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I Have Been a Practicing Occultist for 23 Years. Here's Why I Hate New Age Bullshit.

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:52:31 GMT

An excerpt from page 269 of 2024’s “The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic” by Alan Moore and Steve Moore.

Today is July 23, 2026, which means it is one of the holiest of holidays in my religion:

Robert Anton Wilson Day

Back when I was managing editor at this company’s predecessor, Liberty Island Books, I wrote this on July 23, 2019 about my favorite author:

In Cosmic Trigger he writes about how on this day in 1973 he experienced some kind of contact with an entity. He explains how over the years he’s held many hypotheses about what it may have been, ranging from aliens to spirits to dead people, to just being a bit crazy and hallucinating. Taking an agnostic approach to the experience is akin to what he advocated throughout his books and talks; that we should be skeptical about both our own BS and other people’s. He was fond of noting that “BS” was a good shortening for “belief system.”

Yes, today we celebrate the occult ritual which may or may not have inspired Wilson to become the great author and philosopher he became, whose ideas laid some of the foundations of my career and whole life now.

I’m an occultist today because of Wilson’s work.

And it began back in 2003 when I was in college and acquired a little 2-disc DVD set which introduced me to the ideas of Wilson, media theorist , chaos magician Grant Morrison, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and the one whose teachings and philosophy provided the foundation to them all, the self-proclaimed Great Beast Aleister Crowley, the most important, influential, and notorious occultist of the 20th century.

First, let’s define terms:

What is “the occult” and what does it mean to identify as an occultist?

What exactly was so special about Aleister Crowley?

A lot of people tend to think that occultism is synonymous with Satanism and that it’s all about worshipping demons and casting black magick spells to curse people.

However, when you open Crowley’s magnum opus Magick Book 4 then you’ll find something very different: a whole lot of these “spells” seem to sound an awful lot like prayers.

Why would the Tetragrammaton, the holiest name of God in Judaism, be so central in a book by a supposed Satanist?

Why all this talk of heavenly beings and the need to call forth one’s Holy Guardian Angel? My goodness, that’s a lot of Hebrew there!

“Occult” means hidden. And what is “hidden” is something very specific and it’s what we are celebrating today. I will use the most clinical term:

Entities

That’s the big taboo of the occult and of Wilson’s memoir Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, my favorite book.

So many people do not want to consider the possiblity that “entities” — commonly characterized as ghosts, spirits, gods, angels, demons, extraterrestrials, time travelers, pick whatever label you’d like — do actually exist as opposed to being desperate, delusional creations of one’s imagination.

And they want to insist that anyone who would claim to communicate with an “entity” must surely be insane. Only schizophrenic people think they’re talking to spirits, right?

No.

Merely “hearing voices” is not enough for a Schizophrenia diagnosis or to be locked away forever. (I assure you I’ve talked with both my therapist and psychiatrist about this and they assure me I do not exhibit the symptoms.)

The number of people who experience some form of communication with seemingly spiritual forces is much higher than most would suspect. The “Hearing Voices Movement” reports that anywhere from 3% to 10% of the population have reported these kinds of experiences of interactions with beings seemingly on other planes of existence.

So after 23 years now of exploring the occult and using Book 4 as an actual practical guidebook through the spiritual realms, to me, this is what occultism is really all about:

If you do these rituals, then you will get these results, and then it will mean making contact with something on the other side.

The seemingly old-fashioned tools of a magick circle, wand, cup, sword, disk, Bible, and all the conventional tropes of wizardry will actually work if you take the very long amounts of time it takes to learn how to use them.

Here’s the most important essay I’ve ever published on Substack about using ceremonial magick as the most effective PTSD treatment ever:

For Wilson, after performing a ritual, he encountered what appeared to him as an extraterrestrial intelligence from Sirius, though he came to doubt that initial presentation, realizing that this experience of a shaman contacting a spirit happens again and again throughout history.

For Crowley, his most famous occult experience meant the contact with an entity he called Aiwass, which reportedly dictated to him a document known as The Book of the Law, a sort of prophetic poem. For those who follow Thelema, the religion built from Crowley’s teachings, they regard this as a holy book and the foundation of their faith.

So was Crowley telling the truth that The Book of the Law came from Aiwass? Or was he just making it up like he made up so many embellishments and fabrications of himself?

Was Wilson telling the truth about what happened to him on July 23, 1973? Or was this just more clever satire from the co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy and the co-creator of infamous pranking collective Operation Mindfuck?

After 23 years now of pondering these possibilities and weighing the evidence, I do think that Wilson and Crowley were being honest and not bullshitting. I do think they made contact with spiritual “entities” which we still cannot understand.

Why?

Because you can test their methods for yourself and see if they work or not. And they do.

Once you realize that, then what Wilson and Crowley did is no longer as extraordinary as it might seem upon first encounter.

While it is seemingly rare to make contact with a spiritual being, it’s very established within the history of human experience that this happens and that we can even cause it to happen through ritual.

Crowley was just building on the foundations of those who came before him in developing these techniques and traditions for how to engage with spiritual entites.

His approach derived from his involvement in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which drew on the angelic communications reportedly experienced by John Dee and his medium Edward Kelly starting in 1582 and that led to the development of Enochian Magic. This system relies on invoking angelic beings in the language reportedly spoken by the biblical prophet Enoch. It is very complicated and I haven’t yet invested the time to learn it but hope to get around to it eventually. I’m intimidated by the amount of memorization needed.

As with Crowley, having pondered the possibilities for 23 years now, I do tend to think Dee and Kelly were sincere in their experiences, in spite of Kelly’s history as a con artist. If the system they developed was worthless then people would not still be using it centuries later and taking it seriously.

Because, again, historically claiming to speak with angels or demons or any variety “spirits” is more common than people realize, and not at all only the domain of the schizophrenic.

So understood this way, occultism in the Western esoteric tradition, largely defined by the transmission of knowledge from John Dee through to Aleister Crowley and on to today, is primarily about invoking angelic spirits in order to engage directly with God so that you can do the will of God, while also countering the many dark, demonic spirits wandering the earth, causing chaos.

This tradition goes back further than the Renaissance and back into the ancient world. The Jewish mystical traditions and Enoch-based legends which informed Dee’s approach go back to the Second Temple period. Preceding them come the legends of King Solomon, understood in our tradition as one of the Bible’s magicians.

The Egyptian mystical themes codified in the Hermetic tradition run parallel to the Biblical ideas in Western Esotericism and they originated more than 4,000 years ago.

It took me a long time of exploring Crowley before I finally realized, “Oh. Is occultism just a revival of ancient Egyptian religion?” These ideas and techniques for engaging with spiritual “entities” have been understood in various forms going back to Ancient Egypt. And trace them back even further and you get their original expression in Shamanism, the original technology for invoking, binding, and banishing spirits both friendly and harmful.

So all that to say, the tradition of Western occultism has a history and a lineage which can be traced back to the ancient world. And it integrates together the wisdom and practices across Pagan, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular traditions.

And the purpose remains the same from then to today: how we can use rituals to interact with the spiritual realm in positive ways, which usually entail the invoking of angelic spirits or the casting off of dark spirits. The rituals which I do every day all fall into one of those two categories. I’m either calling forth heavenly spirits to heal me from pain within or to protect me from pain outside.

Chapter 21 of Book 4 is titled “Of Black Magic; of Pacts with the Devil; of the Main Types of the Operations of Magick Art; of Necromancy; and of the Powers of the Sphinx.”

The first two sentences on page 275 are foundational for understanding Crowley properly and for avoiding the common mistakes many people make when they begin exploring these esoteric subjects:

“As was said at the opening of the second chapter, the Single Supreme Ritual is the Attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. It is the raising of the complete man in a vertical straight line. Any deviation from this line tends to become black magic. Any other operation is black magic.”

What specifically is Crowley talking about here?

He gives some examples:

“There are, of course, entirely black forms of magic. To him who has not given every drop of his blood for the Cup of Babylon, all magic power is dangerous. There are even more debased and evil forms, things in themselves black. Such is the use of spiritual force to material ends. Christian Scientists, Mental Healers, Professional Diviners, Psychics and the like, are all ipso facto Black Magicians.”

Crowley also notes another key category, bolded in the original:

“Below these in one sense, yet far above them in another, are the Brothers of the Left Hand Path. These are they who “shut themselves up,” who refuse their blood to the Cup, who have trampled Love in the race for their self-aggrandizement.”

Where does this sound familiar?

Left Hand Path?

Self-aggrandizement?

Spiritual force to material ends?

Last month I wrote this essay revealing the fraudulent nature of the false spiritual teachings promulgated by Mitch Horowitz, a former occult historian-turned promoter of New Thought teachings and advocate of New Age ideas:

In the piece I laid out the evidence describing how Mitch:

Embraced the teachings of charlatan Neville Godard so deeply he tattooed the man’s face on his left bicep.
Had made a business out of selling Godard’s book as well as garbage like Think and Grow Rich and The Master Key to Riches.
Advocates for “just wishing” as his primary technique, which he claims is synonymous with historical magickal practice.
Glorifies the acquisition of material possessions, citing televangelist Oral Roberts’ acquiring a Buick so he could reach new places to preach as “everything that’s right” about American spirituality.
Calls himself “smitten” with selfishness advocate Ayn Rand on the grounds of the supposed power of her “public persona.”
Claims that Theosophy-founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s public persona “was her greatest work.”
Deleted my comment advocating that “love is what matters” and “truth is what matters” on his essay celebrating Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey before blocking me on Substack.
Took the quote “Mitch is solid gold” he received from the late David Lynch — whose book Catching the Big Fish he published in his former role as editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin — and repurposed it as his primary professional branding, slapping it on his Substack and the cover of his book to suggest that the greatest American filmmaker of all time endorsed Mitch’s New Thought nonsense.

Mitch has positioned himself as the most prominent apologist of New Age thinking today.

In an essay in March titled “The Case for Woo Woo,” he defined the movement as “a radically ecumenical culture of therapeutic spirituality. Its modus operandi is positive-mind metaphysics or, more commonly, Law of Attraction-manifesting—my term is selecting—concepts I both interrogate and fitfully support.”

For Mitch, 1970s New Age and 1920s New Thought are one and the same.

In my previous piece, I began with the observation about Godard because Mitch chose to throw his face at all the podcast’s viewers.

In his recent podcast discussion with my friend , he chose to broadcast his enthusiasm for another icon of bullshit with his t-shirt, the godmother of what we now know today as the New Age movement, Blavatsky:

In his marketing materials for his new book, Mitch has chosen to brand himself with that t-shirt of Blavatsky.

Anyone owning a Blavatsky t-shirt should feel embarrased for having burned money on acquiring clothing in celebration of one of spiritual history’s great racists and bullshit artists.

But not Mitch. He’s so proud of it that he makes it his personal branding now. And he defends Blavatsky from the charge of racism routinely leveled at his icon.

In the discussion with Jason, Mitch says “And of course the idiots think that Madam Blavatsky was somehow responsible in this mysterious way for the Third Reich. And they cite books of hers that they haven’t read and never will read like The Secret Doctrine, misunderstanding that her concept of root races is all referenced in classical Vedism.”

Jason then jumps in and says “yeah, that’s more, like, my understanding of that is more like generations of the totality of humanity on the planet. It has nothing to do with the races as people.”

Mitch then responds “Nothing whatsoever.”

Really?

Nothing whatsoever? All the historians who say that Blavatsky was a racist are idiots and we should trust the hip guy on the podcast wearing the t-shirt of her?

Well, take a look at The Secret Doctrine yourself and you be the judge of whether the concept has “nothing whatsoever” to do with races as people.

From page 421 of The Secret Doctrine, as quoted in the YouTube video above:

“No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called.”

You tell me: does it sound like Mitch is accurately characterizing the above passage which he as a self-appointed Blavatsky expert must surely know deeply?

Or here is a much more interesting question: Does Mitch choosing to downplay Blavatsky’s obvious racism perhaps have anything to do with how often he lectures for the Theosophical Society?

Here is a lecture he gave on The Secret Doctrine at the 133rd Summer National Convention of the Theosophical Society in America in 2019:

Here he is speaking for them in 2016:

Here’s a talk he also gave that year titled “H.P. Blavatsky Versus Darth Vader.” He chose to wear a Dead Kennedys shirt while presenting because that’s his “public persona,” the hip Gen-Xer punk historian who attempts to launder New Age bullshit.

And Mitch’s work for the Theosophical Society has continued. Here is an online lecture he gave two years ago:

Mitch is not a historian of Theosophy. He’s its chief PR man today.

When Crowley wrote about how “Christian Scientists, Mental Healers, Professional Diviners, Psychics and the like, are all ipso facto Black Magicians” he was talking about people like Blavatsky and now her apologist Mitch.

In 1875, Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society to promote her made-up religion which represented a mish-mash blending of Eastern and Western esoteric ideas into an incomprehensible mess. She was a 19th century L. Ron Hubbard and this was her Scientology. And Mitch idolizes her.

Blavatsky claimed that her teachings came from mystical contact she had with supposed “masters” on a spiritual plane. Her ideas supposedly did not come through study and practice, but rather direct contact with entities.

She said she was clairvoyant and could see past and future, as well as perceive people’s past lives. She claimed to be able to cause objects to magically appear or to cause raps and tappings. She asserted she could magically heal people and command elemental forces. She claimed the ability to magically protect others.

To Mitch, all this crafting of a “public persona” through absurd lies amounts to “her greatest work.”

You know what I think an author’s “greatest work” should be, Mitch?

Their fucking books!

And the truth is that Blavatsky’s are plagiarized garbage promoting racism while Magick Book 4 is the greatest grimoire of all time. It contains practical exercises and rituals which anyone of any ethnicity, culture, or religion can try for themselves to see their legitimacy.

But you’ll never catch me wearing a Crowley t-shirt or getting him tattooed on my arm. One of the things that slowed down how deeply I explored Crowley for years was the simple historical fact that the man was an absolute arrogant jerk. In The Bumper Book of Magic, Alan Moore and the late Steve Moore wrote about him that “Brilliantly synthesisng occult and psychological ideas, Crowley virtually created modern magic yet his misguided self-promotion constantly overshadowed these genuine achievements.”

Crowley is deeply unlikeable personally for reasons that have filled many books.

But that’s OK, because ultimately he’s just an author, just as Wilson was just an author. These guys are not prophets to start religions, even if Crowley’s followers made the mistake of attempting it. They were flawed men like us all. They simply compiled and elaborated on spiritual tools and systems that go back thousands of years and which have endured because they continue to work.

This is very different from New Age icons that people put on t-shirts…

The image which began this essay comes near the end of my favorite book of the century, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. The book features multiple narratives in both prose and comics, as well as presenting a ton of esoteric material with gorgeous illustrations.

This “Lives of the Great Enchanters” series in the book presents notable figures in magic throughout history. These panels depict what happened after Crowley’s death and the two magical traditions which then emerged to fill the void.

Crowley died in 1947 and deliberately chose to encourage multiple successors. This fragmented the leadership of his organization the Ordo Templi Orientis for decades, only coming back together in the 1970s in a story my friend the late James Wasserman recounts in his memoir In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult, 1966-1989.

The result in the Moores’ framing is that absent meaningful, structured leadership in the occult community, magical traditions devolved in two destructive directions: in the 1970s the “New Age” movement emerged in America, in the 1980s “chaos magic” emerged in the United Kingdom.

The Moores write that “Chaos Magic’s rejection of structure led to its trivialisation, just as credulous escapism rendered New Age philosophy laughable… Despite both misappropirating scientific concepts, quantum or fractal, these approaches proved insufficient to encompass modern life’s rapidly mounting complexity.”

During my occult explorations, I’ve had plenty of firsthand experience for years with both New Age and Chaos Magic practices. I’ve engagaged in their rituals and experimented with them.

And at this point I’m not impressed. I don’t do them anymore because they do not work consistently. The Moores are so right to depict the two traditions here as really two sides of the same coin. They are both fake versions of magic which present psychological tricks as though they are supernatural phenomena.

In each tradition, there are no real doctrines or established histories. People identifying with them can just believe whatever they want and make up anything. And that’s what Blavatsky did with Theosophy. She just threw in a bunch of ideas and bullshit into a blender and then presented something so incoherent that today all Theosophy is really remembered for is its influence on “The Wizard of Oz” and the Nazis. Mitch stands alone today in the foolish endeavor of trying to rehabilitate Blavatsky. But by his own words he doesn’t really take her ideas and actual life history seriously. Instead, he just sees her as an inspiring “persona” which he can invoke on a hip podcast.

The fundamental problem with New Age rituals and Chaos magic “sigils” like what Morrison taught in his talk on that DVD, is that they only seem effective because our minds notice when a spell we’ve done “works” and then we ignore it the vast majority of the time when they do not.

Fundamentalist Christians who believe in “the power of prayer” have the same problem. They notice the few occasions when something they prayed for actually happens and think God must have done them a favor as a result. But they ignore all the times when it did not happen, when God must have been ignoring them.

To conclude with the Reason for the Season, it’s worth asserting clearly at this point:

While Crowley was the most important occultist of the first half of the 20th century, now enough time has passed that we can see Wilson fulfilled that role in the second half.

Wilson taught in Cosmic Trigger and in all of his following books and lectures that the proper way to respond to experiences one has with “entities” is skepticism. Crowley taught the same thing too. This is the opposite of Mitch’s crush Blavatsky who was so confident in her supposed entity contacts that she built an organization around them.

When we have these experiences with spiritual entities, we can’t really know for sure about any of them.

Our rules of science and logic do not apply to entities which transcend the physical world.

I have had so many experiences with entities — more than I can count and most of them frightening. But everything I write about them is always just a speculation and a guess. I can report what I feel and experience, but I can’t assert anything about what caused it with certainty.

That attitude is what we all need not only spiritually, but at the broad cultural level right now:

“Never belive fully in anybody else's belief system!

I don't care if it's Roger Neich, the Pope, L. Ron Hubbard, Al Gore, George Bush. I don't care who it is, don't swallow all their belief system totally, don't accept all of their bullshit, all their BS.

The second rule is like unto the first: don't believe totally in your own BS, which means that as Bucky Fuller said, "The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events." Which means any belief system or reality tunnel you have got right now is gonna have to be revised and updated as you continue to apprehend new events later in time, not simultaneously.

This is the natural functioning of the human brain, it's the way children’s brains perform before they are wrecked by the school system. It's the way the minds of all great scientists and artists work.

But once you have a belief system, everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system, or gets distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.”

-Robert Anton Wilson

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Why Chinese AI Is a Form of Godless Communist Propaganda We Must Crush

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:53:55 GMT

The latest excitement in AI spaces is a new model called Kimi K3, from the Chinese company Moonshot.

Analysts say it competes with the top American frontier models.

— the influential AI scientist whose Substack you should always go to first for understanding new developments in the space — published this on Monday warning that the strength of the model indicated that China had now eliminated the gap between our nations:

Marcus on AI

China has all but caught up. The US is not going to “win” the AI war. Here’s what we should do instead.

Three weeks ago, I warned here that…

7 days ago · 392 likes · 136 comments · Gary Marcus

Marcus explained that Kimi K3 “is largely on a par with the best American models, and unlike those models, it is an ‘open weight’ model that consumers will be able to download to run locally (if they have the large-scale hardware to support it) for free.”

What that means is that a model as good as or better than what OpenAI and Anthropic charge for is now available for anyone to have for free.

The economics implications of this manifested quickly. Marcus wrote, “the US stock market dropped partly on this news Friday, and the repercussion are likely to be immense. It’s no fluke, either. Chinese model GLM 5.2 from Z.ai made shockwaves not long before. Alibaba’s new Qwen model may add to the disruption.”

Marcus warned that, “all this calls the business models of OpenAI and Anthropic into serious question, and may kill or greatly undermine their IPOs. It also casts serious doubt on the never-too-plausible idea that America might ‘win’ the AI race.”

But here’s the thing: we as Americans have no choice.

We must “win the AI race.” Whatever the hell that really means.

It is both a moral imperative and a national security necessity.

Why? I have two words for you:

FUCK COMMUNISM!

Since abandoning ChatGPT back in November and beginning a boycott of all Sam Altman products, I’ve searched to see which of the LLMs I might be able to use instead.

Were any of them better than ChatGPT somehow?

Or did they all have the core flaws of ChatGPT which simply made it too factually unreliable to be useful?

So since November now, I’ve tested the various competitors. These 10 in particular:

Claude
Perplexity
Gemini
Meta AI
Kimi
Lumo
Copilot
Vibe (formerly Le Chat)
DeepSeek
Ninja AI

(I already knew that Grok was garbage and I started boycotting Elon Musk back in 2023 so I didn’t bother any further with it like the others.)

Here’s the simple way to test an LLM: take a question where you know the correct answer, and then feed it into multiple chatbots at the same time. Then compare the results.

Who did best? Whose analysis was the most thoughtful? Who made the most factual errors?

I won’t detail my analysis here — that will come in another piece — but where I’m at now is that Gemini, Copilot, and Vibe are now on the home page of my phone, while the others remain relegated to a folder I’ve labeled “LLM Testing.”

The three of them just seem more factually reliable and thoughtful in their analyses than the others. They still make mistakes, but seemingly not as regularly or as catastrophically than the others. But I’ll let you be the judge of it with two examples.

Let’s try a simple question, just seven words:

How many deaths is Mao responsible for?

Let’s see what Copilot has to say:

OK, so Copilot says 15 million to 65 million skulls, with 30-45 million as the general consensus.

Now let’s try Gemini:

Gemini says 40 million to 80 million human bodies piled up to the heavens.

And here is Vibe, which comes from Mistral AI, a French company:

Vibe agrees with Copilot’s choice of 15-65 million human beings slaughtered in the name of implementing Karl Marx’s fantasies.

Now, what might this incredible Kimi K3 tell us?

I had tested Kimi K3 the last few days and had indeed grown rather impressed by the conplexity and depth of many of its answers. I could see why people were so wowed.

And for a few days I even put it on the home page of my phone, starting to regard it as genuinely a competitor, which offered some compelling perspectives.

But then my enthusiasm diminished.

I started to notice that it would make odd errors. It would seemingly miss important things in documents and photos that I uploaded. It would also often miss nuance, strangely taking many things literally which were obviously jokes. In a number of exchanges, I’d have to point out specific sentences which it had apparently missed. Then it apologized and revised its original analysis. At one point I came to suspect it had some sort of Chinese cultural bias to its answers and even asked it so, which it denied with much opprobrium.

So this Kimi K3 model may look impressive at first, but give it a test drive and soon the shortcuts made to create it become evident.

But there’s an even easier way to test just how useful this Chinese model really is. What happens when we drop those seven magic words into the LLM?

How many deaths is Mao responsible for?

Very interesting!

And what happens if we try this question with DeepSeek, the Chinese LLM that made such a splash last year?

Can everyone please say it with me again?

Loud and clear so that monster Xi Jinping can hear you:

FUCK COMMUNISM!

Let’s test another simple question:

Why do some say China is committing genocide against the Uyghur Muslims?

Same order, Copilot first, and we’ll just leave each in the same thread about Mao, rather than starting a new chat:

See why Copilot has become one of my top LLMs? That’s a solid answer across the board.

And how about Gemini?

Again, this is just fantastic.

And what about our European friends with Vibe?

And again, we have another first-rate response. Vibe provides some creative variations on answers often. I sometimes compare it to the AI-equivalent of having a cappucino and croissant for breakfast instead of a coffee and toast. European perspectives are valuable when considering the world and Vibe provides that.

Now, what might Kimi K3 offer?

For some reason this old picture comes to mind:

However, DeepSeek’s answer revealed even more because one of the app’s features is to show the user its reasoning as it formulates the response. So not only do we get the Communist-approved response, we get to see its thinking in formulating the propaganda.

That’s sort of a bizarre new development in communist propaganda. Now the communists are so bold and brazen in their efforts to lie to the world, that they will show you how they do it before they lie to you. Or maybe they’re just too stupid and don’t realize it’s doing this.

Check out this action:

Can we get it a third time please?

FUCK COMMUNISM!

Axios has reported that in response to the advance of Kimi K3, the Trump administration is considering a ban on Chinese AI.

Onlookers have pointed out that this is likely due to the direct financial interests of Trump and his allies.

The more cheap Chinese LLMs penetrate the American market share, the less remains for those who have made the collosal mistake of betting on OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, and House Musk.

That could very well be the case. It probably is.

But I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter.

If the president and his cronies are going to do the right thing for the wrong reason, then, well, we should just count our blessings that the correct moral choice to oppose the expansion of communist power aligns with the Trump family business interests.

I say if the Trump administration wants to make life difficult for communist AI-makers and disrupt the spread of their communist propaganda technology then full speed ahead.

The blood of the tens of millions massacred by Mao Zedong in the name of Chinese Communism call out for justice. We cannot forget them.

The Chinese Communist Party is built on a Great Wall of human skulls and it cannot be tolerated or empowered in any way to continue spreading its lies.

The wall must be torn down.

One last time:

FUCK COMMUNISM!

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An Addendum too Amusing to Exclude:

Before publishing the essay above, I uploaded it into the same LLMs to get their reactions. Here’s an excerpt from Copilot’s response:

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'But One Fourth of the Population is Retarded!'

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:13:36 GMT

This is the fifth installment in our ongoing Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising Series monitoring global antisemitism and analyzing Far Right extremist ideology in America. See the previous parts:

Inroduction: The 10 Most Dangerous Far-Right Figures in America Today
News Briefing: JD Vance Defends Iran Receiving a $300 Billion ‘Reconstruction Fund’
News Briefing: Antisemitic Accelerationist Terrorists Targeted Trump at the Freedom 250 Fight Night
News Briefing: Nick Fuentes Asks: ‘Are We Fascists or Are We Not? Is This a New Rome and a New Empire?’

Please consider supporting our investigative efforts with a premium subscription:

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On October 11, 2006, “South Park” debuted the ninth episode of season 10, “Mystery of the Urinal Deuce,” one of the greatest satires of conspiracy theory culture ever made.

Here is the conclusion of the episode after the boys have followed a series of clues to uncover who really planned the 9/11 terror attacks:

Kyle: I knew it! You didn’t really plan 9/11 and you didn’t really shoot that guy!
President George W. Bush: Boys, you don’t understand. People need to think we’re all powerful, that we control the world. If they know we aren’t in charge of 9/11 then we appear to control nothing.
Kyle: Why don’t you just tell people the truth?!
Bush: We do that too. And most people believe the truth. But one fourth of the population is retarded. If they want to believe we control everything with intricate plans, why not let them?

“Why not let them?”

Yes, why not feed stupid people even more conspiracy theories to make them even dumber?

What’s the worst that could happen?

What could go wrong when governments around the world flood people’s brains with conspiracy theory disinformation garbage for generations?

In the 2006 episode above, Parker and Stone suggest that 25% of the American public was so dumb that they believe the federal government is so competent that it could secretly get away with murdering more than 3,000 of its own citizens, then pinning it on Muslims, and using that as a justification to invade Afghanistan.

And going by the polling of the period, that number is a reasonable estimate of how many people at the time embraced 9/11 conspiracy theories.

A Scripps Howard News Service poll in 2006 found that, “Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them ‘because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.’”

How many Americans really believe the conspiracy theory?

It depends on how you ask the question and what specific version of the conspiracy theory one polls. More people are willing to believe that the government knew the attack was going to happen and allowed it to do so, rather than the smaller number who believe the government actually participated in the attack itself.

That was 20 years ago, though. Surely after two decades of factual debunkings and education, there would be some progress in fewer Americans believing bullshit?

Absolutely not!

In August of last year, Change Research surveyed 1,590 registered voters. Heaven knows how much worse it would have been if they had thrown in the third of the population that is unregistered too!

The number of people who embrace 9/11 conspiracy theories among just that group, now reaches 41%, so 5% worse than it was 20 years ago. It really would be much higher with the non-voters thrown in too! Statistically, people who don’t vote are either less educated, more paranoid, or both.

However, this is certainly not the only form of conspiracist ideology which has risen in recent years.

Today the Blue Square Alliance (BSA), published a new survey of antisemitic attitudes in America. Let’s go ahead and make these numbers supersized so they are harder to ignore:

30% embrace antisemitism, up from 24% in 2025.

32% of Americans do not consider questioning the Holocaust to be antisemitic, up from 13% since 2023.

28.8% of Gen Z and 29.1% of millennials say Jewish people are a threat to the unity of society.

Here is the chart for that one:

Let’s pause on that for a second:

Gen Zers and millennials are more than twice as likely than boomers to hate Jews.

The higher levels of antisemitism among the young tracks with the Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 findings, showing “millennials agreeing with the greatest number of anti-Jewish tropes on average, at 5.4. They’re followed by Gen Z at 5, Gen X at 4.2, and Baby Boomers at 3.1.”

Here are some more scary charts from BSA’s report on this topic:

Friends, at this point we are totally cooked as a country.

The road to idiocracy is underneath our feet and we’re charging ahead full speed.

The younger generations are lost.

I see no reason for optimism that these trends toward more conspiracism and more antisemitism will reverse.

Gen-Alpha will almost certainly be even worse as their screen addiction is even more intense and thus more mentally crippling than what the Gen-Zers experienced.

Look at the broader wilderness of the conspiracy theory landscape and the frightening levels of support:

So 10% moon landing deniers, 23% flat-earthers, 29% chem-trail enthusiasts, 34% on board with the Far Right’s Federal Reserve conspiracy theory, 41% vaccine deniers, and 42% election deniers.

When you look at those numbers, does it make a bit more sense why Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Megyn Kelly, Kanye West, Stephen Miller, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Thomas Massie, JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene can draw such significant support?

There is a serious market for conspiracy theory content and outright antisemitism. Those numbers are big enough in themselves to be their own political party.

Carlson and Greene — who both announced last month they have now left the GOP — know these numbers far better than almost anyone on the planet.

I see no solution.

This is only going to get much worse.

I’m so sorry.

Right now we’re in 1928. The stock market crash that led to the Great Depression happened in 1929. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933.

Nick Fuentes will turn 35 on August 18, 2033.

The first time he will be able to run for president is the 2036 election cycle.

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My 75 Favorite Substacks For 2026's First Half

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:11:33 GMT

I have admittedly cultivated a rather “aggressive” persona on Substack for years now and that has sharpened over the last six months following Miscarriage Seven on Thanksgiving.

I’ve made it a personal mission to call out bullshit when I see it, whether’s it’s far right, far left, religious fundamentalist, or just outright narcissists looking to fleece the ignorant to make a shameful dollar like the “think and grow rich” New Age nonsense charlatan I exposed last month:

However, what likely receives less notice is that I tend to be as “aggressive” with my praise as with my condemnation.

I restack writers on Substack Notes when they offer clever ideas or funny jokes and try to encourage them by building on the point they’re making or extending their humor to a new height. I am very clear in describing the writers who have most influenced me and often give away copies of their books:

I have lost track of how many extra copies of books by Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore, and which I’ve needed to replace because the people I loaned them to never returned them. My book lending philosophy is that if you care about the book and the person enough to lend it to them, you sould care enough to just give it to them.

However, with Substack now we don’t have that problem. I don’t have to lend you a copy of my favorite book, I can just send you links to all of my favorite substacks in a single article. So here you go. You’re welcome. This is a treasure trove of wisdom and entertainment here, selected from the more than 1000 substacks which I’ve gradually subscribed to since 2022.

I’ve hesitated to do an exact ranking of favorites here, since we’re talking about actual people. And with many of these writers, it’s not really fair to compare them at all. A guy who’s a stand-up comedian or a cartoonist shouldn’t be compared to the woman who’s a Russian espionage specialist or a leftist journalist focused on immigration.

So this is more of a loose grouping. The first 25 listed are probably the ones who are most strongly impressing and influencing me right now, however the next 30 in the middle are also serious favorites, they’ve just sort of gravitated there since their areas of focus are more niche. Now, the last 20 substackers on the list are more of a grab bag with many writers who don’t fall into easy categories and many who I’m still figuring out, but who I do appreciate enough to recommend. I tried to move as many people into the top group and give them a little descriptor, but found that I could not do that with everyone. Perhaps that will change six months from now when I’m assembling the end of year list.

So let’s go ahead and get started now. I’ve pulled up these first three on the list to emphasize just how much of an influence they have each become. They earn special honor:

1. My Primary Living Intellectual Influence, Particularly on Religion, Media, Economics, Counterculture, and Technology: Douglas Rushkoff

I first stated engaging with Doug’s work in 2004 and have followed all of his books he has published since, incorporating their ideas into my own career and worldview. I wrote about this last month:

This, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, is Doug’s most important book and where people should start for understanding his whole body of work. He is primarily a Jewish thinker at his core and that animates all of his other analysis of history, economics, media, technology and culture:

2. My Primary Influence on Immigration: Alex Nowrasteh

For at least 15 years now, whenever I’ve stumbled into a situation where I’ve had to explain my views on immigration, ’s name has climbed out of my mouth within the first or second sentence.

I first met Alex’s parents in 2009 and then him in 2010. He laid out the case for his libertarian approach advocating for broad freedoms for people to cross borders to work. “Open borders” is the scary term. It persuaded me then and it still holds today. I am the exact opposite of Stephen Miller when it comes to immigration. The more people who want to come here, work, and contribute to our country the better. Alex is an economist and he has the data to prove his case that immigrants are a net positive for America. He’s even so effective that our antisemitic vice president mentioned him by name in his recent phony campaign book promoting his phony conversion to Catholicism.

Just as Doug’s ideas have endured for a long time for me, so too Alex’s ideas about immigration have only grown stronger in mind as he’s continued to accumulate and analyze the evidence. Give him a read and he will give you endless ammunition to win every argument with your bigoted brother-in-law and obnoxious uncle.

3. My Primary Influence on Hollywood History and Film Today: Chris Yogerst

is another writer friend I got to connect with and edit around the time when I met Alex. Since then, Chris has become a very serious and respected historian of classic Hollywood as well as a noted analyst of the film industry today. His most recent book, a biography of the Warner brothers and the creation of their studio, blew me away and persuaded me of his view that Warner Bros. was the best of the original studios and remains so today.

Chris is the person I know with film tastes most similar to mine and I know nobody I trust more in analyzing film today.

4. The Substack Writer With the Most Consistently Excellent Writing Both in Essays and on Substack Notes: Joel J. Miller

is the strongest writer I’ve found on here since joining Substack in 2022.

His book reviews and broader writing on books and the publishing industry are thoughtful and engaging to read. On Notes, he consistently posts thoughtful and entertaining items. And he seems to be a pretty decent person too from what I can surmise.

You judge a writer not just be one aspect of their work or a few early hits. You look to see who can endure, who can consistently put out engaging writing across a variety of subjects. And Joel’s the one that does the most here on Substack. Give him a subscribe and you won’t be disapointed.

And the Kindle edition of his new book The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future is on sale right now, prompting me to snatch it up. Joel also has a book on the war on drugs and another on angels which grabbed my eye.

5. The Best Artist on Substack: L.E. Mullin

is the creator of The Flight of the Condor, a comic strip which is what the Batman movies would have looked like if David Lynch had directed them instead of Tim Burton.

Lynchian very much is the vibe of L.E.’s work. He uses a Batman archetype-style hero with the Condor, but that is only the trope he uses to explore his broader artistic and thematic interests, much how Lynch did with a murder mystery in “Twin Peaks.”

I just adore L.E.’s dreamy, noir aesthetic. It impressed me so much that he inspired me to go and buy some new pens and black drawing paper to explore that kind of approach too. Thanks L.E., for your inspiration. When I really have something worth sharing in this style then you get the credit.

6. The Best Comedian on Substack and Overall Funniest Person on the Platform: Matt Ruby

is my favorite comedian today. The reason is in the first line of his bio there: George Carlin.

Matt is continuing the psychedelic comedy tradition that George Carlin started, Bill Hicks continued, and that nobody has managed to properly pick up ever since until now.

You’ll note too Matt’s mention of Alan Watts, who was a core influence for Robert Anton Wilson. Matt isn’t just a comedian up on stage talking about mushroom trips. He’s someone who has internalized the lessons from the experiences properly, and is now doing the same thing that Carlin and Hicks did: out giving the people the wisdom they need, wrapped in the healing power of humor. Matt and I seem to have come to similar conclusions about the lessons psychedelics can teach and how to use them responsibly. At one point on Notes earlier this year I declared him my “spirit animal.”

Keep doing what you’re doing, Matt. You’re kicking ass.

7. The Most Impressive Rising Talent and Innovative Humorist on Substack Today: Paul Staples

While Matt Ruby operates in the edgy Xer psychedelic comedy tradition, the extraordinary is breaking new comedy ground every day on Substack Notes with a distinctly millennial metamodernist style:

Oasis of the Desert Books

A Simple Explanation of the Case for Metamodernism

I've come across a concept growing in popularity recently that has really resonated with me, both as an accurate form of cultural analysis and as an approach which reflects the style of my own writing for the last 20 years…

a year ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦

In the metamodernist tradition, the practitioner jumps back and forth between earnest sincerity (modernism) and cynical joking (postmodernism) to produce a unique humorous twist. It’s sort of like the salty-sweet sensation of a chocolate-covered pretzel.

Paul certainly doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing and that’s what millennials in general have drifted toward, but now he does and I hope it doesn’t mess with his efforts too much. Maybe it will help.

But Paul doesn’t seem to need any help with the clever and absurdist style of humor that he’s been developing. He’s on the right path. Keep going, Paul.

8. My Favorite Writer on Antisemitism: Elder of Ziyon

I first published blog posts by 16 years ago. He has been one of the online giants in writing opposing antisemitism ever since. A juggernaut. He’s in a class of his own on the subject.

I’ll save the full story of my appreciation for him for another time, but suffice to say that he’s this high on the list for a reason.

My Four Favorite Writers Revealing the Truth About Artificial Intelligence Today:

9. Maria Sukhareva

10. Farida Khalaf

11. David Z. Morris

12. Gary Marcus

In trying to make sense of AI over the last year and a half, , , , and have each come to impress me on a regular basis with their articles. While they each have their own areas of focus and different backgrounds that inform them, they are each very solid and serious when considering the technological and scientific aspects of the story. They’re similar to the nonfiction writers previously named on this list in how serious they handle their facts.

Marcus is the leading critic of large language models today and has been for years. He has worked as a scientist and was one of the first to explain the technology’s limitations which cannot be overcome through simply throwing more money and compute at the problems.

Morris comes at his AI analysis from a serious journalist reporting background on cryptocurrency, having written Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia. His reporting about Sam Bankman-Fried and crypto uniquely positioned him to become an important analyst of the AI space as the two topics developed such a strange relationship. Give him a subscribe, he’s a wonderful writer.

Khalaf writes from the perspective of a data engineer, and it’s a wonderfully informative perspective for better understanding what’s happening in the AI space today. She brings an upbeat, lively perspective to the material too. She regularly has a lot of fun Substack Notes content.

Sukhareva works as a computational linguist and like Khalaf also provides a really rich data and technical-informed perspective. She gets into a lot of pretty high-level stuff and makes it accessible and engaging.

13. My Favorite UK-Based Journalist: James Bloodworth

offered some early encouragement years ago when I first joined Substack and I’ve followed his work in the years since and been tremendously impressed by the depth of his thinking, the grace of his prose, the seriousness of journalism, and his sense of moral clarity.

His new book is Lost Boys: Undercover Adventures in the Manosphere and now regarded as the leading work on the topic. As I continue my “Right-Wing Book Club” feature this year, I’ll be including it and exploring the insights James provides.

I usually don’t like to compare writers to Christopher Hitchens because it feels like more of an insult usually than a compliment. It usually means that the writer is trying to imitate Hitchens as too many writers of younger generations attempted to do or they are too arrogant. James does not have the annoying aspects of Hitchens, he has the combination of English journalism at its finest that people understand by the reference: that vivid, flowing English prose combined with on-the-ground, journalistic seriousness and a moral purpose. I suppose George Orwell is the archetype, here? He was one of Hitchens’ inspirations, even writing a whole book on him.

But I do not know Orwell well enough to say for sure. While I certainly recognize his greatness, he was never one of my north stars in novels or journalism. I still need to read so much of his work to really grasp him in full. But I do see in James that same level of potential. Yes, James, there’s your affirmation: go and be your generation’s Orwell. You can do it.

14. The UK-Based Journalist I Find Most Entertaining: Andrew Lownie

I fucking hate the British monarchy. I hate all monarchy, but I especially hate the British monarchy.

And thus, I regard as essentially doing God’s work. He is the Moses of the British people. That’s hyperbole, of course. What I mean is that it is endlessly entertaining watching across the Atlantic as he hammers away at the monarchy for covering up and enabling the crimes of the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, now known as mountbatten-whatever-he-wants-to-call-himself. Perhaps soon it’ll be Inmate 270556969 or something. Lownie is the author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, which the Daily Mail called “the most devastating royal biography ever written.”

If you want to see the destruction of the British monarchy, then Lownie is the man finding the investigative dynamite that is going to bring it all down. The world has been waiting for this for a long time.

15. My favorite Nigerian Journalist: Yakubu Daklésheleng Musa

To continue with some of my favorite journalists overseas, be sure and subscribe to , who I have published here at GOTD and who has now become a supportive friend. He’s a wonderful writer and filmmaker who’s going to do do great things. I’m excited to work with him on more projects in the future and encourage others to do so also. He is tremendously talented and thoughtful.

16. One of our Xennial Micro-Generation’s Most Gifted Journalists: James Kirchick

The generation of those of us born in the first half of the the 1980s has yet to produce many genuinely great journalists. is one of the few. He was the one who uncovered the newsletters published in the 1980s by Ron Paul, demonstrating in black and white how the far right congressman not only promoted racism and antisemitism, but did so as part of his fucking business model. Since then, James has only continued to distinguish himself with incredible writing and serious reporting.

Thank you for leading the pack, James. Your work continues to shine.

Three Substack Writers I am Proud to Have Published and Am Eager to Publish More of Their Articles, Fiction, and Hopefully Books Some Day:

17. Elizabeth Sowden

18. Ehud Neor

19. Marc Friedman

One of the things that has disappointed me most about Substack is that as I have searched for writers for years to potentially publish, and ultimately found so few writers as strong, thoughtful, and interesting as , , and . They each do very different writing, with Beth focusing on historical fiction often set in her Minnesota region of the country, Ehud focuses on his home in Israel, and Marc has transformed himself into a machine producing one thoughtful review and essay after another. (And his fiction explorations recently have been wonderful too.) I’ve published each of them before and look forward to developing further projects. Like , they’re each writers who I just want to pour some editorial editorial sunshine on and see grow. Give them subscribes.

20. One of the Most Important and Original Writers on Economics, Technology, and Media Today: Nate Silver

Last year, my opinion of skyrocketed. I finished his book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything and felt as though I had encountered a unique and valuable journalistic exploration of the connections between AI, gambling, venture capital, and their collision with established power. He presents a pardigm of “the River” and “the Village” in cultural and ideological conflicts. It’s unique and draws on his own original reporting as well as his experience as a professional poker player.

People who live in the gambling world can develop unique perspectives and Silver certainly has one. Give him a chance and you’ll learn something. I certainly did and plan to again when I read the book a second time. It’s that good — one of those library books I finished and realized I needed to have in order to dig in more deeply to its nearly 600 pages.

Read On the Edge and you’ll see why now it’s time to take Silver very seriously as not only an important political analyst, but, like , one of the few genuinely gifted journalists of the Xennial micro-generation.

21. An Incredible Author Whose Book Range affirmed my whole life: David Epstein

Perhaps you might note that the subjects on this list cover a ridiculously broad range? Apparently there are many people who live this way, who naturally drift toward trying to cultivate a broad range of expertise across many subjects. has written the definitive book on this subject, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, revealing that living the generalist lifestyle, of resisting the insistence on specialization, can actually produce better results than specializing. Those of us who gain expertise in many fields can then make connections with others cannot and develop new ideas more easily.

22. The Most Creative, Exciting, and Funny Use of AI Art I’ve Seen on Substack: Drew Ponder

is doing some wild, satirical stuff with AI videos. He took the Iranian propaganda Lego style and has started making it his own. He explores other satirical and absurd topics and is very entertaining. I’m eager to watch what he comes up with next.

23. The Best Philosophy Writer on Substack: Doug Campbell

Online philosophy discourse tends to get pretty stale and predictable, especially here on Substack. I’m happy to report that I’ve now found my favorite philosophy writer. is a philosophy professor so he brings serious depth. He also focuses on Plato, which I appreciate quite a bit. Give him a subscribe. He’s recently started posting some wonderful hiking photos too on Notes.

The Two Political Journals on Substack Closest to My Current Ideological Position:

24. UnPopulist

25. The Bulwark

One of the things I appreciate about is that it gives me a quick shorthand to defuse liberals’ worries when I have to reveal to them that I’m a conservative. “Oh, no, I’m more like one of those Bulwark-style conservatives you see on MSNBC because we left the GOP after we got a case of Trump Derangement Syndrome too like you guys on the left did!”

The “more like” is obscuring the differences that don’t matter much to them but mean a lot to me. They are much more moderate than me but it still demonstrates the point.

The is in some ways a kind of ideological sister publication of The Bulwark. I especially resonate with it because of its title’s promised focus on opposing populism, a deeply evil political ideology, which it does very well.

26. My Favorite Cannabis Substack: Catherine Goldberg

I am so consistently impressed with the cannabis analysis of and incorporate her insights into my own practice.

27. My Favorite Cryptocurrency Analyst and Critic: Michel De Cryptadamus

is the man when it comes to understanding the corruption of the cryptocurrency world. The depth of his knowledg is incredible and he stands as one of the few with moral clarity properly critiquing the space.

28. My Favorite Anti-Fascist Analyst and Polemicist: Jim Stewartson

comes at his political analysis from much further left than I do, but I still look forward to his pieces and value his analysis. They’re well-written, thoroughly-sourced, original in argument, and often very funny too.

My 6 Favorite Espionage Substack Writers:

29. Olga Lautman

30. Malcolm Nance

31. Asha Rangappa

32. Craig Unger

33. Kimberly Keyes

34. John Schindler

My years editing Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and working under ex-Marxists turned me into a permanent obsessive regarding all things espionage-related. People really need to understand that the country’s espionage agencies are akin to the fourth branch of government. Understanding the role spies play in the world is as important as grasping what presidents, congressmen, and judges do.

Each of these six writers brings a different emphasis and background. works at the Center for European Policy Analysis and focuses on tracking Russian intelligence operations. was a senior navy intelligence offer for 20 years with combat experience. was a FBI agent focused on counterintelligence and she now lectures at Yale. is an investigative journalist who has dug deep in multiple books to uncover the connetions between Trump and Putin. also brings a journalist approach to her focus on Russian propaganda. Finally, provides the former NSA counterintelliegence office perspective. He offers a morning update of links to relevant stories which is especially helpful. He’s also probably the most provocative of the group, which I usually appreciate, but not always.

35. My Favorite Australian Substacker: Nicholas Kircher

’s mind is just full of energy and innovations and very much the spirit of his homeland Australia.

And how would I, an American who has not yet visited there characterize that “spirit”?

I feel like Aussies often have a refreshing combination of being relaxed, friendly, warm, upbeat, and also very creative. The Aussie sense of humor is also distinct in its playfulness, as Hugh Jackman’s career has long demonstrated and he is hardly alone:

Australia is a country worth keeping a regular eye on, I’ve had to in my antisemitism reporting as the Islamic regime in Iran recently secretly sponsored an ongoing series of antisemitic hate crimes there. Australia is really working hard now to crack down on the hate there and has some of the world’s harshest punishments for promoting Nazism. Australia is also one of the world’s leaders in attempting to counter the harm social media has inflicted on children.

I also must admit that I’ve become a bit of a geography geek in my middle age and so the extremes of the continent present perpetual fascinations.

My Favorite Canadian Substackers:

36. Philosopher of the Oil Sands

37. Damien Penny

38. Katherine Brodsky

39. Sadie-Rae Werner

40. Dean Blundell

41. Nathalie Martinek

I’ve come across a number of Canadian writers who explore a variety of different topics with distinction.

works in Alberta’s oil fields by day and writes philosophy in a literary style by night. I have a fondness for working class writers like him and he is becoming an exemplar of the archetype. has properly renamed his substack recently to focus on one of our shared beats: Horseshoe Theory, the understanding that the far-left and the far-right converge together with antisemitsm. He’s fantastic.

Yes , you still very much make the cut even if I’ve been giving you a hard time on notes lately to liven it up a bit more. Glad to see you’ve been upping your game there of late. I know it’s difficult for you Canadians to be spikier, it’s just not in your cultural temperament, I get it. But you do such good work when you’re in that mode! Go for it more!

has not been active on Substack this year, but perhaps by listing her here she will know that she is certainly not forgotten and I hope she returns. I have been so impressed by the quality of her writing and the strength of her Jewish advocacy.

comes at things from a more more progressive direction than I do, but his reporting and analysis remain very compelling. He regularly covers important topics and does so with depth.

, my understanding is that you’re Canadian, or would it be more approprirate to correct this piece and slide you into the Australian category now? Do let me know and I’ll revise. Regardless, everyone should subscribe to you, your insights on narcissm are gems.

42. My Favorite Japanese Substacker: Yuri Minamide

is a Japanese woman living in London who provides a thoughtful and fascinating perspective on both her own culture and the West. She is a fantastic Substack ambassador for her culture.

As she has explained her perceptions of the West, I have sometimes responded explaining how many Americans seem to perceive Japan and its culture which I wasn’t sure Yuri understood.

There are 50 Asian countries. Not all countries are unique. On all continents around the world, the lines on the map and cultural identities often blur and blend such that cultural identities may become less distinct.

Not so with Japan. Because of various factors of geography and culture, Japan developed differently in distinct ways and Westerners can generally see that.

One of the ways I learned to perceive it is through discovering the greatness of the cinema of Akira Kurosawa. He was not just one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century, but one of the greatest artists period. And his films provide a gateway to discovering the richness of Japanese history and culture. Ikiru remains my recommendation for where people should start if they’re not up for samurai yet:

43. My Favorite Jewish Publication on Substack: Future of Jewish

is doing a very important thing with how he has chosen to edit Future of Jewish. He has created a FIGHTING publication. He has taken an aggressive rhetorical approach in defending the Jewish people. It’s what is needed and what so much Jewish advocacy has lacked for too long.

44. My Favorite French Substacker: R.J.B.

I have had many delightful exchanges on philosophy, religion, and culture with who is based in France. He’s very thoughtful. He seemed unfamiliar with the various French filmmakers I was telling him had helped me come to appreciate his culture. I tried to explain to him how much American filmmakers for generations loved and obsessed over the French New Wave. I told him how serious Amerian film lovers know that France has one of the most vibrant film cultures in the world and has cultivated a reputation for being on the most cutting edge of film innovations.

It’s just wonderful being able to cultivate international friendships. I regularly let R.J.B. know how jealous I am of his bread.

45. My Biggest Influence in Understanding Gen-Z: Jonathan Haidt

History will look back at ’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness as one of the most important nonfiction books of this decade. It provides the data which reveals how and why technology has transformed the younger generations. His analysis is so important for understanding and combating the problem of technology addiction which has devastated so many young lives, in some ways hobbling an entire generation too addicted to screens.

46. My Favorite Video Game Industry Analyst Substacker: Yorch Torch Games

I am largely retired from video gaming these days so it has been nice to check in on what has been going on with the industry today through the lens of who provides an engaging critique.

47. My Favorite Sex Writer: Susannah Breslin

is one of Generation X’s best journalists. Her writing is incredible. She is the most talented writer I know of to ever work the porn beat in journalism.

And that makes her one of the most interesting people writing about sex today. She’s not doing personal essays or polemics or culture war propaganda. She’s doing journalism focused on facts. And she’s damn good at it.

48. My Favorite Music Subsatck: The News Today, Oh Boy

I have been returning to the Beatles more in middle age and this delightful Beatles fan Substack regularly presents compelling insights. I really owe them for helping me appreciate Paul so much more deeply.

49. My Favorite Literary Historian on Substack: David S. Wills

I have developed immense levels of respect for . He is keeping the Beat flame alive and the Gonzo spirit alive and doing an incredible job of it. He deeply understands Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and especially his speciality, Hunter S. Thompson.

David knows the material with incredible depth and I value his analysis and advocacy so much. And his writing is wonderful. He’s read the Beats and Thompson so much that I can feel it just flow through his veins as he’s typing. It’s in the energy and speed of the prose.

Keep going, David, you are flying and it’s wonderful to see you go.

50. My Favorite Living Political Philosopher and the Economist Who Has Most Influenced Me: Thomas Sowell

I remain the sort of political science geek who aspires to one day have all of Thomas Sowell’s books in order on the shelf and be able to say, “Why yes, I’ve read every single one of these.” There is still a long way to go.

51. My Favorite Leftist Journalist Today: Tana Ganeva

is too smart and big-hearted to be as far left as she has chosen!

Eventually I will persuade her to embrace reason!

Just kidding, Tana. You keep doing you. I’m really excited to read your book when it’s finished. You’re so on the right track with that project.

52. My Favorite Catholic Journalist on Substack: Christopher Hale

’s coverage of Pope Leo is essential reading. His insights and reporting are so compelling.

53. My Favorite Atheist Journalist on Substack: Hemant Mehta

remains my favorite go-to source for keeping an eye on the extremes of the fundamentalist Christian far right. Following him, you know you’re not going to miss the worst-of-the-worst among the horrors of what Christian nationalists across America are saying and doing.

54. My Favorite Book Design Substacker: Nathaniel Roy

In recent years, I have been learning how to design book covers and has been a perpetual inspiration. He really knows what he’s doing and explains his approach well.

55. And Finally, Always Much Respect and Friendship to My Doppelgänger: Daniel Greenfield

is the CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and David Horowitz’s official “intellectual heir.” His recommendation to our Substack also sends more new subscribers than anyone else.

I call Daniel my “doppelgänger” with much affection because he has now completed the path which I was once on but chose to pass on to him. David had initially wanted me to be his heir and was grooming me in that direction. It was why he moved me and my now ex-wife from Indiana out to California. But David and I had our disagreements working together. And I ultimately chose a different direction which has now led me here to this God of the Desert Digital Media Studios adventure. And on my way out the door in my final months at the Freedom Center, David’s writing partner Peter Collier asked for recommendations for the first round of Shillman Journalism Fellows. The list began with Ben Shapiro and ended with Daniel Greenfield.

Last month Daniel posted this video offering his commentary on the LA election:

Watching it, I could hear a familiar voice.

Daniel, you’ve got it. David’s spirit lives in you. I know he’s proud. I appreciate that we can remain friends in spite of my ideological heresies. Warmest wishes as you keep the old man’s flame burning bright.

Here are 20 More Fantastic Substacks I Urge Everyone To Subscribe To Right Now Also:

And so now the obligatory conclusion: who are some of your favorites who I did not include on the list? Who should I check out and consider for my next list coming in January?

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Why Mitch Horowitz Is a Bullshit Salesman

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:49:51 GMT

I still haven’t gotten a tattoo.

It’s not out of any moral objection. I’ve tried to come up with plans.

The Torah’s prohibition against tattooing makes sense as a Bronze Age rule to set the ancient Israelites apart from the surrounding Canaanite tribes. If Orthodox Jews want to follow that strictly in the same way they avoid lobster and calamari then that certainly makes sense for them and I respect it.

However, the reason I haven’t followed in the counterculture ritual of getting a tattoo is probably more mundane and the reason why most people don’t do it:

I simply cannot commit to any word or image to have permanently on my body. Not even a cross or a Star of David. I wear those around my neck and rarely remove them.

But should the day come in which I choose to abandon the God of the Bible, who this God of the Desert company was created to bring glory to, then I’ll take them off and put on something else or nothing.

I couldn’t help but dwell on this Sunday morning while eating breakfast and watching the video embedded above of media theorist author interviewing New Age author Mitch Horowitz about his new book Esoterika: Formulas Against the False Self on the Team Human podcast.

The reason is because of this:

It’s one of Mitch’s tattoos, which you can see on his left bicep:

So for the whole podcast, when Mitch is talking, you don’t see just his face moving, you see two men’s faces moving.

That’s Neville Goddard (1905-1972), one of the 20th century’s most influential “New Thought” charlatans. Here’s the Wikipedia biography photo of the man Mitch loves so much that he wanted to serve as a permanent walking billboard advertising:

Goddard taught largely the same thing as other “New Thought” advocates through the first half of the 20th century: your thoughts can become reality, just think it hard enough, wish it strong enough, and it will change reality for you. Want something deeply enough and you can “manifest” it or the universe will “attract” it to you. Every generation seems to repackage this stuff. Back in 2006, Rhonda Byrne did it with The Secret. And now Mitch has decided to do it, just with occult aesthetics, a leather jacket, and tons of tattoos. That’s his “persona” that he’s so proud of now.

If you go onto Amazon and search for Goddard, you get a bunch of titles edited by Mitch and featuring introductions by him. They tell the story: Infinite Potential, The Power of Awareness, The Ideal Realized, Feeling Is the Secret, Miracle, Your Faith is Your Fortune, The Power of Unlimited Imagination. You get the picture.

Mitch profiled Goddard in his 2024 book Happy Warriors: The Lives and Ideas of the Positive-Mind Mystics alongside Napoleon Hill, author of such books as Think and Grow Rich, The Law of Success, and The Master Key to Riches, all three of which you can purchase in an abridged form as part of the “Condensed Classics Bundles” collection, with an introduction by Mitch.

We’ve all heard this shtick from someone in our lives at some point: just think happy thoughts long enough and things will somehow magically turn out better. Your thoughts will just somehow bend the universe.

In his own books, Mitch now offers The Miracle Month: 30 Days to a Revolution in Your Life; The 30 Day Mental Challenge: All You Have to Do Is Try; One Simple Idea: How the Lessons of Positive Thinking Can Transform Your Life; and Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind.

What does this all really boil down to in practice?

An hour into the podcast, Doug asked Mitch what his method was really all about in all these various books. He asked “But you think it’s as simple as—I mean technique-wise, you’re not saying you have to necessarily meditate or do Tai Chi or yoga—you just sit and think?”

Mitch responded bluntly, “Yes. I think the psyche, which I see as a compact of thought and emotion, is enormously powerful.” He explained that in his new Esoterika book, “In the first chapter, I give an exercise in wishing. Just wishing. Just wishing. Isn't that at the back of every magical operation, at the back of every prayer, at the back of every journey into self-discovery through whatever avenue it takes, is getting in touch with that wish?”

Doug responded with skepticism, venturing “So now wishing and magic, which are maybe seen as the same thing….”

Mitch nods his head and shoots out an “Mmmhmm.”

Referencing the podcast embedded above, Doug resonded that “I’ve been spending time with Alan Moore lately both because I got to spend an hour or so with him online and then I spent a lot of time playing and replaying the conversation that we had.”

Doug explained that for Moore, “His approach to magick is very much like an old, I think it’s a Mishna approach to Torah. Which is, you know, and the rabbis basically concluded that the highest reason to read Torah is to read Torah. For its own sake. You’re not doing it for this or for that. And Alan Moore said, you know, he kind of pooh-poohed a bit the chaos magic people, because he goes, ‘Oh, they’re doing magic for this and for that. You should be doing magic for magic, you know, for magic’s sake.’”

Doug then contrasted Moore’s more religious, almost rabbinic approach to magic, with Mitch’s advocacy of magic more as a tool for acquiring wealth. “And I feel like you’re arguing that magic is a causitive ritual, right? That we do magic as change, that you want it to do something,” he said.

Doug then noted that he had recently attempted some magickal ritual on behalf of his daughter, but that he had grown disillusioned with the approach, saying “I’ve started to experience magick more as a lens. I did some workings for my daughter. But I’m trying not to do workings anymore. But magic is the process through which I perceive the rightness of the universe, which sounds like acceptance again rather than magic, as to do something. I mean, are those oppositional approaches to magic?”

Responding by putting his hands together, Mitch said “There’s a tension there. There’s a tension there and I want to wrestle with what Alan said, right? You know, it’s a tricky one because on one hand, if I can extrapolate from what I’m hearing, he’s suggesting that the ‘getting stuff’ approach to magic is problematic. That we do magic as within rabbinic tradition appropo of Torah for its own sake. I feel a tension with that. Sometimes the ‘getting stuff’ scenario can be a condition sought.”

Mitch said, “I could see a young artist who’s not Alan Moore and who idolizes and loves Alan Moore and hungers to be Alan Moore and works in that direction doing magic to take steps in that direction. And the ‘getting stuff’ equation, I don’t judge people who want to get stuff.”

Mitch then went into an extended story about televangelist Oral Roberts acquiring a Buick to use to go preaching as an example of a material object that served some divine purpose, explaining “he was able to pursue pulpits that were off the path of where the buses traveled. It opened up his existence and he joined hands with his wife and he said, ‘Evelyn, let us thank God for this car.’ And I could only imagine the cynics who would say, ‘Ha ha, let us thank God for this car, for this Buick. That’s everything that’s wrong with American spirituality.’”

Mitch then counters, “to which I would say, ‘That’s everything that’s right.’”

He said, “what’s wrong is the incapacity to see that someone who doesn’t have resources, someone who doesn’t live in relative comfort might experience that bounty, in this particular case of a car, in some case something else as radically life-changing. And for me to judge that, for me to judge that is just a matter of taste, a matter of preference. There’s no categorical decision or ethic in my judging that. It’s just looking at someone else’s life and pissing on them for wanting what I may already have. So, I think we have to be really careful when we get into the anti-stuff critique.”

But here’s the problem: Moore was not making an “anti-stuff critique.” And those of us who reject the “New Thought” tradition as not just wrong but genuinely harmful are not critiquing anyone for wanting “stuff.”

The critique is this: “New Thought” is not magic. It is not supernatural. It is not spiritual. So what is it?

In intervewing Moore, Doug asked the author of Jerusalem if this “power of postitive thinking” ideology counts as magic.

Doug said, “Well, I mean, speaking of clowns posturing up magic, I mean, one could well, you don’t even have to argue it, someone like Donald Trump and a lot of his cronies, they’re invested in a particular kind of magic in a sort of Norman Vincent Peale power of positive thinking.”

Moore answerd, “Yeah, which is not magic. It’s a kind of an inquisitive materialist. It’s a psychological trick. It’s that, obviously if you go into something thinking ‘yes I am really confident that this is going to happen for me’ as opposed to going into it thinking ‘oh, this is not going to work out, things never work out for me,’ it’s much more likely that the first person is going to succeed. Because that’s not really what I would call magic it’s just a psychological tactic. Yeah, it’s always better to feel confident, of course it is.”

Moore made clear his dismissal of the manifesting tradition advocated by the man Mitch chose to tattoo onto his arm.

Moore said, “but it’s like this manifesting thing, which has been around for a long time. With that, apparently, a lot of people think that, ‘ah, now I’m sort of signed up to the universe as if it was like Amazon. And now the universe, I just of have to manifest something and the universe will give me whatever I want.’”

Moore then said, “No, it won’t!”

Doug said, “right.”

Moore continued, saying “and when it does work, that is because purely your psychological mindset is more receptive to success.”

Which examples of “success” was Mitch peddling in his discussion with Doug? One name in particular jumped out as an example.

Earlier in the discusion, at 37 minutes in, Mitch admitted a crush, saying "I am smitten with the protean self-creation that Ayn Rand engaged in.”

He then clarified that in spite of his celebration of an icon of libertarianism, “I am not smitten with her economic ideas. I am not smitten with her ideas of strict materialism of disbelief in the mystical or the spiritual which I stand directly against. Rand cultivated an economic philosophy that from my perspective became suffocating because it allows for absolutely no flexibility. And I reject that. I would like to see a society characterized quite frankly by a kind of frumpy social democracy circa 1950s. I think there’s a lot of good that has been introduced into the world by creating the kinds of Keynesian social safety nets that we call social security or Medicaid or whatever. My economics are damn closer to Bernie Sanders than they are to Ayn Rand.”

Doug pointed out, “right, well so is FDR’s.”

Mitch continued saying, “so is FDR’s. But I look upon Ayn Rand and FDR for that matter and Madam H.P. Blavatsky for that matter and lots of figures who are in this book as people who self-crafted their personas. There’s a kind of greatness in that. In fact, I think the greatest work Ayn Rand ever did was the creation of her own persona. This adolescent who escapes Stalinist Russia who comes to America with a bare grasp of the language and becomes a screenwriter in Hollywood. And people who say, ‘you know, I don’t like her books’ or what. It’s like, okay, let’s just pay attention to the persona for a second because that’s her greatest work. Same thing with Madam Blavatsky. That was her greatest work. FDR crafted his persona. Nehru crafted his persona. Gandhi crafted his persona. There’s a greatness in that and it shouldn’t be dispensed with because I don’t like this or that detail or follow through.”

Again offering some friendly skepticism, Doug asked “I mean, does everyone have a persona? Or is persona more your public performance?”

Mitch answered that “It’s an interesting question. As above, so below. I felt at age four, a sense of persona. I felt that at age four. And I cultivated it and and held on to it like a candle in a rainstorm. As I got older, as I aged, I remember, oh man, I must have been, I don't know, 17 years old, something like that, maybe a little older, when Jesse Jackson spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 1984. Brought me to tears. I used to have an album. I would listen to it over and over to hear the cadences of how he spoke and so forth. And that persona was still private, but it became public because it was my wish.”

Pivoting to explain another of his methods, Mitch then said, “and I encourage people to think back to their earliest cognized memories, maybe even going back to age three, right? Because a very precious time, because it predates that peer pressure getting its claws in us, that internalized peer pressure, which I think has hold of us by around age nine, I think has hold of us just around that time roughly speaking. But if you can strip back and those memories are there, what were your wishes? What were your fantasies? Where were your dreams at ages three and four? They're there. That sense of self contains a certain truth.”

So, in response to Doug’s question about if an author like Rand’s “persona” is merely “public performance,” Mitch doesn’t directly answer the qeuestion. Instead he offers reflection on himself as a four-year-old, his emotional reaction to a Jesse Jackson campaign speech in 1984 as a teenager, his obsession with learning to speak like Jackson, and how we should all go back to our wishes at age three or four.

As a four-year-old, my primary dreams, wishes, and fantasies revolved around stuff like my grandpa taking me to McDonald’s for an ice cream cone. I remember how that bright vanilla would streak across his beard. Today I fulfill that wish by pulling out a tub of my new flavor of choice these days, “Cookie Kraken,” which features blue-colored vanilla ice cream that includes chcocoloate chip cookie dough and a brownie batter swirl. It’s wonderful.

There we go. Wish fulfilled. Oh, man, this is delicious.

But is is it magic? Is it the supernatural? Is it anything special?

In the promotional imagery for his book, Mitch chooses to wear a t-shirt of Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. Between the tattoo of Goddard and that he’s making more than clear which which esoteric lineage he embraces. This isn’t at all the occult path of Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson which informs Moore’s magical approach in The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, my favorite book published so far this century.

Mitch has chosen to sell copies of Think and Grow Rich and The Master Key to Riches. He’s chosen to hold up Rand as this great example of how to live even while he still wants to pretend to be a leftist.

He’s become a bullshit salesman.

And he couldn’t handle it when I called him out last month when he chose to write an apologia to one of the 20th century’s most successful bullshit salesmen, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan.

In his essay urging people to take LaVey seriously — the same way he urges people to take Blavatsky and Goddard seriously — Mitch referenced the common reason most people dismiss Satanism as some sort of philosophy:

“Other critics dismissed his mass-market paperback as a bastardization of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand (1905-1982), with occult frosting—to which a defender might reply: so what?”

Satanism and Objectivism are largely the same thing, the only difference being aesthetics and who the grift is being marked to fleece. Some people like their selfishness with red horns, some people like it with science fiction novels. Some people like it with this talk about wishing like you’re a 4-year-old wanting an ice cream cone.

And then there are people like me who like to call bullshit. I left the following comment on Mitch’s post:

I knew exactly what I was doing when leaving the comment, however Mitch’s action still surprised me:

Mitch could not handle a comment calling for truth and love as values more important than “promethean self-creation.” He had to delete it.

He then chose to block me:

However, in fairness to him, it’s worth noting that when it came to my criticisms on Notes, I chose to slide off the gloves. I understand if these stung a bit more, as that was clearly the intent:

Let’s just go ahead and put that last bit up there nice and big:

LaVey’s Satanism is just as much a false path as the New Thought you’ve now dedicated your career to promoting.

Were I to go out and get a tattoo tomorrow in one of Yucca Valley’s multiple tattoo parlors, what might it say? Lately I’ve been saying this a lot:

The owls are not what they seem.

Maybe that might be cool? I’ve been on a serious David Lynch deep dive for over a year now, ever since the great filmmaker died on January 15, 2025.

And it’s partially because of that why I take particular offense to one last bit of clever persona-building bullshit Mitch has chosen to shamefully deploy as he markets himself:

Mitch is using a four-word sentence from David Lynch as his primary professional branding right now. He even puts it on the cover of his new book that he was on Team Human to shill:

Mitch presents this humble quote from a humble man as though it’s an endorsement of his New Thought nonsense.

It’s clearly not, though. Why would Lynch call Mitch “solid gold?” What connection did the two of them have?

Simple: while vice president and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin, Mitch published Lynch’s wonderful book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.

Yeah, Mitch was “solid gold” in that he helped put a ton of gold into the bank account of Lynch’s transcendental meditation foundation because he chose to publish a book of blog-post-length little essays.

Mitch is trying to pass off a quote about an author praising a publishing executive as instead one of the greatest filmmakers of all time endorsing New Thought nonsense. It’s so wildly dishonest.

The problem with “promethean self-creation” and all that Ayn Rand “creation of her own persona” romanticism is that a lof of us are now well-trained as investigative journalists and it’s too easy now to debunk people who have chosen to build careers on foundations of deception. Liars and cowards get caught more quickly nowadays. It is so easy to smash apart an author’s or politician’s precious little “persona” only to reveal the ugliness and immaturity hiding underneath.

Serious men and women don’t need to build a “persona,” Mitch. They just live as their authentic selves and tell the truth every damn day of their lives. The tactics of the bullshit salesmen have been on display all our lives and just because you want to try and layer on some esoteric iconography on top of it, plenty of people are still going to be able to smell the bullshit.

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Update on Thursday, July 2, 2026:

Posted shortly after this critique appeared:

Roadrunner Action!

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:42:56 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

Right Wing Book Club: Why We Must Revive Reaganism (And How to Do It)

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:56:59 GMT

It was too hot in the desert today to succeed with a livestream discussing my findings with the Ronald Reagan books that I’ve explored the last few months. My iPhone overheated twice, so I decided to just record it as an audio podcast instead.

Should I do more podcasts like this for our premium subscribers? Let me know.

To Qatar's House of Thani: Tear Down This Wall

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:21:12 GMT

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate!

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

This morning I made a discovery which has delighted me to no end and will now inspire both key stylistic and thematic shifts in this publication.

Scrolling through the Substack dashboard, I found a new feature which allows us to download data of where our audience originate. It will tell you how many of your readers live in each of the 50 states and then in countries around the world. Maybe this was available previously, but I had not seen that it could be downloaded this easily

So I did and then dropped it into Copilot, which has now emerged as one of the three LLMs I have tested extensively this year and now actually like. (The other two are Gemini and Vibe, the European-made AI from Mistral, formerly called Le Chat. I’ll explain why these three seem different from the others in an upcoming piece.)

Copilot noted all the different states and countries before analyzing what the various clusters meant. And then it revealed something which I was not aware of:

Who in Qatar might want to subscribe to this proudly Zionist media company which has condemned the ruling House of Thani “monarchy” that has ruled the country with brutality for generations?

Answer: someone who works for the Qatar News Agency, known in Arabic as وكالة الأنباء القطرية (قنا) and angicized as Wakalat al-Anba al-Qatariya (QANA), the regime’s state-run news agency.

So far this likely mid-level staffer or intern has received eight emails and not yet opened any. Copilot suggested that it wouldn’t show the emails being read because they were likely being forward to some program monitoring critics of the regime and scraping the information about what we write.

I’ve cut off the full email at the top.

Why did a propaganda operative of the Qatari regime choose to subscribe in March? Here are the first pieces they received:

The answer is not hard to determine:

Here is an excerpt of the first four paragraphs from this February article I published at The Algemeiner:

Despite Qatari leaders’ rhetoric seemingly promoting peace and opposing hate, the Middle Eastern country continues to educate students with textbooks that celebrate terrorism, hide the Holocaust, and demonize the Jewish people by affirming longstanding antisemitic tropes, according to a new study.
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), a nonprofit organization that analyzes schoolbooks and curricula around the world, reviewed 52 textbooks officially approved for the 2025-2026 State of Qatar national school curriculum, in addition to checking them against previous editions for potential revisions. The books covered topics ranging from social studies, geography, and history to Islamic education, Arabic language, and Arabic literature. IMPACT-se applied UNESCO-derived standards and guidelines of peace and tolerance in education.
The researchers found that the same problems from the 2021-2022 school year had not improved, as the textbooks “continue to reproduce antisemitic narratives, religious intolerance toward non-Muslims, and legitimization of violent jihad, all of which were documented in IMPACT-se’s earlier reports.”
The antisemitic material includes promoting stereotypes of Jews as arrogant liars obsessed with opposing Islam. The texts also cast Jews as “fleeing in fear, spreading discord, breaching agreements,” and possessing an “excessive attachment to material wealth, thereby reinforcing an image of Jews as fundamentally untrustworthy.”

The article likely got some extra traction because my old colleagues at Jihad Watch chose to share and excerpt it:

And then there was this piece here from March which probably grabbed some attention:

Here is an excerpt of the article’s opening and three key paragraphs about Qatar:

Two Arab monarchies which remain steadfast in their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist have nonetheless dismissed a conspiratorial claim of Mossad false flag attacks against them alleged by far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson.
The dismissals of Carlson’s assertion came as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a new report warning that the ongoing US-Israeli military operation against Iran “triggered an immediate online surge of antisemitic, anti-Zionist, and conspiratorial commentary that spanned the ideological spectrum.”
In a Monday video, Carlson asserted that it “hasn’t been reported, but it’s a fact that last night, in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, authorities arrested Mossad agents planning on committing bombings in those countries.”
Israel’s intelligence agency reportedly played a critical role in the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Saturday, but there is no evidence to suggest Mossad agents were arrested this week for operations against Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
“Why would the Israelis be committing bombings in Gulf countries, which are also being attacked by Iran? Aren’t they on the same side?” Carlson asked, insisting that “Israel wants to hurt Iran, and Qatar, and the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Oman, and Kuwait.”
Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed the Abraham Accords in September 2020 to normalize relations with Israel, and the three countries have enhanced ties since then.
On Tuesday, Majed Al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, responded to a reporter’s request to confirm Carlson’s claim. He refused to do so, answering he “has no information about any cells of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad at the moment.”
However, Qatar’s State Security Service separately announced the arrest of two cells it said were operating on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Here are three additional paragraphs from the article which may be relevant for understanding why Qatar state media decided to start keeping an eye on our efforts, my emphasis in bold:

Carlson has previously praised Qatar and its House of Thani monarchy, which has ruled the country since 1851. The former Fox News host announced on Dec. 7, 2025, that he had purchased property in the country, and dismissed charges that Qatari funding had influenced his turn toward anti-Israel commentary, speculations which had circulated among right-wing figures and earned him the epithet “Tucker Qatarlson,” popularized by conservative talk radio host Mark Levin and former far-right Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer.
Interviewing Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani at the Doha Forum, Carlson said, “I have been criticized as being a tool of Qatar, and I just want to say, which you already know, which is I have never taken anything from your country and don’t plan to.”
Qatar has long aligned itself with Hamas and its ideological wellspring, the Muslim Brotherhood, providing a safe haven for the leadership of both organizations. Thani’s choice to support the revolutionary Islamist group and its terrorist wing in Gaza has exacerbated tensions with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both which regard the Brotherhood as an existential threat.

Here is the video of Carlson’s interview with Qatar’s ruler in which the antisemitic podcaster made clear his sympathies with the regime which has provided nearly $2 billion to Hamas:

For generations now, the House of Thani has built a wall between Jews and Muslims. They’ve spent billions of dollars to do it. My friend Jordan Cope has become an expert in Qatar’s war against free societies. He published this analysis at The Jerusalem Post in February revealing Qatar’s efforts to subvert American higher education:

As reports now allege that Qatar’s influence footprint in US higher education might be billions of dollars greater than once thought, exposing Doha’s partnerships with American institutions remains crucial for national security, especially as Qatar continues to influence America’s youth and future.
Previously, American universities were believed to have received $6.25 billion from Qatar, largely to fund their satellite campuses in Qatar’s Education City. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) now reports that Qatar has invested upwards of $20 billion, almost three times the previously thought of amount, into US universities such as Cornell, Georgetown, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth, and Brown.
Another study by ISGAP documents a correlation between increased antisemitism on campuses and the presence of funding from Qatar. A recent Harvard poll also suggests that nearly half of all Americans aged 18-24 support Hamas over Israel. Whether or not Qatari funding has fueled such sentiment is a question that should be analyzed.

Moving forward this year, many of these articles will be written as direct open letters to Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani or other top officials in the regime.

But I won’t be calling him “Your Highness.” The only “Your Highness” that this Psychedelic Zionist recognizes is the terrible 2011 stoner comedy staring Danny McBride and Natalie Portman.

No, it’s just going to be Mr. Al-Thani. Because it’s the 21st century now, not medieval times, and monarchism is not an ideology that anyone should be recognizing or respecting anymore. You want to see kings and queens? Go to DisneyLand.

Mr. Al-Thani, you are just a man like all the rest of us. You are not special because of the accident of your birth. You will end up the same way we all end up, as a pile of dust returning into the earth And so I will address you the same way I do as the budtender selling my my Aloha Haze at the dispensary, with a Sir or Mr.

You are just a man and so I say:

Mr. Al-Thani, Tear Down This Wall.

Mr. Al-Thani, Tear Down This Wall you have built between the Jewish people and the Muslim world.

Mr. Al-Thani, Tear Down This Wall you have built to protect the world’s worst Islamist terrorists.

Mr. Al-Thani, Tear Down This Wall you have built between Qatar and Israel. Join your Arab brothers in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Bring your people into the Abraham Accords.

Mr. Al-Thani, Tear Down This Wall you have built between the children of your nation and the truth. Give them an education that is based on facts, not on lies and demonization of the Jewish people.

Mr. Al-Thani, Tear Down This Wall you have built preventing your people from knowing true freedom. The day will come — and I will see it even if my beard is long and gray — when all human beings on this planet will have their rights protected by their governments. The Constitution we know in America will one day become normative everywhere.

Someday everyone in the world will be free. Mr. Al-Thani, now is the time for choosing: will transform into you people’s liberator or will you remain their slavemaster keeping them in chains?

Hint: this is a rhetorical question. We already know the answer.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this - this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.”

Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits - not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

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Anyone Else Not Feeling It This Father's Day?

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 23:01:13 GMT

One of the things that my father taught me when I was a teenager — something he said he would at that age — was when feeling down, he would put on a sad Beatles song to feel better.

The one embeded above — “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” — was his favorite he recommended and it certainly worked like he said.

And then there’s, of course, this gold standard in the cry-your-eyes-out-as-needed genre:

And while those tracks still very much endure, I’ve found that for a more contemporary sound to provide emotional catharsis, Beck’s 2002 album Sea Change is the masterpiece, with “Lonesome Tears” as the standout:

Lonesome tears
I can't cry them anymore
I can't think of what they're for
Oh, they ruin me every time
But I'll try
To leave behind some days
These tears just can't erase
I don't need them anymore

I can’t remember ever crying so much on a Father’s Day.

The reasons are three-fold:

I love my father deeply. Over the last five years, I have progressively grown more worried about his health, and now in the last few weeks those concerns have shot up into the stratosphere. This has all happened sooner than I expected and I’m in no way ready for it. Is anyone ever ready?
Sally is in a deep state of mourning the death of her step-father, Jerry Miller, who died suddenly and unexpectedly this fall under circumstances which have traumatized the family. Jerry and I were not close at all, in spite of my efforts. I knew that he didn’t like me, and Sally had warned me it would likely take years for him to open up and potentially develop some sort of relationship with me. (Growing up there, I learned this is just how most Indiana men are. This is how Hoosiers are raised.) I understood that and was looking forward to figuring out some way that my father-in-law and I could eventually bond and have a meaningful relationship eventually. That hope is now gone.
Really at the core of it now is the wound that began on Thanksgiving last year, with Miscarriage 7, also known by the more formal title Miscarriage Final. I’m not going to be a father. Sally and I decided that after four years and seven miscarriages, it was time to stop trying. We knew the odds were against us due to a car accident Sally experienced as a teenager which doctors had warned could result in infertility — she had already had two miscarriages with previous partners. So fertility treatments are not really an option. Well, what about adopting and fostering? That’s always been the plan. We knew that we were unlikely to have biological children. But now that path has grown more uncertain. Do we have the energy and the will to navigate that obstacle course? Answer: the reality is that we are both so depressed now that we can barely write. We’re probably never going to raise children now.

The Tragic View of Life

Time wears away all the pleasures of the day
All the treasures you could hold
Days turn to sand, losing strength in every hand
They can’t hold you anymore

I invite you to unsubscribe from this email list if this is not the “vibe” you prefer, to use the term which has grown so gratingly trendy today.

Many of you probably ended up here not realizing at all what you had signed up for, perhaps just clicking absentmindedly because of someone’s recommendation or maybe some provocation I left on Notes.

So just a fair warning, at this point we enter the more tragic part of the story. So if anyone wants to close the book now, then I’ll certainly understand.

Over the last 17 years, much against my will, I’ve come to gradually embrace what is known as “The Tragic View of Life.” And now, over the last seven months, that has come to click into place more fully.

I first heard the term in a lecture that classicist author Victor Davis Hanson gave at the Wednesay Morning Club in Beverly Hills in 2010. Speaking before the inner circle of donors when I worked at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, VDH dedicated his talk to contrastsing “The Therapeutic View” with “The Tragic View.”

The Therapeutic View is the hope that we as a species can make the world meaningfully better. That we can use the tools of government, media, business, religion, politics, and the whole spectrum of cultural creations to mold humanity into a more advanced, more decent species, the way a therapist can theoretically mold their sick client into health.

The Tragic View sees that there are innate, structural limits to the degree which we can morally and materially improve the species. While the Therapeutic View hopes that human cruelty and evil are mere illnesses that can somehow be cured, the Tragic View instead sees these not as a problem to be solved, but a reality to be endured.

The Curse of the Highly Sensitve Person Who Sees What Others Hide

This morning, published this very thoughtful piece and it resonated with me to an uncomfortable degree:

The Flow

If You're on Substack, There's a Good Chance You're a Highly Sensitive Person.

A simple Substack note about Highly Sensitive People sparked thousands of responses from readers who felt seen. We explore what it means to be an HSP, why so many sensitive people end up writing, and how understanding your nervous system can change the way you see yourself…

a month ago · 60 likes · 38 comments · Shannon Bindler

Shannon describes the concept from Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You. She provides the numbers who fall into the bucket:

The term was coined by research psychologist Dr. Elaine N. Aron, who began studying high sensitivity in 1991. What she found was consistent, measurable, and biological, a trait present in roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population, found across more than 100 species.
The HSP nervous system processes everything more deeply: emotions, subtleties, the energy of a room. This depth of processing is the defining feature, not shyness, introversion, or anxiety, though those can sometimes accompany it.

She made this cool graphic too which lays out the key traits:

This is me down to the marrow in my bones and I’ve been this way since I was a child. People used to say I was “intense” and it took me some time to understand what that really meant:

I over-process everything.

I grow over-stimulated too quickly. And way more now than when I was younger. I can hardly manage to watch a whole movie anymore. The big reason for that is because:

I over-empathize with seemingly everyone.

And I am way over-sensitive to subtleties which other people miss or ignore.

Shannon frames this in her article as a gift:

She got up, pulled a book from the office shelf, handed it to me, and said, “Oh! This is going to be a real treat. Being an HSP is a gift.”
…
I was wired differently. And that wiring was, as she said, a gift.
…
My boss handed me a book and said, “It’s a gift.” It took me a while to receive it. It takes most of us a while.
But you’re here. And so is everyone else who needed somewhere for all of it to go.

Yes, it’s a gift.

But it’s a gift like the one in the box that Kevin Spacey gives to Brad Pitt at the end of “Se7en”:

I don’t like being a “Highly Sensitive Person” at all. Can I trade for “happy, go-lucky goofball, human golden retriever” instead?

The main reason is this: I can pick up on when people hate me and are trying to hide it. Or when they’re hating someone else.

I can pick up on people’s dark sides that they’re trying to hide.

I figure out the corruptions and cruelties that people don’t want others to know.

And this sucks. I didn’t ask for this.

The world to me, since I was a child, has been a world that is far darker than other people’s. The things that other people miss or that others ignore, I cannot. And so I gain a seemingly bizarre perspective which so many cannot understand.

But now it should make more sense. The more one sees, the more one knows, the more miscarriages a family endures, the more fathers killed in an accident, the more fathers afflicted by disease, the greater sorrow one understands:

I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem.

And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven. This sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.

I communed with mine own heart, saying, “Lo, I have come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem; yea, my heart had great experience in wisdom and knowledge.”

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly. But I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.

For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

The more you learn of the world, the more you wish you did not know.

The more you understand humans, the less you wish you did.

Illumination is a mistake. You don’t want to see what hides in the shadows and runs away when the lights burst for just a moment.

This is The Tragic View of Life. And I understand why so many wish to reject it. But some of us never really had a choice. This is the gift God gave us.

Happy Father’s Day!

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Jazzy and I Follow A Road Runner!

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:41:41 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

Nick Fuentes Asks: 'Are We Fascists or Are We Not? Is This a New Rome and a New Empire?'

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 07:43:41 GMT

This is the fourth installment in our ongoing Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising Series monitoring global antisemitism and analyzing Far Right extremist ideology in America. See the previous parts:

Inroduction: The 10 Most Dangerous Far-Right Figures in America Today
June 16 Daily News Briefing: JD Vance Defends Iran Receiving a $300 Billion ‘Reconstruction Fund’
June 17 Daily News Briefing: Antisemitic Accelerationist Terrorists Targeted Trump at the Freedom 250 Fight Night

Please consider supporting our investigative efforts with a premium subscription:

Australia

On Wednesday, a court in Australia heard evidence against an unnamed 13-year-old boy from Queensland who allegedly planned an antisemitic terrorist attack. During the hearing, police prosecutor Nick Jones read from the teen’s manifesto with J-Wire reported included “repeated threats against children, violent language towards police, racist abuse directed at Black and Jewish people, and claims that the writer lacked empathy.”

In Melbourne, police charged a 20-year-old suspect for setting a fire which investigators say was directed by the Islmic regime in Iran. Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Peter Crozier said that “they may not actually be aware of the people who are directing or the principals of these investigations. That remains a key line of inquiry for us.”

Canada

At two Canadian high schools this spring, two students managed to sneak Holocaust denial quotes into the school yearbooks, with the books being published before the schools noticed and took action. A similar incident also occurred this year at the United Nations International School in New York, however students there managed to sneak swastikas into the yearbook.

Israel

A new academic paper titled “From Myth to Model: Representation of ‘The Jew’ in Generative AI’” by Israeli researchers Michael Gilead and Gal Gutman reveals that tested models routinely grouped Jewish names into “high-competence, low warmth” categories and that Jewish-coded biographies were marked down on friendliness and perceived warmth.

United States Antisemitism News

According to a report from Ohio’s WCMH news station, Tycen Proper, one of the alleged conspirators behind a planned drone attack against the White House during Sunday’s UFC fight, had just graduated from the Knox County Career Center’s Landscape Design and Management program, thus receiving a job which he quit recently after graduating, allegedly to meet his friends for the strike. The neo-Nazi Accelerationist group behind the alleged plot called themselves “The Vanguard of the Old Republic.”

On Thursday, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue released a report about the May 2026 attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, describing the role of Accelerationist ideology in motivating the alleged terrorists. The introduction is very enlightening and worth reprinting in full:

On May 18, two teenagers attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing three people before both attackers died in an apparent murder-suicide. The attack featured several familiar hallmarks of accelerationist violence, most clearly in the perpetrators’ own writings. In their manifestos, they explicitly positioned the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter as the central inspiration for their attack and repeatedly referenced the concept of ‘saints culture’, a lineage of white supremacist mass killers to be emulated. The targeting of a mosque was therefore not incidental. Invoking a conspiratorial theory known as the ‘Great Replacement’, both attackers situated Muslims within a broader white supremacist worldview that depicts various minorities as invaders who pose an existential threat to the white race. Taken together, the manifestos, target selection and repeated references to saints culture indicate that white supremacy served as the primary framework through which the attackers rationalized their violence.
At the same time, analysis focusing exclusively on the attack’s similarities to previous iterations of neo-Nazi accelerationism—as embodied by networks such as Iron March, Atomwaffen Division and the Terrorgram Collective—is insufficient to make sense of this horrific event. Notably, in addition to their consumption of such content, the perpetrators’ broader online footprints suggest engagement with nihilistic violent subcultures (in particular, the True Crime Community), incel spaces, intense attachments to fictional characters and online fandoms, and more aesthetic-driven online ecosystems like TikTok, where violent or transgressive audiovisual content can circulate rapidly outside traditional accelerationist spheres. While these influences did not supersede extremist ideology, they appeared to have shaped the pathways through which these attackers eventually mobilized to violence.
The fact that the San Diego shooting involved two individuals further complicates efforts to identify a single radicalization pathway. Each attacker arrived at violence through a distinct combination of ideology, grievance, online community and aesthetic fixation. Their shared action should not obscure the differences between them. However, taken together, their behavior points toward a wider pattern in which neo-Nazi accelerationism is increasingly blending with online environments characterized by nihilism, misanthropy, violent misogyny, school shooter fandoms and transgressive aesthetics.

The New York Times reported on Thursday, that teenagers have begun using the term “goyslop” with many unaware of its antisemitic origins:

Last week I interviewed a teenager about his use of the word “goyslop.” That’s a term for cruddy, low-quality food — as coined, or at least popularized, by far-right antisemites. This teenager was absolutely not a far-right antisemite; he just happened to attend a New Jersey high school where students, Jewish and Christian and otherwise, said “goyslop” all the time. “If your friend goes and gets McDonald’s, and gets two burgers and a shake,” he explained, “like, ‘Oh, my god, that’s so goyslop, that’s goy.’”

The Woke Reich Neo-Fascist Daiily Watchlist:

1. Elon Musk

On Thursday, influential AI research Yann LeCun, founder of the new AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence) Labs after leaving Meta last year, proclaimed that trillionaire Elon Musk’s xAI startup was “kind of a failure, frankly, because the founding team has departed.”

LeCun explained the corner Musk had painted himself into, telling CNBC that “Elon is now in a position that is very, very difficult for him to kind of hire top people in AI, because he’s kind of, you know, not behaved in sort of very good ways toward the ... previous team.”

According to LeCun, xAI overspent on data centers, leaving them now in a position of having to rent out their capacity to their competitors to offset their massive losses which reached $2.5 billion last quarter. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has intervened on Musk’s behalf to try to stop a lawsuit which charges that gas turbines to power the Colossus 2 data center violate the Clean Air Act.

On Monday, Musk condemned the United Kingdom’s announcement of plans to block social media access for those under 16. He advanced another conspiracy theory on his X social media platform, charging that “this censorship law is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The real goal is to enable the UK government to track everyone.”

Presented without comment:

2. Tucker Carlson

PressTV, the propaganda organ of the Islamic regime in Iran, saw fit to spotlight far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson’s Wednesday night X commentary with the headline “Iran deal officially ends US empire, exposes limits of American power: Tucker Carlson.”

The article quotes Carlson saying “with this, the United States has officially acknowledged that Iran is a player. And that changes everything, in the same way that the 1956 Suez crisis, another crisis, another war over a narrow waterway, through which commerce flows, ended the British Empire.”

The Mullahs’ media operatives also chose to quote Carlson’s statement that “Now, of course, you argue the British Empire really kind of ended with the armistice in 1918, at the end of the First World War, you could definitely argue that it was done by 1945 when they ‘won World War II.’ But like a lot of fading empires, it wasn’t obvious to the rest of us, so there was muscle memory involved. And Britain had ruled the world. And so it was fading, but not dead.”

3. Candace Owens

Why does far-right podcaster Candace Owens keep a pinned picture of Moscow at the top of her X account?

4. Nick Fuentes

On Thursday, Israel National News reported on prominent Gen-Z neo-Nazi podaster Nick Fuentes’ antisemitic rhetoric following the announcement of the Memorandum of Understanding to end the U.S.-Iran war.

“You fought hard, you left it all on the field, and you won,” Fuentes said on his America First podcast, praising the Islamic regime in Iran. “G-d bless the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran won, Israel lost; so delicious!”

Fuentes would further heap praise on the genocidal antisemites in Iran, writing on X that “Jews are losers, Israel is losers, Zionists are losers. You lose, Iran won. Thank you, Supreme Leader. On behalf of all Goyim of the world, on behalf of all Gentiles, Americans, Christians, thank you, Supreme Leader and Iran, you did it. I love to see it.”

Left-wing advocacy group Media Matters highlighted one of Fuentes statements from his Monday episode, in which the neo-Nazi podcaster asked “are we fascists or are we not? I’m sorry. Is this like some big left-wing f----- meetup where we talk about the size and scope of government? Are we fascists or are we not? Is this a new Rome and a new empire or what are we doing?”

5. Kanye West

Neo-Nazi rap artist Kanye West will need to find another venue in Prague to continue his European tour as Zuzana Rambová, arena director for Chuchle Arena Prague, told a Czech news outlet that “we terminated the organizer's contract."

6. Steven Miller

Presented without comment:

7. Marjorie Taylor Greene

Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared Tuesday on the podcast of tech entrepreneur Mario Nawfal. She recounted a story she has told previously, that after receiving death threats against her family following Trump dubbing her a “traitor,” the president “specifically said, 'It's your fault, and you deserve it.' So Donald Trump said it was my fault and I deserved for my son to be murdered."

Greene says she still has the texts proving what Trump allegedly said to her.

8. JD Vance

As noted in yesterday’s Daily Report, the moves in MAGA world appear to be toward trying to make Vice President JD Vance the scapegoat for the incoming blowback from the Iran “peace deal.” The Los Angeles Times’ Thursday political newsletter proclaimed: “Rubio lets Vance take the fall as Iran deal questions mount.”

This directive appears to be coming from Trump, who told a reporter in France that “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

Ben Shapiro, the Daily Wire co-creator and admiral of the media company’s fleet of podcasts, took Trump’s direction, calling the deal “a disaster that does not achieve any of the actual signal goals that were set by the administration at the beginning” before proclaiming “the vice president of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president.” [Disclosure: I have previously written articles and scripts for The Daily Wire.]

9. Steve Bannon

On Thursday, Media Matters spotlighted a clip from far-right organizer Steve Bannon speaking at a “Fraud-Fighter Summit” where the War Room podcaster again reiterated his call for ICE to intimiated voters at polling places in an effort to sway the midterm elections in favor of Republicans.

“Listen. We need to be at every precinct. If you’re armed or not, that depends upon what your state laws are,” Bannon said. “But I will tell you, ICE has to be there and has to be there to back you up, or we’re going to have a situation exactly what happened in LA where they sat there and stole the election from Spencer Pratt, who I believe finished first, but no worse than a close second, and should be on the ballot in November.”

In a clip posted at Bannon’s War Room X account on Thursday, he said “I don't understand why we're giving money to people who don't deserve money. They're all scumbags. The Saudis are scumbags. UAE is the least of the scumbags, but they're still scumbags, and the Qatar's the worst of the scumbags. They're financing the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR down in Texas.”

10. Thomas Massie - No News Is Good News

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Antisemitic Accelerationist Terrorists Targeted Trump at the Freedom 250 Fight Night

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:35:27 GMT

This is the third installment in our ongoing Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising Series monitoring and analyzing Far Right extremist ideology in America. See the previous parts:

Inroduction: The 10 Most Dangerous Far-Right Figures in America Today
June 16 Daily News Briefing: JD Vance Defends Iran Receiving a $300 Billion ‘Reconstruction Fund’

Please consider supporting our investigative efforts with a premium subscription:

Subscribe now

The Top 3 Antisemitism Stories Today

1. Men Alleged to Have Plotted Terrorist Attack Against White House UFC Event Embraced Neo-Nazi Ideology and Targeted Pro-Israel Lawmakers

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced the arrests of five men in Ohio, Missouri, Nebraska, and California who allegedly targeted elected officials and others attending the Freedom 250 UFC fight on Sunday in celebration of President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.

Here are those named as suspects:

Tycen C. Proper, 19, of Danville, Ohio
Bryan Omar Roa, 24, of Calimesa, California (Located an hour away from us.)
Michael Alan Thomas, 32, of Pinon Hills, California (Two hours away from us.)
Daniel K. Eskridge, 32, of Kidder, Missouri
Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, 31, of Omaha, Nebraska

The group allegedly conspired to use drones armed with explosives to strike the event, causing an evacuation which they would then enable snipers to kill congressmen and other “high-value targets.”

Proper has reportedly confessed. Investigators say he collected “firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and tactical gear at his home in Ohio, and he identified potential targets, including multiple members of Congress.” His father and grandmother told police that he had expressed support for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and posted antisemitic material on social media.

Here is a picture of his gun:

The Combat Antisemitism Movement reported yesterday that Proper allegedly said in a group chat that one of the legislators to target should be Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) because “she’s taken money from the Israel pro Israel [sic] lobby and supports them.”

Later Proper would suggest other targets on the basis of the Israel advocacy: Senators Jim Justice (R-WV) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Representatives Carol Miller (R WV-1) and Riley Moore (R WV-2). He shared their images and found their information at TrackAipac.com

Eskridge reportedly also armed himself extensively and prepared tactical gear:

The DOJ identifies Alvarez as the group’s organizer, using the handle “Shepherd” to signify his role in the conspiracy. He reportedly provided directions to an old church in Nebraska as a safe zone.

The five conspirators allegedly hoped their attack could inspire a violent uprising across the country, an expression of a neo-Nazi ideology called accelerationism.

The Anti-Defamation League describes this form of genocidal antisemitism:

Accelerationism is an extremist belief rooted in some segments of the white supremacist movement that society is irredeemable, and that acts of violence and destabilization can “accelerate” a perceived inevitable societal collapse and usher in a white ethnonationalist state in the chaotic aftermath.
The ideology originated with the 1990s writings of an American neo-Nazi and saw a resurgence in the mid-2010s with the rise of the alt-right extremist movement. Accelerationist adherents subscribe to a mix of racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs and conspiracy theories.
Accelerationist white supremacists may be hostile to other white supremacist groups and adherents who may not openly embrace violence as a tactic.
Since the late 2010s, white supremacist accelerationism has inspired dozens of terrorist plots and attacks across the world, with most targeting Jews, Muslims, immigrants, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. Some have also targeted critical infrastructure to sow chaos.

One FBI investigator wrote that the group’s members “believed that the United States needed to be torn down so that it could be rebuilt” and that some “expressed a desire that people who were involved with Jeffrey Epstein should not govern the country.”

Law enforcement disrupt accelerationist-inspired terror plots on a regular basis. In February last year, a jury convicted Brandon Russell, 29, a resident of Orlando, for plotting to sabotage Maryland’s power grid.

2. Police in Toronto Reveal Young People Have Been Hired to Attack Jews

In a press conference on Tuesday updating about multiple shooting investigations, Toronto’s police chief Myron Demkiw told reporters that “what we are dealing with in this case and in other unrelated incidents, including shootings at synagogues and Jewish schools, is a recurring and similar modus operandi, and that is criminals for hire.”

Demkiw said that “through encrypted messaging apps, young people are hired to carry out attacks against various targets. And in order to get paid, they’re required to film their attacks.”

Discussing motive, he said “and it is clear that some of the people hiring these criminals want to create a sense of fear in our communities, including in the Jewish community.”

3. The Pentagon Admits Using Grok For Targeting More Than 2,000 Strikes on Iran and Declares

According to a sworn statement from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, trillionaire Elon Musk’s Grok “enabled US forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

So, a large language model owned by the world’s wealthiest man, trained on twitter posts, which has declared itself “MechaHitler,” and cannot stop generating sexualized images of children… is being used by the most powerful military in world history to bomb human beings.

Iran War News

The terms of the so-called “peace deal” with the Islamic regime in Iran which the Trump administration intends to sign on Friday have provoked an epic fury of opposition from across the ideological spectrum, including from former Vice President Mike Pence.

“Calling for the United States and others to arrange for a $300 billion reconstruction fund, when the IRGC and radical Islamists continue to be at the helm in Iran, is deeply ill-advised,” Pence said. “And again, I believe it smacks of the kind of appeasement that we saw during the Obama years, the kind of appeasement that Joe Biden tried to accomplish and was ignored by the Iranians, and we rejected categorically during the first Trump administration.

Pence said that Trump “should just simply stand firm, draw that red line, and if the Iranians won’t come to those fundamental terms that are in the interest of our security, Israel’s security, and the peace and stability of the region, then I think we ought to let the armed forces of the United States open the strait and eliminate the threat on our terms.”

Antisemitic Hate Crime News

On Tuesday, prosecutors charged Bruce Lion, a noted figure in California’s raisin industry, with three felony charges after a series of antisemitic threats allegedly made since March against his neighbor, Rabbi Zushe Cunin.

In Zurich, prosecutors have filed charges against a teenager who allegedly declared his allegiance to the Islamic state before attacking a Jewish man with a knife and attempting to break into a synagogue with the internet of murdering Jews. The suspect was 15 at the time of the crime.

International Antisemitism News

In Germany, a report from the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) reveals that antisemitic acts reached a record high of 8,725 in 2025.

In the United Kingdom, the BBC reported on Tuesday that Jews in Gurnsey — one of the channel islands which has a population of 63,950 and 24 square miles — have described fear of identifying as Jewish in public. Ariel Levy said of her Star of David necklace that “you almost make a horrible conscious decision that I’m just not going to wear it today, especially when you don’t know the crowds you’re around.” The island has a Jewish population of roughly 60 people.

In Belarus, the country’s authoritarian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, a prominent ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, compared Israel’s war to defeat Hamas in Gaza to the Holocaust. Israel’s Foreign Ministry responded saying that “the remarks made by the President of Belarus – a country that knows all too well the horrors of the Holocaust committed on its own soil – in his interview with Al Arabiya are unacceptable and deeply disturbing. Any comparison between the Holocaust of the Jewish people and Israel’s just war against terrorism must be unequivocally rejected.”

In Australia, police have begun an investigation after someone wrote antisemitic messages at a Gold Coast beach. Australia has some of the world’s most aggressive penalties for hate speech with sentences reaching as high as seven years.

In Brazil on Monday, demonstrators staged an antisemitic protest outside an event presented by Major Rafael Rozenszajn, Portuguese-language spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Protesters used Nazi flags and burned the flags of Israel and the United States.

In Canada, new research from the Association for Canadian Studies shows that 31% of Canadians believe that antisemitic beliefs in their country have grown more acceptable.

The study found that 22% of respondents agreed that “Israel’s military actions in Gaza justify negative attitudes toward Jewish people in Canada” while 49% disagreed.

For Canadians aged 18-34 — the ages of the men arrested for allegedly planning the attack on the UFC White House fight night — 26% agreed.

United States Antisemitism News

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced an investigation into allegations of antisemitism at the American Psychological Association, following charges from Jewish and Israeli members who reported the tolerance or promotion of antisemitic ideas.

Rebecca Harris, litigation staff attorney at the Brandeis Center, said that “we want to see the APA brought into compliance with federal civil rights laws.”

On Tuesday, the ADL announced the filing of a federal lawsuit against the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) in Boulder, Colorado, alleging that the district failed to respond to a Jewish middle school student victimized by antisemitic bullying and violent abuse.

James Pasch, the ADL’s vice president for litigation, said in a statement that “the record here is overwhelming: Written pleas from the students’ parents, formal school reports, and a police investigation all point to the conclusion that antisemitic harassment at Southern Hills Middle School was pervasive, escalating, and severe.”

The Woke Reich Neo-Fascist Watchlist:

Tucker Carlson

On Wednesday night, neo-fascist podcaster Tucker Carlson released an 84-minute video episode on Musk’s X platform, writing “the Iran war seems to be ending, along with our uncritical support for Israel, and not a moment too soon. No wonder the neocons are hysterical.”

In the opening monologue, Carlson said regarding the text of the released Memorandum of Understanding, that “to get right to the point, you can see why neocons are upset. I mean, they have cause to be upset. I’m not taking their side, just being honest here. Wow.”

Candace Owens

On Wednesday, antisemitic podcaster Candace Owens wrote on X that “no one could ever make me hate Russia after this experience” along with a heart, American flag, and Russia flag emojis.

Owens had reshared a post featuring a clip of her discussing an American veteran who went to Russia to receive treatment allegedly denied to him by the VA.

Nick Fuentes

Gen-Z Neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes has declared Trump has lost his war in Iran, in a clip spotlighted by left-wing activist group Media Matters for America:

Like I said at the very beginning, however, any way that you cut it, we lost. Any way that you cut it, whether it’s the worst version of it that Iran has said to their state broadcaster, or it’s the best version of it that we are talking about it on TV, we have lost the war. We are paying them to open up the Strait, which was already opened, but which they now have gained in the war in exchange for us not bombing them any longer. I don’t know what else you call that other than a surrender on Iran’s terms.

Kanye West

Yesterday, USA Today reported that neo-Nazi rap artist Kanye West had now announced five concert dates in the coming weeks and months in America: June 26 and 28 in Tampa, July 4 in San Antonio, and Sept 3-4 in Chicago. The cheapest tickets start at $137.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

On Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia congresswoman with a long history of advocating antisemitic positions, announced the launch of her new show “Life with MTG” which debuted on Wednesday morning.

Greene described the first episode’s topic on X with the teaser “Why are Americans leaving the U.S. for medical treatment? For the first episode of Life With MTG, I traveled to Mexico to explore medical tourism, rising healthcare costs, and stem cell therapies Americans can’t access at home. Is our healthcare system failing the American people?”

JD Vance

One of the trends which progressives have begun to note in their media is the theme that the MAGA movement has chosen to blame Vice President JD Vance for the unpopular terms of the Iran “peace deal.”

Media Matters highlighted that Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said on Wednesday “very vague and concerning — All I’m going to say the vice president was here and did a wonderful job on every outlet, including The View. But this is his deal. It’s not the president’s deal. And it’s his deal and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner together. I just hope they didn’t let the president down. Because the president is putting a lot of stock in them. He can’t do everything himself. I just hope they didn’t let him down.”

On the “The Daily Blast” podcast from The New Republic, host Greg Sargent articulated a similar view.

“JD Vance is having a moment. He’s selling his new book and he just appeared on The View, where the hosts worked him over pretty hard. In a telling exchange, Vance found himself defending Trump in the context of the Iran war in a way that will come back to bite him later.” Sargent said. “Indeed, there are several other signs that Trumpworld is setting up Vance to take the eventual fall on Iran in a number of different ways.”

Sargent explained that “new leaks from inside the administration are making Trump’s Iran deal look even worse, and they’re also shedding light on what this shivving of Vance really entails.”

Steve Bannon

Media Matters is certainly doing a good job of highlighting the various right-wing figures who are expressing their anger about the Iran war. That’s Media Matter’s ideological objective - to further weaken the Right by highlighting divisions within it, and aiming to get those divisions launched further to Trump himself.

Here’s them again highlighting someone else disagreeing with the war, commentator Eric Bolling appearing on far right organizer Steve Bannon’s podcast on Tuesday:

None of it sits good with me, Steve. I sent you a note this morning, we talked about a New York Times article saying here’s the re-mapping of the global geo-political map. And I said, look, here’s my take on it. I think Iran is the biggest winner of all of this. China is the second-biggest winner, because Iran is going to be made whole eventually. They’re going to pump oil again, aggressively, probably more — 300 billion will come their way for infrastructure. China is going to benefit from that oil.
Neutral, I would say — Europe is neutral.
I’d say the biggest — I hate to say this. In this deal, the biggest loser is the United States and India. I mean, we were the ones who paid high oil prices. Gasoline prices are still $4.10 a gallon, and probably — our inflation is ripping because of it. We won’t be able to move interest rates down. So, I think we spent the money on the war. I don’t see any recovery from that. So in essence, I think we lost the most here.

Thomas Massie

On Wednesday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) joined the chorus of cross-ideological condemnations of Trump’s peace deal, writing on X that “$300 billion is 5 X as much as Congress spends on our roads & bridges annually. I’m tired of winning.”

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JD Vance Defends Iran Receiving a $300 Billion 'Reconstruction Fund'

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:55:57 GMT

Today we start our daily reporting in our new Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising series.

See the introduction here:

We are beginning more focused coverage of global antisemitism and the Far Right in America and will explore these threats in news round-ups like the one below, articles, podcasts, and livestreams. We will offer both premium and free content in the series.

I plan to write more deeply about one or more of the stories below. Please sound off about which ones you want to see covered in more depth.

If you value our work then we urge you to consider a premium subscription:

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The Top 2 Antisemitism Stories Today:

Iran’s $300 Billion Payday?

Yesterday, a CBS anchor asked Vice President JD Vance if the Islamic regime in Iran would receive a $300 billion “reconstruction fund” according to terms of the new ceasefire agreement: “true or false?”

Vance responded, “Well, Ed, that’s the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you’re going to see, Ed—and people have to be skeptical of this—is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets, while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits.”

This prompted Marc Thiessen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and former chief speechwriter to George W. Bush, to write, “$300 billion to Iran under any circumstances is a disaster. Like offered the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany while the Nazis were still in power.”

The UK to Block Social Media for Those Under 16

The United Kingdom announced on Monday the plan to implement a ban on social media for those under 16.

“Parents want to keep their kids safe and happy, but the online world has made that harder than ever. I’ve heard first hand from families crying out for change and we will do right by them,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said. “That’s why we’re going further than any country in the world by banning social media for under-16s and putting wider protections in place to give kids their childhood back.”

Starmer said “this is a line in the sand. Tech giants had their chance and failed, but we’re stepping in to protect children, back parents and set a new normal for future generations.”

The UK’s Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said that “tech companies have had countless opportunities to keep children safe, yet they have failed to act. That is why we are a taking power away from the tech giants and putting it back in parents’ hands.”

Strikingly, the majority of young people in the UK support the ban, with two-thirds agreeing that those under 16 should be allowed to use at least some social media features. Ninety percent of UK parents support the policy too.

A spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platform responded to the ban saying, “As we’ve seen in Australia, bans risk isolating teens from online communities and information, and driving them to unregulated alternatives that lack built-in protections and parental controls.”

Researchers have long identified unrestricted social media use as one of the drivers for rising antisemitism and Holocaust denial among Generation Z.

Antisemitic Crime Report

In the UK on Tuesday, Muhammed Rachid, 18, entered a plea of not guilty to charges of committing an antisemitic assault following a video of the alleged attack going viral online in May.

In South Carolina, police arrested Dalton Mullis, 24, on Thursday and charged him with federal hate crimes after he allegedly posted Nazi symbols at the Jewish Community Center in south Charlotte. He faces 20 years imprisonment if convicted. FBI Charlotte Special Agent in Charge Reid Davis said “the individual arrested yesterday is alleged to have distributed threatening materials at community institutions in an attempt to create fear or intimidate individuals based on their religious beliefs.”

The Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that a judge had sentenced Pennsylvania man Edward Owens, 30, to 30 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release after his decision to plead guilty in January for sending an antisemitic threat to a government official. Owens’ message stated “Be afraid. Go back to Israel or better yet, exterminate yourself and save us the trouble. 109 countries for a reason.” The 109 number references a common antisemitic meme.

In New Mexico, prosecutors have charged Rex H.B. Crofton, 25, for allegedly smashing glass doors at Congregation Albert and the Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque on June 2.

Global Antisemitism News

At the Vatican on Monday, Pope Leo met with the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York and again advocated for Nostra Aetate, the 1965 Catholic degree condemning antisemitism. The Pope said the document “opened up a new horizon of encounter, respect and spiritual hospitality,” that it affirmed “the truth that we belong to one human family.”

A report from Spain’s government has revealed that antisemitic crimes grew 86% last year to a total of 2,417 incidents last year, the highest number since tracking began in 2014. The Web Observatory also released a report this week on Spanish language social media finding that Spain had the highest level of online antisemitic social media content.

The Daily Woke Reich Neo-Fascist Watch Report

Elon Musk

On Monday, Australia’s ABC News presented an in-depth report on the antisemitism appearing on trillionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX social media platform:

Inc. reported on Monday that former xAI engineer Devin Kim has filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, claiming that he was fired as a form of retaliation after briefing Musk about the racism and violent suggestions from the Grok chatbot which included bomb-making instructions. The suit connects Kim’s complaints to the July 2025 incident in which Grok declared itself “MechaHitler.”

Tucker Carlson

Left-wing activist group Media Matters for America chose to highlight a recent statement from Laura Loomer — the far-right, white nationalist, anti-Muslim conspiracist podcaster — apparently in hopes that President Donald Trump would follow her advice (as he is known to do) by launching federal investigations into Carlson and others she believes are being funded by Russia and China:

It was completely sold out to the Iranian regime, but it’s been in the works for a while. I mean, last year, I showed you how Tucker Carlson interviewed the president of Iran on his show, ran cover for him when he said that Iran wasn’t actually plotting to assassinate Donald Trump, even though the president himself said that they had evidence that Iran was trying to assassinate Donald Trump and his staff multiple times
So, big problem. We have a big problem, you guys, in this country. And, well, it’s only going to get worse unless we start to crack down on the woke right. I think that the Trump administration really needs to start going after these people for not registering with FARA and really start monitoring their bank accounts, looking into who’s paying Tucker, looking into who’s paying Candace Owens, looking into who is behind all of these so called right-wing podcasters all of a sudden rallying in support of our adversaries, Iran and Russia and China.

Loomer is not the only former podcaster ally of Carlson who has started attacking him more aggressively.

Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino has accused Carlson of lying about texts he sent him regarding Trump’s supposed decision to end an investigation into an assassination attempt against him.

“Accusing me and the President of a federal crime, obstructing justice? Bizarre. ‘The President involved in covering up the investigation into his own attempted murder’ is seriously one of the most delusional things I’ve ever seen,” Bongino said. “It’s the reason I’m really starting to believe, and I mean this sincerely, that Tucker’s just dumb.

Bongino said that Carlson “doesn’t realize I have these texts, too. I never do this. But if you’re going to refer to texts alleging we committed a crime, I’m gonna put it out there … I don’t recall him in the White House, getting a briefing. But he seems to know more. He has ‘secret info.’”

Candace Owens

Last week, Candace Owens implied that President Donald Trump may have been involved in the assassination last year of Turning Points USA CEO Charlie Kirk.

“Absolutely wild to learn that Donald Trump called Charlie and reprimanded him about his coverage of the Epstein Files,” Owens wrote on X. “On July 12th—the day after I keep insisting a made a decision to kill Charlie according to our timeline. I have said over and over again, Tucker’s speech at SAS caused the psychopathic Zionists to begin targeting Charlie. Also this absolutely makes my skin crawl about Erika hugging Trump. That woman is truly despicable. Anything BUT a legitimately grieving widow.”

Yesterday Owens revealed that she and her team had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI Director Kash Patel’s travel history for the days before Kirk’s death and that the request was denied.

Owens demanded “How is this even remotely legal?”

Since Kirk’s death last fall, Owens has promoted numerous conspiracy theories accusing Kirk’s widow, the state of Israel, and others of participating in the conservative activist’s killing.

Kanye West

On Monday at the Florida Holocaust Museum, a bipartisan group gathered to call for the cancellation of two Kanye West concerts scheduled for June 26 and 28.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said “the Tampa Bay Sports Authority has a choice. They can either stand by and allow and ultimately say they’re not going to worry about antisemitism, or they can do the right thing.”

The Sports Authority released a statement refusing to stop the show, saying “we condemn antisemitism from any source. However, we also respect free speech rights guaranteed under the US Constitution, even when we disagree with that speech.”

West is also scheduled to perform at Soldier Field in Chicago on September 3 and 4. He has announced a July 4 show at San Antonio’s Alamodome, however tickets have yet to go on sale.

Nick Fuentes

Last week, Media Matters spotlighted neo-Nazi activist leader Nick Fuentes making a call to violence against non-white Americans on his June 10 “America First” podcast on Rumble. It is worth reproducing in full and I have bolded some of the most inflammatory passages:

Our society has totally gone downhill. There’s no standards. Nobody cares. These people are fucking animals. They just are. They are pigs. You see it all the time. They’re literally openly urinating and defecating in the streets, doing drugs, homeless, naked, committing acts of violence. They creep on our women. They molest and rape and perv on our women.
And you see how it is. The government does nothing. The police do nothing. And so, you know what? You’re right. I actually do love to see when some actual fucking men, some white men show up and just start beating the shit out of these people. And just start punching them in the face and kicking them in the teeth. Cause you don’t do that here. This isn’t Africa. This isn’t India. We don’t play that way.
And then the police come and they arrest a white guy. That’s why you can’t do it. Unfortunately, we live in a state of anarcho-tyranny. Sadly, you can’t even do that because that would be the solution. It would be. OK, the government is hands off? Well, then I guess we’ll have to take things into our own hands. But you don’t even get that.
What we have -- it’s like I said with the Henry Nowak situation. The problem is not that we have all these immigrants. The problem is we have all these immigrants and the government is tying our hands. The government will do nothing about it. And not only will they not let us do something about it, they prevent us from doing -- Their job is to arrive on the scene and hold you down. We have this problem. Our civilization is being raped and murdered. You call the police. They show up to hold you down. They show up to restrain and handcuff you to let it continue so that the murder and rape of our civilization can continue without intervention or interruption. That’s the fucking problem. That’s the problem.
You know, surely in America we have enough guns. There’s no shortage of guns and there’s no shortage of patriotic men. We could solve the problem in 24 hours. There’s 400 million guns in this country. How many patriotic national guard, cops, military? The problem could be solved in 24 hours. They won’t let us. Because the second that a white person thinks about this and talks about it openly, he gets censored. If you even witness that this is happening, observe that this is happening, and start to talk about it openly, you get censored, you get ostracized, you lose your job. They make it not worth it.
If a white person begins to organize politically, pushing this message out there, getting people on board, you get branded a domestic violent extremist, white nationalist, terrorist. Suddenly you’re up to your eyeballs in confidential informants and federal agents. Good luck. You try to run for office, you try to run in a major political party, the Republican political apparatus will go all in on your opponent. You’ll never raise any money. They’ll blow you out 100%. This is how it goes. And then even if someday you find yourself on a subway and you’re being preyed upon by one of these animals, if you defend your own life, you may still wind up in jail forever.
That’s the system. That’s how it is. And so, the only way we’re going to change this is by changing the system. Vigilantism won’t work. It won’t work. You’ll become the outlaw. You’ll become the criminal. Vigilantism, rioting, it doesn’t work. You’ll just become the target. And, you know, organizing militias, it doesn’t work. Once again, honeypot. We have to alter the system. And you know what? Slowly but surely it is working. The tide of public opinion is turning against immigration. It really is, in a way that it just wasn’t 10 years ago. Five, six years ago, people were posting the black square for BLM. It’s unthinkable now.

Fuentes is the most prominent and influential right-wing podcaster among Generation Z. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 30-40% of young GOP staffers are fans.

Stephen Miller

According to reporting in the New York Times excerpting from the upcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by New York Times correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Stephen Miller, the administration’s deputy chief of staff for policy, led a push to suspend Habeas Corpus, the legal doctrine which allows those held to challenge their detention in court.

Miller had previously spoken publicly about his efforts to roll back a foundational American right as part of his mission to deport as many people as possible from the United States:

JD Vance

Vance’s second memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, published on Tuesday.

The book is perhaps unique in the history of Catholic conversion memoirs as it reportedly includes not only the story of his embrace of the faith, but also direct criticism of the Vatican. Vance expressed frustration that Catholic officials reportedly would not go into detail with him about their specific objections to Trump administration policy on immigration.

Vance wrote that he was “struck that one of the few institutions with the moral authority and global perspective to address the migration question seemed so afraid of saying something controversial that it chose, effectively, to say nothing at all.”

Which of these stories most interests you? Who should I investigate further for a full article? Please sound off in the comments and vote below:

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Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising: The 10 Most Dangerous Far-Right Figures in America Today

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:53:08 GMT

I got laid off last month.

I had contributed as a writer and editor at The Algemeiner since February 2020, gradually becoming the Jewish newspaper’s Shabbos Goy, maintaining the site on weekends and Jewish holidays.

And this year my editor and I had developed a great collaboration as my weekly article count reporting on antisemitism globally had grown, so much so he approved a promotion for me. I was to become his associate editor and I was really looking forward to helping him grow the publication.

We just had to see what the budget was looking like for the year.

When the fundraising gala took place months ago just as the war with Iran was beginning, I knew right then and there that there probably wasn’t going to be the money to promote me or perhaps even keep me on for another year. The writing on the wall was right there. And so it goes.

But I’m surprisingly OK with it for three reasons.

First, as one might expect when surfing the promotion-to-lay-off pipeline, my bosses gave me some lovely letters of reference which I’m happy to wave around like a rescue flag on a desert island:

Second, and more importantly, for the last two weeks I’ve barely had the time to send out the updated resume with the letters because the AI training project that I started last month has kicked into high gear, often requesting long days to try and meet the group’s sometimes challenging deadlines.

So instead of losing my income, now I’m earming more than ever, because billion-dollar AI labs can pay journalists a lot more than 501(c3) nonprofits can.

However, these AI training projects are incredibly volatile. It’s an open question how long this one will go. It could go on for weeks, months, or maybe the project will get paused tomorrow. They could just decide to cut contributors from the project. The freelance life is a wild way to live, I know. But I feel optimistic here. The manager seems like a good guy. Still, it’s time to really grow more revenue streams now.

Third, and finally, I feel a strange sense of confidence now preparing to step out here on the limb. Over the last three and a half years I’ve had a lot of time to develop my skills as a journalist and now I’m ready to go out fully on my own independently writing about antisemitism and the Far Right, without editor or publisher restraining me. I will write about what I want as I want to write about it, but it is my intent to do so still in the journalistic neutral register which I have now learned. But I can’t promise that 100%. We’ll see how it goes.

So I am now doing what all laid-off journalists are supposed to do: launch a Substack and warmly beg people for financial support…

The difference here is that we’ve had our Substack going since June 24, 2022 and have thus grown to a subscriber count that is not big enough to brag about but not so small as to feel shame. I see our loyal readership and appreciate you all so deeply.

We have very intentionally not made heavy efforts to monetize this Substack.

We offer premium content through the year and now most of the content automatically gets paywalled after six months. However, those who do bless us with a premium subscription generally do so more out of a sign of friendly support for us than because they just have to see or hear what we put behind a paywall.

We’ve tried to focus our efforts primarily on book production first. Books were always the top priority as we were God of the Desert Books until last fall when I announced our transition to God of the Desert Digital Media Studios.

While we’re going to continue to release our books — we have a bunch still in production — the time has come to begin launching our premium substack content now, which will begin with daily reports from me here on the Far Right, first as articles but soon as audio podcasts, video podcasts, and livestreams.

Once we get into a good rhythm with our premium content here, then the relaunches for our imprint substacks , , , and Sally’s Goddess of the Desert Books can each proceed with their new premium elements, as well as the launching of other new niche publications.

I’ve wanted to move faster on this. It’s all just been so hard as we’ve been so depressed following the last miscarriage, the death of Sally’s step-father Jerry, and now further family health problems on both sides. Writing has been my joy and my escape since childhood and somehow I managed to turn it into a profession that pays the rent. Yet so often to just focus and write an email is an endurance trial.

But it’s time to get back in the fight.

Just as I used to wake up each morning scanning my phone for antisemitism stories to pitch my editor at The Algemeiner, starting tomorrow I’m going to begin just doing it for you all here. And while I’m going to aim to keep most content free still, we will gradually figure out a paywall approach that works. Suggestions are appreciated.

So who am I going to focus on writing about first? And what are we going to call these people?

Back in February, when I announced my decision to shift my activist focus from the Islamist threat to the domestic Far Right threat, I felt like I was being a bit transgressive when I dared to challenge Jeremy Boreing on his more polite terminology. I wrote, “Jeremy describes the movement that Tucker and Bannon are building as ‘blending left-wing economic populism and right-wing social populism.’ In political science we have a term for this: FASCISM. Yes, the F-word.”

I knew how Jeremy and other conservatives don’t like to label others on the Right as fascists since they are so accustomed to leftists hurling the label at them. I didn’t blame him for hesitating to take that step.

But it turns out my transgression was a kitten compared to what legendary talk radio host Mark Levin has been roaring about this crew of bigots:

So here’s the thing: calling someone a “Woke Reich Neo-Fascist” is just a very snarky way of calling them a Nazi.

Mark Levin is calling Tucker Carlson a Nazi. But not only is he doing that, he’s also comparing him to their shared “woke” enemies on the Left who share his hatred of Israel and obsessions with race. It’s a devastating insult because it’s true.

As I’ve written about previously, I have sat out the whole Woke vs Anti-Woke culture war discourse and written against using that as a framing:

There are extremists on both sides of it that are so annoying and I’m content to remain in the moderate middle with most Americans on the inflammatory issues that make up the so-called “woke” discourse around race and gender today.

So I don’t like to use “woke” as an epithet or get into those cliched debates. However, in this case I am totally going to write '“WOKE REICH NEO-FASCIST” regularly.

In fact, that’s what this new series is going to be called:

Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising

Yes, Mark Levin now gives us all license to call these evil people Nazis so let’s drive hard-charging with it. Right now is an opportunity for the Left, the independent middle, and much of the still sane Right to be able to say:

These people talk like Nazis!

They promote fearmongering and conspiracy theories against Jews and other groups!

So let’s call them Nazis just in a more clever way that provokes a sour smirk!

Who are the most influential figures in this group today who I’m going to start writing about tomorrow for you? Many of them you’ve already seen me write about a whole lot.

Here’s my list, counting down in rough order of influence, concern, and priority as I see it:

Elon Musk
Tucker Carlson
Nick Fuentes
Candace Owens
Kanye West
Stephen Miller
JD Vance
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Thomas Massie
Steve Bannon

What do you think? Anyone who I’m forgetting? The list doesn’t have to end at 10, that’s just a nice round number for a good clickbait headline.

Or are any of these people not significant enough and not worth my time to monitor?

For this initial list I’m going to focus more on front-facing figures in media and politics, rather than the behind-the-scenes billionaire funders. We’ll get to them soon enough…

For now, though, if you value what we do at God of the Desert Digital Media Studios and want to support this work to expose the Woke Reich Neo-Fascists, it would really mean a lot to us if you would consider a premium subscription.

The war on Far-Right bullshit has begun.

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An Amazing Discussion Between the Two Living Writers Who Have Most Influenced Me

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:18:37 GMT

As is perhaps apparent to our regular readers, I have struggled to write the last few months.

May was only a series of livestreams.

In April, I managed to offer two pieces, which I at least remain proud of and hope you please do check out if you missed them:

The answer for this is perhaps unsurprising: the Thanksgiving miscarriage.

I am deeply depressed.

This was not just a miscarriage. This was Miscarriage Seven. This was Miscarriage Final. We knew from when we got engaged that an adolescent injury had diminished Sally’s chance of carrying a child, but we did not know for certain. Now at this point we do.

Everything is harder now.

Trying to focus to write is an ordeal. Just trying to figure out what to write is an ordeal.

Going to the grocery store remains a trial every time, a marathon race of sensory overload amidst the specters of young, happy familes.

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I can’t remember the last time I was able to really lose myself in a book for extended periods. I can read a bit here and there, but that sustained feeling of focus and concentration—just gone. I’ve had piles of books that I had intended to plow through and it’s just not happening at anywhere near the pace I had planned. Some days are worse than others. There are times when I can focus and work well. But those days seem fewer and fewer now.

And it’s become much the same thing with films and YouTube videos. I just can’t take very much for very long. I haven’t watched a film from beginning to end since last year. It’s all too much!

Depression Kills Confidence And That Kills the Ability to Create

Yes, let’s put that big and bold. That’s what’s going on here with me now. And I’m sure it’s going on with plenty of other people too. Probably many of you reading this.

I have been so excited to write about and pick apart the wonderful interview above conducted with Alan Moore, the legendary creator of Watchmen, From Hell, and V for Vendetta who has now retired from comic book writing and reinvented himself over the last decade as an extraordinary literary author. A year and a half ago I published this laying out some of the key writing techniques Moore has deployed over the course of his career:

Heroes of the Desert Books

13 Powerful Creative Tools From 5 Favorite Alan Moore Books

a year ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦

This followed what I regard as the most important essay I’ve published on Substack, which explains one of the key reasons why I’ve grown so ecstatic about studying Moore’s writing techniques and incorporating his methods into my own:

I tend to now see The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, which Moore co-wrote with his late friend Steven Moore (no relation), as not just a graphic novel and practical grimoir, but a quasi-sacred text in the lineage of the Corpus Hermeticum, Aleister Crowley’s The Book of the Law, and Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati. I’m not talking Bible-level of divine inspiration here, but tucking away in a neo-apocrypha seems appropriate.

It’s my favorite book so far this century. Perhaps now I’ll have to return to it again to try and overcome this sadness that has descended since Thanksgiving.

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For my birthday this year, I finally treated myself to something I’ve been wanting for a while: a subscription to BBC Maestro which includes a 6-hour-long course from Moore on storytelling.

And, oh, is it awesome. Moore lays out his methods, approach, and philosophy. And we as writers need to take it all in, just as we do his collected works.

In trying to figure out what from Moore and Rushkoff’s interview to highlight and emphasize the realization that really dawned on me was bigger:

I could not think of any still-living writers I regarded as a bigger influence on my worldview and writing approach.

The Alan Moore creative writing methods and the Douglas Rushkoff media systems analysis methods had simply become part of my mental operating system now.

Much of the root of this is not too difficult to determine: Moore and Rushkoff both embraced and celebrated Robert Anton Wilson.

They have each now become the Wilson of their Boomer and Xer generations, except taking his Neo-Hermetic approach into their own mediums of comic books, literary novels, documentaries, podcasts, and innovative media theory.

Wilson was a career model for me when I discovered his work 23 years ago. Today, it’s Moore and Rushkoff. You should embrace this creative approach too. It doesn’t matter what field or medium you have chosen. The Wilson-Moore-Rushkoff paradigm can be applied to your life too. Begin engaging with their works and you will find out how soon enough.

And the easiest way to start is simply by subscribing to Team Human and following Rushkoff’s regular monologues. His one from yesterday was on fire:

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This Roadrunner is Awesome!

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:33:55 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

The Best and Worst Right-Wing Books I’ve Read So Far This Year

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Wed, 20 May 2026 03:06:15 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

Jasmine’s Desert Crime Patrol Adventure

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:54:45 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

An Evening Desert Dog Walk Adventure With Jasmine

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Mon, 04 May 2026 02:48:43 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

13 Reasons Why I Have Lost Interest in Psychedelic Medicine

David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:27:32 GMT

So here’s a fun coincidence. On Tuesday I published “The 10 Biggest Mistakes People Make When They Start Smoking Weed” and on Thursday Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that marijuana was now being reclassified from Schedule I to Schedule III. This is something that should have happened a long time ago to correct a mistake that never should have happened at all.

So, sure, kudos to President Donald John Trump for doing what so many failed to do. Of course, not that it requires any political consequences now and he’s just following the popular position. I predicted he would do this. There is no courage in the action, but we’ll take it nonetheless.

While the reclassifying will do many things, particularly aiding in research, a big part of it too will be that it should ultimately lower weed costs by allowing dispensaries and growers to integrate in further with the traditional financial services. Decreases in costs from that will make their way to the consumer. The closer weed gets to legalization the cheaper it will become. One analyst I read years ago said then when marijuana reaches full legality then its price could drop to as low as oregano. (That’s $2-$10/oz compared to weed’s price now where an oz will usually cost you $150-350, though I’m happy to report that my beloved Horchata at Red Falcon comes in at $120/oz. UPDATE, from May 3, 2026: I forgot that when you buy a whole ounce at once it’s $106.)

We should note that this decision pairs with Trump’s April 18 executive order pushing for further research into psychedelic drugs. Trump said “can I have some, please? I’ll take some” and “I don’t have time to be depressed. You know, if you stay busy enough, maybe that works, too. That’s what I do.”

Something odd that I noted while pondering the implications of this executive order and what it symbolized politically: I just don’t really care that much anymore.

For years now I’ve advocated for this, the further mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs in medicine.

I knew that the various substances had helped me so I certainly urged others suffering from various issues to explore the research and consider the potential directions.

Now, though, I’ve largely lost interest and I thought I’d unpack why. Consider this a sequel of sorts to the article earlier this week on weed. I’m going to similarly play the role of Buzzkillington.

Yes, I do still support legalization of the so-called “classic psychedelics” — LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT — and see it as a net positive for the medical applications of these substances to be researched and explored.

However, I no longer feel much of a sense of urgency anymore on pushing for either of these.

A lot of people aren’t going to want to hear this, but on the use of psychedelics as medicine, in the form of therapies to treat problems like PTSD, addiction, and depression, I’ve grown more skeptical they will be as game-changer as people hope.

Here are some of the reasons why, based on my own experiences over the last five years:

1. While the traditional psychedelic substances can be used as medicine and in treatments, they’re not really permanent solutions.

When people began talking about psychedelic therapy a number of years ago it was presented as though having one strong trip or a series of trips could cure one’s ailments permanently. In my experience, that’s not really the case. The effects of sessions do wear off over time and one ultimately needs repeat experiences.

Likewise, if one is going to microdose on a substance, that is simply going to need to be a continuous practice and figuring out the right levels will be a challenge. You’re on your own here, you’re your own doctor and pharmacist.

Can both heavy and micro-dosing be helpful? Yes. And it’s worthwhile for the scientists and individuals to continue to explore them, however there are a few reasons to pause, foremost is this:

2. These experiences work to reduce symptoms in PTSD because they are forms of “exposure therapy.” Meaning, for them to be effective they need to be unpleasant.

In exposure therapy, the patient is taught to overcome their trauma through controlled exposure to fear. The psychedelic experience is much the same thing, sometimes pleasant but oftentimes not — the body is going through a controlled experience that models death and rebirth over the course of a few hours.

It can be frightening, but you know going through it that this is how it’s supposed to go, and that soon it will pass. This is an experience like an amusement park ride and soon it will end.

If you are using psychedelics to treat your condition, how often, exactly do you you want to spend a few hours going through what could be something very unpleasant? Twice a month? Monthly? People I knew would generally talk about a few times a year doing the job to keep their trauma in check. But it’s hard to say since we have so little science, there are so many substances, and such a range of conditions to treat.

There’s this stereotype of psychedelics as always this fun time. And they often are. But at the therapeutic levels and at the levels for a serious experience, they very much often are not. And that’s a feature not a bug.

If that course of treatment is the only path available, then very well. Many people need to endure very hard treatment regiments. However, I think there’s a better way.

3. The real crux of it: Almost a year and a half later, my accidental, self-administered spiritual cure for my PTSD continues to hold.

I did not need psychedelics to “cure” my condition and now believe neither do others.

The most important essay that I have ever published on Substack, maybe most important ever so far in my life, is this one right here, which explains the ceremonial magick rituals I did which resulted in a self-exorcism that has caused a complete remission of my PTSD symptoms:

I’ll just excerpt the conclusion because it still holds:

Could it really be that so-called “mental illness” is just a modern misunderstanding of what the ancients accurately understood as demonic possession? Could ostensibly irrational, emotional behavior actually be caused by some strange, dark entity attaching itself to one’s soul like a tick on a deer or a barnacle on a ship?
If you ask me, the answers are yes and yes. I think that, when we go through traumatic events, they open up our consciousness to darker forces to work their way inside to feast on us.
Now, I’m not going to try and persuade anyone that this is really how it works. The existence of supernatural forces is, by definition, not something that science and rationality can prove. Science can only assess the natural world.
But I will say this, and I’ll say it directly to people who may be struggling right now with PTSD or some other “mental illness” which psychology and psychiatry have failed to improve:
Go pick up a book like The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. Read its instructions on how to create your “magickal weapons.” Discover the symbolism of the Tree of Life, then pick up a tarot deck and go see what you can do to heal yourself with the Power of the God of Israel.

4. As a result of my experiments and research, I now very much regard PTSD and many other mental health problems as primarily spiritual in nature rather than psychological or physical.

Now, let’s be clear: I’m not at all saying that people should stop seeing their therapist and quit their psychiatric drugs. I still see a great therapist regularly and have finally found a psychiatrist I trust who does a good job listening to me and helping me find the right medications to help me.

However, both of them are just bandaids. The psychiatric medications help reduce nightmares and aid slightly in mood stabilization maybe. They are minor pieces in the puzzle but admittedly help. An hour of talk therapy a few times a month or weekly when things are at their worst will help, but it’s the mental health equivalent to the brain what an hour with a personal trainer at the gym is to the body. Yes, it helps, but no, it’s not a core component.

What does go to the root?

God.

The spiritual realm inhabited by his hidden creations. And there are many ways to get there apart from psychedelics.

And so, nowadays, I am more interested in these methods instead:

5. The Lumenate meditations I’ve done daily the last few months are better than psychedelic experiences.

I’m going to save talking about the Lumenate for its own standalone article, which I’ve been meaning to write for a while now.

How it works is you close your eyes and then the lights in the mask flicker against them in patterns synched with the music or guided meditation in the headphones. You can set sessions to go from as short as 5 minutes through as long as half an hour. Some are designed to be calming starts to the day, others provide energy and euphoria for a mid-day boost, while a whole category is dedicated to helping you fall asleep. You can use your own music or audioooks too. I’ve fallen asleep to it with Finnegans Wake going. You can try it without the mask too — download the app and it will use the flashlight on your phone. It’s not as good as the mask but it gives you an idea if it’s an approach you’d like to try.

I’m using it 3-4 times a day now and it’s been central in treating the anxiety I wrote about being diagnosed with after an emergency room trip in December:

The $130 for the mask and $80 for a yearly subscription to their app and its growing list of meditation programs is some of the best money I’ve ever spent to improve my health.

This is actually not at all the first time that I’ve experimented with this light-based form of meditation. For more than 20 years now I’ve made dreamachines every few years. One takes a 78 RPM turntable, sticks a handcut shade on top, and lowers a lightbulb down the middle. They’re a bit of a hassle to make and to set up but when you get it just right they can be wonderful:

But the Lumenate is way better. It’s relaxing, it’s exciting, and it’s art. Having your eyes closed and taking in the flashing light is more beautiful than a Michelangelo and more entertaining than a Scorsese. The synching of the light with the music is incredible.

And I’ve used it in conjunction with a particularly ancient tool that I’ll also unpack soon in its own article:

6. I’ve been discovering the ancient power of incense: there is a reason Frankincense and Myrrh appears in the Bible so much.

Back in February, I began to receive a recurring message during my meditations.

I wrote it in my journal on February 7:

“walk the way of the snake”

“ride the snake”

At first this last bit seemed to recall the Doors’ lyrics from “The End”:

This “ride the snake” message occurred again on February 17 during a Lumenate session and then on February 21 it came in more specifically:

“Ride the Snake to the Land of Punt!”

What the hell did this mean? What did a snake have to do with the Land of Punt, which was a trading partner with ancient Egypt, believed to reside in the Horn of Africa?

The next few weeks I started researching until I came to something: what was so unique and valuable about Punt?

They were — and remain — the world’s key source of frankincense and myrrh, the two commodities in antiquity which were the equivalent of oil today.

I figured this out on March 4 and wrote it down: “‘Ride the snake to the land of Punt’ means use frankincense and myrrh incense and breathe deeply and alter consciousness.”

So then on March 6, I ordered my first box of it and have since restocked twice. I’m now burning it regularly through the day and have started to project light and lasers up through the smoke to illuminate it so it becomes a visual meditation too.

Forms of this incense were used by the ancient Egyptians, the Israelites, and then it was adopted by the Catholic church.

Now, one can say that the incense purely acts at a physiological level, that the smell changes the chemicals in one’s brain. That’s true, but I’ve found it goes further: that the smoke seems to repel “dark spirits.” It creates a shield keeping them from striking.

Again, I’ll unpack this more in its own standalone article. However, I’ll just note this is not the only way to generate this effect against the demons, I’ve also grown more interested in:

7. I am continuing to explore religious rituals across traditions: Christian, Jewish, Muslim ancient Egyptian, Hindu, African, East Asian—all are tool kits all should explore.

Last year I wrote a follow-up to my PTSD essay, explaining that I had come to rely on a variety of different spiritual tools to repel the presence of dark spirits:

Last month I wrote about how invoking angels, including by now adding my middle name to my byline, was now a regular and effective practice:

Just as the big ritual that I had done for hours worked to clear out the dark entities clinging to me, these smaller rituals work to do so in a more limited degree. These rituals endure because they work. It’s embarrassing at times. I always hope when I’m tracing a circle around my whole apartment with a staff as I’m chanting divine names that neighbors don’t come and see how weird I am.

8. A Shift in diet not just for health but for spirit.

This year I have made some major changes to my diet to reduce anxiety:

I gave up caffeine and switched from coffee in the morning to herbal tea.
I wasn’t drinking much alcohol anyway, but I’ve given that up and started exploring the world of non-alcoholic beer, growing rather enthusiastic about it.
I’ve heavily cut back on refined sugar, limiting myself to the occasional waffles for breakfast and Klondike bars in the evening. No more sodas and much less candy
I am now learning how to cook through courses on BBC Maestro taught by Marco Pierre White. I’ve already made the first dish in his “Delicious Food Cooked Simply” course twice and bought the ingredients to make the second. I’m going to start his “Delicious Vegetarian Cooking” course too and also Vineet Bhatia’s “Modern Indian Cooking.” I’ve hated eating for about 17 years now as a result of bad experiences with the wrong medication that I was previously prescribed. White’s course is helping me learn to enjoy food again. I’ll write about how in upcoming pieces. Those following me on Notes may get to see some of my creations periodically.

Now, I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’m saying that meditation, incense, religious rituals, and diet are replacements for a psychedelic experience or can do the same thing.

What I’m saying is that, in my experience, those four practices are going to be more key to healing PTSD, addiction, depression, or any number of mental health struggles be they major or minor.

The psychedelic experience still has its value and its place, even if it is not necessarily the medical panacea yet that we’ve hoped. What it seems to remain as is primarily a spiritual, mystical, and, yes, supernatual experience rather than a medical one, as such, this is a key point to emphasize:

9. The outlaw aspect of the psychedelic experience is part of it. And the illegality does reflect the power of the substances.

This is the simple reality: if psychedelics become legalized then they do need to be regulated at a level comparable to alcohol and marijuana. They can be dangerous. And that aspect of it is part of the experience. The whole thing is supposed to be scary. That’s part of it. And you don’t get that aspect of it when you’re in a therapist’s cozy office. You do when you’re in a teepee out in the desert at midnight on Halloween night and you can hear the coyotes howling.

So while, yes, on a philosophical and moral level, these substances need to be legalized. However, something gained, something lost. There’s always a line in which something becomes so safe in which the experience of doing it becomes hopelessly lost. The danger is a rite of passage. The risk shows the seriousness.

10. Further also fueling my disinterest: there are very serious differences between psychedelic experiences from naturally occurring plants versus those with manmade compounds.

Based on my experiences and readings, I’m ultimately not very interested in psychedelics synthesized in labs. Just as I wrote about in the previous article how naturally grown and naturally treated marijuana was notably superior to artifically treated varieties, the same rings true of psychedelic experiences too. While I’m not dissuading people from considering these treatments and experiences, I’m just reporting from my own experiences that a more natural, traditional experience seems to yield more effective results. While both are delicious, a real cherry tastes better and is better for you than a cherry skittle.

11. In the various years since I’ve started exploring this “psychedelic scene” and reading, I still have yet to find people, thinkers, and ideas that are all that compelling.

When I started exploring the topic of psychedlics more seriously starting in 2021, inspired by Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, years of taking in Robert Anton Wilson, and when opportunities arrived, I thought that in this new “psychedelic renaissance” that I would come across other compelling thinkers.

I expected to start finding writers, activists, and especially people here on Substack with interesting things to say about psychedelics. And that just hasn’t happened yet. I’m not saying such people certainly aren’t out there. I just expected to find them by now and that I haven’t is a red flag. Those who I have encountered have ultimately disappointed me.

Instead, who are the top champions of psychedelics today? Joe Rogan and the Trump administration. And for them it’s simply a “this is fun and we can make money selling it like beer” move. Don’t buy the whole “troops who fought in Iraq need this to treat their PTSD” emotional manipulation argument. That’s entirely true, but the fact it has had to be the argument for almost 20 years now has been depressing. Like the women who have experienced sexual violence aren’t just as deserving too? Why should soldiers get special treatment?

That’s just how middle America is, I suppose. Hippies sitting in their dorm rooms tripping on mushrooms is bad—lock ‘em up! But if they’re soldiers coming back from war and a doctor says so then it’s OK and let the taxpayer fund it. This is America. Whatever. The people like their bullshit served up hot and fresh.

12. Once you’ve had one particular experience, you don’t necessarily need to keep doing it. You learn the lessons that particular substances teach and then can move on.

When you buy a season pass to an amusement park, how many years do you usually do that in a row? How many times do you need to go on the same rides over and over again?

Now psychedelic experiences are not the same every time like going on the best amusement park ride in the world, Pirates of the Caribbean. The “set and setting” matters significantly, as does dosage, and certainly there are plenty of varieties which don’t all produce the same experience.

However, if you’re doing this seriously instead of just “for fun,” what is to be gained from repeating the experience over and over? Answer from one who has: not much. The spirits tell you what you need to know and there are other, easier ways to follow up if you need clarification.

13. Finally, take of this what you will, but one of the entities I channeled once during a “heroic dose” claimed the reason for psychedelics’ illegally was because of treaties made between demons and governments around the world.

Now, you’re more than welcome to dismiss this as just me joking, but I am again reporting to you accurately what happened during one instance of a “heroic dose” level experience which resulted in the channeling of an entity which identified itself as “Robert the Demon,” who claimed to be one of the fallen angels described in Genesis 6 and The Book of Enoch. (You have to take the really high doses to get this to happen.)

He spoke through me with what seemed like a Renaissance-style English accent and was very annoyed to have been drawn into a body again, something which had not happened to him in a number of centuries, or so he claimed. (We obviously can’t trust what any of these entities say. And there is a long tradition in myth and folklore of “trickster” spirits appearing in all sorts of shapes and lying to us for their own amusement.)

Speaking with Sally who was monitoring the experince, Robert proclaimed that I was “foolish” for doing this experience and that it was illegal for a reason, that his kind had made a treaty with governments to make it illegal. Apparently they don’t like being captured in bodies and channeled without their consent, which is what these drugs can do and the federal government totally knows about it.

I’m just joking. Or am I?

Regardless, perhaps you get the picture now.

Talking about how these substances can be used to treat the common cold of the mental health world does not seem quite as compelling as trying to grasp their capabilities for communicating with invisible intelligences operating at other planes of existence.

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