Quotulatiousness

January 29, 2026

“The meme works because Amelia has perfectly normal, mainstream opinions”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Humour, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Little Platoon responds to a lamestream media report on the Amelia phenomenon:

This story was quite funny enough before it got noticed by the rickety old goblin creatures of the mainstream media.

Amelia is not a “purple-haired AI goth girl”, she is a government-created videogame character designed to teach kids that “liking the national flag” and “attending protests where that flag might be seen” makes you a potential terrorist.

That really was the extent of it. The game she comes from is extremely non-specific about the content you’ve been radicalised by. At no point do you think, “yes, I can see why this was terrorist behaviour”.

The actual storyline is not a million miles away from Winston Smith and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

So the effect is: you have this totally normal opinion that most people have? You’ve been seduced by Amelia and now the Hijabi Hero (IRONY) at Prevent is going to send you to jail.

Amelia hasn’t been “hijacked by the far-right”, she’s just a textbook example of Death of the Author.

The government wanted to have her demonstrate the dangers of online radicalisation. But because this is the British government, they made it seem cool, justified, and you’ll probably get a hot goth girlfriend out of it.

The meme works because Amelia has perfectly normal, mainstream opinions.

She can say “I like pork sausages and dogs”, like roughly 98% of British people, and this will send a certain sort of person — the government, the Anti-Extremism Lead at Generic NGO — into a full-on panic attack.

It’s about the disconnect between the values of the government and those of the people they govern. The joke is that Amelia could ever be considered “Far Right”.

(Ironically, the interviewee in this clip is just as AI-coded as the actual AI clip they play. He’d probably require fewer tokens to generate.)

Meme coins remain extremely cringe, however.

At The Hungarian Conservative, Joakim Scheffer discusses the reaction of the caught-flat-footed mainstream media as their attempts to downplay Amelia’s impact serve to increase interest and attention:

British outlets The Guardian and LBC published strikingly similar articles about Amelia in recent days, both concluding that the purple-haired goth girl, who stands against mass migration and in favour of traditional British values and culture, is, in fact, racist and fuels hatred.

The Guardian introduces Amelia as a girl “who proudly carries a mini Union flag and appears to have a penchant for racism“, before lamenting the “plethora of increasingly sophisticated AI-generated iterations” of her, including “real-life” encounters between Amelia and movie characters, “accompanied by racist language and far-right messaging”.

Since her “birth”, Amelia has indeed become increasingly popular. From an average of around 500 posts a day when she was first introduced, the figure rose to roughly 10,000 daily posts starting on 15 January, when the meme broke through to international audiences. Amelia has since reached the highest levels of the right-wing internet ecosystem, even being reposted by Elon Musk himself.

January 27, 2026

Amelia was not created by the “extreme right”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, A View From Yorkshire points out that the media coverage of the Amelia phenomenon often leaves the audience with the impression that Amelia was created by some far right extremists, which clearly isn’t true:

Let’s nuke the myth properly.

Amelia was not “created by the far-right”.
She was created by the British state, funded by taxpayers, in a government-approved anti-extremism game for teenagers.

Her crime?
Questioning mass migration.
Talking about British values.
Suggesting borders, culture and continuity might matter.

In other words: centre-right, mainstream opinions held by millions of normal people.

The media response?
SCREAMING, CRYING, THROWING UP:
“FAR-RIGHT!”
“RACISM!”
“DISINFORMATION!”

Even the game’s own creators admit the game does not say questioning mass migration is wrong — yet journalists still foam at the mouth like Pavlov’s interns because the spell didn’t work.

Here’s the truth they hate:

Amelia didn’t get radicalised.
She got recognised.

People saw a perfect accidental parody of how the establishment treats ordinary dissent:
If you question orthodoxy, you’re not wrong — you’re dangerous.
If you wave a Union Jack, you’re not patriotic — you’re extreme.
If you ask questions, you need monitoring.

So people did what the internet always does when power looks stupid:
They laughed.
They memed.
They stripped the moral panic naked.

Now we’re told there’s a “highly coordinated hate network” behind it all.
Sure. Or maybe — stay with me —
people are done being lectured by institutions that despise them.

A cartoon goth girl didn’t expose extremism.
She exposed how fragile the narrative really is.

If a meme breaks your ideology,
your ideology was already on life support.

The Amelia memes do seem to be getting under the skin of certain members of the government:

Amelia is a girl of many talents:

Epochalypse
Published 24 Jan 2026

An absolutely beautiful song covered by Amelia ❤️

A UK anti-extremism educational game called Pathways, faced significant public and media backlash.

The game, developed by SOUK in coordination with the Hull City Council and East Riding of Yorkshire Council, was designed to educate students about the dangers of online radicalization.

How the Game Backfired

Antagonist’s Popularity: The game’s primary antagonist, a teenage girl with purple hair named Amelia who held nationalist views, was intended as a cautionary figure. However, she was ironically embraced by some online communities and became a viral meme, with users finding her “goth baddie” design and character more interesting and relatable than the non-binary protagonist, Charlie.

Criticism of Content: The game was widely criticized by media outlets, including The Telegraph and The Spectator, as “clumsy” and “overtly manipulative”. Critics argued that the game effectively suppressed free speech by suggesting characters who questioned immigration policies should be reported under the UK government’s “Prevent” counter-terrorism strategy.

Portrayal of “Research”: The game’s narrative structure suggested that “researching” information online could be harmful, as it might lead to “intaking a lot of harmful, ideological messages”, which also drew criticism.

Ultimately, the attempt to create an effective anti-extremism tool had the opposite effect in many online circles, with its intended villain becoming an ironic symbol for anti-illegal immigration sentiment.

#amelia #pathways #memes #patriotism

Kimberly Steele disgrees with the characterization of Amelia as a “tulpa” (which I think I first saw advanced by John Carter at Postcards From Barsoom) and argues that she’s actually an “egregore” instead:

Amelia crossing paths with Harry Potter and the gang, very appropriate for this essay

In rides fantasy Amelia to the rescue, a digital Joan of Arc to galvanize the lumpen male proletariat into action against leftist groupthink oppression. Her flame burns hotter than the tradwife because she is not a deferential, docile, opinionless mirage waiting for her man to do all the the heavy lifting. Instead of modeling crusty tropes from the 1950s in a housedress, she mouths off to Mohammed in a miniskirt. She champions sensible norms that middle aged people like me took for granted back in the day. She is an advocate of schoolgirls being able to walk down the streets of Liverpool without being acid attacked or drug into fenced areas to be assaulted. She suggests Britain is for the British and that it should not be handed over to the same hordes that have been trying to overrun it since before the Middle Ages. She suggests that men on all sides rise up and outgrow Puer Aeternis — to the invaders, she insists that they cease their infantile dependence routines and go back and fight for their own country on their own soil. To the white native islanders, she suggests they grow a set and defend their nation while it still stands. Nothing that Amelia wants or espouses is extreme. She is a middle-of-the-road pundit who could run for office on a moderate platform (or what used to be considered moderate in my day before everything in the middle was categorized as far-right) and win. She’s not exactly Hitler, no matter what the leftie pearl clutchers claim.

If only she was real. Amelia has been called a tulpa, which is a Buddhist term for a thoughtform that is forced into existence and made to do tasks, much like a Jewish golem without the clay and awkwardness. I don’t think Amelia is a tulpa. She is nobody’s bitch and she was not created on purpose. Instead, Amelia is an egregore. Imagine your old school mascot was a giant, anthropomorphized tiger. Perhaps there was a person who dressed up as a big, striped cat for games every now and then. Now imagine that your mascot became extremely popular across the world and every sports team adopted him as their mascot too. Now imagine that your big tiger began appearing randomly in the nightly dreams of people who were very into sports, and then after a few years, non-sports fans. Tiger fan fiction was inspired by the egregore. Tons of giant tiger merch was sold both at games and in regular stores. Imagine if chick lit writers wrote ghastly bestiality porn about the giant tiger, and entire genres of tiger man erotica bubbled up online. You would begin to think perhaps there was consciousness behind the tiger man image, and if you did think such odd things, traditional occultists would take your side of the conspiracy theory.

An egregore is a shared image that gains its own consciousness. Any given novel’s character is essentially alive, gaining his/her/it’s own consciousness, ego, and world. […]

Amelia says what men cannot say, and it is good because she does it in a way that is unsquelchable and eternal. She is bad because she is yet another symptom of provisional living. On the plus side, she makes toxic liberal women super mad because unlike a real girl, they cannot tear her down or cast her out of the longhouse/take her ability to make a living away in order to force her compliance. She highlights all of their shortcomings without having to try, and that is why she will have much hate projected upon her. Their evil eyes gaze into the digital mirror. This force may be enough for them to completely self-destruct, given enough time and distance.

There are some men who see Amelia as some kind of savior. If you are one of them, let me assure you she is not going to save anyone any more than Pepe the Frog. If you want to save and be saved, please go outside. Be with the sky and the trees, and don’t feel you have to pick up a fishing pole, soccer ball, or a toolbox to be out there. When you do come back inside, instead of turning on the dopamine drip and immersing yourself in the antics of fantasy girlfriends or dreaming about invading Haiti, please use the internet to learn manly skills. My husband, whose father was largely absent before he divorced my husband’s mother when my husband was 12, taught himself nearly all of his considerable skills via books and the internet. If you are a visual learner, the internet holds a treasure trove of knowledge. For those would be warriors who are not currently serving or who will never serve in the armed forces, please go out and defend real girls on the streets from the monsters, creeps, and traffickers who make it impossible to feel safe as a female. Where are the men willing to watch the streets and to at least threaten various immigrant scum with retribution for their terrible behavior? Where are the volunteer neighborhood patrols that ensure women and children can walk to and from school without being harassed? In the stranger danger/Satanic Panic 80s, we had a thing called Neighborhood Watch where you would put a blue star in your window so any little kid who felt threatened could knock on the door and find a safe house. Where are the blue stars? Where are the boys with baseball bats? Go out there and defend your country. Do it for Amelia.

Update, 28 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 12, 2026

Is Keir Starmer malevolent or stupid? Or both?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, Tim Worstall wonders just how damn stupid Two Tier Keir actually is:

I fear our answer has to be very, very, stupid indeed. Unless he’s simply malevolent which makes things oh so much better, right?

Now, I confess to a fundamental disagreement with the very premise here. For the argument about why we should make child porn legal, see here. Making it more difficult to generate, let alone illegal, strikes me as the wrong decision. But then I’m sufficiently wise in years to realise that I might not be able to persuade some people of either that or of the many other things I am correct about. So, let us leave that aside.

There’s also the point that Grok is hardly the only image generation tool out there these days. Further, the one thing we know about computing is that this year’s leading, bleeding, edge is the free phone app of 5 years in the future. Shrieking that this must be banned just isn’t going to cut it as anyone trying that is simply a Cnut demanding the tide doesn’t flow in.1 On that larger issue of image generation in general we’re just going to end up changing the societal rules. A picture is no longer proof of anything. After all, it wasn’t up until about 1850 — those painters would just do any old thing, the truth be damned — and it won’t be after about 2028. Well, there we are then but …

But OK, let us leave all of that to one side and start from where British politics currently is. Grok generated AI kiddie porn is Bad, M’Kay, and must stop:

    Technology Secretary Liz Kendall says she would back regulator Ofcom if it blocks UK access to Elon Musk’s social media site X for failing to comply with online safety laws.

    Ofcom says it is urgently deciding what to do about X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok, which digitally undressed people without their consent when tagged beneath images posted on the platform. X has now limited the use of this image function to those who pay a monthly fee.

    But Downing Street said the change was “insulting” to victims of sexual violence.

“Downing St” is the equivalent of the American “the White House said” … so yes, that is Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister there.

We’ve also an article from Liz Kendall today:

    That Grok continues to allow this kind of content to be created by those willing to pay for it is an insult to victims. No business model should be built on the exploitation and abuse of women and children.

    …

    The Online Safety Act was designed precisely for situations like this, where platforms fail to take their responsibilities seriously and allow harmful content to proliferate. The British public rightly expects robust action. This is a matter of urgency that demands an urgent response.

    I’ve also been clear that the Online Safety Act includes the power to apply to the courts to block services from being accessed in the United Kingdom if they refuse to comply with UK law.

We can see the threat there. If Elon Musk doesn’t do something about this then we’ll block X/Twitter from the UK.

  1. Why yes, I do know the correct story of Canute and the tides.

A Canadian and Australian connection showed up as well:

While I don’t depend on the social media site formerly known as Twitter for my news, I have found it a very useful additional source since Elon Musk took over the site. I’m clearly not the only one to feel this way:

As they used to say, however, “never believe anything until it’s been denied by the Kremlin”:

January 11, 2026

“The Paradox of Indifference”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kulak describes the experiences of crafting takes for the gaping maw of social media and getting … nothing. You might as well not have bothered — we all know how that works, don’t we? But sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle and your post goes viral and then you get the worst kind of feedback:

People don’t show up to comment “No one gets it”, “Another miss”, “You aren’t funny”, “You’re wasting your life on Twitter” [as they tweet at you], “No one loves you”, “You never get laid”, “you’re a whore”, “you know nothing about BDSM Romance in Desert Storm, nor how that relates to the Czech Surrealism”, “No one cares”

When you are actually wasting your time and getting no traction, Not a soul alive is going waste their own time EVEN MORE-SO to sit there and commentate your embarrassment and failure.

Think about it, No matter how much Jehovah’s Witnesses or street preachers are wasting their lives and no one is listening, you’d be wasting your life even more so to sit there trying to persuade them of that fact.

Indeed the ONLY times you’ll EVER get comments like these … Is when you ARE getting traction.

It’s really amazing! Countless times you’ll tweet or post something you thought was clever, insightful, drole, important, philosophically or spiritually relevant … And nothing.

Then one of them Moon-Shoots, takes off to 6, 8, 10 MILLION impressions, 10s of thousands of likes …, thousands of retweets … And suddenly THAT ONE you start getting “No one cares”.

I’ve seen THOUSANDS of comments, “No one cares” “you’re weird for caring” all on the same tweet, RETWEETS from accounts with a MILLION followers “Who cares what this person thinks!? No one’s listening to them” They tweet out to a million people.

YOU DO!

Otherwise you would have just kept scrolling.

Its actually really remarkable the amount of effort, collective work, and social organization that goes into this.

I’ve seen Tweets with THOUSANDS OF COMMENTS, getting hundreds of retweets and hundreds of comments that “No one cares” … Sometimes these retweets themselves get comments and conversations going in circles “These people really think we care what they think?”, “I know right? They’re obsessed with us, as if we care” and if you’re looking closely you can actually see various followers of the people who “don’t care”, Comment themselves that they “don’t care” beneath their favorite E-Celebrity “not caring” that they also “don’t care”, and then follow their way back to your original tweet to say “We don’t care”, before Retweeting you themselves to say “God, these people. They actually think we care!?”

Indeed there’s an entire MEME FORMAT — the only meme as far as I can tell the left has ever successfully created for themselves — That exists solely to express that they “don’t care”

“Giant Thumb Guy”, Look at us Cool people in our group collective, and you outside it, and how we just barely acknowledge you then go back to ignoring you.

You see you can tell it’s a leftist meme format because they didn’t use any wojaks or existing memes … Also it’s poorly constructed and uses a redundant three panel format that has been on its way out in memes since 2015.

I’ve seen various leftists create elaborate Photoshops of this meme … Just to respond how little they care, because that’s what you do when don’t care.

Now admit it, Can you tell a redditor created this? Look at the alt-text that came embedded in the image. (No I don’t actually know what Guilty Gear is…but we’ll be charitable and assume its just a fun and well enough written game and not barely concealed porn)

And of course other times their innate violent impulses infect the meme:

Because escalating immediately from words to threats of violence shows how cool and unconcerned you are.

“But Kulak!?” I hear you say, in a bout of inner-Redditor cleverness, “You’re a hypocrite! You clearly care too! You’ve written this entire piece so far just going on about how you don’t care, about them not caring, about your thing that you did that they didn’t care about!!! Would you have done that if you don’t care?! A-Ha! We got you!”

Ugh … Of course I care. This is fascinating. My anthropological instincts are tickled to the core!

Simply fascinating.

My working hypothesis is that leftists, a wide cross-section of women, effeminate men, the SSRI’d, men who’ve suffered genital trauma, the unintelligent, the weak willed, and just generally those of poor inner conviction, reason, hormonal health, and disagreeable virtue (but then I’ve repeated myself many times now) … Interpret their emotions and ideas via a complex communicative social environment they maintain with each-other.

Their minds and reasoning depends on a group, or longhouse, or “Community”, or “friends” … whereas the superior Chad, Chadette, Chud, and Chudette western autists are able to forgo, for extended periods, any need for such a social mental framework or even forego such “friends” and “community” entirely.

Thus, like the apex predators they are, these noble solitary creatures are able to rely upon their own superior reason and judgement. Inside of you are two wolves … and one of them is fallacious and gay, and the superior rational man should ignore him.

It’s a long post and covers a lot of territory, so do read the whole thing.

January 1, 2026

New Year’s memery

Filed under: Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

The period between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day (aka “Hangover Day” for amateur drinkers) tend to be pretty low-traffic periods for internet sites, and my experience is that my own readers drop in far less frequently until around January 2nd. Taking advantage of this, I can drop in a few low-effort posts to keep up appearances and get on with my usual holiday sloth with no-one the wiser. So … memes:

First, a tribute to yet another armpit of a year:

And on to the bright promise of the infant 2026:

Sorry, that was apparently a repeat post from every year since 2016, prompting this heartfelt apology from the powers-that-be:

Not so much a meme as an accurate recapitulation of our descent into the cultural cesspool we currently inhabit (h/t to Ted Gioia):

New Year’s resolutions? Here’s a suggestion:

Ian has the right idea:

It’s a fair question, isn’t it?

You can tell it’s not their first rodeo:

Not a meme, but in the general direction of memery — Dave Barry’s “Year in Review“. An excerpt:

The biggest story of 2025, to judge from the number of people who sent it to me, was this raccoon:

In case you somehow missed this story: In late November, this raccoon got into a state liquor store in Ashland, Va., by falling though the ceiling. Once inside, the raccoon ransacked the store, leaving a trail of broken bottles …

… and apparently consuming a large quantity of booze before passing out in the bathroom next to the toilet. That’s where the raccoon was found by a store employee, who called an animal-control officer, who took it to an animal shelter. When the raccoon finally sobered up, it was hired as director of security by the Louvre Museum.

No, seriously, it was released into the wild. But the photo went majorly viral, and the raccoon became a huge celebrity. We, the American people, LOVE this raccoon. And I think I know why: After the year we’ve been through, we can relate to it. We have had way too much of 2025; it has left us, as a nation, lying face-down on the floor of despair, between the wastebasket of stupidity and the commode of broken dreams.

December 22, 2025

Monday meme-ery

Filed under: Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Sorry for the lack of substantive content, folks. I thought I could get a bit of time yesterday to put up a few more posts, but that turned out to be a pipe dream. Just so you won’t feel cheated at finding nothing new here, I’ll take the lazy way and post a few seasonal memes and pretend that’s what I intended to do all along. Just smile and nod and pretend you agree, okay?

October 18, 2025

Remembering GamerGate

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

We’ve lived through such a tumultuous decade that it’s sometimes difficult to remember what things were like in the “before times”. On Substack chat, John Carter linked to this essay by Billionaire Psycho which helps refresh memories about one of the seminal events that kicked off the political and social chaos of the last decade:

GamerGate is maybe the most important event of the past 20 years which never receives mainstream media coverage. Lomez will be publishing an in-depth history of GamerGate, to serve as an official record going forward, and that’s crucial as part of building a foundation for a new culture — fighting the narrative war over how history is remembered, how history is interpreted, what events are recognized as significant and influential moments in culture, and how Western identity is defined.

GamerGate was only possible because a generation of incompetent Leftists inherited an empire built on propaganda that came without a legible instruction manual. Leftists forgot how to run their imperial machine. Video games sedated young white men, funneling their energy into a simulation of achievement, an illusory power fantasy of digital significance. Leftists forgot that porn, video games, movies, junk food, and other passive consumption activities primarily existed to prevent young white men from doing anything useful with their lives. And this zone of sedation was viewed as another industry to conquer so that DEI activists could bully the video game industry into providing overproduced elites with fake jobs.

This event was important for several reasons.

GamerGate exposed American Sharia laws. It unveiled the shibboleths, religious taboos, and blasphemy codes which were considered more important than Constitutional protections on “free speech”. A gulf emerged between written laws, and selective enforcement.

GamerGate was maybe the first time in 50 years that Leftists suffered a real, measurable defeat.

It functioned as a generational awakening: a catalyst that activated a decentralized army of shytpoasters, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, journalists, and RW activists.

It mapped out in real-time the architecture and OODA loop of the Leftist hivemind, providing empirical data on how the swarm intelligence perceives, coordinates, reacts, propagates … and suffers damage.

It educated critics of the hegemonic monoculture that rules the Global American Empire.

But I think the most important aspect of GamerGate was that it disproved the narrative illusion that everyone more or less accepted as conventional wisdom, the bedrock of the uniparty worldview. Before GamerGate, it was taken as a self-evident fact that America was a capitalist country, and that all of the evil in the world was caused by Wall Street corporations chasing “shareholder value” and advancing “the profit-motive”. Capitalism and racism were the invisible demons which could be used as scapegoats for anything bad that ever happened at any point and at any place in American society.

Leftism could do anything it wanted, no matter how dumb, destructive, intrusive, or evil — and then blame capitalism and racism for the consequences.

This illusion was shattered by GamerGate.

[…]

There’s one important thing that’s been lost since GamerGate (GG) and the Meme War of 2016, which is the adolescent fun, transgressive irreverence, and juvenile sense of humor which once characterized the RW youth. There was a brief window when video game enthusiasts believed they could meme their way to victory (they did), win a landslide election (they did), and reverse imperial decline (they didn’t). Ten years have passed since then. Countless accounts have been banned, doxxed, deplatformed, debanked. Dissidents have been prosecuted and imprisoned. The presidency of 2016 was stalled out and subverted, the election of 2020 was stolen, the election of 2024 almost ended in an assassination on live television. Covid lockdowns crashed the economy and trapped everyone in their homes, while Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted outside in the name of George Floyd.

At some point, it stopped being fun, and the contest turned into a forever war.

Comedy turned serious.

But it should be remembered that in the aftermath of GamerGate, humor and a playful, childish energy fueled the engine of RW victories. That’s the secret ingredient.

Samizdat is the key to winning.

Always remember to keep having fun, and keep laughing, because our enemies are ridiculous.

October 13, 2025

Speculation that J.D. Vance “maintains a Twitter alt, that he is in fact an anon poaster”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The latest post from John Carter at Postcards from Barsoom includes some interesting speculation about how well J.D. Vance has handled his engagement with social media trolling and why that might be:

Gigachads on the official DHS X account only provide evidence of one poaster in the administration, but this is a poaster in a very prominent, public-facing role, who has been allowed to do this for quite some time now, obviously without rebuke. That strongly suggests that the administration smiles upon the memelord, and it also makes it more likely that the chud running the DHS X account is far from alone. An obvious question is why the DHS would be so tolerant of its social media manager posting right wing memes, when this is guaranteed to draw the ire of the left. One possible explanation is that the administration wants its anon army to understand that they have guys on the inside. Memes are a tool for informal coordination; by posting these memes, the administration is winking at the base, telling them “We’re listening to you, and as for CNN … we don’t think about them at all. Now follow our lead …”

The young men powering the new administration were acculturated within the free-wheeling environment of loosely connected online networks, in which irony and ambiguity is simply the water in which they swim, and the only hierarchy is the one established by informal influence and demonstrated ability. They are not accustomed to subordinating their activities to directives pushed down from the summits of rigid org charts. Their basic assumptions are individual initiative, freedom of action, and a magpie willingness to grab good ideas wherever they can be found and put them to immediate use without waiting for permission.

And it is not only the junior staffers and federal agents who have this mindset.

Importantly, at 41, Vance is a young man by political standards. His cultural assumptions are not those of network news, but of digital networks. When the Vance memes making fun of his weight, or riffing off of his remark to Zelensky that he never even said “Thank you”, started circulating, he didn’t get mad about them. He laughed, and rolled with it, because he understood that – coming from the online right – these memes were an expression of affection, the way you rib your friend by calling him a faggot and he pokes you back by calling you a fat retard. Naturally the feminized left does not understand this at all. They think that these memes are humiliating to Vance and so spread the memes themselves, while interpreting the popularity of the memes amongst the online right as an indication that the base loathes him. As always, the left lacks theory of mind for their opponents. Imprisoned within the iron bars of their own ideological-managerial cage, the left has completely failed to learn the lessons of participatory media, and like a general staff doggedly trying to break the trench lines with cavalry charges, continues to try to fight the current war with the weapons they used to win the last one.

There is widespread speculation that Vance’s comfortable navigation of meme culture comes from direct experience, that he maintains a Twitter alt, that he is in fact an anon poaster. There is of course even speculation as to which account is his, although naturally, no one knows for sure, and Vance sure isn’t telling.

If there are poasters in the administration, we might expect them to treat policy the way they learned to handle memes. Any random small-account anon might come up with an absolute banger of post … so why shouldn’t they be able to come up with banger policies, too? Why limit themselves to adopting policies developed inside the long, tedious processes of bureaucratic committees and comfortable think tanks? If rapisthitler1488 has a good idea, well, why not use it? You can just do things. This attitude is at the heart of what Dudley Newright calls the “up-the-chain phenomenon”.

We’d also expect an administration laced with poasters to pay careful attention to the online right, using it to gauge the public mood in order to correct course. At its worst this could turn into audience capture, but at its best this enables a much more responsive reaction to public sentiment than that afforded by polling data since it is both immediate and disintermediated. Rather than waiting for the polling agency to carefully word a question to get the answer it wants, and then painstakingly call up and interview a statistically representative and unbiased sample so that it can provide rigorous Poisson errors for the answers to its biased questions, public sentiment can be analyzed as soon as people start tweeting, and evaluated in terms of the public’s own words. In essence, the poastocratic administration becomes akin to a livestreamer monitoring the chat.

Finally, we might expect to see the administration deliberately trolling the base. Experienced influencers know that outrage bait drives engagement. If you want to move in a certain policy direction but are being pressured behind the scenes not to do that, or conversely if you are being pressured to do something you know will be unpopular, an excellent way of assembling the political capital necessary to do what you want is to announce that you’re going to do the opposite. The howls of outrage from the base then provide you with the excuse you need to do what you wanted to do in the first place. “Let me check with the boss … Well, sorry, I’d really love to help you, but the boss won’t let me do that.”

OK, you say, this is all very interesting, an emergent feedback loop of cybernetic governance linking the networked hive mind to the traditional institutions of government, but is there any actual evidence beyond some meme-slop posted by the DHS in an effort to assure the base that they are getting the Got What They Voted For Award? Well, let’s get into that.

Update, 14 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 29, 2025

The dangers of joining the online hive mind of social media

Filed under: History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Freeman, Nicole James discusses the experience of being immersed in a social media swarm or hive mind phenomenon:

Ever noticed how your social media feed doesn’t sound like “independent thought” so much as a stadium of people chanting, “Yaasss, queen!” in matching sequins? One minute you’re scrolling idly, the next you’ve been recruited into a sect with better lighting filters and the odd ironic dog meme. All it takes is clicking on one video of a dachshund in a raincoat, and suddenly you’ve been ordained High Priest of Sausage Dogs, condemned to a lifetime of puddle-splash reels and algorithmic sermonizing. That’s the hive mind. It’s the Internet’s favorite parlor trick, turning ordinary humans into synchronized swimmers thrashing about in a soup so murky it makes the Hudson on a hot July afternoon look like Perrier.

Bees and ants nailed this millennia ago: buzzing, working in lockstep, worshipping a terrifying queen—basically the Kardashians of the insect world. But instead of honey, humanity now churns out TikTok dances, Reddit debates about whether Die Hard was a Christmas movie (it wasn’t), and Facebook is where your uncle accidentally joins a cult.

Yet this collective buzz can tip into something darker. Collaboration can harden into groupthink, flattening individuality like a raccoon on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Cristina Dovan, a life coach based in the UK, calls the hive mind “group decision-making where individuals meld into one big throbbing consciousness”. Which sounds noble, and also like the worst hangover imaginable.

Collective intelligence can shine. Wikipedia (on a good day), Reddit’s problem-solving posters, Kaggle competitions, GitHub fixes. It’s a brainstorming session without the burnt office coffee and stale biscuits.

But history, and the Internet, remind us there’s a darker wing.

Psychologist Irving Janis, who coined “groupthink,” pointed to the Bay of Pigs invasion as Exhibit A.

Let’s return to 1961 where JFK is young, popular, and surrounded by Very Serious Men in suits. The CIA pitches a plan to topple Fidel Castro that went roughly like this:

  1. Train a ragtag bunch of Cuban exiles.
  2. Drop them on a swampy stretch of coastline actually called the Bay of Pigs (because nothing says “stealth” like announcing your arrival in Pork Bay).
  3. Hope the Cuban people spontaneously rise and overthrow Castro, preferably in a neat anti-communist conga line.

Everyone in the room knew it sounded dodgy. The beaches were wrong, the surprise was nonexistent, Castro’s army was enormous and very much awake. But instead of saying, “Excuse me, Mr. President, this is bananas”, the advisors all nodded along as if they were trapped in a corporate retreat exercise called Let’s Pretend We’re Bold Visionaries.

The result? A fiasco. Castro’s forces crushed the invaders in three days flat. America looked ridiculous, Kennedy was humiliated, and “Bay of Pigs” became shorthand for “the world’s worst team-building activity”. In short, a textbook case of groupthink, or as we’d call it today, “watching as your drunk mate climbs onto the shed roof, yells that he can backflip, and you cheer instead of calling an ambulance”.

September 10, 2024

Chilling effect (with a British accent) – “No one is now sure what they are allowed to say”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Spaceman Spiff makes a bid to star in one of Gauleiter Keir Stürmer’s big show trials, coming far too soon to a town hall near you:

In Britain many of us now walk on eggshells.

The country and its systems are broken. Free speech is being outlawed. Many are frightened to say anything, although it doesn’t stop them noticing and thinking.

Recent emphasis on invented categories of offence — misinformation, disinformation and now malinformation — mean almost anything can come under the purview of the State and its informers, from ill-timed comments to jokes and humorous observations.

Famously, memes based on simple observation are admissible in Britain’s world-famous show trials, including this one no doubt:1

It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.

Everything must be monitored because less and less can be tolerated by those in positions of authority. Their narratives are failing, and they are panicking. They are getting desperate.

Noticing is verboten

Many of the topics that trigger the strongest response by the British Government are simply unpopular policies that normal people can no longer ignore.

More accurately, policies that directly affect growing numbers of law-abiding taxpayers who did not vote for them.

Do not discuss immigration

Mass immigration is the supreme example. Britain’s cities are being flooded with “asylum seekers”, most of whom are economic migrants with no right to settle in the country.

Many are alien peoples from distinct cultures with no connection to Europe and a poor track record of assimilation.

They are aided by an army of well-funded human rights lawyers who distort laws designed to help the genuinely dispossessed, which most immigrants are not.

Thanks to our generosity many privileges are extended to foreigners that are unavailable to natives such as free housing and financial help on the understanding these are used sparingly and temporarily to aid the desperate.

These myriad of kindnesses did not emerge to serve those who want the benefits of first-world living while dodging the corresponding costs; the development of high-trust social structures, the communal spirit that transcends tribalism, and the selflessness it all requires. These are rare phenomenon much of the world cannot produce or maintain, and they are being squandered in Western nations by the selfish obsessed with demonstrating their own virtue.

No serious discussion of immigration is tolerated at any level in Britain. However, this does not stop the erosion of goodwill upon which most of their schemes depend. The generosity they abuse is a limited resource and the magnanimity upon which it depends is evaporating quickly.

    1. Many are being jailed in Britain for posting memes and related social media content. The judges often go to some lengths to confirm it is not the content of the material they are questioning as they are perfectly legal, but the perceived intent behind the posting itself.

    This unprecedented legal descent into clairvoyance, hate speech and arrogance is relatively new. It will not age well and tells us more about the decline in competency in the judiciary than anything else. Standards are clearly not what they once were.

    To put this kind of absurd reasoning on display in irremovable public court records speaks to the level of delusion and arrogance we are now dealing with in Britain. Our social betters are truly lost in a world of their own.

August 13, 2024

“We just don’t understand the key role of ‘vibes’ in 2024”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill admits to being an “old square” who hasn’t really been able to figure out the Kamala Harris campaigning style:

“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I was thinking the other day: what do I know about Kamala Harris? Off the top of my head, no Googling, I know she was the attorney general of California. I know she locked up lots of people for marijuana violations. I know she likes Venn diagrams. I know she didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. I know she’s “brat”, though I don’t know what that means. I know her ceaseless cackle will haunt me to my grave. I know she’s unburdened by what has been. And I know she was the border czar, even if she herself seems to have forgotten that fact.

And that’s it. That is the long and short of my knowledge about the possible future leader of the free world. You could torture me for days and I wouldn’t be able to tell you her positions on the big issues presidential candidates once held forth on. Iran, say. Or global trade. Or job creation. I’m open to the possibility that this is partly down to my lack of reading, but there’s also more to it than that. The truth is Harris is a wholly new kind of politician. One who’s not meant to be known but felt. It’s less her policies we’re meant to be wowed by than her vibes. Brace yourselves: America might soon be ruled by a meme made flesh.

[…]

There’s a twisted irony to this feverish beatification of Kamala as the vibe goddess, the mother brat, the “Gen Z Meme Queen” (kill me now). Which is that it’s the handiwork of the kind of sniffy liberals who laugh at rednecks for falling for the “Cult of Trump“. It’s being pushed by online leftists who spend the rest of the time wringing their hands over Trump’s “demagoguery”, his sinister ensnaring of supposedly dim voters with rhetoric and style. These people urgently need to take a look in a mirror. For their creepy worship of Harris is the very definition of demagoguery. Their excuse-making for her ivory-tower style of campaigning makes the most wide-eyed MAGA people look critically minded in comparison. As to their lying down so that the Kamala vibes might wash over them and provide with them an emotional kick – it’s giving North Korea.

What are “vibes”, anyway? All I know, being middle-aged and literal, is that vibes is short for vibrations. It’s a Sixties thing, originally. It’s about pressing pause on all your thinking and worrying and just letting the beat rush through you. That’s fine in a club or art venue. But in politics? In a presidential campaign? Surely we should expect more from our elected representatives than a fleeting therapeutic thrill. It is a testament to the almost total hollowing out of public life, to “the fall of public man“, as Richard Sennett described the crisis of modernity nearly 50 years ago, that in an era of economic downturn, social conflict, war and fear, all we’re getting from one of the presidential candidates in the United States of America is vibes. And brat. And memes. And laughing. So much laughing.

The new politics of vibes is even more degraded than the politics of personality. That political style of the 1980s and 90s also spoke to a decline in democratic seriousness, where politicians would seek votes less on the basis of what they believed than on their spin-doctored pose as intimate, authentic “good guys”. But at least they tried to connect with us, at least they talked to us. Aloof, inscrutable “brat” Kamala is something far worse – a politician without substance or personality. Bereft of both vision and character, all she has to offer is strange vibrations.

February 20, 2023

Monocultures are risky in agriculture … and even more so in politics

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Unlike his usual bite-sized quips-with-links at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds occasionally writes at length for his Substack page:

The western front of the United States Capitol. The Neoclassical style building is located in Washington, D.C., on top of Capitol Hill at the east end of the National Mall. The Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Our modern ruling class is peculiar. One of its many peculiarities is its penchant for fads, and what can only be called mass hysteria. Repeatedly, we see waves in which something that nobody much cared about suddenly comes to dominate ruling class discourse. Almost in synchrony, a wide range of institutions begin to talk about it, and to be preoccupied by it, even as every leading figure virtue-signals regarding this subject which, only a month or two previously, hardly any of them even knew about, much less cared about.

There are several factors behind this, but one of the most important, I think, is that our ruling class is a monoculture.

In agriculture, a monoculture exists when just a single variety dominates a crop. “Monoculture has its benefits. The entire system is standard, so there are rarely new production and maintenance processes, and everything is compatible and familiar to users. On the other hand, as banana farmers learned, in a monoculture, all instances are prone to the same set of attacks. If someone or something figures out how to affect just one, the entire system is put at risk.”

In a monoculture, if one plant is vulnerable to a disease or an insect, they all are. Thus diseases or pests can rip through it like nobody’s business. (As John Scalzi observes in one of his books, it’s also why clone armies, popular in science fiction, are a bad idea in reality, as they would be highly vulnerable to engineered diseases.) A uniform population is a high-value target.

[…]

Codevilla wrote the essay [here] over a decade ago, and it has only grown more true in the interim. Despite its constant invocation of “diversity”, in many important ways our ruling class is much less diverse than it has ever been. And, as a monoculture, it is vulnerable to viruses of a sort. Including what amount to viruses of the mind.

When Elon Musk referred to the dangers of the “woke mind virus“, he knew exactly what he was talking about. Ideas can be contagious, and can be viewed as analogous to viruses, entities that reproduce by infecting individuals and coopting those individuals into spreading them to others. Richard Dawkins, in his The Selfish Gene, coined the term “meme” to describe these infectious ideas, though the term has since acquired a more popular meaning involving photos of cats, etc. with captions. And yet those pictures are themselves memes, to the extent they “go viral” and persuade others to copy and spread them.

Our ruling class is particularly vulnerable to mind viruses for several reasons. First, it is a monoculture, so that what is persuasive to one member is likely to be persuasive to many.

Second, it suffers from deep and widespread status anxiety – not least because most of its members have status, but few real accomplishments to rely on – and thus requires constant reassurance in the form of peer acceptance, reassurance that is generally achieved by repeating whatever the popular people are saying already. And third, it has few real deeply held values, which might otherwise provide guard rails of a sort against believing crazy things.

In a more diverse ruling class, ideas would not spread so swiftly or be received so uncritically. People with different worldviews would respond differently to ideas as they entered the world of discourse. There would be criticism and there would be debate. (Indeed, this is how things generally worked during the earlier, more diverse, era described by Codevilla, though intellectual fads – lobotomy, say, or eugenics – spread then, too, though mostly through the Gentry/Academic stratum of society that now dominates the ruling class.)

January 26, 2023

Are memes the natural communications channel of non-progressives?

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on having to explain memes to her husband:

His time is more limited, and his time off — he does the taxes for all the family businesses and I’m not the only one with three — usually ends up being spent researching HIS obsessions, like music or some obscure movie thing that fascinated him for no reason I can figure out, or something about early 20th century history.

But he definitely never hung out on political blogs. Which means when I’m trying to explain why something is immediately obvious — like, DIL in training doesn’t like to eat sandwiches, so I immediately said “But you’ll still make them for my son, right? Otherwise, it’s just unnatural” three of us laughed and my husband looked confused. Because “women as sandwich makers” was not part of his mental archive. And then I had to explain how it started in the blog fights of the early oughts — I end up, more often than not having to get galoshes and a spade and go digging, until he gets how we got here.

And then I suddenly feel a weird sympathy for the left and their absolute belief we use “dog whistles” and are in the middle of some form of conspiracy.

It’s not just that they can’t meme, or are humorless (though dear Lord, that’s part of it) but the inherent structure of politics in this country — and parts of the world, though they’re behind us by a few decades — makes the two sides very different in how they communicate.

The left STILL commands all the traditional communication channels. And because they are and assume they are the “accepted” mode of being in the culture — because they have the cultural megaphones from media to education, from government mechanisms (even when nominally not) to entertainment — they communicate in the open. They just slap their “I support thing” as virtue signaling over everything, plus some. They — and this is partly personality attracted to the side — seem to change their programming over night and all talk about “new thing” in unison.

This means their mode of communication is detached from reality (often) and rests on shaky ideological/economic foundations but it’s out in the open and blared from a megaphone.

They make jokes that aren’t jokes, merely pointing out they support the thing. And they say things they think will shock the right, but they have no clue what the right is or what would shock us.

They are in a way the young girl just released from a convent school trying to shock the kids in public school. They get weird looks. We understand them, but they don’t get us at all.

Meanwhile the right comes from years of silence. Years of being silenced, and not even being able to explain it to anyone. If I had a dime for every time I told someone in the nineties or oughts “yeah, most bestsellers are left because the right ones who are known to be so are stopped early” and got back “Nah, the left is more creative, because they’re anti-establishment and blah blah blah.” (HOW the left, in control of everything, is supposed to be anti-establishment is a good question. I mean, sure, they do a lot of things they think are shocking, but wouldn’t shock anyone who wasn’t born in my grandparent’s generation. Look, people, naked Shakespeare was OLD HAT when I was a kid in the late sixties. Now extrapolate from that.)

At least now most people know — it took Twitter, I think — that the right was being hard-silenced.

Which means most people my age who are the oldsters of the “we talk back” generation came to our own conclusions and thought we were crazy to dissent from what “everyone knew” for the longest time. No, really. We were out there, thinking we were along, but we could see no other way to make sense of things, so we stood. Alone, we thought.

A lot of my generation discovered they weren’t UTTERLY alone due to Rush Limbaugh. (I was never a big listener. I just am not. I don’t listen to podcasts, except maybe once a week. Even the audio books I listen to are usually things I already read. I don’t hear very well, and need to be sure I can “catch” what’s said, even if I miss some words.)

And most of us hit the nascent right blogosphere with two feet in the early oughts. Which is where a lot of the early memes like the “girls make sandwiches” meme comes from.

But the blogs, and particularly the blog comments, being a wild west type of atmosphere, where people who developed their opinions in isolation came together and figured out how it all fit for the first time, is a completely different form of communication from the top down, revealed truth talk on the left.

On the right, the clash between right feminist and right not particularly enthralled with feminism gave rise to “Make me a sandwich and get me a beer” as response to screeds on how you’re disrespecting some feminist shibboleth. (Particularly when women on the right hadn’t fully realized how much of the feminist “current thing” was really Marxism in a cute scarf and high heels.) And from that it got meme-fied into short hand, so you could drop a picture of an early 20th century mesmerist levitating a girl and label it “And like that this sandwich maker becomes an ironing board” and it was immediately funny, both poking fun at feminist outrage and the troglodytes or pseudo troglodytes (I’ve been known to be one of those) on our side who think women are inherently house-keepers. (And a lot of this is self-conscious mocking of the person by him/herself.)

We had to develop a sense of humor about our internal battles, including our own opinions, and we had to be able to communicate we weren’t ossified in our opinions really quickly, to prevent minor disagreements becoming blog or alliance shattering wars.

A lot of memes come from that. Because they can communicate “Yeah, this is what I think, kind of, but I’m aware it’s also funny.” Or “This is how I see your opinion. Care to clarify” in — usually — a non-offensive, quick-hit manner. A manner that allows the other person to come back with “Yabut–” Or “Funny, but in fact–”

The left doesn’t do that, because no scrapping allowed in the ranks. They value unity and directives come from above.

Beyond giving them a tragic inability to meme (Seriously, we should start a fund to send them to meme school) it also leaves them with the conviction that the right is always speaking in “dog whistles” or “code” and that we’re plotting horrible and scarifying violence against them, in these bizarre coded words.

July 25, 2022

Political memes: threat or menace?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Christopher J. Ferguson considers the social dangers of sharing political memes:

Modern politics has always been replete with issues about which people feel passionate, sometimes aggressively so. But the culture wars currently raging in the US, Canada, and across much of the industrialized West seem to be particularly fraught. In my 50-plus years, I have never seen so much anger and hostility among citizens of otherwise stable countries. Some of these people will participate in protests or engage in civil disobedience, but many more will employ the political meme to express their discontent. Given how widespread the phenomenon has become, it’s worth asking whether political memes actually advance advocacy goals and our knowledge of important issues, or if they simply feed an unconstructive cycle of anger, misinformation, and polarization.

The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, who used it to describe units of culture, socially transmitted and imitated across generations in ways synonymous with genes — adaptive ideas survive, while maladaptive ideas perish. But in the social media age, the word usually refers to “an image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users often with slight variations”. The subset of memes that focus on politics are generally designed to boil complex issues down to a digestible combination of emotive image and sloganeering text that flatters those who agree with its message and provokes those who do not.

Most academics who study memes agree that they are poisonous to healthy public discourse (“toxic” is a word that crops up a lot, even in the scholarly literature). One scholar bluntly called them “one of the main vehicles for misinformation”, and they tend to distort reality in several ways. By their very nature, they leave no room for nuance or complexity, and so they are frequently misleading; they tend to lean heavily on scornful condescension and moral sanctimony (usually, the intended takeaway is that anyone who agrees with the point of view being — inaccurately — mocked is an imbecile); they make copious use of ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, and motte-and-bailey arguments; they intentionally catastrophize, generalize, personalize, and encourage dichotomous thinking; and they are aggressive and sometimes dehumanizing. They are, in other words, methods of Internet communication that display all the symptoms of a borderline personality type of mental disorder. Of course, it’s possible to construct a meme that is short yet still thoughtful and sophisticated, but these are few and far between.

The best evidence we have today is incomplete and limited, but it suggests that political memes have a net negative effect on society. If the idea is to persuade or advance practical advocacy goals, then there is little evidence that they work. To the contrary, they may be counterproductive — the evidence we do have suggests that they contribute to political polarization, distort issues in the name of political expediency, and provoke indignation, hatred, and intolerance (on both sides of the political spectrum). Yes, the available evidence is fragmentary and would certainly benefit from better and more open science designs. However, it accords with larger observations about social media and political polarization. Perhaps new and better research will reveal that alarm about the negative effects of memes is simply another moral panic comparable to those that arose around video games or smoking in movies. But since memes add almost nothing to public discourse that would offset the risks, it’s probably worth hesitating before sharing them.

I save the odd meme that wanders through my various social media sites that I find amusing or (occasionally) effective, and memes as described in this article certainly do seem to be far more common than they were even a few years ago. A few selections below the fold, just because:

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