Jester's Privilege: A 2024 Year in Review
As we embark upon the next nightmare
As the sun completes another orbit around the Earth in this upside down and backward reality I find myself reaching a milestone in writing this column, or newsletter, or whatever you want to call it. For a full calendar year I’ve managed to crank out an entire essay every single Friday and nobody is more surprised than I am that I haven’t missed a single day.
This is despite having no employer to chase me, no editorial to pass or veto me, and quite little audience to let down. But what little audience I do have, I’m proud to have not let you down, but also, and I’ll try not to underappreciate this, I’m proud not to have let myself down. It truly is a thrill to have anyone at all reading my work consistently week after week.
I can’t stop thinking about a phrase I heard recently: Jester’s privilege. Supposedly an actual concept from back when kings wore even sillier costumes than they do today, the court jester is said to have had the unique privilege to make fun of anyone he wanted, including those who of whom making fun would ordinarily get you in very bad, even mortal, trouble. Even including the king.
This is because the jester, by virtue of his status, was not considered a serious person who anyone important would listen to.
This is a concept akin to the famous half full / half empty glass analogy—you can either look at the situation as a positive or a negative. The negative that important people don’t care what you have to say is also the positive. I never picked a solid theme for this thing besides just saying what’s on my mind every week and increasingly that means thrashing the shit out of public figures, some of them legitimately powerful and some of them just C-list hacks—and yes, even the owners of Substack—and I don’t have to deal with any of their bullshit in return because I’m just an E-list or F-list at best.
The associated frustrations are that, on more than one occasion, I’ve sort of gotten ahead of a news story that would later be independently “broken” by a legitimate media organization who of course gets the credit for it. There is very little in the way of prestige to be gained from piggybacking on the legitimate work of some journalist who’s never heard of me and saying “see also here’s where I wrote about this a month ago.”
Of course, the positive aspect for me is that all the bullets and arrows strike the actual important and serious guy while I get to sit here in obscurity while you, my lucky subscriber, get to occasionally read about stuff from me before anyone else. I’d say that you, more than anyone, are the overall winner here.
All that said, and for those of you who joined my jester parade this year and might not know who I am yet, here’s a look back at some of my notable stuff from this year.
Skull-Measurers and Sock Puppets: The Creepy Eugenics Obsession of Elon Musk
Elon Musk has always been a little off about race. But that comes with the package of being an “anti-woke” crusader. Just because he has the brain and social acumen of a 17 year old gamer doesn’t necessarily mean he burns crosses on the weekend.
So much has been said about Elon Musk’s racism but it’s a lot more than just him liking white people best. There is a whole creepy subculture of “race science” weirdos who permeate public conservatism but operate just out of the mainstream. They have their own communities and coded language and a great deal of them have Substack newsletters.
They smuggle their ideas within the language of science but it’s mostly just discredited concepts they want to sell to powerbrokers to smuggle good old fashioned racism into the mainstream.
A month after I published this there was a story in the Guardian that identified many of the same players including a Substack publication called Aporia. But it only outed Christopher Rufo as being mixed up in this garbage, not Elon Musk.
In fact, this type of discourse is pertinent again now as we speak because Musk, who since I wrote this at the start of the year has rocketed to a very powerful position in government, is currently under fire from his and Trump’s white supremacist fans for his pro-Indian stance. It’s similar to how the same people were upset at him earlier for his pro-Israel stance.
It is reductionist and over-simplistic to simply call Musk a “Nazi” and be done with it. His real views are a complex racialism that should be understood better in order to be countered, and failing to do so and simply accuse him of bog standard White Supremacy is too easily countered by the “but he loves Jews and Asians” riposte.
Similar reading:
On how the panic over supposed DEI hiring above qualified applicants is nonsensical when you consider the prevalence of unqualified nepotism—particularly relevant as Trump and Musk are picking the new cabinet and stuffing important high-level government positions full of Fox News anchors, B-list television celebrities, venture capitalists, and the entire staff of the original Paypal.
The pro-natalism fad that’s super popular among white nationalist tech dickheads grinds hard against my philosophical opposition to creating entire human beings just to serve as an extension of your own ideology instead of granting them full agency.
The Real Origin of Woke
Is there any political word that sounds more embarrassing being said seriously by a grown adult than “woke?” A past tense verb crowbarred awkwardly into doing the job of either a noun or an adjective depending on who or what it’s complaining about at the time. It only really started hitting the mainstream political discourse over the past few years, str…
If you were to press me on my favourite thing I wrote this year, it’s probably this. It’s become a legitimate meme that nobody can adequately define the word “woke” as much as they might gnash and wail about it, and I think I’m satisfied with my answer being the closest to true as anything I’ve read.
Specifically: Everyone knows what “woke” originally meant to the African-American community and thinks they can define the modern usage as a cynical commentary or corruption of that, but I don’t think that holds true at all.
A lot of people responded to this piece telling me it was ridiculous and that the true definition of woke is clear as day, but they didn’t always provide said definition and when they did it was always something different, which really only bolsters my argument here.
Similar reading:
The same tech dipshits who are drowning us in ubiquitous AI products we never asked for and don’t want are frustrated and terrified that the AI keeps coming out “woke,” but mostly because they can’t figure out what woke is so they’re having trouble teaching the machines to not be that.
What the Right Gets Wrong About Capitalism
Most countries have some sort of national day—one day on the calendar when it’s customary to just celebrate the fact that a particular piece of dirt has a particular name. Maybe it’s the day some treaty was signed, or some battle won. Often it’s an excuse to take your shirt off, cook meat outside, and explode something.
I wrote a few times this year about capitalism being the proverbial face-eating leopard that the right doesn’t necessarily expect it to be. Or, in this case, it’s a dragon that the right thinks should be obedient to their political project—since capitalism is economically right-wing, it should also be culturally right-wing—so they get shocked and conspiratorial if and when the dragon turns on them.
This particular article earned an accolade and recommendation from independent journalist
, which is probably still my proudest shout-out from my independent writing career.Similar reading:
Just another example of capitalism being a blunt idiot that doesn’t follow commands, tech companies largely don’t know how to fund their operations through any means other than advertising in a world in which the market tends to soundly reject advertising wherever it has the ability to do so. The only alternative anyone can think of is venture capital, in which whole industries are propped up by some rich guys who eventually get bored and then it just collapses.
One of the biggest hurdles against replacing or even just reforming capitalism is that so few ordinary people have a clear understanding of what it is or means, so we just keep going around in circles with the same stupid debates in which everyone involved is wrong.
The Silicon Valley Insurrection: Take Back the Internet
I have my doubts about their loyalty to the game this time around, though, because this is a different kind of American Republicanism than we’ve seen before. They have the rallies and the rhetoric and the aesthetic but they’re a product of a new generation. Donald Trump is already a decrepit fossil of German authoritarianism whose final task is to pass the torch.
As I reported above - over the past 24 hours there’s been a civil war brewing between factions of MAGA loyal to Elon Musk with his idiotic meme cartel D.O.G.E., and the pure White Nationalist wing of Trump support, driven primarily by Laura Loomer, who are increasingly frustrated with Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments being very obviously heavily influenced by Musk’s suggestions.
Specifically, a disproportionate number of these people are just tech guys whose names Musk has in his Rolodex, people from PayPal and Uber and Reddit and Andreesen-Horowitz who were promised government jobs if the tech oligarchy could succeed in smuggling themselves into government inside a Trojan Horse shaped like an octogenarian politician they idolized back in 2016.
As I type this the story has only been picked up by Indian mainstream news like Times of India and Hindustan Times but it’s sure to break into western outlets within the next 24 hours. The reason Indian outlets are on top of this first is because the controversy involves so many of the Musk/Vance selections having names like Ramaswamy, Patel, Bhattacharya, and Krishnan. Not exactly the top of the list for folks like Loomer who were hoping for a lily white cabinet.
Loomer could have been even further ahead of the game if she’d read my piece early last month about how Trump is already on his way out the door and his former base has been sold a lie in order to smuggle the Tech Oligarchy into every aspect of the United States government.
It was clear when this random handpicked Peter Theil candidate JD Vance wound up Vice President: Like Watchmen’s Ozymandias, They don’t need to waste time explaining the plan now. They already carried it out before we confronted them.
Now I legitimately never thought I would have reason to praise Laura Loomer for anything—and psych, I’m still not going to praise her, fuck that Nazi asshole—but for the past day or so she’s been spitting truths that should have occurred to everyone in Trump’s orbit long before today.
Similar reading:
The philosophical underpinnings of a lot of this tech oligarch nonsense is not as sophisticated as you would think. It’s just a lot of clever sounding crap plagiarised from fantasy fiction and repackaged in ways that people mistake incomprehensibility for depth.
Just for fun, what do these guys’ policies actually look like in the real world when literally all they know how to do is code, be racist, and hate the poor?
As always, you can read the complete archive of everything notable I’ve ever written on my website.
Thank you all once again, tremendously, for sticking with me for another year. My sincere hope is that you’ll stay with me as we navigate this silly world together into the new year. Before I finish up, here’s some further info about the newsletter going forward:
As I’ve been reporting for a while now, I am running this identical newsletter on two separate platforms, Substack and Ghost. There’s no difference in content between the two platforms except for your choice about which one to use. Many people including myself have reservations about Substack, stemming either from the ethicality or sustainability of the platform, so the choice is now yours.
Until now, the Ghost version has been for paid subscribers only, but as of today, I’m opening it up to free subscribers. The terms are the same for either platform—paying subscribers get every article a full week before everybody else, but this is just an incentive. Ultimately and eventually, everything is released free. I’m still in the process of mirroring everything in my archives over to that platform so please bear with me.
I’m also no longer offering a subscription to The Poolish as a perk for paid subscribers to Plato Was a Dick. The Poolish still exists but I’m in the process of deciding what to do with it. Please read the latest edition of The Poolish for more information about this. Readers already subscribed to The Poolish through their paid subscription to this newsletter are grandfathered in and remain subscribed at no cost to yourself unless you manually cancel.
Thanks again, fellow jesters, and let’s see what the new year brings.
Congrats on a great year! Looking forward to your take on the upcoming one.
Really well done on maintaining a weekly schedule, come rain or shine. I’m just a very green blogger, and am considering that instead of the longer, heavier posts I’ve done so far.