This is for those more interested in winning than not getting their feelings hurt.

Pinned to the top of my Locals page is a video I made last October trying to explain the importance of what I called "Order of magnitude thinking.” This is a way of properly calibrating strategies for accomplishing your goals with the amount of power necessary to accomplish those goals, as we often confuse one means of accomplishing what we want with the goal itself. We want our kids to not be indoctrinated in garbage ideology, but proceed to act as if changing a school board is the actual goal. We want to not be governed by tyrants, but then proceed to direct all energy and attention on things that are not, in fact, the true governing bodies. We want truth and objectivity to characterize the news media and higher education, but spend baffling amounts of time trying to change entities that will never again engage in truth or objectivity. What gives?

Pt. 1
Let us consider two parallel thoughts, and then converge them on a possible philosophy of action. The first thought is that any time spent on ineffective strategies or actions are by definition wastes of time that make our enemies stronger. Consider a scenario where you occupy a position of power, and can observe the actions of those who seek to remove you from that power. You watch from your castle walls as these would-be dissidents spend year after year constructing siege equipment out of cheese, arrows out of hair, and swords out of clay, then proceed to attack the trees around them. Every so often, a stray hairrow comes whizzing at your stone walls, causing nothing but amusement to your soldiers. How do you feel about their strategy? As the one supposedly threatened by these dissidents, are you? Of course not. Despite the tremendous time, energy, and sincerity they are putting into their siege, it is ultimately a clown show of epic proportions, and is as intimidating to you as tranny story hour is to activist parents. Your best move here is to pretend to be scared and threatened in order to ensure that your foes continue their ludacris and eternally failed assault on your empire. You need do nothing more than encourage their belief in the efficacy of a bad strategy.

Never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake. Outside of some histrionics in the media, do you see much true interruption coming from the Left when it comes to opposing, say, the banning of CRT in schools? Of course not, as this action does not constitute a real threat to them. If anything, it makes them stronger. The regime gets to accuse its dissidents of being the real censors. It gets to play the victim, and trot out teachers who will be revered as modern-day Anne Franks. Meanwhile, those same teachers will continue to teach whatever they want, because that's how this works. Whew, that was a close one. Good thing their trebuchet is cheddar.

The trees are passing unenforceable laws and yelling at school boards. The forest is what your child is taught. This tree is one way of getting there. But there are many trees in the forest. This essay is not about these particular trees or forest; it's just an example. Too many reactionaries make buckets of bling doing the same thing you would do from your castle walls: encourage would-be dissidents to engage in pointless and often counterproductive actions, but I'll save my critique for much of the Right-Wing intelligentsia for another day.

Pt. 2
The second thought we need to consider is the opposite of ineffective strategy. It's not good enough to point out bad strategies; we must construct a tactical playbook that not only has all blueprints for cheese trebuchets ripped out, but is filled with pages on how to build proper siege equipment. Or better yet, a stronger empire guarded by a bigger castle. I mean, who wants to camp outside in the mud, spending a lifetime trying to capture a cesspool?

Empire-building is also a topic for another time. You crawl before you can walk, but you need to stop rolling around in dirt before you can crawl. Part 1 was how to stop rolling around in dirt. Now let's look at a few crawling methods. Back to ineffective vs. effective action, any effective action is one that leaves you stronger and your opponents weaker. Any ineffective action is one that leaves you weaker and your opponents stronger. It's really that simple. If you can't demonstrably show how an action will make you stronger, then you must assume you have actually made your opponents stronger. In practical terms, when facing a foe like ours (regimes/institutions in our current society), anything that increases the perception of their legitimacy makes them stronger. One goal is therefore to create strategies that decrease the perception of their legitimacy.

Any time we make an appeal to power, we are by definition increasing their legitimacy, as we are further acknowledging their legitimate position of power and decision-making. Back to our school board example, yelling at them to change their policies is a failure on several levels. Not only does this help them to castigate the dissidents and paint themselves as victims, but it legitimizes their positions by acknowledging that they are the ones in charge. Even if you were to persuade them to reverse a mask mandate, they remain in charge. Moreover, their legitimacy has increased because they appear to be rational and responsive to the public. This is not a winning strategy.

One way to decrease a regime’s power is to reduce their resources. A way to reduce a regime’s resources is to remove parts of that which they rule over. Consider some alternate timeline where Ukraine mounted an effective counteroffensive to the point of securing a Russian surrender. The terms of this surrender include Russia ceding its entire Western section to Ukraine. Everything west of Saratov is now Ukraine. Time to move Russia’s capital. Fortunately they all speak the same language, making the transition easier than you’d think. Russia's territory has now been reduced, and Ukraine's territory has grown. In a vacuum, is Russia now stronger or weaker? Weaker, of course. The resources (people, territory, etc.) they can leverage against their foes has decreased. One real-world example of this otherwise absurd hypothetical is the increase of Israel's relative power via increased territory after the 6-Day War.

Consider another alternate timeline where after Russia has invaded Ukraine, its Far-Eastern territory decides to peacefully secede from Russia, instating Yakutsk as its capital. It doesn't want war either with Russia or Ukraine. It just wants to be left alone, kind of like the Confederacy, but with 85% less slavery. Again, is Russia stronger or weaker? The answer is the same. Russia has less resources to leverage against its opponents. War is in many ways a game of resource management. See: the Nazi siege of Stalingrad.

In our culture war, some of the resources to be managed are energy, interest, public support, and money. When your foe is an institution, one of their most precious resources is legitimacy. This is why our strategy must in many ways be based on altering the balance of power in terms of legitimacy. Any strategy that makes them seem less legitimate is a good strategy. Any strategy that makes those opposed to them seem more legitimate is a good strategy. Any strategy that somehow does both simultaneously is an optimal strategy, but this is difficult to achieve for several reasons. One, this type of strategy often revolves around direct conflict or challengers to the institution. As they are stronger and have nothing but friends in the media and we are weaker and have nothing but enemies in the media, this will not go well. Remind me again how that peaceful protest at the capital went? Worst day since 9/11, got it.

There are exceptions to this rule. Many martial arts have moves that use a larger foe's weight and force against them. But these moves depend on 1) knowing how to execute them effectively, and 2) knowing the follow-up moves which will further increase your advantage (i.e. power) over your foe. I'm yet to see much evidence of this knowledge being employed effectively by anyone other than the regime. Anyone heard from the Canadian truckers lately?

There are a few ways to independently increase the legitimacy of dissidents and decrease the legitimacy of the regime. With the latter, a great strategy is to let them do their thing. There is no real opposition to the regime in California. Is their legitimacy increasing, or decreasing? A good yardstick for answering this question is to look at the growth or decline of those seeking to be ruled by the California Regime. In 2020, we learned that California's population declined for the first time in recorded history. Among those leaving the state were several large businesses, taking their employees and revenue with them. We can safely say that the California Regime is decreasing in legitimacy. Unfortunately, there are countless other regimes who share the perspectives of those in the California regime. The Harvard Regime shares the perspectives of the California Regime. The NPR Regime shares the perspectives of the California Regime. And so on and so forth.

When these regimes are challenged with cheese trebuchets and clay swords they either maintain or increase their legitimacy. The regimes which are allowed to crap the bed into irrelevance are decreasing in legitimacy. CNN will probably always exist. But how'd that CNN+ launch go? The flier said their party would "Go until ?" but from what I hear everyone had pretty much cleared out by 8. The CNN Regime is bleeding legitimacy because no one is challenging their power, only their legitimacy. The Babylon Bee isn't trying to take over or reform CNN. They're perfectly fine letting CNN do its thing, and mocking it into oblivion. The Larry Elder and now Michael Shellenberger campaigns are attempts to take over and reform California. We saw how that worked out for the Black Face of White Supremacy. I suspect a similar fate will befall Shellenberger, regardless of his impressive Liberal bona fides.

Pt. 3
We've established that merely seeking to influence the power structures of a regime is almost always a failed strategy, as all it does is legitimize the regime while doing nothing to grow the power of those opposing it. Thus the acquisition of power and legitimacy is a much more reliable approach, and often goes hand in hand. My relationship with something like The Daily Wire has gone from "Those guys are awesome!" to "Those guys are probably part of the problem..." to "Those guys are definitely part of the problem, but they're also touching a section of the elephant which represents part of the solution." When Harry's Razors pulled their sponsorship of The Daily Wire, TDW did not plead with Harry's Razors to sponsor them again. They just started their own razor company called Jeremy's Razors. I have no idea if Jeremy's Razors are any good, but I assume they're at least passable. Thus The Daily Wire increased their own power and legitimacy while simultaneously decreasing the power and legitimacy of Harry's Razors, without ever directly seeking conflict with Harry's. It might seem like creating a competing business with Harry's is indeed seeking direct conflict. In a way, it is. But the soldiers in that conflict are not employed by The Daily Wire. They are regular people who need razors. This is not the same as Jeremy Boering trying to take over Harry's, and the difference between the two is incredibly important.

Examples of this same strategy but from a losing perspective are David Hogg's potato brain attempt at creating a MyPillow competitor (Good Pillow, lol) and the Commie alternative to PragerU, The Gravel Institute. Hogg resigned from his failed pillow company last April, and TGI quickly gained the same amount of YouTube subs as it had Twitter followers, and then stalled out entirely. Epic win. The reason Jeremy's Razors are, as of this writing, succeeding where Derp Pillow and The Stalin Institute failed is because one can only assume Jeremy's Razors are good enough to represent legitimacy to someone who just wants a razor, and the other two enterprises are not.

One very effective means of increasing your own legitimacy in a way that will naturally, non-confrontationally decrease the legitimacy of our foes is to decrease their territory of control. You do this by creating and offering alternatives to their institution, which will almost always be better due to how absolutely awful the regime is at anything other than sniffing its own farts. If you open a Waldorf Astoria across from a seedy roach motel, you do not also need to engage in an advertising campaign revolving around how much the seedy roach motel sucks. The difference is obvious to anyone with an IQ over 19. If you want to be governed by the closest approximation of competence that can be found in today's society, move to where the closest approximation of competent governance can be found. If you don't want your kids to be indoctrinated or taught by complete morons, put them in an environment where they will not be indoctrinated or taught by complete morons. If that environment does not exist, build it. Field of Dreams be with you. (And also with you).

A final word for those who remain convinced of the efficacy of trying to infiltrate and reform these institutions from the inside. Even if we were to ignore the fact that the strategies available to those who originally took them over are wholly unavailable to current would-be insurgents, there's some basic math to consider. The purpose of infiltrating the institution is to shift the balance of power within it from those you oppose, to yourself. From one standpoint, your mere existence in that institution rather than the existence of someone loyal to the regime does indeed represent a numerical shift in the balance of power. However, it is a mistake to assume this shift can be extrapolated out until eventually the power is in your favor. If I see one bug in my house, I don't think much about it. If I see several, I call an exterminator. One dissident is not a threat to the power structure. In many cases, they can be used to show how tolerant and benevolent the power structure is. There is no such thing as incremental reform when it comes to the major institutions we are up against. At a certain point, their already active immune system kicks in.

If you see the old regime as a pollutant and yourself as the disinfectant, the most important question is how much pollutant remains after your disinfecting presence has been applied? What happens when you pour a teaspoon of bleach into a lagoon? Has anyone checked to see if the water level in the swamp fluctuated any from 2016-2020? If you do decide to go take a look, use caution: the last guy we sent out to check on it hasn’t been heard from since.