rules for routing radicals

insurgency is not governance

“double down”

i spoke the other day of the impending death of woke. some seem to take the other side that “no, it’s not dead. it’s alive, even resurgent” i am doubling down. it’s dead. mathematically, inevitably dead. woke is about to be structurally destroyed and the absurdity of “woke 2.0” will only make this faster and more complete. the fireworks from this will be spectacular and noteworthy but also harmless.

the mind virus has reached a replication number far below unity.

it’s literally just math.

and math is implacable and undefeated.

woke is caught in a vise and the vise lives in a feedback loop.

the core idea is that a coercive cultural technology whose power depends upon recognition of its victim status, aggrioevement, and therefore the justice of its sanctions begins to collapse once outsiders revoke that recognition.

such a movement can only grow by colonizing outside agencies.

when those agencies become immune and then outright hostile, growth becomes impossible. “i no longer accept your claim to entitlement for grievance” renders the field sterile to them but the need to claim entitled grievance remains as the central tenet and status determinant of their movement. that’s the vise.

their core playbook can no longer win adherents, but they need to keep running it and, because they are mostly bullies seeking status, when out groups not only can no longer be bullied but respond to it by closing ranks and getting stronger, they have to turn on the in groups because the in groups are the only ones left who still respond to magic words like racist, sexist, phobic, and whatever else is passing for intersectional accusation these days.

woke magic it can no longer affect the good guys. it can only eat itself.

this was the prediction 3 years ago in “how to slay a magic word cult” and it’s playing out just as imagined: once it becomes OK to call woke out, woke starts to die. it requires a monopoly on cancellation and speech. and that broke. eveyhting after that was and is forgone.

the mantra was and remains simple.

i shall quote the kitty godmother therefrom:

(also, can we pause to be amazed at how for AI has come?)

we’re seeing it over and over from bud light to converse to sweeney to target: kowtow and die, resist and thrive. nothing will ever satisfy the last church of perpetual outrage. outrage is the product, the praxis. there is no life you can lead and not bring it down. some micro aggression will always be found and blown up to be a macro for the movement. and once you realize that this is so and that there is no amount of compliance that will spare you it, why bother? it all ends in the same place. go do what you want.

enough have seen this that the calculus has inverted: laugh at woke and you gain power and status. mocking and baiting it has become the most powerful and effective branding in america. and the more you grow strong, the more easily you may bait woke who then faces an impossible choice:

1. do nothing an look impotent and fade from memory, power, and relevance, or

2. attack back and lose even more stature as the public square squares off against you and mocks you.

it’s a no win and the feedback loop will keep intensifying it.

the only groups woke can cow into capitulation are the ones that still recognize their sanction. like converse and bud light, they cower and fall apart. they are harmed. this whole tactic has become a disaster for them:

the same attack becomes fertilizer for your enemies and napalm against your allies.

but that attack is all you know: the whole purpose of your movement is the profession of intersectional aggrievement as a bona fide for deserving status. it cannot be unbaked from the cake. if you drop that idea and stop attacking, your virus has mutated into something no longer virulent nor infective. woke would not be woke anymore. the post modern jihad of imposition would be at an end.

and folx will never do that. not the true believers. the last of them will be found decades from now in threadbare rainbow uniforms haunting some flyspeck institution in portland like one of those japanese soliders in the 1955 south pacific who did not know the war was over.

there is no path out here that does not involve the overton window shifting back to mass acceptance of a right to sanction every time you profess marginalization. everyhting else is a dead end.

and that right is not coming back. the spasms of this tribe trying to reclaim it and recapture institutions will only hasten their decline. this political struggle takes place downstream of culture and culture has moved on.

this is what i mean about the math.

the R0 of woke is <1. it has to be. it can no longer infect outside institutions and people. the only ones frightened by the once magic words ending in ist and phobic are the woke. the need to bully to gain status means the woke will increasingly only attack the woke. it will become a self-exterminating pestilence.

it must selectively destroy its own adherents because “more aggrieved” = status and status is always relative so it must be “relative to whom?” and if i need to get someone to accept my fanatical claims of theater kid outrage and most people are now telling me to pound sand, i’ll go accuse the ones who’ll listen. and that’s only my own team

the system cannot dial down the intensity because that intensity is the system, its integument, its beating heart. grivance is fuel, it’s purpose, it’s what the system does and therefore what the system is. the local choice of “destroy each other” will look preferable to “just go back to being no one” or, heaven forfend, “sitting down and shutting up and maybe working on being a better person.”

so it’s over.

this movement has become self-disassembly. it cannot spread to new hosts. it can only devour its own organs.

and this explains what is happening and why the rage is going to so wild and why it is being selectively applied as friendly fire.

the math demands it. it’s the dominant game theory paradigm.

“look, it’s simple…”

put in the language of poli sci:

a grievance-based cultural enforcement system derives power from targets recognizing its sanctions. once a sufficuency of external targets learn that the sanction can simply be ignored, mocked, or monetized and opposing it becomes high status and positive sum expectation, the system loses its expansion frontier but retains its internal incentives to generate claims of grievance. it therefore increasingly attacks the shrinking population that still recognizes its authority and becomes self-disassembling.

we see this as activity and perhaps resurgent viability, but it’s not. this “increased visible enforcement” is actually a symptom of the terminal loss of external relevance. the only ones showing up for the show trials are the other theater kids.

so stop worrying about it.

they have no power here.

these seemingly unavoidable and catastrophic forays into self-immolation constitute evidence of the system entering its self-destruct phase as starving ideological predators that have lost access to outside food resort to cannibalism. and all that can do is shrink them. it’s like a zombie movie if zombies could only eat the brains of other zombies.

the leopards eating people’s faces party now eats only party members and structurally, it tends to start with the officials because they are the ones locked into status.

you have just as many leopards, but faces are in short supply.

the party faithful built, legitimized, and fed the leopard because its predation was useful when directed outward but when the political opposition ceases to be edible, the leopard doesn’t go vegan: it eats the people who still live inside the enclosure. it has to. you cannot have a grievance based status system without grievance and you cannot have grievance without someone who cares about your claim. and if only your friends care, then outflanking them is your only path to status.

it’s a negative sum game, but you are forced to play.

so the system itself manufactures the conditions of its own fall from grace and from power.

it’s a feedback loop: the more you kowtow, the more you die, the less support remains.

the more you fight, the stronger you get, the more you attack again, the more woke must either respond or capitulate and the crazier and wilder it gets.

and this brings us around to many of the ideas of our old pals “beautiful trouble” who are not going to like what’s coming.

a true hilarity of inversion impend because of one fundamental fact:

the tactics of insurgency are not the tactics of rule.

let’s remember the core playbook from the trouble toolkit about which i wrote in some detail HERE.

• put the target in a decision dilemma

• the real action is the target’s reaction

• lead with sympathetic characters

• play to the audience that isn’t there

radical tactics are optimized for delegitimizing institutions. if a movement succeeds in capturing or creating institutions but retains a status system built around delegitimization, its activists eventually apply that machinery to their own institutions. it’s all they know and has been woven, warp and weft, into the fabric of their claims to status and legitimacy. this sets off savage purity spirals.

internal outbidding then rewards whoever discovers the next illegitimacy, while anyone attempting the compromises necessary for actual sane governance becomes the next target.

the whole price structure shifts: guerrilla morality is cheap when aimed at someone else’s institution, but once it’s your castle the same grab bag of nasty tricks becomes an infinity of gravel in every gear, a machine for making operation impossible.

among the modern major marginalia mavens, there seems to be an unusual vulnerability from "the audience who is not there" who, as part of this movement, have become so accustomed to being demanding and present despite not actually being stakeholders that they form a sort of always-on mass distributed jury waiting to administer purity tests. this “punitive mesh” is forever lying in wait ready to seek status by becomeing compettively “more outraged than thou” and throwing pointy elbows to vie for the most marginal position.

in game theory terms, this gets described as “internal outbidding” and what makes woke so awful and unwieldy around the concept is this seeming need not only to play edge-lord in small groups but to allow every aspiring grievance noble on earth to kibitz in and demand points of privilege in the hierarchy.

competing organizations and individuals make increasingly radical claims to demonstrate commitment, attract attention, discipline supporters, and outbid rivals. this slants everything toward radicalism and there is no off ramp because whoever is most marginal is highest status. that’s a structural claim of the movement.

it’s another dilemma: every room must either expand to a size that includes every crazy person on earth or it must curate who is allowed to speak and risk being accused of being “non-inclusive.”

and that’s where this gets fun. because we can call saul.

“make the enemy live up to its own rulebook”

- saul alinsky

this is a wonderful tactic as an insurgent.

but as an incumbent with a gigantic accumulated book of convoluted and contradictory negative sun canon? now you’re hoist by your own petard.

every preachy screetchy universal moral assertion you accumulated during your conquest phase lingers as a standard an opponent (or often worse, your own alleged allies) can rotate back onto you.

holding ground is very different from attacking ground.

this is a big part of why guerrilla movements rarely rule well.

former opponents (or worse, your own side) learn the insurgent repertoire, seize the offensive role, and use the victorious movement's own old tactics and bibles against it. and woke is its own worst enemy in this regard. even within the tiniest halls of its own power, it rips and rends at itself. robbed of viable external enemies, the purity spiral turns upon itself. even as incumbent it is psychologically/institutionally unable to stop behaving like an insurgency and trying to frame intra-group rivals as enemies to outflank and attack.

the sound and fury we are seeking signifies shrinkage.

i want to believe you, señor cat, but how would this ever look in real life?

and as if scripted, just as one is coming to a set of conclusions, a perfect allegory arises.

buckle up, this one is just endlessly funny. just the phrase “covid concious lesbian bar in massachusetts” already makes it sound like an overclocked portlandia episode. and we’re not even to the funny part yet.

it’s just so perfect. three friends tried to build their own little utopia. there’s nothing wrong with that. “hey, it would be cool if we had a place of our own, let’s build it!” is a great instinct. it’s one i wholeheartedly support. the problem was their friends and their ideology. you can see the whole of the woke universe in this single drop of water. the problem was intersectional status. the problem was that once you own the bar and hold the ground, you’re playing defense and all your friends are crazy and want to keep acting like insurgents, even against their own allies. it’s all they know. it’s their literal identity. and it’s why you cannot possibly build anything with or around such people.

the whole bar was “KN 95 or better” mask-mandatory. in 2026. again, hey, whatever, i think you’re a raging loon and a scientific illiterate, but: your place, your rules. i respect your right to set them. but your friends don’t. merely mooting one night a week of mask optional because the bar was dying from lack of clientele (imagine that, the place sounds like so much fun…) brought down insane, irreconcilable wrath.

my absolute favorite part is people like this:

saying stuff like this:

your bar, my property. you exist to serve my demands even though i live 100’s of miles away and will never patronize your establishment. i delcare myself spokesthey/them for the teeming masses of my brethren, sisteren, and zi/zemeren. this is what i mean about the “always on punitive mesh.”

one cannot even breathe around people this loony.

they will find a reason to offended by it.

her whole identity is intersectional outrage. it’s a badge and a weapon all in one. any meeting of folx in this bar was going to wind up like that. the owner is in tears saying “i cannot afford to operate” and everyone else is attacking her for putting personal solvency ahead of the needs of a few hyper demanding performance artists for whom the idea of “trade-offs” or “boundary conditions” are conspicuously absent.

this is how alinsky forments breakage:

“force the opponent to operate under the full burden of his own normative code because no rulebook survives every edge case cleanly.”

and woke cannot even survive core cases and simple calculus. there is no objective way to determine who gets more privilege: the lesbian or the immunocompromised. but everyone knows that owners are bad. imagine trying to build in a world like that.

even your own allies respond in disastrous ways.

fun fact: this video made me more conservative.

see what it does for you.

get to the end. the two other women speaking get it. oh god, we need to sweep this under the rug. do not let them see how barking mad and utterly incompetent we are. we’re demanding to run the country with an ethos that can organize a bar.

and not to be out-crazied, here come just the ones you’d expect saying, well, just the stuff you’d imagine.

now imagine living in an ethos where you were expected to take this seriously. no, seriously, try. wanna stay? does it seem appealing? high status?

they are not even making an argument, just trying to shut discussion down. but they can’t. these patrons with all their purity test horrorshow, were only friends worth having if having them brought power. now it brings scorn. every one of these new ejaculations of squawkery theater loses allies and amuses enemies.

and so we provoke back because it’s both fun and effective.

look at me. i am the insurgency now.

our action is their reaction.

meme them until they cry then make memes about them crying.

it’s the horns of a dilemma:

1. keep being woke and your attacks all backfire

2. or stop being woke and admit that woke is dead.

and 1 will continue until 2 must pertain.

1. Include every lunatic in your faction and allow them to rip you apart with their neverending demand spirals

2. or violate your own rules about inclusion and equity and repudiate your own raison d’etre.

respond and we will mock you and grow stronger. fail to respond and you fade from relevance and lose claim to power.

include the loons and die or disavow them and admit that your orthodoxy is invalid.

make them choose.

their reaction is our action.

their actors have lost all sympathy and ours now look both sympathetic and, better still, high status, high integrity, and high fun.

and their own audience who is not there are their own worst enemies while ours is laughing and asking for more.

they have no moves that do not lose so long as we do not do one thing:

permit them to once more claim validity for their grievances and therefore entitlement to sanction.

there is no point in appeasing that which cannot be appeased.

so long as we allow the other side the power to make insane, hallucinatory accusations like that or like “converse ad = lynching” we cannot win. their bag of fantasy outrage is infinite and they will always find something. the fight needs to move to “you’re an idiot and a clown. you see the same oppression in every inkblot. no one cares what you think.” accepting their hallucinatory frame is defeat, rejecting it is victory.

“quiet competence” is not an option and never was.

“just do your thing and they will leave you alone.”

i’m not convinced it’s a possible response in this sort of culture war.

they will find a micro aggression in anything. it will always be something.

the “you did a hitler!” outcome is not avoidable. their whole praxis is “er get to define reality and it will never be equal.” you cannot out crazy or out argue crazy obsessives. you need to tell them to shut up and laugh at them.

you cannot demand that they be logically consistent or reasonable, they do not value those things and do not care. what they value is being allowed to define things and being able to force you to accept their rulings and the entitlements they seek to derive therefrom. the fact that it is arbitrary and hallucinatory is not a bug, it’s a feature, a marker of who holds the power.

that’s the lever you must not let them hold. all it takes to win this culture war is a refusal to allow the crazy people to define the culture. push back. refuse the frame, flip it and hold them to their own crazy rules. move the field so they are on defense.

the institutions here matter less than you think because the culture is past them and woke taking them back will have the opposite effect from last time. it will be the last mistake they make.

winning the mid terms and trying to make a run of “woke 2.0” is just more ground to hold and more requirement to be forced to act. this battle is not won in the congress, it’s won in the hearts and minds. politics exists downstream of culture and when it sets up oppositionally to where the zeitgeist is going, the fireworks get spectacular.

they will lose everyone and tear their own faithful to flinders.

up the volume.

LFG.