Things I Like About Midwesterners
Go Big Red
A year ago today I published an essay entitled Why I’m no longer a White Nationalist, which brought me back as a public figure more or less overnight after the piece was amplified by
and subsequently clowned on by in a Twitter thread that ended up going massively viral.Given that my comeback was almost entirely attributable to this one piece—and that it was also directly responsible for winning me one of the strongest friendships and most generative collaborative partnerships of my life—it seems fitting to celebrate its anniversary with a follow-up.
It also seems fitting that this follow-up mostly disregard the ideological content of the original tract—in part because I’ve already elaborated at nauseum on my evolution out of white nationalism, but also because my departure from that ideology was only tangentially related to why the essay went viral.
The reason it went viral, of course, is that I used it to brutally insult Midwesterners (in particular Nebraskans and other residents of the Great Plains and Upper Midwest) in a manner pretty much everyone who read the piece recognized as fundamentally accurate. They say a hit dog hollers, and I’m proud to say my essay elicited from Midwesterners a howl befitting Michael Vick’s basement.
So it’s not surprising that for every fan I won with the piece I also made ten enemies. This tradeoff was obviously worth it, and I absolutely knew what I was doing, but I’ve also regretted at times that so much of my reputation is built on invective toward a people for whom my honest feelings are genuinely quite nuanced.
Which isn’t to suggest I regret my framing; it was hugely cathartic to let out that bile and jam it down the throats of indignant Runza Hobbits. But looking back I’d say the piece is properly understood as the anguished lamentation of an insecure and earnest 24 year-old1 mediated through the calculated guile of a slightly older and far more cynical man, who at once deeply needed to give that overeager lad a platform to say his piece and strongly suspected that artfully channeling this rage was exactly how he’d reclaim the influence he’d lost in 2017-2018 (which in hindsight was likely responsible for much of the angst that defined my Nebraskan Era).
It goes without saying I basically achieved this; the piece won me momentary salience in The Discourse, and in the months that followed I was able to turn that into something far more substantive than I ever enjoyed in 2016.
But that also means the time for Shock and Awe is over. Once you have a loudspeaker you need to speak gently and carefully with a certain regard for diplomacy and tact—something our friends astride the 100th Meridian are famously talented at.
So in the vein of my popular articles from last year praising women, chuds, and blackpeepo, here are just a few things I really like about Midwesterners.
They’re insanely loyal
In the original piece I portrayed my departure from Nebraska rather theatrically as a totalistic repudiation of its people and values, but the truth on the ground was obviously a lot more complicated.
It’s true the overwhelming majority of people I met there I haven’t spoken to since. But there are also two fellers I worked with in 2018 - 2019 who continue to text me fairly regularly, even though I’m honestly kind of a shitty friend to anyone who isn’t an active collaborator or woman I’m pursuing romantically.
Both of these gents are quite Faustian in their own right. They’d easily make it on the coasts, and in Omaha are just going to fucking devour everyone around them. Naturally both of them are rich kids—the first a suburbanite from Lincoln who’s always devising new hustles and used to love scheming with that weirdo from Florida; and the other a kulak Bilbo Baggins type who unironically grew up husking corn and is these days himself an eceleb in the grindset crypto space.
The latter dude in particular was probably my best friend for the second half of my stint in Nebraska. We were sort of foils in many respects, and even got credentialed at the same time, but our competition was incredibly friendly and as coworkers we managed to arbitrage our respective talents quite well, with him doing half my work for me and me teaching him how to grab our bosses by the balls and twist.
An interesting fact I learned about him during this epoch is that he’s still close friends with his childhood männerbund of farmboys. One of these guys is a chadly med tech salesman, but the other two are honestly sort of unimpressive and I imagine most people who grew up on the coasts would have yeeted such men from their life by now. But it would never even occur to my buddy to do this—or to stop talking to me.
Meanwhile I can barely call my parents without turning it into podcast content.
It’s cute how they say ‘pop’
Growing up I saw a lot of maps like this posted on 4chan and reddit:
![New version of the US coke, pop, soda map [OC][PNG][950x600 ...](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F902f7380-2258-4569-a4f2-ba53a4271a2a_950x600.png "New version of the US coke, pop, soda map [OC][PNG][950x600 ...")
But I never seriously entertained the notion that Midwesterners said “pop” as a real thing. It sounded so retarded to me—like something out of a cartoon from the 1940s.
But then I started my job in Omaha, and during my initial tour of the office was directed to the company “pop machine.”
At first I just laughed nervously, surmising that she was probably just saying this ironically to play up her region’s exoticism for a normal person, sort of like how Southrons often channel My Cousin Vinny around visiting Yankees, or Australians will out of nowhere begin acting like Crocodile Dundee.
Subsequent weeks disabused me of that notion as everyone I met in Omaha said ‘pop’: haggard Denny’s waitresses and well-coiffed yuppie broads on brewpub dates; roided-out personal trainers and smarmy hipster actuaries in problem glasses; priests and prostitutes; froggish hicklib bitches and guys dismissed as chuds even by other chuds. All of these types said ‘pop’ without even the faintest hint of irony.
I genuinely feel this might have been one of the strongest factors in undermining my White ingroup sentiment. Consider for a moment the relative ubiquity of “soda” in the Middle American lexicon. Hearing “pop” all the time felt sort of like stepping into a parallel dimension where instead of “mom” everyone calls their maternal parent “crobaster.” Could you really think of this realm’s inhabitants as your coethnics in precisely the same way you do momsayers? Even if you tried your damndest, it would really make the other cultural differences stand out.
But familiarity only breeds contempt when the thing is bad, and by the time I left Nebraska I’d grown to earnestly appreciate popsaying in much the same way I love it when Afro-Americans say “chile” or “fam” or “hol’ up”—so much so that I’ve actually started using the word myself to quickly build camaraderie with Midwesterners in high stakes professional / sexual situations. It turns out that pointedly asking a coed from Iowa what sort of *pop* she wants has basically the same impact as correctly using Yiddish slang with a bit of edge in your voice when talking to a Jewess.
Looking back I suspect my reaction to “pop” was rather like how inexperienced girls often react to a foot fetish. At first it’s weird or even gross, but once they’re past the alien factor it’s quite charming—sometimes to the point where they’ll pester future boyfriends to suck on their toes during sex even when he doesn’t particularly want to.
Long story short I’m now a xenophile on the Pop Question.
Their grocery stores are fantastic
A while back there was an eruption in These Parts over “Bodega Bro”—a hilariously Teutonic lad from Michigan who moved to NYC and got in hot water for complaining that bodegas are shitty and it’s impossible to find affordable high quality groceries.
This event was fascinating to me for several reasons. For one thing BB was sort of a reverse-Bismarck, going through precisely the same kind of cultural shock I experienced in 2018 except in reverse. He also looked almost identical to my aforementioned kulak friend, so I naturally felt rather defensive of him when I saw him getting dogpiled by random Puerto Ricans and this weird gay Jew who I can only conclude is playing a character because I’ve literally never in my life met someone who talks like this despite having worked with several gay Jews from NYC.
Anyway I also found the reaction amusing for the simple reason that this hostility very obviously came from the fact that Bodega Bro looks and talks the way he does instead of from the actual content of what he said. I’ll attest that the Jews I worked with shit talked bodegas literally all the time, and also didn’t mind when I did—probably because I myself am a mercurial coastal elite both Jews and Nazis think of as Mischling-coded. As a consequence I’ll have an easier time landing a Holocaust joke than Bodega Bro has making fun of a fucking convenience store.
This is due to an intractable fact of human nature: most people can’t stand it when an Other (particularly one who’s ostensibly on the “other side”) pokes fun at something characteristic of Their Thing, especially if (like Bodegas / Chasidim / Huskers football) it clearly sucks ass and the other fella’s Thing is manifestly superior in some regard.
Which at long last brings me to my point here, which is that Midwestern grocery stores are nothing short of amazing. When I lived in Omaha my suburban apartment was situated just down the block from an enormous Hy-Vee, which was far and away the single highest quality grocery store I’ve ever had the pleasure of shopping in.
In Faustian Sun Belt states like my beloved Florida and despised homeland of Arizona you tend to have a mass market grocery store (in my case Winn Dixie) for poorpeepo and minorities plus a middle market grocery store (in my case Publix) for ruffians of the Laptop Class like Walt Bismarck. Then if you’re gay and want “high quality ingredients” or your sugar baby has a Master’s Degree you’ll do your shopping at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods or some shit and pay restaurant prices.
But in Omaha that would never be necessary because I could find Whole Foods-quality groceries at my boring suburban Hy-Vee, including all the trendy favorites of overeducated wellness girlies—think kombucha, ghee, sorghum, bone broth, and a million types of candy that don’t taste good. More pertinent to my interests, they offered a truly formidable array of exotic European cheeses that managed to bedazzle even my sophisticated coastal palette.
The store even contained an in-house restaurant where for $8 a man could purchase for himself a sumptuous plate of meatloaf or beefsteak with two hearty sides. Often I’ll find myself missing such culinary abundance, as in Florida I’ll need to spend at least $40 to obtain a similar meal via Uber Eats (obviously the price differential is mostly due to delivery fees and tip, but in Omaha my roommate / Mischling Nazi bestie would always retrieve the meal, so experientially it’s apples to apples).
Even Omaha’s convenience stores were splendid. Directly across the street from my apartment there existed a really special joint called Casey’s, which offered hot dogs and tacos of a quality you might expect from a high end food truck. Usually I just used it to pick up White Monsters / protein bars, but even then I always appreciated its superb cleanliness and that it was staffed by attractive young wypipo instead of brusque subaltern types, because in Florida going to 7-11 always feels like slumming it.
Admittedly it was rather annoying that the quality of its grocery stores went hand in hand with Omaha being such a car-centric city… but this did have the unexpected benefit of forcing me to finally get my driver’s license and first car after years of procrastinating and being That Guy Who Doesn’t Drive. This was actually the only period of my life where I drove on a regular basis—since returning to Florida I’ve let my battery die more times than I can count, both because it’s parked eight stories into the garage of an urban high rise and because I typically will prefer to Uber everywhere since this permits me to bullshit on my phone during.
Counterintuitively this was also the only period of my life where I was genuinely quite slim—I think I cut down to 170 lbs at one point. Since then I’ve oscillated between average, fat, strong, and strongfat, but at no point have I felt agile and physically light on my feet as I often did in Omaha. Part of this is probably just attributable to aging and shifts in priorities downstream of money making it less essential to be physically attractive, but I’d hazard that at least 30% of it is specifically due to it having been materially more convenient on the margins to eat high quality food.
Everyone told me it would be way easier to get fat in Omaha than Florida because of the weather or fashion or some shit but these people were hilariously wrong. Florida makes it way easier to leverage crazy asymmetrical strategies, but if you just want to optimize around health and stability you can’t beat the Nebraskan incentive structure.
Speaking of…
Their hookers are disgusting
This one is more of a different strokes thing, but I will say that the Midwestern incentive structure absolutely does incentivize women to be more “virtuous” if you care about that sort of thing.
I personally dislike this attitude quite a lot, but I also recognize that my own tastes are sort of aberrant and that most biologically normal people will feel on some level that I deserve to be tortured to death... and if we’re being honest, is it altogether proper for a Spiteful Mutant like myself to contest this?
It goes without saying that escaping such an impulse is precisely what I appreciate about Florida. It has more of an honor culture than a morality culture, which generally accompanies a far looser attitude to blurring the line between transactionality and earnest intimacy—the natural result of commingling rednecks, Cubans, Jews, and tax/weather/lockdown refugees from frostier climes.
As a consequence of this Florida has an absolutely massive culture of sugar dating, wherein the girl is in a somewhat nebulous position between hooker and girlfriend, and it often slides back and forth even within the context of a single relationship. And very crucially, the girls you’ll find involved in this lifestyle in Florida—whether they’re natives or from out of state—tend to be perfectly classy young ladies who unwashed normalfags would never in a million years suspect of doing such a thing.
This was most certainly not the case in Omaha, where it’s fairly easy to find a spouse in college if you’re a psychologically normal young person of a generally conservative disposition. If a girl in her twenties wants to be provided for, she’ll easily find a husband and won’t need a sugar daddy. The girls who *do* want that in Flyover Country tend to be horribly low status or unappealing.
And I suppose this is overall a Good Thing; Nebraskan courtship norms are scalable and prosocial for 100 IQ White people, and for most folks would work a lot better than the sensibility that prevails on the coasts. But they weren’t good for me in particular, and I’m quite certain I never could have landed decent girlfriends in the style I enjoy while I lived there. Easily 99% of the Huskettes I found on SeekingArrangement were trashy methheads, and even at the time I had enough self-awareness to recognize a relationship would have a hard enough time accommodating one trashy methhead.
So had I been forced to stay in Nebraska it’s possible I simply wouldn’t have become the somewhat sleazy fellow I am today. I certainly wouldn’t have had the chance to meet women like Rebecca and pursue those types of relationships. I may have been hammered by society into following a fairly conventional life script.
Most of you in the DR will believe that’s a Good Thing, and instinctively feel anyone who wants something different for themselves deserves to be tortured to death.
And Walter Bismarck will defend to his last breath your right to think that.
They’re a bunch of alcoholics
One thing I very earnestly love about Midwestern culture is the ubiquity and tolerance for casual alcoholism. People in the Midwest soyface over beer constantly and it’s one of their most endearing traits. My bosses even took us to a brewery for our Christmas party and used to bring in cases of beer to the office we could freely imbibe after 4pm.
I’m not sure how much of this remains the case for Midwestern Zoomers, as I know they drink far less than Millennials as a rule and I departed Omaha before I started dating girls from that cohort. But in either case I’ll observe that this cultural tendency is fantastically prosocial, and probably responsible both for cementing my friendship with the aforementioned Huskerbros and for securing a short-lived relationship with a Seventh Day Adventist biochemist two inches taller than me who taught me I could in theory pull top shelf broads without leveraging a racist internet casting couch.
So to any despondent Zoomer bros reading this who still think themselves an “incel"—you almost certainly just need to drink more.
Because if Hobbits have any undeniable virtue, it’s that those fuckers party hearty.
I’ll conclude this piece with a couple pictures from 2018 - 2019 that I think will offer Wally B superfans fairly decent insight into just what sort of fellow I was at the time (and also what babyface 24yo Walt who still couldn’t grow a beard looked like).
But I’m also putting them behind a paywall—less because I want to squeeze even more shekels from you boys and more because I’d really like to obtain a Hananian solid orange check by the end of this year and currently have a long way to go.
Enjoy.