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[Note: the following story is fictional. Sort of. Read to the end for an explanation.]
My name is Cynthia Goldblatt. Cynthia Goldblatt. Cynthia Goldblatt. I am this person. I must respond to this name, even a split-second delay could give the game away. No, I thought, I’m worrying too much. If I ever fail to respond to my name, I’ll just laugh and say my brain was fried by watching YouTube shorts.
I had considered dying my hair black to fit better with my obnoxiously Jewish name. But I decided against it, for if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the American far-right, it’s that they have terrible J-dar. If anyone comments on my “Aryan” appearance, I’ll tell them I’m “half-Jewish.” I am the stereotype, a representative of the lying, Jewish-controlled media they don’t trust and are eager to appear in.
I was headed to Butterworth’s Restaurant, which was located blocks away from the Capitol in the heart of D.C. Like other establishments in the area, it was unremarkable up close, for the most powerful area in the world was NIMBY-fied and frozen in time. If you didn’t know where you were, you might guess Erie, Pennsylvania.
Butterworth’s was the hangout spot of choice for young MAGAs in D.C., which was not an accident, as it was created and marketed to be such a place. In a society where the personal was becoming increasingly political, it was a good model for an aspiring businessman to copy. You could even get your local liberal media outlet to give you free advertising if you fabricated some incident of “racism.” The name “Butteworth’s” brought to mind the wholesomeness of old England, the interior brought to mind the Victorian era, with small chandeliers hanging from the and sconce lights mounted on the walls, floral wallpaper, fine rugs, and Queen Anne couches and chairs.
I walked around for a while before I found my target, Natalie Winters, Steve Bannon’s 24-year-old podcast co-host who has worked as a White House correspondent since January 2025. She was wearing a fitted, button-down white mini dress with short sleeves. It was a style she displayed often on her Instagram, professional but not too professional. Sitting with her at the table were three other young women. “Hello,” I said, “I’m Cynthia Goldblatt. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I hoped I got the tone of I’m-going-through-the-motions-to-pretend-to-respect-you right.
“Same,” Natalie said.
I went through the standard journalistic questions for a few minutes, what are your names, can I quote you on the record, etc. They all told me I could quote them, though only Natalie would allow me to quote her by name. Though I’m not a real journalist, I figure I might as well keep the agreement I made, so I’ll call them the black-haired girl, the redhead, and the not-very-pretty one.
“So what are you women up to tonight?” I asked.
“Girls night out,” Natalie said.
I pretended to be surprised.
“You see, we aren’t so different from you.”
“You’re normal Americans, just with more conservative views.”
“Yes,” Natalie said. “Though I’m more of a Bannonite. That was the case ever since I was a teenager. I just really cared about immigration and I loved the Pepes and the Keks and the memes. I was an autistic teen boy, basically.”
“Are you still an ‘autistic teenage boy?’”
“Everyone matures,” Natalie said. “But my politics are the same. I am a Bannonite, a nationalist. I believe that America is a nation, not a shopping mall. Those stodgy old conservatives, the National Review types, they used to insult us, tell us we’re just teenage nobodies, didn’t seem to get that we wouldn’t be teenagers forever. Or maybe they thought we’d turn into them. But we didn’t. And we’re the future of the American Right. Some people still don’t get it, but nobody under thirty buys into that National Review stuff.”
I intentionally formed a look of mild displeasure, which made the girls smile at one another. A lib unnerved! What they did not know was that I was one of them. I, too, had come of age marinating in 4chan. And I thought that 4channers would grow out of their radical politics because I knew the politics of 4chan were impractical. There would be no “white ethnostate.” There would be no git reverting the sexual revolution. You grow out of it or you remain in your politically isolated ghetto. Either way, the rest of the world goes on oblivious. But it turned out not to matter that the vision was impractical. Walt Bismarck said that “the real ethnostate is the friends we made along the way.” That was a humorously wholesome message about his journey out of white nationalism. But there’s a darker interpretation. The real ethnostate is Butterworth’s. It’s these four young women sitting around a table and giggling and parroting nonsensical slogans about how “America is a nation and not a shopping mall.” And then some schlub in northern Minnesota loses his job because his factory relies on Canadian imports. Then some just-married couple struggles to buy a washing machine because of tariffs. Then some kid gets sickened with preventable disease because his parents don’t trust the vaccine schedule. These chicks were poisoning the blood of America, but they were getting something out of it: friendship and community.
“Are there any elements of this new style of politics that you feel uncomfortable with?” I asked.
Natalie looked hesitant. “Yes,” she said. “The conservative media shilling for Russia unnecessarily is sort of a symptom of the Covid backlash. Because we don’t trust the authority on that, we’re going to not take their words on anything. Do I think Putin’s a great guy? No.”
I got out my pen and paper and wrote down some incomprehensible gibberish, the way I had seen reporters do. The problem with the Young Right is that most of its members are not very bright and don’t know much about the world. They don’t know who Rodzianko was, don’t know about the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, couldn’t tell you where Lviv or Kharkhiv were. And unlike the unwashed masses, who rely on the media to tell them what to think, they have no such institution, so they just bloviate into the ether, retweeting other ignorant social media accounts and calling things “BASED!” This is the movement that even some intelligent people think was gonna save America.
“Do you worry about the next thing?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” asked Natalie.
“The next thing. Maybe Alex Jones decides to rile people up about chlorinated swimming pools, then the New York Times publishes an article debunking his claims, and people respond by saying they don’t trust the media because of COVID so Alex Jones must be correct.”
Natalie looked at me skeptically and I worried it was perhaps not something a mainstream media person, of whom she had much experience, would say. “No comment,” she said.
I decided to move on to a different subject. “You called this ‘girls night out.’ For many women, part of that is looking for romance. Is that the case for some of you?”
“Not ‘romance,’” the black-haired girl said. “We’re looking for husbands.”
“Raise your hand if you’re looking for a husband.”
The black-haired girl and the not-very-pretty one raised their hands. After some hesitation, Natalie raised hers, too. “I’ve already got one,” the redhead said.
I feigned surprise.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m twenty-one-years-old, still in college, and yet I’m already married. That’s the theme of 2025: you can just do things. The mainstream media, no offense to you, has been telling us that women of our class aren’t allowed to get married. Well, I just did it.”
“I don’t recall telling anyone they were not allowed to get married,” I said haughtily.
“You didn’t need to,” the redhead said. “It’s in the message of every film out of a Hollywood that’s controlled by people of your,” she paused, “ideological worldview.” The others eyed her naughtily. “You didn’t need to tell us not to do it because you created a world where it was never done.”
“Maybe it’s as simple as people want to see movies about astronauts, not women nursing infants,” I said.
“But many of us do,” the black-haired girl said. “The tradwives draw large audiences. Social media has removed the gatekeepers. No more can a small elite group tell us what we like.”
“Oh,” I said, pretending to be annoyed. I turned to the black-haired one. “So, how is the husband search going?” I asked.
“I mean, it’s a challenge, nobody said it would be easy. I’ve been hoping to meet more of the techbros, the DOGE-guys, but to my disappointment, they rarely come to places like this.”
“Interesting,” I said. I had heard similar things from others. Many of the “techbros” grew up and went to work in very “blue” environments. They were pushed out of the Left by its hostility to capitalism, local government mismanagement, affirmative action, and (most importantly) #MeToo. They weren’t pleased when they met the Rightists whose passions were calling abortion, IVF, and vaccines Satanic and being so low-class the spacetime continuum bends under the enormous weight of the lack of class. A few walked out in disgust in favor of Hananianism, others embraced rightoid brainworms. More just kept their distance, not being interested in having unvaccinated kids who’d wind up in remedial classes.
I turned to Natalie. “What about you? How’s your husband hunt?”
“I think most men are gay in DC — either out or closeted depending on whether they’re Democrats or Republicans,” she said. “I want to marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison. Perhaps I have…” She stopped there.
I burst into laughter. It was just so funny on so many levels. How the Trump movement was a lot like Baltimore – women forced to step into male roles because the men keep getting sent to prison, disproportionate punishment that was always evidence “they” were out to get them and never evidence the ingroup is full of lawbreakers. The four women looked at me with hostility, like I had finally “scored a point” against them.
I decided to explain why I was laughing. “Remember, you agreed I could publish anything said here tonight and attribute it to you.”
“I’m counting on it,” Natalie said.
“You’re not concerned Republican men in D.C. will be insulted by your statement?”
“Won’t be keeping me up at night,” Natalie said.
“Fascinating,” I said. “But it does make sense. Most will see it for what it is. It’s not that you literally believe 90% of men in D.C. are gay. You need an excuse for why you’re not living up to your tradwife ideology and this is what you choose. They can forgive you for that. What they couldn’t forgive you for would be if you acknowledged that there was something wrong with their ideology. Like if you had said, ‘maybe the reason fertility rates are down is because birthing an infant just isn’t that fun compared to the many activities modern society makes available to women like working as White House Press Correspondent.’ Loyalty to the tribe is the supreme value.”
Natalie frowned at me.
“What we’re trying to do here is rebuild social norms from scratch, often with no help from the older generation,” the redhead said. “This is a difficult process, which will have unforeseeable consequences. But we won’t be psy-opped into giving up.”
I turned to Natalie. “I can think of another reason you aren’t married,” I said. “Hypergamy.”
For the first time in the entire conversation, the four women looked shocked at something that had come out of my mouth. Here was the confirmation I was not who I said I was. “Oh, I’m not supposed to know that word, am I? Well, I do. And yes, the concept has been abused by the Andrew Tates of the world, but you really can’t understand modern dating without it. Women will usually phrase it as ‘I want to marry an equal,’ but the problem is only ever with men who rank lower, never with men who rank higher. 80% of the people in the place are men, but the guy who debugs SQL queries for $145,000 a year is not an appropriate match for a woman who’s on TV.”
The redhead and the not-very-pretty one looked confused while the black-haired girl looked angry. She rose to her feet. “Get out of here,” she said to me.
“No,” Natalie said. “I want to know who this person is. Her name isn’t Cynthia Goldblatt.”
“No s***,” I said. “Do I look like a Goldblatt?”
As I was speaking, the power abruptly went out.
I looked around and smiled. “Right on schedule. It’s true what you people like to say. ‘You can just do things.’ For instance, generals can just order the President of the United States to be placed under house arrest. A hundred thousand nude bodybuilders are converging on Washington. No more will we have a democratic system where our trade policy is determined by some obese loser in Wisconsin who’s mad his town got ‘left behind.’ The new era of Friedrich Nietzsche and Bronze Age Pervert begins today, an era defined by strength and virility.” I pulled out my gun.
Okay, I’ll cut it off there. I said at the beginning that this was “sorta” fictional. There are not a hundred thousand nude bodybuilders marching on Washington, but there is a person named Natalie Winters, who really is twenty-four years old and really does work as White House correspondent. She really did say she wants to “marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison.” It’s such a clownish statement you would never believe it actually came out of someone’s mouth, but it did. Other statements in this story, such as the ones about Russia and Natalie being an “autistic teenage boy” are also taken from the same interview a journalist did with Winters, which I encourage you to read.
In a country where 38% of liberal women aged 18-29 identify as LGBT, you, dear reader, may find yourself drawn to the “BASED” subculture. I’m not asking you to stay away, just to see it for what it is. It’s not Crémieux, it’s not Razib Khan, it’s not Steve Sailer. It’s people like Natalie Winters, whose response to the Trump-Musk feud was, “this whole thing is proof of why we shouldn’t vaccinate children.”
From outside it seems that all major sides of US political discourse are cursed with insanity of a special kind, that comes only for powerful and wealthy. You can't solve anything alone but participating in creating and shaping a subculture is the closest you can come to it. Yes, MAGA people are mostly retards, that should only motivate you to find a viable alternative and use them to your advantage. Neoliberal status quo forces are too entrenched for this, too fixed in their structure and institutions, you can't have a sensible centrist reform there, you need to dive into chaotic primordial soup of a radical variety. Movements quite often are turned on their head and completely transformed from inside, some small group in the right circumstances can capture the minds of hundreds of millions of people. Nobody expected the radical communists, the ISIS of their time, to come to power anywhere, much less the largest European state. Yudkowsky built a subculture alone, from some scraps in a cave and now it holds the hearts of many people who try to bring the singularity into existence. You shouldn't be BASEDtm, but you should still be based in the original meaning, trying to build a solid base for something better which can include not only sensible university educated people, but same unvaccinated retards and even the basement dwellers.
P. S. Looking at this, I think this comment feels disjointed and off topic to the op, but I will leave it as is because something in your text inspired me to write this, so why not let it exist
I mean, ideally all of this would happen organically. Subculture is how you get new ideas, new insights. But because of modern technology and our understanding of psychology we managed to basically take artificial control over the engines of culture. Music used to come from seedy dive bars where local artists would work on their sound before being discovered by labels. They’d sound unique because the isolation from the mainstream music scene allowed them to experiment and invent new and interesting sounds. New ideas tend to come from the fringes where an idea can be worked on and perfected away from mainstream culture.
The internet and especially social media have changed all of this. Those hidden pockets of creativity are now put online where the concepts are put online and co-opted or destroyed before they can be refined enough to stand on their own. Worse, the internet has created a situation in which everyone is almost constantly being bombarded with content (read:propaganda) all the time. You think like everyone around you unless you take special care to unplug. But especially in politics, this means it’s almost impossible to come up with something new, unless you’re pretty much a radical. Everyone else is reading the same script, the one that doesn’t work anymore because it’s not 1982 anymore. Most of the apparatus of politics runs on inertia a dead system that ran on Consensus, on very carefully crafted campaigns and old tired bromides and ideas about politics that were invented for your grandparents or great grandparents. We have AI and fentanyl, we’re possibly approaching WW3, and our traditional ways of thinking about politics was laid down when digital clocks were the height of modern technology, Spock was on TV, and kids hid under their desks because the commies were going to nuke us.
Give me the radicals, even if they’re wrong. It’s the only defense against total stagnation and irrelevance.
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