'Manifest Man' Destiny

And: Win Marshall & Me; Iran 'Straight Answers'; Whence The DSA?; Trump & UAP; More

Scene from Manifest Festival (source)

One of you excellent readers sent me this article about the “manifesting” culture. Google “manifestation retreat,” and you’ll be surprised. The article opens at a Silicon Valley area retreat for “rationalist” tech nerds called “Manifest Festival” — and believe you me, if you can resist reading after this opening line, you are a stronger person than your diarist:

On a cool June evening in Berkeley, I watched a man named Victor try to shoot a beam of light out of his penis.

Poor Victor had been ordered to do so by a popular Internet sex influencer named Aella. It didn’t work. Victor could not get his light saber sufficiently erect, in a manner of speaking. What’s going on here? More:

All ideologies rest on a theory of what humans are, or ought to be — there’s John Stuart Mill’s homo economicus, Hannah Arendt’s homo faber. Aella’s theory of man, and Manifest’s, holds that humans, with sufficient feedback and rigor, can and should train their brains to function like computers, that we can set aside the superstitions, the insecurities, the neediness and pride, the whole tangle of stuff that makes seducing a woman by means of imagined scrotal light feel humiliating — that, with enough work, we can become homo manifesticus.

Unlike other manifestation retreats, Manifest Festival is more focused on data strategies than on strictly New Age woo. At the conference, attendees learned strategies for finding partners:

It was called “how 2 socialMax Manifest 😎,” and it was led by a 23-year-old quantitative researcher at a trading firm — let’s call him Josh. He proposed to teach the room what he called “portfolio theory applied to socializing.” As it went, friendship was a kind of trading book. Like in any trading book, one should always maximize expected value when socializing. One should not, Josh advised, “give a fuck about fairness” — that is, whether an individual reciprocates the effort you give them — because fairness is a drag on returns. According to Josh, asking someone a great many questions as you strike up a conversation is “OP” (“overpowered,” a high-return move at almost no cost).

The single most overpowered move of all, though, is vulnerability. The trick, Josh explained, is to disclose something that makes you look bad, precisely when almost no one else is willing to do the same. You take the hit to your personal vanity, and the friendship deepens faster than it otherwise could. By way of example, Josh told the room about his porn habit. He was, he explained, a “gooner.” He’d confessed as much to the last stragglers in a thinning room at a previous conference; one of them stuck around to talk to Josh, and he later gave Josh a free ticket to Manifest. Josh’s vulnerability had paid off! He recommended the strategy to the rest of us.

If Davos man ever had a porn addiction, it’s unlikely that he’d ever admit it. But then, Davos man probably wouldn’t need Josh’s instruction in the first place. Socialization comes naturally to him. The relevant skills were installed early, at the right schools, among the right people, so thoroughly that he has long since forgotten they are skills at all. At Manifest, though, there is a certain existential loneliness, a specifically sexual strain of angst, that did not lift once in the three days of the conference. Multiple sessions every day centered sex, love, and romance — that is, how to master them, or merely obtain them. These neuroses practically announced themselves at the door: the first thing I saw at Lighthaven, more or less, was a whiteboard by the entrance on which someone had written, “Single? Check out FEMBOYS.”

Read the whole thing — please! These people are not mere fringe freaks. They are working and living in the region of the country where the most powerful, and most wealth-generating, technology of the 21st century is growing. They are most definitely not satisfying themselves with exploring their own kinks:

These people have had their hands on real power before, and recently. On my final morning of the conference, I rode the shuttle from the hotel to Lighthaven, and a few rows ahead of me sat Caroline Ellison. Not long ago, Ellison ran Alameda Research, the trading firm at the dark heart of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX — the fraud whose billions had, for one brief and giddy stretch, made this very community a genuine force in American politics. The statistician Nate Silver held court at Manifest two summers ago, and David Shor — “the most influential data scientist in the Democratic Party,” according to Vox — was currently at Lighthaven to speak on “The Politics of AI.” Also, as one well-connected rationalist told me, lowering his voice as he said it, figures of even greater influence appeared in the blocked-off “private events” that peppered the schedule — those parts of the weekend that were not for me, or for most of the people there, ever to see.

Ellison, for the time being, was riding the public bus to Lighthaven with the rest of us, but only for now. The fortunes that bankroll this world have a way of regenerating, and the vanished FTX billions are giving way to the freshly vested equity of the AI labs. (Had Bankman-Fried’s fraud stayed hidden, one rationalist told me, Alameda Research’s stake in Anthropic alone would eventually have made customers whole.) Davos man may not yet have noticed what is underway in Berkeley. But Manifest man is auditioning to replace him all the same.

You and I, sitting in our normie armchairs, have so little idea about what’s going on in this country as society, having lost any real gravitational connection with sacred order, spins wildly off into the darkness of space. We might comfort ourselves by assuming that these people live on the fringes, and there have always been fringes. It’s a bad bet.

Winston Marshall And I Talk Aliens

‘We Need Straight Answers’

Watch this brief exchange between Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) and SecWar Pete Hegseth, on the subject of the Iran War:

I understand that Hegseth would not be able to give a straight answer to that question in public. But I hope that the Senators would get him into a SCIF and grill him on that point. It is far past time for Congress to continue deferring to the president’s braggadocio on Iran. He’s been telling us all year that the US has smashed Iran. Obviously, we haven’t, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we do not have that capability.

Listen to this heated exchange at yesterday’s hearing between Hegseth and a Democratic senator, who puts good and necessary questions to him about the lack of a strategy for victory in this war. Hegseth was on the Hill asking for billions more to fund the war, but responded to legitimate questions from lawmakers by doing things like accusing this particular Democratic senator of Not Supporting The Troops. Disgraceful! “Not Supporting The Troops” is the last rhetorical refuge of a scoundrel.

Look, even if you think the Iran War was necessary, you should expect the leaders who started it to have a victory plan. The Trump crew does not. How many times have we heard the president come out in public and boast that America has Iran on the ropes — and then we find out that it’s not true. No doubt Iran has had the hell bombed out of it … but it still controls the Strait of Hormuz, which is the only thing that matters. And it still has its uranium.

It is believed that the Iranians have moved their weapons program into a stronghold named Pickaxe Mountain (that’s what Sen. Kennedy’s question was about). Hegseth answered Kennedy’s query by saying vaguely that the US military has the capability to take it out, raising the question: Is the US prepared to introduce nuclear weapons into the theater of war? We’ve already used the most powerful bunker-busting weapons we have on buried Iranian weapons sites, and they didn’t seem to do the job, at least not sufficiently. What’s next, then?

If the Trump administration is considering using a nuclear weapon against Iran, to advance victory in a war that was always unpopular with the American people, and/or is thinking of deploying US troops on the ground in Iran, we bloody well deserve to know!

This is not happening in a vacuum. Take a deep dive into the tables of a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll about Trump approval ratings, broken down into how he’s handling various issues. Nearly four out of five Independent voters oppose Trump on Iran; one in three GOP voters do. Trump’s overall disapproval rate is at 61 percent. This is not what any American president leading an increasingly serious war, one with massive potential consequences for the global economy, needs. But here we are, and the hubris and arrogance of this administration’s approach to the war from the jump is to blame.

Trump and UAP NDA

Here’s great news:

NDAs are “non-disclosure agreements” that UAP whistleblowers who worked for the federal government say they were compelled to sign. If they violate them by going public, they could go to jail. If this report is what it sounds like, then the president might have opened a very important door for witnesses willing to come before Congress and testify. From the Fox News report, which has been greeted enthusiastically by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), a Congressional leader for disclosure:

“President Trump recently directed the Department of War and the intelligence community to allow former government employees or contractors, that have relevant information about the disclosure of UAP, to come forward to meet with designated government representatives — AARO or the President’s UAP taskforce, ‘PURSUE’ — and have their prior NDAs abrogated,” a senior administration official said, with AARO referring to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon office established to investigate UFOs and other unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).

Another senior administration official emphasized the move was not a “declassification directive” and only allowed employees to come forward through government channels.

What this does NOT mean is that those bound by NDAs can go on TV or on podcasts and say what they know. What it means is that they can now cooperate with government disclosure investigators. What is not clear is whether this clears them to testify before Congress. In any case, this seems like progress to me.

Weimar America Update

Click here to watch this clip. Glaser, a comedian, says that she pays for her porn because she “feels so bad” for the women being abused in it, and she hopes that they are receiving compensation for their suffering.

She begins by saying she cannot reach climax without pornography — the same problem that countless young porn-addled men have, according to studies.

Note too that we have reached the point in our descent in which not only is someone with Glaser’s condition conceivable, but that it is no longer taboo to go on the world’s biggest podcast and talk about it, in the same way one would talk about drinking too much coffee.

As you know, I spent a lot of time reading histories of Weimar Germany. The term “Weimar” is, in pop culture, a symbol of sexual decadence. In fact, Weimar’s sexual decadence was much worse than most of us know. And yet … it’s hard to deny that we, in 2026 America, are worse. I don’t want to dwell on this depressing fact, but I just want to remind you that saying this does not make you some kind of Puritanical doomer. This stuff matters.

Earlier this summer, I had an intense conversation with a young Christian husband and father, who told me he struggled mightily to overcome his porn addiction, which started when he was a young kid. He told me that he does not know a single man his age who hasn’t had the same problem, or who currently struggles with it. Priests and pastors have told me the same thing over the years about the younger men in their congregations.

If you think this is simply a matter of not being able to stop looking at dirty pictures or movies, consider the case of Nikki Glaser. She cannot function normally, in sexual terms, without watching videos of women being gang-raped and tortured. There is a neurological reason for this: the more porn you watch, the more extreme your habits become, because your brain needs that to produce the same amount of dopamine that gives you pleasure.

Reading the standard Weimar Germany histories, I found that historians struggled to deal with the role sexual decadence played in the disintegration of German society and the rise of Hitler. They plainly did not want to take a position that put them in opposition to the Sexual Revolution, the “blessings” of which are never, ever to be doubted in elite liberal professional circles.

It is true that sexual decadence did not “cause” the Nazis; economic and political factors were far more important. But the extreme sexual decadence of Weimar Berlin and other major German cities were a sign of a social fabric that was fast unraveling, and of the collapse within the hearts and minds of many Germans of a sense of sacred order.

The decadence was confined to major urban areas, for obvious reasons. In our time and place, it is everywhere that the Internet is. A judge whose district covers a large rural area in a conservative state told me that it’s mind-blowing how degenerate rural America can be — this, based on the criminal cases that come through his court. He blames Internet porn and boredom. This did not happen in Weimar Germany. It’s happening here, though.

Don’t forget that Hannah Arendt said that social atomization was by far the biggest cause of the rise of totalitarianism in both Germany and Russia. Sexual decadence, especially porn addiction, is a big driver of social atomization. Look at the evidence (for example) showing how young men and women of the digital era are coupling and marrying in much lower numbers than in the pre-digital era. You don’t think there’s a connection between online porn and that? Really?

Where Did The DSA Come From?

The American Left has a radicalism problem. If you aren’t heavily online, you might be missing out on the Democratic Socialists of America’s march on the Democratic Party. You likely heard that DSA champion Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York, gave a speech yesterday in which he regretted that he doesn’t have the legal authority to arrest Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes. The arrogance of thinking that a mayor of an American city should even think of doing such a thing (or that he ought to have a foreign policy) is something new in American politics (this, whatever you think of Netanyahu, or any foreign leader).

But it’s entirely in keeping with the DSA’s crackpot radicalism. Unless you’re on Twitter, you might not be aware how incredibly, insanely far left they are. We aren’t talking about Scandinavian-style socialism here. It’s more extreme.

Take this below about Hasan Piker, the popular far-left podcaster, who addressed a DSA gathering the other day wearing a Mao Zedong jacket (he calls Mao “one of the great leaders of the world”):

Liberal commentator Bill Maher says he has “read the quotes” from DSA people, and that he refuses to “live in Communism,” as they want. In that clip, he calls out the Democratic Party for being asleep at the wheel as the DSA has been marching from victory to victory against regular Democrats.

The recent Fox News appearance of Gustavo Gordillo, a DSA leader in NYC, produced a wealth of insane quotes. In this one, he said his family, like many other migrants, came to the US from Latin America to escape capitalism and American imperialism.

Echoing my warnings in Live Not By Lies, Coleman Hughes points out that younger Americans have not been vaccinated against this sort of thing. Excerpt:

How do we explain this trend? I would argue that the question is backward. The puzzle is not why socialism is popular. Socialism is famously easy to message: “Take from the rich and give to the poor.” The real question is why younger Americans lack the antibodies against its natural appeal that older generations of Americans seem to have.

The simple answer: You would have to be in your 40s, at least, to have grown up in an America where socialism was the ruling philosophy of our main geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union. Having the Cold War’s final years and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as twin memories is a powerful inoculation against socialism’s appeal. But any American under 40 doesn’t have that.

If my theory is right, socialism’s appeal is only going to rise in the coming years. The problem that such a rise presents is twofold: Socialism kills economic growth, and economic growth is the only long-run anti-poverty program that has ever worked anywhere. Those of us who understand this must fight the resurgence of socialism tooth and nail.

True. But you know, the DSA is only the natural extension of the crazy identity politics the mainstream Democrats embraced nearly twenty years ago. It’s bearing fruit, and that fruit is poisonous. I’m not a Democrat, so I don’t really know what resources the Democratic Party has within it to combat this garbage. For the sake of the country, though, I hope they will find them, and get cracking.

You regular readers know I’ve been pointing out that we on the Right have a similar problem with the rise of the Groypers and their comrades. Look at the huge problem the Dems have with the DSA now. That’s going to happen to the Republicans too if they don’t wake up. The thing is, the Dems can’t fight the radicals with warmed-over Obamaism, or whatever. Nor can the Republicans fight the insurgent far right with conventional Reaganism/neoconservatism. The Iran War was Trump’s great gift to the far right. The silence of GOP leaders, including the president and vice president, in the face of this challenge is a foolish strategy. These people don’t want a place at the table. They want to overturn the table.

If the DSA youth have forgotten what Communism is, and if the far-right youth have forgotten what Fascism is, then the Olds on both the mainstream Left and Right have, for their part, forgotten that these ideologies have not been permanently defeated. I remind you that in the face of economic collapse in 1929, millions of Germans — especially the young! — abandoned the centrist parties and ran into the arms of the National Socialists and the Communist Party of Germany.

René Girard said: “The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them.” I would tweak this to say they repeat the crimes of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but otherwise, yeah.

I’ll end this section on a positive note: Aaron Renn, who has a good record of forecasting cultural trends, sees the coming end of right-wing populism — in large part because there is no one with Donald Trump’s gifts to replace him), and its successor being what Renn calls the “New Constructivism” (smart people who recognize the validity in much populist critique, and who are coming up with credible solutions to the problems populists identify). As a conservative who has generally been supportive of populism, against the stiff and outdated ideology of old-school Republicans, I hope he’s right.

But if the New Constructivism is going to have a chance to succeed, Republicans who have learned the good lessons from populism have got to figure out how to deal effectively with the race radicals now surging among the next generation of GOP leaders being formed at the grassroots activist level. So far, there is no indication that they have any idea how to do that. I don’t see it on the Democratic side either, though in fairness, I don’t know nearly as much about the Dems.

You cannot co-opt these people, either on the Right or the Left. They don’t want to be co-opted. They want to tear it all down. It won’t do to look at how the far left burned out in the early 1970s, and relax in the expectation that this will all run its course. Back then, America was a far more cohesive and stable society than it is today. And the Internet did not exist, both as a channel to push insane ideas, and as a technology that isolates people and makes them vulnerable to those ideas.

Fun With First Liberty

I’m about to have to hop in the car for a quick overnight run to Nashville for business, but before I do, I want to tell you how great it was to be last week at the First Liberty Institute annual conference in California. Kelly Shackelford gathered a great crowd of judges, lawyers, and other warriors for religious liberty. Between the First Liberty event, and the previous week’s Alliance Defending Freedom summit, which I also attended, I got a huge boost to my spirits. It’s hard to overstate how much it means to be in the physical presence of smart, determined men and women who are all-in on fighting for religious liberty. You feel much less alone in this fight. Again and again I say unto you: if you are a Christian with money to spare, please direct at least some of your tithe to either of these organizations. It really, really matters.

As I got off the plane in Alabama from my return flight home, a fellow passenger saw that I was carrying clothes in a First Liberty branded tote bag. He stopped me to say that he is a former military chaplain, and that First Liberty was absolutely terrific in helping him and other chaplains hold their ground within the military. I’m telling you, readers, we need to support First Liberty with our prayers and donations (and ADF too!). We might never need their services, but you never know, and besides, some good, otherwise defenseless people do.