Last Week in Review - 15 January 2023

On the Turning of the Cultural Tide, Having High Hopes for the Rising Generation, Laughing at Wokesters, and Cultivating New and Better Habits

Greetings and salutations, fellow earthlings! Hopefully the new year is off to a great start for all of you. From where I stand (or sit or lie down, depending on the time of day), we are only two weeks in, and 2023 is already shaping up to be a great year.

Weekly Review 15 January 2023 (Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash)

The Cultural Tide Is Turning

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe the cultural tide is turning, and that it has been for several months now, though we’re just now finally beginning to feel it in a big way. The tsunami of wokeness, after crashing ashore during the 2010s and cresting during the planned-demic and the “fiery but mostly peaceful” summer of 2020, is now rapidly receding, and ever more “normies” are seeing the wreckage it has left behind and recognizing wokeness, along with all its neo-Marxist ideological underpinnings, for what it is: a purely destructive force that is opposed to human biology and well-being. To borrow a phrase from Trump, this is huge.

We will have a cultural revolution in this country, but it will not be led by the Maoist wokesters. The communists made their long march through the institutions and completely captured almost all of the big ones, but in the process, they destroyed those institutions to the point that almost no one sees them as legitimate or beneficial; thus, the wokesters are now victims of their own success. Increasing numbers of regular people have either set about building new institutions themselves, or they are fully supporting anyone else who is trying to do so.

If you have your ear to the ground, you can hear the seismic shift in the cultural zeitgeist. And what is really exciting is this: we have front-row seats to watch history being made, and more importantly, we all get to participate in making it.

If you spend much time on Substack, you will encounter some interesting heterodox thinkers with some useful insights and fascinating ideas. Whatever the Left Bank in Paris was to the writers of the Lost Generation in the 1920s, Substack has become for the countercultural writers of the 2020s. Or you could compare it to the Beatnik

¹

literary scene of the 1950s: they were at the vanguard of a cultural revolution that didn’t hit the mainstream until the 1960s. Whatever historical era you wish to compare ours to, this is the pattern that we will see playing out: ideas and concepts being raised in essays and comment threads on today’s Substack articles will be hitting the mainstream in a big way a few years from now. And we get to see it happen in real time and be a part of it.

One such writer is the philosopher and poet of Barsoom, John Carter, whose recent essay on Tonic Masculinity

²

lands like a punch on the nose of all the woke nonsense about gender and human sexuality that has completely unhinged the West culturally, completely unmooring the mainstream ideology from biological reality and the wisdom of the ages. After reading it, all I could say was, “Amen and amen!” If you haven’t read it yourself, read it now:

Tonic Masculinity

The Rising Generation Is Going to Be Okay

As for the rising generation, I must say that I am very hopeful. I have a 13-year-old daughter, and like many parents of teenagers, I have been worried about what kinds of ideas and values she’s picking up from the culture and its instruments of indoctrination (e.g., public school). I think my daughter and I have a good relationship, but we have the typical parent/teenager dynamic where I am not all that cool to talk to about things, making it sometimes difficult to get a read on what she is really thinking. However, occasionally she will open up and talk, and I have learned to drop everything when she does and mostly just listen and ask questions. Yesterday, we were visiting my brother’s family; at one point, I was talking to one of her male cousins, who is also thirteen; and my teenage daughter joined the conversation.

Ladies and gentlemen, what I heard them say was profoundly encouraging. They have both taken the red pill — though perhaps they’ve taken a wee bit too many of them (as Michael Malice wisely puts it, “Take the red pill, but don’t take the whole bottle”) — but they have woken up and now see our globohomo culture for what it actually is. They spoke of NPCs and Psyops and “controlled opposition” and a host of other things that made me realize that they know the score: our culture and its values are not just unnatural, they are profoundly anti-nature, and especially anti-Human Nature, and these harmful values are being pushed by malevolent actors whose goal is to undermine the well-being of regular people for selfish and nefarious purposes. My daughter and her cousin even went so far as to call the folks pushing these harmful values “demonic.”

That’s all I needed to hear to know they will both ultimately be okay. It is freaking difficult, at any age, to find your way through the gaslit hall of mirrors that is Western culture right now, and it is even more challenging for teenagers, who lack the life experience and emotional maturity necessary to put Life’s bigger issues into perspective. But these kids are doing it.

Maybe they’re the minority. Maybe they’re like us, going online and sharing notes with other heterodox thinkers and feeling greatly relieved to learn that they’re not alone in feeling like everything about the dominant culture is perversely twisted in such a way as to make it malicious. Maybe they are few in number, but they are doing it. And that is how it starts in any demographic that wakes up and pushes back against harmful ideologies and values: the more intelligent and curious among them realize something is off and begin talking to each other about it, and once that process gets going, it just keeps building momentum at an exponential rate, until it becomes an unstoppable force of Nature, like an avalanche smashing into smithereens each and every artificial structure in its path. The kids are waking up, and having glimpsed the Truth, they cannot ever again be content merely to settle for fashionable lies, no matter what the people around them may say or do.

The WEF Boys Are Back (and you know they will always be wack) . . .

Speaking of demonic actors pushing malevolent cultural values, the WEF is convening again this coming week in Davos, and it looks like Russell Brand is going to be having fun with it on his Rumble channel. I tried embed a video preview from his Rumble channel but for whatever reason, Substack, though it will seamlessly embed videos from YouTube, will not do the same for videos from Rumble. Soooo . . . here’s one of Brand’s recent videos from the evil empire of Googledom over at YouTube, cued to start at the point where he previews his upcoming coverage of the WEF:

Bottom line, Russell Brand has the right idea. The way to discuss the woke, the WEF, the Brandon Administration, and all these other jackasses is to treat them as the absurd joke that they are. The woke and their cultural overlords do not make any good faith arguments or suggestions for improving the culture, so there is no point in treating them like they do. As has been accurately observed by many cultural critics recently, if the Left did not have double standards, they would have no standards at all. Their only categorical imperative is acquiring and wielding power for its own sake, and they will attempt to subvert and bury anything true and real that gets in their way. They do not deserve respect or a sympathetic ear. All they deserve is scorn, sarcasm, and satire. As long as we’re stuck in their stupid clownshow, we might as well have fun with it, and that is what Brand appears to be doing.

New Year Resolutions

On a different note, my own New Year resolutions have been a mixed bag. I made multiple resolutions and started them all at once before realizing that this was a recipe for disaster. Better to do one or two things at a time and actually do them than to try a dozen things all at once, dissipate your focus and energy, and have all of your endeavors fizzle out before attaining fruition. So instead of doing everything all at once, I will focus on one or two things a month throughout the year.

Is this practical wisdom or a copout? Maybe a little of both, if I’m being honest with myself. But wise old Socrates’ primary injunction was “Know thyself!” As in, acknowledge and account for your own limitations and weaknesses and find the most effective work-arounds you can for them.

It also seems to accord with the methods used by wise old Ben Franklin, who made a list of virtues he wished to cultivate and then focused specifically on one virtue each week, keeping a journal of his progress and then reviewing it at week’s end. And I guess old Ben is a worthwhile figure to imitate (except for the getting syphilis part — I wouldn’t recommend imitating him in that).

Anyway, this month I am focusing on keeping my Slow-Carb Diet and maintaining my writing schedule, both of which I am doing pretty well on. I have improved my overall level of physical activity and gotten some exercise, though not as consistently as I should, so that will be my focus next month.

I have cut way back on the Delta 8, but still indulge occasionally when I start feeling stressed or irritable, although in much lower and infrequent doses than I had gotten used to. It’s definitely not the best thing for dealing with stress and irritability, but it’s better than many things; so rather than cutting it out straight away and turning to something worse, I am phasing it out gradually and replacing it with better methods of stress reduction.

And when it comes to getting my home straightened up and ready for hosting social gatherings, well . . . that hasn’t really happened at all; but the season for Spring cleaning is just around the corner, so no worries there. I do have a home-repair project to work on this weekend, to wit, fixing the kitchen sink. The handle (probably made of crappy, cheap Chinese steel) broke off at the base in such a way that I will have to replace almost the entire thing. Unfortunately, I was never much of a handyman, although I have had to learn a few things as a homeowner, which has given me a new appreciation for YouTube/Rumble, because you can find video tutorials for just about every repair there. I love reading, but when it comes to making repairs, I need visual guides — I can read instruction manuals backwards and forwards and will somehow never get it, but if I can just see someone else do it once, I can pretty much figure it out (and even have fun with it). So this weekend, I get to channel my inner Red Green and engage in (for me) some “tonic masculinity” by fixing something, which is always rewarding to accomplish.

I am doing well with The Slow-Carb Diet and am beginning to see and feel a difference after only two weeks. Based on my experience with this diet before, after a month, the changes to my eating habits should become deeply ingrained enough to put those routines on auto-pilot: just keep buying the right foods and by then I will be so used to eating them that I don’t even crave anything high-carb outside of my weekly cheat day.

As for writing, I am being consistent and setting aside the time and space to do it each day. That is the biggest piece right there. As Steven Pressfield observed, the Muse may be fundamentally mysterious and may staunchly resist being reduced to anything remotely resembling a formulaic process, but if you regularly put your butt in the seat and block out distractions and interruptions, you can count on the Muse to show up and inspire you — eventually. You will have writers’ block sometimes; but keep coming back and making time for her, and the Muse will inevitably drop by, share her visions with you, and make your pen move across the paper, or your fingers whir across your computer’s keyboard, in a truly magical way.

Anyway, hope you all have a great week! Enjoy the holiday weekend (MLK-day in the USA)!

1. For the most part, I detest the Beatniks and their values and think that their literature is terribly overrated, although Allen Ginsburg was excellent in The Clash’s song “Ghetto Defendant:”

2. The term “Tonic Masculinity” was coined by fellow Substacker Jay Rollins. in his recent article on Andrew Tate. Use this term and help make it more culturally ascendant than the harmful alternative, “toxic masculinity.”