As many of you know, I've been a champion of the free exchange of ideas for quite some time now. My mission has been modest in scope, I don't care to save the Nazis or give a platform to perverts, segregationists, or trolls. While free speech certainly entails these things, they are not my passion and not my life's work.

I have interest in one simple thing: men's interests and their ability to communicate them with each other. I had no idea when I came on board the red pill train that this would be such a cultural battle, but the writing on the wall was quite visible as soon as I opened my eyes.

There has been a constant war against the free exchange of ideas. I am not a feminist, nor do I follow intersectionality theory, but there is some truth to the old saying, the enemy-of-my-enemy is my friend.

Men are not limited to any political party or race, but they find their interests parallel to certain politics and races in our current cancel and censorship culture. The tactics used and perfected against men over the past few decades are now hard at work against whites and conservative voices. You don't have to be white or conservative to be a man, but you absolutely need to recognize the tactics being used right now don't really care if you're white or conservative if your interests are even remotely tangentially aligned.

And don't forget the cries of the racist and political movements. It's not whites, it's white men. It's not conservatives, it's the ol' boys club.

The Red Pill as a discussion forum has always varied greatly by race, creed, and political affiliation. We have large contingencies from dozens of countries, many of whom have no relation to USA politics.

But today US politics and racism are being deployed in a global battle for our culture and internet, with organizational forces that greatly resemble the very oppression they pretend they are fighting. They know they're not really resisting oppression when they yell "words are violence" as they assault you to prevent your ideas from spreading. The occupation knows what they are here to do, and they just hope that the smoke screen they keep kicking up will prevent you from seeing the truth.

The truth is, the race, gender, and economic wars we are in are skirmishes in a greater war. Black people don't really need to hate white people, women don't have to hate men, nobody has to do any of this stuff. But for the power grab to succeed, they need us to continue fighting with each other so we never target the people pulling the strings.

The power grab taking place is one that's happened many times before, in many different ways, as countries in history have devolved into totalitarian states. What's unique today is the battle is taking place in the world's biggest forum, and the first of its kind: the internet.

Battle for the Internet

The internet is a clever tool. In the early days there was a saying "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." (John Gilmore) This still holds true today. It is almost impossible to completely extinguish an idea on the internet. The internet is a hell of a thing.

The battle for the internet itself I think has mostly been ceded by the opposition. But it was a fruitful fight for them, with many casualties. Copyright law was weaponized as a censorship-cudgel that paved the way for future censorship. It was based on the plausibility that surely a crime as bad as infringement must justify a network of tools to remove items from the internet.

The internet nerds out numbered and out smarted those who tried to disappear things from the internet. The Streisand effect was coined, as many elites slowly learned that the more they tried to manipulate the internet, the worse it would get for them.

Organizations that tried to "game" the system as they used to with traditional media learned quickly that 4chan could out-game them in every way possible. Moot became Time Magazine's most influential person in 2008 thanks to his "not his army." Mountain Dew's new flavor, decided by the internet, ended up being a toss up between "Hitler did nothing wrong," "Gushing Granny," and "Fapple."

By 2010, it would almost seem as though the nerds had taught the world a lesson. Do not anger the internet, we are bigger, more organized, and smarter than you.

And that message was absolutely received.

What followed was a counter attack that is still in progress today that is overwhelming and wide-reaching, and may look like the final blow that ruins the free exchange of ideas forever.

Male Speech, Conservative Speech, White Speech… Hate Speech

The first and most obvious attack was an ideological attack. The internet cells of people who disagreed and launched the measures of the 2000s and 2010s tended to group themselves along particular ideological lines.

To prevent their power, they must be disbanded and made unable to communicate with each other.

Hordes gaming internet polls and amplifying Streisand events cannot take place in any meaningful way if large groups of people (men) are unable to coordinate and communicate.

It was already culturally popular to hate on men, thanks to decades of groundwork placed by Marxists and feminists in schools and public forums. So it makes sense that /r/TheRedPill was one of the early pioneers hit by the hate speech brigade.

Reddit was hellbent on removing unsightly elements from their website, and had gone through a number of test runs, removing borderline material involving children, which was a defensible position to take, but later moving into simply censoring ideas that were counter to the new narrative.

And that narrative was that criticism of groups was the same as hatred.

It was an easy line to blur. Men had no public allies. Anybody willing to be honest about the world around them was now labeled a “misogynist.” When they got cancelled from their friends, jobs, and lives, they had nobody to turn to, as other men saw the warning and quickly aligned themselves with the right side of history.

The phrase /r/TheRedPill was blacklisted on Reddit as a whole. Mentioning it would see your comment silently erased, as an attempt to prevent new users from stumbling upon the ideas we espoused and ultimately to prevent us from changing minds. Later, Reddit fully quarantined the sub, to make sure it was invisible to search engines and make it difficult for even members of the sub to access it.

Of course, criticism is not the same as hatred. But that didn’t matter. It never needed to make sense. It never had to stand up to scrutiny. The point was to repeat the word “hate” enough times that the group inherited the attribute of “Hate Group” by association, regardless of the truth.

And it worked well.

Once society fully swallowed the idea that masculinity was a synonym for hatred, it was a small skip over to conservatives and eventually whites.

I needn’t give a full history of the attacks on conservative values (though maybe I will in a long-form book at some point) but the blueprint was the same. Conservative values became hate, and eventually espousing the ideas was hate speech.

Pro-life? You hated women.

Pro-family? You hate gays.

Don’t want girls and boys competing in the same sports? You hate trans.

Don’t want illegal aliens to vote? You’re racist.

Don’t want open borders? You’re a racist.

It wasn’t hard to rebrand conservative values as hatred, the path was already paved and only required small tweaks from the anti-male movement that came before it.

The next step was to rebrand racial identity as hatred. And it really didn’t take nearly as much work as I expected. BLM reared its ugly head after an isolated shooting, and it became publicly acceptable to call for the killing of whites on the basis that the only racial identity enjoyed by whites is one of supremacy and hatred.

There’s method to this madness. As evidenced by Reddit’s actions, and mirrored later by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and every other social media site, the idea was simple: as long as perfectly acceptable positions can be framed as hatred, there is ample justification for the removal of these elements from the platforms and away from public view.

And it worked well.

Build your own Platform.

The argument bandied around after each wave of censorship is probably familiar to you. “Build your own platform.” It’s not censorship, it’s not an attack on free speech, it’s just capitalism. You can always just build your own!

This was an effective argument because it embraced the position of the right, who generally are strongly in favor of capitalism. If Twitter won’t let you do it, then just make your own. Why is that so hard to do?

There are a few hitches to this, however. And we will see that a number of companies worked in tandem, with antitrust and anticompetitive behaviors.

Gab is probably our poster boy for exactly why you can’t build your own platform; at least, not a twitter-sized platform.

Gab was a twitter clone whose main claim to fame was that they embraced free speech. If it’s legal, we will host it. (*except porn)

As a coordinated attack, they were shut down by every avenue that would lead to a capitalist being able to start their own platform.

• First, their hosting was denied and seized. They were forced to find new hosting.
• Then their domain was denied and seized. They were forced to find a new domain registrar, twice.
• The domain registry fought them on their TLD, they eventually gave up on gab.io and settled on gab.com.
• They were kicked off Google’s Play Store due to “hate speech” even though you could just as easily find hate speech online through their own Chrome Browser.
• They were kicked from Apple’s App Store, which makes it impossible to load on an iphone because you cannot easily sideload apps onto an iPhone that are not on the app store.
• Paypal & Stripe banned them, so they could not take payments via paypal or Stripe.
• Visa blacklisted the owner and his family, so they cannot do business with any credit card merchant on the planet, period.

This is an abridged history, but you get the point. Building your own platform, as it turns out, is pretty well impossible unless you toe the line. Though at this point, there’s a pretty good chance competing with the big guys will find yourself with similar issues, hate speech or not.

Start your own Credit Card.

So where does that leave a new platform? Well, after having to implement your own tech infrastructure and having no way of deploying it to user devices, you still have no way to get paid, and therefore cannot afford to run the platform.

So what’s next? Start your own credit card.

I say this in jest because I recognize exactly how much work that would take, and there is still one major problem with it. Since these companies all operate with impunity and in anti-competitive ways, I fully expect this scenario:

In order for your credit card to work, people need to accept it. To do this, you need to create the tech infrastructure, get yourself licensed as a Money Transmitter in every state (which is a multimillion dollar+ venture), and then get yourself partnership agreements with the various merchant services companies that exist. There are a lot of them.

Once you do this, VISA will inevitably threaten the merchant service companies that if they do business with your new card, they will pull out. This, of course, would be suicide for any merchant service and so you would lose.

Crypto is an option that many saw as an answer to these problems. I don’t think it’s got widespread enough adoption to be viable, given the critical mass you need to reach with “normies” to be successful.

So how fucked are we?

This entire essay seems a lot like doom and gloom. And in a way, it’s hard to spin it as anything but. The truth is, we’re in the shit right now, and there will be plenty more casualties before it’s over.

We are witnessing global power plays in real time, the outcomes of which will have long-lasting effects on all of our lives. What can we do?

I don’t have an easy answer for this, but I do have some ideas.

Critical mass social media sites seem to be running the show right now. Many people have enjoyed a growth in following that was virtually impossible in the days of conventional media. Getting thousands of people to watch a movie or a show was an expensive ordeal. Advertising dollars, gimmicks, actors, etc.

Today, a guy with some good ideas and some ingenuity can amass millions of followers. Each thing he writes gets exposed to hundreds of thousands.

This is giving away a level of exposure for private citizens that the media companies absolutely abhor. They let this happen on their watch, and they’re hell-bent on fixing it.

However, I think the social media companies are overplaying their hands. Reddit is currently on a crusade to remove all wrong-think, and in doing so they have angered even the communities they “allowed” to stay. As of this writing, there is a mass exodus leaving reddit and never turning back.

And I’m working on one of them.

TRP.red and Forums.red are the life rafts I constructed to give my small corner of the internet a place to communicate when all else fails. Forums.red (as of this writing) is about to launch into beta in the next few days, and we will see just how much we need Reddit.

I think the answer to this problem is not to gather your followers on a mainstream platform, the answer is the internet in the late 90s: Decentralized, specialized, and numerous.

We may be currently unable to harness the power of big payment to create larger than life platforms that slingshot us into the sun, but one thing we can do with our current infrastructure is create millions of specialized forums and websites, each with dedicated topics and communities, sharing information between us in a Hydraesque-manner.

Centralization is the wrong answer.

Separate, specialize, and overcome.

Use accounts on major media sites to push people to your specialized sites. But do not live there. Do not depend on it.

Make sure your followers have an independent way to communicate with you (and you them).

They cannot attack all of us, and they really can’t if each of our properties is inexpensive to run and operate, and requires little in the way of donations or funding.

I recognize the irony in saying this as I developed TRP.red tribes as a means for centralization. I offer the TRP.red Tribes (and soon to be forums.red) as a meeting place, safe for male communication and thoughts, as a means of decentralization from the mainstream companies. But the dangers are still apparent if you gather on my site instead of others, so I will be soon implementing some big changes that will help with the decentralization of the internet:

Tribe Portability. I will be adding an opt-in only feature for users to be able to share select data with the tribes they follow so tribe leaders can keep in communication with their followers even in the unlikely event trp.red closes.

Direct Communication. I will be adding the ability for Tribe Owners to communicate directly with followers, without the need for followers to come back and constantly check the website.

Forums.red. As I mentioned here, forums.red’s beta is about to launch in the next few days, and we’re very excited to see how you like it. More updates to follow.

Stay Safe

-rps

I appreciate Jared Trueheart taking the time to respond to my criticism of his new book, “The Red Pill Ideology.” If you haven’t read my review, you can see the original here and his response here. I find myself compelled to rebut this response as I don’t think Trueheart was able to really address the core of my concern.

Moralizing:

Trueheart once again fails to recognize the nature of moral philosophies: it cannot be assumed that all people adhere to one moral framework. When writing a book that appeals to a moral framework, it makes sense to first illustrate exactly what moral framework is being utilized and why.

Since the nature of Trueheart’s book is to change minds (presumably those who subscribe to TRP) it would behoove him to first make an argument to convince the readers to come along with him and view the arguments through the lens of said moral philosophy.

But it goes deeper than this. Because Trueheart isn’t asking his audience to analyze a belief system through the lens of a moral philosophy, he’s actively trying to convert his audience to his moral philosophy… without first stating what it is or why we might adopt it over our own.

He makes a very illogical assertion that because my forum bans appeals to a moral authority, that we outlaw the discussion or perspective of having morals, writing it off as simply because we “know [we] are performing immoral acts.”

It’s a most perplexing argument for him to make- doubling down on his moral philosophy and saying that the reason we aren’t swallowing it is because we’re immoral by his standard, begging the question and still doing nothing, absolutely nothing in the least, to convince his audience why his moral system is superior and should be considered as an alternative to TRP.

Ultimately, his point boils down to this circular argument: TRP is wrong because Trueheart’s moral system says so. Trueheart’s moral philosophy is right because Trueheart’s moral system says so. Why should you agree with this? Because Trueheart’s moral system says so.

It’s a lot like playing checkers with a toddler. He makes up the rules, and by those rules, he wins.

It’s funny to me that he mistakes my critique as misidentifying him a “religious zealot.” I suppose it’s a point that flew well over his head, but my point was not that he believes in god. My point was that he believes himself to be god.

Of course, that too is a metaphor, and for simplicity’s sake I suppose I should elaborate that I do not think he actually believes himself to have created the universe, but he DOES believe that his moral frame of reference is universal – and thus shared by all whether we admit it or not.

Lower-case “god” in this case is a literary stand in for whatever or wherever he believes his moral authority is derived from. I don’t know because he never addresses this in his book. I think he should.

This is the reason that “moralizing” is against the rules on TheRedPill forum. Not because people cannot act in moral ways, but because we come from different moral frameworks, so arguments from morality are akin to arguments from any other authority. They’re not convincing, and they operate as just-so arguments.

Don’t do X. Why not? Because X is wrong. Why is X wrong? Because X is wrong.

You can see how this circular reasoning does nothing to aid in the discussion.

And yet- when returning to the hypocrisy argument of men banging sluts while desiring virgins, Trueheart can’t help himself but again pose another moral argument while conveniently avoiding the many, many paragraphs I wrote explaining how it’s only hypocrisy from within his moral framework, and only if you view casual sex as immoral.

He once again makes the appeal, that “boning sluts” takes away “any power from men to shape the world” without once addressing why this is good or bad, and what incentives men have to even desire to be involved in any world shaping at all.

Once again, there is no internal hypocrisy in wanting to bang women, while simultaneously wanting to bag virgins. No, the only problem is that Trueheart doesn’t like it. And like any solipsist, he doesn’t understand that other people have different values than him.

To Trueheart, it is on the male collective to band together and teach women to behave. And any man who works against this violates his framework. But once again, no such framework has been discussed, and no convincing argument for it has been made.

Trueheart wants to create a cock consortium or penis cartel of some sort to collectively bargain with sloots. Good luck wrangling the Chads, my friend.

Biology

Trueheart makes a fundamental mistake when discussing biology and evolutionary instincts. He makes the final claim:

“How convenient that red pill guys forget that biology compels us to reproduce, not to have sterile, promiscuous relationships.”

If you paid attention in highschool biology, you’d probably remember that evolution has no set of goals. There are no purposes. Evolution is the effect of two main pressures against a population: natural selection (don’t die before you reproduce) and sexual selection (be attractive and fertile enough to reproduce).

This process iterates through every generation. Even today.

This does not follow that it gives us purpose. The drive evolution gives us is to satisfy certain urges. It does not necessarily drive us to mate successfully, let alone start families. That one may lead to another is the reason we are alive today. But it’s a retrospective. Evolutionary behaviors drive people to masturbate as well. So far, not a lot of children came from masturbation. (…phrasing) But it makes sense in perspective of evo psych.

In other words, pleasure from sex is literally the reason we have sex and the reason the human population is still here. If evolution programmed us with goals in mind, we’d be able to do it without the immediate pleasure reward, wouldn’t we?

But humans are far from goal oriented. We eat till we’re unhealthy, we fuck when we can’t afford kids, we spend when we need to save.

This is a very poorly understood idea of the mechanisms behind evolution.

Regarding feminism- I do not believe feminism to be the boogey man, nor have I really made any claims that feminism was the brainchild of some angry woman somewhere that put a wrench in the spokes of masculinity and families. Feminism is a cog in the machine, one that has had immediate and direct effects. To discuss the cause of feminism and the factors in the sexual revolution would require a much longer, more in depth conversation. I did, however, make the claim that the reaction is in part due to a feminist policy: no-fault divorce. I don’t see a refutation of this in the rebuttal.

Scientific Rigor and Pragmatism

This is probably the best and only argument that Trueheart has made thus far. But it still fails to fix the major failings of his book.

TRP, and the scientific world at large, has a dearth of well documented studies that might prove TRP’s collective observations because the conclusions fall outside of the overton window. Any studies that may point in the direction of TRP tend to be downplayed or re-contextualized to mean something that falls within the overton window.

But that does not change the nature of our collective observations.

While not to the standards of double-blind studies, it does still pass the test of hundreds of thousands of men sharing notes and checking each other’s works. This does not preclude empiricality. It simply fails to meet the bar of the overton-establishments.

That is why we are okay with the pragmatic approach. This also means that better solutions can be found as the theory gets refined. TRP is hardly settled, it’s an ongoing work crowd-sourced from hundreds of thousands of men.

I have not denied an objective truth through this, only suggested that we do not have the resources or the desire to bother with double blind studies. For most men, getting laid and having a happier life is good enough. That may not satisfy Trueheart, but TRP men don’t care. It is Trueheart who is trying to convince TRP men, not the other way around.

Manning Up

Again, without even a hint of irony, Trueheart says that he is not telling men to man-up and in the very same breath says but “men do have to behave like men in order to continue being men.”

He acknowledges that “man-up” is how society attempts to control men, and then he acknowledges that red pill men are sensitive to this. And then he follows it up with no, but really, man-up.

Sure, his version of “man-up” might not be identical to the feminist or mainstream versions of it. But he commits the very same crime he argues against, and expects the reader to accept it as-is with no justification or rationale for it.

In Trueheart’s world, in order to be a man, you must be his brand of man. You must have kids. You must embrace the family lifestyle. Otherwise you fail to be a man. No irony intended. Seriously, just man up.

In order to better make my argument, I’m just going to copy a paragraph from Trueheart’s response and let it make my argument for me:

“Red pill men unknowingly advocate for a subjective definition of manhood. This makes them exactly as manly as others who think this way, like male feminist and Vassar alumnist Michael Kimmel.”

At this point I struggle not to simply quit this rebuttal and call Trueheart an elaborate troll. According to him, we advocate for a subjective definition of manhood. Then he turns around and states his subjective definition of manhood. You can’t make this shit up.

Market place

“Redpillschool seems to think that the market in this context is a metaphor. It’s not.”

As stated in my original review, Trueheart continues to demonstrate he does not know what metaphors are. Does he think that you literally buy women with money? Perhaps Trueheart does, that would explain why he fails so terribly at his critique.

“And again, the red pill cannot fathom the cognitive dissonance of boning sluts and bemoaning sluts. In a closed market of five men and five women, every man wants four sluts and one non-slut to be the mother of his children. You do the math and when you come to the end you can tell me if those men will choose to have sluts or wives because they can’t have both. Red pill men choose sluts, what does that say about them?”

Trueheart still does not understand what a zero-sum game is. I don’t think it makes sense for me to simply re-type the exact same argument from my original review that Trueheart has yet to address, but I’ll shorten it here again: What’s good for me isn’t necessarily good for you. That’s not hypocritical, that’s competition, son.

“The red pill ideology claims that the sexual marketplace is everywhere. You walk down the street see a woman and you’re in the sexual market place. This is false. The red pill needs this belief in order to justify other beliefs; that any woman can be a slut on the right day, or that women cheat more than men.

The sexual market place is not everywhere just like an economic market place is not everywhere. There’s a farmer in Idaho living on a self-sustaining farm with his family right now. He’s not participating in any market place and dedicated husbands and wives likewise do not participate in the sexual marketplace.”

I’m struggling with this. Does Trueheart believe there’s some sort of auction house that you have to go to to bid on women? Like, on Main St. in some town somewhere?

Your participation in this market is not voluntary, unless you decide you are not interested in mating with somebody else. You do not exit the market if you get married. Ask the 50% of married men who are now divorcees if they (or their wives) actually got out of the market.

Donovan Sharpe Thinks you don’t need romance.

I can’t speak for Donovan Sharpe. I don’t know much about him. I know his affiliation with the 21 convention suggests he might be a cuckold or a lady-boy given what I know of others who have joined. I know the organizer is far from anything I would label “red pill.”

But what I do know is that I moderate the largest red-pill forum on the web (almost half a million subscribers at this point), and his name has come up about 5 times- all in reference to the 21 convention.

I won’t claim to be the authority on all that is red pill, but I think that an established forum such as ours, with half a million subscribers, is substantial enough to make a claim that fringe guys and hucksters who steal our nomenclature do not make them so. Trueheart, for instance, claims to be red pill yet has not demonstrated even an introductory level of understanding of the material.

“According to redpillschool:

“it isn’t hard to understand that, at the very least, the contradiction is resolved by the fact that what’s good for one man is not good for all men. There is no pretense to say that red pill theory or the actions subsequently taken by its followers are good for all men.”

This doesn’t resolve any contradiction. An individual man who bones sluts while bemoaning slutty women is still a hypocrite working against his own biology to create a world he loathes.”

Trueheart still fails to understand that he’s not the center of the universe. He says a man acting on his own accord is working against his own interests. He cannot hide the fact that he’s using this phrase interchangeably with “Trueheart’s interests.”

Trueheart just can’t handle the idea that if a guy wants to bone slutty women, he’s allowed to do it and enjoy it. And as much as Trueheart thinks it hurts him when other guys do it, that does not make an argument.

“I never claimed that men should deny their desires, only that they should control their desires.”

Oh. Okay.

Generalizations

“Here’s a generalization:

Women are like that.

Here’s a statement that is not a generalization:

All women are like that.”

Trueheart can’t handle that a generalization with the word “all” in front is still a generalization.

This makes sense, since Trueheart is an absolutist who doesn’t understand metaphors. Of course he would take hyperbole literally and discard the entire generalization. Because why not? Why would we, at this point, expect Trueheart to use critical thinking when applying red pill theory after what he’s written?

A convincing book, it is not. A convincing rebuttal, it also is not.