In March 2013, the blogger Spandrell described Singapore as an ‘IQ shredder’. The mechanism was simple enough. A high-functioning city sucks in the bright and the conscientious from a much larger hinterland, puts them on a hamster wheel of rents, credentials and status competition, and then so thoroughly postpones or prevents reproduction that the very genetic material which made the city valuable is incinerated for the sake of property prices. Nick Land later generalised the point: the model shredder is a high-performance capitalist polity that skims talent regionally and globally and converts it into present output at the expense of the future stock. London, New York, Hong Kong and the rest of the glittering archipelago work on the same principle. They do not merely attract intelligence but consume it.

This article borrows the name and nothing else. What follows is not a theory of cities, fertility or selection, and it is not very scientific. It is a taxonomy of how prolonged exposure to the online right produces significant cognitive decline. The original shredder wasted genomes. This one wastes minds that are still, in theory, attached to living skulls. My occasion for writing this is the now much-publicised fact that Tucker Carlson has just given two hours of national oxygen to a South Dakota welder who explained that algebra puts letters among the numbers in order to ‘fuck with you’, that it is ‘fake math’ for people ‘in The Matrix’, and that anyone who takes it seriously is a good little ‘goy-slave’. Carlson found this amazing. America’s most famous living journalist now sits nodding while a random craftsman recasts the quadratic formula as an ethnic plot. How did we get here? A lot of people have been wondering that, so I thought I’d take a stab at it. I have identified nine primary paths by which the modern online right destroys brain cells in real time. I’ve watched it happen to many people.

1. Basic Tory Boyism

Penalty: -10 intelligence

This is the entry-level setting: the bog-standard small-government Beltway libertarian who can be relied upon to support any foreign war that comes with a press release, to treat Zionism as a moral primitive rather than a state interest, and to recite the entire catechism of the Boomer Truth Regime without once noticing that it is a modern myth-complex. Markets are magic. Churchill was a saint. The postwar settlement was the end of history except for the bits that still need more bombing. The type is not stupid in the ordinary sense. He has read Atlas Shrugged and a few Cato briefs and can operate a spreadsheet. But he has outsourced his map of the twentieth century to a set of legitimating myths, which he now defends as if they were geometry. Once those myths are load-bearing, every subsequent fact must be reshaped to fit. The cover charge for remaining respectable is a ten-intelligence-point tax penalty.

2. Slopulism

Penalty: -20 intelligence

This is when, essentially, someone becomes a MAGAtard or cheerleader for a particular party and swaps their intellectual integrity for a set of themed pom-poms and a miniskirt. Too many examples to count, but their stock-in-trade is cope, becoming a true believer in a particular politician. Think about it: the one line of work outside of the legal profession which practically necessitates lying daily and this person chooses actively to make excuses and propagandise for it. To me the person who does this becomes lower than a slug. It makes me sad to think of the people who sacrificed their cognitive abilities to be cope squad for this or that party. Automatic penalty: minus-twenty intelligence.

3. Slop ethnonationalism

Penalty: -15 intelligence

After a period of shedding liberal priors, a certain kind of person journeys into blood-and-soil nationalism and does not stop when he has a usable account of kinship, territory and demographic change. He continues until the brain has been reduced to slogan, low-IQ gruggery and the basic reactionary rants. Repeat the grug noises enough and the Overton window will shift! At which point the race will somehow be heroically saved. Anything against this is deemed ‘very unheroic’. Meanwhile no institutions are built and no counter-elite is organised, because he was too busy lobbing bricks through the Overton window. Here the penalty is fifteen points because the person has not merely adopted a false theory of change, but a theory that feels like activity while guaranteeing sterility. This is not to mention that grugs are inherently off-putting to anyone who is not them, so they automatically scare off any would-be counter-elites too.

4. Reductive HBD scientism

Penalty: -5 intelligence

This is the opposite tendency: the making of a shibboleth out of IQ statistics. Human biodiversity is not nothing. Group differences in measured cognitive ability are among the more replicated findings in psychology. The trouble, as I outlined before, is that the scene lives off aggregate data that are old, small, often non-random, and then pressed into extraordinary claims about billions of people. Almost no new collection is done. What remains is the curation and protection of dodgy datasets, plus a worldview in which a mid-century psychometric table is asked to explain almost everything. The scientism here is limited rather than raving, which is why the penalty is only five points. It is still a penalty, because a man who cannot tell a political formula from a fact has already begun to shred IQ.

5. Kook conspirtardism

Penalty: -15 intelligence

Many people are better off taking no red pills at all. Their minds cannot metabolise them. The result is not enlightenment but an epistemic crisis in which every previously stable feature of reality comes under suspicion at once. This is the lane in which James Delingpole informs us that dinosaurs are not real and that David Bowie is secretly still alive, and in which Candace Owens elaborates Charlie Kirk into a secret psychic master of astral projection who knew about the UFOs and whatever else the feed is serving that week. The operational disaster is not that some official stories are false, because one might guess that the media lies about absolutely everything. Rather, the disaster is that kook material discredits almost everything it touches, including the real machinations of real organised minorities and of the real intelligence services. Minus fifteen points, automatic.

6. Low-IQ antisemitism

Penalty: -15 intelligence

There is a difference between pointing to the disproportionate power of this or that faction, or to the specific tactics of specific people, and ascribing to Jewish people a near-superhuman omnipotence such that they stand behind every event in world history, down to your catching a common cold. Tucker’s algebra segment falls neatly into the second category. As with the kook material, the effect is to discredit any discussion of the topic. Serious analysis of ethnic networking, donor capture or foreign-policy lobbies becomes impossible once the public association is a welder on a podcast declaring algebra fake. Another automatic minus fifteen points, which combined with any of the above, already finds our online rightist in sub-functional territory.

7. Algo windsockism

Penalty: -20 intelligence

This is the condition in which a person becomes one with the social-media algorithm and turns into a human windsock, swept along by whatever comes down the hyperreal raw sewage pipe of slop in a given hour. Captive Dreamer and Zoomer Historian are banner examples. Something is always happening. The Overton window is always moving. The clip is always the most important clip. There is no memory and no ranking of importance, only the next stimulus. A twenty point penalty here is not rhetorical inflation, because a mind that cannot hold a thought still for longer than the refresh cycle has ceased to be a mind in the relevant human sense.

8. Do-somethingism

Penalty: -30 intelligence (episodic)

Often coupled with one or several of the above, this is the emotional wretch, brain-fried from too much social media slop feed, who perpetually squawks that one must ‘do something’. Their reasoning shuts down the moment Danny Tommo jumps into the sea or someone climbs a lamp-post to put up a flag. The affliction is sporadic, which is the only mercy. Otherwise intelligent people, arrested by it, will treat a gesture as a strategy and a spectacle as a transfer of power. This is a full thirty points of docked intelligence, while the episode lasts. Policy recommendation: fall out with them during the episode and do not let them forget it afterwards. They will remember the quarrel as betrayal. You will remember it as hygiene, block all paths back to you. Particularly virulent among slop ethnonationalists who, during such an episode, are operating a minus-fifty-intelligence penalty from their natural level, unlocking levels of moronic previously only glimpsed in old documentaries about mental asylums such as Titicut Follies.

9. Reflexive snap-back liberalism

Penalty: -5 intelligence.

This is the Richard Hanania lane. The preceding eight types are so repulsive that the degenerated liberal world begins to look cosy again. The move is a deliberate re-taking of the blue pill, Cypher in the restaurant. It is understandable as a nervous system response. It is still a penalty, because it is almost never an honest return to prior error. It is Machiavellian bad faith: one has seen the structure, found the company unbearable, and chosen the more comfortable lie while retaining just enough forbidden knowledge to sneer at the worst of both camps. Five points for the bad faith, the steak is not free when you’re paying for it with lies. Liberalism is not magically great again just because the online right is full of idiots.

The original shredder at least produced GDP. Singapore got the rents. This one produces content of vanishingly diminishing returns and of ever lower quality. The talent – such as it was – is drawn in by the allure of forbidden knowledge, run through a sequence of identity costumes, and deposited at the other end unable to distinguish a lobby from a demonology, a dataset from a scripture, or a lamp-post from a political programme. Elite theory has remained available the entire time this sordid and pathetic display has been playing itself out. So has ordinary scholarship. So has the distinction, which is not difficult, between noticing patterns and hallucinating omnipotence. The online right does not fail because it noticed too much, it fails because it cannot stop at enough, has no discernment and because the algo demands ever more content to devour. The city shreds IQ by paying the bright not to reproduce. The online right’s social media feed shreds their IQ by paying them to talk. The second bargain is actually worse: you do not even get the skyline or the overpriced sushi bar, just some moron braying half-baked maxims at you.

Incidentally, when some upstart starts squealing ‘do something’ at me, they would do well to remember that this little corner of the internet and its ‘network of tens’ has been spectacularly more productive than most others owing largely to the fact that it attracts sane, productive, and normal people which it selects for and deliberately excludes all of the above sorts which it selects against, because they can never and will never get anywhere. I can think of at least six lasting organisations that emerged out of my community, largely owing to our emphasis on quality people building things that last, which are resistant to slop news cycles. I have never made a song and dance about this but allow it all to carry on quietly in the background. Even some slop merchants who have become noisy critics of mine, in the next breath praise projects that started with our little community, without even knowing the origin! I have tried to lay the groundwork to form a genuine theoretical framework, a canon of thinkers and literature, and a way of approaching the current epoch and all its ills that will stand apart from all the dead ends listed in this article. Almost everything I do is intended to filter out those who will be useless because they were not able to avoid the online IQ shredder. I encourage whoever remains to step over party politics, ‘left versus right’ culture war nonsense, the increasingly pathetic attention economy, and ever more desperate public stunts performed by plastic patriots, to come together and form coalitions of sensible and centred people who want what is best for their local communities and beyond those their nations. I have consistently provided roadmaps to avoid the many pitfalls, it is becoming ever more important to tune out those who simply cannot read them.