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Don’t Loughner me, bro.

Remember Jared Loughner? He’s the nutbag who shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed (among others) a federal judge and a small child. Loughner was a schizo lost in his own head, his sanity drowned in a sea of byzantine “theories of everything.”

He was obsessed with the notion that language is “brainwashing,” so he decided to invent his own personal language. His reasoning was, “If you say ‘pencil,’ my mind conjures up the image of a pencil. Therefore, you’ve thought-controlled me. To free my mind, I’ll call a pencil a boodlyboodlyboopboop, and now when you say ‘pencil,’ it’ll make me go, ‘Huh? What?’ And I win, brainwasher!”

Loughner’s vendetta against Giffords began when he attended a meet-and-greet and asked her, “Congresswoman, do you think skibbyskip should be graaklygracked at a rate of noopynoop for people earning nimmybeep per gooblezoop?”

And she was like, “The fuck you talking about, you lunatic?”

So he declared, “Now she must die” (then he caught himself and said, “I mean, now frapzappa must bleekahooly”).

I get a lot of DMs from young guys trying to show off their brilliant “theories of everything.” To be honest, these dudes scare me. But I think the right can learn a lesson from these nuts (as in, what not to do). It’s a theme I routinely visit: Keep it simple. These Loughners credit me with having “red-pilled” them via my work from the 1990s, but that work only resonated because I never did the “dry-erase board” conspiracy crap. I kept it simple (“this ‘gas chamber’ has an escape manhole and a door that locks from the inside, and the blueprint is of an air-raid shelter, which the physical evidence backs up”).

Sadly, my fans often fail to grasp the essence of my appeal.

For example…

I got a DM from a guy who wanted to talk about Kera, the porn actress who lived with me as I helped her flee that foul industry. This gent had a “theory of everything” about how Hollywood movies “brainwash” young girls into becoming porn actresses.

I told this fellow that in the real world, that’s not how it works. If we study Kera’s example, we find something that can be explained quite simply, no Illuminati/QAnon ooga-booga required.

Kera came from a rural white Nebraska town that was dying. The work was gone, the hope was gone. For the teens, there were exactly three things to do with all that kinetic teen energy: skateboard, do drugs, and have sex.

Movies didn’t enter into it. I doubt Kera saw more than five films in her entire life. In her town, nerds watched movies, not the cool kids.

It’s a simple dynamic: Town dries up—jobs gone overseas or farmed out to illegals. Teens have nothing to do, so they get high, playact as Tony Hawk, and screw.

Kera and her porn-girl friends had one thing in common: not cinephilia, but absentee, alcoholic, or abusive dads. Every one of them had daddy issues. Kera’s dad was an absentee, alcoholic ex-Marine. A conservative, BTW. Not a liberal. Good Christian right-wing “thank you for your service” veteran who told his wife to get bent because a hotter younger woman spread for him. So he abandoned his family when Kera was a toddler. Couple that with living in a dying town, no prospects, no future, just drugs and sex, and voilà, you have a porn star. The young people look for a way out, and when Kera met a dude who told her she could make $8,000 a day fellating guys on camera (when she’d been fellating them anyway for free), off she went.

You have to be very dense to see any “mystery” here. It’s all super straightforward. No need for the dry-erase board. But rightists always have to make what is simple, complex.

Leftists keep it simple: Their job is to alter human nature and tell people that what they view with their own eyes is false. From New Soviet Man and Lysenkoism to today, when we’re told “women don’t exist,” “white skin makes children evil,” and “the way to end crime is to never arrest or prosecute criminals,” we see a single-minded intent: warp reality.

The best countermeasure against those who seek to alter human nature and ignore the evidence of the senses is to acknowledge human nature and the evidence of the senses. But rightists don’t do that, because they’re drawn like moths to their labyrinthine theories.

The Loughnerian blippity-blapper who DM’d me made a point that deserves examination. When I explained how Kera wasn’t “brainwashed” by movies but influenced by real-world circumstances, my “fan” was like, “Aha! Caught you in a lie! In last week’s column, you wrote about how the Soviets conditioned Nuremberg defendant Fritzsche into parroting their untruths. Gotcha, dude. You yourself admit that brainwashing exists!”

Okay, let’s workshop that claim, because I wouldn’t quote an anonymous Twitter fan if doing so wasn’t in the service of a larger, more important point: Just because conditioning exists doesn’t mean that everything is conditioning. If you actually read the piece I linked to regarding the Soviet brainwashing of Fritzsche, you’ll see that the conditioning took effort. Daily, physical, 24/7 effort. They didn’t show Fritzsche a movie. They worked on him, in person, for a year straight.

In their never-ending quest for easy answers, rightists all too often neglect to learn how conditioning actually works. It ain’t about movies; a kid in a healthy, stable family, attending a school that teaches math and science not trannyism and Kendi, can watch a movie and be fine. Yes, Disney perverts want to include foul messages in their films, but kids only become susceptible because of real-world circumstances: broken families and daily in-person propagandizing in schools.

The left has legions of worker bees who are committed to this conditioning (not just in public schools but private ones as well). Conditioning kids to hate their race if they’re white, to reject the scientific reality of male and female, and to see themselves as trannies (or “pansexual” or whatever can destabilize the American family by destroying the mother/father dynamic).

What has the response to DeSantis’ anti-propagandizing bill taught us if not that there’s an army of teachers who demand the “right” to propagandize?

In a way, K–12 indoctrination mirrors the situation in Kera’s Nebraska town. White kids are disheartened, demoralized, made to feel like they have no future (“You’re evil and the future is brown”), but then they’re given a way out via sex (“If you go tranny, now you’re special! Now you’re no longer evil. Now you can prosper in the new society”).

The right’s flights of fancy about conditioning (“It’s Hollyweird movies!” “It’s vidya games”) are born of impotence, because the actual fixes to the problem—ending the dominance of leftist ideologues in education, ending the degradation of the traditional family—require hard work. Fighting fanatics is onerous. Fanatics want the fight, and, in any fight, the guy who seeks and enjoys the fight will always have the upper hand against the guy who just wants to be left alone.

Leftists are better at this stuff. If you had a time machine, and you told someone in 1950 that a small but committed band of extremists would convince millions of American children that “men” and “women” don’t exist, the 1950s guy would think you’re nuts. But the fact is—and I think this genuinely takes a lot of people by surprise—enough dedicated “conditioners” in the right places can work miracles, especially if they’re laboring unopposed.

And rightists rarely mount an effective opposition, hampered as they are by a grassroots that’s hobbled by lunacy, bizarre obsessions, infighting, and no unified goal, and an establishment that, when it comes to cultural issues, is more skittish than Shaggy.

Shorn of the ability to take on the conditioners, rightists find comfort in easy fixes like “Movies is hyp-mo-tizing us!”

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that left and right monetize in very different ways. Leftists have a knack when it comes to expanding their cult of fanatics by making it profitable to those who might not have otherwise joined. Leftists have made an industry out of “diversity consultants” and “diversity offices” throughout corporate America, government, entertainment, and academia. Mediocre intellects incapable of learning math and science thrive on college campuses in “diversity departments”; mediocre artists incapable of making films are hired by studios and networks to oversee “diversity quotas.” People without the intelligence to understand how to run a business are hired by corporate giants to monitor “diversity.” And your taxpayer bucks go to thousands of “diversity” bureaucrats in your state, county, and city governments.

See the dynamic here? The cult expands by getting non-cult institutions to fund the cult. To give jobs to members. To make the cult not just a belief system, but a lucrative profession.

The right, on the other hand, monetizes by shearing its own. “Ben Shapiro here! I’m starting my own Disney! We’ll make family-friendly films that will de-hypmotize your kids! Make your checks payable to Ben Shapiro Doesn’t Need the Money but He’ll Take It Anyway c/o the Jeremy Boreing Toupee Fund, Daily Wire, Box 134, Nashville.”

Leftists strong-arm and extort to get money from outside their circle. Rightists keep scamming the same gullible saps within their circle. Leftists profit from their own, rightists deplete their own.

Faced with the grim reality that leftists are conducting daily hands-on conditioning in schools, and even those who aren’t conditioned are finding it profitable to parrot the cult doctrine in their professional or academic lives, it’s understandable that rightists are drawn to quick fixes. Real fixes seem an impossible task.

When I was a kid, we had a family friend, a kindly man named Ward, who became very ill with cancer. He tried every medical treatment, but the disease just kept spreading. At the end, when the diagnosis was terminal, in his desperation, his fierce desire to cling to life, he went down to Mexico to try hoodoo-voodoo psychic healing. He died, of course.

The left is cancer, progressing in a determined manner with a single purpose. Cancer can be fought, it can be defeated, but never by ooga-booga fever dreams (QAnon, Pizzagate, the fetid contents of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mind), and not if your “doctors” are just trying to scam you. The way to fight Disney isn’t to con your followers with a “new Disney” pyramid scheme, but to render Disney propaganda powerless by keeping your own family strong and removing your kids from daily conditioning at school while supporting efforts to end leftist indoctrination of all children.

DeSantis is fighting the cancer correctly. We’ll see how it plays out. Remember, cancer can go into remission and return. Being single-minded of purpose, setbacks never make cancer second-guess itself. Cancer is not introspective.

In the meantime, stay sane. Sanity can be difficult to maintain because the fight ahead looks dire when viewed with clarity. But do so anyway.

Don’t Loughner yourself, bros.