White reactionaries have always used whatever power and framing they could to resist any perceived threats to their idealized white identities.
Same with idealized masculine identities. And class identities, even if you’re not a member of that class. It’s about how you see yourself, not who you actually are. Poor people of color support white male billionaires because they see themselves as part of that aspirational gestalt. Better to feel aligned with the “winning” oppressors than the “loser” oppressed. Avoid that “victim mentality”.
So if all you have as a sense of self is this fantasy of supremacy, not only based on nothing, but even in the face of overwhelming reality to the contrary, and you refuse to face that these things are completely fabricated, you’ll break your brain trying to defend them.
It’s like sports fans – you’re not on the field, no one on the team is from where you live, nothing about your team says or has anything to do with you or who you are. But people literally kill for that shit, because they adopt that supremacy-by-proxy identity of “fan” as their whole identity.
“Bro, they won because I wore this hat all year. I’m helping, How dare you talk shit, I will kill you for disrespecting the (checks notes) Las Vegas Raiders.”
None of this shit is real. We make it up, and we redefine it however we want. And getting genocidally angry at the ghost story that anything is being lost as we evolve is just psychotic.
Our whole world seems to be built on generations that have nothing inside their heads or their hearts but a ruthless drive to hurt others to feel superior like a twelve year old teabagging an opponent in Call of Duty.
Everything sucks because these aren’t real boys, Pinnicchio, it’s all idealized external signifiers like race, gender, class, etc, these fucking sports teams of identity, these idiot costumes from entrepreneur-in-bio to alpha male to Spiritual Prayer Warrior to Constitutional Patriot and none of it has any basis in reality, and has no real structural integrity.
Being consistent or cogent doesn’t matter. All that matters is performing the identity over and over for that sweet validation, and that delicious conflict so you can feel like you’re “winning” all the time, because that’s literally the only thing you can feel. Doesn’t matter that your “argument” is easily debunked bullshit, as long as you can pretend to “win” or “trigger the Libs” to validate that mix of persecution fetish and supremacy fantasy.
Capitalism wants to sell us anything that triggers our id, our immediate and feral needs, and get us as addicted as possible to satisfying our most base desires. Whether that’s porn, ice cream, or political outrage and identity fantasies. And so here we are, with on-demand delivery of all those things.
Capitalism wants identity cults, so that buying an overpriced t shirt with a brand logo makes you feel cool as fuck boi or that buying some artificially scarce collectible to dunk on your friends is not only “normal”, but it’s part of your identity to spend three days in line for a fucking Labubu drop.
We’re obsessed with being obsessed, and we are trained to want to perform our “winning” every second of every day, with Jeep or Supreme being as vital to our identity as whiteness or masculinity.
It is an immature, undeveloped structure of self that is easily manipulated by appealing to your ego, and everything in this world feeds it. It’s the basis of the algorithm that does not care if it sells us soda or Nazism, as long as we buy it.
And the more feral and immediate our response, the more incentivized they are to sell us that thing. So…long form thought piece on the nuances of complex policy involving funding plans and tax rates? Or OMG IMMIGRANT KILLS BLONDE LADY YOU COULD BE NEXT?
Grifters like Chaya Raichik, Riley Gaines, and Matt Walsh, desperately trying to leverage a single point of outrage porn into millions of dollars are following the same script as billionaire-funded institutions like the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society.
Charlie Kirk was an absolute hack, being debunked regularly by anyone who wasn’t a nervous 19 year old. No one feared or hated him. He was a joke among the actual critical thinking crowd. Yes, a racist, reactionary pest, but no one is actually better off in his absence. His widow is as much a grifting con artist as he was. The identities they prey upon remain untouched.
Now, as we have said, the Left is not immune to this garbage. The Tumblr Left, Tankies, and the weird pro-gun Left have their own idealized, delusional reactionary identity cults. But there’s a fundamental difference in what they fight for. Sure, absurd language policing and “decolonize your Netflix queue” are cringe, but the outcome is that we get universal health care and affordable housing, not ICE assaulting grandmas in the streets.
Progress is not just recognizing that the world is drastically unfair based on some shitty, made up bullshit that doesn’t stand up to the slightest critical thinking, it’s growing up to understand that we are all connected and we’re all responsible for each other, at least to some basic level.
And letting some malignant narcissist unleash his pet sociopaths to ethnically cleanse a population of largely innocent people to torture gulags to be able to crow about “winning” and “I voted for this” or some ketamine-fueled psycho send a bunch of 8Chan pedo gooners to commit a HoloDOGEmor in cutting off vital aid to the most vulnerable populations on earth just because it makes his tiny pee pee tingle to imagine kids dying without food or vaccines, well that’s just the beginning of a never-ending cycle of genocidal bloodlust to feed an identity cult that has no relationship to reality.
Imagine being so obsessed with the Oklahoma Thunder that you wanted them to leave the arena and start murdering people in the streets. That’s literally what’s going on here.
From trans people to progressives to “Demoncrats” to actual ethnic cleansing, using State violence to feed this murderous, genocidal sports team identity of race, gender, class, and ideological supremacy is a completely fabricated delusion that is not only unsustainable, but fatal to us all.
They don’t care about these issues, they don’t care about each other, they don’t care that 234,000 Americans died preventable deaths from COVID, they don’t care that tariffs are killing farmers and small business, they don’t care that housing prices are skyrocketing, or that private equity wants to buy our public utilities, or that AI and crypto – two technologies developed to make child porn and pay for child porn, respectively – are an unregulated bubble larger than the mortgage backed securities bubble that crashed the entire global economy in 2008.
They don’t care. They don’t care about anything but a feverish devotion to the performative cruelty and State violence that feeds their delusional, idealized identities, and there is no point at which they’ll be satisfied.
They will not stop, they must be stopped.
Kelsoland.Institute 