Last week on my podcast I had a show titled, What Are We Even Doing Here? A sincere, off the cuff, riff on the influencers of whatever demographic niche you want to think of. Is it the manosphere, a term invented by feminist bloggers to force your average Christian Blog to have to apologize for Roosh V and his rape article? Is it the Intellectual Dark Web, something that would have been great if it was any of those things? The dissident right, or what I think of is mainstream left on unemployment and with a need for demagoguery? How about Red Pill, or the boogey man that everyone gets to use for the systemic problems of everything from soup to nuts?
All these things used to be things. Small, niche, and attracted an equally small but motivated and die hard userbase. It was the underground garages of 80s EDM, the warehouses of 70s Punk, or the gritty comic artists of the 1980s in Seattle.
Like all good things, they become popular, then drain the life out of it to be made palatable to a wide, beige audience, and ultimately, rolled into the system that it was created to escape from. Red Pill was never about conservatives, or Trump, or fighting feminism or any other pet cause.
It was supposed to be 2 weeks to free the people!?So what are we even doing here? We wanted to get rich, get laid, and become famous, obviously. Jordan Peterson dressed like a Batman Villain, Andrew Tate started a War Room and Moldbug went on a national press tour. Finally, the system was taking notice, and everyone’s grievances were being addressed.
Stop compelling speech from Canadians and clean your room!?(an off topic point, but I think I own those exact same shoes. If so he has expensive tastes)
What are we even doing here? Narrative victories and material failures. Peterson was a shrink and a teacher who wanted Canada to stop being so gosh darned authoritarian and evil. Since then, we have sent storm troopers against truck drivers, decimated trust in financial institutions by showing the government power to force banks to their will, and kept a dozen Canadians in prison without due process for parking violations. But he’s dressed sharp and moved to Arizona.
Red Pill was about guys getting laid, whether from a stranger, a girlfriend, or a wife, along with the sense of self worth that we all want. Since then, we have had a Filipino cuckold, a sterile, plastic surgery billboard for Elliot Roger, two Russian mob assets in an alleged human trafficking scandal, and now fewer people than ever are getting laid. I guess there’s a lot less trashing of men online, but that’s more because the millennial woman is on her last years of the dating circuit and has to focus on landing one before it’s too late.
And the list goes on. Every since niche goal has been completely ignored in favor of putting the biggest clown in front of the largest audience in the niche skin suit.
What are we even doing here? We are in the fatigue portion of the program. Like the alt-right a decade prior, we have reached the Andy Warski waxing his nipples on livestream. In 2016, the Trump cheerleaders were all about bloodsports. It was fun, then it was mainstream, a few people made temporary careers from it and then the audience got the fatigue and moved on, but not before one last ditch effort at fame. And since the ‘movement’ (I don’t have a punctuation mark to make my use the term any lighter than this) without any of the cultural interest behind it.
So the muscle eats itself. The dignity and self respect of the influencer is the only remaining currency. Unlike the freshly minted 18 year old starlet that starts an onlyfans to cash out on, it’s a more self deluded and dishonest trade because the 18 year old on onlyfans and the audience knows exactly what they are doing. They are selling a young womans peak asset at an audience that is looking for 18 year olds, specifically because it’s illegal to look for 17 year olds. Is it disgusting? Sure. It is honest.
What are we even doing here? Lauren Southern accusing everyone she’s ever worked with for being horn dog coke head borderline rapists to shill a book. Myron dressed up as a Rabbi rubbing pennies together for a few grand. Joe Rogan trying to convince us all that he’s super duper interested in Andrew Wilson, who is known for two things: Yelling at bimbos about not having a moral stance that even he cannot meet, and lacking the grip strength to open a jar of pickles.
I don’t know the name of the PR firms that influencers use, but you can tell pretty quickly when someone joins one as they do a very specific circuit of collaborations. If someone is on Piers Morgan, they surely have a contract with the firm.
What are we even doing here? All of the cool and edgy counter culture movements have suffered a fate worse than death. They became moderately popular, and very quickly cringe. What are we even doing here? Disney decided to buy the Avengers and Endgame quickly became the Twerking Adventures of Green Feminist Schlub against an evil white corporate man. The franchise used to have the GDP higher than half of Europe in 2010 and now it has the GDP of half of Europe in 2026. Embarassing. Cringe.
And there is no American Election (proper noun) for 3 more years. And no, Trump will not become a dictator and cancel them, they make too much money for Americans to stop having them. So what are we even doing here? Floundering. Everyone is looking for something new.
The people who peaked in the pandemic are done. They don’t know it yet, they desperately want to leverage a stagnant audience into a new thing and have a rebirth. Almost nobody will. Don’t believe me? Do you know JF Gareipy or what he’s been up to the last 8 years? Didn’t think so. I’ll give you a bit: he allegedly murdered his wife and watches redpill creators to sent le cease and le desist letter from his l’avocate.
I feel the worst for the influencers who came late. This new one, Claviclar (don’t ask) acting like the college freshmen who still hangs around high school at lunch so he can pick up chicks, except he didn’t even go to this high school. There’s more, I’m only picking on him because he’s the worst one I can find.
All together, they form a pick up soccer match of 8 year olds who swarm the ball and feverishly kick at it, denting shins in the process, until someone manages to kick the ball across the field, at which point they will run towards and swarm it and the process repeats. What are we even doing here? Creating the inception of slop: mainstream eats up popular niches and spits them out as more mainstream slop, while the second tier influencers (I’m not sure if I even count as one) sit under that dinner table, eating the scraps that fall from Disney’s mouth and creating second tier slop.
What are we even doing here? somewhere out there is invisible people that no one can see, creating something that’s awesome. I don’t know where they are, if they are offline or online, how they keep the ‘normies’ out of it, and who is going to make it popular enough to watch it kicked around like a soccer ball, but it’s there. And if you are in it, treasure these moments. Sooner than you think, you’ll be like me, writing and speaking about the niche when it was full of poeople, motivated for the love of the gain, addressing a real grievance, and for little notoriety.
You’ll be talking about them in the past because the most embarrassing, cringe, compromised person you know is somehow your brand cheerleader, making you look worse than Hitler because of his antics. Then you’ll sit on your computer, writing for your Substack like platform (because Substack was Medium was Wordpress was Geocities was USENET) about how your thing is cringe now, and asking yourself:
What are we even doing here?
How many people did you find entertaining 6 years ago that are absolutely cringe today? Let me know in the comments
P.S.
For what it’s worth, I still over some type of navigation for the rest of you. I figured this was coming, as I had seen it before. You’ve seen me switch from pure Red Pilled informative entertainment into a more generalized fiction work. Books, audio, hopefully Tv and movies if I ever figure that out. I started this as soon as I saw the writing on the wall. Just like during the 21 convention days when I heard Rollo promise everyone that sticking with the red man group that everyone would get paid as it grew. I’ve been around for enough layoffs to know a red flag when I see one. I started my own thing and haven’t looked back.
So if you’re in a niche, and you are now popular enough to have a clown stealing your thing, scatter out and learn new things, make yourself as anti-fragile as you can. Because you don’t want to be the guy sitting there on a camera, defending yourself against the accusation of you being just as bad as Andrew Tate or whoever stole your niche.
That’s why I’ve written literary fiction, science fiction (cyberpunk) and moved into the publishing niche. For those who haven’t read Dog Walker or Softbone yet, you’re missing out. Even science fiction haters loved softbone, and guys who would never think to read slice of life romantic novels have loved Dog Walker. They were written by man, for man.
