Trust the Plan

Ignore the terminally online: now is not the time to blackpill

Before I get into the essay, here’s a notice for anybody who’s going to be in London in February for ARC (the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Jordan Peterson’s alternative to the WEF), which runs from the 17th to the 19th. I’ve helped put together a tremendous afterparty on Wednesday the 19th at a location to be disclosed in East London, near the venue. We’ll have world famous DJs, including the iconic Danny Rampling, and so much more. Entrance is by invitation only, so if you want to go, you’ll have to sign up using this link: https://lu.ma/euie0c7j?utm_source=REN. I’ll be there, of course. Maybe I’ll even buy you a drink…

---

I sometimes liken conservatives and right-wingers to Pavlov’s dogs: you know, the unfortunate dogs that were electrocuted to create artificial responses beyond their conscious control. Basically, the poor little fluffers ended up being conditioned to cringe and spasm and squirm even when the stimulus that caused them to cringe and spasm and squirm in the first place was removed.

Why am I saying this now? Because barely a week into Trump’s second term, some on the right are already acting like Pavlov’s dogs. The stimulus—in this case, years of endless defeat—has been removed, but still the deeply conditioned response is elicited. That deeply conditioned response is to blackpill, to assume the worst is going to happen, to bitch and moan that all is lost and the revolution is betrayed and maybe it would have been better if Trump had been assassinated or Kamala had won instead.

I actually saw somebody, a “respected” Twitter poster, say it would have been better for Trump not to pardon the Jan 6ers, because having thousands of genuine political prisoners is more radicalising than letting them go. Really. The thinking here—if indeed such a sentiment could be dignified with the term “thinking”—is that, by pardoning the thousands of people caught up in the Fedsurrection, Trump was releasing a pressure valve that would help protect and preserve the current system. Righteous anger will be quelled. 1776 will not commence again.

It’s embarrassing, kind of shameful, but like I say, it’s deep conditioning. The right, and not just in the US, is accustomed to loss and betrayal, perhaps to the extent that many of its more demoralised members simply can’t recognise winning even when it lands on them with the combined weight of Tom Homan and Dr Phil tackling a Guatemalan Lyft driver in a dawn immigration raid.

Yes, I just said that.

Don’t get me wrong. Generally, the mood is jubilant, I was in Washington for the Inauguration and its aftermath, and, honestly, I’ve never felt or seen anything like it. I got intimations of the coming wave of optimism and enthusiasm when I attended Hereticon, a conference for free thought, in Miami just days before the election, but nothing could have prepared for what was to come.

All of a sudden, Trump was back, swinging a military saber to YMCA and pouting like David Coverdale c.1987—and then the next day he was signing executive orders banning birthright citizenship and ICE were kicking down doors and it was on, baby!

I’ve criticised the conservative temperament before, including for Human Events. About a year ago I wrote a piece in which I discussed a new study from social and personality psychology. The study showed that conservatives are generally too kind, too charitable, to their enemies. Conservatives extend courtesy to their liberal opponents and give them the benefit of the doubt, whereas liberals do nothing of the sort in return. They just win.

This is a basic, foundational quirk of the conservative temperament, an inability to understand the so-called friend-enemy distinction: reward your friends, punish your enemies. Don’t confuse the two. It’s that simple, and yet so many conservatives just can’t resist.

Blackpilled conditioning, if you will, is something else. Thankfully, it’s not built in to all conservatives, right-wingers or even a majority of them. It’s mostly online that we see this, and we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking the terminally online are representative of anything other than, well, the terminally online.

Much of the focus of the online blackpilling has been on the pace of the deportations. ICE are “only” deporting a thousand people a day so far. Only.