The Rock and the Egg
A Useful Guide for Telling One from the Other
Your eyes are closed. You hold out each of your hands. Into one is placed a rock, into the other, an egg, each having approximately the same size and shape. You must decide which is which using the senses available to you.
Sight is closed off, as noted. Hearing will be of little use. Smell might help*, but the egg is fresh and the stone is a stone. You could try to taste it, but biting down on a rock could be hazardous. This does give you an idea, though. You run your fingers across the surface of stone and egg, but you gain nothing by this. Each is cold and smooth and hard and hefty. A test of each object at the surface level is fruitless. Then you squeeze. All at once, the distinction between the two objects that a moment ago each seemed so solid is revealed. A particular application of touch- pressure- sufficed to distinguish strength from fragility. Weakness is the diagnostic distinction. Pressure is the surest test of weakness.
*Note, smell will help identify this Rock, but only if he is cooking.
Yesterday was the three-year anniversary of the Kyle Rittenhouse self-defense shooting, wherein a teenage boy defended his life from a rampaging mob of leftists and other opportunistic criminals. Though he was thereafter acquitted, the incident has dogged him ever since, with those unable to defeat him in the streets or the courts still making what hell of his life they can. The day before this anniversary saw the arrest of Donald Trump for ridiculous and politically-motivated charges, the first time such has happened in American history. That these events occurred a day apart from each other I believe has some cosmic significance. Much like the election protests that led to the persecution of President Trump and so many of his closest supporters, the Rittenhouse incident reveals a lot about the state of the current system, and pace the manifest doomer content, I believe that there is a silver lining in the storm clouds, a silverpill, if you will. Rittenhouse and Trump, each in his own way, and at different ends of the continuum of power, revealed an important truth about the system: it is weak, tottering, and stands firm only insofar as pressure is not applied. The arrests, the censorship, the desperate lies are signs not of power but of fear, inchoate and visceral, a fear that springs from a dawning awareness of its own illegitimacy, that only the inertia and rapidly dismantling norms of prosperity past keep the normies on couches and out of the streets.
I hereby claim to coin silverpill; Urban Dictionary’s definition is lame.
Kyle Rittenhouse was the most ordinary of ordinary Zoomers, seventeen in 2020, a high school quasi-dropout with a part-time job and few clear ambitions. In an earlier age he would be beginning a career in a factory in his hometown, choosing the evening barstool he would occupy for the next fifty years, and perched thusly, engaging in vigorous after-work debates about the performance of the Packers. That life was traded away before he was born and, apart from the fame he received as a result of the fallout from the Kenosha Protests, it is difficult to imagine where he might have ended up. He seems to have been dimly aware of some need for change in his society, as he followed Donald Trump on social media, and seems to have had conventional loyalties to normiecon staples like the police and military. His parents were separated and he lived with his mother in Illinois; his father was the one with the home in Kenosha. Rittenhouse worked in that town and had connections there, and though the media kept idiotically repeating the mantra that he “crossed state lines” to be at the protest, he actually had a reason to be there.
The immediate pretext of the violence of August of 2020 in Kenosha was the shooting of Jacob Blake. Blake’s girlfriend and mother of his children had called the police on him, reporting that he was in her house unlawfully and had taken her car keys and was attempting to leave with at least one of the children, over whom he had no custody. Every cop dreads a domestic dispute, especially in the context of the chaotic nihilism of the underclass. Blake resisted every effort to talk and every attempt at non-lethal arrest, and, knife in hand, turned on the officer attempting to bring him into custody while Blake was in the process of fleeing the scene with a child. The officer shot Blake, who survived but is now paralyzed from the waist down. The shooting was later ruled justified and the officer returned to work without sanction, but that was in the future, and in the summer of 2020, the managerial state, the radical left, and the media all had a common project, the removal of Donald Trump from office by any means necessary. The police shooting of a black man, regardless of facts or context, would immediately be weaponized to that end.
It is important to understand the dynamic between these three forces. The managerial state is not itself leftist; it is not committed to a project of equality or the amelioration of social problems arising from capitalism. It is a neoliberal oligarchy focused on globalization, creating homogenous populations managed through the creation and provision of material desire, corporatist, statist, and bureaucratic, but above all committed to progressive ends through the benign rule of credentialed elites. Leftism figures into this as both a safety valve and system of control. Leftists amenable to the elite are parked in sinecures in universities, NGOs, and corporate HR departments, where they can do the hard work of destroying what remains of traditional culture, thereby serving the interests of neoliberals, for whom such is a hindrance to the creation of the mass-man they need to consume the new product. The other leftists, those too deranged, mentally ill, or violent for life in an office, are allowed to form militias that operate in territories given over to leftist rule, Portland, Oakland, etc. This is Antifa and its hangers-on, the black bloc of Nazgul who show up whenever the regime needs to remind the normies what happens when its protections are withdrawn. The media, for its part, has the task of packaging and contextualizing the violence and destruction as both legitimate and part of the bigger project of removing regime enemies in the name of keeping everyone safe. That’s a nice store you have there . . . be a shame if it got burned down because of racism. Best to let the nice people at GAE get back to running things. So remember, show up and vote D. You wouldn’t want us to have to come back.
You were already picturing this.
The Democrat governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, denounced the police shooting, making sure to include phrases like “racism” and “merciless killing” in between meaningless caveats. The plan was clearly to give Kenosha up to the sack and the left got the message loud and clear. All summer, Black Lives Matter, an amorphous group/movement that was equal parts grift and instrument of leftist radicalism, had organized protests which devolved (or developed) into violence, often featuring Antifa, more anonymous, more violent, and more purely ideological. Now that fury was set to descend on Kenosha. The system called out the National Guard, people boarded up windows, but it was obvious that nothing meaningful was going to be done to protect lives and property should the left decide to attack either. The people of Kenosha were to be made an example of; their role was to cry in front of their burned-out donut shops while Joy Reid mocked their impotent white tears.
Into this situation stepped Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse, as noted, was in town due to his work and familial connections. After the first night of destruction Rittenhouse and some friends volunteered to clean up graffiti; he then stayed on in town to help protect businesses the next night. One of his friends loaned him an AR-15 for this purpose. Guarding a used car lot, which the police and National Guard were content to let be razed, Rittenhouse was attacked by two protestors, Joshua Ziminski and Joseph Rosenbaum. Both men were violent criminals; the former was carrying a stolen handgun while engaging in multiple acts of arson, while the latter was a mentally-ill, drug-addicted pedophile recently released from both prison and a mental hospital. Ziminski seems to have been the more calculating of the two, with Rosenbaum simply possessed of a perverse urge to destroy. In any case, they were but part of a larger mob making its way down the main strip, being driven there by riot control elsewhere. It seems that it was Ziminski who initially pointed Rittenhouse out to Rosenbaum, and Rosenbaum charged at him, daring him to shoot him while inexplicably screaming anti-black racial slurs at the white Rittenhouse. At nearly the exact moment Rosenbaum caught up to Rittenhouse, hurling a plastic bag containing all of his worldly possessions at the teen, Ziminski fired a shot in the air. Rittenhouse turned on Rosenbaum at the sound, whereupon the latter grabbed at the AR-15 Rittenhouse was carrying. Tucker Carlson described what happened next better than I ever could:
A great moment in TV history.
At this point, egged on by Ziminski, the rest of the mob turned on Rittenhouse, who had actually stopped to administer aid to Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse fled in the direction of the line of the barricades of law enforcement with the mob in hot pursuit. One of them, Anthony Huber, attacked Rittenhouse with his skateboard, dealing out several blows that dropped Rittenhouse to the ground. Before Huber, another mentally ill violent criminal, could strike him fatally, Rittenhouse fired from a prone position and shot Huber through the chest. As he staggered off dying, another man, Gaige Grosskreutz, approached Rittenhouse, pistol in hand. This was the first encounter Rittenhouse had had that night with someone who wasn’t already a felon and Rittenhouse helped Grosskreutz avoid catching his first charge by shooting him through the arm. Having dispatched three attackers in a few minutes’ time, all of them grown men and demonstrably lethally dangerous, Rittenhouse threw up his hands and wandered over to the police, who simply let him walk through their line. Discovering that he was wanted, his mother took him to turn himself in the next day.
Still the record holder
The media circus and trial that followed showed the system at its idiotic worst. Rittenhouse was painted as a racist so often that it was widely believed the men he had shot were black (they were all white). The fact that he had “crossed state lines” from his home state of Illinois to Wisconsin was repeated across hundreds of outlets despite it being utterly meaningless. Political pressure led to charges being brought, despite there being no evidence of a crime and no choice other than shoot-to-kill that would have resulted in Rittenhouse emerging from that night with his life. But then, that was the point. He should have died, Kenosha should have burned, and the deplorables should have taken the lesson to heart. Instead, an untrained kid put two members of the paramilitary wing of the Democrat Party in the ground and left a third horribly wounded. There were no riots in Kenosha after that. Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges in November 2021.
That’s all it took. One teenager with a gun shut down that whole production. The system said: ”look what happens when we choose not to protect you.” Rittenhouse’s response was “this.” The boy took charge when the men were content to play the part they were assigned in the drama. He revealed to the world that the left is nothing without the protection of the police, without the courts to jail their opponents, without corporate power firing their enemies and social media censoring any criticism. Twenty serious men could have cleared the whole street of insane, junkie chomo-communists . A thousand such men would have spared Rittenhouse the trouble and expense of a trial by a clear expression of their disapproval. Ten-thousand . . .
This is an actual game that Rittenhouse himself is behind. Based confirmed.
Likewise, there are many lessons one can draw from the Capitol Riot of January 6th. Were feds involved? Sure, probably (notably, Antifa and BLM stayed home). Was it idiotic and incoherent? Sure, also probably true. But at the end of the day, Trump went out of office demonstrating the same thing as when he entered it; for all its surface power- for all its ability to jail and censor and shun and deplatform and impoverish- the system, when pressed, breaks. Donald Trump’s Boomertruppen, with no real plan and no clear goal, chased the entirety of Congress out of their deliberations without even the pretense of a fight. All of these people, who spent decades sending the youth of America off to foreign lands to die for ‘democracy,’ when faced with the choice to defend it with their persons, tucked tail and ran. Bear in mind, these were the stakes they themselves outlined in subsequent accounts; Trump was trying to destroy the American government; he was trying to overturn the Constitution. Fair enough, but what did they do when faced with that threat? By their own admission they didn’t know if the country would survive Orange Hitler’s assault and they couldn’t know police would shortly restore order. According to them, they faced the greatest threat a country could face . . . and they ran away. They hid under their desks and the world watched them do it. The hero of the republic was an incompetent diversity hire cop who shot an unarmed woman in the neck. That’s it.
There was no insurrection. No one was armed and no one tried to take over. That accusation is idiotic. No less pathetic than the MAGAgeddon, however, was the response of the ruling elite, to simultaneously call it the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor and to flee in terror from their posts. Our nation faces a mortal threat and the people charged with meeting it are moral and physical cowards. Trump’s normiecon followers, people who send money to Hannity but wonder if that Matt Walsh is a little extreme, shuffled diabetically into the seat of power and walked off with trophies like Alaric in the Forum. They pushed, and the shell cracked.
This blond beast was actually trying to carry off Pelosi, but mistakenly grabbed a 200 year old desiccated hunk of wood.
This is what has motivated every action of the regime since then, a desperate need to wipe that episode from the public mind, to appear strong again, to have their pronouncements believed and their power feared. Keep in mind, nothing about this election has anything to do with Trump the man. Neither his supporters nor his enemies care what the charges against him are or what he plans to do if elected. No one cares about the job he did during his last term and no one wants to move on. This is not an election, but an exorcism. Trump the man is meaningless, a vain boomer who still doesn’t understand, deep down, that the system is his mortal enemy. Trump the ghost, the haunting reminder of the weakness of the system, of its failure under pressure, of its illegitimacy, of its ignorance and fear of the people it mismanages- that’s what matters. It’s why they hound him, it’s why they can’t just ignore him, rig the election, and pretend he is gone. He can’t just be defeated, he has to be undone. Humpty-Dumpty has to be put back together again, and all the king’s horses and men are bent to that purpose. They will be just as successful as their fairy-tale counterparts.
"Left" is that clade of political ideologies that have as their endpoint a state of normative equality as applied to every category of human distinction, economic, racial, sexual, etc. Leftism represents the secularization of the eschatological principles of Christianity, shorn of their transcendent significance. It represents the endpoint of a heresy which evolved out of late Calvinism, among other influences. Liberalism is a body of ideas that shares a relationship to leftism, but was born out of different Christian Protestant traditions (Anglicanism, English separatism) which emphasized compromise and the settlement of differences through consensus. Liberalism seeks to instantiate the progressive liberation of individual humans from constraints imposed by nature, social convention, and personal circumstances; in its current form, neoliberalism, this is achieved through scientific management on the part of credentialed elites. In America, right liberals are called 'conservatives,' and left liberals are called 'progressives.'
Over an against these are the "right," those philosophies that valorize transcendent order, reflected in religion, social hierarchy, family, and tradition. Rightist thought represents the continuation of philosophies that predates the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment. This is why, in my view, only the right represents a credible challenge to the current order and the only source of human renewal.
I biked down to lake street in Minneapolis the day after those "fiery but mostly peaceful protests." My first thought when I saw the damage was, this looks like Syria. I know now what it feels like to be in an occupied city. I couldn't go for a walk in my neighborhood without my neighbors calling the police they wanted to defund. For months after, George Floyd square became the most dangerous place in the city. Homeless were thereafter allowed to turn the park system into a den of iniquity. People started acting like there was no law. Carjacking increased 500%. Working for the parks, every day I picked up heroin needles and broken car window glass.
I sold my beloved house I had been in for 16 years, with my twenty fruit trees, mushroom logs, the greenhouse I built with reclaimed lumber and sliding glass doors, my 1000 gallon pond and 200 species of plants, three days before the Fed started raising interest rates. I was not going to wait for the next Marxist firebombing and plandemic lockdown.