Month: June 2021

The Decline of Victoria’s Secret & ‘Cancel Culture’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If anything can give us some insight into what “cancel culture” is — and isn’t — it’s the gradual decline of Victoria’s Secret. This legacy brand is very much a creature of the pre-‘cancel culture’ morality, so its decline in popularity is a helpful tool on that particular social front.

I’m male and of just the right age for Victoria Secret to be taken for granted as socially acceptable quasi-soft porn that takes the beauty pageant concept one step further. But the brand has had a lot problems of late, both internally and with women’s shifting self-perception.

I would prefer that we could come to some sort of middle ground whereby Victoria Secret could continue to do its pre-2020s thing in peace for people who enjoy it, but that’s not to be. That ship has sailed and now the whole endeavor is probably going to tank because “the center has not held.”

It’s difficult to sell the concept of Victoria Secret to wealthy women in major metropolitan areas when they’ve moved on to buy a Pelton or whatever. Or, put another way, in the public sphere at least, the Victoria Secret ideal is seen as an attack on the vast majority of women who don’t look like that. I’m obviously not a woman, but just casually observing things, it seems as though macro things are afoot that are leading us to a New Era — one without Victoria’s Secret.

But I will note that if you look at the broad swaths of human history, things don’t go in a straight line. Sex with always sell and all it would take is a Second American Civil War and we might come out the other side (if, thankfully, the Good Guys win) with a whole different set of priorities than we do right now.

I’m really pushing it with that bit of speculation, however. Just like how good movies and rock music have apparently faded into oblivion, so, too will Victoria Secret join them soon enough.

If Tucker Carlson Is So Worried About People Reading His Personal Shit — Wait Until He Hears About Tik-Tok


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

In a surreal turn of events, Tucker Carlson is now ranting about how the Biden Administration through the NSA is reading his “private emails.” Add this to how Fox News has turned on the U.S. Military in a rather abrupt fashion and it’s all very bonkers.

I think Carlson is spooked by something. A reporter somewhere is asking questions about something that makes him look bad and he’s freaking out, looking for some explanation for how they know what they know. So he’s blaming the NSA out of desperation, if nothing else. Or, the whole thing is just bad faith bullshit and he’s trying to recon something that is about to pop out in the near term.

Anyway, if Carlson is going to be all paranoid, he should at least be interesting about the idea that Tik-Tok, and Big Tech in general, may have the technology to read our fucking minds. While I don’t seriously think Big Tech can read our minds, they definitely have a spooky ability to figure me out in a very specific manner. Specific enough that I’d like bonkers Tucker Carlson to at least look into it and see what HE finds.

But, in the end, meh.

My Hot Take On ‘Cancel Culture’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I say the following knowing damn well that my own personal history — and views — don’t fit the media narrative and are, as such, ripe for me to be “canceled” rather abruptly if I ever make it big somehow.

But, having said that, to me, it’s a clear mark of someone with very simplistic and recursive political views if they ever start ranting about “cancel culture.” I say this because most of the people who rant about cancel culture don’t even really know what the fuck it is. In general, I think, they see it as evil liberals destroying the lives of conservatives like themselves for just being conservative.

Things grow a lot more muddled, however, when inevitably these “canceled” people either pop back into the mainstream media world after a little while or if you look into why these people were canceled. The vast majority of the time, the conservatives who were canceled for just being conservative usually did something that they deserved to be “canceled” for. They used the N-word. They were forcing women around them to jerk off, they were being over-the-top abusive in some way. Or, they were just assholes who happened to be conservative, too.

But the reason that the abstract fear of “cancel culture” resonates with the average conservative is ever since about 2012, America’s culture has been changing at light speed relative to what your typical conservative thinks of as “normal.”

So, what you often find happening now is conservatives are told by their thought leaders to live in abject fear of the abstract concept of being “canceled” when the average person just living their life — even conservative people — don’t really have much to worry about. All the instances of conservatives being “canceled” I can think of off the top of my head, they were assholes who deserved it.

The abstract concept of “cancel culture” is now something for really earnest, really masculine men to hide behind whenever they “red pill” themselves and start ranting about this or that fucked up thing. The worst part of all of this is I agree that a lot of people have grown too sensitive at the edges of social and political debate. But I think that is more a problem that is a sign of our late-stage Republic than anything else.

Once we either become an autocracy or we have a civil war, shit like “cancel culture” is going to be, well, uh, canceled. When the autocracy comes, we’re all going to be so worried about not getting pushed out of windows by ICE that we won’t have time to worry about who got canceled. Or, if we have a civil war, by the time it’s over, cancel culture will be the least of our worries.

But something about how people who are into Joe Rogan’s podcast getting all bent out of shape about “cancel culture” and seeing it as some sort of vague monster that is holding them back really fucking gets on my nerves.

Twitter Chatter: Something ‘Big’ Is About To Happen (Lulz?)


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here and there these days, you see cryptic Tweets from major “resistance” people on Twitter saying something about how something “big” is about to happen. I’ve grown extremely jaded about such things — Trump is politically above the law — so I pretty much think any such talk is either bullshit, delusional or something that should evoke a lulz.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend something “big” is about to happen. What could it be?

First, I don’t know. Second, there’s only one thing that I would consider “big” at this point — concrete evidence that some big names in MAGA, including Trump, actively worked with the January 6th insurrectionists with the specific goal of a successful violent coup.

But even absolute, rock hard evidence of this would only last one Twitter news cycle at this point. Historical determinism — the dead hand of history — has kicked in. There simply is now no escaping the existential choice of autocracy or civil war. Something’s gotta give.

I say this because even if you knock out Mad King Trump as a viable political force, a dozen other would-be autocrats are lurking in the shadows to finish the job he started. And all it takes in one of them winning one presidential election and that’s it, that’s all she wrote — we become a white Christian ethno state. The center-Left has been proven to be completely ineffectual in protecting liberal democratic norms and a President Pompeo or President Cotton (etc, etc, etc) will flip a switch and turn us into an autocracy.

The media will be purged, one way or another, the ICE infrastructure will then be weaponized and people like me will mysteriously begin to fall out of windows. At this point, it’s just an issue of how long things stay “normal” before we wake up in a dystopian autocracy hellscape. Though, given how MAGA dark money craves a Constitutional Convention, it may that which is our absolute last gasp of freedom.

Having said all that, the other option is MAGA will bungle our inevitable transition into an autocracy and we have a civil war. A very nasty, very bloody mess of a civil war that will involve WMD domestically and WW3 abroad. It will be so horrific that everyone — even, hopefully the “good guys” who win — will regret it happen and in desperation will give it some sort of narrative and value after the fact. (Like what happened after the end of the First American Civil War.)

The key takeaway from all of this is nothing is going to save us. Even if we knock Trump out politically, the same rot that caused him in the first place is still there and someone else will use what they learned from Trump and finish the job. Or we have a civil war.

Tucker Carlson: The Most Dangerous Man In America


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I don’t think we appricate how easy it would be for Tucker Carlson to become president. A huge swath of the Right’s media echo chamber listens to his personal form of White Nationalism Lite with rapt attention.

Because make no mistake, that’s what Tucker Carlson is: a White Nationalist.

In fact, it’s because of him, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram that the United States is careening towards a near future where we are no longer a nation-state based on the idea of the Constitution, but rather one based on the “blood and soil” of a white Christian ethno state. There are a dozen would-be autocratic successors to Trump who will flip the switch — with Carlson being at the head of the pack.

And, yet, from what I’ve heard, Carlson isn’t interested in the gig. Which, in itself, is interesting.

Carlson is similar to Trump in a lot of ways as a would-be candidate — he has no government experience, for one. But would have at least a few strengths that Trump doesn’t have — he’s young, bright, articulate and focused. All of those things that Trump obviously doesn’t possess. But there’s another thing that Carlson has that Trump doesn’t: an ideology.

Trump is so deranged and idiotic that he just goes from the gut about what he believes and why. There’s no over arching ideology other than, “own the libs,” even to the point where that’s more important than making any sense whatsoever. Carlson, meanwhile, knows exactly what he believes and is able to articulate it in a way that the average (white) person can get into.

But there are a number of obstacles to Carlson, besides his own self-avowed uninterest in the job. He has to figure out a way to eliminate Trump as a political force. Then he would have to get past the maw of the dozen other would-be autocrats who want the gig far more than he apparently does.

Anyway, don’t sleep on Tucker Carlson.

Developing And Writing Four Novels Is Going Well, So Far


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, here I am, now working on four books instead of what I was working on — two books, one story. This is double the work, obviously, but it actually makes completing the whole project easier — since I’m working on all four books at the same time, I can create something out of whole cloth and plop it in the past if need be to help me get me out of a pinch later on in the series.

But the key issue remains — I have to actually finish this thing, no matter how many books there are.

I’m looking at these four books as one huge story that is broken into four parts that have plots and character arcs of their own. I think I may have reached “saga” levels of storytelling at this point. But whenever I get a little nervous, I remember how great the characters I’ve come up with and how entertaining the over all story is.

Now that I have four novels in this “saga,” I have plenty of room to play with. If I want to flip the script or do something different, I can do it in-universe and help the overall goal of finishing the books.

But, as I have been for some time, I’m completely delusional about all of this. This project has gone from me just wanting to write a novel to writing two novels to, now, four novels. I’m doing all of this blind. I have no idea if anyone will actually be interested in any of this — I mean, why should anyone care? But I feel given how crazy some of the stories out there are these days, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on as long as you have a coherent plot and interesting characters.

At least, that’s the theory.

Revisiting Ezra Klein’s ‘Why We’re Polerized’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The United States definitely has a late-stage Republic vibe to it these days. Something is warping our politics in surreal ways to the point that on an individual basis one can find oneself having some pretty bonkers conversations. At the core of this, of course, is America’s third historical rail: race.

I read Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized and it was very illumining, but for one thing — he went into all this detail as to why we’re polarized, but could not figure out what to do about it. He offered no solutions, probably because there are none at the moment.

It would be like someone writing a similar book in the late 1850s — there just was no solution to the division America faced within the construct of traditional American democracy. Something was going to give.

Just within my own family, I’m the political red headed step child. Everyone in my immediate family is bed rock, old school conservative. If the issues behind the rise of MAGA were not fucking with our politics, they would be pretty much just your regular very conservative people — they only flirt with MAGA because of negative polarization. They simply feel they have no other choice but to go wherever MAGA takes the Republican Party.

The macro bending of our political system warps individual political conversations in some pretty bonkers ways. I have a very conservative relative who is upset about the Virginia police official who lost his job after an online leak showed he gave about $20 to the Kyle Rittenhouse defense fund. This relative was upset that the officer got in trouble both because of a leak and because of the small size of the donation. To my relative, this is just another example of “cancel culture run amuck.”

Meanwhile, to me, I’m flabbergasted that my relative wouldn’t see what I see — you deserve to lose your job (especially if your in law enforcement) if you support a political murderer. It doesn’t matter how much you donated or how we found out. No one with such fascist political views should be in law enforcement, period.

It’s small things like that that trouble me a great deal. Fascism is ascendant in the United States in a rather conspicuous manner and one day we’re either going to slip into an autocratic managed democracy or we’re going to have a civil war.

At the moment, I think there is a historical determinism to the United States becoming a white Christian ethno state of “blood and soil.” The Establishment Powers That Be have a vested interest in keeping everyone calm and so when we’re absolutely forced to make a decision, they’re going to tell everyone that living in a fascist state is just The New Normal.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that on a macro historical level, America’s fate rests more on how likely it is that Trump or any number of his potential successors is deft at shepherding us into autocracy or if they bungle it. Only if things get out of their control will we go the other high risk, high reward route: civil war.

I don’t want a civil war, but I also don’t really want to live in a MAGA-themed autocratic state where I have to worry about ICE pushing me out a window. In a strictly rhetorical manner, I would rather risk dying on my feet a free man than living a slave in an autocratic state.

But that’s just me doing my usual “doom shit.” It’s possible that things will endup being far more subtle than I keep sketching out. We’ll drift into autocracy, but it will be a “light touch” autocracy for a long time until someone realizes that they can get away with anything they want on a political level and they overreach. Americans get woke to living in an autocracy…..and I don’t know.

Anyway, I would advise you to get a passport or make sure you live in a part of the country that aligns with your political views. Good luck.

COVID19 Scenario: August, 2021 — ‘The Omega Variant’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Editor’s Note: This has been edited some since its original publishing.

Each time COVID bounces from one person to the next, there’s a chance it might mutate into something along the lines of the virus found in The Stand. It’s an admittedly microscopic chance, but it does exist. Throw into the equation people from all over the world in Tokyo at the moment and it’s easy to imagine a Stephen King-size clusterfuck.

While it definitely looks like we’re out of the woods — least in most of the First World — when it comes to COVID19, it’s still out there bouncing around with opportunity after opportunity to mutate. It makes you wonder what the reaction would be if COVID19 mutated into something far, far nastier than it is now. Given that August is the shittiest month, I’m working on the assumption that if it happens, it will pop out around August, 2021.

A lot would depend on how this speculative “Omega Variant” popped up. If it was localized to one place at first, then nations are on edge enough right now that it would probably be fairly easily controlled. But my fear is if an Omega Variant appeared, it would appear all over the world at the same time and all we could do is simply attempt to do some triage to an End Of The World type situation.

If variant of COVID19 appeared that was far more deadly than anything out there now, at first, the whole thing — at least in the English-speaking Western World — would, again, be seen through the prism of politics. The Right would scoff, saying “Here we go again.” They would do everything in their power to obstruct the American government from doing anything to mitigate a looming disaster, just like they did the first time.

It would not be until the Right saw some potential political gain that they would switch gears and start to demand something be done. Then, of course, it would be too late. Instead of 600,000 dead, we may be looking at something closer to 10-30 million. If things started to get that bad, it’s very possible MAGA would start to angle for a way to seize power via a coup — or something. They’re already halfway there now, if the country was felled by a severe second wave of COVID19, they might attempt to step into the breach.

So, it’s at least possible that at some point in the next few months (years?) we’re going to have to go through all of this again because an Omega Variant breezes past all our vaccines and starts killing people not in the thousands, but the millions.

But I’m wrong all the time. I’m sure the monster won’t come back for one more round. We’re going to cruise into a new Roaring Twenties, at least until we have a civil war or turn into a MAGA autocracy. This is all very speculative. It’s just if the COVID pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that when you’re dealing with a virus, all the narrative management in the world isn’t going to save us.

UFOs Are Real: Now What?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here are the options we face when it comes to the UFOs that the Pentagon told us are “real.”

  1. It’s a Psyop
    All of this is just the US government fucking with us in an effort to distract us from something. What, though?
  2. It’s all a big misunderstand called by faulty equipment
    It’s all just easily explainable telemetry problems that may be connected to number one.
  3. Private companies have Singularity technology
    We’ve reached the Singularity via private companies. They have all these technological goodies they’re keeping from us — for some reason — and they’re going to slowly roll them out over the next few decades to maximize profit.
  4. The US government has Singularity technology
    What we’re seeing is some DARPA, NSA, CIA shit. Why they would not only be spying on their own military base but also be so conspicuous about it is unknown.
  5. Foreign governments have Singularity technology
    China and Russia (at least) have developed extremely advanced technology and, instead of using it to dominate the globe NOW, are keeping it secret so…they can use it at some point in the future?
  6. ETs.
    Probes — or something — from a highly advanced Galactic Empire have travel across the vastness of space, only to hang out on the Eastern seaboard and do really conspicuous shit that all but assures they will eventually be known about by the broader human public.

Deep State Radio & My ‘Doom Shit’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I listened to the most recent Deep State Radio and, while I was pleased, I noticed something. While they kept talking the “doom shit” that some people on Twitter get mad at me about when it comes to MAGA, Trump and our coming decent into autocracy, there was an element of ignoring the pink MAGA elephant in the room.

That elephant is they are so concerned about the political problems we face when it comes to MAGA that they said not a word about the other option before us: civil war.

Now, I know why this is — they’re working with metrics that are real, not speculative and they don’t want to sound hysterical or like their doing “doom shit.” But I compare it to a fictional, anachronistic podcast in, say, 1859. They would be talking about the rise of Slave Power and how “these United States” risked being all slave under autocratic Slave Power rule. The idea that Lincoln would win and slave states would leave the Union in protest is probably something they would dare broach.

But not one listens to me, so I talk about it all the time.

As I keep saying, we have something of a spectrum ahead of us with a MAGA autocracy on one end and a civil war at the other. I vacillate wildly between these two possibilities in my mind. At the moment, I think we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy because The Powers That Be have every reason to tell an enraged populace that Everything Is Fine.

It will only be if MAGA bungles the historical inevitable of America transitioning into an autocracy that there is any risk of the “doom shit” that I keep writing about here and on Twitter becoming a reality.

Before I go, let me explain my gratuitous use of “doom shit.” See, one of those well respect Resistance Twitter accounts who do a lot of yeoman work covering the Trump Era got mad a me for pretty much saying, “I simply don’t believe Trump is every going to be legally held account for anything he’s ever done.”

They yelled at me and said, “You have to stop it with the doom shit.”

At the moment, at least, it’s not “doom shit” — it’s what really going on. Mad Kind Trump is politically above the law. And, even worse, even if we magically fell him on a political level, he’s always just been an avatar — there are a dozen would-be autocrats lurking in the shadows, waiting to finish the job he completed.

As such, we still face the choice of autocracy or civil war between now and January 2025.