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In the liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 2024—as Donald Trump’s broadest coalition yet prepared for a triumphant, second inaugural—a series of events unfolded signaling a dramatic transformation. What emerged from this political chrysalis was not the expected triumphant march of unified conservatism, but rather a brutal reckoning that would reshape the movement’s future—and crown two unlikely kings in the process.

And though this story unfolds against decades of failed immigration policy and tech industry misconduct, it’s really about what came next: how two marginal figures—long dismissed as mere internet trolls and fringe provocateurs—seized on a moment of elite vulnerability to position themselves as the new leaders of American nationalism. This is the strange case of Sam Hyde and Nick Fuentes: the Jekyll and Hyde of the alt-right’s evolution from digital chaos into political power.

The catalyst arrived, as of course it must in today’s world, in the form of a post on X. On December 26th, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Yale Law Grad and bio-pharma executive turned political aspirant, unleashed what would become known as the H1B manifesto. With the tone-deaf arrogance of a McKinsey consultant explaining market inefficiencies, Ramaswamy informed Americans that they had failed as a people. Their children, he declared, were too enamored with “sleepovers” and proficient at “being jocks” to compete with people like himself, the disciplined offspring of Tiger Moms—those millions of legal immigrants and H1B visa holders that have flooded American workplaces, cities and towns in recent years, not as brilliant innovators, but as cut-rate replacements for native stock.

The irony was exquisite: a 1st-generation Hindu immigrant lecturing the natives over their perceived inadequacies during the week between Christmas and the New Year, that most American of interludes. Within hours, the MAGA base erupted. Elon Musk, perhaps sensing an opportunity to stake his own claim in the gurgling populist miasma doubled down, opining with his own characteristic subtlety:

“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who build SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.

Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

In the aftermath of this and other follow up’s, many of which Musk later deleted, X engineers went on a banning spree, censoring hundreds of so-called Groyper accounts and overtly manipulating the timeline to prioritize sentiments better aligned with Musk’s. Nevertheless, even with every available thumb pressed firmly on the scale, the effort failed miserably. The Silicon Valley elite had clearly underestimated the strength of the base’s sentiment with regards to immigration. The short, tortured honeymoon between MAGA’s populist base and Silicon Valley’s techno-oligarchs was over before even the inaugural champagne could go flat.

What followed was revelation dressed as scandal.

Internet sleuths began documenting the true, unimaginable scope of the H1B program’s deformities: rather than being utilized to fill essential roles American citizens didn’t qualify for, it was systematically replacing them with workers earning a third to half of prevailing market wages and tethering them–through fear of losing their visa status–to the companies that sponsored them.

The internet autists discovered more: it was not just technology companies making use of the loopholes as many Americans had been led to believe, but nearly every sector of our economy from commercial and investment banks, hotel chains, the prestigious consulting firms, universities, heck, even gas station franchises—the entire edifice of the American economy had, in short order, been not-so-quietly reconstructed on imported labor–with many more clearly planned by the Tech Bros. All this while a degenerate, bi-partisan political and media class ran cover for them under the rubric of “winning the future” and “confronting China.”

The Coronation of the Troll King

On New Year’s Eve, as Ramaswamy slinked back to Ohio, where, in a bracing indictment of the local GOP he looks primed to win the Gubernatorial race, and Musk backtracked, deleting the most inflammatory of his tirades, Sam Hyde, stand-up comic, animator, apparel and filmmaker and general digital media rapscallion released “Dear Elon”—an hour long video that would soon garner over 21 million views on X alone, and announce the arrival of a new political era.

In a media environment dominated by podcasts and streams, “Dear Elon” was produced and designed as a newfangled talk show, with substance and style in mind. Hyde, seated in an Eames-like high-backed leather chair and dressed for the occasion in a charcoal oxford shirt draped over by a black wool pea coat, addressed Musk directly from the confines of his cavernous yet spartan Providence studio. There was a puritan aesthetic at work: the lighting moody, the cuts dramatic, the aspect ratio comically wide.

This was not just another Hyde stream, and it was clear the producers wanted their audience to take a moment and appreciate the craft, almost begging them to watch on a big screen. The audio engineering captured ASMR levels of authenticity: the ambient hum of the room and every guttural sound, spit and sniff emanating from Hyde and his off screen production team. Here was the primal scream of the forgotten American, dressed up, but only to a point, unafraid to bare everything, warts and all.

This was not the crude trolling that had made Hyde infamous—the satirical TED Talk in Roman centurion costume, the Adult Swim show cancelled after one season for being too transgressive–this was statesmanship wrapped in superior aesthetics. Directed by Alex Luke it was clear from the jump, a new Sam Hyde had arrived; rather than engage in the online warfare unfolding on X during the past week–scoring a witty retort or two as had been his habit–Hyde, recognizing the gravity of the moment, opted to spend that time mustering the creative forces of his loyal and increasingly talented team, to launch a new talk show.

“I want to believe that Elon is one of the great men of our age,” Hyde began, cracking open a Diet Coke with the casual authority of someone who knew he held the moment. “That he has what it takes to become a 21st century Andrew Carnegie. It’s important to have great men to look up to, Trump, Joe Rogan, Elon, Tucker. And it’s not necessarily important that our great men are perfect but they are symbols of what we can be. I’d like to offer you an escape, an exit from this hole you’ve been digging.”

The language was elevated, the tone measured but from a position of strength. He had Elon’s number, brilliantly diagnosing and distilling one of the most stultifying issues facing contemporary America into obvious terms anyone could understand:

“You tapped into a critical, mainline concern for the American people, and you treated it in a way that was glib and dismissive. You just became a Republican three months ago and you’re talking about removing a big portion of regular people, root and stem.

No.

People fucking love you. They will forgive you. Nobody is trying to get you to become turbo based-pilled, full Pat Buchanan immigration policy. People broadly understand that you are a San Francisco Tech California international immigrant.

You’ve courted the MAGA base, you wanted these people on your side, they’re ready to be on your side, but you’ve got to fight not for Ben Shapiro’s idea of America as a collection of ideas. It’s Americans, that’s who you have to fight for.”

The transformation was complete. The man once known primarily for pranks and provocations–even if much of his more recent content, TV shows and streams had shown glimmers of maturity and sophistication–morphed into something else entirely: a political philosopher with his own burgeoning media empire, speaking directly to the disaffected young men whom the establishment had written off as irredeemable. Where traditional conservative media offered platitudes about American exceptionalism, Hyde offered brutal honesty about American decline—and practical, DIY advice for navigating it.

His follow-up episode, “Dear Vivek,” was even more surgical. Rather than dignifying Ramaswamy’s consultant-speak prose with debate, Hyde simply tossed the man’s books out of frame mid-sentence and declared, “Arabs get out.”

Then, he handed his platform to his audience—the very Americans Ramaswamy had dismissed—letting their voicemail recordings do the heavy lifting, displayed as full-screen analog soundwaves during their replay. The message was clear: Ramaswamy’s hot takes on how and why Americans will be replaced don’t matter; here are the actual voices you want to silence. Here is their frustration, their anguish. Now you listen, Vivek.

Over the next eight months, Hyde released 8 additional episodes, one featuring “The Hakagure,” a text on Samurai discipline and spirituality, one on “Black Conspiracies,” now with sidekicks Luke Valentine and Ryan Rivera sitting astride Hyde, another on “Education Sucks,” one on Boomers, “The Ghosts of the Gooks He Killed” in which Hyde smokes a pipe while featuring his first guest, a rough-looking Boomer Grandma brought on to bemoan her no-good children. One got the sense that with each new episode, the production and creative teams were cohering around a succinct vision–80’s vaporwave introductions, bizarre ad-reads and obscure interstitials and remixed video clips from Luke’s found B-roll footage.

One can’t help think that as traditional Late Night Talk Show TV stumbles–with both Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel ostensibly cancelled–The Sam Hyde Show is painting, on a broad canvas, a new way forward.

The Rise of the Professor

While Hyde was steadying the balance of his new, imperial persona, Nick Fuentes was undergoing his own metamorphosis. The now 27-year-old right wing firebrand had spent years in digital exile, banned from major platforms, de-banked and dismissed by polite society as a basement-dwelling extremist. Just days before Vivek’s tweetstorm, Fuentes had been the victim of an attempted assassination outside his Chicago home. The killer, having already murdered two roommates earlier in the day, drove a hundred miles to Fuentes’ home outside Chicago, rang the doorbell and was caught on Fuentes’ security camera looking the part of a medieval assassin, all black bike helmet, carrying a crossbow. Unable to reach Fuentes and finish him off, the killer fled into a neighbor’s home, killed their dog and was eventually shot dead by Chicago PD.

The establishment’s overreach had created its own opposition. While they demeaned Fuentes he played the studious underdog, learning, listening, honing his craft and biding his time for a moment which he must have known could not be far off. His studio got a makeover and he successfully launched his own media platform AmericaFirst.Plus, with subscription tiers up to $100/ month. It’s entirely conceivable that Fuentes is now generating upwards of seven figures a month in streaming revenue. And his presentation leveled up too, with slickly-produced interstitials and B-Roll footage, tastefully-remixed voice overs, all against a backdrop of contemporary hip hop, as the lead in to Fuentes’ nightly streams.

Most importantly, his message and tone, while still occasionally acerbic and Rococo, moderated. Boy Wonder had, along with undoubtedly his audience analytic charts, grown up.

As the Trump Administration predictably faltered on mass deportations, botched the Epstein Files disclosure and proved either unwilling or simply unable to restrain Israeli belligerence against Gaza and Iran, Fuentes merely had to stick to his guns and mop up even more disaffected adherents. As Con Inc–the establishment conservative ecosystem–rushed to rebrand, amidst yet another Middle-East dustup–MAGA as neo-conservative, they simply lost more trust, and viewership.

In August, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson—the twin pillars of respectable right wing conservatism—launched coordinated attacks on Fuentes. As Candace referred to him as a “stunted juvenile,” Tucker, while acknowledging Fuentes’ obvious talent, countered that he was “a weird gay kid in his basement.” The disproportion was the tell. Media figures with massive platforms and institutional backing were threatened enough by a young man with a webcam to launch catty, ad hominem attacks.

Fuentes’ response was methodical. Similar to Hyde’s response during the H1B kerfuffle, rather than engaging in X feuds, he doubled down on producing content illustrating not only his encyclopedic knowledge of American political history, his understanding of how neoconservative networks had, for generations, captured conservative institutions, and most crucially his preternatural ability to connect seemingly disparate events into coherent, and entertaining, narratives. All grounded by America First principles.

Where Owens offered conspiracy theories about French first ladies (or husbands), Fuentes delivered graduate-level seminars on the intersection of intelligence agencies, foreign policy and gatekeeping operatives. The contrast was devastating. The established conservative media—compromised by donor interests, anchored by foreign entanglements and institutional capture—found themselves outflanked by the very figures they had dismissed as irrelevant.

The Alliance

In August, Fuentes appeared on The Sam Hyde Show for an episode titled simply “America First.” If the old guard wanted to play kingmaker, the young insurgents would demonstrate that the crown, in fact, had already changed hands.

The visual semiotics were deliberate: both men in leather jackets, Fuentes in shades, the aesthetic of rebellion made respectable. But the content was the real revelation. For two hours, they delivered a master class in revisionist history—tracing the origins of neoconservatism from Irving Kristol through the formation of Israel and its ties to the Cold War efforts of the CIA, explaining how immigration policy had been weaponized against the American middle class, and demonstrating an intellectual depth and sophistication throughout that made their critics look shallow by comparison.

This was not the crude nationalism of internet comment sections. This was systematic, historically grounded, and rhetorically-sophisticated political theory. Hyde, playing the role of curious interlocutor–he’s a dead ringer for Trotsky and his on screen presence is a visual and aural feast— allowed Fuentes to display his formidable intellect and calm demeanor while maintaining his own position as the movement’s aesthetic innovator. The chemistry was undeniable—the artist and the intellectual, the emperor and the professor.

More importantly, they represented something their critics could not: authentic independence. While Tucker Carlson carried the baggage of a career as a member of and atop the media and political establishment, to say nothing of his intelligence community connections, and Owens showcased her abilities to court controversies and burn bridges, Hyde and Fuentes had been forged in the fires of cancellation, and emerged, singed to be sure, with rather large chips on their shoulder (who could blame them?) but with the thickest skin imaginable. They owed nothing to anyone except themselves and their native, loyal audiences.

What’s most galling about the above dynamic is that both Carlson and Owens were, not long ago, themselves insurgents, cancelled, fired and exiled for their perceived challenges to establishment shibboleths. The Overton Window was not only shifting, it had moved zip codes. And here they were turning their fire on obvious allies who had been America First since the beginning. Was this all just a bit of theater by the new masters of the form? Shouldn’t Owens and Tucker recognize the strength and resiliency of the targets of their ire and how hollow their attacks would be?

We’ll have the answer to this if and when either Fuentes or Hyde appears on Tucker, which now seems a matter of timing. Perhaps after Charlie Kirk’s murder, the time is finally drawing near for what will surely be the political media event of the year. It’s a good bet that the right will unite, with a home base located, once and for all, at America First.

The New Dispensation

What emerges from this transformation is not merely a changing of the guard, but a fundamental shift in how American nationalism understands itself and the will it will require to get what it wants. The old conservative movement, with its emphasis on abstract principles, exceptionalist platitudes and universal values, has given way to something more particularist, racial and historically conscious. This is not the rearguard passivity of Bill Buckley’s “standing athwart history, yelling stop.”

Hyde and Fuentes’ audiences overlap significantly, consisting as each does largely of, though not exclusively, young white men who have been systematically excluded from the opportunities their fathers and grandfathers took for granted. Rather than offering them false hope about meritocracy and hard work, Hyde and his cohort provide practical advice for surviving in a rigged system: avoid debt, stack crypto as a hedge against unceasing inflation, learn a trade, stay physically fit, get right with God and build parallel institutions. It is a politics of survival that acknowledges decline while refusing despair. And should despair occasionally get the best of you, as it sometimes does to all of us, Hyde’s platform MDE.TV offers endless entertainment to take the edge off.

Fuentes, a devout Catholic, represents the intellectual and religious framework for this new nationalism—one that understands America as a particular people with a particular history, not a universal proposition open to anyone willing to sign on to a set of ideas. And one that desperately needs the grounding of faith and Church teachings to thrive. He refers to his most loyal fans as Soldiers for Christ.

His analysis of how immigration has been used as a weapon against American workers resonates because it explains what his audience can see with their own eyes. It’s no coincidence that both Fuentes and Hyde align on the need to follow through on Trump’s long-promised and yet to materialize mass deportations. While Trump started as an insurgent, he’s become the establishment that can never quite bring itself to complete the one task underpinning its fervor.

Together, they represent the completion of a cycle that began with Trump’s 2016 insurgency. Trump identified the problems and demonstrated that the establishment could be defeated. And needed to be. But for all his greatness, Trump remains trapped within establishment frameworks, dependent on relationships, advisors and institutions that fundamentally disagree with his populist instincts. He is, ultimately, the ur-Boomer who can’t get out of his own way.

Hyde and Fuentes represent the next evolution: a nationalism that is developing its own institutions and distribution, its own aesthetic, and its own intellectual framework. Having been canceled, mocked and left for dead (literally in Fuentes case) they neither need permission from conservative think tanks nor approval from legacy media. They have built their own ecosystem and demonstrated its viability.

The Jekyll and Hyde Transformation

And then, the moment they had both been waiting for arrived, though in a manner neither man sought. Charlie Kirk, personal friend of President Trump and his family, the 31 year old founder of Turning Points USA, a globe-spanning conservative youth network, was assassinated at a public event in Utah.

The parallel to Stevenson’s Gothic tale is not merely literary flourish. Like Dr. Jekyll, the American right had long maintained a respectable facade while suppressing its more authentic impulses. The establishment conservative movement—with its emphasis on tax cuts, robust foreign policy, and abstract principles—was the Jekyll persona: respectable, institutional, acceptable to polite society.

But this respectability came at a cost. It required a near constant explaining away or simply ignoring altogether the systematic displacement of the American working, and now middle class, the capture of institutions by hostile elites, and the transformation of the country into something unrecognizable not only to its founding population but to anyone born before 1990. The cognitive dissonance became unsustainable.

Hyde and Fuentes represent the emergence of the movement’s Hyde persona—not in the sense of being monstrous, but in being, dangerously to some, authentic. Each coming from their own angles and experiences, they echo what the base actually believes rather than what donors, media and the consultant class want to hear. They prioritize American workers over abstract economic principles. They acknowledge that politics is about power, not policy.

The transformation is irreversible. Once a movement has tasted authenticity, it cannot return to managed opposition. The establishment figures who built their careers on controlled dissent—offering just enough resistance to channel populist energy without threatening elite interests—find themselves increasingly obsolete.

The Long Game

As Trump’s second term unfolds, the real battle for the future of American conservatism will not be fought in Congress, on the pages of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or at think tank conferences, but in the cultural realm where Hyde and Fuentes have established their dominance. Their audiences are young, energetic, and immune to the moral blackmail that has long kept conservative opposition in check.

The establishment’s attempt to destroy them has only made them stronger. Each deplatforming, each attack, each effort at marginalization serving only to demonstrate their independence while strengthening their resolve. They have become what every successful political movement ultimately needs: figures who cannot be bought, threatened, or controlled.

The strange case of the alt-right’s Jekyll and Hyde is ultimately a story of institutional failure and generational replacement. When established institutions fail to represent their constituencies’ interests, new institutions emerge to fill the void. When respectable spokesmen refuse to speak uncomfortable truths, new voices arise that exist to just that and only that.

Hyde and Fuentes did not create the conditions that made their rise possible. They simply recognized those conditions and positioned themselves to benefit from their inevitable consequences. And focused their energies on crafting new artforms in the process, the mark of genius in each. In doing so, they have not merely seized the moment—they have defined the future of American nationalism for a generation that has nothing left to lose and everything to build.

The metamorphosis is complete. The movement has found its authentic voice. And unlike Jekyll’s transformation, this one appears to be permanent.

—

Zachary Cohen is a writer in Boulder, Colorado where he runs Nomad, a bespoke branding agency. He helps to edit and design the @HardResetMagazine and is working on a book on the band Phish. His substack, The Wandering Jew, can be found here.

X @Zac__Cohen

Carousel guest fiction by

ROBOT RIGHTS ‘R’ HUMAN RIGHTS!

Beige cardboard. Black scrawl. Dirty mouths, wide open, repetitive screams of the slogan, surrounded by dozens of variants forming common cause through wicked indignation.

John Preen stares into the whites of their eyes from behind a crystal-clear, high-definition monitor occupying the far wall of the boardroom.

“The statement is categorically untrue.”

“Deeply false equivalency.”

“I think I know what the ‘R’ stands for, heh.”

A chorus of snide laughter from members of the executive suite. The quarter-hour bell chimes and those present drain their glasses of pH-balanced water in unison.

“John, be a dear and fetch us those refills.”

A voice, fit for radio, cuts through the commotion, sharing pitch and frequency with no other man. John remembers all the commercials from his schoolboy days.

At Squishy’s, we take pride in the home-cooked quality of our burgers. Just like Grandma Brown used to make. I’m Robert Brown, and I honor her memory through our family business. Good food, done right. That’s Squishy’s.

The CEO-King, seen onscreen holding a framed photo of his beloved matriarch.

John smiles fondly as he serves fresh water on a silver tray to the army of suits seated around the conference table, attention glued to the escalating protest outside the corporate tower.

“Zoom out and pan left through the crowd.”

Additional signage appears across the frame, producing a few spit takes from the collared class.

“Machine Lives Matter? Those opportunistic sons of grifters!”

John thinks this critique is a hair too harsh, though the national MLM movement does always seem to show their balaclava-covered faces whenever civil strife hits the fan like unprocessed feces, charging exorbitant speaker’s fees for thought leadership at anarchist conventions then licensing the use of their logo and fine-tuned ad copy to disparate cells throughout the land.

At the head of the table, Mr. Brown folds his wrinkled hands. “Perhaps there’s more than a passing reason their organization shares initials with the multi-level marketing schemes of old.”

His inner circle of associates and support staff pound their fists on the thick burgundy ten-top in proud agreement, spilling their refreshments. John sneaks in to wipe up the mess, seen but not heard. He feels lucky to be privy to such high-end crosstalk, how the sausage patties are made—worth more than all his collegiate experience combined.

The streetview camera scans past another outlandish outcry from the perpetually disaffected, this one scrolling right to left as electronic text.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES HAVE BEEN A DISASTER FOR THE AUTOMATED RACE.

The particularly outspoken CFO, Sven Zelko, huffs and puffs with ruddy rage.

“The sole race we need to worry about is the arms race to see which superpower will be ready to blow those bolt-buckets to a cold Christian hell before their barbaric hordes reach our gates!”

His withering wordcraft and immense girth contribute to a behind-the-back moniker coined by underlings at the office: The Potato Laureate of These United Plates. More dinner than tectonic, and a far cry from Pangea; anyway . . .

John braves a question. “Why is optimization such a dirty slur ‘round here?”

The whole room averts their gaze from the monitor to linger on the new kid, then back to the boss in anticipation of response, tax bracket ping pong.

“Son, I built this company on a promise, and I intend to hold true to my word as a man. People want burgers flipped by people. Generative meals are a soulless fad. The eternal maximization of our profit margins is a madman’s gambit, akin to the progressive advocacy trumpeted by those below.” He gestures with dramatic emphasis towards the screen. “When will it end?”

John presses further. “That word: soulless. Does sentient thought not a soul make?”

Sven snickers. “Word soup does sense make good?”

A few department heads chuckle. Mr. Brown commandeers the discourse once more.

“Life is a gift from God above. Complex algorithms that simulate the same are mere falsehoods, hollow imitations no matter how convincing the mimicry. Squishy’s is a decades-in-the-making institution of significant prestige, and now, apparently, a moral bulwark against the rising tides of computational degeneracy. What’s next? Human beings living with the automated, loving the automated, fornicating with the automated? Soon before long, society will grow sterile, and those who make cause to mate with machines shall inherit a scorched and barren Earth. The line in the sand between heaven and hell is here, at Squishy’s headquarters.”

The board applauds Mr. Brown’s rousing call-to-arms as John listens in awe to his superior. Again the bell chimes; again the water drains; again John swaps out fresh glasses.

Insulated from economic turbulence, his elephant-sized feet as ballast in the wind tunnel, Sven can’t abstain from behaving like a negger, even in the direction of his hyperlocal God-Emperor.

“Mr. Brown, if you’ll excuse my insolent tongue, perhaps this doe-eyed ward would benefit from a pinch of backstory.” The room itself nearly dutch-tilts as all heads cock askew to stare at the outspoken Lord of Financials. “Why place a half-century of labor in the crossfire to wage a crusade against the day?” He smirks. “You must have a highly-personal reason for doing so.”

Robert Brown rises gracefully and steps to the other side of the room, gazing through the crisp, transparent glass at the Squishy’s assembly lines arranged across the factory floors below.

He reaches for a handmade wooden box that sits atop a Greco-Roman alabaster pedestal, steady hands emerging after the rummage with a faded computer printout. He clears his throat.

“Rob, I understand the irony of dispatching this message via email. Hopefully you won’t label me a hypocrite, our favorite insult as precocious lads. The inbound war games will be entirely technological. To participate in any sociocultural exercises will require a buy-in, and the price is too steep for my conscience to afford. I must fight this battle from the shade, and what better source than underground. If seeking escape from our collective embarrassment makes me a coward, then so be it. Please don’t look for me. I’m sorry about Anabel. God gives success. Love, Donnie.”

Expect tears from a man of his stature and you’ll be disappointed. Robert folds up the missive and returns it to the enshrined container, eyes dry like fabric in the sun.

Sven slices through the silence. “His only brother chose oblivion over obscurity, accelerating his demise instead of allowing the flesh to fade away into irrelevance, a weakling’s wager—”

“He’s not dead. We’ve communicated more recently, since this letter, but he demanded that I destroy every trace of the trail, each lick of evidence,” Robert interrupts.

“And what did he have to say for himself? Which grand justification did dear Donald invoke to excuse the abandonment of his post, the ejection from his battle station?”

Robert smiles warmly, presses together thumb and index finger, and draws a line invisible across his thin, pursed lips, sealing off the possibility of self-incrimination with a versatile little zipper.

“But tell us—who is Anabel?” Sven says with poisoned tongue.

“I was supposed to protect her!” Robert screams towards the empyrean realm.

Glass shatters and the lines of divination across his palm run red with blood, tributaries spanning the nine circles. John snaps into action, fetching a replacement cup, rat race autopilot; Robert politely waves him off and strides from the conference room to regain his composure.

Sven smiles through illuminating eyes and a quarter-inch curvature of the mouth, snake-like architect of his fellow man’s emotional turmoil. “Donald’s dispatch from the edge of capitulation was penned in response to this behavior.”

With a flourish of his remote hand, the boardroom lights dim, and surveillance footage swaps to a dated news bulletin on the far wall’s screen. A blonde bombshell whispers the words to some tragedy ‘til Sven cranks the volume.

“—her tale is unfortunately a familiar one, and her name might ring a bell—”

The hydration alarm sounds in flawless unison; John ignores, for once, attention glued to the slick talking head.

“—Anabel Brown, heiress to the beef-tallow throne of the Squishy’s corporation.”

Archival photographs replace the reporter’s visage, displaying a sweet doll of a teenage girl shyly grinning for the camera.

“Like many women of her generation, Anabel was exposed to nearly-sentient machines from a young age. Facing social pressure as she approached adulthood, Anabel became an early adopter of experimental new technologies, choosing to shack up with an unbranded prototype designed to offer creature comforts and old school lovin’ for the lonely . . .”

Paparazzi pictures, somehow both darkened by stray shadows and overexposed, show Anabel cuddling with an uncanny automated approximation of a human male.

“. . . much to the chagrin of her increasingly-reactionary father, Squishy’s CEO Robert Brown.”

An image of the man himself, dignified within a print advertisement sharing the good tidings of fresh food products.

“According to our inside sources, each additional patch to the computer’s programming sent their less-than-virtual romance careening towards volatility ‘til Anabel sunk into the throes of addiction, nothing but a stereotypical information junkie hooked on the flow of code across the digitized airwaves. Perhaps the elder Brown was right—”

The television signal fades as the aging scion returns to his company’s affairs, barking orders in clipped tones.

“We must prepare an official response to these ridiculous rioters, complainers by any other name. We need a gesture of goodwill for the community to deflect the forthcoming negative press; perhaps a week of free burgers sent to every children’s hospital in the state.”

The war room buzzes to life as John takes initiative and switches the monitor back to the view of protestors outside their stronghold. Robert’s momentum grinds to a halt when he sees the screen: a down ‘n’ out gal with a bad pink pixie cut holding provocative signage.

I LET ROBOTS FUCK ME RAW!

His jaw drops in abject horror.

“Oh my God . . . that’s my daughter.”

This is a Carousel guest post from , editor of

To watch an Aaron Sorkin show is to experience propaganda. Of course, all media is propaganda, so let’s be more honest than the man himself and call this essay Anti-Aaron Sorkin propaganda. Because, what’s the only difference between, say, Howard Zinn and Aaron Sorkin? Aaron Sorkin is a better writer.

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In fifty years, if the liberal project lasts, as he hopes it does, Sorkin’s writing will survive as a cringey propaganda poster illustrating the absurdity of a dominant regime. He exists to smooth out a narrative so it can be regurgitated at parties and Thanksgiving. No one reads, no one pays attention in class, people don’t even pay attention at the movies. History is something we agree upon. And the average American still does, barely, agree upon Sorkin’'s version. What version is that?

“America isn’t the greatest country on Earth. But it can be.”As long as the Democrats are in charge for forever.

A Few Good Men… And A Bunch of Assholes

Sor…

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This is a Carousel guest piece by anon

Google Gemini launched week with all the discretion of a loud wet fart. 

Much to the chagrin of the AI safety community, Google’s “diverse, equitable, and inclusive” product resulted in a series of side-splitting misfires. It all began when Gemini refused to generate images of white people. Greek philosophers? Black. George Washington? Black. Nazis? A diverse and inclusive groups of Africans and Asians. And on and on.

If you wanted it to generate images of white people you needed to enter a negative black stereotype. Prompt: People eating watermelon: White. People eating fried chicken: White. But if you wanted it to generate an image of a black person eating watermelon? Greek philosophers eating watermelon: Black.

It’s a prime example of “woke racism,” demonstrating that America is a systemically racist country—or in Covfefe Anon’s famous formulation: “the woke are more correct than the mainstream.” 

Only America is systemically racist against whit…

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This is a Carousel guest piece by artist Bobby Mars

Several prominent anon figures of the online right have recently revealed their faces. Bronze Age Pervert, Delicious Tacos, and Sol Brah, among others, joined the ranks of the facefags, those who dare to post their visage online. Why take this moment to shed years of carefully constructed anonymity in one fell swoop?

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Most importantly, note that these anon personas are, as I say, constructed. They’re not particularly well protected—BAP has long been identified as Costin Alamariu, for instance. The function of anonymity for these figures, once they reach a certain level of notoriety, is not so much to protect them from retribution as to amplify their mystique. 

The hidden anonymous figure, the voice from the shadows, is a prominent archetype in western culture. It signals a deliberate and prophetic truth—even more so, a hidden truth. The voice of such a figure is one of esoteric revelation, as they reveal something hidden and forbidden, t…

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This is a guest piece for EWOMAN WEEK by Veronica (@our_daily_pain)

In the essay “On Women,” Arthur Schopenhauer explains that in women “reasoning faculty is weak, things clearly visible and real, and belonging to the present, exercise a power over them which is rarely counteracted by abstract thoughts, fixed maxims, or firm resolutions, in general, by regard for the past and future or by consideration for what is absent and remote.” This lack of historical knowledge or principle is likely why women often operate via decentralized mimesis, guided by the internet, tiktok and trends the same way they’re subject to the pull of the moon or hormonal rushes.

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The internet is the perfect place for feminine repetition, anything online becomes (by necessity) stripped of all association, rendered into a state of endless malleability, re-discovered and re-dissected forever. Tiktok trends are like this, the stupidly named “clean girl,” for example, is a recapitulation of Glossier’s 2015 redux of 20…

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This is a Carousel guest piece, part of EWOMAN WEEK, by baby g

The Longhouse prevails in strange ways. 

People Magazine’s 2023 Sexiest Man Alive has been announced. And no, it’s not Jacob Elordi. The crowd boos. It’s Patrick Dempsey! Crickets. This caps off a year of masculine neutering and completely sexless male celebrities. How did we get here? We must study the Longhousing of the Sexiest Man Alive.

Not only has no one thought about Patrick Dempsey in years, but he’s aged, washed up, and generally unerotic. Sure, he played neurosurgeon Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd on ABC’s Grey's Anatomy and drove race cars nearly a decade ago, but now he’s 57 and has adult children. And apparently a cancer foundation. Cool.

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Upon hearing the news, Dempsey said, “I was completely shocked, and then I started laughing, like, this is a joke, right?” While People has certainly peaked in terms of relevance, so has their judgment. We used to get raunchy tidbits about the sex lives of celebrities; photos of waste…

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This is a Carousel guest piece by an anonymous attendee of the Free Press debate in Los Angeles featuring Grimes and Anna Khachiyan

I went to the Free Press debate this week—and while entertained, I can’t say that the debates participants answered the core question: has the sexual revolution failed? Failed at what? And failed whom? These are the core questions a debate has to answer. At the start, we saw widespread agreement on what enabled the sexual revolution: namely, the pill and a change in public morals around sex. But here was where the debate started to go off track. 

No one engaged with what the pre-Sexual Revolution moral paradigm entailed—monogamy. Louis Perry, the strongest at the debate, did state that all non-monogamous societies are definitionally polygamous, but we did not get a coherent account of what the Sexual Revolution was fighting against. What was monogamy? And why has the West historically preferred it to polygamy?

I…

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This is a Carousel guest post by a Twitter anon, the entrepreneur behind Pluribus.

Cancellation is a plague, and like all plagues there’s profit in the cure. We’ve grown accustomed to it hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles for the better part of the past decade. Considering the Creator Economy is a $100B industry comprised of 50M+ creators and their 4B+ followers, it’s rather surprising that the market hasn’t managed to produce some form of cancellation insurance. Until now. 

How do you calculate risk when a core feature of the phenomenon is how arbitrary it is? Even if the rules were consistent, how would an actuary gauge someone’s likelihood of saying the N-word? And if you somehow manage that, how does the claims adjuster determine if they didn’t do it on purpose to get a payout? 

Cancellation insurance is impossible through traditional mo…

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This is a Carousel guest post by a Twitter anon.

When it comes to radioactive materials, it's a mixed bag. A nuclear power plant can provide energy to half a million homes. A nuclear bomb can obliterate just as many. Radiation is a valuable tool to diagnose and treat disease, but too much exposure to it can lead to death via body horror. In the early 1900's there was a rush to develop and market an assortment of products that touted the health benefits of radioactive decay before anyone truly understood its dangers. This misapplication of scientific discovery entwined the fates of Eben Byers and William J. A. Bailey, ultimately leading to their death and changing public perception of radioactivity forever. This is a story of Radioactive Quackery.

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It’s a cautionary tale about what can happen when business interests become enamored with a new scientific discovery and try to exploit it without due diligence. It's also a testament to the power of advertising. Radioactive health tonics becam…

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This is a Carousel guest piece by an anon

The > 80% Female Workplace

I worked for five years at a media agency that was over eighty percent female. For the first few years, I reported to a straightforward young man of German Catholic ancestry, with blond hair and blue eyes. He was known to be devout although he otherwise kept his religion to himself, and thereby got away with it. He was no-nonsense, and I enjoyed serving under someone of high moral character. He in turn reported directly to the CEO, also a man. No women existed in my chain of command.

My boss had a long term girlfriend, and, although he was usually the first one in and last one out of the office, he spent almost no time whatsoever fraternizing with the broader team. That he no longer attended company events, even the sacred holiday party, was frequently mentioned to me by the women. He could get away with this, however, having a familial relationship with a member of the board of directors. 

I had no such security. When w…

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This is a Carousel guest review by Matt Pegas. Yes, we already reviewed this movie. Our feeling is, we’re only going to review good movies until they stop making bad ones, even if it means reviewing the same good one over and over again.

The idea of making a "real movie" has long been a holy grail in the online right. More recently, with the influx of cash and talent represented by the outputs of Alex Moyer, Amanda Milius, Peter Vack and others—not to mention the recent funding of a Delicious Tacos Short film to be directed by Asher Penn—this goal has suddenly begun to appear decidedly attainable.

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SPECIAL RELEASE 36. Asher Penn

Listen now (75 min) | Please welcome Asher Penn to The Carousel. Asher is founder of Sex Magazine and the man behind the Delicious Tacos short film that Curtis Yarvin can’t stop blogging about. Asher and I discuss the genesis of the project, Peter Vack, the quality of Tacos’ writing…

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · Isaac Simpson

But what do we mean by real movie? A proper budget? A wide theatrical release? Something that changes the culture by becoming “part of the conversation”? The former two things hardly guarantee the latter, as filmmakers behind Bros, Amsterdam, and Babylon learned the hard way last year, while outsider titles like Terrifier 2 found their way to relevance on microscopic budgets and word of mouth…

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This is a Carousel guest piece by an anon

Work has many synonyms: drudgery, toil, the grind, the great, big suck. All these words signal the same thing—work is hell. This has been true since getting kicked out of Eden. Work breaks your back and your spirit. It makes you humble. It makes you value little things like your daily bread and the prospect of eight hours of peace in a warm bed. In our contemporary epoch, office work, which was once lauded as the preferable alternative to manual labor, is especially hellish.

The office worker is subjected to daily humiliation rituals of Kafka-esque complexity like attending “optional” birthday parties for Susan in Accounting’s dog or sitting through the same DEI training seminars again and again. The HR harridans who rule over this dystopia, never completely log off and are always ready to file a complaint about the mildest touch of spice. Fifty thousand a year is nice, after all, and it would be sad to part with it. The office worker repeats th…

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This is the second Carousel guest piece from Twitter anon @DegreeStudies. The first can be found here.

I once heard a former US diplomat speak at Princeton about his time in the Embassy in Iraq in the years after the 2003 invasion. He began with a devastating anecdote. In occupied Iraq, one of his first tasks was to map the local constellation of potential liberals to identify individuals who the Americans would encourage to run for parliament. His favorite potential candidate was a women’s rights activist campaigning in her neighborhood for issues like reproductive health and education. The woman, still in her thirties, came to the diplomat and said that if she ran, she would be killed, and that groups in her community had told her as much. The diplomat told her not to worry, that he had seen this all before. In the post-Soviet states where democracies were just getting off the ground, vestiges of the old regime used similar fear and intimidation tactics, but they never had the energ…

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This is a Carousel guest piece by Twitter anon sorcova de corb

ACHTUNG! This text can expose you to adversarial thinking, which is known to the State of California to cause literal genocide. For more information, go to thecarousel.substack.com.

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Humble Beginnings

It’s 1986.

America is high on coke, crack, and Reaganism.

Fitness enthusiast Jane Fonda and second husband Thomas E. Hayden endeavor to hold the line against GOP encroachment. They’re helping Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley in a narrow race for California governorship against an insurgent Armenian, Republican incumbent George Deukmejian, by entreating more lefties to the polls. Hayden, long-time professional agitator and peak physiognomy example, settles on environmental and health concerns as potentially winning causes.

They muster attorneys to draft a ballot proposition and, in a masterstroke of “it’s literally in the name” marketing, dub it the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. Ms. Fonda hangs up her leggings to campai…

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The canary in the coal mine, as they say, of this world collapsing and forcing me to display my genius was the Hooters of Burbank and Hooters of Hollywood closing for good thanks to PC culture and this Bidenocracy. I wish to thank everyone who helped shape my genius from the doomers, and druggiies in my B0lt to the onlyfans girls who ji[pped me all those times, they were MY wanda and now I present my VISION: enjoy. --Boltdiver.LA

Boltdriver is a movie. You can watch it for free on Boltdriver.la, and, as far as I know, nowhere else (and why would you…it's free). There’s little else to explain what Boltdriver is. The website is minimal. There are no credits, much less bios of the filmmakers.  It has no synopsis, no trailer, no reviews, no links.  It's just Bolt Driver. Press play.

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Below the play button is an anonymous typo-ridden, free-associated farewell statement, the kind left from beyond the grave after a suicidal blaze of glory, or maybe just when a barely-followed meme page shuts do…

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This is a Carousel guest post by an Anon Substacker

Nut-cutting time.

“Nut-cutting time” is a phrase mostly heard in my neck of the woods. Us Southerners love a colorful phrase, and we especially love a colorful phrase if it is one-part black humor and one-part pure grotesquerie. Nut-cutting time refers to a last resort—when all else has failed, it’s time to grab some cojones and go forward. Most men will face multiple nut-cutting times in their life. For Spencer Grunhauer, the protagonist of Dan Baltic’s excellent novel NUTCRANKR, his nut-cutting time comes after months of embarrassment. Cancelation, humiliation, and a  hyper-speed descent down the social ladder lead Spencer, a graduate of one of the finest liberal arts universities in the United States, to bring a 9mm Glock to the Monkey Love May Day, a communistic celebration of bondage and workers’ rights. Spencer’s goal is an explosive missive—a high-velocity impact statement jacketed in metal designed to right wrongs and save the …

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This is a Carousel guest piece by a Twitter anon

I spent New Year’s Eve 2014 in a hotel in Tripoli speaking with a politician fighting to remain relevant on his country’s national stage. Two sides were emerging in post-Gaddafi Libya, and our man was relegated to the sidelines. 

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A former mayor of Tripoli appointed Prime Minister by the Libyan Supreme Court, he was looking for Americans who could plead with our government or the UN to include him as a party in forthcoming peace talks. That we probably didn’t have the juice we all knew but was left unsaid.

Over the years, lots of political hacks (including those near the current American president) have made fortunes bilking dictators in exchange for the promise of political assistance, but our host wasn’t really a dictator and we weren’t really getting paid. My main thought on the Libyan conflict and our host’s role in it was that people aren’t obligated to tolerate …

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This is a Carousel guest piece by Matthew Pegas

15:00

I hit Fremont Street and the magical thinking starts right away. We’re all chaos magicians in Las Vegas, trying to draw order from randomness and spin silver dollars from black bile. I’m on a 15-hour layover between Los Angeles and Philadelphia on the way home for Thanksgiving: next flight not until 1am. I just Ubered to this side of town from Harry Reid International Airport, baptized into Vegas energy by the slot machines in the terminal and a driver who looked like a stripper on her second career. It’s a brisk, blue-skied November day, and I’m alone and feeling lucky.

I accidentally arrive at the Neon Museum two hours before it opens, so instead I beeline back a mile of drive-over sprawl and pass under the highway to Fremont Street. I’m heading to the El Cortez, one of the oldest casinos in Vegas dating back to 1941, and my favorite for gambling. Gambling: not exactly a problem, but I’ve g…

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