gets paid to borrow money but that one pays a fee to hold money. The earlier analysis of Terra is a theoretical example of such a set-up. The most famous practical example of a monetary system based on demurrage fees is the Austrian currency Wörgl, which was used in a small town of the same name in 1932.90 In 1931, the mayor of the town, Michael Unterguggenberger, was in a desperate economic situation in the aftermath of the Great Depression and convinced the town’s administration to test the principles laid out by the German economist Silvio Gesell in his book The Natural Economic Order (1918). The experiment was based on a currency with a monthly demurrage fee of one per cent. The fee was represented with stamps, which could be bought in local shops and were put on matured notes at the end of each month.

(...)

3.7 Goal Function  

The goal function of the monetary system is not to be confused with the goals of the central bank, such as, for example, price stability or full employment. This is because the central bank only makes up one aspect of the banking and monetary system. The goal function describes the purpose of the monetary system as a whole, whether it is explicitly stated or not. Viewed as a whole, the current system is in practice, even though it is not explicit, based on what can be described as a chrematistic goal function by which financial and (indirectly) political capital is concentrated to financial institutions. On the one hand, the goal function is a more general aspect that can seem less concrete than the previously mentioned aspects. On the other hand, one should bear in mind that the goal function makes up the basic foundation that the six previously mentioned aspects must be based upon. The systems presented in the third chapter are mainly based on goal functions that have a common denominator in that they strive for the monetary system to serve the interests of the public rather than to make the public serve a financial elite, with a money flow that meets the potential supply of goods and services or, according to Soddy’s terminology, the virtual wealth. In such systems, the aggregated capacity of the economy does not depend on whether there is enough money or not but on access to human capital and raw materials. It is from this perspective that one should read the quote from Ezra Pound’s article What Is Money For, which opened this chapter:

For a state to say that it cannot realise its objectives 

 because there is no money

is the same as saying that one cannot build roads 

 because there are no kilometres.

Francis Bacon is said to have coined the phrase that money is a good servant but a bad master, which is a good summary of a chrematistic goal function that accumulates capital to an elite, in contrast with an alternative goal function that serves the interests of the public.

Epilogue Based on what has been presented in this book, it should be evident that there are dimensions of the monetary field that have to a large extent been neglected in science, media and politics. In the discussion it has been shown that money power can be viewed as a social management tool, just as with the executive, legislative and judicial powers. From this perspective, it can be noted that the discrepancy between different banking and monetary systems is as significant as that between radically different political systems. 

The current monetary system furthers centralisation of economic and political power to a financial elite, which has been possible because the system is difficult to grasp not only for the masses but also for the so-called intellectual elite. Because banks, money and debt have generally been viewed as fringe issues without any importance to economic and social development, economists have not put enough attention on exploring the field from new perspectives that can give a better understanding of the properties of money power. 

A perspective that can offer new possibilities for analyzing different types of monetary systems and their socio-economic consequences is to view economics as an energy science analogous to electrics and mechanics. Based on the document Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, money can be viewed as potential economic energy moving in the opposite direction of goods and service production, which in turn correspond to dissipative and kinetic energy respectively. Compared with conventional theoretical frameworks such as the quantity theory, the energy theory implicitly makes it clear that it is not enough (although necessary) to take into account money supply and speed of circulation in order to understand fluctuations in price and production, and that tendencies in the monetary flow must also be taken into account.

An example of how an analysis of monetary flows can contribute with more clarity is the way in which quantitative easing (QE) by central banks can exist in parallel with low price inflation or even deflation. A model such as the quantity theory does not catch up that QE is issued by buying obligations that primarily affect the stock market rather than the real economy. 

Conventional models also overlook to a large extent the way in which economic actors are indebted to each other and how these relations affect power relationships in different sectors of society. The current situation in which individuals, corporations and whole nations have been put in a position of dependency in relation to global finance could most probably not go on for very long if economists established new standard models that exposed this dynamic. A related area that could benefit from flow-based analysis is how the flow of interest income and expenditure affects private and public actors, and whether negative interest systems such as, for example, that of Wörgl can give rise to a different dynamic.

The author’s ambition with this work is not to suggest an all-encompassing monetary solution on a national and international level but it is highly desirable that other economists eventually respond to that challenge. However, regarding potential solutions, one can conclude that several of the alternative monetary systems presented in the third chapter have a common denominator in that they do not let the banking and monetary system automatically serve the interests of a specific group of people or institutions and instead put it in service of the public interest. One might add that alternative monetary systems have different characteristics and different types of economies can make use of this by adapting the respective aspects of a monetary system such as control, convertibility and interest (in a classical sense or negative interest in the form of demurrage), depending on the conditions of the economy in question. The increasing number of cryptocurrencies in the wake of Bitcoin, together with the increased use of parallel local currencies, could be an early sign of an impending monetary revolution that might eventually change the financial system in a way similar to the internet’s impact on the media landscape, even if change proves to be impossible to make from a political level. Economists are therefore urged to prepare for such a scenario by putting a greater focus on the monetary question.

The author hopes that this book can encourage other researchers to pick up and further clarify the dynamics of the current system, including its political consequences, and explore which alternative systems are most appropriate from national, regional and international perspectives. Hopefully, the study of money power can continue in the spirit of Frederick Soddy, whose words from 1934 neatly sum up what should be the fundamental purpose of continued research and its application:

Let us not enslave men that pretenders may rule, but take back our sovereign powers over money in order that men can be free.99

Money Power

A Force for Freedom or Slavery?

Isac Boman

The Comfort of Conformism

Nowadays, although it is fashionable to be feministic, anti-racist, pro-LGBT, eco-friendly, vegan, and Islamophilic while mocking white males, it is even trendier to show it, i.e. to proclaim it loud and clear. This behaviour is typically a form of ostentatious virtue, which Molière portrayed in his Tartuffe, otherwise known as The Impostor. The Anglo-Saxons have recently revived the idea by speaking of ‘virtue signalling’ to describe the propensity of progressives to openly express their opinions or sentiments. This phenomenon, which affects both the elite and the average urban bourgeoisie, has been significantly exacerbated by social media, through which bobos can signal their virtue to the rest of the world, regardless of whether it’s sincere or hypocritical!

The Chinese have a word for progressive whites who seek to flaunt their moral virtue. They call them the baizuo, which means ‘white leftist’ or ‘white progressive’. They are arrogant and condescending, regarding themselves as morally superior and, as such, in a position to lecture the entire world: the baizuo is the archetypal metrosexual bobo on an electric scooter, who proclaims himself left-wing without being particularly militant. If de-colonialists and woke activists are now spearheading the war against white privilege, the baizuo, whether Hollywood jet setters or junior service sector executives full of xeno-oestrogens, are the bulk of the troops that follow without questioning.

Georges Bernanos25  had already denounced them in La liberté, pour quoi faire?26  : ‘Their submission to progress is matched only by their submission to the State [...], and progress exempts them from ever straying from the path followed by everyone else.’ The Chinese media portray the baizuo as people who only care about issues such as minorities, LGBT rights, and the environment, with no grasp of the real problems affecting the majority of their own people. They promote peace and equality to satisfy their sense of moral superiority, while reamining so obsessed with political correctness that they tolerate the backward values of Islam in order to preserve multiculturalism.

When mentioning this last trait, it’s hard not to recall the scandal surrounding Muslim grooming gangs, most of which are of Pakistani origin and have been operating in the United Kingdom since the early 1980s. Despite the numerous testimonies and evidence, neither the police and social services, nor the political authorities have shown any willingness to act, for fear of coming across as racist. A journalist investigating these rapes was forced to undergo a workshop on racism and diversity. Tens of thousands of young white women have suffered the worst possible abuses in Rochdale, Telford, and Rotherham, all in the name of multiculturalism and political correctness, and the show biz sphere has failed to mobilise and defend them. How many networks of this kind still exist?

Virtue signalling is not just a way for people to boast. Often involving unconscious mechanisms, it is also a strategy that allows one to acquire social capital by making themselves look good and showing off that they champion just causes. Moreover, being ‘on the right side of history’ allows one to join the side of the winners, that of the dominant ones. Denigrating white privilege is fully in line with such social and psychological comfort.

It’s a simple and risk-free way to acquire social prestige. A white leftist that denounces white supremacy and structural racism — how brave! It is nothing more than elitist moralisation worthy of poodles. One fights against oppressive windmills to give themselves the impression of standing out from the crowd, just like a billionaire that promotes ecology and cycling while actually owning a private jet. As Philippe Muray27  once said, the right-thinking ones never slip, because they are actually the ice.

In addition, conformity is also a sexual strategy: indeed, woke issues resonate particularly well with left-leaning women. Since they tend to be more sexually open and to marry or have children later in life, they represent a larger pool of potential sexual partners. And since you have to sell yourself to bourgeois women steeped in anti-racist feminism, you proceed to signal your virtue… That’s progressive courtship for you. Peacocks show off, deer bray, frogs croak, and metropolitan soybean men make it known that they find the gender pay gap scandalous or that they cried upon learning of the death of George Floyd.

Political correctness is a powerful mechanism. If you repeat something over and over again, you end up adhering to it. Often acting on pure conformism so as not to stand out, professions of faith are eventually internalised and become genuine beliefs. During the Korean War, many American prisoners in the hands of the Chinese communists underwent such a psychological process: instead of torturing them, their captors demanded small political concessions. In exchange for small rewards — food, cigarettes, walks — they made them say or write that ‘the United States was not perfect’. They also asked them to list some of the problems plaguing capitalist societies. The prisoners thus made small, harmless, and sometimes even sincere compromises with the enemy. In doing so, they entered into a mental pattern of collaboration, harmless at first but destined to grow further.

A New Moral Order  

Once you’ve put your finger in the cogs, you’re often permanently trapped. And to resolve the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, that of things one does not believe in, the human brain ends up wanting to believe. When one experiences themselves saying or doing something, their mental image of themselves is changed and they end up wanting to conform to how they now perceive themselves. It’s mentally more comfortable and easier to live with.

This new moral order also benefits from a psycho-physiological mechanism openly exploited by social media: popular posts generate notifications, which in turn trigger endorphin rushes, creating a feeling of pleasure. As with a drug, the user is driven to always want more. There are, in fact, two effective ways to receive such physiological gratification on social media. The first, which particularly affects teenage girls and delights predators, is to adopt hyper-sexualised behaviour in order to gain virtual attention. More accessible to left-leaning white adults, the second consists in conforming to the dominant ideology. This interaction between virtue signalling and its reward (on the one hand, in the shape of social prestige, and on the other, through hormonal and moral remuneration) fosters woke indoctrination.

As a dominant ideology, political correctness also has another weapon: shaming. Psychologists use the term ‘socialisation’ to refer to the process through which children are encouraged to think and act the way society demands. This education is carried out through a shaming game whenever they make comments or behave in ways that go against our society’s moral code. This moral code weighs so heavily on people today, especially when one is a left-leaning white person, a baizuo ashamed of their own race and ancestors, that it becomes difficult to avoid a constant feeling of guilt.

American anti-racist activists have even coined the expression ‘white guilt’ to encourage white people to blame themselves for the ‘sins’ of their ancestors. Those who criticise white privilege readily rely on this aspect of guilt to impose their discourse and demands more effectively. Foreign agents such as Al Jazeera (Qatar) and Anadolu (Turkey) even exploit this guilt as a soft power tool. In this regard, Mathieu Bock-Côté28  speaks of neo-Maoism, referring to the ‘self-flagellation sessions of artists and other socialites who accuse themselves of being improper allies in an increasingly ostentatious expiatory ritual’.

White progressives are now beating their breast and indulging in self-criticism so as to stay on the side of the good guys, the ‘allies’ of minorities, rather than give the impression of being part of the racist camp. This subservience will, however, do them no good, as submission never pays and they will be asked for more and more contrition. In Un coupable presque parfait. La construction du bouc-émissaire blanc,29  Pascal Bruckner30  reminds us that ‘nothing arouses more rage than a man who has fallen to the ground. Already hated for its past domination, the West is now despised for its decline’.

Acceptance of the various aspects of progressivism and the above-mentioned white guilt, including the dogmas of critical race theory, is, in fact, a process of power and structural domination, which is exactly what white privilege is criticised for. Should one publicly reject even one of the precepts of wokeness, the result may very well be ostracisation and marginalisation from one’s ‘good’ society, as already seen with cancel culture.

Beyond the abuses of woke revolutionary guardians, however, the dominant ideology perniciously imposes itself on everyone: while social media act as an amplifier for social gratification in the name of virtue signalling, it also encourages self-censorship, since discussing sensitive topics carries the risk of public humiliation. Progressives can live their lives with unconcealed faces, whereas their opponents risk being pilloried if they reveal themselves. Digital anonymity is thus the last bastion that protects what little remains of freedom of expression in the West.

Those who do not particularly seek to defend ideas also suffer from this social pressure and moral domination. Even if they are not fully aware of it, they have no choice but to adhere to the dominant discourse or, at least, say nothing against it, thus allowing it to spread without any opposition. In 1987, the deconstructionist Gilles Deleuze anticipated the advent of what he called ‘societies of control’: ‘We are not even being asked to believe, but rather to behave as if we did.’ Is allowing people to say that a cross-dressing man should be able to play rugby on a women’s team (genital ablation is no longer even necessary in this respect) or that non-whites are victims of systemic racism such a high price to pay when what is at stake is a person’s ability to keep the job that allows them to feed a family? Conversely, default acceptance, ever palpable in the apathy of the masses that mechanically embrace fashionable ideas and influencer trends, is often rewarding and costs nothing.

In no way is this soft liberal-progressive totalitarianism a deliberate social engineering project. The conditioning of minds that it induces is simply the result of social and psychological mechanisms that exert intense socialisation pressure on individuals. So much so that on 6 January 2021, American teenagers denounced their own parents for marching outside the Capitol in support of Donald Trump, resembling George Orwell’s 1984 or the heyday of Russian communism.

Initially a mere amalgamation of liberalism and anti-racism, the ideology of diversity was long limited to the dogmas of the individual — ‘There is no such thing as society’, said Thatcher — and multiculturalism. Possessing real institutional power, it is now spurred on by critical race theory, which permeates the political class, the media, culture, and academia. The dominant ideology imposes its precepts; the fact that it does so while denouncing an alleged white supremacy that is clearly struggling to resist it is nothing but cruel irony.

White Privilege 

Georges Guiscard 

The book The Sweden Syndrome: ...

 Foreword by John Carter  

While riding a municipal bus in Uppsala, I had the opportunity to observe a group of high school students. In one seat were a few Swedish boys, of the bespectacled, well-behaved, and soft-spoken variety typical of Sweden’s intermediate professional classes. In the seat next to them was a small group of Swedish girls. Behind the girls were some Arab boys, who were engaged in pulling the girls’ hair and otherwise tormenting and teasing them, much to the girls’ displeasure. In other circumstances this might have been an innocent, even light-hearted scene, and there was a part of me that was amused by the Arab boys’ antics and the girls’ protests, but the rigid posture of the Swedish lads, the way they carefully looked anywhere but at the Arab boys, gave the scene a tense, dark aura.

Here in microcosm was a holographic fragment of Sweden’s peculiar sociological madness. The Swedish boys were clearly deeply uncomfortable with the way the Arab kids were treating what they could not but instinctively think of as their women; whether their discomfort was due to the Arab boys’ discourteous behaviour, or due to displeasure at these foreigners getting the attention of girls the way boys have always done, the fact of their discontent was obvious. The lads radiated a desire to intervene, but their inaction turned their anger into something futile and pathetic.

These boys had been raised to be good feminists and anti-racists. Whether they personally bought into these ideologies was immaterial, for they certainly understood the consequences of transgressing them. As good feminists, the girls were meant to be able to take care of themselves. If they wanted help, they’d ask for it; moreover, they certainly weren’t anyone’s tribal property, so the Swedish boys had no standing to protect their women from foreigners. As to the Arabs, the Swedish boys were trapped in the double-bind of anti-racist multiculturalism, in which they must simultaneously ignore race and be acutely conscious of it: they must not think of the Arabs as members of a foreign and hostile tribe, but simply as Swedes just like themselves; yet at the same time, should they assert themselves against the Arab boys, they would certainly be harshly punished for this expression of racism.

For the girls’ part, I had no doubt that they would have much preferred the Arab kids to stop. Their body language was not of the sort that teenage girls use when they’re being teased by boys whose attention they are pleased to have. Yet they too were trapped by the anti-racist imperative to avoid offending New Swedes by any means necessary, while also being prevented from asking for the help of the Swedish boys because, after all, they had been raised to be strong, independent women. Possibly some part of them felt angry at the Swedish boys for not standing up for them.

As for the Arabs, neither the strictures of feminism nor those of anti-racism applied to them one bit, and they knew this quite well. Thus, they felt no compunctions about taking liberties with the girls. Doubtless any attempt to stop them would have been met with unabashed racial verbal abuse and quite possibly physical violence. From the point of view of the Arab boys, the Swedish girls were nothing but whores, and as for the Swedish boys — who were required by feminism to defer to the girls — well, they were obviously even lower than whores, contemptuous creatures of no account.

It is a particularly sick society that binds the hands of its own men in this fashion, that its women may be offered up in the name of sexual liberation and gender equality to foreign invaders whom that same society refuses to hold to the same standard, because to do so would be culturally insensitive.

Over my time in Sweden, I made several similar observations: broken glass on bus stops, which would be repaired only to be shattered the very next day; gangs of young Afghan men prowling the downtown, staring at the populace with a frankly predatory gaze; female friends who would whisper to me, under their breath and with the door closed, that they didn’t dare go out at night unaccompanied; other girlfriends who stated forthrightly that they’d stopped wearing makeup and started deliberately dressing down in order to dissuade the attention of these immigrants; stories of racial bullying in the schools escalated to such a level that the parents had no choice but to transfer their white sons and daughters; ubiquitous gypsy women begging outside grocery stores or shoving their cups under your face when you sat on the terrace (the gypsies were a recent arrival, having flooded into the country when Romania joined the EU, and having quickly identified the gullible, good-hearted Swedes as easy marks).

The pace of Sweden’s demographic change has been rapid. This was brought home to me somewhat viscerally when a landlord from whom I’d been renting a room returned home one evening, shock written on his face. He was something of a recluse and a misanthrope, a retired engineer who lived at the edge of Uppsala but spent most of his time in his rural cabin. We’d had a few good conversations, as unlike most Swedes he had no illusions about the ill effects of immigration. Nevertheless, it was all somewhat abstract to him. When he returned to the apartment that night, he had just been to the city centre for the first time in several years. He told me that he thought I’d been exaggerating, but now knew that I had not exaggerated one bit: the city was completely changed, there were Africans, Middle Easterners, and Afghans everywhere.

Meanwhile, the good Swedes I met at work or in social settings were resolutely blind to all of this, convinced that there was nothing to worry about, that there were no problems, and that anyone who said anything to the contrary was a sexist, a racist, an Islamophobe, and probably a Nazi. When I tentatively raised the subject with one, he proclaimed confidently that such thoughts were the short path to Auschwitz. Another conversation that stuck with me was with a colleague who had spent a year or so as a conscript in the Swedish military, an experience to which I could relate, having served a few years in the Canadian militia myself. The subject of bar brawls came up: for myself, I’d always enjoyed the sense that the boys from my platoon had my back and vice versa, and that any civilian who threw hands was starting a fight with all of us; he’d been in similar situations, but found the unreflective tribalism of it horrifying. I pointed out that there were good reasons of evolutionary psychology for this sort of pack instinct, and that tribes which lacked it tended to go extinct; he responded by saying that we’d evolved past such things. Later, he explained to me that he did not care at all whether there were no ethnic Swedes left in Sweden by the end of the twenty-first century, so long as the people living in Sweden continued to practice Swedish values of tolerance and so on.

How does a country come, in such a short period of time, to embrace its own annihilation with such enthusiastic abandon? In other European countries, you might point to a bad conscience over the legacy of slavery or empire, but the only people the Swedes ever conquered and enslaved were other Europeans. With the exception of the Saami in the far north, Sweden had been perfectly ethnically homogeneous, with no oppressed minorities because there were no minorities to oppress. Some Swedes would tell me that Sweden had to make amends for its neutrality in the Second World War, as though tiny Sweden declaring war on Nazi Germany would have made a lick of difference. Others, bizarrely, pointed to the possibility that a certain amount of Swedish iron might have been used to forge chains and manacles for Trans-Atlantic slave ships, based on nothing more than the fact that those were made of iron, and that iron was a fungible commodity, and it was therefore plausible that a certain fraction of Swedish iron was put to this use.

To me, such justifications seem like ex post facto attempts to rationalize the phenomenon. To the contrary, I suspect much of Sweden’s ostentatious self-harm is explained by Sweden’s somewhat inflated sense of its importance on the international stage, a belief encapsulated by the Swedish government’s characterization of Sweden as a ‘humanitarian superpower.’ Swedes are fashion-conscious people with an aristocratic assumption that others are looking to them and taking their cues from them. Thus, for instance, when it comes to Net Zero policies, Swedes will happily agree that even if Sweden became completely carbon-neutral, it would not make any difference to the global anthropogenic carbon budget, which is dominated by countries such as China or India who could not possibly care less about ‘climate change.’ Nevertheless, they assume that the whole world is watching what Sweden does, and that therefore Sweden must set an example. The actual truth is that much of the world is only vaguely aware that Sweden exists: your average American has a hard time remembering the difference between Sweden and Switzerland, for instance, to say nothing of the Chinese, who assuredly do not give Sweden a moment’s thought in their daily lives. An uncharitable interpretation of Sweden’s self-description as a ‘humanitarian superpower’ is that they are jumping in front of a parade in order to pretend to lead it.

Another important factor is that Sweden is a consensus society. Swedes are much more reluctant to violate social consensus than assertive Americans, eccentric Anglos, or the argumentative French. Say the wrong thing on the wrong subject, and be quietly ostracized. Sweden’s elites astutely use the educational system and the media to manage the social consensus on race, immigration, feminism, and so on, with the result that Swedes feel an intense emotional pressure to conform to these ideologies. To speak against them too strongly is to endanger not just one’s social life but one’s career.

That isn’t to say that every Swede agrees with all of this suicidal insanity. Far from it. There’s a vibrant political underground in Sweden: large and well-organized nationalist groups; a robust and highly critical commentary sphere of anonymous online dissidents; and a large and influential nationalist party in the form of the Sweden Democrats. Many Swedish men, in private, will admit that they revile the self-destructive left-liberal tyranny. For now, the establishment has been successful in keeping such men from power, but I do not know that this will remain the case indefinitely. In a consensus society there is always a quiet conversation taking place underneath the public conversation, consisting of whispered private remarks and things that are said by being left unsaid, the purpose of which is to continually test the consensus. When a consensus is reached that the consensus has changed, the new consensus rapidly displaces the old, bringing abrupt changes in governance, law, public policy, and social norms. In Sweden, that quiet conversation under the public conversation has been proceeding furiously, both in pace and in tenor, for many years now. Moreover, it can’t be ignored that the wider Western world is quickly souring on multiculturalism, replacement migration, feminism, and the rest of the intersectional left-liberal ideology. Left-liberalism is no longer hegemonic, and ordinary Swedes will certainly be taking notice of that. As open-borders globalism becomes unfashionable, political elites who cling to it look ridiculous and out-of-touch, rather than trendy and chic.

Perhaps that prediction of eruptive political change in Sweden will be borne out in the near future; perhaps, though, things will simply continue to decay, and it will strike the reader of a decade or two hence as obscenely wrong. Time will tell. For now, Sweden remains in the grips of this madness.

The present work by Karl-Olov Arnstberg is a thorough, clinical description of the symptoms and etiology of what the author calls ‘the Sweden syndrome.’ Arnstberg summarizes the Sweden syndrome’s characteristics as a combination of oikophobia, hierarchical inversion (i.e. preferring the worse to the better, the lower-performing to the higher, and so on), reality denial (the postmodern superstition that objective reality does not exist, and that subjective morality can be treated as objective: as he puts it, ‘pathos replaces logos’), and the collapse of distinctions and boundaries (e.g. men/women, self/other, us/them, etc.).

Arnstberg traces the historical process that converted Sweden from a nationalistic Folkhemmet which treated the country like a family into a multicultural administrative zone that perversely prides itself on privileging the foreigner over the native. He shows how these beliefs were introduced into Sweden’s elite and propagated through the key educational, academic, legislative, judicial, and media sectors. He shows in gut-wrenching detail the consequences for ordinary Swedes: vicious gang-rapes; teenage boys forced to submit to having their mouths urinated in after being robbed; legal persecution, public defamation, and career destruction for complaining about it. He demonstrates how the legal system has been twisted to harshly punish native Swedes, while letting migrants off with a slap on the wrist. He explores the deleterious consequences of feminization for Sweden’s institutions following capture by ideological feminists, and how the imposition of feminist dogma turns Sweden’s men and women against one another, and against their own natures. He demonstrates how the disease expresses itself even at the level of national symbols, for instance with the castration of the Swedish military’s heraldic lion.

For Arnstberg, the Sweden syndrome is not a mere academic exercise, but something that he has lived through. He was personally acquainted with some of the principals who drove the early debate on multiculturalism. As a professor of ethnology at Stockholm University, he had both a front-row seat to the deepening psychosis of academia, alongside mastery of the conceptual toolset necessary to document and analyze the degenerative process. Finally, as an outspoken critic of the government’s immigration policies, Arnstberg has personally experienced the regime’s tactics of cancellation and defamation face-on.

The book is called The Sweden Syndrome, but the broad stokes of the disease that Arnstberg describes can be seen in practically every Western country. Sweden is not unique in this regard. However, Sweden presents an exemplary case study due to the rapidity with which it succumbed and the thoroughness with which the symptoms presented themselves. No matter what country you live in, you’ll likely recognize the symptoms Arnstberg describes.

Arnstberg’s concise analysis of this complex mass psychosis is a service not only to the present, but to future generations. While, as Arnstberg notes, we do not yet have either a vaccine or a cure, the first step to treating an illness is recognizing and describing it.

There are reasons to be hopeful that the fever is breaking. Since this book was written in 2022, the Sweden Democrats have become the second-largest party in the Riksdag and therefore too big to ignore. Thus, they have finally broken through the long-standing cordon sanitaire with which they were isolated from any meaningful policy influence, entering into the government as part of the so-called Tidö Agreement coalition with the other right-leaning parties (the Moderate Party, the Christian Democrat Party, and the Liberal Party). Meanwhile, the Swedish government has started experimenting with offers of lump-sum financial compensation to induce migrants to leave the country. These are small, tentative steps towards sanity. The Tidö coalition is an awkward one, particularly for the Liberals, and the centre-right parties have faced furious condemnation from both domestic media and their European counterparts abroad; while the Sweden Democrats are the largest party in the coalition (and the second-largest in the Riksdag), neither the prime minister nor any senior government ministers are drawn from the party. As to the remigration efforts, these have been completely unsuccessful, with only a few hundred accepting the government’s bribe to leave, as compared to the million-plus who ultimately need to be removed. Nevertheless, these are small steps in the right direction, and mark the first reversals of left-liberal multicultural globalism in decades.

John Carter

Canada

November 23rd, 2025

Friendly Big Brother

‘Newspeak’ is the name for the ideal language in George Orwell’s surveillance state. It is meant to supplant ‘oldspeak’ entirely. Newspeak has only one goal: to restrict room for thinking freely. Every year, words decrease in number, and the space for conscious thought diminishes. Syme, a friend of 1984’s hero Winston, raves about the beauty of destroying words. ‘Thoughtcrimes’, he enthuses, will be made impossible when the words necessary for them are struck from the lexicon. In the process, the notion of freedom will be abolished too. On this score, Orwell’s surveillance state differs fundamentally from the world of the digital panopticon – which uses freedom to excess. Today’s society of information is not characterized by destroying words, but by multiplying them without end.

The spirit of the Cold War and the negativity of enmity dominate Orwell’s novel. The country it describes is in a state of permanent war. Julia, Winston’s love interest, speculates that the bombs raining down on London every day have been launched by Big Brother and the Party in order to maintain fear and terror in the populace. The ‘Enemy of the People’ is called Emmanuel Goldstein. He commands a network of underground conspirators seeking to overthrow the government. Big Brother is at ideological war with Goldstein. ‘Two Minutes Hate’, broadcast daily on the ‘telescreen’, takes aim at Goldstein. In the ‘Ministry of Truth’ – in fact, a Ministry of Lies – the past is revised and fitted to ideology. Orwell’s surveillance state employs the psychotechnical methods of brainwashing: electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs and physical torture. The ‘Ministry of Plenty’ (newspeak: ‘Miniplenty’) sees to it that consumer goods are always lacking, so that an artificial state of need may be maintained.

Orwell’s surveillance state, with its telescreens and torture chambers, is fundamentally different from today’s digital panopticon, with its internet, smartphones and Google Glass. In the digital panopticon, the illusion of limitless freedom and communication predominates. Here there is no torture – just tweets and posts. Nor is there a mysterious ‘Ministry of Truth’. Transparency and information have taken the place of truth. The new conception of power does not involve controlling the past, but steering the future psychopolitically.

The neoliberal technology of power does not prohibit, protect or repress; instead, it prospects, permits and projects. Consumption is not held in check, but maximized. No production of scarcity occurs; instead, surplus is generated – indeed, a superabundance of positivity. Everyone is encouraged to communicate and consume. The principle of negativity, which still defined Orwell’s state, has yielded to the principle of positivity. Needs are not repressed, but stimulated. Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure. Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers. Big Brother now wears a friendly face. His friendliness is what makes surveillance so efficient.

Bentham’s Big Brother was invisible, but he was everywhere in prisoners’ minds. Inmates interiorized him. In contrast, the inhabitants of today’s digital panopticon never really feel that they are being watched or threatened. Consequently, ‘surveillance state’ is an imprecise name for describing the digital panopticon. Here, everyone feels free. However, precisely this feeling of freedom – which is nowhere to be found in Orwell’s state – is now the problem.

The digital panopticon thrives on its occupants’ voluntary self-exposure. Self-exploitation and self-illumination follow the same logic. In either case, freedom is exploited. The digital panopticon lacks a Big Brother wresting information from us against our will. Instead, we lay ourselves bare voluntarily.

The advertisement that Apple aired during the 1984 Superbowl has become the stuff of legend. In it the company presented itself as a force of liberation, which would counter the Orwellian surveillance state. In lock-step, listless workers – evidently without a will of their own – march into a vast hall and listen to Big Brother’s fanatical declamations on the telescreen. Then the ad shows a woman rushing into the assembly hall, the Thought Police in hot pursuit. Bearing a sledgehammer before her heaving breast, she dashes forward. Full of resolve, she runs straight up to Big Brother and throws the sledgehammer at the telescreen with all the force she can muster; it explodes in a dazzling burst of light. The assembled workers promptly awaken from their torpor. A voice declares: ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’ But despite Apple’s message, 1984 did not signal the end of the surveillance state so much as the inception of a new kind of control society – one whose operations surpass the Orwellian state by leaps and bounds. Now, communication and control have become one, without remainder. Now, everyone is his or her own panopticon.

Psychopolitics

Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Byung-Chul Han

Science vs. Wisdom

    

Just as power, depersonalizing and socializing, has become gold, capital; likewise, wisdom, depersonalizing and socializing, has become “concept,” “rationality.” And this is the second root of the European evil.

Both Western philosophy and positive science, in their essence, are fundamentally socialist, democratic, and anti-hierarchical. They present as “true” only what can be universally recognized and accepted by anyone with a certain level of education, regardless of their individual life experiences. Like the “majority” rule in political democracy, they assume equality and apply the standards of quantity and number, rather than recognizing qualities, unique attributes, or the privilege of exceptional qualities.

It is useless to proclaim individualist or even relativist doctrines when, in the very way of proclaiming them, which is the conceptual manner of profane philosophy, one demonstrates adherence to these democratic, impersonal, universalist presuppositions that lie at the base of that very philosophy. The path is entirely different — those same presuppositions must be contested first if one does not want to commit the same absurdity of an imperialism that, instead of imposing itself through the hierarchy from above, as mentioned, sought its justification in popular recognition. Here one begins to realize the nature of the enemy we have to fight, how frightfully the very “culture,” not just the “society” of Europeans, is an active democratism — and what renunciations they must demand of themselves to regain health.

Just as money is a reality indifferent to the quality of the individuals who possess it, so is the “knowledge” of Europeans. More precisely: driven by a will for equality, an anti-hierarchical intolerance, and therefore a socialist concern, European knowledge has necessarily focused on something where the effectiveness of individual differences and the condition, for knowledge, of active individual differentiation, is minimized. Hence, it refers either to physical experience, which is roughly the same for all humans as animals (positive science), or to the world of abstraction and verbal conventions (philosophy and rationalism).

The push for socializing and universalizing knowledge has inevitably led to its abstraction, creating an unbridgeable gap between knowledge and life, between knowing and being, and between thought and “metaphysical reality.” This is why, in the West, thought often becomes a creator of unrealities, of “reified” words, and of empty logical frameworks when it is not reduced to merely transcribing the most external, general, and uniform aspects of material things. This intellectual sport becomes even more ridiculous when done sincerely.

From this stems all the unreality of the modern spirit: separated from life, man today is almost a shadow moving among schemes, programs, and intellectual superstructures incapable of mastering reality and life itself, while becoming increasingly dependent on a science that adds abstractions to abstractions, enslaved as it is by phenomenal laws that are observed but not understood, all exhausting themselves in mechanical exteriority without any of the resulting possibilities also holding value for the inner being of man.

Given the limitations of the present discussion, we certainly cannot delve deeply into the matter here. However, one should not think that it is unrelated to the problem of the empire: as we pose it, the problem of the empire is the problem par excellence, relative to which particular problems cannot separate themselves and constitute a domain of their own. The particularism, the mutual indifference of the various forms of human activity — here politics, there science, here practice, there religion, and so on — is another already noted aspect of European decadence and an unequivocal symptom of its inorganic nature.

The foundations of the imperial hierarchy must rest on knowledge: “The wise must govern,” as Plato already said — and this is a central, absolute, definitive point in any rational order of things. But nothing would be more ridiculous than to identify such knowledge with any positive science or philosophical speculation: instead, it coincides with what we initially referred to, using a traditional expression common to both classical Western and Eastern traditions, as wisdom. And wisdom is something as aristocratic, individual, effective, substantial, organic, and qualitative as the knowledge of the “civilized” is democratic, social, universalist, abstract, and quantitative. Here again, there are two worlds, two perspectives, two different visions to be placed against each other without dilution.

According to wisdom, knowing does not mean “thinking,” but being the thing known: living it, realizing it. One does not truly know a thing unless one can transform one’s consciousness into it. Hence, what results from direct and individual experience alone will count as “knowledge.” Contrary to modern mentality — which labels what immediately appears to the individual as a “phenomenon,” a “subjective” appearance, and posits something else behind it, which is merely thought or supposed (the “thing-in-itself” of philosophers, the “absolute” of profane religion, the “matter” or “ether” or “energy” of science) as the “true reality” — wisdom is an absolute positivism that calls real only what can be grasped through direct experience, and considers everything else unreal, abstract, and illusory.

From this perspective, one might argue that all knowledge is reduced to finite and contingent things perceived by the physical senses. And indeed, this is the case for the vast majority of people, who can only truly understand this finitude and contingency, which remains as such despite all pseudo-scientific explanations. However, we assert the possibility of experiencing forms of knowledge beyond the sensory experience of ordinary people — experiences that are not “given,” not normal, yet achievable through certain active processes of inner transformation. These transcendent experiences are as direct, concrete, and individual as sensory experiences, but they perceive reality beyond the contingent, space-temporal aspects inherent in all sensory perception. While science attempts to transcend these aspects, it often does so by reducing true knowledge — vision, living individual evidence — to mere probabilities, incomprehensible “uniformities,” and abstract explanatory principles.

The meaning of all this might not be immediately clear to everyone, and that is natural. However, it is essential to understand that our focus is solely on experience; that for us, there is no distinction between finite reality and absolute reality, but rather a finite and absolute way of experiencing reality. There is a finite perspective or an absolute perspective. The entire so-called “problem of knowledge” is thus contained within the interiority of man, depending not on “culture” but on his ability to identify freely with different forms of experience along a hierarchy. This hierarchy culminates in a state of perfect identity, spiritual vision, and full realization of the unity between the self and the thing, achieving a state of power and absolute clarity regarding the thing itself. When this state is reached, further questioning becomes unnecessary, and all reasoning, much more talking, is rendered superfluous.

Such is, in very brief lines, the sense of that wisdom which constitutes the core of metaphysical teaching and the spiritual science of the East, and which was equally known to the West, both in the ancient mystery schools (where the initiation rite precisely operated the transformation of consciousness necessary for “knowing” and “seeing” metaphysically) and in other more well-known currents, such as the Alexandrian, Neoplatonic, and Pythagorean traditions, as well as in Hermetic, Gnostic, Theosophical, Illuminist, and Kabbalistic traditions that persisted even in the post-Christian period.

The key point is that sacred and sapiential science, unlike ordinary science, is not about “knowing” but about “being.” It cannot be taught through books or universities or conveyed in words. To acquire it, one must transform oneself, transcending common life into a higher existence. This type of knowledge precisely measures the quality and reality of individual life, becoming an inviolable privilege and integral part of it, rather than being a mere concept or notion that can be stored in the mind without any personal transformation or inner change.

Hence, the natural aristocracy of wisdom and its decisive non-popularization and non-communicability. Europeans often confuse “communicability” with understanding, assuming that what can be spoken can also be understood equally by all. They fail to see that while this may apply to intellectual abstractions and conventions based on sensory experiences assumed to be more or less equal for everyone, this uniformity breaks down when qualitative differences reassert themselves. In such cases, discursive communicability is no longer a valid criterion.

Wisdom, founded on the evidence of experiences beyond those of common men, leaves only one path open: to attempt, through a free and creative act, to reach the same level as the one imparting the teaching, thereby knowing through experience what the other knows or says with a word, which otherwise would remain just a word. Against the socialization, depersonalization, and conceptualization of knowledge, against the democratic inclination to “popularize” and dilute the superior for the benefit of the inferior so that the greatest number can participate without changing and ceasing to be inferior, we unyieldingly oppose the contrary attitude: there must be hierarchies within knowledge itself. There must be many truths separated by deep, vast, impassable chasms, corresponding exactly to various qualities of life and power, to many distinct individualities. There must be an aristocracy of knowledge, and the “universality” understood as communicable, democratic, and uniform must cease to be a criterion. We must not lower ourselves to them; rather, they must elevate themselves to us, dignifying themselves and genuinely ascending according to their abilities along the hierarchy of beings, if they wish to partake in the higher and metaphysical forms, which serve as criteria unto themselves and to the inferior and physical ones.

Thus, wisdom also results in freedom, openness, and breadth. At the core of socialized knowledge, there is always a “must,” a hidden, intolerant moral imposition. What is deemed “scientific” or “philosophical” truth must be universally recognized; no other attitude is allowed. As an expression of collective despotism, it seeks to reign despotically over all individuals, making them equal before it. It has organized itself, built its weapons, proofs, methods, and violence on this very will.

In contrast, wisdom dissolves, reintegrates, and returns the individual to himself. Each person has his truth, which precisely and profoundly expresses his life. This truth is a unique way of experiencing and expressing reality, which does not contradict or exclude other different ways. These diverse ways are equally possible within the differentiation that forms the basis of the hierarchy of wisdom.

This is sufficient regarding the second root of European decay and its remedy, justifying the principle that “the wise must govern.” In the realm of wisdom, the hierarchy of knowledge aligns with the hierarchy of power and individual superiority. Knowledge is being, and being is power, which naturally attracts the dignity of imperium.

In contrast, all of Europe stands with an organization nearly two millennia old. There is, as we said, the reign of professors, “intellectuals,” and eyeglasses without eyes — the academic, “cultured” world. By arrogating the privilege of knowledge and spirit, this world only demonstrates the extent to which the decadence and abstraction of the post-Christian world have advanced.

Julius Evola 

Pagan Imperialism 

American History Z - extracts

 The devastating crack ultimately peeked out on September 2nd, 2024, when Tucker Carlson decided to release a new podcast episode. In the episode, Tucker had brought on a man named Darryl Cooper. Darryl had a podcast of his own called MartyrMade in which he covered all kinds of extensive and nuanced history. He often provided a fairly novel perspective that challenged the traditionally presented story about things. Not too many people in the mainstream had heard of Darryl before his appearance on Tucker. That was about to change.

Tucker provocatively introduced Cooper to the world as the most important and popular historian in the country, immediately piquing the curiosity of his viewers. The two men went on to have a conversation that covered many things, but most notably, World War II. However, this wasn’t your typical discussion about “the war.”

Darryl’s perspective on World War II wasn’t anything like the narrative that we’d heard growing up. His viewpoint basically rejected most of the fundamental, foundational facts that we’d been taught over the course of our entire lives, and on which so much of American — and more broadly Western — political discourse had been based. Surprisingly, Tucker didn’t contest these views. In fact, Tucker egged him on.

A nuclear bomb was set off across the West as soon as Darryl said:

I think, and maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic, maybe, but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now, he didn’t kill the most people. He didn’t commit the most atrocities. But I believe — I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did. Becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.

When Darryl suggested that Winston Churchill could’ve perhaps been a villain, rather than an indisputable hero, most people couldn’t handle it. The magic protecting Churchill was far too strong for the average man to grapple with this type of a challenge. The majority of the West assumed Darryl had to be deviously twisting the narrative here. There was no other explanation for this.

After his first devastating comment, Darryl then followed it up with another atomic blast:

You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position — and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it — that when they went into the East in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July-August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re — so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, ‘We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.’ And one of them actually says, ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?

When Darryl’s words implied that the Holocaust may not have been an entirely ruthless, calculated extinction event, people were almost universally horrified. No part of that could be true based on what we’d been taught growing up.

The public’s reaction to Cooper’s appearance was so visceral for one very specific reason. Darryl’s propositions had directly challenged the validity of two of the greatest load-bearing myths in our society. Those myths being that the Holocaust was the most evil, intentional act in all of history, and that Hitler was the devil incarnate. The meltdown from Conservative Inc., as well as from liberals, was cataclysmic.

A senior deputy press secretary for the White House came out and said: “giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda is a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans, to the memory of the over six million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler, to the service of the millions of Americans who fought to defeat Nazism, and to every subsequent victim of Antisemitism.”

The Anti-Defamation League then posted to X: “Tucker Carlson’s praise of Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper is an insult to the memory of the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered by Hitler’s Nazi regime.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, fiercely reiterated the same sentiment.

The denunciation didn’t come purely from the left, though. Lots of conservatives also took shots at Darryl.

Ben Shapiro called Cooper a “fake historian and pseudo-Nazi apologist” and went on to complain about the rise of antisemitism. It was curious that Shapiro had never cared about the rampant anti-White rhetoric within our society.

Liz Cheney also chimed in: “Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda, including, ‘Churchill was the chief villain of WW2’ and Hitler ‘didn’t want to fight.’ No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage.”

Darryl was predictably smeared as a Holocaust denier, antisemite, and overall traitor to Western civilization. This was totally in line with the standard reaction that we’d always seen from the older generations whenever these topics were broached. Almost nobody was surprised by it. What those who run our society were not prepared for was the reaction from Gen Z.

Gen Z was not innately triggered by Darryl’s comments. We did, however, notice that every critical response to Darryl seemed to be an automatic, over-the-top condemnation that reinforced the approved narrative. It was a reflex. There was absolutely no substantive refutation of Darryl’s actual claims. We didn’t see any real attempt to prove Darryl wrong. Instead, Cooper got a sweeping denunciation. He was a pseudo-historian!

We’d seen this before.

The reactions to Darryl’s statements were a little bit too hysterical for us not to notice. It had reminded us an awful lot of some of the establishment’s reactions that we’d witnessed in the recent past. Particularly when other clearly false yet mythologized societal narratives had been challenged by those who weren’t part of the expert class.

While the other narratives hadn’t gone down easy, this one was much, much stronger than anything we’d come across before. We’d found ourselves up against some of the most ancient magic within our civilization. Up to that very moment in time, the force field surrounding World War II had essentially been impenetrable for a full eight decades. Previously, nobody could’ve imagined questioning the details surrounding the unambiguously evil Nazi regime. The aura protecting these incantations was starting to waver for the very first time.

The liberal order had sowed the seeds of its own destruction. They thought that if they were loud enough in their insistence that their claims were so unbelievably and indisputably true, nobody would dare to question them. But their hubris over the last decade had loosened far too much of their grip. Young men now had the strength to resist even their most potent charms.

We then started to wonder why the Holocaust was considered to objectively be the worst thing to have happened in all of history. Why did we spend so much time learning about it in American schools? Why was there a Holocaust museum in every single city? This had happened in another century, on another continent, and involved groups of people that none of us were a part of. What was going on here?

We started to also wonder what technically made Hitler the incontrovertibly worst human to ever live. Of course, we were always told that it was because of the Holocaust. The death of 6 million Jews was definitely a gruesome outcome. But if it were merely about the death count, then Stalin should surely be thought of as the greater evil. Yet, America had partnered with Joseph Stalin. If the evil of Hitler rested primarily in the number of people he killed, as well as his use of concentration camps, then Stalin would’ve blown Hitler away based on that metric. So, how was it possible that the West had teamed up with Stalin, someone statistically worse, and still retained its position as the good guys in this great war against evil?

We had also been told that Britain had entered the war because of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. If that were distinctly true, then why did we decide to give Poland over to the Soviet Union once the war concluded? That was a pretty substantial contradiction. The border of Poland couldn’t have been that important if we’d been willing to cede it to the communists when it was all said and done. But we’d been happy to force a global war because Poland’s border had been threatened?

For our whole lives, most of us had basically assumed that the Nazis must’ve been the most horrifying thing to ever happen. It had been beaten into us that this was the case. With how much time had passed, Gen Z now felt like we could view the Germans as fellow human beings. No one seemed to agree with us, but the cartoonish portrayal of Nazi Germany as the irredeemably evil empire from Star Wars was starting to look like pure propaganda. These were people, after all, not literal demons. The veneer around the Nazis had already started to fade a bit, even before Darryl had made his infamous statements.

Once we discovered that two of the most fundamental claims surrounding the war narrative were so obviously logically inconsistent, we were severely disoriented. So much of what we thought about the rest of history started to break down along with it. Our lens that we had once used to decipher good and evil had been cracked.

We didn’t know who or what we could trust. We did, however, know for certain that we were being lied to. Like before, we didn’t know to what extent, or to what end, but we knew.

**

The Last Dose  Gen Z had spent a decade being forged in the fires of chaos and insanity. Our journey had been full of broken promises, cowardice, betrayal, and the blackest of magic. Nevertheless, we’d withstood it all despite the failures of everyone we’d put our faith in.

It looked like we were totally alone in this new world that we’d been damned to. We thought we’d won with Trump’s return, but we were quickly realizing that it wasn’t going to be so simple. We continued to be deceived. There appeared to be one last road that we needed to venture down.

As we watched the magic protecting World War II start to falter, we knew that we were on the verge of a pivotal discovery. The metamorphosis was almost complete. But we didn’t have anyone that seemed capable of guiding us through this last doorway.

We didn’t know it, but the teacher who would complete our journey had actually been toiling in manufactured obscurity for a decade. He’d been waiting. In fact, he was even one of us. He was part of Gen Z.

Not many people in the general masses had heard the name Nicholas J. Fuentes before 2025. The gatekeepers of truth had successfully excluded him from the conversation, but they couldn’t do it forever.

In a suburb just outside of Chicago, Nick Fuentes grew up as a regular kid. He hailed from a typical middle-class, Catholic family. He didn’t have rich parents and his dad wasn’t some well-connected man. Despite his humble beginnings, Fuentes always had a deep pull toward the political realm.

Growing up, Nick had pretty much been a standard conservative. He was the classic Republican kid. He did all the things that an ambitious, precocious young man usually would. He was a member of the debate club, played in the school band, and his high school graduating class had even voted him “most likely to be future president.”

When Nick finished high school in 2016, he went on to study at Boston University. It was during his first year of college that Nick would make his initial entrance into politics.

During Trump’s presidential campaign, Fuentes had become well known on his college campus as the kid who wore a red MAGA hat wherever he went. His unapologetic support for Donald Trump predictably incited all the expected enemies. Nick was eventually asked to debate the student body president of Boston University over his support for Trump.

Fuentes, who basically held standard neo-conservative and libertarian views at the time, argued the typical talking points in the debate. When the topic of racial differences and outcomes came up, he commented that “it has nothing to do with race, everything to do with culture. Asia has taken our culture and done well for themselves. The Middle East? Not so much.” He was just a regular old conservative back then.

Although Nick’s performance wasn’t publicized in any meaningful mainstream way, it managed to grab the attention of some of the prominent right wing outlets that were trying to recruit the budding Gen Z youth. Nick was then befriended by a circle of right wing activists who had recognized his potential. Following the election in 2016, Fuentes was given a show on the Right Side Broadcasting Network. He decided to call it America First.

Though Nick didn’t have much of an audience, he kept at it. At only 18, Fuentes himself was still trying to figure out what he believed. Who can blame him? Great is the burden on the young shoulders of Gen Z.

Nick then started to challenge his own opinions. He dug into the fringe right wing ideology circulating across the internet — one of the few “free spaces” for uncensored questions and discussion in our present world. Over the course of his investigations, Nick noticed something about the mainstream conservative movement that he had just become part of. He recognized that a particular exception to the America First doctrine always got made for the State of Israel. This was repeatedly excused due to the fact that Israel was insisted to be America’s “greatest ally.” But that qualifier wasn’t a good enough reason on its own. Nick wanted to understand what exactly made Israel our greatest ally. Surely, there must’ve been a perfectly good reason for them to have received such a significant label and unrelenting preference.

As Nick continued to ask his new friends in the right wing sphere why Israel was the number one recipient of foreign aid, he was met with a peculiarly consistent response. His basic questions about the obvious double standard were immediately deflected and marked as antisemitic. Nick didn’t get it. He wasn’t antisemitic, he just wanted to know the reason why Israel was supposedly so valuable to America.

Trump had been extremely vocal in his criticisms of foreign aid during his 2016 campaign. So, why was everyone on Team Trump clamoring to support this foreign country? Why did no one have a real answer as to why this was our greatest ally? Why did we have politicians like Ted Cruz who explicitly said that he originally sought political power so that he could be the leading supporter of Israel?

Nick was now starting to have his eyes opened slightly, but he still didn’t really know what was going on. Fuentes then noticed a detail that gave him quite a bit more insight. During Netanyahu’s first visit to the United States with Donald Trump as President, Nick listened as Trump told Netanyahu to withhold the construction of further settlements in the West Bank. Rather than following the direction of the President, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to Israel and authorized the largest expansion of Israeli settlements in the region. Nick was confused as to how this foreign leader could so unabashedly disregard the President of the United States with such ease.

As Nick kept asking about the many narratives surrounding Israel, he continued to be met with smears and accusations of antisemitism. He stuck to his guns. He thought that this was the free marketplace of ideas. He expected a debate, not an iron curtain.

Due to Nick’s open investigation into the Israel question, hit pieces from all across the political spectrum started popping up. He was routinely called a “Jew hater” for asking about the exception that the American right made for Israel. After all, the movement he questioned was supposed to be prioritizing America over everything else, so what was the hang-up when it came to Israel?

Nick soon took to Twitter to voice his irritation about the Israel contradiction. He addressed his 1,000 followers with a tweet which explained that people should live in the country they are loyal to, Israel and Jews included.

Ben Shapiro, one of the most popular and established (and Jewish) voices in the conservative movement at the time, decided to quote-tweet Fuentes. Shapiro claimed that Nick was a blatant antisemite for suggesting that American Jews may be harboring loyalty to Israel. Fuentes was confused. Shapiro was openly pro-Israel.

Following Shapiro’s response, Nick was totally blackballed. He was unanimously blocked and cut off from each of the friends he thought he’d made since his debate. His shot at a writing gig at The Daily Wire was gone as quickly as it had come.

Fuentes was bewildered. He was an 18-year-old conservative trying to figure out what the right wing truly thought. He wasn’t an antisemite. He was merely trying to hold the conservative movement to its own stated principles. If conservatives were supposedly prioritizing America’s interests first, then somebody would need to explain how helping Israel genuinely benefitted America.

While everyone continued to ignore Nick’s questions, Fuentes looked more into the fundamentals of Israel. He noticed that Israel’s status as an expressly Jewish state should’ve been another contradiction of the broader Republican worldview. We were supposed to be indifferent to race. Group differences were technically not even supposed to exist, so why would it be okay to emphasize one particular ethnic difference and then positively define a nation by that metric? Wasn’t our colorblind approach the very thing which made us great? That was Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, after all.

And yet, it seemed that many Jews didn’t really adhere to Dr. King’s vision. Their high degree of outward ethnic pride was something to be cherished, whereas a whiff of White identitarianism was condemned as the worst thing of all time, a direct line to Hitler and Nazism. Fuentes ultimately concluded that it should be perfectly fine for White people to be proud of their race just like everybody else gets to be. As a Catholic, he still held to the belief that every human had equal worth in the eyes of God. However, he also understood that this theological principle didn’t magically make the differences between the races go away.

Nick’s promotion of White identity would end up being the point that gave him his first taste of public infamy. Fuentes had actually been at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville during the summer of 2017. Just before the rally’s climactic end, Fuentes had posted to Facebook that a, “tidal wave of White identity is coming.” After his Facebook post had openly identified him as one of the evil racists at the event, Fuentes came under heavy fire.

Nick ended up having to leave Boston University due to the controversy and subsequent threats he started receiving after the protest. The fallout continued with his firing from Right Side Broadcasting. It looked like his hopes of becoming a mainstream conservative contributor were about dead.

As Fuentes was pushed further into the right wing underground, he leaned harder into his support for White people. The incredible amount of disdain he saw for Whites across the culture ultimately led him to look into some of the people who were pushing this hatred. Strangely, it seemed to be the case that many of the most vocal critics of White people were nearly always Jewish.

One particularly notable case of a Jewish person that publicly and excessively criticized Whites was Jon Stewart. Over the years, Stewart had constantly gone onto his wildly successful show to openly condemn and ridicule White people. He’d frame his tirade as being responsibly and bravely self-reflective. He would say things like “us White people” just before providing a bizarrely uncharitable assessment of White culture and behavior. Most people didn’t think twice about it. Jon looked White. To most Americans, he looked like a progressive liberal who was simply calling for more racial justice across society. Off the air though, Stewart would exclusively identify as a Jewish man, not a White man.

This was odd behavior. Even stranger, Nick learned that Stewart wasn’t Jon’s last name. Leibowitz was his original surname. Jon had been using the last name Stewart since the 1980s, apparently in an effort to hide his roots.

An enormous number of culturally prominent Jews had also changed their last names, consistently to a White, European surname. The Jews that chose to camouflage themselves behind a new last name were generally the most vocal critics of White people as well. Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, had also spent years denigrating White people during his time as one of the most famous musicians and cultural icons on the planet. Nobody seemed to notice that he wasn’t White. Because of the disguised identity of these men, all the vitriol spewed against Whites was pretty much excused entirely as self-critical reflections or self-denigrating humor.

Nick found out that these Jews didn’t consider themselves to be White despite what their outward portrayal suggested. Jews had regularly gone out of their way to clarify that they were not White. The Jerusalem Post once published an article titled, “Jews are not White: Race and identity in Israel and the US.” The American Jewish Committee posted on social media, “The lie that all Jews are White or came from Europe is one that has spread through anti-Israel protests around the country.” The Forward, a Jewish news site, released an article with the headline, “No, Ashkenazi Jews Are Not ‘Functionally White,” in which the author argued that Jews are in fact a distinct racial identity.

This wasn’t some fringe opinion that Fuentes had magically come up with. Jewish people didn’t hide the fact that they perceived themselves as completely separate from European Whites.

Once Nick saw that Jews viewed themselves as a distinct ethnicity, he realized how ridiculous it was that so many books attacking White people had been written by them. Last names like Berger, Cohen, Katz, and Applebaum dominated the discussion about the irredeemable evils of Whiteness. This denigration of one race by another obviously wouldn’t be allowed in any other context.

The amount of animosity toward Whites was gratuitous. Nick wanted to figure out what was causing so many Jews to dedicate their lives to bashing White people. Fuentes soon found out that this hatred of White Christians is doctrinally inherent to the Jewish religion. Jesus Christ is not, in fact, a respected figure in Jewish culture. The Jews view him as heretical. This opinion has also been codified in their Talmud. Judaism teaches that after Jesus Christ died, he descended into hell and has been boiling in human excrement ever since. This will supposedly continue for eternity.

Nick learned that this hatred for Christianity wasn’t merely a theological doctrine that could be disregarded. He found out that in Israel, Jews routinely spit on the Christians who go and visit the holy land. A large number of Christians are even physically assaulted during their stay in the Jewish nation. Israelis also refuse to use the additive plus sign in mathematics because of its similarity to the symbol of the cross. Instead, they use an inverted T-shape.

With these instances of obvious contempt for White Christians, Fuentes didn’t understand why so many people insisted that our society was founded on Judeo-Christian values. To be Jewish is to reject Christ, so how could these things be compatible? These two value systems sure looked to be fundamentally in conflict with each other.

The relationship between Judaism and Christianity was worse than incongruous, though. It looked like Jews were actively trying to damage White, Christian culture. There was hostility, not apathy. The most glaring incident of malice was the promotion of mass migration into Western countries. Jewish people appeared to be the most prominent advocates for White societies to be inundated with Third World migrants.

Growing up, we’d been trained to believe that America has always been this collection of different cultures from around the globe. We were taught that this was fundamental to Americanism. In actuality, this was never the case. The founders were quite explicit in their notations that America was a nation of and for White people. The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicitly reserved citizenship for “free White persons of good character.”

It wasn’t until the 1900s when we started to see a shift in the underlying premise of America’s founding principles surrounding race and immigration. The particular adjustment in the national sentiment on immigration started when Israel Zangwill, a Jewish man, came up with the term ‘melting pot’ to describe America around the beginning of the 20th century. Slowly but surely, the seeds grew out of that reframing, reaching the point that we became ubiquitously known as a nation of eclectic immigrants from around the globe.

As the narrative around immigration began to set into the minds of Americans, an enormous amount of powerful Jews started pushing hard for America to get flooded with immigrants. This went beyond rhetoric, though.

Rather than continuing to maintain the national origins quotas that used to prioritize immigrants from European countries, Emmanuel Celler, a Jewish man, decided to help introduce legislation in 1965 that would ultimately change the standard American immigration policy. The new policy abolished the old, supposedly racist quotas, and opened up America to massive waves of immigration from the third world.

The Hart-Celler Act facilitated the mass migration that brought the White population in America from around 90% in 1965 down to 58% in 2026. The shift in demographics over the last 60 years hasn’t been some organic transition. There was never a democratic vote to reduce the White population of America and replace it with Third Worlders. This had been done intentionally, without the consent of the governed.

While there’s never been broad calls for more diversity in Israel, a bizarre amount of Jews have oddly made it their life’s mission to fund immigration throughout the West. George Soros, a Jew from Hungary, has spent decades using his immense fortune to fund mass migration into the West through his Open Society Foundation.

There’s never been a genuine argument for why White, Christian countries should exclusively get dumped with an endless amount of people that don’t assimilate, don’t have any skills, and are usually a drain on our welfare system. None of this worked in theory. The only actual reasoning behind such import-migration would be to destroy the cultural and financial systems of the countries affected by it. This is no mere speculation: the Cloward-Piven strategy devised at Columbia University in 1966 explicitly expounds it.

It no longer looked like a coincidence that Alejandro Mayorkas had been so hell-bent on letting in as many invaders as possible into America during his time as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. It sure seemed like there were a lot of Jews that simply hated White society and wanted to see it destroyed by this form of migratory destruction.

Over the years, Fuentes observed prominent Jews loudly and proudly clap for this immigration into the West. There was a uniquely Jewish celebration of the demographic transformation of White cities. Bill Maher once said on his podcast: “London is now minority White. And I think that’s a victory to be celebrated. It’s a good thing. Diversity is our strength.” Why would this American Jew be happy that the English capital city of London is no longer predominantly English? Would this ever be acceptable to say about any other race or culture that isn’t ethnically White? Does Tel Aviv also need more African immigrants?

The amount of influence that Jews seemed to have over the migratory policy of the West was certainly eyebrow raising. Nick then tried to figure out how so many Jews managed to occupy these positions of power in the first place. There are about 10 million people in the nation of Israel, and Jews make up just about 2% of America.29  There were almost as many Jews in the United States as there were American Indians. However, while we’ve basically heard nothing from American Indians besides casinos and alcoholism, Jews somehow dominated nearly all of our cultural, political, and financial discourse.

While being only 0.2% of the world’s population, 10–20% of billionaires happen to be Jewish.30  Jews are also especially overrepresented in Congress and academia, two of the most influential spheres within our society. Many Jews have explained away their overrepresentation by insisting that they have higher IQs.

Even after granting the generally high IQ of Jews, Fuentes still couldn’t accept that explanation on its own. He discovered that while Jews are around 2,000% overrepresented across Ivy League admissions, their standardized test scores haven’t come close to constituting such an incredible disparity.31  Asians, who have performed similarly on tests and made up a larger segment of the American population, haven’t enjoyed the representation in the elite spheres of the United States anywhere close to what Jews have.

Thus, it looked to be that Jews were very obviously practicing extreme nepotism that helped facilitate their incredible overrepresentation. Given America’s alleged commitment to being a colorblind meritocracy, Nick didn’t understand why it was okay for Jews to be so overtly tribal.

Another area of Jewish overrepresentation that Nick noticed was in the media. With all the hit pieces written about him, Fuentes recognized a clear pattern in the last names of the authors. The Jewish prominence within the press wasn’t purely relegated to left-wing outlets, either. It looked like The New York Times was stacked with just as many Jews as The Daily Wire.

The claim that Jews had an unusually firm grasp over the media wasn’t some conspiracy. The disproportionate percentages of Jewish involvement in the press compared to their size was undeniable. The major media moguls throughout the last 100 years have pretty much all been Jewish.

Along with the press, Jews seemed to have an additional stranglehold on Hollywood. Some of the industry’s most important men like Harvey Weinstein, Sumner Redstone, Bob Iger, and Steven Spielberg, were Jews. The list goes on and on. In fact, in an article published in The LA Times titled, “Who Runs Hollywood? C’mon” the Jewish author proudly boasts about the Jewish dominance within the industry.

Sadly, Jewish control over Hollywood didn’t appear to be some benign coincidence. Nick couldn’t help but notice that Hollywood was an extremely consistent promoter of the most degenerate behaviors imaginable. Movies and television constantly propagated homosexuality, feminism, transgenderism, drug abuse, promiscuity, and typically denigrated traditional values wholesale. Hollywood consistently encouraged total debauchery that was directly opposed to Christian ethics.

The opposition to Christianity within Hollywood didn’t seem to really be a secret. It was blatant. When Mel Gibson, one of the most exceptionally based men around, first tried to make The Passion of the Christ, he couldn’t get any major Hollywood studios to fund it. He actually had to finance it himself, though it ended up being one of the most successful independent films of all time. The Hollywood executives wanted no part of that movie even though they knew it would’ve made them enormous amounts of money.

This hostility to Christianity wasn’t only isolated to a few Jewish men in Hollywood. Some of the most vigorous promoters of anti-Christian behavior in American culture also happened to be primarily Jewish.

Nick had discovered that the pornography “industry” has also been heavily dominated by Jews. Al Goldstein, a prominent Jewish pornographer, once had this to say: “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism. Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged.” The man they called the “Walt Disney of Porn” was a Jew named Reuben Sturman. The owner of Pornhub is a literal rabbi, and the majority stakeholder of OnlyFans is, unsurprisingly at this point, Jewish.

Along with pornography, Fuentes discovered that many Jews have routinely helped to push other destructive vices across Western society. Online gambling was practically founded solely by Jewish people, and the same goes for the legislation that made it legal in the United States. Jews then helped to bring it to the cultural forefront. Dave Portnoy, the owner of Barstool Sports, is probably the most notorious example of a Jewish man who has had no problem introducing people to this vice that destroys lives while he profits.

This stuff didn’t stop at culture, though. Fuentes realized that there was also a sinister hold on the financial system. Wall Street was almost completely run by Jews. The banks, as well as the other financial institutions that were so dead-set on maintaining our debt-based society through usury, were nearly exclusively led by Jews as well. Larry Fink, Bernie Madoff, Robert Kapito, Bill Ackman, Leon Black, and even the original, now deceased Lehman Brothers happened to be Jewish men.

The most pivotal levers of power across Western society looked to be totally dominated by Jews. Nick had come to the explicit conclusion that this power wasn’t being used in a positive or even apathetic manner. In fact, it looked a lot like it was being used to intentionally destroy White society. This pattern seemed to be more than just a coincidence. If most of the people in power behaving this way were albinos, I think it’d probably be safe to conclude that there might be something up with albinism. For some reason though, when it came to the Jews, there wasn’t any way to speak about this without being universally condemned and silenced. Raising any issues about their broad and collective behavior would immediately get you branded as a Nazi.

It was as Dave Chappelle had said, “If they’re Black, it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob. If they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence… and you should never speak about it.”

Nick had been blackballed from the mainstream conservative movement for asking why so much foreign aid money was sent to Israel. The things he’d then gone on to uncover were looking to be about a million times more controversial. Nick had accidentally stumbled upon the most potent and final dose of the redpill. He was floored by what he’d learned.

As usual, these investigations only led to more dangerous questions about the liberal mirage.

16. Ye ‘24  Nick Fuentes had managed to discover an answer that explained at least some of what had been going on in White societies over the last 80 years. Unfortunately, this particular explanation was about as radioactive as anything could be. Still, it was undeniable that Jewish influence had contributed to many of the structural problems that Gen Z men had faced throughout their lives. The most devastating detail was that it looked like it had been done intentionally.

When Fuentes decided to bring his observations up on his show, YouTube did not take kindly to it. He continually faced repeated strikes for hate speech. His videos were constantly demonetized, and he was eventually suspended for the last time in 2020. By the time Nick received his permanent ban, he had accrued around 70,000 subscribers.

Though being kicked off of YouTube was a major blow to Nick’s momentum, the fanbase he’d built had proven themselves to be extremely loyal. These dedicated fans would become known as “Groypers.” The Groypers faithfully followed Nick in whatever direction he went. In this case, they followed him over to a site called DLive, where he kept on asking these universally unsavory questions.

Fuentes was very clear from the start of his investigations that he didn’t hate Jews. He has never condemned all Jews for their blood, and he never will. His Christian faith actively precludes that. Nick simply wanted to understand why Jews were permitted to behave in such a clannish manner, often in opposition to the interests of the White societies which they inhabited. He also wanted to figure out how and why they could move with such power and impunity.

The extreme double standard bothered Nick. It irritated Fuentes to watch men like Eric Weinstein, who had continually advocated for a colorblind world, go and flip off the Arch of Titus because of a millennia-long ethnic blood feud. Everybody seemed to be able to play identity politics, except for White people. Nick just wanted the rules of race to be fair in our society. Either everyone gets to play identity politics, or no one does.

No matter how Nick approached his investigations and observations, he continued to get called an antisemite. His questions were said to be reigniting the Hitlerian flame. Fuentes truly did not understand how his questions were what raised the concerns rather than the genuinely destructive behavior that he was pointing out.

Nick came to understand that Jewish people, along with the State of Israel, were protected by a magic veil. This forcefield appeared to derive its protective powers from the Holocaust narrative. Whenever Jews or Israel were publicly criticized, that criticism was immediately shot down by some of the most powerful voices throughout society. It was declared that any discussion of Jewish behavior would inevitably lead to another genocide. Thus, nobody would even listen to the substance of the arguments. Of course, absolutely nobody was calling for any sort of violence at all.

Nick, like everyone else since the middle of the previous century, had grown up being taught the Holocaust was the worst event to ever happen. This was an enforced opinion. We’d seen all the movies and learned all the history in public school. The Holocaust miraculously managed to be worse than American slavery and racism itself. It was the quintessential event whereby all of liberalism’s worst enemies converged into a singular, untouchable narrative. Fuentes found the relevancy of the entire claim odd. The Holocaust didn’t take place in America. It wasn’t committed by Americans, or against Americans. It also happened in another century. He took a step back and asked why this particular event carried so much weight within our culture.

Fuentes was able to detach from so much of the gravitational pull of the propaganda to the point he could take a clear, close look at the full World War II narrative. After piecing together everything he’d learned, Nick concluded that the Holocaust was continually being invoked to protect Jews from broad condemnation for their deliberate undermining of White American society. Of course, the crimes committed as part of the Holocaust were real, but there wasn’t a uniquely exceptional display of evil when compared to other atrocities. The Holocaust was obviously being used as a cudgel to smash any criticism of Jews and Israel.

Rather than dissecting every claim about World War II, Fuentes made a much more operative point on the matter. Nick posed two very simple questions to everyone paying homage to the Holocaust religion: Why is this still relevant to Americans in the 2020s? Why is it objectively the worst thing to happen in all of history, when many events supersede it in scale, suffering, and brutality?

These questions effortlessly bounced off the magic shield, but Nick didn’t care — even if his arguments wouldn’t be answered, that didn’t mean they weren’t valid. Nick’s main conclusion was essentially that he didn’t care about the Holocaust more than any of the other tragedies throughout history. Most importantly, he didn’t accept it as a valid argument for why White people weren’t allowed to have an in-group preference. He also didn’t think the Holocaust should be used to shield Jews from general criticism. That seemed like a fair enough stance.

Unsurprisingly, the perspective that Nick came to have on the Holocaust only expedited his banishment from mainstream conservatism. He was instantly blacklisted from CPAC and Turning Point USA events across the board. Instead of engaging with Fuentes’ arguments, establishment conservatives were doing all they could to shut him up.

Despite his ostracization from the mainstream conservative movement, Nick had remained loyal to Donald Trump through it all. Fuentes always held the belief that even if Trump couldn’t publicly support the dissident right, he appeared to harbor genuine sympathy for the cause.

Nick’s deeply-held faith in Donald Trump ultimately led him to show up at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

Following the infamous riot, a video of Fuentes with a bull horn, egging on the protesters had gone viral across social media. Nick was bombarded with aggressive scrutiny, specifically because it looked like he’d evaded legal consequences while so many others had their lives destroyed.

In the video, you could hear Nick saying, “Keep moving towards the Capitol. It appears we are taking the Capitol back from the police… Keep marching, and don’t relent, never relent… Break down the barriers and disregard the police. This Capitol belongs to us now.” Given the scope of the government’s crackdown on January 6th offenders, it seemed suspicious that Nick wasn’t already in solitary confinement.

With the apparent avoidance of criminal penalties, a narrative spread that Fuentes was actually an undercover federal agent. Many prominent conservatives claimed that since he wasn’t put in prison for his involvement in January 6th, then that proved he was secretly working with the authorities to help orchestrate the event.

The people pushing that narrative apparently missed the fact that Nick did not escape January 6th unscathed at all. As a result of Fuentes’ involvement, he had his bank account frozen for six months, he was put on a federal no-fly list for a year, and he was subpoenaed by Congress. Fuentes also testified under oath during his deposition that he’s never had any contact with federal law enforcement. If he was lying, he could be imprisoned for perjury. And yet, he has not been.

Fuentes didn’t trespass, he didn’t enter the Capitol building, he didn’t fight with cops or the media, he didn’t vandalize anything, and he wasn’t part of a militia. Even with all that being the case, Nick had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for lawyers to defend himself. He had to do this while his assets were frozen and he couldn’t process online payments.

If Nick is a federal agent or psyop, then he is the product of the most convoluted, diabolical, and brilliant execution of an intelligence operation in history. If it is in fact true that Nick is a creation of the CIA, then we don’t stand a chance against these brilliant, evil people anyway, so we might as well call it a day then.

Following his public involvement in the Capitol riot, Nick was banned from the streaming site DLive. There was no other alternative for Fuentes to turn to after he was deplatformed from this obscure site.

Fuentes had been getting crushed by basically every single tech company for years. Among all the distasteful opinions he held, his opposition to Jewish power and influence caused the most severe consequences. However, the response he received had really proven his whole point. It sure didn’t seem to be a coincidence that so many of these companies were led by Jews.

After being banned from DLive, Nick tried to establish genuine autonomy for himself. He launched his own online platform in October of 2021, called Cozy.tv. As usual, his loyal followers — the rank-and-file of Gen Z — had no problem adjusting to the new platform.

Even by 2022, however, Nick Fuentes was still a rather unknown figure to the broader American public. The gatekeepers had done an incredible job of keeping him quiet. He’d managed to attain the title of “the most canceled man in America” within far right circles. Nick would then get his first taste of true celebrity when Kanye West, now known as Ye, decided to come out with vocal criticism of organized Jewry.

Nobody close to Ye’s level of fame had been willing to call powerful Jews out by name and in such a manner. If nothing else, the outburst played a pivotal role in shifting the acceptable discourse on the subject.

Ye’s infamous meltdown started with a characteristically disjointed tweet: “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”

After his sudden awakening, Ye decided to pick up Fuentes as one of his new allies. Word about their relationship started bubbling up across right wing Twitter, but it sounded like a joke at first. It was not a joke. The world was about to get introduced to Nick Fuentes.

In November of 2022, Ye brought Fuentes along with him to a dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Ye’s original reasoning for setting up the dinner was so he could ask Donald Trump to be his running mate in his own 2024 presidential campaign, Ye ‘24. Fuentes was going to assist in the campaign. The whole thing seemed so absurd that it felt like it had followed the logic of a dream. Predictably, the press went insane over the dinner.

While the average person wasn’t aware of what Fuentes was really about, the media knew exactly how they were going to frame him. Articles decrying the fact that Trump had eaten dinner with a “White-supremacist and Holocaust denier” flooded the internet. Right after the news broke, Jimmy Kimmel opened up his monologue and addressed millions of NPCs by saying, “A meeting of the mindless at Mar-a-Lago. We learned on Friday that Trump had dinner with Kanye West, and a White supremacist / Holocaust denier named Nick Fuentes.”

Luckily, Fuentes was used to the negative coverage at this point. He wasn’t bothered. Nevertheless, the media displayed an impressive level of coordination and persistence. In a word, they had received their marching orders. They were instructed to systematically destroy Nick and Ye’s reputations, and they did. There was, again, no refutation offered that tried to dispute the claims made by these two men. Ye’s challenging of Jewish power was dismissed as crazy, evil, and laughably untrue. There was a simple insistence that Ye had gone off the deep end, without anybody bothering to articulate why he was wrong.

We watched as all the things Ye had accused the Jews of doing in his original tirades were done to him once again. This time, it was far more outwardly effective.

Ye was crucified in the press. His social media accounts were suspended. Adidas, Gap, Balenciaga, Foot Locker, TJ Maxx, and Vogue cut ties with him and removed his signature gear from their shelves. He was dropped by his talent agency and even had his assets frozen. Chase bank notified him that they were terminating his bank account. This is the same bank that maintained Jeffrey Epstein’s accounts while knowing about his status as a sexual predator, by the way.

Ye’s access to his children was then threatened. Somehow, Harley Pasternak, a Jewish, personal trainer for celebrities, had a significant level of control over this part of Ye’s life. He sent Ye a text message which outlined some options for him to survive his newly found opposition to Jewish power:

I’m going to help you one of a couple ways… First, you and I sit down and have a loving and open conversation, but you don’t use cuss words, and everything that is discussed is based in fact, and not some crazy stuff that dumb friend of yours told you, or you saw in a tweet. Second option, I have you institutionalized again where they medicate the crap out of you, and you go back to Zombieland forever. Play date with the kids just won’t be the same.

After losing his bank account, his sponsorship deals, his social media, his children, and his reputation, it sure seemed like Ye’s claims about the power that Jews held in society were pretty accurate. In the face of such heavy backlash, Ye still stood strong and held onto his extremely unpopular perspective. He even went so far as to release a song that he called Heil Hitler, known more colloquially as “Nigga Heil Hitler.”

While nearly every protest song is typically focused on its message more than anything else, this tune was genuinely good enough on its own to become a number one hit. One can imagine that as soon as it started making the rounds on X, quite a few calls were made. A number one song praising Hitler couldn’t have been allowed. So, it was banned on all streaming platforms. Plenty of people noticed that you could freely sing about whatever other demonic and degenerate stuff that you’d like to, but not this particular topic.

Ye’s cancellation had actually managed to prove his point. There was no attempt to rebut Ye’s accusations. We instead saw a strategic, unilateral cancellation campaign that was merciless and effective. There was no other group in society that could muster 5% of this type of response. Criticizing Whites made you money. It helped your career! Where was this type of reaction for the people who openly demonized White people throughout society?

After the Ye debacle, Nick’s once seemingly outlandish claims about organized Jewish power were starting to appear fairly well-founded to anyone paying attention. The crackdown on Ye opened a lot of peoples’ eyes. So, Fuentes pushed his message harder.

Even with his tremendous consistency, Nick’s reach remained severely suppressed. It looked like the cancellation efforts had worked. Most people that knew about him were only familiar with terrible headlines and some extremely controversial clips from his show. However, after Rumble, an alternative to YouTube, came out with an unrelenting commitment to free speech, there was some hope that Fuentes might get a shot at finally reaching a broader audience. In early 2023, Nick decided to start uploading America First to Rumble.

Though Nick’s account initially dealt with a couple of suspensions, Rumble maintained its commitment to free speech even though so many prominent figures were calling for them to censor him. Rumble wasn’t willing to add Nick to the front of the search results, nor give him a partnership deal, but Nick’s access to the platform did help facilitate his ascension.

While many sites had previously banned the presence of Fuentes’ face from their platforms, things were beginning to change. Clips of his show had started popping up all over X following Elon’s purchase. People began to see Nick’s actual takes on their timelines, not just his least-palatable sarcastic jokes. Thankfully, most people on the right wing were familiar enough with Rumble to consider heading over and checking out Nick’s full, uncensored show. By mid-2023, Fuentes’ view counts were starting to rise dramatically.

Ye had jarringly injected the Jewish question into the public, but his approach had been a bit too presumptive to really shift public opinion. His cancellation had raised plenty of eyebrows, but the narrative needed something a bit more substantial to awaken NPC normies up to the premise of Jewish power. Surprisingly, Israel ended up doing that by itself. It was the Israeli response to the Hamas attack on October 7th that ultimately softened the barriers that had once indiscriminately shielded Jews from any criticism.

Following October 7th, the slaughtering in Gaza and the excessive destruction that Israel was inflicting became too much for people to ignore. Social media sites were inundated with this footage. People were horrified.

Israel had strategically chosen to market October 7th as the second worst thing to happen since the Holocaust. They had equated it to 9/11. They went so far as to say that the population comparison to the United States made it equivalent to something like 45 “9/11’s.” That claim didn’t land quite like they’d hoped.

It had become blatantly obvious that Israel’s framing of October 7th had been done in a way that would help justify their military response in Gaza. It was also being used to protect them from criticism. Any critiques of the Israeli government’s actions were smeared as antisemitic. But the atrocity propaganda of October 7th wasn’t working nearly as well as the Holocaust had.

After seeing Ben Shapiro get caught spewing a fake story about 40 babies being beheaded, it all got to be a little too absurd. It was beginning to sound an awful lot like what they’d said about soap and lampshades a long time ago.

The spell was breaking.

Israel’s militaristic response was getting to be too much even for its virulent supporters. Charlie Kirk, one of the right’s most famously devoted Israel lovers, was publicly asking if the Israeli government had issued a stand down order before the attack. There was starting to be some speculation that the Israeli government had wanted the attack to happen so that they could use it as a pretense to expand into Gaza.

Americans had always heard that Israeli aggression was distinctly retaliatory. The Israeli Defense Force was said to be the most moral army in the world. Their military actions were framed as purely defensive, and uniquely justified given the fact that they had to constantly maintain their ‘right to exist’. October 7th sincerely challenged that narrative.

We saw videos of gratuitous death and destruction wreaked by Israeli forces across Gaza, mostly upon the civilian population. Many innocent children were being killed indiscriminately. Even for many of those beholden to “our greatest ally,” that was not okay — not our values.

Despite the incriminating pictures and videos, Israel successfully managed to persuade many evangelical Christians that their military response was their sole option for action. For everyone else, that argument was not working. The Israelis seemed to relish in the destruction. They were glad to watch Gaza get leveled.

By now, many of us had learned about the Greater Israel project, which had the ultimate objective of expanding Israel’s borders further. Just as they’d been growing since their inception, they wanted to continue, not just into the West Bank, but also into Gaza.

We soon learned about the hostility that Israel openly expressed toward the Palestinians. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in regard to these people: “We are fighting against animals.” Netanyahu echoed that sentiment. There were even reports that some IDF soldiers had protested for the right to rape their Palestinian prisoners.

The rest of the world didn’t believe that the Palestinians were animals. In fact, the West mostly objected to what Israel was doing in Gaza. However, whenever detractors voiced their dissent, Israel apologists defiantly declared that the deaths weren’t necessarily good, but that every single death was exclusively the fault of Hamas.

Israel and its defenders apparently felt that the men who pulled the trigger on Palestinian children weren’t responsible for any of it because of what happened on October 7th. That wasn’t a good enough reason for pretty much anyone. These people didn’t get to wear a cloak of moral impunity that allowed them to kill whoever they wanted. A past tragedy didn’t excuse any and all forms of retaliation, nor did it unilaterally protect against criticism.

The slaughter in Gaza brought a significant amount of attention to the Israeli Defense Force as a whole. We were witnessing IDF soldiers shooting kids in the testicles and laughing about it, remarking that it was target practice. That didn’t sound like members of the most moral army around. That didn’t look like our “greatest ally” with whom we share civilizational values.

For a country that was so fearful of these animalistic terrorists, we were surprised to learn that Netanyahu and the Israeli government had actually funded Hamas. They had believed that the continual threat of a prominent, rabid terrorist group calling for the extermination of Jews would help Israel in the PR war. The activists who were demanding the establishment of a Palestinian state to be established would then have to explain or excuse these inconvenient terrorists.

While the Israeli government’s move to fund Hamas was strategically effective, it didn’t really support the narrative that they were defenseless victims who were being helplessly terrorized. People were certainly starting to notice what was going on here.

Word was also getting out that the IDF had a policy which they happened to call the “Hannibal Directive.” This operative rule insisted that it was better to kill Israeli citizens through friendly fire, so long as it meant that they wouldn’t be taken hostage and give up valuable secrets, or get used as political leverage. In fact, many Israeli civilians on October 7th were killed by Israeli soldiers.

More odd things regarding Israel and its military came to our attention in the bloody wake of October 2023, but nothing exemplified the Jewish supremacist mindset better than Israel’s “Samson Option.” This unofficial doctrine states that the Israeli military would choose to nuke the entire world if the country faced destruction. It draws its name from the biblical figure, Samson, who used his last burst of strength to pull apart the pillars of the temple he was in, collapsing it and killing everybody. Many Jewish commentators continue to see absolutely nothing wrong with this approach. Why does this small country, which has officially denied possessing nuclear weapons, have the right to blow up the world if it’s threatened?

The awakening that October 7th had brought to society was crucial in priming the public for what was about to come next. The cultural discourse had been heating up over Israel and the Jewish question. No one could deny that many prominent Jewish people had some degree of serious leverage over public discourse. Any critique of Israel and Jews openly resulted in silencing and cancellation. While the public was waking up to this, Nick Fuentes’ prominence was increasing alongside it all.

**

The nativist right loudly declared itself to be America First. Sadly, Trump chose the alternative.

Donald Trump turned away from his base with seemingly no shame at all. Ten years of loyal support had been disregarded. We were considered the bad guys for wanting to be a sovereign nation. We were also the bad guys for wanting the Epstein files to be released!

While the dissident right had their hopes crushed, Israel loved Trump’s new direction. They even awarded him the most prestigious award they could give, the Israel Prize. Through his heroically anti-American actions, Trump became Israel’s top goy.

Our interests had been discarded for a foreign country thousands of miles away. Everyone wanted the young men of America First to just go away. There was nowhere to turn to. Nothing made any sense.

Then, immediately following the bombing, a particular clip popped up on X. In the video, we saw a familiar looking man. All that many knew about this guy, Nick Fuentes, was that the press had sporadically smeared him as an evil, sexually repressed troll throughout the last decade. Most of us still didn’t know what Nick Fuentes was all about, even by mid-2025. We hadn’t actually heard what he had to say. But, this time, we gave him a real listen. We had absolutely nothing to lose.

The clip was from Nick’s show, America First, but it was from an episode that had aired around two years ago, right after the October 7th attack.

In the clip, we listened to what Nick had to say loud and clear:

Israel benefits from the attack by Hamas because now they get to solve the Gaza question finally. Now, they get to go in and kill them all and ethnically cleanse this region. In doing so, they know they’re provoking an unavoidable retaliation. There’s an unavoidable, reciprocal attack by these Iranian militias against Israel, and all that does is give Israel an excuse to do what they always wanted to do, which is to bomb Iran’s centrifuges, which is their nuclear program. And if they do that, then Iran is in a war with Israel, and then they draw the United States into a war with Iran. And they get the crown jewel, what they always wanted, which is an end to the regime in Syria and an end to the regime in Iran. That seems to be the big play that Israel is making.

Following October 7th, we had all watched the gratuitous slaughter in Gaza. We watched as Assad’s regime in Syria was toppled. Iran’s centrifuges had just been bombed, and America was now loudly calling for regime change in Iran. We were a bit stunned at the accuracy of Nick’s predictions. He must’ve known what he was talking about, at least to some degree. His calculations were far too precise to dismiss.

In the past, many of us had negligently believed the media slander about Nick. Most of us didn’t ever bother to take him seriously. That ended as soon as we saw that clip. At this point, we were all listening to what Nick Fuentes had to say.

The old footage of Nick Fuentes had been so striking for one specific reason: he was correct. After years of being told nonsense like how senile, decrepit old men were really at their intellectual peak, we had figured something out. We’d discovered that what makes somebody correct is not the amount of former CIA officers who sign off on some letter. Truth isn’t dependent on the number of experts that declare a certain thing to be true. What makes someone correct is the ability to accurately predict future events and diagnose their causes. Predictive power is what proves that the model being used for forecasting is indeed rooted in truth.

Fuentes’ predictions following October 7th showed us that his political model must be based in truth, purely because of its accuracy. But how was this the case? How did this guy in his mid-twenties have a political model that allowed him to know things that the experts and the supposedly renegade intellectuals didn’t?

We learned that Nick Fuentes had such a ruthlessly accurate political model because, above all, he didn’t care about how his statements would be received by the powers-that-be. He didn’t care about having to integrate the uncomfortable realities that so many others decided to omit from their models. He wasn’t captured by ideology or conformity.

Nick was one of the only political commentators doing genuine political science. He was focused on an accurate diagnosis. He didn’t worry about where the road led to, so long as truth was what guided him. Almost nobody could say the same.

The reason that Nick understood what was going on in Israel was the same reason that he understood the problem of race in America. It was the same reason that he could identify the issues that feminism was causing. It’s why he didn’t go along with the madness of BLM and the coronavirus during 2020. It’s why he stood up for the stolen election. It was why he wanted America to remain a White country.

It didn’t matter how unattractive the truth was, Nick would include it in his model. He rejected beautiful lies, even when the truth was uglier than anyone could stomach.

Rather than keeping these distasteful realizations to himself, Nick had the courage to announce exactly what he was seeing to anyone who would listen. He had also been uniquely willing to call out the head of the snake. Fuentes unapologetically explained that Jewish power was in fact playing a significant role in the nonsense happening throughout the West. He did this, not out of a hatred of Jews, but because that is where the pursuit of truth had led him.

Perhaps the most crucial detail to take note of here is that Nick hasn’t ever been happy about the conclusions he’s come to. He hasn’t been trying to prove himself correct. In fact, he has actively been trying to prove himself wrong. This is probably the single most important distinction that separates the far right from everybody else: we do not argue for a world that ought to be; we understand and accept the world as it is, and then we adjust our models accordingly. We are not utopian. And if you believe we’re wrong, we want you to tell us why. We’d actually love to be incorrect about our conclusions. Because the reality we face is grim.

Ever since Nick originally entered the political realm, he had been waiting for somebody to come and explain to him where he’d gone wrong. The issue was that nobody was able to. Nobody was even willing to debate him. Instead, he became the most canceled man in America.

So then, how and why did the most canceled man in the country manage to become so beloved by the young men of Gen Z?

The answer is very simple. Despite whatever the media has tried to tell you, we have come to like Nick Fuentes most fundamentally because he is consistently correct. It’s not about rebellion, humor, or edginess. Nick just seems to be the one person brave enough to accurately tell the uncensored truth.

For a decade, we have watched as man after man has buckled under the pressures of the matrix. Nick looks to be one of the only men alive who simply refuses to cower to the forces of the liberal order. Even in the face of death, Fuentes has continued to preach what he believes to be true.

Following the bombing of Iran, the world was finally forced to reckon with Nick Fuentes. Despite 10 years of coordinated suppression, Nick has persisted. He has never folded. Now everybody has been compelled to learn his name and hear what he has to say. Nick Fuentes is on a generational run.

All the former voices that had either ignored or condemned him welcomed him with open arms, as if they’d just stumbled upon him. Nobody bothered to address the fact that they’d all banned him or disregarded him for a decade. Everyone appeared to be in agreement on one thing: Nick had enormous talent. And that, for the powers-that-be, is a problem.

The newfound celebrity status hasn’t changed the media’s opinion of Nick. He remains a total pariah. As Nick has risen in popularity, he has routinely been blamed as the sole catalyst for the radicalization of the men of Gen Z. Everyone insists that we’ve all fallen under the spell of this evil con-man, who has supposedly turned us into crazy, cruel racists and antisemites.

But everybody in Gen Z knows that this is absolute nonsense. The truth is that, by the summer of 2025, we’d merely caught up to Nick.

We had spent the last 10 years traveling the very same road that Nick Fuentes had already been down. By the time we were introduced to Fuentes, he was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together for us. He had the depth of knowledge to give our broad observations the context we needed to make proper sense of everything.

Nick Fuentes never redpilled American Gen Z men. Actually, Nick didn’t have to redpill us. The lies of liberalism did that by itself.

American History Z

Joey Oliver