The Modern Malaise

By George Boreas

This critique of the new political right and left – the frogs and snowflakes – applies René Girard's ideas on mimetic desire and explores the social consequences of it becoming unhinged: rivalry, obsession, the "black pill," and the recession of the sacred, or what they used to call the "death of God." A remedy is proposed in the end.

 

Discover countless insights on what's making the frogs gay, why a lot of philosophy is sadomasochism, why homosexuality is a humiliation fetish, why paganism is not a good eugenics program, and how Christianity rises above all these things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Boreas
• Release date: Jan 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224333561

George Boreas

eorge Boreas is a Canadian expat living in Shanghai, China. He was born in the Balkans. He has a professional background in engineering and business, and he now teaches economics. He moonlights as as an amateur boxer and a writer of short stories, novels, and essays on René Girard's mimetic theory.

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Copyright © 2024 George Boreas

All rights reserved

The Modern Malaise:

A Girardian Treatise on the Culture War 

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Cover art: The Frogs Who Ask for a King, Gustave Moreau, 1884.

Cover design by George Boreas

The Modern Malaise

A Girardian Treatise on the Culture War

George Boreas

Virgil the True

To the frogs and snowflakes inside all of us.

THE FROGS, grieved at having no established Ruler, sent ambassadors to Jupiter entreating for a King. Perceiving their simplicity, he cast down a huge log into the lake. The Frogs were terrified at the splash occasioned by its fall and hid themselves in the depths of the pool. But as soon as they realized that the huge log was motionless, they swam again to the top of the water, dismissed their fears, climbed up, and began squatting on it in contempt. After some time they began to think themselves ill‐treated in the appointment of so inert a Ruler, and sent a second deputation to Jupiter to pray that he would set over them another sovereign. He then gave them an Eel to govern them. When the Frogs discovered his easy good nature, they sent yet a third time to Jupiter to beg him to choose for them still another King. Jupiter, displeased with all their complaints, sent a Heron, who preyed upon the Frogs day by day till there were none left to croak upon the lake.

– The Frogs Who Wanted a King, Aesop.

(trans. George Fyler Townsend)

Foreword

I urged George to write this book as a Girardian critique of what you could call the dissident right, the Nietzschean right, or the alt-right. None of these names quite captures the essence of this resurgence of reactionary ideas in ironic, digital garb, but they all point to a trend that demands closer examination.

In the end, George and his anonymous interlocutor, Virgil the True, settle on the term the New Right – an old label for a modern phenomenon; a loose collection of online communities and figures who have gained prominence in recent years for their strident opposition to mainstream conservatism and their embrace of transgressive, often nihilistic worldviews. While Virgil at first appears a sympathizer, George is quick to denounce the ideological core of the movement.

Drawing on the work of French philosopher René Girard, George argues that the New Right, for all its posturing as a rebellious underdog, is merely the mirror image of the Woke Left it claims to oppose. Girard’s key insight was that human desire is inherently mimetic, meaning that we learn to want things by observing and imitating others. This can lead to what he called mimetic rivalry, where people become locked in a cycle of ever-escalating conflict as they compete for the same objects of desire.

George sees this dynamic playing out between the New Right and the Woke Left. Both sides are caught in a feedback loop of mutually reinforcing outrage and provocation, with each side’s excesses fueling the other’s sense of grievance and justifying its own extremism. As Girard warned, such warring doubles can only lead to an explosion of violence if left unchecked.

George dwells particularly on Frog Twitter, a subculture within this milieu characterized by its use of ironic, meme-based humor and its flirtation with racialist, eugenicist, and fascist ideas. I must admit that prior to urging him to critique these ideas, I had been seduced to a degree by the aesthetics and meme magic of Frog Twitter and their collective avatar Pepe. Let’s be honest: the New Right gets a lot right about what’s wrong with the world.

Since the last election cycle, I have been tempted by a no enemies to my right approach to politics, following the Marxist playbook that remains in full force on the left – seen in the mainstream apologies for BLM riots. This book reminded me why this kind of compromise can only end in wasted energy and pointless violence.

But George’s critique is not aimed solely at the New Right. His insights apply equally to the would-be man of power, the aspiring Nietzschean Übermensch, on both ends of the political spectrum. Reading this book, I was forced to confront certain warring desires within myself.

I found myself siding with Virgil in his initial defense of the RETVRN of sacred violence – a gilded mirage of what the world might look like if the Men of Power could just seize back control over the commanding heights through sheer force of will.

Would I be counted among their ranks?

However, these aestheticist fantasies, brought into the light of René Girard’s mimetic theory, begin to appear as middle-school daydreams of going Super Saiyan and smashing leftists. Like many young men, I never quite outgrew my Dragon Ball Z phase, with its glorification of raw power and its promise of transcendence through violence. However, as George shows, these fantasies are not confined to the realm of anime and comic books but extend into the realm of realpolitik.

What sets George’s analysis apart is that he does not simply rehash and paraphrase Girard’s ideas, as so many have done in an attempt to make them hip or palatable for the cool kids in the mainstream. Instead, he takes us deeper into the uncomfortable fringes of the culture war, probing the unacknowledged sources of our desires.

One of his most provocative contributions is the discourse on homosexuality as a humiliation fetish – one that cuts across the ideological spectrum. Turns out that what’s making the frogs gay is not just the endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the water.

The insights – which I will not reveal here – are sure to make even ardent right-wingers uncomfortable, as they suggest that their own desires may be more tangled up with those of their supposed enemies than they would like to admit. But for George, this is precisely the point. By exposing the mimetic nature of our desires, he hopes to break for the reader the cycle of rivalry and violence that threatens to consume us all.

George also develops on Girard’s later writings on the apocalypse and the katechon, or restrainer, which take on a new urgency in our present moment. As rivalries and competition intensify across the globe, we find ourselves in a world increasingly unmoored from the traditional safeguards against violence. The old sacrificial mechanisms that once held society together are breaking down, leaving us vulnerable to an explosion of unrestrained brutality and even the coming of the man of lawlessness (son of perdition) prophesied by the Apostle Paul in 2 Thessalonians.

In this context, the New Right’s demands for heavy-handed ordered violence and the Woke Left’s apologies for rioting and looting can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Both are hastening the unraveling of the social fabric and the old boundaries that used to limit violence – immanentizing the eschaton and the coming of the Antichrist. The choice the culture war offers us, as George sees it, is not between order and chaos but between two forms of Satanic violence, each masquerading as its opposite.

We see this dynamic playing out in the traps set by both the left and the right. Young men are drawn to influencers like Andrew Tate – what Girard would call a model-obstacle – who promise to teach them the secrets of wealth and power, even as they reinforce the very insecurities and anxieties that drive and frustrate this pursuit. Similarly, the left misleads us when it promotes false freedom for our identities and paths to fulfillment.

To my fellow travelers on the New Right, I offer this book as a challenge and an invitation. Like many of you, I was drawn to this movement by a sense of disillusionment with the prevailing orthodoxies of our time. I saw in the transgressive humor and edgy memes of Frog Twitter a glimmer of something rare and precious: a willingness to question the unquestionable, to laugh in the face of the sacred cows of leftism and political correctness.

But as I went deeper down the rabbit hole, I began to sense that something was amiss. The more I engaged with the ideas of Nietzsche and his latter-day disciples, the more I felt a gnawing emptiness at the core of their vision. For all their talk of overcoming slave morality and embracing the will to power, they seemed curiously beholden to the very forces they claimed to reject.

In the end, I realized that I was chasing a phantom. The Übermensch I longed to become was just another mask – an avatar like Pepe. Another persona adopted in the endless game of mimetic rivalry. My desires were not my own but merely a reflection of the desires of those around me, mediated through the funhouse mirror of social media and online subcultures.

If I am honest with myself, I must admit that I am Virgil the True. But Virgil the True is false, just as I am false. We are all false, all part of the crowd, the anonymous masses chasing after phantoms of our own making.

And yet, there is hope. As George shows us in this book, there is a way out of the labyrinth of untruth. But it requires a radical reorientation of our desires, a willingness to abandon the comforting illusions of the world and embrace the hard truths of the Gospel.

This is not a call to retreat from the world, but rather to engage it more deeply, more authentically. It is a call to separation, to be sure – but not the false separation of the Nietzschean recluse, who retreats into his own ego and calls it freedom. No, it is a call to separate ourselves from the crowd precisely so that we can serve it more truly, more lovingly.

In the end, the path to true excellence lies not in the cult of the self, but in the imitation of Christ. It is a path of humility, of self-emptying, of dying to the false self so that we may be born anew in the image of God. This is the challenge that George lays before us in this book - to embark on a new and very different kind of RETVRN, one that leads not to the dead ends of reactionary nostalgia, but to the living waters of redemption.

I invite you to take up this challenge and to join me on this journey of repentance and renewal. It will not be easy, and it will require a kind of courage that the world knows nothing of. But in the end, it is the only way to become what we were truly meant to be - not supermen or Übermenschen, but sons of the Most High God.

Veritas vos liberabit,

Virgil the False

A Prayer

Our cause is not a philosophical cause. It is a Christian cause. We strive to shine the light of Truth into the darkness in which many of our neighbors suffer, so that it will scurry the legions of demons that work in the darkness and depend on it.

We confess Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name is the most excellent name given to mortals. It is through His name that all humanity was elevated from a state of blind and bloody bestiality to all the excellent gifts of civilization.

In His name, we are not afraid to fight demons seething with envy. Our faith flows from our experience of salvation, in which we beheld the mighty power of the God of Love. We thank Him for saving us from restlessness, for lifting us up to a high place and dry, above the flood of a thousand torments. We can never repay Him, but by our fight we show our faith and gratitude.

And we pray for strength in the fight. We pray to the Holy Ghost to send us the grace of his spiritual power, so that, tending diligently to the arguments presented to us, and using responsibly the powers of our human logic, we may prove to be worthy defenders of the priceless heritage which we received as the believers in Christ Jesus.

Amen.

Struggle Session I

The New Right

Chapter 1

What’s Making the Frogs Gay?

Virgil: Well George, here we are almost a quarter of a century into the new millennium. The Future has officially arrived, and on the surface, everything seems to be humming along splendidly. Globalization is continuing its march, diversity is our strength, and the arc of history keeps bending towards justice.

Yet beneath the glossy sheen, there’s a growing sense that something has gone awry. Despite all our material comforts, people feel more isolated and depressed than ever. Trust in institutions has cratered. Families are breaking down and kids are growing up without stable homes or role models. Religion is losing sway over people’s hearts and minds (so much for the opiate of the masses). Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical drugs aren’t delivering on their promises – the SSRIs, the benzos, and the Adderall for the kids. The one exception might be the miracle weight loss drug Ozempic, which seems to be working exactly as it’s supposed to. But even that is just creating slightly smaller fat people without addressing the root cause of our obesity epidemic.

In public, everyone wears a happy face emoji. But deep down, there’s a void.

Christopher Lasch diagnosed the modern malaise in terms of a culture of narcissism – the logical conclusion of the self-expression of the 1960s and 70s that’s now rotting us from the inside out.¹

But the problem seems to run deeper than politics, economics, or even culture. There are biological, psychological, and spiritual forces at work that are downstream of culture.

The modern mechanistic worldview has drained all mystery and sacredness from the cosmos. For many, life feels like a meaningless accident in a cold, indifferent universe. And our identities feel weightless – empty suits that could float away at any moment.

It’s from within this sterile and sterilizing milieu that certain new fringe ideologies have sprouted to reclaim the banner of vitality. Oddly enough, one of the avatars for these boisterous critics of modernity has been Pepe the Frog, the unofficial mascot of #FrogTwitter.

George: Where did the Frogs come from? As a casual observer, I became aware of them roughly around Trump’s first presidential campaign.

Virgil: Yeah, it was during the 2016 election that the cartoon frog memes began proliferating across internet forums like 4chan as the viral vehicle for unfiltered political ideas, cloaked in layers of edgy, ironic humor. Pepe’s odd mix of cuteness and ugliness makes him a sympathetic and even adorable character. That also makes him a perfect mask for anonymous right-wing trolls. He is relatable, mischievous, and unlike the reviled White Male, it’s hard to fault Pepe for holding extremist views (after all, he’s just a cartoon frog).

George: So Pepe became a focal point for frustrated young men, who were being excluded from the national conversation.

Virgil: That’s right. Now, speaking of frogs, it’s important not to confuse the Pepe meme with another amphibian-related meme. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones turned himself into a meme with the legendary rant about the cabal of globalist elites who are turning the freakin’ frogs gay!

It sounds unhinged until you start to look deeper into the actual story. Atrazine is a synthetic fertilizer that has leached from the fields into the water supply in much of the United States, where it has been found to disrupt amphibian endocrine systems. A UC Berkeley biology professor named Tyrone Hayes found that Atrazine was causing sexual deformities in frogs – causing male frogs to mount other males.² Naturally, Syngenta (with backing from Monsanto) tried to discredit him and was partially successful even though the research was solid.³

So in the battle between a nerdy scientist and the corporate suits, Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy after all. They really were turning the frogs gay, and Syngenta really was trying to cover it up.

George: Are you suggesting that there is a connection between these two memes: Pepe and the gay frogs?

Virgil: Yes, and it’s a deeper connection than you would think!

Jones’ unhinged style belies the legitimate anxieties fueling the #FrogTwitter phenomenon and a broader resurgence of reactionary thought that seeks to return to a bygone era – before widespread ecological destruction at the hands of corporate elites.

Across anonymous forums, a potpourri of transgressive memes grapple with what young reactionaries see as the modern West’s decline into decadence and decay. But again, it’s not just a cultural decline. There’s something real and physical that is weakening our substance.

From the lowly DMV worker to the corporate executive, modern authority figures seem like slaves to the institutions of modernity. They’re trapped in cubicles with incandescent lighting, eating industrially processed food that makes them sick and overweight. Whatever is good and alive in humans is being stifled. All modern institutions, from schools and government to the medical and charitable-industrial complexes, have this inhumane and bureaucratic quality. Stagnation would be a generous label for this phenomenon. Modern progress has seemingly bred a spiritual sickness, a regression.

The older, conservative establishment is clueless whereas the younger FrogTwitter movement has a certain energy. Despite its cartoonish exterior, we should not caricature it. The movement’s edgy, ironic humor belies a deeper longing and valid critique of the stifling ugliness of modern life.

George: René Girard identified modernity as a period of mounting mimetic rivalry – a crisis of undifferentiation – in which the intensity of our increasingly similar desires turns run-of-the-mill competition into cutthroat rivalry.

You are saying that along with the social crisis, there is a biological angle to the malaise. Chemicals pervading our environment are literally blurring the biological distinctions between the sexes that provide stable identities. Male frogs take on feminine traits, signalling an erosion of masculinity many men perceive in society, and desperately crave to resurrect.

Virgil: Correct. Pepe the Frog – as an avatar for online reactionaries – gave voice to many of the ills. The frogs have energized a space for dissident politics and created a new folk culture from the ruins of meaning. Few have yet to realize the extent of their influence. This little cartoon frog could very well have memed Donald Trump into the Presidency during the 2016 election cycle, when the Pepe memes began to percolate up into the mainstream consciousness.

George: How did that work?

Virgil: One theory is that ideas can travel much faster – going viral – when packaged in memes. They can travel under the radar – unnoticed by the Eye of Sauron of spin masters and mainstream media.

For example, just a few days before the election, a story began to spread about Hillary Clinton’s dinner with the performance artist and self-professed Wiccan Marina Abramovic.

This was the infamous spirit cooking incident. By the time mainstream news picked up on it and tried to debunk it as harmless fun, millions of voters were spooked far beyond the circles on Twitter or listeners to Alex Jones’s radio broadcast. In some sense, the Hillary Clinton-as-witch meme was an exaggeration. But it felt true. And it was funny as hell.⁴

George: I was there. I wasn’t meming myself, but I was watching it. I saw Pepe the Frog everywhere, and I can attest that it was a huge force. The memes exposed the hypocrisy of the establishment. Quite simply, they outmemed the left.

I was captivated by the movement behind Trump’s campaign. Prior to 2015, I would have considered his bid for the presidency as a joke. But after watching one or two of his debates, I was struck by the bluntness of what he was saying and the energy behind it. He made all his opponents, and all politics that I remembered before him, look like the work of preprogrammed automatons. Watching him stand on the debate stage with several other candidates was like witnessing a robot achieving consciousness and suddenly breaking ranks to mock his still-programmed peers. Trump’s rawness was, if nothing else, wildly entertaining to me.

The same thing can be said of the frogs. They deserve credit for bringing about a tremendous reality check to public discourse. It was an act of courage, above all else. They certainly had a transgressive quality; some compared it to old punk rock. But all their transgressions were easy to forgive given how they expressed what countless people were repressing. Meanwhile, the left continued to stick to the same old ghost-written speeches filled with nauseating tripe, prime-time commercials, virtue signalling, and gaslighting about all their policy disasters and corruption. They were unable to comprehend the rising force of the new internet.

Virgil: Right, the Left can’t meme. It’s a known fact, partly arising from their allergy to politically-incorrect humor. Hillary’s campaign was especially pathetic in its attempts to meme. It was obvious to anyone online that the Right was having more fun.

Same goes for the old establishment Right. Many young people who would have never identified with the Republican Party of Jeb Bush could get on board the raucous and politically incorrect Trump Train. The old guard of conservatism evokes images of a pudgy academic type, writing a white paper no one will ever read, in some underground DC office lit by incandescent light. Conservatism, Inc. likewise never mounted an effective rebuttal to either the lively memes or the general vitalism that is adjacent to Frog Twitter. They are still offering white papers and policy proposals. They are boring and irrelevant.

Frogs speak a different language—one of friendship and solidarity. They provide an apparent solution to this modern malaise and call for a return to a livelier, more aggressive mode of power. Young men are called to action instead of philosophical navel-gazing.

Some people argue that this is similar to 1920s Germany, where widespread malaise ultimately led to the ideology of Nazism. Comparing Trump to Hitler is silly. However, it seems that something is brewing, and there is a growing appeal to violence, eugenic breeding, etc.

George: Is this energy being channeled toward an eventual political revolution or coup – a January 6th kind of event?

Virgil: Perhaps, but it’s disingenuous to look at January 6th and claim that the protestors were within arm’s reach of seizing power. If anything, January 6th demonstrates that the time was not ripe for any real insurrection. The disorganized crowd appeared generally low IQ and not particularly formidable. The shirtless man wearing a Viking hat who entered the Speaker’s chamber in the House of Representatives looked more like Homer Simpson than Leif Ericsson. While he possessed some energy, he was never going to lead the protestors in a coup d’état in any world. Donald Trump, the true figurehead of the movement up to that point, didn’t have the political will to summon the generals who might have been loyal to him to contest an election that he had already lost in the minds of a majority of Americans.

Wat means?: #FrogTwitter Explained in Seven Memes

George: If the January 6th protestors did not fit the profile of the ideal revolutionary imagined by this movement, then who does? What attributes must one possess, and what weaknesses must be shed in preparation for the revolution?

Virgil: Here we need to mention the de facto thought leader of the New Right – a term that encompasses both #Frogtwitter and a broader group of mostly anonymous right-wing bodybuilders. In the 1960s, a group of French nationalists came to be known as Nouvelle Droite (The New Right) under the philosophical leadership of an academic writer named Alain de Benoist. Anonymous shit-poster Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) is in some sense the Alain de Benoist of the modern New Right – now an international movement.

A trained political philosopher with a PhD from Yale, BAP has issued a stirring exhortation – calling all frogs to build a sub rosa movement, based on solidarity and friendship, to set the preconditions for a future time when it might be possible to seize the reins of power. His bestselling book, Bronze Age Mindset (2018), claims not to be about politics, and it’s certainly not in the same way that a Heritage Foundation white paper is about politics. But the political implications are undeniable.

Bronze Age Mindset has sold well over a hundred thousand copies, maybe even over a quarter million copies. Yet you won’t find it at an airport kiosk. Likewise, BAP claims no leadership over the movement, even though his singular influence is undeniable.

Despite this influence, BAP has mostly evaded mainstream recognition of criticism. He is spoken of in hushed voices – sometimes praised, sometimes scorned. His conservative critics, like Clemson University professor C. Bradley Thompson, shoot themselves in the foot when they attempt to dissuade their students from reading him. That only gives BAP a greater air of transgression – making it the forbidden fruit.

Similarly, leftist publications have largely refrained from publishing exposés, simply because their readers would be confused as to why a serious journalist would spend so much time debunking someone who openly identifies as a pervert.

Graeme Wood, a former friend and correspondent with BAP, recently wrote what is perhaps the most detailed exposé of the man behind the mask in an Atlantic article, titled How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the American Right.⁵

The piece is eye-opening, and Graeme does a fair job of characterizing BAP’s beliefs with less pearl-clutching than is typical of his critics. It contains some vital context for understanding BAP’s journey from the heart of academia to the fringes of Internet subculture, then back into the mainstream through his intelligence, charming sense of humor, and sheer force of will. We also catch glimpses of a disturbed and insecure psyche, who sends shirtless pictures of himself to friends with the question Do you like this pic of me?

The article concludes by criticizing BAP for falling victim to COVID conspiracy theories and mocking Anthony Fauci, who is apparently still regarded as an unimpeachable character by the establishment media.

Readers outside of the Atlantic/intelligentsia bubble may roll their eyes at this and side with the dissenters who challenge the mainstream media narrative that denies the growing rifts between reality and the media’s portrayal of events.

It’s easy for those who oppose the authoritarian far-left responsible for the crimes of the pandemic period to maintain an attitude of no enemies to my right, just as the left has defended their own radicals in true Bolshevik fashion. However, this dynamic only partially explains how so many young men have been lured into an increasingly reactionary stance against the modern world. They are called to embark on a great adventure to overthrow the biological refuse that currently sits atop the political hierarchy. Best of all, they think, they’ll do it with their friends.

There is an acknowledgement in Bronze Age Pervert’s writings that now is not the time for such a revolution. Now is the time to prepare – to study, to train, and to befriend like-minded people, ideally those in positions of power. To ready oneself for the day when the conditions are ripe, and the decadent rot of the status quo is ready to crumble.

George: Before we delve into critique, let’s go a little further in mapping out the profile of the typical person involved in this movement and understanding their motivations and desires. What are the details of their beef with the modern world?

Virgil: We can lay out seven memes that shed light on what the New Right and FrogTwitter stand for, and how they seek to reshape the modern world.

1. Arete: Physical Excellence in a Grecian Mold

Virgil: It is common to see Grecian statues used as avatars by members of #FrogTwitter. They aspire to the Grecian ideal of physical and martial excellence, as well as an outward representation of inward excellence (Arete) and preparedness for battle. Striving for the perfect bodily form is not only about aesthetics but also about the ability to dominate others and replace their gods with your own. Ultimately, it is a form of self-mastery. Individual excellence against the masses of mediocre men.

This includes physical culture, pagan religion, Bronze Age heroics and epics, and the use of V instead of U like in Roman monuments, among other things.

George: I might as well say right away how so much of what you are saying about BAP and Frog Twitter is reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche. Having read and heard some of BAP, he immediately strikes me as a modern prophet of Nietzsche’s philosophy, what with his exhortations to will to power and obsession with Greco-Roman virility.

2. Real Food vs. Synthetic Alternatives: Fighting Seed Oils and Toxins

Virgil: Related to the emphasis on physical fitness, there is a whole set of memes around the contamination of the food supply, especially by seed oils. Seed oils are industrially processed cooking fats, including Canola, soybean oil, and corn oil, that are high in inflammatory polyunsaturated fat.

Many were originally used as paint thinner and industrial lubricants before being converted to cooking oil. They are cheap to produce, don’t go noticeably rancid in transit, and are a perfect fit with a hyper-commodified food supply.

The omnipresence of seed oils in restaurants and packaged food has led to a feeling that what we are being fed is not real food. Some frogs point to a cabal of global elites who are deliberately poisoning the population and plan to transition humanity to eating bugs in pods in order to become more sustainable and fight global warming. This talking point is often attributed to the World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab.

I will not eat the bugs and I will not live in a pod, the reply goes.

This line became something of a rallying cry throughout Covid, when the world was forced to shelter in place our pods.

A quick Google search of Klaus Schwab Eating Bugs doesn’t yield any direct quotes from the master conspirator himself, but it does turn up a 2021 article on the WEF website from one Antoine Hubert titled, Why we need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems. Enough to make you wonder what they have planned.

Now let me come back to your question, George.

You asked what’s their beef? If the insects weren’t enough, the global establishments attitudes towards meat would be another. We’re hammered with vegan propaganda everywhere we turn. Typically it’s not even framed in terms of animal cruelty, but rather in terms of the effects on climate and greenhouse gasses.

Up until very recently, the overwhelming majority of Americans were healthy and trim. Something happened starting around the 1980s where we started to get very fat, very fast. Well, McDonald’s used to fry their French fries in beef tallow. In 1990, they followed the trend towards heart healthy plant-based propaganda and switched over to vegetable oils.

Coincidence?

Now, there is a rise of artificial meats, such as Impossible Burgers and others, which sound like something out of the movie Soylent Green.

We’ve transitioned from a world of real things to synthetic alternatives. To borrow another catchphrase from BAP, everything is fake and gay.

When it comes to the chemicals turning the frogs into hermaphrodites, these critiques carry some weight. But it’s not just synthetic fertilizers disrupting our endocrine system. BPA in plastics, polyester, and a whole host of other environmental toxins are adding literal insult to injury. Even beer, rich in plant estrogens, can emasculate you!

Where to turn in this Brave New World?

3. Boosting T to Resist Globohomo

George: Okay, let’s continue. What are some other memes that highlight the lens through which Frogs see the world?

Virgil: Next, we have Globohomo – the homogenous landscape of multinational corporations that are not only eroding gender distinctions at a hormonal level but also promoting gender-bending as a fashion statement or virtue signal.

If chemicals in the water supply are turning frogs gay, what might be happening to humans?

Much of the New Right wants to return to a world where men are men, women are women, and both have clearly defined roles.

Corporate America’s promotion of seed oils and junk food may be responsible for obesity and a decrease in sexual dimorphism, the visible differences between sexes driven by different levels of sex-specific hormones like testosterone and estrogen. Men today look more like women, and women look more like men.

George: Aren’t young vitalists using testosterone injections? Isn’t it contradictory for them to use synthetic testosterone to enhance their appearance? You got some of these guys looking about as natural as GMO chickens.

Virgil: Much of the discussion revolves around natural methods of boosting testosterone levels, such as weightlifting and sun exposure. Joe Rogan, who is not a part of this movement but could be considered adjacent due to his embrace of masculinity, martial arts, and similar topics, advocates for testosterone replacement. However, he does not claim to be returning to any natural tradition, so there wouldn’t be a contradiction.

George: He’s definitely adjacent. I mean, he loves talking about hunting and eating moose meat...

Virgil: I get the sense that these are Joe Rogan’s genuine interests. Some people come to these things as part of a package for their discontent, whereas others may stumble into them more organically. Joe Rogan had a difficult childhood and attended a rough school, so he started doing martial arts as a means of escape.

4. Physique Poasting

Virgil: It’s worth noting that Joe Rogan attained his status in part by backing up his talk with real action and strength.

In a modern, feminine world, you can stand out from the crowd if you look like a warrior.

Thus, there is the taunt on Twitter of Poast Physique [sic], which is issued as a challenge to anyone pontificating about social matters who might not have the strength to defend their position in a physical fight.

According to Urban Dictionary, If your physique passes the Post Physique test, your argument is valid and confirmed as truthful. Example:

– Yo dude we are only alpha males in this group chat on Discord! You don’t stand a chance!

– really? Post Physique man :)

This takes us back to the original meme of physical excellence. Posting a shirtless selfie shows that you are part of the physiological elite who has resisted modern trends. You are putting your money where your mouth is by rising above the pervasive toxins and mediocrity of our age to become an ideal of the human species.

The best way to do that is to stop eating these commodified, homogenized food-like substances, like heavily processed seed oils, soy meats, etc. Instead, you turn to sun, steak, and steel, to get ripped.

5. Sun, Steak and Steel

George: Sun, Steak, and Steel… Where have I heard that before?

Virgil: Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death was an autobiographical essay by the Japanese