Sludgestack

Awaking into the New World’s Dawn

One of my recent pieces, “The Mudsill Theory Revisited,” proved to be more controversial than I’d anticipated. Some people doubted that my in-depth analysis of a dysfunctional relative and the wider phenomenon of internet degeneracy could have applications germane to a rightist critique of modern life. It’s a fair assumption, but one I can readily refute. Case in point- sludge.

As noted in my essay, infamous lolcow Cyraxx is fond of screaming profanity-and-racial-slur-laced tirades directed at an audience of half-dozens, and generally prefers to do so in the very late hours of the night, when his grandmother/mother (yes) and her boyfriend are trying to sleep. The elderly pair have frequently expressed their displeasure at this to Cyraxx, but to no avail. Lately, however, commenters on the Raxxverse have noticed that Cyraxx seems far more listless, incoherent, and, well, sedate in his livestreams, and the consensus theory seems to be that he’s being freestyle medicated by his caretakers in such a way as to render him, if not wholly docile, at least quieter. Thus the phrase, “sludged-out,” to refer to his credulous consumption of chemical concoctions presumably given to him by Sally and Ed. It’s probably something like this:

But sludge is more than just a cocktail of high fructose corn syrup and opiates. It’s a metaphor. It’s what you turn to when the voices in the basement get too loud or demanding. You’re just trying to enjoy your well-earned rest from a day of scrapping and collecting state benefits, but losers won’t shut up and let you enjoy yourselves. If you think of the scrappers as the neoliberals stripping the copper out of the American industrial base and the people collecting welfare as the great deep state blob, well, that makes America Cyraxx as far as they’re concerned. And as we’ve seen, that’s not something you want to be.

He’s earned approximately $5.85 in music sales in thirteen years.

Sludge in the sense I mean is less the drink of choice for Gully Dwarves and more an abstraction wrought of words and images mainlined into the brainstreams of the masses. It’s a construct of propaganda, the combined product of media, government, and the education system generally. That’s not to say it’s wholly an idea; sludge for the mind works best in combination with sludge for the body. People who eat and drink crap tend to think like crap about crap. It’s a package deal really, a whole-of-society approach.

This American gets it.

Sludge makes you sleepy, content, and placid, if a bit disoriented. It’s designed to halt critical faculties and confirm you in your preferred state of believing the world is working like you think it ought. This isn’t to say that it makes you think things are going well necessarily, just that they’re going as expected. Sludge is compatible with unwanted political outcomes or chronic discontent. The key desired result is unfocused docility. You can be a bit mad so long as what you’re mad about is what you expect to be mad about and you come to the conclusion that nothing can be done. People can spend lifetimes like that.

Sludge has been a part of American life since the dawn of mass media but has evolved along particular lines. There was once a kind of bipartisan sludge, a generic-flavored sweet substance that went down smooth like the old Coca-Cola that was made with sugar. It was served on all three networks, the newspapers- heck, the neighbors would give you their personal version at block parties. Then the government decided it didn’t much care for the people it ruled over, and came up with a “Civil Rights” regime to replace them with more obliging clients. The people who liked this development were called liberals; those who didn’t became known as conservatives. Each would get their own brand of sludge.

Sometimes they came packaged together.

The liberals practically bathed in theirs, a mixture of smugness, condescension, and narcissism. They were the vanguard of history, righting the wrongs of the past through a commitment to justice, shutting down their benighted (and downmarket) rivals. When you hear someone using phrases like “the right side of history,” or “that’s not who we are,” you are listening to a sludged-out boomer, or someone trying to appeal to them. And yes, I mean Barack Obama, more on him in a minute.

Conservative sludge was the main legacy of the Reagan Administration. Here’s some cowboys and flags and soldiers and a cross. Don’t worry everybody; we’ve got this. Just go to sleep. If you wake up and all the factories in your town are gone and none of your neighbors speak English, take another swig and vote for us harder. It’s what Rambo would want.

This Canadian gets it.

But the respective brands would not fare equally well. People forget that Coke’s big rival was once Moxie; Pepsi was a relative latecomer. Sometimes people just won’t drink your sugarwater anymore, especially when they notice it’s rendering them toothless. The last great iteration of conservative sludge was the Bush Lite variety of the 2000s. It had pretensions to Latin flavor, but was manufactured exclusively in New England, and it didn’t fare nearly as well overseas as advertisers predicted. By 2016 it had lost nearly all of its market share, though it still had its fans among elite consumers.

It’s actually not bad. Order yours today.

Liberal sludge, on the other hand, was just hitting its stride. Say what you will about them, but unlike conservatives, liberals hate novelty and stick to what they know and love- money, self-righteousness, and hedonism. Bill Clinton’s brew was just what the boomer ascendency ordered, and by the time the grandkids could vote, you could even get it chocolate-flavored. And yes, I mean Barack Obama, again.

Tablet Magazine recently published an excellent long-form essay about how Barack Obama and David Axelrod essentially created a whole new system of sludge production, building on the remains of the dead traditional media. It was like two buddies buying an old brewery in a decaying Midwestern city and turning into into a trendy gastropub serving their own microbrew, except all the employees were intelligence agents and if you gave their spot a bad review on social media you got censored, fired, and audited. But you couldn’t say it wasn’t popular with the cool kids.

Overdose- many such cases

Then something unexpected happened. Things were going great for Obama’s DEIPA. All the conservatives had to compete with it was New Bush, which wasn’t really testing well despite (or perhaps because of) the name recognition. The thing about sludge is that it works best when you’re not really thinking about what you’re drinking, and that stuff was guac-flavored. It seemed to the marketing team at Liberal HQ that they could afford to be bold, and they offered up a new variety of sludge, this one for the ladies. But while the slogan for Virginia Slims might be appealing, no one really wants to chug a beverage that tastes like someone extinguished one in it. And yes, I’m talking about Hillary Clinton.

I’m just kidding. I, like America, love this sweet, grandmotherly, cookie-baking woman and have no need to be visited by any officials in any capacity. Also, I’m happy with my life and not depressed at all.

But who cares? I mean, what are people going to do, stop chugging the sludge slopped out by their moral and intellectual betters and actually take stock of their situation in a sober and earnest way? Are they actually going to vote for a wholesale repudiation of the class that had been serving them soporifics for decades? Are they going to put down the jug of liquid stupidity and take a chance on something radical? When they could vote for John Kaisich? Yeah right…

The internet is a network of sludgepipes, but in its paradoxical way it offers the means of escape from it as well, like a bar that hosts AA meetings in the basement. The most poisonous environment possible held out the possibility of detox to those willing to embrace agency and commitment. You can learn on social media; you can network. And a critical mass of people who’d had enough of being sludged-out went cold turkey, then straight-edge.

But in fairness, 2016 wasn’t quite the watershed it might have seemed. Just like Coca-Cola panicked when they found out people preferred Pepsi in taste tests but quickly realized most people will just drink whatever’s in front of them if it doesn’t taste like burnt tar, the liberal establishment decided that Trump was an aberration, and they set it work sludging-up (or perhaps sludging-down?) their consumer base for the inevitable fall of the man who seemed to embody the solid state of Tang. This sludge took on notes of caviar and cabbage as Russia was soaked into the lizard brains of CNN viewers. But since both they and MSNBC get viewership numbers somewhat less than a typical Cyraxx trolling livestream, this proved to be unhelpful.

Ironically, while their normal sludge is unwatchable, when they literally get drunk every New Year’s Eve it’s actually pretty entertaining.

This is where the phenomenon known as Woke enters the picture. Among liberals are a subset known as progressives; these are the class of people educated in a particular way such that they’re able to launder leftist ideas into usable liberal form. Leftism represents an important source of material for liberals-it’s how they pose as bold, counter-system individualists rather than the dull, hive-minded careerists they generally are, and progressives give them sanitized, anodyne versions of concepts that would otherwise require personal sacrifice, critical self-reflection, and the subordination of one’s own will to a greater cause.

The suffering this man endured was legendary in the Atlanta of my youth. And no, that’s not me calling in.

Under normal circumstances, liberals do recognize the destabilizing power of even neutered leftist radicalism, and thus are careful to confine progressives mostly to college campuses where they are imprisoned in a stilted, medieval guild from which they can’t threaten the modern economy. But Orange Drink Man Bad was no ordinary threat. He- or rather the movement he cleared the way for- was waking people up, and liberals needed their own version. Hence, they broke the glass on the crazy alarm and pushed that big red Woke button.

Woke is the opposite of sludge, at least in its social effects. While sludge keeps people phlegmatically waiting for something that will never happen, Woke demands action, the more incoherent and violent the better. If sludge is a narcotic, Woke is Surge, envy-colored angry-juice consumed by implacable mental defectives given license to destroy and pillage their neighbors by the state. Woke as a system of social signals exploded in the later days of Trump-1, with buttoned-down lunatics insisting on a right to loot on the part of racial minorities, statues to prominent (physical) sludge consumers going up as those of presidents were torn down, and every book, show, and movie being retooled as one long collective enterprise in Woke product placement.

While this was going on, a new form of sludge was being perfected, this one injectable and compulsory. Sludge consumption would become a matter of law in many places, whether implicit or explicit. If you wanted to work, if you wanted to leave your home, if you wanted your city not to be on fire, you held your nose, took your dose, and voted the right way.

After the 2020 election, Woke in the form I described rapidly died out. The taps were turned off. Symbolized by the new dotard president, somnolence would be the order of the day once more. It’s lasted longer in the arts than anywhere, due to the financial inertia involved, but even there it’s finally grinding to a halt. The grifters took their money and bought homes among the people they claimed to hate, the true believers returned to academia and obscurity, and the vast majority of tepid trimmers just went about their normal routine of liberal sludge consumption. Every attempt was made to recreate a conservative version, but no matter what the system tried, whether banning home brews or putting millions behind new product launches, nothing worked. A small but defiant remnant refused to take their medicine and go back to sleep.

The reason for this is simple. Woke is a top-down, mass-produced concoction. When the system stops making it, the effects wear off. The rightist version- not conservative but authentically right- is organic and grassroots, not something imbibed from without but the natural result of refusing to consume product in the first place. It’s why “woke right” is a contradiction in terms. Sludge must be mainlined constantly to be effective. You only need to take the redpill once.

The longhouse version

Now, of course, there are still people peddling conservative sludge. They’re mostly on X now, throwing out terms like the aforementioned “woke right” in a desperate attempt to sell something no one is really buying anymore. Fans of this are old and dying off. Like Qing Dynasty opium fiends, they’re throwbacks to an older and more degenerate time. The most successful of the lot are the Evangelical Conservatives, who in their American Protestant way benefit from nostalgia in offering barely altered liberal sludge from twenty years ago. But that liberal sludge is doing banger sales on its own, as the establishment pumps it down the throats of its consumers while it finally makes an attempt to accommodate itself to the new dispensation. The effects are quite profound. Even as the liberal order collapses all over the world, the liberal public just seems to be fentanyl shuffling along.

Liberal sludge flows freely here on Substack. You’ve got the hack politician variety, the media-certified flavor, folksy teacher-activist, a super-sweet version for the young people, hackademics, various sorts of cringe-edgy, and of course the religious type for people who find Russell Moore too strident. Of all of them, old-school conservative sludge rebranded for liberals seems to do best, but they have a bigger marketing budget.

How do you spot sludge, should you be interested in avoiding it? Actual writing demands that you think. Throughout this piece, I’ve set up and maintained a metaphorical framework that a careful reader will have to analyze in terms of its conceptual relationship to philosophy and recent historical events. I’m inviting you to say that I’m right or wrong. Sludge, on the other hand, just hits the taste buds and those parts of the brain that relax and sedate conscious thought. “Trump is Hitler” isn’t asking you to make a real comparison between the real estate mogul and India’s complex antihero. It’s telling you, “you’re right. Orange man bad. I’m smart because I’m a writer and I get it and so do you so you’re smart too now go to sleep, but make sure to vote for the new chocolate and Virginia Slim flavor we rushed to market first.” Writing reads like writing. Sludge always kind of sounds like AI, which is nothing more than fully automated sludge production.

H1488-B?

It would be wrong to say sludge is unpopular. People like feeling that sweet sugary buzz. But no one who’s serving it is really your friend. They’re profiting from your quiescence and ignorance. The great torpor of the liberal world as it’s being deconstructed, and the legacy of the now-defunct conservative variety, should serve as a warning that authenticity in one’s consumption habits is the surest proof against being poisoned, and that cleaning up your diet means more than skipping the seed oils. Say what you will about Cyraxx, but at least he’s sludged-out unawares. Do your part and avoid the toxic slumber.

The club remix