Soft Bois Eventually Give Way to Hard Men

The nationalist dandies are funny, in a pathetic sort of way. The brutes who come after them aren’t.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

1. Soft Bois

Yesterday on THE NOW PUBLIC TNL (more on this below) we talked about some of the big proponents of populist-nationalist-revolution-what-have-you.

And the thing that struck me is how many of the guys who are super butch on the subject of fighting the wokes and charging the cockpit are . . . look, let’s just say I don’t get the sense that they chop their own wood.

Let’s take a quick tour.

As Charlie notes this morning, Michael Anton is out there calling for just asking questions about having a violent revolution in America.

Anton is a former private-equity guy turned speechwriter whose dream is to be a chef. Per the New York Times, Anton is “a classically trained chef who favors French cuisine.” He is also something of a dandy.

Then there’s Roger Stone, out there calling for violence—when the voting stops the shooting starts, I guess? He once posted (and then deleted) a picture of the judge hearing his case with a crosshairs next to her head. So tough. But Stone makes Anton look like a biker. He’s a dandy’s dandy. A heavily made-up old man with a penchant for complicated glasses.

Curtis Yarvin is the internet troll who wants to get rid of democracy and replace it with monarchy and who thinks that mass killings by right-wingers are wrong mostly because they’re bad for the brand. Yarvin is more or less what you’d order from central casting if you were looking for “middle-age, basement-dwelling coder on the spectrum.”

The trad-con bros who can’t stop slapping each other on the ass while they do hot talk about overturning the democratic order? Have a look at these guys.

The dude who wants Orbanism in America? Hello!

Rod Dreher @roddreher

I had a moment of transfiguration today when presented with a platter of 18 oysters from Marennes-Olerons -- the first French oysters I've had since I was last in Paris three years ago. There is nothing I would rather eat in this world, and no place I'd rather eat it.

This isn’t a manly-man dick-measuring contest and I’m not a lumberjack myself. The point I’m trying to make is that none of the outcasts and weirdos who are talking about overthrowing the liberal order in the name of the Great Common Man would be at home in a Budweiser commercial.

Or at a real bar, where real people who work with their hands go to drink Budweiser.

Hell, I’d be shocked if any of these guys has ever even had a Bud.

Instead, these are people who saw the populist movement rising and decided that they could get in on the action and ascend to a place where, one day, they’d be the ones in charge. And then, instead of being outsiders, they could tell both the woke lib hippies and the lax-bro banker-establishment cons to get bent.

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Maybe this is the way it always is with revolutionary types? I don’t know that Trotsky and Lenin were all that butch, either. In hindsight, they look like third-rate intellectuals thirsting for power. But Koba was not. He was a brutalist. And he was more than happy to take over for them.

The problem is that the soft bois eventually give way to hard men, who understand and are eager to use power. What starts out as fops and dandies posing and talking tough about how super-duper double-bad they want to overthrow liberalism can eventually lead to actual men with actual weapons deciding to try it for themselves.

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2. The Next Level Is a YouTube Show Now

We’ve moved the podcast I do with Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller out from behind the paywall. We’ve turned it into a YouTube show. So maybe it’s not a “podcast” anymore? Maybe it’s just a show? I dunno. #content

Anyway: Here it is. And if you’ll permit some immodesty, it’s a banger of a first episode.

Do me a favor? Click on the link there and go subscribe to the show on YouTube. And give it a thumbs up even if you’ll never watch it there. (Bulwark+ members can still watch here ad-free and commune with the family in the comments.)

If you prefer it as a pure podcast, go and subscribe to the feed here. And five-star it and leave a review?

It’s ridiculous, but these likes and reviews and subscribes actually all help in real ways. If you do it, the show grows faster.

And this show has everything: Furries. The Sword of Destiny. Thirsty Gavin. Soft Boi Nationalists. J.D. Vance gakking Ohio. Fettermania. The riddle of Kyrsten Sinema.

We really brought it this week. So do me a solid and go support the show on:

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3. Lossless Data Transfer Technology

This Twitter thread charmed and impressed me to a ludicrous degree. I’m going to give you just the highlights, but it’s worth reading in its entirety.

Incunabula @incunabula

The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement. 1/

Incunabula @incunabula

The Tripitaka Koreana, stored in Haeinsa, a Buddhist temple in Gayasan National Park, South Korea, is the most comprehensive and oldest version of the Buddhist canon, with no known errors in its 52 330 152 characters which are organized in over 1496 titles and 6568 volumes. 2/

Incunabula @incunabula

Serendipitous data transmission over centuries occurs of course in libraries, but the Tripitaka Koreana is a single uniformly produced series of texts, and the obsessive levels of care taken in its production and storage leave no doubt it was created with eternity in mind. 3/

Incunabula @incunabula

Each block was made of birch wood from the southern islands of Korea and treated to prevent the decay of the wood. The blocks were soaked in sea water for three years, then cut and then boiled in salt water. 5/

Incunabula @incunabula

Next, the blocks were placed in the shade and exposed to the wind for three years, at which point they were finally ready to be carved. After each block was carved, it was covered in a poisonous lacquer to keep insects away and then framed with metal to prevent warping. 6/

Incunabula @incunabula

There's no fixed way to calculate this, but 52 million carved Chinese characters is around two gigabytes of information. So the Tripitaka Koreana has transmitted two gigabytes of data over nearly 8 centuries with no corruption or loss: nothing else created by man comes close. 8/

Read the whole thread here.