But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
Matthew 12:36
Since I was in high school, we’ve been joking about how nobody born after 1985 will be eligible for public office, because our entire social lives took place online, and everything we’ve ever said in confidence is permanently archived and awaiting discovery by opposition researchers.
October 2025 appears to have been Judgment Day for online Millennials in politics.
First, Jay Jones is outed calling for the murder of Virginia Speaker Todd Gilbert and his children (“little fascists” — they are five and two).
A Kansas Young Republicans’ chapter was shut down after chats were leaked in which they joked about Nazism, slavery, etc. This week, a Trump appointee had chats leaked with similarly naughty content.
CNN found a Reddit account belonging to Graham Platner, a candidate for US Senate from Maine, in which he referred to himself as a Communist, said “all cops are bastards”, described white people as “racist and stupid”, etc.
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Predictably, the establishment GOP came out to disavow and apologize on behalf of the Kansas Young Republicans, while Democrat politicians circled the wagons around their guy.
JD Vance (#48, Our Man in Washington, the First Gamer President) held the line, pointing out that these struggle sessions over low-level staffers making naughty jokes in a group chat — while their own elected officials say much worse, and repeatedly insist that they mean it — are transparently about leftist frame control, and that this strain of kvetching was Defeated at the Ballot Box.
Vance makes the normie-palatable argument that these were “kids” “making mistakes” — but the truth is, most of the offending posters were in their late twenties or early thirties.
The real reason discourse-policing is untenable is that the Overton Window no longer represents anyone’s real opinions.
No one who thinks about politics for a living — or even as a serious hobby — actually believes in the respectable moderate liberal consensus anymore.
The bedrock of this consensus was the conviction that human beings are biologically fungible — that differences in achievement were some mixture of software (culture) and material conditions.
“Liberals” tended to believe that material conditions were the primary driver: if poor kids grew up with enough money, they’d be just as bright as white kids. So the thing to do was to run the experiment aggressively, and hew closer to “equality of outcome” so that minority households would have the resources to shine.
“Conservatives” tended to believe that culture was the primary driver: suggesting that handouts and affirmative action would further degrade and immiserate minority communities, who would no doubt be healed of their pathologies if they could but experience the bracing discipline of free markets.
(Of course, it would be necessary to correct systemic injustices and “level the playing field” — but with care not to create dependency. This is why conservatism was always “liberalism driving the speed limit.”)
Disagreements between liberals and conservatives could be heated, but everyone was running the same experiment, in pursuit of the same goal: a race-blind civic nation in which hard work and ingenuity was rewarded (and, conveniently, produced in precisely equal proportion across all demographic cohorts.)
The problem is that the experiment has run its course, and come to definitive conclusions.
The most greatest economic abundance in human history was poured out attempting to close these gaps — and now it’s over, America is approaching fiscal collapse, and the most important gaps (poverty, indebtedness, violent crime) have remained stagnant or actually widened.
This set of facts is extremely difficult to dispute, and there are really only two ways you can go with it:
Either you embrace the idea that inequalities exist in nature, or you go to war with nature — which is why every serious Republican under 50 is some flavor of blood-and-soil reactionary, and every serious Democrat under 50 is some flavor of revolutionary Marxist.
The “moderate liberal consensus” survives only as theater, for the consumption of normies and dilettantes and olds.
Nobody honest and thoughtful still believes in it, which means that any leak of a politically-active group’s private communications is guaranteed to offend normie sensibilities.
But you’ll notice that, while ordinary people are repulsed by the open bloodlust of Leftist activists, academics, pundits, and politicians, it never seems to harm their careers, or trigger a circular firing squad of disavowals from among their ranks.
Indeed, Leftists vocally defend the liberal consensus, and fight to maintain it, even though their beliefs are (when articulated honestly) comfortably outside it.
That’s because the legal and professional consequences of scandalizing the normies only cut one way.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination with respect to “protected classes”, establishing what we now recognize as the “intersectional stack”.
Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) expanded the definition of discrimination to include any standards or requirements that are discriminatory in effect (which is all of them.)
Meritor v. Vinson (1986) created the notion of a “hostile work environment”, making it de facto illegal to make any member of a protected class uncomfortable at work.
This case law, taken together, effectively bans public expression of right wing ideas (all of which create Hostile Work Environments by suggesting policies that would by definition inflict a Disparate Impact on one protected class or another).
To make it more concrete: I know a former Assistant Attorney General who was fired for privately-expressed right-wing opinions, expressly because those opinions exposed the state to liability under US civil rights law.
No such liability is created when Jay Jones expresses a desire to murder white children — and that fact alone should be enough to disabuse anyone (who is paying attention) of their Moderate Liberal Consensus beliefs about the nature of the American state.
Normies cling to this consensus for the same reason it emerged in the first place.
It’s not that it’s so hard for your coworkers to make sense of FBI crime statistics, or spending-per-pupil in Chicago public schools.
It isn’t even, exactly, that they’re afraid of being called a bad person: they’re afraid of feeling like a bad person. They have no way to confront these facts within the moral frame they were raised with.
Much easier to conclude that there must be something wrong with the data, or gesture vaguely at socioeconomic factors — or simply set the problem aside and not think about it. It is not just understandable, it is (individually) rational to do this.
And the problem runs deeper than their propaganda environment. Who doesn’t want to believe in the underdog? Who doesn’t want to believe that anything is possible (especially for a child)? To the extent that propaganda works, it works by drawing up these very human and pre-political feelings.
You can say that it doesn’t matter what the normies think — but this moral ambiguity is also why the Right does not actually believe in its right to rule.
People on the Right often complain about how free liberals are with their opinions at school, at work, etc., while we constantly feel the need to hide our power levels.
To some extent this is because we face different practical consequences — but if you’ve ever tried explaining your most Based opinions to a good normie friend in private, you know that that’s not the whole story.
The facts are not in doubt, yet somehow there is doubt — halting, hedging, endless contextualizing. You’re more honest than the normie, but you still don’t quite know how to square the Hate Facts with your conscience.
It’s true that Leftists have greater moral clarity because they are in power — but they are also in power because of their moral clarity.
They don’t have to coax and cajole and threaten each other into pursuing their common interests at every moment. There are no unresolved moral arguments to exploit. Everyone just knows, in their balls, that the correct course of action is always the most leftiest thing they can get away with.
In response to the moral indigestion of the Right, a meaningful fraction of Generation Zyklon is trying hard to lather up some sociopathy in themselves — but it doesn’t get much farther than petty, giggling hostility toward minorities.
Conscience is as undeniable, as a matter of human nature, as the hate facts are. You’re not going to succeed in suppressing it in yourself, and trying is bad for you.
The Right is stuck here because winners aren’t cynical.
They don’t jeeringly cast themselves as the villain in someone else’s story. The only reason to play this role is that you have no story of your own, in which you are the hero.
Obviously this isn’t a criticism of being anon, or venting your thoughts in a private group chat — but the reason the discourse on the Right is still furtive, subterranean, and snide (even after most of the punishments for wrongthink have been withdrawn) is that we are still searching for moral clarity.
The people who overthrow the absurd tyranny that we live under will understand themselves, their thoughts, and their behavior, as straightforwardly righteous. They don’t do irony — they do not understand the gay idea of irony.
Instead of embracing the Leftist frame of hierarchy as oppressive, and trying to get comfortable living with enmity and resentment, the winners will love their enemies, even as they confound and enrage and punish and rout them — because the goal will be to restore them to friendship with God and man, in hierarchies of natural affection and reciprocal loyalty.
The winners will understand their mandate to rule as a duty they owe to the whole of society, including the people they have to break and dethrone. Only people who feel God’s approbation have the will and courage to do what is necessary to win.
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