Title: Failure to Launch
Subtitle: The end of playbooks
Have you ever seen the episode of The Simpsons where Homer Simpson becomes a boxer? Moe discovers that Homer has an unusually thick skull, so he puts him in the ring. Homer keeps winning, not because he’s skilled, but because his opponents get exhausted punching him in the head. Eventually, they wear themselves out, and Homer just pushes them over.
That feels analogous to what I see happening to the American public over the last few years.
In my opinion, the United States was supposed to have a full-blown revolution during the BLM riots of 2021. The conditions were there: widespread anger, media and institutions providing what looked like unconditional support, political support, and a fog of war that had most white people reeling, even today.
After Occupy Wall Street, for example, several journalists noted a dramatic shift in media and institutional reforms, pointing out massive spikes in Google Trends for words like slavery, racism, and related terms. The university I work at completely changed its policies toward DEI during that period, prioritizing diversity frameworks over traditional merit-based criteria.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there is ample historical racism that deserves serious discussion. One of the authors who most shaped my thinking on this is Thomas Sowell, who has written extensively about the downstream effects of the Great Society programs of the 1960s. He argues that after the Jim Crow era, Black communities were trending upward economically, much like other immigrant groups in America, but that this trend reversed as incentives shifted under those programs (primarily welfare which incentives single motherhood). Many intellectuals on the left, including figures like Noam Chomsky, broadly supported the Great Society framework, which I view as, at the very least, deeply sus.
Anyway, I think the BLM riots were meant to become a full-blown revolution, every bit on the scale of past revolutions. Instead, something else happened entirely. Like Homer Simpson, society simply absorbed blow after blow. Over time, the energy dissipated.
Let’s be honest: our society is far more docile than previous generations. We live in a world of comfort, abstraction, and hyper-specialization. Many of us, myself included, would struggle to survive the conditions that were routine for people in the 1940s. And that may actually be a good thing in some respects. What I think is actually happening is that all the playbooks are no longer relavent and there is a scramble to figure out how to navigate this new landscape.
Will European wheat have an effect on Bret Weinstein? This is Part II of his European experiment, the results.
Watch Part I: https://rumble.com/v6pns8o-is-bret-allergic-to-european-wheat.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
Dr. Bret Weinstein is running an experiment on himself. After a decade of avoiding wheat he has tried eating it while in Spain. In this update video he explains how he has been feeling and answers common questions around glyphosate and dry fasting.
Watch more on the topic of glyphosate and dry fasting from Bret and Heather:
It’s not Complicated: The 230th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying https://rumble.com/v52it2i-the-230th-evolutionary-lens-with-bret-weinstein-and-heather-heying.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
Think Fast: The 252nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying https://rumble.com/v5rcks8-the-252nd-evolutionary-lens-with-bret-weinstein-and-heather-heying.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
No live stream today, instead Bret is running an experiment from Spain.
Do you have a wheat allergy? Have you been able to eat wheat in Europe without the symptoms you experience in America? After a decade without intentionally eating wheat, Bret Weinstein is running an experiment while visiting Spain - will the European wheat cause the same symptoms he experiences when stateside?
Watch more on the topic of allergies and vaccines from Bret and Heather:
Mr. Jones and Me: Nathan Jones on DarkHorse
https://youtu.be/anC_au3HhdA?si=rNhk6_SUzF0lsgI1&t=1781
Bret and Heather 180th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Allergies, Adjuvants, & Affirmative Action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Ra_qW470w?si=G9BTq7Nv3WusHR2-&t=1968
Joe Rogan Experience #2198 - Bret Weinstein https://youtu.be/iOQdjgdRcfA?si=d-hVtgZ54MZ96Jdn&t=5664
Bret talks to Russell Brand in the wake of his Baptism.
Find Russell on X: @rustyrockets (https://x.com/rustyrockets)
Find Russell on Rumble: https://rumble.com/russellbrand
Moink: Delicious grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken, and wild caught Alaskan salmon. Visit www.moinkbox.com/darkhorse to get a year’s worth of bacon free when you sign up.
Title: Melisandre the Red Woman
Subtitle: How she captured my imagination
At first, I hated Melisandre, the Red Woman, an ominous priestess demanding blood sacrifice and using dark rituals in service of Stannis Baratheon, whom she believes to be a prophesied savior. Early on, I thought she was the devil: willing to burn the innocent, convinced that her god’s will justified any atrocity.
But her character became interesting to me once the threat of the White Walkers became known. In that moment, she spared the life of Davos Seaworth, Stannis’s Hand. That moment really struck me when, the pragmatism behind her decisions and how she completely recalculated everything upon learning of the threat of the north.
From then on, Melisandre became one of my favorite characters. As much as I hated her, it became clear that she wasn’t acting out of emotion or hatred, but out of an ideological belief, and at a level that I will never understand, that at some level, she believed she was doing what had ...
Leviathan’s Mal-adapted Immune Response
I think what I see in society, and in individuals, including myself, is a kind of hyper-sensitized moral immune system: one that reacts aggressively to certain forms of bigotry while remaining apathetic toward others. For example, I see open hostility toward Muslims or Somalians while the U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, delivers a speech addressing the expulsion of a student at Florida State University for verbally attacking another student who was wearing an IDF shirt.
What I think may be happening to our society is that we have been given social vaccines repeatedly throughout our lives. Our moral outrage has been trained, or conditioned, to be hyper-focused in some directions and largely inactive in others. And, to be honest, if there were a button that many of my friends could press that would instantly remove every Russian from the planet, I think some of them would press it without hesitation.
So why do I bring this up? Because a maladapted social immune ...
