You are Not Real

Encountering Internet Discourse with a Hangover.

“Only two martinis, Publius” I said. “Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear, Publius,” I said.

Sigh…

One of the persistent memes about Substack is that it’s full of Nazis. There was a famous attempt at the end of 2023 to get Substack to purge these “actual Nazis” off the platform, which Substack declined to do on grounds that the ACLU would have well understood back in the 80’s. This is all fine and well-done. However, it fails to consider the historical reality that there are no Nazis on Substack.

That’s right. Read it again. I emphasized it for you. There is no such thing as a Substack Nazi. All of the accounts that you might think are Nazis, aren’t. They are not real.

You might think that you are a hardcore enough Pepe to think that you are a Nazi. You are not. I don’t care how much you blame Jews for every evil in the world, think Churchill was the bad guy in WW2, or find yourself saying “could we give fascism another shot, you guys? Maybe without the military hubris? idk”, You are Not a Nazi. You are fake.

You are not marching through the land, doing damage to Jewish or any other untermensch properties. You are not fighting street battles with your ideological enemies and inventing songs about the comrades that fall. You are not building a party to take over the state. You are not even spray-painting swastikas on Jewish gravestones, something the kind of Nazis the ACLU defended back in the 80’s actually did.¹ You are just throwing Conan memes and warmed-over slurs into the mouth of the Shoggoth that is the Internet. You are not real.

What I say of right-wing LARPers is doubly true of the left-wing variety. All you internet tankies are not Communists. It doesn’t matter how much you seethe about Capitalism, how many time you masturbate to Das Kapital or The Conquest of Bread or some other hipster-Menshevik tome, you are NOT a Communist.

Communists threw bombs into the machinery of the state. Communists built support networks to break the law and survive. Communists robbed banks. You think Luigi Mangione struck a blow for the working classes? Stalin would have kidnapped Thompson’s entire family until he forked over millions for the Bolshevik coffers², and the only thing Trotsky would have said about it is to complain what took him so long. You haven’t got anything like the balls for that. Even the Antifa balloonheads can only get it up to throw pre-set bricks into pre-designated storefronts when the local cops and DA’s are already prepared to look the other way. You are not a communist. You are just some asshole who doesn’t wanna pay rent.

This applies universally, even to those who think the absence of political faith is the winning move. No one is more full of shit than an Online Anarchist. Oh, Taxation is Theft, is it? All Government is Evil, is it? And pray, just what are you doing to combat this wickedness? Are you taking your income off the grid, living like a wild man in the woods? Are you setting up a commune where you all take turns as a kind of executive officer of the week, subject to review by a bi-weekly meeting blah blah blah? No? Just paying your taxes, submitting to the state, and Raising Awareness, are we?

Cool. Have fun arguing with the Sheeple who are sooo brainwashed they think something that’s been part of human society for the last five thousand years might be useful. What a bunch of retards.

For as much as we love to dunk on Basic Liberals and their Gay Puritanism, they actually make an effort to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs. Sure, most of it is performative boycotting and ersatz struggle sessions, but it’s something. They aren’t Liberals online and something else in reality. Their politics are un-examined and full of hypocritical contradictions, but they’re genuine.³

Look, I get it. You gotta start somewhere. You gotta think thoughts before you can make something of them.⁴ You gotta let the mind go free and process possibility as the Late Republic does what it does. I’m not calling you out,\; I’m calling in your honesty. You know there’s a gap between beliefs and reality, we all have that. Even the Online Religious, who also try to live what they preach⁵, feel that.

So when we’re engaged in these irruptions of Noise Discourse, it’s best we recognize that whoever we’re talking to or about is probably just as harmless, just as much a good citizen, as you are. Even if they are advocating dumb stuff that enables sociopaths to do horrible things, well, the Worst Do Get On Top, don’t they? Anarchists ain’t mad for no reason.

All that’s going on here is that Ideas are being thrown against the wall of observation. It’s fun and easy to do precisely because there’s no immediate consequences for doing so.⁶ And we can take what we see and turn it into real-life action, but we have to remember the gap between our words and real life.

Labels are dangerous things. Self-labels the most dangerous of all. To apply a label to yourself is to create a set of obligations to Be, to Think, to Support. That doesn’t mean you should never Identify As, but that you should do so with awareness and certainty. We spend far too much time trying to create home-brew political ideologies that have even less connection to reality than fascism. What is Alt-Right? What does Dissident Right smell like? Can you spot a Dirtbag Leftist in the wild, and if you shake him upside down, will beer money for your Barstool Rightist buddy fall out of his pants? Do any of these things mean anything for your day-to-day?

Anon, we need to treat the Internet like College: good place to meet people for brief periods, good for learning and exploring and maybe partying,⁷ but Real Life is always there waiting for you, slapping down hard limits.

So yeah, I didn’t actually call myself by my Internet pseudonym while I was pouring Boodle’s Gin into a shaker last night. In fact, that whole conversation was a rhetorical invention to give these thoughts the kind of cachet my previous drunk rant got. I’ve been pondering this essay for about a week. I am, however, actually hungover, and I actually think that we should re-examine what we think about Identity. What you are, who you are, ought to be self-evident. If it’s not, then you should consider whether it’s really you, or just a non-definitive aspect. Then it becomes a question of what you want, why you want it, etc. If the shadows on the wall of the Internet can’t help us find the lever to change the world⁸, they should at least give us a sense of what we’re doing in it. But that requires knowing the shadow for what it is.

1. The ACLU didn’t defend them for that, just for their rights to march and protest. And boy howdy did they get shit for it.

2. Admittedly, that doesn’t do much for the working class, either. But that’s Communism for you.

3. For that matter, you can say the same thing about the Patriot Fronters. I experienced some pushback recently for repeating the commonplace about the PF being feds in front of people who had RL experience with them, and I had to admit that I was talking out of my ass. Maybe that group is thoroughly penetrated, but they’re also putting themselves out there, and according to some, doing real work. Maybe that isn’t true, but I have no way of knowing. Repeating memes isn’t thinking.

4. Nietzsche can gibber like a crackhead as much as he wants, thought precedes action, Duh and/or Hello…

5. I’m gonna go ahead and give Online Pagans the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re propitiating their various deities in some way, even if offering hecatombs is a bit pricey in this economy.

6. Unless you get doxxed, and the Shoggoth decides to eat you. But that doesn’t happen nearly as often as we like to pretend.

7. That’s a hard “maybe”.

8. I can mix whatever Ancient Greek metaphors I want!