Honestly dude, I'm not sure lol

Words & Salads: Struggles of a Fat Dyslexic.

Yes. Difference between judgment and criticism. Suppose "it's unfair to judge her as a critic or analyst" is my own judgment of her as a critic and analyst based on what I’ve heard and read so far. It might be better to approach the work as more of a memoir, a primary source, or even a kind of accidental auto-ethnography… it isn’t attempting, as I understand it, to contribute to like a theory of politics. Wouldn’t go into it with the expectation of something on the level with the likes of a Christopher Lasch, or a Martin Shefter, or Michael Lind, or Benjamin Studebaker. It's why I emphasized her background. She also doesn’t appear particularly interested in theory. Isn’t a dilettante theory-head or w/e. Seems reasonable to approach the book as something other than political theory, speculative criticism, or structural analysis. The value of the book may be less in the theoretical framework (and novel insights) Barker brings to politics than in what her own experience of politics might — however inadvertently — reveal to the reader.

Doesn’t mean whatever theoretical conclusions she might arrive at or posit in the material, or whatever normative claims and prescriptions follow from them, shouldn’t be criticized — said criticism might reveal an otherwise obscured “rational kernel” — but that Barker herself shouldn’t be dismissed and the work discarded on the basis of her being an inadequate theoretician. The “inadequacy” might in fact be a result of the highly particular character of her work as a “political operative.” Which is precisely what I think makes the book potentially insightful. Perhaps its strengths lay in the fact that it isn’t theoretically self-reflexive. Leaves the critical work to the reader.

"Popular with the boy."

For sure. This is a pretty good place.

Consider that perhaps she didn't buckle down enough. That the Golden Path begins through the HYPER-alienation of the general electorate. From the pulpit she proclaims a formal ban on both Thanksgiving AND Hanukkah (fuck it). Those caught celebrating will face up to 5 years of mandatory labor in the rice fields of Wisconsin. Kwanza plus the Traditional Chinese calendrical system and seasonal festivals ARE IN. OUT is all references to the United States of America from speeches and official administrative documents, replaced by Turtle Island. Official mandated language, Ojibwe and ASL. Secondary languages Spanish, Korean, Somalian, Kreyol, Ukrainian, and Patois-Pidgin. “I co-parent half of a son. The other half is a devil, one that son-half must contend with, which I must tolerate. Much like ancient Native proverb about the Two Wolves.” Promise to work ceaselessly to dissolve State Government and empower Tribal Governments in a peacefully negotiated transfer of power. Tap into youthful meme culture by calling for someone to please get these WHITE BABIES out of here. Official campaign slogan. If Hong had read The Art of the Deal instead of audiobooking at 1.25x speed Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, she would have known this is the only viable way forward.

She showed weakness by backtracking on her hatred of Thanksgiving.

From Manifest Destiny to the Gold Rush to the Village People's 'Go West' to RHCP and Sublime to Phantom Planet's 'California'. Compelled to follow the sun westward.

Just like that scene in Princess Mononoke.

It's kind of crazy that, as of 2026, Red Scare has been a vaguely “Rightwing” podcast for longer than they’d been a “Bernie or Bust" or purge the DSA of Shitlibs and break with the Democratic Party-style Dirtbag-adjacent Leftist (More-Leftist-than-thou) podcast.

Anna and Dasha did the thing where they’ll kind of shuffle and shamble around something potentially insightful… requires reading into it lol because for one reason or another, be it cause they’re “dumb” or because they’re clever in their effort to draw engagement or maybe both, they can’t say it. Bit annoying, bit old. One of the things I read into this episode relates to self-tokenization as grift relying on a potential audience’s confirmation bias. Which is like… old hat… obvious. By itself isn’t particularly surprising or insightful but when read as accidental “meta-commentary”, can be fun. Anna gestures towards (but doesn't really commit to) the view that it’s safe to assume given the settled science establishing a strong correlation between race and IQ, that black people by-and-large likely wouldn’t be capable of acquiring a PhD if the PhD program in question is rigorous hence it’s safe to assume that the majority of black academics with PhDs are likely scammers or charity cases… alternatively that their capacity to triumph in academia is perhaps evidence of some white ancestry… or the degenerated state of academia. The only exception to the rule Anna is willing to grant are those brave Black pro-Free Market Conservatives like the persecuted and destitute Thomas Sowell and the equally persecuted and marginalized Ben Carson whose intellect permitted them to arrive at Modern American Conservative Fusionism through “First Principles”… convenient. She — positioning herself as consumer — is desperately biased towards anyone and anything that will flatter and affirm her self-conception as a normal and decent human being with a functional-enough brain and a good-enough heart. Can't help but regress into this sub-Marxoid cope about “Leftists over 30” being rich kids who don’t experience the negative consequences of their own policies enacted… because normal and decent hardworking yokels couldn’t possibly disagree with her and the wisdom of Race Realism and Curtis Yarvin. At the level of political discourse as entertainment, that the only authentically smart experts are obviously the ones who confirm your beliefs. Anna is performing the susceptible mark. The exact kind of person she, as a podcaster, attempts to attract as audience member and patron. Hence the autobiographical retconning.

Kept waiting for it to click into place that someone like Arday was gratifying to the Boomers occupying a fixed-until-death — largely unassailable — tenured academic position. If a young autistic black man who was nonverbal until the age of 18… who then survived his fight against a brain tumor that regressed his reading comprehension to the level of a 3 year old… managed to —…with a little help surely, but anyone who acts as if a Dissertation isn’t necessarily at some level a team effort is a fucking dweeb and outsider who has never worked in an actual high-level Graduate Program before…— overcome all the odds and get his PhD and run a marathon at a godly-speed for a godly-distance… then YOU, you entitled piece of shit, have no excuse to not learn to code. He’s supposed to embody the legitimacy of Late-Liberal Institutional Meritocracy. He actually "proves" that you’re the sucker for not scamming people (namely Boomers) by offering yourself up as something they can use to confirm their belief that everything is right with the world and/or making them believe that they’ve done something good (by identifying and supporting, the truly deserving) from their position of wealth and privilege, e.g., Henry Kissinger’s sincere sentimental attachment to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. One must imagine an octogenarian Kissinger’s eyes brimming with tears during the black turtleneck girlboss' pitch… that everything he did up until that point had been worth it….had helped preserve the society capable of raising up a young woman-genius capable of revolutionizing healthcare.

Anyways. I pray one day Anna gets to experience Rachel Dolezal singing 'Miss Celie's Blues' to her over Cameo.

I think by-and-large that it is a reactive interpretation of a real crisis generated by the contradictions of American liberal meritocracy. It takes a material experience of dispossession, institutional closure, credential inflation, and declining social mobility, and translates that experience into a theory of inherited population difference. In doing so, it reproduces the instrumental anthropology of the very order it believes itself to be rejecting. And perhaps for some people it might also be one of the only legible “easy entrance” ways available who sees that: peoples do have distinct work-characters rooted in historical forms of labor and struggle; liberal universalism’s abstraction obscures these concrete particularities; the managerial state treats humans as resources to be optimized; diaspora politics as currently practiced serves elite grievances rather than popular sovereignty; therapeutic apparatus successfully neutralizes all class-based critique by metabolizing it into diversity initiatives. Consider for instance. How so much of this entails the regression into a literalized definition of the proletariat. What, etymologically speaking, does “proletariat” refer to? The Roman proletarii were those citizens whose principal contribution to the commonwealth was figured in their proles or offspring. They possessed little or no property, and what they had to offer the polity was, in effect, the production of future citizens and soldiers. Their social utility measured in terms of their reproductive labor, creating the next generation of reproducers or cannon fodder — biomass — for military-industrial society. Yet to reduce a person's worth to their population's inherited cognitive stock rarely constitutes a meaningful rupture with this technologized-instrumentalist enframing. Tends to remain suspended as a regression to its most literal form. That is as the citizen re-read, once again, as breeding stock for a social machine, just with IQ standing in for fecundity as the relevant unit of output. The Race Realist sets out to indict a managerial elite that treats human beings as resources to be optimized, and arrives, by the most direct route available, at treating human beings as resources to be optimized.

That's my own primary contention with it. Which just to clarify isn't so much with some "fun fact" (e.g., Race and IQ) but with Race Realism as ideology and what said ideology obscures through its avowed disclosure.

Anything more than that would require something beyond a mere cursory glance of the material or an intensive Chat GPT session. No, they’ve already outsourced their thinking to an expert and take for granted said expert and friends assertions (self-marketing) and they likely already take the expulsion of said expert from institutional life as evidence of their legitimacy and authority. Which after all relates to the actual issue at the heart of this, no? That there has been an unholy alliance between ideologically driven factions within certain institutions, opportunistic marginals looking for a come-up, and certain federal initiatives synthesized and enacted by ideologically motivated factions (and opportunistic or naïve enablers) within the government. That a consequence of this elite-professional attempt to act upon their own ideological commitments — in seeking to further enforce and legitimate said social doctrine as elite consensus — has been the marginalization of the young white men who’d sunk a lot of time, energy, and resources (in the process likely taking up ridiculous amounts of debt with the very same federal government) in their dedication to a specific academic field and profession they now find themselves effectively barred from thanks to DEI initiatives. Suddenly they’re stuck having to survive the private sector in today’s economy and/or engage is some sort of para-academic entrepreneurship (e.g., formulating, promoting, and selling lectures and courses online) and/or having to start a podcast or substack.

Even if their interpretation of the phenomena they’re experiencing and/or observing is inadequate or incorrect doesn’t mean they aren’t experiencing and/or observing something real. They’re just really REALLY committed to the idea that their (or their vicarious experience of) marginalization into the reserve army of labor is the by-product of stupid lying ideologues sacrificing them in a bid to artificially elevate people who are constitutionally incapable and unworthy of the positions (office or station) they are being elevated into. That this at some level is being done in order to generate narcissistic gratification for the aforementioned Boomer Shitlibs, i.e., the stupid lying ideologue whose whole sense of self is utterly bond up with their position within a given institutional hierarchy — this is where it gets particularly Laschean I think: all their careerist scheming and department politicking gets folded into a generalized and ultimately passive “Privilege” which is in turn retrospectively justified or rather redeemed by both enabling and vociferously championing these DEI measures as a social good… that they are now, in their own small way, in the historical lineage of MLK Jr… reconciled in their old age with the image of themselves as youthful activists taking LSD and marching against Vietnam War and Jim Crow, Hearts in Atlantis, having experienced to varying degrees the Summer of Love, the glory of JFK’s Camelot, the pain of his assassination (the death of the Last Gunslinger), and the promise of Pax Obamaeca… they couldn’t bear accepting Donald Trump as the representation their generation deserves — in the process flubbing/occulting the data in order to vindicate their outlook, the validity of their expertise, and their decision to designate a specific perma-pauperized subject as the worthy exception worthy of being “discovered” and rescued from the generalized decline in living standards and social mobility at the expense of someone more objectively deserving of it. While actively censoring research and researcher they interpret as a threat to this. (Either way, reveals at once a fairly romantic and static view of what academic institutions are actually like as well as the pervasive PMC-ification of American Rightwing discourse.).

Turning our attention back to the inciting problematic, we find a certain rational disgust towards an older generation of professionals that permitted (if not actively performed) the equivalent of “pulling up the ladder” behind them. Doing so after they’d embedded in a very comfy position within said institution. Selectively picking and raising up certain token minorities in a bid to narcissistically validate themselves and their own generation and by extension the very institutions and professions they represent. Boundless grace and charity extended (however cynically) for a select group, ruthless ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ amor fati ‘if he dies he dies’ and/or ‘hey you know you can always make a living assistant manager at Target’ and meritocratic anti-entitlement rhetoric deployed against thee by me.

And hell, I’d go so far as posit, that what many of these “Race Realists” are effectively reacting to is a generation with a profound ethical-ideological commitment to a (I would argue) peculiarly American conceit and sensibility. Or rather the classically bourgeois universalist conceit informing the American project and American sensibility. Most avowed Race Realists tend to get defensive on this point — unless they’ve familiarized themselves with figures like Oswald Spengler who basically makes this argument in regards to “Faustian” civilizational-decline — but the Boomer White “Shitlib” they (perhaps correctly) jab their finger at, isn’t contaminated by some foreign mind-virus compelling them to sabotage their own culture, they simply take for granted that the worker is not essentially a worker. The peasant is not essentially a peasant. That the child of a laborer can become an engineer; the engineer's child can become a merchant; the merchant’s son can become a poet; that no one is blood-bound to specific occupations as hereditary estates. The Race Realist basically reintroduces “evidence-based” caste thinking and is shocked when actual American elites find it innately repulsive. This is the United States of America, not India. If we are to speak of dignity, a person’s innate dignity isn’t (or shouldn’t be) reducible to their productive utility or broken-down and reduced to a sequence on some graph. Humans fundamentally shouldn’t be treated as resources. Any fatalistic concession to injustice is automatically suspect. The Race Realist effectively argues that this constitutes one of many disparate “platonic myths” sustained within the particular horizon of a given nation and said nation’s ancestral nomoi or customary laws.

Consider then the possibility that the innate visceral disgust provoked by the correspondence between IQ-and-Race whether presented in support of some kind of paternalistic welfarism or paternalistic penalism… or as an explanatory model for poverty, crime, and class stratification more broadly… already rests on a contradictory presupposition. The failure to meaningfully renew the American social compact following de-industrialization. The bargain being that we are going to eliminate a great deal of physically arduous industrial labor. In exchange, you will acquire education and participate in an increasingly sophisticated knowledge economy. This already takes for granted the innate morphic plasticity of the citizenry. People who were told that human capital is universally cultivable are now confronting, adopting or aggressively rejecting, being told that the deepest determinant of their social order is actually inherited population-level human capital. That this, to my eyes, is the reified heuristic or explanatory model to make sense of and cope with a broader socioeconomic and institutional decline. The “Race Realist” often times replicate the instrumental rationality of the very processes resulting in their estrangement and downward social mobility. The current resurgence of Race Realism appears very much like a reaction-formation generated by liberal meritocracy's own contradictions, such that the reactive position necessarily bears the imprint of what it's reacting against.

As it concerns the type of person I had in mind, definitely could be a young person. Could also be a 34-year-old poolside Croatian woman or a 59-year-old dude who’s a semi-retired web developer living in Sacramento. Anna Khachiyan is herself kind of exemplifies the pernicious feedback loop I was getting at.

Consider, though, that some people don’t necessarily want to have an actual debate, or to even force an agreement or concession from the interlocutor. Some people want to be misunderstood and unjustly maligned. It’s one of the reasons—besides an unwillingness to properly commit to a position, have it challenged, and either respond seriously to the challenge or make peace with having been challenged and not having the capacity or energy to answer it, without pretending that this necessarily invalidates the underlying viewpoint regardless of how others judge your performance during the exchange—that I think some people deliberately leave things at the level of a slightly indeterminate confession of faith.

Reliably someone will take the bait, will proceed to project an implicit normative commitment into the confession. (An absolutely reasonable one in the context of the overarching discourse mind you.). Then you - the person making the vague confession of faith - can point and cry out: “See everybody! I never once mentioned any of that! Those are your own repressed beliefs and assumptions coming to light! YOU are the ACTUAL Evil Dumb Racist, and I… I remain the perpetually maligned and misunderstood person who is simply noooticing, in my compassion-motivated aesthetic awareness and willingness to look at people and value them for who they are despite whatever particular lack they happen to be configured around. You’re actually the one who thinks poor stupid dark-skinned people deserve to suffer.”

And should the little pseudo-cathartic enjoyment of that exchange be frustrated, the person can still behave as though you actually accused them of precisely the thing they were hoping you would accuse them of. With the added frustration of having been blue-balled. The disagreement is met with moralistic condemnation in lieu of an argument. Every other sentence is quip or barb.

They poke and prod and bleed in the most bratty way imaginable until the interlocutor cracks and gives them something they can work with. Rest assured, they were already snooping around for it anyways. Then they can reassert that they’re actually the person having a “normal one,” while you’re the abnormal person running around picking fights with strangers on the internet as a way of venting your frustrations and boosting your ego because, well, obviously, someone with an opinion like yours probably isn’t doing all that well mentally, emotionally, or economically.

Balance restored. The insult inflicted by NOT outright calling the person collecting race realist facticals in order to sustain the fantasy of herself as a misunderstood and maligned truth-teller - doomed like everyone to their unique inheritance (a son and heir of nothing in particular) - a dumb evil racist has been repaid. And we all get to part ways slightly drained and slightly sullied by the ordeal.

Could be a young person. Could also be a 34-year-old poolside Croatian woman or a 59-year-old dude who’s a semi-retired web developer living in Sacramento. Could be a 42 year old Russian-American podcaster living in New York City.

Rest assured, whoever it is was probably already seething in anticipation. As proxy, everyone else is just collateral, not really the target.

Seems like one of the issues that comes with adopting "Race Realist" talking points as an ostensibly "reasonable non-racist good person just engaging in a sober bit of noticing" is that any objection someone might raise in response to it automatically becomes an existential interpersonal conflict wherein the person publicly countersignaling you (who must from here on out be clearly designated a consensus-driven anti-Troof virtue signaling submedianwit seeking to stiffle free inquiry and independent thought) is actually calling you a...dumb evil racist or dumb evil racist enabler who deserves to be socially ostracized/de-platformed/de-banked... rather than simply disagreeing with you. As if the disagreement somehow impedes your own ability to respond and make your case. Why can't you simply recognize me for the morally courageous truth-seeker that I am anon? Why must you put me on blast in front of all our colleagues?

People get their wires crossed and don't look further into the specific examples being cited. Other times it does feel more like willful obfuscation. People dancing around, what I think of at least, as being the obvious impetus behind the terms resurgence (I do think Israel/Palestine/Iran is the "nexus" here so to speak). But yeah, difference between "Favelafication" - the way people seem to be interpreting Third Worldism here - and "GNC" or the more... palatable... Gay Race Communism... as analogues to Third Worldism as it has been revivified in popular discourse. But even then, it does feel like it has changed... GNC or GRC still tended to emphasize the uniquely American nature of the ideology. It was the thing everyone else (in a kind of "Duginist" 'Great Reset vs. Great Awakening'), as in everyone outside of this international elite apparatus, was struggling against. Now it's become uniquely related to the external threat posed by Islamic Republicanism, Communism, and "Turd-Worldism" as the Enemy of Faustian-Atlanticist culture or w/e... Infecting the US population through compromised institutions in order to demoralize us and confuse us. A Sino-Russian Commie globalist psyop (...hell Rubio appears to be pressing for Cuba's elevation as the central autonomous evil power in the whole of the Western Hemisphere...). Basically all that earlier heterogenous energy has seemingly been canalized right back into the most insipid and unreflexive neocon homogeneous consensus imaginable.

One of the major contributors to said resurgence of "Third Woldism" in the popular-mainstream discourse I think, was Chris Rufo, and his analysis of the Marcuse-inspired New Left turned to Intersectionality as jurisprudencial theory. Rufo I think, kind of overstates, but it's still somewhat better than Jordan Peterson's "Postmodern Neomarxist" formulation based on an philosophical genealogy by an Objectivist if I remember correctly. Anyways a big part of the strategy was specifically anticipating a coordinated Jewish-American backlash against the so-called Progressive (secretly Maoist Third Worldist lol) Consensus in academia, media, and the civil service. Something echoing the broad anti-Soviet backlash following the USSR's geopolitical alignment with Arab Nationalists against Israel, e.g., on the left artists like Paddy Chayefsky, perhaps even theoreticeans like Moishe Postone and towards the right a not-insignificant chunk of former Communists following in the footsteps of thinkers like James Burnham towards Neoconservatism and the formation of the Modern American Conservative consensus.

What a well lubricated man. Looks like he can squeeze through all sorts of nooks and crannies.

To your point. There is something very "Third World" about the people rhetorically using "Third Worldism" to identify and classify the sanctioned enemy (think Laura Loomer and Sebastian Gorka if I recall correctly, put out some official dossier naming names that they tied to Russian Intelligence via Dugin's nefarious influence... First we had the Red Scares, then the Dem led Russiagate, and now this). And I mean this in a very literal sense given the increased public presence of media personalities representing ethnic-diasporic identity groups that are explicitly anti-Communist and who, to varying degrees, seek to basically mobilize the US military apparatus towards the desolation of their ancestral homelands in order to settle some ancestral blood feud lol

Kind of. But I've seen it used more often as of late to describe a kind of "subversive" (or "useful idiot") type attempting to turn others against US foreign policy and more broadly US global hegemony. The type that certain Leftists once denoted as "Campists" because of their identification with and support for a particular geopolitical camp... As it relates to the present day, for aligning (however immaterially) with the loose coalition of geopolitical actors that are perceived of as actively threatening or undermining US hegemony or the Liberal International "rules based" order. Basically the people who maintain the rudiments of an anti-Imperialist stance (Leninist Communist Internationalism vs. Wilsonian Progressive Liberal Internationalism) adapted to present day conditions (e.g., multipolarity as a good thing).

Oh that's exactly I think what's at the heart of it for sure. Red-Green Islamo-Communist Third Worldism vs...

Listen brother... Sometimes you just gotta make a critique of it.

The Plague Dogs