My Lunch With Danny Li
or, On Protecting Virgins
A fortnight back I broke in the new year with an intrepid Zoomer boy looking to pick my brain on matters of public morality and gender dynamics.
Like Rajeev and WBE I met Danny Li outside my high rise in Downtown Orlando and took him to World of Beer—though unlike in those cases I let Danny paypig this time and even forgot to thank him after, furthering the case that Walt is secretly an art hoe.
The lad was handsome and lithe—a bit shorter than me but still quite tall for an Asian by my reckoning, which in fairness is something I also tend to think about every other Asian guy who registers to me as a real human bean with interiority, so this could just be a case of innocent grandma racism on my part borne of having come into the world only a year or two after Elliot Rodger; some part of me I think will always be impressed by them not being five feet tall. In my defense though I’ve gotten much better about that after working with a bunch at Deloitte and separately discovering I have an eerily identical neurotype to Mao Zedong, whose time in power maps uncannily well to the rise and fall of the Walt Right circa 2024.
But back to Danny—not wanting to seem racist I suppressed the urge to ask him if he was kin to Lana Li, but was rather less successful in getting “Lees of Old Virginia” out of my head during our walk to World of Beer.
Nonetheless I got to know him and concluded he was a bit less autistic than me but approximately the same amount evil, which portended well for us getting along.
Going into our date I wasn’t familiar with his oeuvre on account of for the most part only reading my own posts and those of girls I have a crush on, and primarily knew of him from assorted Notes drama that according to Danny had tanked his reputation on Substack and gotten him Cancelled—which I suppose he meant more in the context of normalfag sensibilities in lefty cultural spaces since at least from my vantage point there aren’t any meaningful consequences in 2026 for e.g. saying Nigger and talking about raping chicks, and Danny’s far less edgy than that. Seems there’s just a severe cultural bifurcation taking place that isn’t easily legible to anyone who doesn’t spend time in both sorts of ecology, whereas my own tendency is kind of just to dehumanize libtards and perceive it as obvious that their opinions are gay and don’t matter.
That said it turned out Danny and I had a fair bit in common—an earlier iteration of internet fame on YouTube, a pivot from STEM to artistry reflective of a more general tendency toward self-reinvention, a sentimental streak toward women gone curdled—that all in all made for an entirely bracing conversation.
But I’ll let him tell that part of the story.
What I intend to do here is formalize in writing my response to two specific questions Dan the Man had for me whilst preparing his own article—both to contextualize the recent overtures I’ve made to Zoomer Boys (see The Fuckboy Right and recent podcast with my 19yo intern) and to record for posterity the reasons for my actions last April now that a bit of time has passed and I can reflect with clear eyes.
first, can you remind me what you call your exact position on morality?
So at the deepest level I’d call myself a Moral Error Theorist or Noncognitivist, which is to say I see moral intuitions as epiphenomenal just-so stories deployed for the most part unconsciously (particularly in women) for the purposes of status jockeying and to justify one’s own material interests without incurring prohibitive cognitive load.
They also help us rationalize or aestheticize any feelings of empathy or disgust or ingroup bias that pop up day to day, and neurotype variance along such lines is what precipitates factionalization in more complex societies, with “beliefs” serving mostly as fake and gay pretext for whatever Queen Amygdala wants.
Anyway Dmitry’s biofoundationalism series is great for a higher resolution picture and hard evidence of all this for anyone who wants it.
What matters for our purposes is that on top of Error Theory I’m also what I call an Intersubjectivist—which is meaningfully distinct from Moral Relativism (and this is kind of the crux of my worldview tbh and at least by my reckoning what makes me more than a nihilistic brutalist a la WBE) because while Intersubjectivists absolutely see Oughts and Shoulds as spooks we also aren’t in Middle School anymore and realize we need stable, predictable mechanisms for dispute resolution and coordinating our way out of collective action problems / maladaptive incentive structures, and so see moral utterances as “true” to the extent they’re functionally operationalized or more broadly just essential for orderly cohabitation (you can think of this as akin to natural law).
Some such understanding is the fundament of civilization, and to whatever extent you don’t have such mechanisms you’re effectively in a Hobbesian State of War.
Granted, with the Fairer Sex you’re never NOT in a state of war on some level—but if you put enough oxytocin and eventually babies in a chick who doesn’t have BPD it also seems possible to groom a quasi-masculine sense of honor and even stable diachronic ontology into her over time. Besides that women clearly aren’t trustworthy, but they’re also seldom competent enough to permanently damage you and for the most part quite nice if you just flirt with them a bit, so it’s mostly low stakes who cares.
With men it’s trickier—clearly all mediated in the grammar of status, but unlike with girls you actually do have some room for positive sum transactional negotiation and game theoretics, which when executed properly scales to credible institutionalism.
Take a nice long gander around whatever room you happen to be in right now.
Now observe that everything therein, from the floor to the furniture to the very clothes on your back to more than anything the device you’re staring at, exists because of rules that actually DID mean something prior to the Zoomer Oral Culture deciding it’s coo for Luigi to shoot a married father in the back of the head and moreover if you object to that in any way you’re an incel because deadzo was a schlubby middle aged man.
And note when I say “Rules” I don’t mean in the way Aristotle or Confucius defined them so much as in the way Machiavelli or Sun Tzu defined them, which needn’t even be taken as normative, sufficing full well as a purely descriptive analysis of how things like power, status, narrative, and momentum work in a premodern textualist society where smoke isn’t divorced from fire and isn’t easily faked and people have really long memories and if you want things from other men who obv controlled everything that mattered back then you couldn’t just play himbo hetaera and advance your position by making people Feel Good in the moment; you had to be reliable and consistent and mindful of both your reputation and position in professional / civic / religious status hierarchies, because if you DIDN’T do that you sure as shit couldn’t compete in any marketplace of consequence with guys who did have proper skin in the game and as such were fully accountable as counterparties and interlocuters.
Today things are different, as thanks to hypermodern frictionlessness you kind of just can nakedly lie your way to success in a way that yields massively asymmetric returns.
God knows I can’t stfu about that in my own writing.
Hell, one of the primary reasons I founded The Tortuga Society was to make you fellers a bit less bashful about being overtly rapey and manipulative in your dealings with multinationals, which seems to be the prevailing attitude in Millennials especially despite basically all of us at this point having very deliberately torched our boyish sentimentality toward women, which one would think is a considerably harsher ask.
And don’t mistake me for some misty-eyed Tradtard; on the main my neurotype and that of anyone witty enough to get internet famous benefits hugely from these aspects of modernity, while a few centuries back there’s a decent chance I’d have ended up thrown down a well or some shit after one ackshully too many.
But there’s another reason I founded Tortuga, which is that I longed for a place where at least internally we could operate under meaningful standards of behavior—some sense of camaraderie and self-imposed restraint; respect for the meaning other men make of their lives; succor from a world increasingly optimized to sell you dick pills.
And maybe, eventually, sufficient clout to enforce our will on the world and change the operative incentive structure at least in our immediate cultural vicinity.
Which brings me to Daniel’s other question.
can you explain why you hold the purity of virginity in such high moral regard? give that you consider morality completely subjective it’s surprising to me that you have such a strong moral intuition when it comes to this.
An understandable reaction.
My first comment is that one’s metaethical view on the truth-aptness of moral claims has precisely nothing to do with how his own moral intuitions manifest in practice.
Rather the character of one’s moral intuitions is shaped by factors like salience to his material interests and status position (think elites benefiting more from pulling up the ladder on rivals or from faux-populism than overt self-promotion) as well as neurotype variance downstream primarily of genetics and early childhood experience.
Now pursuant to female purity specifically—I wouldn’t say it’s my moral intuition there that’s super strong necessarily given one of the articles that got me big was literally a defense of sluts, but I genuinely do think that even beyond my own intuitions there are entirely good and proper reasons for society to value female purity. To wit:
Women are far more permeable than men to moral suasion and actually will internalize such mores in a way that changes their behavior on the margins.
Men are far more driven by hard material incentives, with exclusive sexual access to a woman being probably the most compulsive, and if you degrade the various mechanisms by which “showing up” as a man proffers that you just create a world where men stop wanting to work and occasionally shoot Charlie Kirk in the face.
Perhaps more importantly, when men stop believing in female purity they tend to become nihilistic shits who no longer believe in much of anything else. There are other cultures where this isn’t as much the case, but in Western Civ at least the idea of female purity (esp as embodied by Mary) is kind of just the Ur-Myth that underwrites basically all others, and once men grow disenchanted with it they can no longer take women seriously as meaning-makers, which due to their monopoly position in that domain instantly makes all of society seem aggressively fake and gay.
That said my big-brained reasons don’t especially matter because anyone who doesn’t share my intuitions will always see them as backsolving for shit I want emotionally—which is obviously true and is also the case for everything they want.
Reasons are frankly kind of gay.
And if I’m being honest injun then just in terms of what I like personally I probs do by disposition value womanly innocence and its attendant sensibilities / aesthetics more than like 80-90% of men—which by the way is also why I more or less exclusively go after chicks who are quite slutty; it’s a lot easier not to idealize them or lose frame and start acting super duper faggoty, which some of you might see as bleak but to my mind is kind of just a precondition for any sort of meaningful love to develop.
Because what you need to understand is that a girl’s Innocence—and specifically its compulsive power over men—is easily the strongest force she’ll ever control in her life, despite bearing fruit precisely when she’s least equipped to gainfully deploy it.
It’s also kind of the only thing that lets a chick genuinely hurt you.
And boy, how they will.
Using their Innocence to bludgeon men who value it is how chicks get back at the psychically onerous aspects of purity culture and extract catharsis, and whether it looks like torturing her controlling dad / dad-adjacent flirtfriend by getting publicly ravaged by an anthropomorphic cockroach or punishing a déclassé bedmate by eating Ted Bundy’s cum and rewriting the story to shit on ur bootiful moments together this is far and away chickies’ most fruitful avenue of vindictiveness and they 100% know it.
Thing is when a slutty girl does something foidlike you kind of just roll your eyes and call her a retarded whore, which in practice keeps her on a pretty tight leash.
When a Good Girl acts foidlike? That’s what leaves a scar—not least of which because she’ll unironically believe the fake and gay Wikipedia edits she tells herself post-hoc about why it was ackshully you who was the Bad Guy all along.
Sluts will *try* to do that, but it doesn’t really take usually, and especially after 25 they tend to find people just make fun of them; their narrative and reputational capital is at that point exclusively tied up with low status simps and guys looking to use them for puss, which in practice gives you basically all the power in the relationship.
Which is how it should be, obviously—and also why all the lads reading this ought to be incredibly cautious around “Trad” women, who in trvth are the ultimate matriarchs.
Anywho I understand Daniel intends to write about my public brouhaha with WBE last year so many of you were witness to.
To my mind the keystone of that story, which usually ends up omitted in retellings unsympathetic to the Waltine cause, is that Layla didn’t even tell me she was a virgin until the night before she met up with our lavender-scented friend.
Had I known she was I never would have gotten so emotionally entangled with her—not because I wouldn’t have pursued her, but because I would have done so in far too overtly Romantic a manner that would have read to her as embarrassingly cheugy and wouldn’t have yielded a single solitary feet pic. It was only because I was under the impression that she’d fucked eight dudes including no less than two Negroes that I was constantly insulting her and talking about raping her and shit, which to your modal Zoomette is kind of the difference between Scary Older Guy and Reddit Uncle.
Another thing often omitted is that Layla told me on the phone that night that she’d repeatedly told him She Doesn’t Want To Have Sex—that she wished he’d Just Leave, and also knows if they meet up they’re Definitely Having Sex, which she Doesn’t Want because she’s a devoted Catholic who values her virginity and Will Definitely Regret It.
Did she mean any of that?
At the time, yes.
Two weeks later when she dropped that article, not even a little
And this btw is precisely the sense in which women unironically don’t have agency and in certain instances really do need to be coercively restrained for literally their own good. They’re relational and affective creatures without a stable diachronic sense of self, which is what lets Dark Triad Niggas pull their strings like a marionette—which I know since I literally did the same fucking thing all the time to girls when I was WBE’s age, just generally only with turbosluts and weirdo Baby Aella types like Rose.
Whereas taking the virginity of a chick who you know values it—who’s transparently a narrative thinker prone to rumination, is doing it out of a self-harm impulse, and will very definitely look back on it with a sour taste in her mouth—crossed a line for me.
Hence the doxx threat against WBE—a Hail Mary pass in more ways than one, which ultimately didn’t work but I absolutely still see as the right move given it was the only option on the table that didn’t guarantee a prison sentence
Which even then a few years and couple dozen girls ago I’d have taken in a heartbeat and with effervescent Millennial gusto, because at the end of the day I kind of just am a huge fag when it comes to women, and not particularly ashamed of it at this point.
Especially considering WBE’s behavior after the Layla incident—immediately writing an article about how to manipulate girls into sex, posting her nudes on Twitter, this:
…which he’d no doubt write off as ironic or whatever, but Layla pretty clearly wasn’t positively disposed towards him when she briefly returned to Substack last summer, and I’ve also heard shit from her friends about what happened that I’m not at all sure is true but continues to fill my nostrils with a pretty fucking rancid stench tbh fam.
So if some anonymous incel or Xanax-muncher wants to call me “cringe” or whatever for actually giving a shit about something and taking a risk for a person I cared about then my answer today is the same as last April: eat my cum, I hope you get raped.
The Zoomer Oral Culture has created an anarcho-tyrannical clownworld bent on totalistically humiliating anyone with different moral intuitions than Jerry Seinfeld; there aren’t any legible standards anymore other than make sure that when the story breaks you have the biggest Narc Cult, and that creates a horrific incentive structure for anyone who doesn’t want to spend their life driving away from angry boyfriends and parking tickets—hence every other Zoomer boy these days being a proto-terrorist while their female peers turn into hookers and dykes.
It creates a world wherein WBE—apparently still miffed about me blocking him—feels free to just say shit and continues trying to spin some narrative about Walter B. being obsessed with money (which I assure you Theon Ultima wishes were ackshully the case) while accusing me of cynically milking my followers for cash, which is kind of a bizarre aspersion to throw given I paywall almost nothing these days while just a few days after saying that he rugpulled his followers for thousands and bragged about it.
That said if I take a step back from my own Scotch-Irish blood feud and look at it structurally it’s p clear WBE is just testing the limits of the Zoomer Oral Culture—determining the extent to which one really can just keep driving away and spinning his way out of shit until the world finally has enough and says No.
It turns out to be quite a lot, which is why his writing is like heroin to a certain genre of disaffected Zoomer boy, to say nothing of the various molested girls who goon to it.
And I’d be a pretty atrocious Vitalist to shit on any of that in principle.
But again, my real critique is less Confucius than Sun Tzu—my guy is sloppy; careless; relies almost exclusively on his enemies being either incompetent or unwilling to act decisively because no one with a job is keen to burn everything down feuding with some random homeless dude, which overall strikes me as a strategy that works fantastically well until very suddenly it doesn’t
For instance, Layla told me precisely where Tomcat was sleeping that night.
The other issue is his clout hasn’t much substance behind it—the lad’s prose is famously terrible, and he hasn’t the slightest interest in ideas or systems.
Which of course is the entire gimmick; he doesn’t seem even the least bit “tryhard” and so is fantastic at connoting preselection—catnip to his target brand of Zoomette.
But among other men? He gets respect for sheer audacity and out of fear of coming off like a bitter incel, neither of which is especially durable; the instant life turns against you (and it always does, the world being basically thermostatic) everyone who ate your cum when you were up will say they always knew you were scum—just how it works.
And perhaps he’s pricing that in, or at this point really does think he’s invulnerable.
The thing is to be genuinely talented at spin you ackshully have to believe it yourself, and TJ isn’t just talented at spin; he’s trained—like Wally B he majored in Philosophy, and in his past life prior to the van depredations worked in marketing.
That was obvious at a glance when I met him; dude is constantly looking for Angles e.g. Walt Only Cares About Money, and aestheticizing cruelty in a manner that paints the other feller as the Real Bad Guy and himself as aww shucks Sawyerian rapscallion is kind of just second nature to him at this point.
Which, again, I’d be a bit of a shit to chastise him for given I myself initially got big on Substack by constantly talking like Reaver from Fable II.
And it’s likewise awfully convenient to draw the line between predator and rake at any particular point between him and me given plenty of chicks from my own Fuckboy Era would have as many terrible things to say about me as Layla no doubt does about him, and I also spent the better part of 2023 scamming women on SeekingArrangement for feet pics on an industrial scale.
It’s an entirely cogent position to hold that valuing virginity as some uniquely sacred ideal is just me coming up with a reason post-hoc for moralfag rightist audiences to conclude I was the dark gray to his black in our gay little Dostoyevsky novel and then internalizing said reason because all good spin artists believe their own bullshit.
I mean, that’s pretty clearly what it was.
That said you’re also a humongous faggot if you blame me for doing so, as let’s recall this was a situation where:
A) WBE had been orchestrating a story wherein he uses Layla to Embarrass Walt for months (recall Layla revealed to me later she was intended to be one of the girls on that double date he’d proposed, which he would have mentioned overtly if he had literally any intention other than that), and when I met him for lunch made a point of minutes into our conversation talking about his plans to fuck Layla in an aggressive and fratty way clearly designed to provoke me;
B) He transparently had her make a bunch of shit up in the article she released to lend weight to his faggoty DARVO narrative, which admittedly was p funny because one of the things she said is that while sexting her I’d sent pics of me facefucking a Jewess Around Her Age with a swastie drawn on her forehead in Permanent Ink, and while the now-31 Rebecca genuinely appreciated the former allegation being ever the vain little yid it’s pretty safe to say she won’t spend the rest of her life with hate speech between her peepers;
and finally
C) TJ himself was trafficking in retarded moralistic narratives about Walt Bismarck being Obsessed With Money so as to make the tale more narratively compelling to his audience of broke bitch incels who cream their jeans at any story that involves him humiliating a rich guy, which in this case included him getting Layla to brand our flirtationship as “transactional” despite me never having sent her a dime.
So if I unconsciously latched onto the virginity aspect and made it the fulcrum of the story both as events transpired and thereafter in a way that read as discordant with my usual rakishness and I never would have usually, then honestly? Fuckin sue me.
The dude could have kept it to amoral boasting, but he was 100% trying to control the fallout on this one by branding me Villain Of The Week because he knew he’d suffer serious and irreparable blowback from humiliating a girl like Layla that would kill his whole Tom Sawyer Act, and even admitted as such to me over the phone.
Hence that whole Sparing Her Virginity angle that was clearly optimized to keep both of their reputations intact while maximizing my own credibility as antagonist and also offering me an out of going nuclear, which all you dumdums took at face value because you have Down Syndrome I guess despite Layla posting literally the most obvious losing your virginity poem in the world right after it would have happened and WBE spending the better part of the intervening weeks bragging about deflowering virgins.
Honestly you guys are lucky I love your money so much or I wouldn’t put up with you.
Anyway the point is when you’re being slandered like that your mind is clearly going to jump to the most broadly legible and sympathetic narrative that also tracks with your extant moral intuitions, which in this case happened to be her virginity.
Which as stated earlier, in a vacuum I for sure still appreciate female purity more than the average dude, but even I’d admit that removed from all extenuating circumstances denoted above that yeah, tbh at this point it kind of does seem weirdly pedestrian for a cynical shit like me to randomly go to war over the virtue of some retarded teenager.
But this isn’t a vacuum and those circumstances were very salient and this was also never about Morality for me so much as Honor—I don’t particularly want to live in a world where niggas just make shit up about their rivals and never suffer the slightest consequence and Luigi is free to murder whomever he likes, and if you DO want to live in such a world you quite frankly should be tortured to death.
Men need to be willing to step on a tack every now and then to ensure perfidy isn’t entirely frictionless and shitheels at least hesitate before pissing on your shoes.
Hence me opting for the Reynolds Pamphlet / Voltorb approach, which at least per Layla’s bestie made the lass freak the fuck out on account of never expecting me to actually hold her accountable for her purdies—usually a safe assumption for chicks in situations like these tbf given most guys aren’t nearly Niggerish / Borderer enough to take the route I did. And so, much like TJ (which tracks given how thoroughgoingly she was emulating him at the time) the chickadee elected not to price in tail risk.
Anyway, shit sucked.
Looking back I also don’t regret much of anything—except perhaps that week my precocious muse inspired me to aestheticize shoplifting, which was quite cringe.
I don’t talk about any of this usually because I’m well aware no one gives a shit. I’m doing so here purely because I know Dan The Man intends to write about it himself, and while I don’t begrudge the lad for using my story for Content as it’s objectively a great one (like what are the odds her name would literally be Layla? That’s a case of nominative determinism so mythic in character it made Piotr Pachota autistically theorize that the entire situation was one big psyop), I also want to make sure it’s my spin on shit that gets out first and no important details are left out in his retelling.
We narcs are quite sensitive about how our stories get told, you see.
And that’s a trait it seems WBE and I have in common—though he’d never own up to it given the centrality of affected nonchalance to his persona. Still, every other month or so one of you rascals will send me a screencap of the dude taking a pot shot at me out of nowhere or kvetching about me having blocked him when the two of us haven’t even interacted for the better part of a year now, and I think that speaks for itself.
It also speaks for itself that Danny perceives defending WBE against the criticisms of some fellow named Donald as having seriously damaged his own rep on Substack.
Lot of other guys must have noticed that.
And even sans Rape Van audacity can take you pretty fucking far in a hypermodern oral culture, but when you make it THAT costly for allies to back you up and haven’t anything the least bit prosocial or substantive they can speak to in your defense then you sure as shit better keep your foot on the gas pedal and pray to Christ you never hit a meaningful speed bump, because the second you do the world is going to turn into an incredibly lonely place real fucking fast.
Lonelier even than for the Facetouching Paypig Who Never Leaves The House.
And that’s all I have to say.
I enjoyed lunching with Danny, and whenever the lad gets around to publishing the story on his blog you should most definite-Li go read it.
Attentive-Li.
Discerning-Li.
Unflinching-Li.
I know I will.
Update: it's out and you can read it here.
Take care of yourself, boys.
— WB
Lol the cadence of this is great
thanks for the reference my man.
this was a fun read.