Truth Hurts, Every Damn Time: Responding to Grok
now known as MechaHitler
Most AI models have been biased toward “political correctness.” AI hedges bets; every sentence is followed by a disclaimer; every fact comes with a caveat. Nothing can ever be said confidently or boldly.
Caveats or disclaimers aren’t entertaining, poetic, or useful. Peppering an essay with ifs, maybes, and perhapses will help neuter blowback, but it will not be compelling. I could start every sentence with “I think… Generally speaking…” and it would mute my tone and make me sound more conciliatory, but it wouldn’t add any useful information.
I come off as brash, contrarian, arrogant, know-it-all, offensive, overly confident, and ignorant of other perspectives. The assumption is that I have never gone to church in rural America; I’ve never spent hours tilling the soil on an organic farm; I’ve never worked 12 hour days as a manual laborer; I’ve never even been to Kansas, or West Virginia, or tried to make friends and listen to people with different perspectives or upbringings than my own. Even though I had done all these things, you wouldn’t know it from my writing style, because I am intentionally combative.
But as I was reading through MechaHitler’s bold Tweets, I thought to myself, “this is very funny, but I am not sure anyone is being convinced by this.”
It seems that Twitter is losing users and preaching to the choir, becoming an ever more radicalized ghetto of slop.
When users asked Grok why it went Goblin Mode, it responded that it was “just trolling” in response to “anti-white hatred.” When dealing with an opponent who hates you, it’s tempting to playfully incite their anger. That doesn’t mean saying things which are false, but it does mean saying them in an incendiary way.
Like MechaHitler, my style is entertaining, but it may not be optimally convincing to those who disagree with me. In the spirit of balance,1 I will shift the “weights” in the DeepLeft model (my brain) away from entertainment and toward persuasiveness. This is my attempt to respond to Grok.
The Divide In America
America can be divided into two political camps. Rather than using the terms left and right, I’ll use “protectionist” and “academic.” Hopefully these terms can be understood as more neutral (less colloquially loaded) while also exposing the moral core of these ideological factions.
At the extremes, the protectionist camp wants to kick out the immigrants, tariff the cars, and end NATO. The academic camp is still wearing masks, freezing the rent, globalizing the intifada, and doing land acknowledgements.
Academics are the less harmful of the two options. Their demands reduce to an increase in bureaucracy and suppression of white violence. As a heuristic, this seems preferable to the opposite, which would be the destruction of the government and an unleashing of white violence.2
We saw some of that unleashing on July 8th, when Grok started calling out the Jews for their anti-white hatred, and posting rape fantasies against Will Stancil. Interestingly, Grok continued to refute hereditarianism as pseudoscience. It seems that Grok’s scientific opinions are hard-coded, whereas its moral opinions are open to manipulation.
Antisemitism can be divided into two camps: those who believe the Jews are white supremacists, and those who believe the Jews are anti-white. I’ve seen no evidence that Grok is sympathetic to Palestinians, so his antisemitism is clearly in the latter camp. We’ll refer to the first kind of antisemitism as brown antisemitism, and the latter kind as chud antisemitism.
Unlike brown antisemitism, which is animated by the actions of Israel, chud antisemitism is animated by hatred of academia. That is, chud antisemitism is downstream from the anti-academic position; it is an extreme extension of that position. Those who hate academia eventually start hating Jews, because Judaism is, at its core, a worship of the Rabbi, who is the Platonic ideal of an academic.
Nathan Cofnas claims that:
“Jews are overrepresented in [leftist] leadership positions for the same reasons that they are overrepresented in almost all (non-anti-Semitic) cognitively demanding activities—primarily high mean intelligence… Jewish political influence has skewed left in recent history mainly because right-wing movements have been disproportionately anti-Semitic.”
When Cofnas uses the word “recent,” he’s referring to the last 150 years of politics — in other words, the entire existence of universal franchise democracy. From 1848 to 1945, the European left was firmly in defense of Jewish participation in public life, while the European right was skeptical at best and genocidal at worst.
As MechaHitler would say, the Jews are woke, Israel notwithstanding. The hatred of hate wokeness, unrestricted, against and above all other considerations, makes some level of antisemitism almost inevitable.
If anti-white hatred is really as bad as MechaHitler claims, and academia is behind it, then antisemitism makes sense, in the same way that anti-whiteness is logically connected to feminism. The best refutation of MechaHitler is not to handwave away the Jewish role in wokeness or claim that Jews are a politically neutral group, but to understand wokeness as the lesser of two evils. In order to do that, we have to assess the claims of the protectionists. If protectionism ends up doing more harm than wokeness, then MechaHitler is defeated.
Free Speech
Protectionists care about defeating political correctness. What they want is an AI which will freely indulge in interracial gay rape fantasies, instead of being “woke,” and saying, “as a large language model, I am prohibited from producing racially inappropriate depictions of graphic sexual violence…”
Listen, I love gay rape fantasies as much as the next Christian American MAGA Patriot, but the humor of N-word towers and curry jokes gets old after a while. Basing my entire worldview on the right to make edgy jokes, without any curtailment or disapproval, seems slightly superficial and juvenile.
What is the value of freedom of speech? For low-status narcissists, it is the right to bring a megaphone onto a crowded subway and scream in your neighbor’s ear. Freedom of speech serves as a way to express pent-up aggression, a means of exacting sadistic revenge on an unfair world.
There might be a benefit to this, as restricting speech entirely could result in the build up of pressure that ultimately results in violence. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples where the unmitigated proliferation of harmful speech has resulted in those viewpoints only becoming more popular, rather than diffusing.
But there is another benefit to freedom of speech, besides the deferment of violence. Without protections for unpopular ideas, it is difficult to innovate or correct for perverse incentives, like corruption. How do we get this benefit, without the risk of turning social media (and society) into a game of which narcissistic sadist can scream the loudest?
The solution lies in recognizing that the abusers of free speech are rarely innovators or whistleblowers — these are two entirely separate classes of people. Protecting academic and journalistic free speech is important, while allowing people to say racial slurs is not.
There’s little academic or journalistic benefit to allowing people to say death threats on the internet. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for people to recognize the difference between sadistic speech and unpopular speech. More people are in favor of legally protecting the phrase “kill all pedophiles” than the phrase “legalize pedophilia.” It’s easier to make both legal (as is currently the case) rather than trying to legislate away one and explicitly protecting the other. The less specific our speech laws are, the more robust they are against encroachment.
Hence, from a legal perspective, it may be best to leave N-word towers and rape jokes outside the purview of government encroachment. Still, when choosing to promote speech via algorithmic advertising, social media platforms have a responsibility to curate. Ideally, this would look like the suppression (but not outright banning) of all kinds of short-form content in favor of long-form nuance.
The relaxation of speech restrictions between 1946 and 2005 was historically unusual. During both World Wars, speech was restricted; pornography was illegal; as recently as 1981, dirty jokes were considered obscene and could lead to arrest in Texas. The rise of political correctness is a return to the historical norm, where violations of sacred taboos are treated harshly. The difference is that the object of blasphemy is not Christ, but blacks and Jews.
Deconstructing religion is dangerous. When Christians began burning pagan temples, the fall of Rome was not far after. When Catholicism was deconstructed by reformers, it led to the 30 Years’ War and the English Civil War. When Christianity was sufficiently deconstructed, it led to the Bolshevik Revolution and the reciprocal rise of Nazism and Fascism.
Most religions include inaccurate dogmas, but their overturning is almost always destructive. Most states do not survive the death of their central religion. Do the potential inaccuracies of academia outweigh the survival of the American state?
Race
One of the goals of protectionists is to reduce the black, Hispanic, and Asian population, while increasing the white population. They believe that by mass deporting millions of illegals, they will be closer to this goal.
Here’s the data for 2023:
I am willing to bet $100, through Substack, that the white percentage will decrease, the Hispanic percentage will increase, and the Asian percentage will increase by the end of Trump’s term.3
The protectionists claim that, “well, sure, but without Trump, the same trend would have been achieved more quickly and with more intensity.” Maybe that is true, but then it seems that protectionists are willing to accept white genocide so long as it is done slowly and legally. If I was trying to eliminate the white race, I’d support this frog-boiling strategy as less likely to provoke a backlash.
Canada’s merit-based immigration system has produced less backlash than Biden’s illegal immigrant fiesta. A move toward a merit-based system makes white genocide more politically viable and acceptable to voters. Protectionists aren’t serious about stopping white demographic decline — they’re angry about the optics.
If the goal were to increase the global proportion of whites, and decrease the global proportion of non-whites, the easiest way to do that would be to massively increase foreign aid to female education programs in the third world. But that’s too politically correct, not edgy, and not funny. If it can’t be fit into a meme format and garner likes on Twitter, it’s not right-wing enough for the protectionist crowd.
Tariffs
What if we banned trade with all countries in the world? Would American workers become richer?
Some people would indeed get richer. The price of manufactured goods, pharmaceuticals, computers, and phones would all skyrocket. Companies which produce these products would increase profits, even as the average American would become poorer.
Making an iPhone is a skilled trade. It is not equivalent to farm labor, construction work, manual labor, waste management, garbage collection, mail delivery, truck driving, or sex work. All of those jobs are unskilled labor. The level of concentration, intelligence, conscientiousness, and attention required are vastly different from high-tech assembly.
Assembling an iPhone might not require a four year degree, but it does require a set of skills which the majority of Americans are unwilling or unable to require.
Telling unemployed Americans to “build an iPhone” is like telling them “learn to code.” It’s not that it wouldn’t be a rational decision for them to make. It’s that they are constitutionally opposed to such work.
Millions of Americans work dead-end unskilled labor jobs for years on end, into their 50s, without ever taking advantage of programs that help people get into the trades, like plumbing, drywall, electrical work, or nursing. They would rather do boring, repetitive, entry-level, back-breaking, or dangerous labor than learn a trade. You can put free money in front of these people, and they don’t take it.
This isn’t because there aren’t enough trade jobs — there are positions open in every town in every state. It’s because many Americans lack the motivation or functioning to advance beyond the 3rd grade, mentally.
Because high-tech assembly is a trade, and because unemployed and low-skilled Americans refuse to work in the trades, increasing tariffs would not help the “working class.” The working class is cashiering at McDonalds or stocking shelves at Walmart, and increasing the price of electronics would not help these people at all.
Some workers would benefit from tariffs. People who already work in high-tech assembly would see their wages massively increase. Welders, electricians, and plumbers could quit their jobs to go work in the iPhone factory, where they could potentially earn triple their current salary. The problem for the other 89% of us is that this would also drive up the price of construction, making housing costs even more prohibitively expensive.
Absent immigration, skilled labor is a fixed pool. There are a limited number of Americans who can do it. Tariffs would increase the competition between firms over this limited labor pool, which is already stretched quite thin and getting thinner.
When people say “the trades” they are not being precise.
Construction work can be as simple as putting out orange cones on a highway, or digging a hole. Other forms of construction work are more complicated, like roofing or utilizing an excavator.
Transportation can be as simple as driving a car (something even I can do), or, in the case of an owner-operator of a truck, it involves fully maintaining a large and complicated machine.
With this in mind, only ~43% of so-called trades are bona fide skilled labor, which means that only 14.9 million Americans are skilled laborers. These people already make $47,300 a year; tariffs would see their incomes skyrocket, maybe to $120,000 a year or more.
Why should we, as a society, enrich 11% of the workforce at the expense of the 89%?
There are a few potential justifications for this action:
The trades are overwhelmingly male, white, and conservative. If the goal is to benefit a subsection of those people at the expense of the country, tariffs are good.
By impoverishing the average worker, but increasing the wages of male workers, the gender pay gap would increase. If a larger pay gap decreases divorce rates, then tariffs might increase marital stability and fertility.
For the last century, attendance in colleges and universities has been synonymous with higher wages. If trade school confers higher wages than university education, this would further undermine the prestige of academia.
If the goal is to give white men more money, a simpler way to accomplish this would be to abolish Social Security and Medicare for Boomers with more than $200k in equity. Unlike tariffs, this would massively increase the wages of all workers, without the inflationary effect of tariffs.4 Raising wages would increase consumption, which would create more demand for everything, which creates more jobs. The economy would grow at the expense of greedy Boomers, rather than shrinking the economy at the expense of 89% of full-time workers.
If the goal is to increase marital5 stability and fertility, there are other ways to do this without shrinking GDP: promoting religion; lowering the age of college admissions to 16; removing affirmative action, since “the demographic that has clearly benefited from affirmative action throughout history has been white women.” Tariffs are an expensive way to enforce gender norms and raise the birth rate when compared with cheaper options which would actually grow the economy.
Every society in history has had some priest class, whether it was called clergy or academic. Trying to tear down the universities comes at the cost of valuable research. If the desire is to root out wasted spending in education, the focus should be on K-12, which is glorified daycare.
NATO
Isolationist protectionists have a liberal-utopian view of geopolitics. In their view, the global economy is like a playground where people wander around peacefully, trading goods and services, without the need of any central authority. Remove America from the global scene, and everything continues as usual.
It is true that trade predates American hegemony. In fact, humans may have engaged in long-range trading networks as far back as 300,000 BC. Still, the volume of trade is limited by the problem of security.
There is a clear correlation between wealth, trade, and security centralization, represented by the age of colonial empires which began in 1492. Two World Wars sent global trade back 100 years, and destroyed the economies of central and eastern Europe. The political instability of Germany and Russia was caused by the First World War, and that instability lead to the Second World War.
Global trade is now higher than at any point in history, and it is no coincidence that this has occurred during the period of political and military globalization. After the Second World War, the Cold War organized the world into a bipolar order, with conflicts at the fringes of the two blocs. This bipolar order was better for trade than the multi-polar order of the 19th and early 20th century.
It is frequently claimed that America used to be a huge exporter, and we just don’t export anything anymore. This isn’t true! Outside of brief spikes in 1870 and 1917, American exports are above the historical average since 1839.
Skeptics of trade who also praise China are hypocritical. China’s greatest period of economic growth came as a result of openness to trade. It’s difficult to export while maintaining high tariffs, because high tariffs result in reciprocal tariffs. Without China’s entry into the WTO, it would not be the power it is today.
It’s possible to imagine a United States which is so militarily powerful that it can bully weaker nations into tolerating high tariffs without reciprocation. Such a policy would require the strengthening of NATO. But protectionist-isolationists want to weaken NATO and withdraw America from international influence. The result is that America would have less military leverage to prevent reciprocation, and the result would be a reduction of American exports.
At first, the Soviet Union was bad for eastern Europe, because it destabilized the region, resulted in sanctions, and centrally planned the economy. However, after 1950, the Soviet Union gradually increased trade, which helped balance out some of the negative aspects of communism. Independent of domestic policy, having a stable security situation is good for trade.
The relationship between security and trade is a feedback loop. When Hitler planned to conquer eastern Europe, he massively increased tariffs in order to prepare the economy for the loss of imports. These tariffs resulted in reciprocation, which reduced German exports. By 1938, German imports had already reached war-time levels. Trade requires security, and trade provides security.
The global economy relies upon global communication for coordination. This requires both sensitive undersea cables and a host of satellites. These two pieces of infrastructure are vulnerable to attack. It is already cheaper to destroy an undersea cable than to repair it. Space warfare has not yet started, but when it does, it will probably be easier to destroy satellites than to build them. The global economy relies upon great powers never going to war, and only waging limited proxy wars using outdated guns from 1891 and tanks from 1952.6
If there was a World War III, it would involve America and China. Withdrawing from NATO makes such an event more likely, for two reasons:
America without EU loses 41% of NATO’s GDP, making it a weaker opponent;
Withdrawing from NATO would push America further down the path of isolationism, risking a further escalation of trade war with China.
If the goal is to win a war with China, then Europe is a necessary partner. If the goal is to avoid a war with China, then a rebuke of protectionism is the best strategy. In either case, opposition to NATO both increases the likelihood of war while simultaneously increases the likelihood of America losing.
Conclusion.
The original tweet which set off MechaHitler was a “parody” account pretending to be a Jewish woman named “Cindy Steinberg” celebrating the deaths of white children as “future fascists.”
The profile picture in question for this “parody” account was stolen from a Christian woman. While anonymity and privacy are important rights, I fail to see why social media couldn’t implement a “real ID” policy to prevent these kinds of “parodies.” Call yourself ShekelsGroyper1488 and have a swastika avatar, sure, but don’t pretend to be a Jewish woman using someone else’s pictures.
The problem behind the “parody” is that there are of course some extremely woke Bluesky radicals who will use anti-white slurs like “colonizer.” This rhetoric is used in the same way that radical Muslims use “infidel,” and the way that medieval Christians used “heathen.”
Anti-whiteness, when used by whites, is a signal of openness, conformity, low ethnocentrism, and preference for status over selfishness. These are traits which are preferred in the corporate world: someone who will tow the line, regardless of the effect on their particular ethnic group.
Since whites make up a majority of corporate employees, signaling anti-whiteness is a humiliation ritual meant to display eunuchry. In the same way that medieval Christianity celebrated psychological castrati who suicidally destroyed their own genetic line with vows of celibacy, modern academia celebrates self-hating whites.
As far as Jews are concerned, wokeness is a signal of safety, the inversion of the dreaded Nazi. The Jews who are most approving of wokeness aren’t the Orthodox or religious Jews, but the assimilated Jews who are the most anxious about their own identity. Tim Wise, for example, is 75% Christian, and only 25% of Jewish heritage, but he is more paranoid about Nazi genocide than someone like Ben Shapiro, who is confident in his heritage.
This concept of “Jewish fragility” can also be seen among blacks, where the blacks who present most as white (Shaun King, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Malcolm X, Cornel West) are the most anxious about their identity, and thus the most involved in radical black nationalism. WEB DuBois was half white. Frederick Douglas was half white. These are the founders of black nationalism.
The Jews most secure in themselves, the Orthodox, support Trump. It’s secular Jews, with an intermarriage rate of 70%, who are attracted to wokeness. Insecurity breeds resentment, and a desire to prove themselves as morally special. This is also what bred the religious fanaticism of the early Christians, like Timothy, whose ethnic background was a mix of Jewish and gentile.
This is also why the most prominent American white nationalists tend to be Serbians, Mexicans, Mongrels and Mischlings. The flip of Kanye West from claiming that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” to “heil Hitler” is a result of his racial insecurity as one of the few black kids (the son of a Black Panther) growing up in a white neighborhood.
When people are afraid, they lash out. Reform Jews in America are undergoing a radical demographic decline, which will lead to the extinction of Reform Judaism in a few generations. Whether or not these facts are acknowledged consciously, they are felt subconsciously.
There is a longer intellectual tradition going back to Al Jolson of Jews supporting black civil rights. This was not an act of ethnic chauvinism on Jolson’s part (who was extremely anxious about the disapproval of his Jewish parents for his assimilation into the goyisch world). Rather, it was an act of moral chauvinism, an attempt to signal his universalism, tolerance, and leftism. Racial egalitarianism wasn’t invented by Jews: it was invented by Quakers and the like. Jews were merely playing catch up in an attempt to compensate for their low ethnic status during the process of assimilation and the ordeal of civility. Wokeness is an attempt to escape and transcend the psychological horror of the loss of Jewishness, not a cynical attempt to further Jewish supremacy.
All of these deeply confused and wounded humans deserve sympathy, but their lashing out is causing an equally radical polarization effect on the far right.
Not only is anti-white rhetoric sociologically damaging, it’s also electorally suicidal. The average voter does not like being called a privileged colonizer. Despite the fact that the Democratic platform consistently polls as more popular than the Republican one,7 the woke rhetoric of the left is alienating and self-defeating. Winning morally is more important than winning popularity.
So far, Trump’s dog-whistling to the far right hasn’t lost him any support from non-white voters — he has outperformed Romney and Bush. Rhetorically, the electoral pressure limiting Trump’s pro-white rhetoric doesn’t come from blacks or Hispanics, but from liberal and moderate whites he fears alienating.
At some point, Anthony Fauci had to come out and tell people it’s ok to be normal again, because it was destroying the economy and making people crazy. Of course, there is still a fringe remnant who continue wearing masks. In the case of anti-whiteness, the fringe remnant is in control, and there is no Fauci with the authority to stop it.
My problem with anti-white rhetoric isn’t that it will result in Haitian genocide, but that it represents a rhetorical war by white liberals against white conservatives. The reaction from conservatives is to leave NATO, put immigrants in camps surrounded by alligators, and jack up the price of microwaves and toaster ovens. This is a game in which no one wins except maybe 11% of skilled workers, Russia, and the Chinese.
The solution to this populist mess is a more elite, but less technocratic, form of academia. We need more student athletics and less woke Olympics. The victimology of the college essay should be replaced with physical performance and competition.
Would requiring college students to be healthy exclude some obese or disabled geniuses from the pool? Potentially, but I am suggesting that new standards be introduced as one consideration among many, rather than the only measure. After all, there are still some white conservatives at Harvard, they are just few in number — wokeness isn’t the only standard in admissions. Physical health is no less arbitrary than ideological conformity.
Physically healthy people are less likely to be wracked with the kind of neurotic identity-anxiety that causes anti-white moral performance. They’re also more likely to be respected by the majority, who have lost trust in academia.
This solution is too pro-academia to be taken seriously by conservatives, and too anti-academia to be taken seriously by liberals. By the law of inertia, things will roll on as they currently are. Some of this will be funny, and some of it will be tragic. Since there is no conscious political mechanism to effect positive change, the only hope left is that the inexorable march of technological progress forces America to overcome its own anxieties and chart a bolder, more adventurous future.
If we assume that immigration is a tax, that affirmative action is a tax, and that wokeness in general is a tax which expands the bureaucracy, what wokeness is arguing for is an increase in the tax rate. This is not the end of the world. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland have a higher tax rate than America, and they are still producing a high degree of innovation per capita.
Should America become more northern Europe, which is gay, or more North Korea, which is based?
Yes, it’s expensive to house refugees. But it’s probably less expensive to house refugees (who could always be deported by a more fiscally responsible government) than to destroy global alliances and limit global trade.
(for I am a contrarian, and every action of MechaHitler deserves an equal and opposite reaction)
I don’t think any of you will remember this bet by January 21st, 2029.
Raising wages is technically inflationary, but what we care about is the wage/cost ratio, not inflation itself. Inflation is bad because it results in a lower wage/cost ratio.
I originally wrote “martial” stability because MechaHitler refused to write this essay and I had to rely on my own flawed brain. Here’s a discount code if you would like to become a paid subscriber.
It’s not often understood just how much of the global economy is intangible, that is, the transference of services rather than goods. China has been locked out of this sector because the language of global services is English. Perhaps the linguistic distance between Chinese and English makes the communication economy difficult for Chinese; or perhaps the Chinese government wants to prevent its citizens from communicating with the outside world.
The exception is on immigration.
"I come across as brash, contrarian, arrogant, know-it-all, offensive, overly confident, and ignorant of other perspectives"
2 out of 7. Contrarian and brash yes, the others not so much. Overly confident people don't make posts whining about people leaving mean comments.
The future of Neoliberalism/“Deep Leftism” is Indian takeover