Slop social media hates that which is not ephemeral. It has no memory, it has no history, it lives only in the exact moment of today’s current thing, driven chiefly by fleeting emotions. I work in the opposite way. The purpose of writing articles like this is, in some sense, to keep a durable record, especially if they end up in books like Applied Elite Theory (2025). I write for people who have memories and have sought in every possible way to shed those followers who live only for the emotional highs and lows of the current thing. It has now been 676 days since I wrote one of the articles that are reprinted in that volume, ‘Against Vibes, Against Cope, Against Captive Dreams’. Captive Dreamer is perhaps the most emblematic example of the populist MAGA-chud-slop-brained X poster. In my last year or so on X (incidentally, it has been 189 days since I left the Raw Sewage Pipe of Slop), Captive Dreamer became my nemesis: the Joker to my Batman, a kind of anti-me. Where I told people ‘The Online Right is Almost Entirely Fake’ (658 days ago), he enthusiastically retweeted and signal-boosted known bad actors such as Patrick Casey (who, someone told me, was lying about yours truly recently – there is, in fact, no article in which I accuse Tucker Carlson of being ‘compromised by the Jews’; my only article on Tucker is this, which laments his indulgence of kookery and residual Boomer slopulism). Where I told people to ‘Tune Out the Clown Show’ (797 ago) and to ‘Escape the Slop Right Matrix’ (283 days ago), Captive Dreamer enthusiastically put on the red nose, danced around, and then ‘Became Agent Smith’ (273 days ago) jumping onto every dogpile and engaging in every kind of smear against apostates such as me, who had seen quite enough of the charade. When I outlined Trump’s Law, he doubled down and engaged in the most outrageous copes downplaying the Epstein files, and trying to make out that, actually, Trump was playing 92-dimensional chess against Netanyahu, and – in any case, ‘with Zionists, you win’. Even as I painted him as the flag-bearer for the ‘algo windsock’ variety of the ‘Online Right as An IQ Shredder’ (56 days ago), he quadrupled down on jumping on every trend that swept through his feed. Where I told people that going ‘full chud’ over the ICE Raids, or, say, kidnapping Nicholas Maduro, or threatening Greenland, or threatening war with Canada, was going to discredit right-wing politics for a generation, Captive Dreamer was enthusiastically telling people like me ‘We’re Going Fucking Kill You’ or to ‘Get Back Into the Crystal’, or that I was a ‘Panican’. I wasn’t the only person saying this, by the way, see, for example, this guy.

When I lamented that fact that intelligent people, including those who had read my books (!), simply refused to see what I was telling them about the genuine need to distance oneself from all of this nonsense which passes for ‘the right’, Dave Greene aka ‘The Distributist’ could seemingly only process it as ‘you’re being like Lauren Southern’. I still do not understand the mind that can read any of my articles or watch any of my videos and be like, ‘yeah, that’s just Lauren Southern’. Weirdly, after accusing me of ‘crashing out’, Dave is now giving advice which sounds suspiciously like ‘the dastardly elite theorists’.

In any case, now, in the light of the catastrophic midterm results for Trump and the GOP, Captive Dreamer can currently be found frantically back-peddling. That’s right! The man who famously said ‘with Zionists, you win’ and who tried to paint me – arguably one of the most level-headed analysts anywhere online – as some sort of deranged America-hating ‘third-worldist’ because I pointed out what the Vice President has now admitted, is now trying to reinvent himself as someone who never supported the Iran War. In this new narrative, Captive Dreamer didn’t wholeheartedly back the faction that sold us that war and hasn’t been the most laughable useful idiot MAGA chud possibly in the known universe. While these days, I prefer to focus on educational content and to step back from analysing the day-to-day news cycle, forgive me for indulging the need to deliver one final elbow drop on my old foe for good measure.

At the same time, I must thank Captive Dreamer for his service. The stark binary he offered as the Joker to my Batman, made it much easier to navigate the terrain and to see, truly, who I could take with me where I was going, and who had to be severed, ruthlessly and utterly. This severance in some respects must be total, as those who are left behind – for lack of a better term, rightoids – now not only occupy a totally different epistemic space from that which we now inhabit, but also must themselves be subject to study almost as a scientist might study an insect under a microscope. As one long-time viewer wrote on a recent YouTube lecture of mine:

Over time, I’ve drifted away from many American and British guests who’d, once upon a time, frequent this channel. It’s 2026. I have no time anymore in these parts for suckers, manipulators, true believers and naivety.

This is the correct attitude. As time has gone on, I have had less patience with the slow kids, or with the willful refusal to see what is right in front of one’s face. I have no time for apologia or copes for specific political figures or parties. The kindest explanation is that many of these people are now simply partisans of the least interesting sort whether through temperament or cowardice or simply by being paid off (whether top-down or through audience capture); the cruellest explanation is that they were never mentally equipped to see in the first place.

With that done and said, the time has come to leave childish things behind. The period in which we were willing to engage with the sorts described above has been over for some time, not least because of how controlled and suffocating the whole dismal scene has become. On the plus side, this comes with a greater willingness to engage with people broadly ‘outside’ of it all, where many intelligent and inquisitive people can be found. You can expect me to continue having dialogues in these more ‘unusual’ spaces, and have a few more forthcoming. A testament to the fact that there is now a public – left or right – that is somewhat ‘ready’ for my general diagnosis can be seen in the fact that in the 136 days since I switched from covering the news to focusing on educational lectures, my channel has had almost 20,000 new subscribers and over 5.4 million views, 900% and 93% increases respectively. As a market signal, this shows quite powerfully that the appetite for news slop – at least of the non-partisan analytical kind that I used to provide – has diminished and the appetite for something more durable and nourishing has increased. Female viewers have more than doubled during this period. Obviously, YouTube does not collect data on political orientation, but I notice many commenters coming from the left now as well as the right. Given how challenging much of this material has been, those female and leftist viewers are somewhat defying the chuds’ stereotypes of them as 2016-era SJWs baying at the sky. I foresee whatever ‘new horizon’ will come, in some sense, coming from this sort of ‘no man’s land’ space of intelligent people who have come to be disillusioned with the options put in front of them and who, to a large degree, have come to ‘see through the system’.

As I’ve outlined in recent interviews, the chief challenge for everyone now, no matter where you came from (i.e. left, right, Labour, Tory, Marxist, populist, dissident, whatever) is to unplug from the hyperreal Matrix, to reject the false binaries the media (and slop social media) presents you, especially emotional engagement with them, and to focus your efforts on what can be achieved in your immediate local sphere of availability. In an exciting new chapter, soon, we will be unveiling ‘A Post-Right Manifesto’, which should give a semblance of coherence, firm guidance, and stability to all of this by formalising it. Going forward, however, anyone who will not learn the obvious lessons of the past decade, which my friends and I have exhaustively and tediously documented, must be excluded. The entire meaning of Post-Right is that such people are, to quote Sleuth (1972), ‘not-one-of-me’. Let the era of the Rake-Stepper and the proud Fell for It Again Award collector be over. Rest in peace chud, your captive dreams are over.