A Ghost in the Machine by Daniel D

In this episode, we discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media. What are the benefits of online interactions, and how do we keep those benefits, while minimizing the costs?

The Good

G.K. Chesterton observed that older technology tends to perform many functions, whereas the new technology that replaces it tends to take only one of those functions and perform it extremely well, while ignoring all the other goods produced by the older tech. An example he gave was the modern light bulb providing better light than a fire, but with very little of the warmth. In an analogous way, social media more efficiently facilitates certain limited goods, even as it misses many of the other goods that are characteristic of offline social interactions. Nevertheless, these limited goods that social media does provide are still a real benefit that could be lost if one avoided social media altogether.

For example, if you’re an INTJ, you probably realized long ago that your personality type is rare (around 2% of the population) and that most people’s brains don’t work like yours. At all. This can make in-person social interactions frustrating — until you learn not to expect others to share your interests, and you develop a knack for doing the whole “How to Win Friends and Influence People” thing of mostly just talking to others about the kinds of things that they find interesting (usually this means small talk about sportsball, the weather, traffic, etc.). But even if you learn the art of navigating social interactions with normies, you still crave discussions about things that you find interesting, so you have to find your fellow INTJs, autists, schizoids, etc. Since we’re only about 2% of the population, this can get difficult as you get older and Life fills up your calendar with social obligations geared towards normies. So what provides a decent makeshift alternative? Social media, of course! And this is a very real good that I certainly appreciate in my own life, even as I struggle sometimes to find the balance between being socially engaged online and offline.

The Bad

The balance between online and offline can be hard to find, and this is exacerbated by the fact that very smart and shrewd people, chasing the so-called “almighty dollar” (in God we trust, but which God?), have made it their lives’ work to engineer social media to be as addictive as possible. They are very well-funded (their paymasters seem to be closely connected to, and tightly aligned with, the central bankster wizards). They have the best technology at their disposal. And they have used decades of black magic research into propaganda and behavioral science to turn our screens into mind-altering and highly addictive drugs. Thus, it is extraordinarily difficult to restrict one’s online engagement to only that which is legitimately beneficial.

As the comedian Louis C.K. once observed, when talking about people who watch concerts and sportsball games through the screens of their phones, “Hey, real Life is happening in HD right in front of you!”

And the Ugly

And then there’s the really ugly. For example, if you never went online, you wouldn’t ever accidentally poison your eyes and traumatize your psyche with grotesque images like this one:

But at least we can use the alchemical processes of Comedy to transmute that traumatic ugliness into something funny and enjoyable. And speaking of Lizzo, did you have any idea just how fat she is?

Turns out, Lizzo so fat, her belly button be bigger than a black man hubcaps on his hoopty! (Her belly button don’t be spinnin like dem hubcabs do, though!)

But seriously, folks … Hope you enjoy this episode. If you’re listening to this on a podcast app or streaming platform, then be sure to visit the Substack Page for this episode, so you can see the embedded media (including the memes about how fat Lizzo be), and let me know what you think in the comment section, and — if you really want to be a pal — kindly subscribe to my Substack, so I can keep bringing you my interesting insights and absurd humor. ¡Adiós, mis bichos raros! (That’s Spanish for, Goodbye or God be with ye, my fellow weirdos!) Note: if you’re a normie, you’re probably in the wrong place, but that’s okay; stick around, and see what you’ve been missing out on …

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader and listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here we are, crashing through another one of Chesterton’s fences, with Tim Walz leading the way. In this episode, we discuss the significance of Walz remaining on the ticket, despite the fact that he has been caught lying — or at the very least, making deceptive insinuations and exaggerations — about his military service (or lack thereof).

Once upon a time, if the public found out that you had committed adultery, your political career was over, as Gary Hart discovered in 1987. Then came Bill Clinton, and he completely normalized cheating on your spouse (and lying about it afterwards) to the point that essentially no one cares about it anymore. Is Tim Walz doing to stolen valor what Bill Clinton did to adultery?

Less than ten years ago, NBC news anchor Brian Williams falsely claimed to have been on a helicopter in Iraq that got hit by an RPG. Due to public outcry, he was placed on leave and eventually demoted. Keep in mind that Williams was a news anchor, not a candidate for Vice President. Tim Walz has falsely claimed to have carried weapons of war in war, and he at the very least strongly implied that he had been in Iraq with the Minnesota National Guard. There was some public outcry, mostly on the Right, but he’s still Kamala Harris’s running mate (about the only person she could find to make her look better by comparison), and most of the institutional media that have covered the story have done so only to tell you why it’s really not a big deal.

Chris Bray has written some great posts about Walz, including this one about the speech in which Walz claimed to have been in Iraq (at an air base that was actually located in Afghanistan):

Here’s what Walz’s fellow National Guardsmen had to say about him:

Is this just one more “Chesterton’s fence” that our clown car of a country will crash through and break completely down? Are there any non-negotiable moral commitments that clownworld Americans still have? Are there any violations at which voters will draw a line in the sand and say, finally and emphatically, no, this cannot stand? Where does this end?

[Note: If you’re listening to this on a podcast app or streaming platform, check out the Substack page for this episode at https://aghostinthemachine.substack.com/p/crashing-through-chestertons-fence in order to view embedded media and what not.

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader and listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This podcast episode is a bit of an experiment: I explore Substack’s home page as it appears to someone new to the platform. What kinds of posts and notes are at the top of the page? What kinds of ideas and perspectives appear to be promoted? If you said “all the latest clownworld craziness,” you are correct.

Basically, it’s like there’s a factory where regime narratives are mass produced and then shipped out to the various media platforms, including Substack, where they can be mindlessly consumed by Yass Kweens and Commie Karens.

There’s the obligatory “Trump is literally Hitler” pieces, like this gem:

The author’s bio and profile pic look exactly like you’d expect:

Then there are puff pieces for Tim Walz, who is apparently campaigning to be America’s Dad, and who demonstrates his commitment to family values by making sure school libraries include books about anal sex and transgenderism:

So in this episode, we discuss the kinds of content Substack’s algorithm shows new arrivals and what that might mean, both for the upcoming election and for the long-term viability of the culture. There is a silver lining in this.

Note: if you are listening to this on a podcast app or streaming platform, visit the Substack page for this episode, so you can see the embedded media and what not: https://aghostinthemachine.substack.com/p/see-how-the-other-half-of-substack.

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader and listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this episode, we discuss (1) last week’s Presidential debate between Donald “Insult Comic” Trump and Kamala “Yass Kween” Harris, (2) the cat-eating, voodoo-practicing Haitian bioweapons who have become the avatars for the Kalergi-planned replacement immigration happening throughout the West, and (3) the bigger picture of a civilizational hostage crisis. How does all of this fit together? Listen and find out!

The TL;DL (too long; didn’t listen) is that if you paid attention to the debate, you could see the areas of difference between the candidates (e.g., crime and immigration) and the areas of agreement (American support for Israel). These data points, in conjunction with the latest cultural conflagrations over the World War II narrative, shed some interesting light on the burgeoning intra-elite conflict.

As Neoliberal Feudalism puts it, there is a level of coordination happening above the level of the nation state: an organized crime syndicate of magicians managing the monetary system. As I noted in a previous post, a counter-elite seems to be forming. No, these are not regular people trying to stamp out organized crime and RETVRN to some kind of utopia of complete local and personal sovereignty. Yes, these counter elites are themselves part of the mafia that runs the world, albeit junior partners in that mafia. And yes, they will employ their own deceitful rhetoric and pretend to care more about us than they really do. Nevertheless, their emergence as a viable counter elite is a good thing for (at least) two reasons.

First, they are not pointlessly cruel like their senior partners — please note that I did not say they are not cruel, only that they are not pointlessly cruel, and that is a meaningful difference. It’s like the difference between a sadistic gangster who enforces humiliation rituals on people just to flaunt his power over them, and a Mafia Godfather who, as long as you pay the protection money, will actually protect you and, as long as you come correct, he will even listen when you tell him about your problem and will do something to help you. Right now, the senior partners in our civilization’s governing mafia absolutely despise non-Jewish whites and Christians, and they will go out of their way to degrade and destroy them and then spit on them to add insult to injury. The Godfather is still a bad dude, but he is preferable to the kind of mobsters who are lording it over us now. The Godfather just wants to run his racket profitably; the current cabal wants to try out ever more bizarre and brutal ways to torture and kill the Goyim. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the Godfather.

Second, as long as the elites are fighting among themselves — even if they are only fighting over which of them will be the top mob boss, just so long as they are fighting each other — they will have to devote some portion of their time, attention, and resources to dealing with threats from their fellow elites. Therefore, they cannot devote their undivided attention or spend all of their time and resources crushing us regular people. That can only be a good thing. Maybe it’s only a small break, but we need all the breaks we can get right now.

The senior partners in the ruling mafia have a particular mythology that buttresses their power and keeps their subjects enthralled. We’re in a psychological prison, if you will, and many of us have developed some form of Stockholm Syndrome. As part of this inter-elite competition, the rising counter elites are allowing and even promoting the kinds of questions and objections that will push the Overton Window into a place where the regime’s founding myths can be questioned. Does this mean the counter elites all have noble intentions and are pursuing the Truth disinterestedly? No, they have an agenda, although some of the thinkers and pundits they make use of may be sincere truth-seekers. But the senior partners of this ruling mafia — the ones who have been increasingly overconfident and therefore openly and pointlessly cruel towards their subject populations — are freaking out about this shift in the Overton Window and the pent-up cultural forces that are now straining against and threatening to burst through the seams of their cultural control matrix. Nobody knows exactly how this will play out, but the introduction of chaos into a system that has been 100% weaponized against us can only be a good thing. We are truly living in interesting times (to put it mildly).

In this post, I cite or mention the following written posts and video content, which you should definitely check out:

* Neoliberal Feudalism’s excellent, very nuanced posts about the coordination taking place above the level of the nation state and about the complicated relationship between the central bank owners and the Jewish people.

* L.P. Koch’s post about the recent brouhaha over people questioning Churchill’s intentions and the conventional World War II narrative, and his extraordinarily thoughtfully articulated post about Hitler being the ultimate Rorschach Test.

* Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper.

Available on X: https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1830652074746409246

Available on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v5dd5np-darryl-cooper-the-true-history-of-the-jonestown-cult-wwii-and-how-winston-c.html

* Tyler Oliveira’s video of his on-the-ground investigative journalism about the mass Haitian immigration problem in Springfield, Ohio.

* My own recent post on the signs of a rising counter elite and what that means for us regular folk.

* And my Note (in reply to L.P. Koch’s post) about Konstantin Kisin’s bad faith straw manning of Darryl Cooper.

If you’re listening to this on a podcast app or streaming platform, visit the substack page for this episode to view embedded media and to share your thoughts in the comment section!

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader and listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Wow, this thing is starting to turn into a real podcast! This time, I even have a real guest, Mark Bisone !

Mark writes the always interesting and incredibly insightful blog The Cat Was Never Found. If you haven’t read his work, you’re missing out, so subscribe already!

We have a fun and thought-provoking conversation about Christianity, the recent infighting between Christians and pagans on the “dissident right,” spiritual warfare, the search for Truth in a world of deceptions, etc. Hope you enjoy!

If you’re listening to this on a podcast app or streaming platform, be sure to visit the post for this episode on Substack, so you can share your thoughts in the comment section!

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader and listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this episode, we discuss the magic of “White Privilege.” Recently, I had an interlocutor of color raise my mythical “white privilege” as a red herring objection in a debate on an unrelated topic. This got me thinking about the way racialized concepts are used to mislead, manipulate, and gaslight people, and what the method to this Marxist madness might be.

The reality is, concepts like “white privilege” are part of a sophisticated PsyOp that is effective on multiple levels at once. Of course, there’s the obvious dialectical impact it has on the Overton Window and how certain issues are framed. There’s also the asymmetry of it: guerilla moralists can just pick up these incoherent, insane stock phrases like so many pieces of shit lying around our cultural monkey house, and then fling them wildly and repeatedly at everyone else. The effort they spend flinging shit is minimal; the shit is cheap and abundant. If you respond to all this Marxcissist shit-flinging with good-faith arguments or by trying to dodge as much of it as you can, you are expending a disproportionate amount of time, effort, and attention responding to them, which is a losing strategy in the long-term.

More subtle than these effects, however, are the ways in which these Marxist concepts encourage you to adopt a one-dimensional perspective about yourself and others, and this is where the poison of leftist ideologies is especially dangerous. When you debate the validity of the enemies’ (really the Enemy’s and his useful idiots’) concepts, you are essentially arguing about shadows on the cave wall, rather than engaging with a deeper reality that is available to us. And if you get into a heated debate about these Marxist ideas, you will — even if just on an emotional, subconscious level — reinforce your identification with these insubstantial shadows.

This doesn’t mean that you should just accept the claims that Marxcissists make, or that you should allow their claims to go unchallenged when they’re presented in the public square, but you should remain aware of the fact that you are dealing with a sophisticated PsyOp laden with some subtle pitfalls for the unwary. Know thyself, and recognize the effect that it has on you, especially if you choose to engage with it.

If you’re interested in my own take on white identity politics, I wrote a fun and lighthearted post on the topic:

Treating the dialectical tricks of cultural Marxism like the absurd joke that they are is a healthy way to deal with them, but whatever your response is, be aware of your own perspective and the elements shaping your identity. Be a conscientious rejector of Marxist materialism. Remember that you are a spiritual being with the incipient potential for connection with God.

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader and listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this episode, we discuss the Right-Wing cancellation mobs and the infighting among folks in the dissident Right (such as it is) about whether we should encourage that sort of thing or be above using the petty tactics of our enemies. To paraphrase Chris Rock’s classic bit about the OJ Simpson murder trial, I’m not saying Libs-of-TikTok should have doxxed her, but I understand.

As the Bible says, “You reap what you sow.” Or as English folk wisdom says, “What goes around comes around.” Or as New Age Hippies and Indian Gurus say, “Karma.” I don’t have to be the one inflicting the consequences of a person’s beliefs and practices onto her, but I also don’t have to feel bad about it when it happens.

In this episode, I reference various takes on this issue from folks like John Carter, Librarian of Celaeno, and Holly’s Substack, with links to their posts below. (If you are listening to this on a podcast app or streaming platform, visit the Substack post for this episode to see embedded content):

* Right Wing Cancel Squads - by John Carter

* To Cancel the Cancellers - by Librarian of Celaeno

* In Which I Resign from Political Commentary — by Holly Mathnerd

So what do you think? Let me know in the comments, and if you enjoyed this episode, kindly like and re-stack. And a huge “thank-you” to my subscribers, especially those who pay me to do this stuff!

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If Friedrich Nietzsche is the “Gamma Philosopher,” as Vox Day called him in a recent post, then G K Chesterton is the Anti-Gamma Philosopher. This isn’t to say that Chesterton was an Alpha or Sigma — he definitely wasn’t. To all appearances, he was not especially virile; he was nerdy, unathletic, and could be a bit slovenly in his everyday appearance; he definitely wasn’t handsome or any kind of ladies’ man; and although he eventually married, his wife was a thoroughly plain jane rather than any kind of beauty queen. Chesterton clearly had gamma potential, but he appears to have ended up a good-natured, well-adjusted, and highly successful man. For that reason alone, Gammas and potential Gammas should read him.

How did Chesterton avoid becoming a Gamma, when he didn’t lift, didn’t become a deadly MMA fighter with an intimidating aura, didn’t become the captain of his school’s football team with the prettiest cheerleaders all vying for his attention, and didn’t become a skilled pickup artist with a long list of enviable conquests? I think his secret lies in his witty observation, “Angels can fly, because they take themselves lightly.”

The tl;dl (Too Long; Didn’t Listen) of this episode is that Chesterton took himself lightly; Nietzsche did not. You could easily imagine Chesterton being roasted by a panel of comedians and laughing more than anyone else. You could imagine Chesterton thoroughly enjoying the jokes being made at his expense and then topping them, both with self-deprecating humor and by giving as well as he got and roasting the very people who were roasting him, and it would have all been done in a spirit of expansive cheer and friendly fun. Chesterton had a quick and nimble wit and a jovial spirit and could have won any audience over to his side. He was not a gamma-esque “secret king,” so he would have been free of the need for others to give him the honor and deference due a king.

You can imagine Chesterton rolling with the punches and having a deep belly laugh at his own expense. You can hardly imagine Nietzsche doing the same. Nietzsche held too many grudges and nursed too many resentments and took himself far too seriously to ever truly let himself go and cheerfully laugh even when he was the butt of the joke. Nietzsche was too smart and thought too highly of himself to live a normal Delta life doing normal Delta things. He was the “secret king” incarnate, and he seriously “believed in himself” like the maniac Chesterton describes in the second chapter of Orthodoxy (in which he recounts a conversation with a publisher friend of his about whether it is good to believe in oneself):

I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.

This passage cuts straight to the heart of the matter. “I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men.” And what secret kings would Chesterton and his friend have found sitting there, atop these “thrones of the Super-men,” in the imaginary castles nestled in the dismal corners of a dilapidated insane asylum? Nietzsche and his ilk.

What answer does Chesterton give to this solipsistic monomania? Not logical arguments, where the flawed premises of self-worship and bitter resentment are left intact, but rather a complete shift in attitude and perspective: renouncing one’s secret kingship and embracing one’s status as a human being, subject to the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth." Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!"

(Note: for a different perspective on Nietzsche, check out John Carter’s excellent post The Prophet of the Twentieth Century.)

And if you want to tell me why I got your favorite philosopher all wrong and what a Gamma I obviously am, kindly click on this button …

… And let me know all about it in the comment section.

And whether you love Nietzsche or hate him, or (and Nietzsche would find this last possibility most intolerable of all) whether you really don’t care one way or the other about him or his philosophy, be sure to read G.K. Chesterton, especially his books Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. If you’re listening on a podcast app or streaming platform, check out the substack page for this episode to get embedded content (which usually doesn’t display properly on third-party sites).

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader and listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Brilliant and sophisticated young people come up with brilliant and sophisticated schemes for reforming the human race; unforeseen disasters ensue … That’s pretty much the story of Marxism, progressivism, etc.

In response to disasters caused by leftist social engineering, the brilliant and sophisticated young people on the (so-called) dissident Right — folks like Walt Bismarck and Richard Hanania — have their own brilliant and sophisticated ideas for social engineering. Such schemes cannot possibly backfire, because these progressives on the dissident Right have better motives and smarter ideas, than those misguided progressives on the Left did, right? Wrong.

The solution to leftist top-down progressivism is not right-wing top-down progressivism. It’s Distributism. It’s breaking up concentrations of power and promoting, as much as is practicable, ownership and decision-making at the lowest possible level of the social and economic hierarchy. A nation of owners and decision-makers is free; a nation of renters and employees and voters in huge elections (where all the candidates have bent the knee to AIPAC and to the central banksters) is bound to be enslaved. That’s the real lesson from “the American experiment.” If the Right intends to seize and to use the Left’s tools — i.e., the machinery of the Total State — it should do so only to destroy those tools as much as possible, so that no one can use those tools to abuse America’s citizens ever again.

“Oh, but when we get control of the one ring to rule them all, we’ll use it benevolently,” the Richard Hanania’s and Walt Bismarck’s of the online Right assure us. I’m sure Hanania and Bismarck are smart — they’re certainly much smarter than me. And I’m sure they mean well — just like all the high-minded reformers who promoted things like federally-backed student loans and “restorative justice” and “no child left behind” and all kinds of other noble-sounding schemes. And I’m sure that Hanania and Bismarck have just as much skin in the game as those past reformers did, which is to say they have absolutely no skin in the game — meaning that they won’t be accountable for any of the unforeseen costs of their reforms. Nobody, not even Richard Hanania and Walt Bismarck, is smart or competent enough to successfully manage the human race from on high. There are too many variables, too much complexity, too much dynamism, for any one person or group to wargame everything out. The only way to responsibly use the one ring to rule them all is to destroy it at the earliest opportunity.

The dissident Right cannot out-social engineer the social engineers on the Left. That’s a losing strategy. The answer is Distributism.

Use centralized power to break up concentrations of power and distribute it as widely as possible. Break the central banks (and the cartels that run them) into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind. Defund and abolish the three-letter agencies, especially the regime’s spooks and secret police.

Let ICE be the last federal agency left standing, use its manpower and resources to deport everyone who’s immigrated here in the past 10 years (at least), and then shut ICE down too. Any future invasions shall be treated as an act of war, and the invaders repelled at the border — by any means necessary.

End dual citizenship (looking at you, Israelis). To paraphrase Jesus of Nazareth,

No one can serve two countries. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both America and Israel.

RETVRN, not to the original Constitution, but to the Articles of Confederation.

Let cultural reforms arise organically, in a bottom-up fashion. Lead the way in your own local area by promoting bottom-up reforms using local resources and local organizations. What works in one locale can be copied elsewhere. What doesn’t work can be better addressed locally, because everyone involved will be closer to the problem and will be far likelier to have skin in the game than social engineers operating at the national level.

National and global reformers, with access to national or international resources and organizations, can afford “luxury beliefs” in a way that local reformers, relying only on local resources and local organizations, cannot. We cannot afford luxury beliefs anymore; we cannot afford any more social engineering from on high.

If Distributism is impractical, then so are all the sophisticated top-down social engineering schemes, whether proposed by the progressives on the Left or the progressives on the so-called Right. If the Right can gain control of the one ring to rule them all, then the best thing to do is destroy it, grind the fragments into the tiniest pieces possible, and then distribute those pieces to the most local, most fundamental levels of society that we can.

If you’re on a podcast app or streaming platform, visit the Substack post for this episode at https://aghostinthemachine.substack.com/p/trying-to-out-social-engineer-the-left to see embedded articles and other media.

Here is Walt Bismarck’s post, How to Castrate the Left:

Here is Dave Greene’s reply to Bismarck’s post:

Here is Bismarck’s reply to Greene’s reply:

And here is Greene’s reply to Bismarck’s reply to Greene’s reply:

And finally, here is Alexandru Constantin’s reply to them all:

Thanks for listening and reading. (And if you prefer written posts to audio podcasts, don’t worry, regular posts will resume shortly — got a few different pieces in the pipeline now …) Be a pal and like and subscribe and re-stack and all that. Thanks!

A Ghost in the Machine is a reader and listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to episode 34 of A Ghost in the Machine Podcast, featuring a Father’s Day message that is simple and straightforward: “Fatherhood, just do it!”

Yes, our culture is criminally insane and the institutions and incentives are all arrayed *against* the formation of happy, healthy families, so yes, you will definitely have to swim upstream against a very strong current. Yes, it’s incredibly expensive and probably seems unaffordable. Yes, it will involve substantial risk to you personally, especially given how anti-Man the “family law” regime is. And yes, you should totally do it anyway.

Here’s the rough time-stamps for this episode:

* 0:00 to around 2:49: Introduction;

* 2:50 to around 7:05: Some general housekeeping notes, future plans for the podcast, upcoming episodes, etc.; and (finally!)

* 7:06 to the end: Thoughts on Fatherhood and why you should take the leap and just do it, if you haven’t already.

In discussing fatherhood, I specifically reference Johann Kurtz’s Note (embedded below):

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