Scott Greer just posted a write-up on Twitter demonology, arguing that online right-wing people ascribe bad liberal things to demonic activity for unserious engagement-chasing reasons, and that this practice is silly and repellent to normal people.
His framing is that this is a provincial intra-scene thing that has no purchase outside our bubble — but it has clearly broken containment from the online right-wing schizo-posters.
Pro-Trump politicians now routinely levy accusations that their opponents are a criminal conspiracy, strongly implying that they cannot be dislodged by ordinary lawful means. Sometimes this includes direct accusations of Satanism; more often you hear phenomena obliquely described as “demonic”, or phrases like “this is a spiritual conflict” intoned in a let-the-reader-understand sort of way.
One of the top podcasts in the world is just a former Special Forces guy putting a bunch of other former Special Forces guys in front of a microphone to say “Yes, the government has been captured by a Satanic pedophile cabal and we will not escape God’s judgment if we fail to crush them”.
And of course Tucker has his UFO thing.
Surely all of these characters are riding these waves with different degrees of sincerity or cynicism — but while demonic possession is a particularly salacious and effective genre of “crisis bait”, it’s just one such genre, all of which is algorithmically privileged for the same reasons.
Brandon Johnson is telling the citizens of Chicago to “defend” the city from federal troops. Elon Musk is now telling the citizens of various Europe countries to “fight or die”, because “it’s now or never”.
It was well said that poasting is provably one of the most enjoyable activities a human can engage in, since the most powerful people in the world, who can buy any experience they want, frequently spend hours a day absorbed in it.
But the schizo mode of online discourse only makes sense if you’re an actual powerless schizo, shouting into the void.
The idea is that one might, as an unknown, exercise power by “raising awareness”: generating a viral conversation around an issue, either so that some friendly face within the power structure will feel a Popular Mandate to take action that you can’t take, or so that neutral/hostile parties are embarrassed into addressing the issue.
But when these guys do it, it’s fair to ask: “Hey, aren’t you a US senator? Don’t you have 500 billion dollars? Aren’t you one of the most capable perpetrators of violence on the planet?”
What’s weird about all this talk isn’t that it’s “fake”, exactly.
I find supernatural explanations for a lot of these phenomena compelling — but even if you think it’s dumb to call them “demonic”, they’re clearly real, and screwed-up, and difficult to explain in terms of straightforward material interest. It’s true that calling our occupational class “demonic” gets more clicks than calling them “super fucking weird” — but they’re definitely super fucking weird.
And these other crises that don’t implicate the supernatural are also real. Elon Musk is right that replacement migration is the intentional destruction of Europe, and Europe’s rulers are consciously complicit.
Even lefty hysteria is worthy of some respect: Brandon Johnson and Gavin Newsom are right that we’re in the midst of a constitutional crisis and that nobody gives a shit about democracy anymore.
What’s fake about all this catastrophizing is that none of these powerful people ever does anything about it. Nothing Ever Happens.
It feels very mature and clear-headed to dismiss all this as online moral panic, hysteria, ginned up by the logic of the attention economy — but almost the opposite is true.
The crises are real, but they’re treated by everyone — even the screaming alarmists — as if they were pure online narrative phenomena.
Jeffrey Epstein’s death in 2019 was the time Nothing Ever Happened the hardest.
It was the first time I can remember comfortably mainstream voices, people with (at least theoretically) significant institutional power, baldly asserting that Jeffrey Epstein had been murdered to cover up a blackmail cabal infesting every domain of the Western managerial class.
The implication of these accusations went unsaid, but what these people (including sitting US legislators) were implying (and continue to imply) was that the US Government is as compromised and illegitimate as it is possible for a state to be, and that almost any actions against it are justified.
Elon is currently arguing (in so many words) that the governments of Western Europe are genocidally hostile to their native populations, and that a violent revolution is imminently necessary.
Which is also true, but probably not a helpful thing for a random European to hear when there’s zero money or infrastructure or institutional support behind it. (Hopefully no Europeans will respond to Elon’s unfunded mandate and get themselves pointlessly murdered by their government.)
This is surreal for at least two reasons:
First, because these accusations apparently have no negative consequences for the people making them; and second, because they have apparently no negative consequences for the accused.
The Epstein Truthers aren’t being assassinated, disgraced, disappeared, or even threatened with legal action. No purported Epstein Clients are being publicly questioned, let alone charged with a crime.
We live in probably the most freewheeling media environment in history, in the practical sense of what “responsible” people can get away with saying — but that appears to be because it doesn’t matter what anybody says about anything.
Mountains of weird incriminating shit keeps getting dredged up, seemingly more every day — and far from punishing their accusers, these shadowy powerful institutions don’t even bother to workshop counter-narratives. The global intelligence cabal, in its diabolical cunning, sees fit to let all these stories hang in the air, unanswered.
And it works out fine for them: all we get are normies on Facebook posting giggly normie memes about how Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself, and eventually the Discourse gets bored and moves on.
There has always been a gap between words and deeds on the internet, but the gulf has expanded to truly absurd proportions.
If you told an ordinary citizen in 1995 that billionaires and politicians and pundits and elite combat veterans would routinely adopt this paranoid, catastrophizing style in 2025, they would assume that the US was on the verge of civil war.
But we’ve become completely inured to it: not just by long exposure, but because it’s so obviously not serious — unaccompanied by even the most modest deployments of real-world financial or social capital.
The most charitable interpretation of this is that all these public figures are stuck talking because they don’t know what else to do — and, in their defense, knowing these truths doesn’t really offer any novel prescriptions for what to do about anything. Presumably we are all already praying very hard.
As far as I can see, the only utility of this type of rhetoric (UFOs are demons, trans shooters are demons, Epstein/Podesta/Klaus Schwab is demons) is its potential to convince someone else to Do What Must Be Done without exposing oneself to too much risk. That also seems to be the goal with respect to European replacement migration. And if that’s all these public figures are willing to contribute to the cause, we don’t have much use for them.
So getting these people’s attention probably doesn’t matter.
There aren’t any friendly faces within the power structure who will take public action against these forces if you make enough noise. At best, they’ll parrot your narrative back to you as an applause light, to let you know that they’re “in on the meme”. They either won’t or can’t take any material action to resolve any of these crises.
Which means that we’re it. If there are characters or institutions that can rescue our situation, we’re going to have to build them ourselves, by discreet means that respect the danger and magnitude of the task.
The real purpose of poasting has always been to find one’s friends.
EXIT News
Weekly Group Calls (Tue 9PM ET/6PM PT)
This week (9/2) we discussed The Forest Passage by Ernst Junger. Junger understood our present moment better 70 years ahead of time than most of us do right now. This conversation was not recorded.
Next week (9/9) we will be reviewing the Summer of Meetups. We’ve had three consecutive months with a meetup somewhere in the country every single weekend. We’ll be discussing how best to organize and make use of future meetups.
New Calls:
Family/Fatherhood and Homeschooling on alternating Thursdays at 7PM ET/4PM PT
Leadership on the second Wednesday of each month at 8PM ET/5PM PT. (This month, 9/10, we will discuss Alexander and Caesar from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.)
Civic Engagement on third Thursdays at 10PM ET/7PM PT.
Meetups:
Boise Labor Day barbecue (9/1) was a success. Big thanks to Jefferson for hosting.
DC members-only dinner meetup tonight (9/4). See #dc channel for invite details.
Utah Valley members-only dinner meetup tomorrow (9/5). See #utah channel for invite details.
Orlando cocktail hour (9/12) — invite below the paywall for subscribers.
Austin meetup (9/27) — member meetup in the afternoon, followed by dinner and cocktail hour. See #ATX channel for details.
Nashville meetup (10/10) — member dinner, followed by cocktail hour. See #tennessee channel for details.
Canyoneering Trip in Zion National Park (10/17-10/18). We missed our lottery drawing, which means we’re taking an alternate route which will be less physically demanding, and RSVPs are back open. We’ve got about a dozen guys committed — members, if you’re interested, reach out to Devin or myself in the chat.
Cocktail hour invites for Orlando (9/12), Austin (9/27), and Nashville (10/10) available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.
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