Opting Out

We were at a friend’s house in the country this past weekend with a group of people who had formed a connection during covid. Its purpose was to talk earnestly and support one another in the face of injection mandates, movement restrictions and the disparagement of free speech and critical thought.

One person brought up Israel-Palestine and how cruel and evil the destruction was. Then she paused, suddenly self-conscious, and said something to the effect of, “I hope I’m not coming off like the anti-semite of the group!”

Everyone assured her, no, she could voice whatever she liked, without fear of judgment or excommunication, which was the point of the group. I started to say how on Twitter it was interesting that many people who held the line together during covid were at major odds over Israel-Palestine and other controversies. But I couldn’t get past the word “Twitter” before our host said, “Why are you still on Twitter?”

I told him a lot of my follows were good, and it’s where my reach was. But as I thought about it, I don’t really need “reach” as I’m not selling anything other than my Substacks, not even making much of an effort there and almost everyone who wants to read them is probably already doing so. The truth is Twitter isn’t really essential for my work anymore.

He told me he had stopped reading any news at all, and I realized this was true when I used O.J. Simpson as an example of something, and he didn’t know The Juice had died last week. He had had an epiphany that he was better off attending to his own life and that any exposure at all was a distraction.

. . .

I sometimes fancy myself an information warrior of sorts, suiting up to do battle with paid propagandists, obsequious online virtue signalers and manipulated normies who lack the bandwidth, inclination or capacity to sort things out for themselves.

It is only I (and millions of like-minded soldiers), it sometimes seems, who prevent the powerful, centralized forces from running roughshod over us all.

. . .

I remember walking through Times Square in the mid-1990s with a friend. There was a black preacher at a makeshift pulpit with a microphone railing against the evils of the white man. The friend, who might have ingested an excessive amount of cannabis that day, walked past him, navigating the crowded sidewalk, exclaiming, “White devil coming through, white devil coming through!”

. . .

Twitter’s algorithm serves me up a fair amount of content about what the EU, Biden administration, WEF and WHO are up to. I can assure you from the usually reliable accounts in my feed it seems very much like no good. From mandatory medicine to censorship for the “greater good” to funding of overseas wars, regulation of your “carbon emission” and central bank digital currencies, it’s a what’s what of Orwellian dystopia about which only the most zombified imbecile would be enthused.

I draw my sword, so to speak, and sever one of its hydra heads with a sarcastic quip. The likes and retweets flow like serpent blood, and for a moment I feel I’ve made a small difference. It’s mostly the choir that’s amplifying my message, but there are onlookers too, stirring with one eye open, not-yet-quite-awake normies who sense something’s not right. Maybe one of them will wake up and, once awake, never go back to sleep. I’m doing God’s work, I tell myself.

. . .

I listened to a bitcoin podcast five years ago between Marty Bent and investor/blogger/thinker Ben Hunt. Both agreed the system was rotten to the core and essentially beyond salvage, but while Marty was advocating for bitcoin as the alternative, Hunt was convinced the powers that be would either make it illegal (they’ll turn you into a criminal!), “ghetto-ize it like gold” or eventually co-opt it.

Marty kept making his case, but Hunt, 25-odd years his senior with a knowing tone of world-weariness, insisted it was futile because of what “they” will do. As I listened, I couldn’t help but wonder who Hunt thought “they” were since “he” was doing yeoman’s work on “their” behalf to dissuade listeners from considering a parallel system.

Maybe Hunt really did think it was hopelessly corrupt and beyond salvage, but he surely gave the impression “they” were in charge, and he and everyone else were powerless to do much about it.

. . .

I still laugh when I think of my friend calling himself “white devil” in front of the street preacher. Most people were either watching in amusement and/or mild fear, or just eye-rolling and ignoring the guy outright. You don’t need to waste time refuting someone with no power over you — if you wanted to preach death to whitey in 1990s Manhattan, you could knock yourself out. It was a free country then.

. . .

It occurred to me in pointing out the nefariousness of the unelected three-letter globalist conspiracy hatchers I might be unwittingly playing the role of Ben Hunt: “This is what *they* are up to. Here’s what *they* are going to do. I need to inform my followers and those I know about *them*, lest we fall victim to totalitarian rule.”

I am implying that unlike the preacher at whose expense my friend had a laugh and probably never thought about again, we need to take them seriously. I am painting them as powerful and real, and the onlookers, many of which are perhaps interested more in whom to ally with ideologically for self-preservation and social advancement, might hear my dire warnings as a kind of advertisement. The message is: “This is who is winning,” and their takeaway, consciously or not, might be “How do I position myself to benefit from that?”

. . .

What’s the alternative to pointing out wrong when you see it, speaking truth to power and fighting against it? How can we watch people run roughshod over our rights for four years and not speak out? If not me, then who? Should we just bury our heads in the sand and pretend like the last four years never happened?

I don’t know the answer, but maybe that framing is a false dichotomy. By declining to engage with a broken system on its terms we need not deny what it is or what it’s up to. We just quietly withdraw our energies from it, not reify it through our focus and opposition. Treat it like the powerless street preacher who is free to rail into the void all he likes.

Good luck to those who still want to believe in it. I think you’re headed for a rude awakening, but that’s a matter for you to navigate on your own. My need to convince you, recruit you to the “army of truth” is just feeding the idea that we need one, that there’s still a battle to be fought, that we haven’t already won.

“Carbon-based life form, coming through!”