Things I like about chuds

Giving the dingus his due

In the last two installments of this series I spoke about the things I find most charming about black people and women.

In this piece I’ll relay what I enjoy most about chuds, who I’ll define here as “unsophisticated and unintelligent right wing guys from Middle America.”

They aren't introspective

Perhaps the most obnoxious thing about intellectuals—and wordcels in particular—is how much time they spend thinking about their feelings and narrativizing their life.

Now to be fair this tendency is a tremendous asset when deployed instrumentally for branding purposes; pretty much everything I have in life comes from being better at it than 99.9% of people, and I tend to regard folks who can’t do this as furniture.

The problems emerge when you start to get high on your own supply, which is something I’ve noticed in literally every wordcel I’ve known intimately and constantly observe within my own scuzzy interiority. People with a lot of verbal ability can spin a fanciful tale that dignifies their worst traits and removes the stink from even their most embarrassing moments, and this gets them into cartoonishly undignified situations that no dullard or shape rotator would ever be able to justify.

For instance, in my early to mid twenties I was BFFs with another alt right eceleb who was probably the only person I’ve known who was better at this sort of thing than me. Like Cap’n Walt the feller had narc tendencies and was kind of spergy / socially “off” but always made up for it by weaponizing his 150+ verbal IQ (unlike me dude actually was a mischling) in all these hyperspecialized asymmetric ways. And for a time this friendship worked perfectly because a lot of our competencies were in opposite domains, which meant the two of us could socially “immunize” each other and help the other guy grow more capable in our own realms of expertise.

Unfortunately we also had polar opposite neuroses around women, and the tension that emerged from this ended up capsizing our friendship as we negatively polarized each other into increasingly extreme behavior, with him becoming the himbomaxxed househusband of an upscale prostitute and me becoming a sex addict with a romantic script optimized around cynically juicing SeekingArrangement.

This kind of shit pretty much only happens to weirdo intellectuals… and it happens to them incredibly frequently. Most of the time it occurs in far less extreme ways than what happened with me and my friend, but that’s just because we’re exceptional guys who could get away with more. I’ve known dozens of weirdo intellectuals over the years, and once you scratch beneath the surface something like this is pretty much always present to some degree.

The reason for this is pretty obvious: when you’re smart you can figure out ways to stay true to yourself and not have your rough edges bullied off by mean normalfags by arbitraging your strengths to create alternate social scripts. Do this enough and eventually you’ll produce an insulated magic bubble where your weirdness becomes okay (I actually wrote a wonderful and self-indulgent essay about this a while back).

And when this works it works; usually arbitrage will get you somewhere halfway decent so long as you’re persistent and willing to iterate, and when you succeed (particularly in matters of friendship and romance) it feels immensely rewarding.

But there are other cases where you just have to reckon with the fact that you have seventeen trash bags piled up in your kitchen and can’t really Ben Shapiro your way out of this one. In those situations the main thing you need is for a small-brained chud to hit you with a rock and tell you to wash your penis.

Because a lot of times your problems simply aren’t that interesting and the delta between your current life outcomes and what would result from behaving only slightly better is fucking enormous. Just consider how many opportunities you’ve scorched because you were tired or hungry or horny at a sensitive moment and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s unintuitive to frame them this way because of their cultural association with normie hotdog grandmas, but principles like “remembering to sleep” and “not getting fat” and “having money” are in a sense the most significant asymmetries of them all.

They operate under straightforward social dynamics

Things are always messy with intellectuals.

Because we’re much higher in trait openness we generally have looser boundaries, take our status hierarchies and behavioral norms a lot less seriously, and are more willing to play with things like ambiguity and subtext. All of these tendencies are basically preconditions for decent art or intellectualism, and the distaste for them among normie conservatives is the primary reason why they seldom manage to create anything more sophisticated than God’s Not Dead.

And yet there’s always a limit to pluralism, and even when consorting with the intelligentsia you’ll inevitably collide with someone’s visceral disgust impulse at some point. But unlike chuds our bigbrained friends will never be honest about finding you disgusting, because that codes as oafish and low status in their circles and they’d much rather see themselves as openminded and tolerant. And so instead of an open signal of disgust that facilitates a clean dehumanizing break you’ll get lots of sterile and depersonalized intellectualization that tries to paper over intractable aesthetic differences… at least until they inevitably reemerge, usually under more familiar circumstances that make the split far more painful for both parties.

Intellectuals will also look down on the chud’s commitment to clear and unambiguous boundaries (think the Mike Pence Rule) as unsophisticated and life-denying, and typically pride themselves on their ability to manage tension and ambiguity in a mature and cultivated way. The problem with this is that everyone actually does have hard boundaries in practice, and when sufficiently pushed will assert their right to them with uncompromising ferocity. But the high openness culture of bigbrains makes it kind of low status to be too overt about this impulse, which inevitably leads to mixed signals / crossed wires and people trying to enforce their boundaries in all sorts of undignified and covert ways (this is incidentally why polyamory is retarded).

Want to know who I bet never has that problem?

They don’t use pretentious jargon

The fastest and most reliable way to ascend the status hierarchy in heterodox intellectual circles is to create a bunch of novel jargon and memes that everyone else starts to use. Guys like Curtis Yarvin/Ryan Faulk/Scott Alexander are virtuosos at this.

The next best thing is arbitrage—spreading jargon / memes from one circle to another, or creatively recontextualizing the verbiage of some elitist bigbrain domain into a more middlebrow mass market and thereby helping to popularize spicy ideas. Fashy white boys who get really into Hinduism are a great example of this. It’s also how I first became an eceleb in the halcyon days of 2015, when there was still tremendous alpha in explaining the Hajnal Line as Lumiere the Candlestick or the Friend-Enemy Distinction / Overton Window as Sebastian the Crab. Of course the cultural ecology of 2024 demands greater sophistication, so these days I usually get the most mileage out of the ever-reliable tactic of agreeing with libtards for the wrong reasons (something Hanania and DLA also excel at in very different ways).

Then at the bottom of the pyramid you get the name droppers and status signalers. Of course these types are all too familiar on the Left—we’ve all met those tedious fellers who wear ascots and get a semi whenever they mention Deleuze or Zizek—but we’re starting to get them in our circles as well. They aren’t generative enough to produce their own jargon or sufficiently agile in their thinking to arbitrage in creative ways, and so they’ll try to convey status by simply referencing bigbrained memes like some 117 IQ grad student in continental philosophy. With the more midwit ones it honestly starts to feel like Mad Libs or an episode of Family Guy.

Anyway I won’t pretend it isn’t fun to navigate this world—I’m good enough at jargon arbitrage that attaining midlevel status in heterodox intellectual scenes is trivially easy for me. But I also suspect I’ve become a bit too reliant on verbal trickery, and to ascend any further I’ll need to either specialize into a more literary style or produce highly mimetic jargon of my own to compete with “IQ shredder” and “membrane.”

Perhaps once Tortuga starts to bring in serious dosh I can hire McKinsey to workshop some ideas for me. I really adore the idea of paying some vacuous Buttigieg type to come up with a meme that makes pretentious Eurofags cream their pants. It would be tremendously compelling performance art—a modern Sokal Affair.

Anyway back to the chuds. I suppose I envy how straightforward their status games are. Sure, there’s less room for arbitrage and specialization, but at least you get an honest script for success: which of these guys is strongest or tallest or has the most money? Which of these girls has bigger knockers? It’s so easy! There’s no serious cognitive load required just to figure out how it works, and pretty much anyone can get a decent body or become moderately affluent if they just manage to maintain some basic level of conscientiousness. That’s refreshingly democratic.

Chud status hierarchies also aren’t nearly as zero sum. When I was in Nebraska hanging out with chud-type guys they would be genuinely psyched whenever their friends got laid or secured a big raise or hit a new deadlift PR. Meanwhile intellectual and artistic status hierarchies operate mostly through curation and exclusion, which necessitates both a gatekeeping impulse you don’t really see in chuds and a sheer competitive intensity that quickly becomes exhausting in an economy based upon significantly higher order currencies than dollar or even eyeballs.

One hilarious consequence of this is that the intelligentsia is insanely hierarchical—really almost neofeudal—in its organizational structure. And that’s not because creatives are narcs (though that’s some of it), but more because they’re hothouse flowers who place an enormous premium on the purity and ~authenticity of their vision. This creates a much larger conceptual gap between genuine collaboration and strictly transactional dealmaking that doesn’t really exist for “content creators” like Uncle Walt, let alone mercurial vaishya types in the business world.

On some level you have to admire this dedication. I mean, if it *weren’t* admirable it wouldn’t arouse such insecurity and validation seeking in people who don’t have it, and would have been extinguished in the human race many centuries ago. But it’s also really fucking annoying and tends to manifest in arbitrary and unintegrated ways that make things far more difficult for creatives than they ought to be. Frequently this purism leaves them tragically isolated and bereft of resources, and just as often (though far more insidiously) it attracts untalented sycophants who serve as deadweight and belie the curatorial impulse these scenes are ostensibly built on.

In the world of business A-Players hire A-Players while B-Players hire C-Players, and in practice this actually creates a very egalitarian dynamic: when operating Tortuga I approach Rajeev Ram and Theon Ultima and Sesped as equals because they’re good at the things I am bad at, and that specifically is what makes the magic happen.

But I’ve found this principle doesn’t map particularly well to the intelligentsia, where A-Players constantly chimp out and break collaboration over “creative differences,” often actualizing their vision on the backs of fanboys. The thing is only A-Players can afford to do this, because they’re the only ones who aren’t desperate for attention and resources. B-Players can’t secure money or eyeballs by themselves and usually get the most mileage helping to actualize the vision of some high maintenance A-Player, while C-Players simply worm their way in through money or ass-kissing or sex.

And so in practice the curatorial instinct frequently degrades into a vulgar popularity contest, and if this tendency isn’t checked (i.e. by the A-Player throwing a narcissistic tantrum that alienates his less dedicated collaborators and burns off casual fans) it will inevitably deluge a scene with faggoty mean girl cliquishness.

But I suppose that’s somewhat inevitable given the people involved—you probably need to be a bit of a pretentious social climber to actively choose a Life of the Mind over instrumentalizing your IQ to optimize VBA macros while snorting Adderall off Deloitte toilet paper dispensers and the teats of UCF coeds with bad fathers. Yet nobody wants to live in a world without any decent art and scholarship, so we’ll take the bad with the good and give the turtleneck enjoyers some grace.

But still, just imagine how satisfying it must be to be that 113 IQ guy who loves Bitcoin and squats and constantly listens to Joe Rogan and Gary Vee. Sure his life remains pathetically linear and boring as shit, but the slope is pretty much always positive, and dude has rock solid confidence as to how he’ll keep it that way.

How many of you bigbrains can say the same?

Their women smell good

For a long time I wasn’t confident enough in this observation to put it in writing, but after consulting a trusted SME I feel justified in pronouncing this with vigor:

Affluent white girls smell bad.

Now personally I only date white girls (and being a tolerant pluralist I happily include Castizas and Jewesses under that designation, my penchant for atticplay aside) and so I have no comment on whether the stench of nonwhite women meaningfully varies by social class. But I’ll absolutely declare with 100% confidence that working class white girls smell MUCH better than their sisters in pantsuits.

I mean sometimes they smell like cigarettes or Walmart shampoo, but they never really have that groace B.O. smell like upper class white girls, and when a poor girl comes over for a booty call you can usually expect her to wash her pussie first.

Meanwhile with affluent white girls it’s very much luck of the draw, and for some of them the impulse to shower before sex actually codes as boorish and unsophisticated. Hell, explore feminist spaces deep enough and you’ll eventually encounter this bizarre subset of overeducated white woman that's staunchly identitarian about having a smelly pussy and unironically tries to frame vaginal smegma as a high status acquired taste like black coffee or Limburger cheese.

Say what you will about stupid poor people, but they’d never pull that shit; they understand when they’re being gross.

Anyway, Stark’s theory on the genesis of this phenomenon reduced it mostly to power dynamics, i.e. rich white women are seen as most desirable and don’t feel the need to wash they pussy to secure their sexual goals. And I think there’s *some* truth to this account, but it misses the entire picture, because I’ve never noticed a difference in hygiene in my affluent gfs when they were really into me vs. less attracted, whereas with working class girls there is typically a more relaxed attitude as you grow into the relationship. This suggests it stems from something more essential to the affluent sheila’s character / sensibilities versus a simple matter of responding to incentives.

Kryptogal (Kate, if you like) offered a more sociologically and historically comprehensive account that I found pretty compelling:

Whatever the cause, you shouldn’t believe the retarded propaganda that tries to situate more educated / affluent girls as automatically more dainty and feminine.

Especially if you’re an upwardly mobile guy with chud roots, there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll be happier with the Dunkin Donuts girl who regularly washes her pussy and has never heard of Deleuze.

They believe in free will

This one is tricky because it’s pretty unambiguously true that free will doesn’t exist in any kind of thick meaningful sense. Most human action should be understood as an intuitive response to complex incentive structures no individual actor could ever control, and “discipline” is mostly a function of shit like dopamine regulation.

Meanwhile success is overwhelmingly a function of timing and luck more than hard work or talent, even if this inevitably gets obscured by survivorship bias in rich people. Of course lots of rich people will pretend to believe they got there by accident, but this is mostly just burning social capital to connote status to their peer group. If you press them enough you’ll see they believe themselves entitled to their success. Even me writing this right now is just a higher order version of that phenomenon!

Because at the end of the day the people who believe in the power of free will and individual agency almost invariably do better than the people who don’t. Yes, success is more about luck than hard work, but you never get the opportunity to benefit from luck in the first place if you don’t show up consistently and serendipitymaxx.

People who correctly insist that everything is downstream of incentive structures and lack the false and obviously retarded belief in free will are usually worthless losers who never accomplish anything because they don’t have any grit or follow-through.

Intellectuals should try to be more like chuds and simply git-r-done.

They follow the leader

A few months ago I was famously mobbed by the iFunny kids, who repeatedly clowned on me for getting “ratio’d” in all of my responses to them (for the boomers among you this means I was getting more insulting replies than likes).

Of course I kept up a stern public face and took the optimal line in response to this: I’m actually getting money from my followers, my people have good jobs and are sleeping instead of engaging in flame wars on the internet at 2am, etc. etc. etc.

But if I’m being totally honest here, in this moment I was very genuinely pissed off at my community for not having my back. I’d worked incredibly hard and made lots of sacrifices to cultivate a pluralist space where we all could discuss anything in a fun and open environment, but when I got ganked by an organized gang of interlopers (or targeted by a Bengali Islamist’s bot campaign, or constantly ankle bitten by a pseudointellectual transexual satanist…) it seemed like nobody had my back.

Gradually I came to realize the iFunny guys were right: any power I had on Substack was hollow, because being the “leader” of a pluralist idea space doesn’t mean much at the end of the day. When the zookeeper gets attacked the animals in his zoo don’t come rushing to defend him; a lot of them will run wild and a few might come to scavenge his corpse, but the vast majority will merely sit around and starve.

This was a bitter lesson, but a very necessary one. And at the end of the day it actually transformed into a fantastic opportunity, because after torching my Walt Right group chat and going through kind of a Stalin Era I massively shifted gears to a far more deliberate strategy of vertical growth through the Tortuga Society—a carefully curated fraternity of likeminded men that operates entirely in private.

Tortuga is far smaller than the Walt Right ever was but infinitely more powerful, because like the iFunny guys we have a clear and distinct purpose and a rock solid sense of group identity. The only difference is that instead of getting a few dozen likes on social media we’re scamming Corporate America for millions of dollars.

So far this has proven a far more rewarding path than optimizing around subscriber count. But it took a bunch of dumb aggressive chuds to drive this wisdom home.

They are unambitious

In early 2016 I had a phone call with Richard Spencer where we very casually explored the possibility of me working for him, and at one point in our discussion he expressed the sentiment that the Alt Right “has too many chiefs and not enough Indians.”

Such a rich WASP thing to say.

Naturally I was quietly offended by the idea that I should straightforwardly align myself under his banner—surely this was an egregious affront to the mighty 22yo Walter Bismarck, who boasted no less than 50k subscribers on youtube dot com!

QED for Spencer I guess.

Looking back though it was kind of a complicated point, as the early Alt Right was so powerful precisely because we were a small cadre of spirited and self-important heterodox intellectuals. Sure this made us prone to infighting and various forms of self-indulgence, but the early Trump era was a special time and we had a unique energy behind us that allowed us to make a far bigger splash than antecedent movements like New Atheism or Ron Paul Libertarianism had ever managed.

But as I’ve written before, this inevitably made us the victim of our own success. After Trump locked down the nomination far too many blockheaded sub-120 IQ chuds joined the movement, and through their numbers and donations made it possible to ignore the herding autistic cats element that kept everyone’s ego in check back in 2015. These guys propped Spencer up to demigod status then turned on him the moment it became convenient, just as their DR successors are doing to Fuentes.

It’s a vicious and probably inevitable cycle. But it’s also far too easy to simplistically blame the chud for ruining the good vibes of our special kool kids klub and enabling bad behavior in our leaders, when the truth of the matter is that it takes two to tango. And I’m not just talking about Spencer here—people who still pin all the blame on him are deluding themselves. Pretty much every prominent figure in the movement was using it for his own purposes, some of us a lot more nobly than others.

Ambition is such a lovely thing—in oneself and in one’s most trusted collaborators. But spend a few hours in Caesar’s boots and it won’t be long before you too start to distrust niggas with a lean and hungry look. The bigger you grow the more you’ll rely almost exclusively on a closed circle of trusted advisors, and the more you’ll come to instinctively despise know-it-all faggots who think they could do it better.

“Too many chiefs and not enough Indians…”

The chud is your Indian. He does as he’s told, gives you money and validation without expecting anything in return, despises your enemies in an uncompromising and uncomplicated manner, and is ultimately expendable in times of conflict.

I won’t let chuds in Tortuga, I certainly don’t want them in my friend group, and if I’m being totally honest I don’t even want them in my comments section. But when the rubber hits the road you simply need large mobs of chuds and their warm dirty fungible bodies to achieve anything meaningful in the real world.

And that entitles them to a certain level of respect. Simple as.