RG | Tank

This brand of weakness must be removed from civilization if it is to remain civil at all. Civil for the people we care about anyway. And hostile to the people we don’t. I would shoot this terrorist while he was sitting in a wheelchair crying in front of me. I don’t care. You don’t know the world. You don’t know these types of people or what they’ve done. You live in the safest society humanity has ever produced. You don’t know what darkness lurks outside these borders. And the demons we’ve had to face down so you can enjoy this pathetically soft world view. These people strapped bombs to kids with Down syndrome and sent them toward our lines. They raped boys. Woman are not people to them. I’ve seen them drop a dead girl in front of me, ask for money, and left the body. They have sex with animals. They butcher each of for God’s sake. In the most disgusting ways imaginable. Complete dismemberment. Terrorists are not human to me. I have fully dehumanized them in my mind. They’ve made it easy after all. After fighting them in Iraq and Afghanistan, I just don’t fucking care. The fact that you do care about them is your right I guess. You are sheltered after all. But I will kill this paraplegic with my bare hands if ordered to. My only regret would be that he could only die once, so I could fucking do it again.

THE COST OF THE ARENA There is something obscene about a country asking a man to walk into hell, then recoiling because he comes home smelling like smoke. This is all tied to our recent discussions about “merit”. We take young Americans, hand them rifles, send them across oceans, and ask them to become intimate with things most lawmakers, journalists, and professional moralists will spend their entire lives safely avoiding. Then years later, some of those veterans are called to serve for something important and suddenly the people in the balcony become forensic experts on every ugly year of their lives. Maybe they drank too much after the war. Perhaps their relationships were a wreck. They behaved badly and struggled. Look at him! Look how dirty he is! No. Fucking. Shit. You sent him into the arena. Accountability matters. Some things cannot be excused by war. But neither can redemption be erased because it complicates a confirmation hearing. If a warrior broke, fought his way back, made amends, rebuilt his life and became useful to his country again, that story should count for something more than another line of attack. But it doesn’t, unless you’re lined with gay race communism. Instead, America increasingly wants warriors without scars. We want the violence performed somewhere far away, neatly packaged, then returned to us without residue. And we want men willing to enter the arena, but God help them if they bleed on the carpet afterward. The ugliest part is watching people whose greatest professional danger is a hostile headline point down from the marble seats at the scarred man below and laugh at the mud on his face. You may be physically cleaner than him because you were never in the dirt. But your soul is filthy. And history will not remember your name.

After spending a decade calling everyone you disagreed with a fascist, you’ll forgive me if I don’t lose sleep over calling you a communist. You taught a generation that political opponents should be branded with history’s darkest labels. Don’t act shocked when those labels find their way back to you, in spades. Free speech isn’t free, it has a cost. And the bill has come due.

One of the reasons X terrifies soft ideologues is that it has become one of the last places where ideas are forced to compete in the open. I don’t block people and certainly don’t deliberately curate an echo chamber. My replies are full of people who disagree with me. And yet every day I watch the same thing happen. The people who spent years convinced they represented the silent majority get ratioed into the earth by ordinary Americans. Not because of brigading, coordination, or because some shadowy force is helping. Because their ideas suck. That realization should horrify them. But it doesn’t, because they’re dented. For years they mistook institutional power for public support. They confused HR departments, media outlets, universities, and bureaucracies with actual consensus. Now the walls are gone and the ideas have to stand on their own. And many of them just can’t. What’s happening on this platform is not the triumph of a movement. It’s the collapse of an illusion. The worst part isn’t that they’re losing. It’s that they’re finding out how few people ever agreed with them in the first place.