His name is Robert Paulson.
None of us are talking about the most worrisome shit on the table.
The only thing more absurd than designating the ethereal entity antifa as a domestic terrorist network would be if Uncle Joe had declared war on the manosphere last summer. However. If this order becomes law be aware. If the political stance and netherworld entity known as antifa is designated as an organized terror group the downstream effects are simple.
Any person or group protesting or criticizing Trump can and will be tagged as antifa and just as with the mexican cartels, the venezuelan gangs, pirate cigarette boats blown up in the gulf, al quada hamas or isis, tagging anyone a terrorist opens the door first to draconian shit like the freezing of bank accounts, blacklisting on the job market and no fly lists but also drone strikes, rendition, waterboarding and all the zero dark thirty shit you or Stephen Miller can dream up.
The maga version of the final solution.
Nosferatu channeled a nazi eulogy last week in front of thousands under the sun. They are building camps because they mean to fill them.
The only would be monarch coming for the enemies within is Trump.
The war on antifa could rage for decades, these could be our irish Troubles, with hot spots of chaos and ICE checkpoints at the state line uneasy crossings mass shootings suicide bombers drone strikes at the border daily unrest the urban underbelly getting ever more dodgy as fuck.
The war on drugs but on us.
If you’re a writer immune to constantly running worst case simulations in the back far side corner of your story shop you have powers that mystify me but come one come all.
I forget, did that war ever end. Did drugs ever surrender or fuck off or just bleed to death in a ravine or what.
Meanwhile maga proud boy hard christian white dudes with good hearts gone sour are stomping the streets in various American cities menacing onlookers while chanting “his name was Charlie Kirk" in the same cadence as the Robert Paulson death scene from Fight Club, but with zero understanding of what Palahniuk and Fincher were saying.
These knucklehead chads and todds are real. They love their moms or hate their dads whatever they had and still have a good heart but they are just as dangerous and dumb as you imagine they tend to the sort of guys you might see driving either a cybertruck or any 100K made in America big boy truck with a Trump flag or his orange head on Stallone’s first blood torso or infidel mural on the back. None of them look as if they have missed any meals lately. They look like they never had to sleep in a car. They look like they have jobs. They look like they will ask what kind of american are you.
They look like white guys who punch a clock, who might have voted for Bernie if we had only zigged instead of zagged.
Now they look like zealots, like ICE agents on their day off.
Like they’re sore they missed the Jan six angry white man event at the capitol and they want to make up for it and the first shall be last. They look like they walk around pissed off all the time because yeah dude I know it’s hard being a white man these days ain’t it you were promised the world some of us got proper fucked some of our sons especially so.
If you pull back and look at the one first thing all these shooters these suicide kids have in common, they are white 22 year old white guys. This one is the kid of gen X white mormons. I knew a family of gen X mormons in the ‘90s. They were lovely. They had mad urban and outdoor survival skills like every ‘90s teen and 20something parent in the mountains. Their kids are clever. Their kids are dangerous if they want to be. They are survivors.
Likewise the sons of the ‘90s are either the paramedic at your door or the cool quiet young man gone sideways about to do some crime. Those boys grew up wild. They learned to be savage. They know their way around weapons. There are millions of them.
Never forget the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan lasted two decades. How many vets white black brown some kind of asian native tribe male and female gay and straight cycled through tours for twenty years of that hurt locker world. How did we take care of them when they got back.
Those are the people we need to be healthy.
They know shit we need to know. Go read the Iceman. The Talentless Writer is a dead cool assassin cool dad in my little pony hunger games daughter world trust me George knows shit.
For eleven years there on psych ward were never not a dozen or more dozens of vets on every psych floor often just waiting for a bed to open up at the VA so yeah killed in action low compared to Vietnam but hundreds of thousands some kind of fucked up.
If they are funneling immigrant detainees through military bases on American soil that is asking our guys and girls our soldiers to run camps.
If this isn’t a bridge too far, what is. This is so far beyond the pale, the pale has lost all meaning.
If we believe in anything surely it’s never again. Then again the prison complex is big business and ICE is becoming a private army.
It never fails to irk how the sphere of man has mangled the meaning of the red pill just as they they have warped the message of that Fight Club scene beyond recognition.
close your eyes
There are thousands of white boys just like the Utah kid on psych wards and drug rehabs in homeless shelters and falling through cracks to live outside skating the fentanyl meth freak dungeon underworld. The puritanical trad wife book of leviticus shit is how we bring on the handmaid’s tale.
wake the fuck up, we did this to ourselves.
To refresh.
The members of project mayhem had no names, the same as entry level cult members everywhere. After a mayhem action involving the destruction of a piece of obnoxious corporate art in the form of a giant gold testicle and the subsequent crushing of a generic Starbucks with said golden ball, Bob was shot in the head by a cop or security guard. The other members haul his body back to the house across from the paper mill and immediately begin discussing how best to dispose of his body.
The body, bury it in the garden.
The narrator known only as Jack or Rupert or Mordecai but also Tyler tells them the body has a name.
Robert Paulson. He was a father, breast cancer survivor estranged from his ex-wife and grown kids and a beast in the Lou’s basement. The mayhem worker bees are baffled by this revelation, then adopt a chant.
In death, a member of project mayhem HAS a name.
His name was Robert Paulson.
They chant it over and over again because they don’t get it.
They have no self awareness and zero grasp of the big picture or the wider world, the same as the angry white guys chanting his name was Charlie Kirk. The death of Bob scene was about the narrator realizing what sort of monster he and Tyler had created. That he had been sleepwalking and just woke to find himself the leader of a homegrown anarchist terror cell, that his fight club minions were becoming the very same mindless sheep he despised in the Ikea world around him, and that he desperately needed to wake them up to the notion that the nameless space monkey next to you is a person with a heart and backstory and their own pain possibly a soul or if nothing else an inner world that surely at least one person loved or gave a fuck about, also known as goddamn empathy.
The american mass shooter is always a damaged young white man. His ideology is irrelevant.
The damage is already done.
If you were the kid of gen X parents the same age as Kurt Cobain and Tupac and Sinead O’Connor, if your childhood or teen years were the real world version of Trainspotting or Dazed and Confused do the math, that’s what their kids are like.
The moms of the middle ‘90s were like the mom’s of the ‘70s, they were survivors. Nothing was easy, there was no cloud. Everything sucked. Keep in mind the gen X girls, the moms and daughters the little sisters on the cusp of the halcyon these were the riot girl days Kim Gordon to Bernadette Mayer to PJ Harvey and Tank Girl and Mulholland Drive, the daughters of Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion were Fiona Apple and and Diablo Cody and Liz Phair from pixie hollow to sailor moon to fuck and run to Kim Deal to Sara Connor and Trinity.
I mean, have you read hello God it’s me Margaret. Have you seen Leon the Professional. The daughters of these women are Juno and the little girl Newt from aliens. They are Alabama Worley and Marla Singer. They are Maya from zero dark thirty.
They are Winona Ryder in Heathers.
If you find them in the real world put them in charge trust me.
There’s a reason every southern family has a wise old granny at the top of the tree house.
The matriarchy is real.
The emo tomboys, the skater chicks, the goth bookworms and the cool Nancy Drews, get out of their way and let them cook.
The best real world job situations I ever experienced were under women managing editors and editors in chief, women charge nurses and dons, sexy cool fearless dynamic mama bears who chose their staff wisely, if there was a patriarchal figure onsite he was steady and true on her right hand, watching her back, these women always had male staff straight and gay who would walk through a wall for them and cool girl staff likewise all over the spectrum who wanted to be them.
This is America. The trail of tears is a flat circle is the no country for old men. If we believe in anything it’s never again.
I find myself wondering if all the endless misread never read back and forth about the definition of fascism and who may rightly be called a nazi is by design.
The manosphere is everywhere.
The honeycomb of the infinite chans, the darkside of twitter, the rancid corners of reddit and discord are legend for being filthy with the nazi curious, the neonazis, the groypers as well as the furry nihilist hell divers and really who the fuck knows what goes on in the dark corners of our cloud, red blue purple straight queer top bottom who gives a fuck, rule 34 people, everything you imagine and worse.
Go read Katherine Dee, she lays it all out on her stack.
The thing about 22 yr old angry confused white dudes with nothing to live for, no hope of buying a house, never finished college because fuck what’s the point of taking on a half million in school loan debt at predatory interest rates designed to keep compounding till you die plus all the girls make better grades and get the better jobs their CV is always a step ahead.
I know dude. Put those stonecold chicks in charge, you will know them on sight.
But for thousands of these dudes, they are invisible. The incels are a thing. They were always a thing but they didn’t network before the cloud. They live and multiply in the dark corners of the net.
The conservative estimate is one percent of the population is a psychopath. Three point three or nudge the math, multiply such estimates by three to be safe and we have nine point six million psychopaths walking among us haunting the highways and the internet.
The same conservative studies show ten percent of CEOs are clinical sociopaths.
As for loners like this Utah kid.
If he proves not to be mk-ultra or russian sleeper agent but just the kid of gen X mormons who grew up in the mountains or in a trailerpark in the hood or at a boarding school in maine any white kid with money and guns motorcycles on and off their meds gangster punk spy movies red dawn what the fuck did we expect this is the final countdown we designed.
A lot of them are shepherds just lost not criminals. Artists and survivors.
They need a mission.
They need healthcare for fuck sake.
These white dudes left and right if the ones who thrive learn the same backwood and street survival skills their dad or uncle or grandad did and the best of them if they find a girl or boy to love them they evolve they will save you but there are thousands of others who fall into a portal of hatred in high school because the girls all want to fuck older dudes liberal artist dudes gay dudes dudes with money dudes who think girls should vote and control their own reproductive cycles and basically anybody who is not you.
Meanwhile we have Andrew Tate telling these sad doomer dudes to stop being pussies, to be cunts, to fuck other men over, to be rapists, to be grifters and liars and machiavellian motherfuckers. Because why not that caveman shit runs deep. I taught my son to be Tom Sawyer to be Billy the Kid to run a wolf pack and my daughter to be a pirate Joan of Arc.
Bill Burr told us this would happen. Daddy keeps cash in the walls.
Chris Rock told us this would happen. If you see men in sweatpants smoking cigarettes on a Tuesday.
Do you not remember the white guy congressman in a wheelchair from North Carolina telling a crowd of white nationalist christian trad wife types to raise their boys to be monsters?
And yeah if you’re paying attention the various proud oath keeper chads talk a lot of shit about the perils of race mixing. I tune out Nick Fuentes but he is well.. he is a nazi self loathing christian but I’d trust him over Stephen Miller.
The lonely white dude mass shooter is our suicide bomber.
The only difference is they act alone and they have no coherent or consistent narrative.
The American mass killers tend to be most often right leaning libertarian and racist, ranging from Timothy McVeigh to Dylan Routh, the El Paso walmart shooter who posted his race war manifesto on one of the chans to the supermarket shooters targeting black people in Boulder and Buffalo.
But they also may also be emo anarchist weird lefty loners or incels grappling with being on the spectrum of straight sadsack no game on tinder or being queer in a region or corner of society like say maga mormons or latter day saints, the big tent evangelical wherever, anywhere the christians talk more about the book of Leviticus and stoning gays to death than about the good Samaritan or the money changers in the temple.
They might just be clones of the nihilist trenchcoat Columbine boys or the I am Bane shooter at a Dark Knight matinee in the Colorado suburbs, the generic lonely doomer white dudes who never get lucky in high school.
They are all of the above and they are multiplying.
if you have a scowling maga chad in your life and he starts with the bizarro world rendition of “in death the members of project mayhem have a name and his name is charlie” bit tell them to take the blue pill google words like satire and nihilism and simulacra and mainly they need to watch Fight Club again because they didn’t fucking get it any better than they got the Matrix.
We created the archetypes. We wrote the simulation and we fed all of our nightmares and dystopian dream worlds into the machines. We told the cloud how to consume us surely we can ghost the machine yet.
We’re still writing this flat circle, we dreamed up this mad escherworld and we can find find our way out.
Total philosophical disembowelment of the manosphere coming soon.
The below was originally part of a sins of the father essay farther down the involuntary paired with anecdotes about being a somewhat chaotic broken father with a soul to my son in the late ‘90s early aughts but the words and messages most of them apply to daughters too.
I’m afraid the first step is you must break your son or daughter’s heart with a viewing of Bambi at age seven.
If you have a manchild flying your DNA profile, representing your name or sleeping under your roof, raise him right. Tell the boy you love him. Teach him to say yes m'am and no sir. To say bless you when somebody sneezes. To look both ways. To give up his seat on the bus. To clean up after himself. To clean a bathroom. To respect the dead.
To sit with his back to a wall in strange places. To keep his nut on a swivel. To be brave. To admit when he's wrong. To not back down when he's right. To know when he’s outnumbered. To always carry a knife.
Teach him to build a fire. To drive a stick. To wear boots he can run fight and climb a fence in. To change a flat. To keep an umbrella and jumper cables in his car. To be a good samaritan.
Teach him to read a room. To read a tell. Teach him how to bluff his way out of a hole. Teach him to think like a poet and scientist at once. To carry a pen and notebook. To measure twice.
Teach him to use a needle and thread. Teach him how long to boil an egg. Teach him to change a diaper. Teach him how to talk to girls. Teach him to seal a wound with super glue.
Teach him to share the crayons. To love books. To form a hypothesis and test it. Teach him to do no harm. Teach him to make a proper grilled cheese. Teach him to slip a punch.
Teach him how to be with dogs. How to talk to them. How to talk to the other humans. To form a pack wherever he goes. Teach him to always have his brother’s back. To keep another shepherd on his wing.
Teach the boy to play chess. To move the pieces in his mind before he touches the board. Teach him dinner table etiquette. Teach him to leave no trace in the wilderness.
Tell him about the times you got lucky when you ought to have got killed. Tell him all the dumbest shit you can remember. The crazy bad ideas the dumb shit not to do. The how to be a man and don’t be an asshole mind your business watch your back day to day man shit.
All the things my father taught me and your dad or uncle grampy taught you and his dad taught him and her on up the line.
Teach him the four agreements. To do unto others. To read the directions. To break rules when necessary and what the word necessary means.
Teach him to look folks in the eye. To respect his elders and forebears. Teach him to believe in something. To believe in self above all.
Teach him the rules of grammar and when to ignore them. Teach him the secret to jazz and poetry is the silence. The blank spaces. The notes you don’t play.
Teach him to be a shepherd. To give spare change to the homeless. To be wary of the money changers in the temple.
Teach him to never leave his hat on a bed.
Teach him to dig two graves if he seeks revenge. Teach him the serenity prayer. Teach him how sad stories and pain divided by the passage of time equal comedy. Teach him to hold the door.
Teach him to be an asshole when asshole need be.
To protect his little sister and trust his brother. To shake hands like he means it. To hit the cut off man. Teach him the triangle offense. The give and go. To walk a mile in the shoes of another. To not look back if he’s walking through the underworld.
Teach him not to drink alone.
Teach him to smell trouble on the wind. To know when to walk away and when to run like hell. To not swing first. To not give up his tray if he’s ever locked up. To not blink. To break his own heart. Teach him to be a gentleman. To be the bad man when he needs to keep the monster from the door. To not be the monster. Teach him to forgive himself.
Teach him the rule of threes. Teach him to stick up for the meek. To use a dictionary. Teach him to fish. To use a compass and read a map. To trust his gut. To walk on the sunny side.
Teach him to suffer a fool but whup a bully. To keep his hands up in a fight. To keep both hands on the wheel when talking to a cop. Teach him to treat every gun like it's loaded. Teach him to breathe and think before he says something stupid. Teach him to be a man.
Talk to the boy. Teach him to never forget mother's day.
peace.
to the phineas poe faithful my heart is with jack fell and jude evers on the velvet stack
I’d much rather be in there ghosting the yellow 24/7 but these are extraordinarily surreal and dangerous times and I can’t not write these chronicles of the collapse society and would much appreciate you hitting the share or restack button if you’re still with me.
much love from the velvet.
always peace.
If America was a story right now, you just wouldn't believe it. Superb, driving prose. The world is falling apart, and the loosest bolts are in the states.
Fuck man. I’ve got a one year old. That whole last stanza hit me fucking hard. 🤘