Pump the Hate Brakes

We are entering a dark and dangerous time

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It’s hard to ever be certain whether the online zeitgeist mirrors larger societal shifts.

We do a lot of self-reassurance these days. “Touch grass,” as the kids like to say. “Twitter is not real life.”

But as someone who has been on the internet for 33 years, I tend to put a lot of stock in the online hivemind. It is the closest thing to a collective consciousness that the human race has ever experienced, and the algorithmic riptides that move and shape the narrative-of-the-now — the so-called “Current Thing” — from day to day have real influence, even if they are derivative iterations of the thoughts and actions of a much more disconnected constellation of thinkers in meatspace.

The truth is, people who are online tend to be more dialed-in to current events than average — even if they are propagandistically misinformed. They also tend, in my experience, to be harbingers of societal change. When you see a brewing mass of sentiment around an issue, especially if it’s counterintuitive, I always expect a trend to break in that direction. It’s like looking at Polymarket betting odds for elections. There’s something real in these aggregated social dynamics that our political scientists can’t seem to accurately re-create in focus groups.

All of this is prelude to a thing I’ve been noticing, which is this: online discourse has taken something of a dark turn of late. On the Left, the unifying power of hatred towards goodness, decency, common sense, and responsibility remains a force to be reckoned with. But the Right is turning into a diaspora of warring factions, all talking at — not to — each other, all ready to die on their respective hills.

The seething anger over the delayed and redacted Epstein list, the insidious infiltration of the execrable Tate brothers into the dissident right, the no-holds-barred, scandal-weaponizing takedowns of personas non grata by blackpilled agents provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos (whom I have always had a soft spot for, despite his indiscretions), the money-grubbing Musk baby mama fiascos, the internal battles over policies fiscal, foreign, moral, and domestic…the new Republican party is stronger than any version we’ve seen in decades, and yet it is undeniably beset by chaos and dissent.

The overwhelming feeling I get these days when logging on to see what’s happening is one of anxiety, unease, and a decided turn towards darkness.

To fight a monstrous enemy, we have become monsters. To kill a leviathan of bloat and corruption that festered and swollen for too long, we have had to become hard-hearted charnel house cut-men. We cannot afford to feel empathy. We are staunching bleeds, excising tumors, and amputating septic limbs. And since our metaphor is politics, the real casualties are human beings. People who are being deported, people who have lost jobs, people who are being investigated for criminal activities in the discharge of their duties, and so on.

We can’t afford to feel, right now, because the awful business of battlefield triage is upon us, and not everyone can be saved.

But there is a real sense that even the people in America who care most about being perceived as moral have sacrificed such concerns on the altar of being “based.” The reason abusers and exploiters of teen girls and young women like the Tates are welcomed by new-right figures is because they supposedly speak truth to power, supplying a misogynistic backlash against the cancer that was feminism.

We are fighting pestilence with pestilence.

And the surge in antisemitism — which I reject wholeheartedly as an ideological attack movement that targets not ideas and ideologies but people and bloodlines — has given shape to a growing momentum towards scapegoating. We are not content to solve problems. We need overly simplistic answers for why they occurred in the first place. We don’t need nuance and distinction. We need people to blame.

I have enjoyed the new administration’s chemotherapeutic approach to kakistocratic metastasis, but there is a growing ugliness welling up beneath the righteous desire to burn and cull systems of politically-motivated oppression that could swing us much too far in the wrong direction if we are not careful.

Nearly a decade ago, I was warning people that if we did not address the root causes of so much discontent, the backlash could be worse than the problems it sought to remedy.

I am not at all certain this is not what we are witnessing in nascent form.

This is a hopeful and optimistic time, but it’s also an incredibly precarious and dangerous one. We would all do well to perform regular gut checks to ensure we have not unintentionally switched teams as a downstream consequence of our resignation to Machiavellian solutions to intractable problems.

When men have nothing left to lose, that’s when they become truly dangerous.

We are on the precipice of an abyss, and we have lost any interest in treading lightly.

I am not here to tell you what to make of it. This is not a criticism of anything in particular. I can only say that my sense of discomfort is growing, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Beware of unseen horrors. When all the poison in the mud hatches out, where will we be? Who will we have become?