There’s a goofy category issue around political commentators and thinkers. It can be summarized in the following question: “is this person a gatekeeper or a gateway?” My contention is that this is a miscategorization of the variable that we’re actually engaging with, and that this is - in its least sophisticated form - a false dichotomy. Even when it’s sophisticated, and gradations are seen, analysts are insufficiently sophisticated. I’m going to be considering a number of different things around public figures, their openness, and the implications of them for getting people out from the lies we’re meant to live inside of. If we take this set of realities more seriously as a continuous variable, we’ll see more possibility in the world to improve how things are going. Speakers as Educators: One of the big gatekeeper / gateway squabbles has been over Jordan Peterson. When Peterson came to be incessantly promoted by YouTube, he did a media tour of channels that in some cases were decidedly outside of the mainstream (i.e. Stefan Molyneux’s Freedomain Radio (since banned)). He was saying things that we’re not authorized to say, which posed basic issues for the worldviews we’re to adopt. Peterson was teaching personality and intelligence research findings from a hereditarian perspective, which essentially functions as the Materialist’s Master Key to refuting the official lies of our time. But, there were problems. Peterson was tied to the United Nations, said that young people moving to the right was impermissible, and despite being a “Darwinist” made strange statements about the significance of relatedness in governing social interactions. He had what he needed to see many problems, yet, for some reason , wasn’t seeing the problems. Did he not know what Huxley wrote in UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy (1948)? Had he not googled the relationship between Aldous and Julian Huxley 1 ? Had he not read Hammond and Axelrod’s Evolution of Ethnocentrism (2006)? Is he holding his cards close to his chest, or is he part of the system wrangling people? In my estimation, it’s wrangling, but it’s a useful wrangling. Did your elementary school teacher sit everyone down on the giant alphabet rug, then read the class Nock’s elitist essay Isaiah’s Job (1937/2021)? Did she read you Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature by Rothbard (1974/2000)? Of course not. Your teacher would never have given you the traits to rank order people. The world was presented as one of endless possibilities where everyone was going to be a policeman, fireman, astronaut, scientist, veterinarian or a doctor. If you thought you could do it, you could. Peterson didn’t maintain those myths. The realities that asserted themselves against those tacit lies of your day-to-day life were being trashed by someone who presented as a perfectly respectable and polished academic. Compared to your public school teachers, he’s totally a gateway. Before we get into this section’s analysis, I’ll give my position on what Peterson is. In truth, briefly, I think the answer to this is in Fr. Seraphim Rose’s book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future (1975), which is outside the scope of this essay. If you read that book, and watch his Bible lectures, you’ll see exactly what I’m getting at. It’s incredibly 1 Peterson teaches, as many do, that Brave New World was a “warning”, and not a disclosure. suspicious to me that this isn’t pointed out more regularly. Just look at that weird Enuma Elish / Genesis waffling in Beyond Order (2021). In short, I think we should take him at his word when he says: “What I’m doing isn’t political. It’s a psychological intervention, and it’s working.” But anyway , what we care about right now is the fact that Peterson is sticking elements and theories into people’s heads that can be used for our purposes. He’s presenting some ideas to a starved audience of “white guys” 2 that they’re gladly eating up, like the less intellectually inclined people bought into when presented with Donald Trump’s messaging 3 . He’s feeding them the ideas that afford right-wing worldviews, but not left-wing views, and we should go to work on that. These people could readily be presentable Paleo-Conservatives, Paleo-Libertarians, and more importantly: presentable Christians. If someone has the five-factor model, and the general mental ability factor, coupled together with hereditarianism, they’re perfectly positioned to see the errors of equalitarianism. You can’t stamp out the inequality of man, and any messaging otherwise is just a pretense for theft. This theft sold through those nonsense presuppositions is the project of leftism. We just need to touch the pieces together, and let Peterson fans carry out the work of wiggling free. 3 Which isn’t to disavow Trump or Trump fans. Everyone has his own reasons and appropriate messaging/messengers. We need specialization of labor/action. Conservative erudites have never achieved anything, and will never achieve anything. 2 Basically: “European Christians who don’t get that they are.” Nobody has to explicitly and directly attack Peterson’s views on the young people going to the right; all they have to do is allow the proceeds of invalidating the left’s presuppositions to do their work. We know the existence of continuous traits by the production of unequal outcomes. You accept equality or those traits. You can’t have both. Them knowing that does the work of roping off over half the political landscape from being worthy of consideration. They’ll have to settle somewhere, and we are what’s left. We don’t even have to leave it at that. These people are intellectually engaged, and also into labels tied to Classical Liberalism. Mises wrote Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (1927/2012), and what an obvious recommendation that makes for them? Who proceeded from Mises? Rothbard and Hoppe for starters. Which organization pops up when you search for Mises? The Mises Institute. That’s a site full of free PDFs, audiobooks and presentations teaching what we think. From that entry point, “findability” (Morville 2005) favors our answers. There isn’t a programmed defense against this messaging, and it has a “tag along” ethic of Christian values depending on which author you come to be interested in. Jordan has even interviewed a famous Austrian economist. There just isn’t an explicit endorsement. What I’m getting at with Peterson is that: there’s a lot there to operate on that doesn’t have a readily erected barrier in / between people’s minds, and he’s also broken the conditioning in many minds on the issue of equality. Things aren’t as straightforward as the Doomers and Purity Spiralers have made things out to be. More concerning, on the gatekeeping end, with Peterson is that weird Democracy fetishism he has employed in question and answer segments. Q&As David Patrick Harry, who runs Church of the Eternal Logos on YouTube, spent some time giving presentations on Marshall McLuhan. At one point in a livestream, he pointed out how Marshall would spin around in his chair and take questions from people in the audience without any kind of filtering. This was placed in contrast to the Peterson / Dave Rubin efforts to curate what gets to be asked. Peterson fielded questions that were submitted(1), voted on(2), then potentially vetoed by Dave(3). This isn’t a complete blackout of audience participation, but it is a pretty substantial attack on challenges to the narrative. If you decompose that process into its three parts, you can see how they move things along the continuum in one direction or another: 1. Being able to submit questions, in and of itself, could give people the opportunity to get a question in while being afraid to speak in front of a large audience or give them license to ask an edgy question without risk (anti-gatekeeping). 2. These Peterson and Rubin events were, as anybody would expect, full of people on their side. This would countervail against (1) to reel in what gets said, because the audience isn’t there to challenge the speakers (gatekeeping). 3. I hardly have to write the idea that Dave Rubin vetoing questions is gatekeeping, but I set out to have three points here (gatekeeping). Strategically, this was the fortified zone around Peterson’s operations 4 . Fortified, but not completely cutoff like Turning Point USA (TPUSA) was doing at the time in response to entryist participants in their events 5 . He was absolutely on the gatekeeping end of things, but not the absolute extreme like TPUSA. They might as well have played a video on a big screen with how they clamped down. Most speakers haven’t been the victims of an organized effort to lay siege to the dais with edgy questions. Despite that, they still go into speaking engagements with a personal willingness to wave people away, have the A/V people cut the microphone, have you expelled from college, or initiate some kind of counter-measures. Between the speaker’s branding, precommitments (free speech), foundation funding, and politics, you can probably generate your own expectations as to how they’re going to strip your license to use wrangle the speaker’s spectacle to your own ends. This section so far has been about strict means to limit efforts to hijack events, but other softer means are employed, and you’ll be familiar with them, by now. A great example 5 These tactics are employed adaptively by organizations, speakers and audiences, so leaving speakers besieged with hostile engagement can induce counter-measures. 4 From looking at recent appearances of his, this has ended, but the big stadium tour might differ. of this comes from the Conservatives. Knowing their audience has a concern for politeness, the Conservative Inc crowd loves to insert actors onto stages to softly delimit what can be asked . Women 6 , for example, are placed onto the stage as leaders, so how can you disavow feminism? They’re not tripping the wire of disavowing Free Speech, but there is a tacit threat the speaker holds over the audience that tells each member “don’t criticize a movement rooted in occultism, or else”. Via this soft restriction, they’re basically playing a political game of “Don’t Wake Daddy”. No wires tripped = no loss of branding. Insofar as the characteristics of the speaker work to suppress the asking of questions, and conversations around the event, they can be said to be gatekeeping. Marshall McLuhan’s handling of the situation in the clip David showed, aside from institutional pressure, was much more of a gateway to the truth than were the other actors mentioned here. This is a perfect opportunity to say to work the different elements covered in this essay against each other, because the same people at these events are users of online fora. If the discourse is being delimited in a tacit attack on stated principles, make that transgression explicit online. Do it under a fake name if you have to. Don’t let them reel things in if their entire branding sits on free expression. Events as Cause for Gathering 6 Or various minorities, veterans, immigrants etc. You can judge how intellectually mature someone is by how detailed of an analysis of Donald Trump he can give. The doomer crowd, who volunteer themselves as little ad hoc demoralization campaigns, will tell you about the $100m donated to his campaign by Sheldon Adelson. The other side of things will tell you that he’s the God Emperor who’s come to save everyone. Maybe a normal person will say some dumb civic nationalist comment about him “sowing division”, as if we don’t live in the Second Tower of Babel. As a big brained self-published pseudo-intellectual, I’m here to say it’s, like, totally, complicated, as are the events themselves. Trump speeches are titanic events that draw in a small city’s worth of people. Not just any people, however. The people drawn in are exactly who is described in the strategic thinking of people like Murray Rothbard (Rothbard 1992), who would gladly hear talk about him or people like Pat Buchanan. They’re the receptive audience of Paleoconservative and Paleolibertarian ideas. This offers potential that the doomer, and the one who believes he’s a witness to the Second Coming, will ignore. The humble MAGApede 7 , who so many belittle, is a Euro-American, knows something is wrong, is in a period of political engagement, is given homogenizing mass media communications (Fox News etc.) that you can fit your messaging to , and could be directly given that messaging to help develop him into the right direction without any interference by Big Tech gatekeeping. You can literally just show up to these events and tell people about your beliefs. 7 This is a reference to the Donald Trump subreddit’s users. It’s a portmanteau of MAGA and centipede. Consider this crowd in comparison to other less permissive crowds. There’s a well-known asymmetry between the tolerance of opposing views where the conservatives let anything go, while the liberals expel and ruin people over increasingly slight infractions. The conservatives are basically a soft target for entryism. If you read the Organizational Weapon (1952/2014), you’ll see the social program of the everyday conservative is prone to exploitation. I’d say this is the case for the following reasons among others: ● They welcome the Cass Sunstein-type of attack on convictions where you upset so-called “echo chambers” with dissenting views to avoid “group polarization”. Escaping the “reasonable” center is something conservatives are averse to. Being unreasonable could soil your bowtie! 8 ● They’re open to being manipulated because they’re trusting, which can generically be seen as a relevant variable for this essay. The more trusting a person or a group is, the more exploitable they are. A specific pattern conservatives are manipulated by is that they conflate their actual ‘epistemic actions’ with ostensibly epistemic actions performed by liberals which are actually ‘pragmatic actions’(Kirsh & Maglio 1994) 9 . Conservatives talk to “just curious” liberals who “want sources” in their efforts to “figure things out”. The reality is, 9 An epistemic action is an action that’s performed to gain understanding, and not mainly to achieve a goal. A pragmatic action is the inverse. Conservatives discussing an issue to get different viewpoints is epistemic, and a leftist revolutionary “asking” for opinions he already knows so he can mold/lead them is pragmatic. 8 I say this as someone with an extensive neckwear collection. the up-speaking liberal is just working through the state of someone else’s beliefs so that they can move others into believing lies. We’re not trying to be abusive, but the fact that this strategy has never failed a liberal should be enough to signal this softening trait’s great presence in the conservative crowd. ● The dialectical pressure to be the “actual” tolerant people who value free speech, unlike the Democrats. Conservatives believe in Americanism, which gives primacy to the heresy of Manicheism - it’s in the First Amendment, sat at the top of our Bill of Rights. New people with new ideas have the potential to bring things to a “greater height”, which we get to transcend up towards through gnosis. There’s no enduring right answer, except for the idea that everything is open to revision and needs to be retested in each new time. I’m sure you can think of more reasons that Americanists fall to O’Sullivan’s Law 10 , but those thoughts provide some basis for you to compare the conservatives to other crowds. There’s no necessary moderation that takes place at these events as long as someone is civil. There is, however, the expected limitation that some people there will come with the limitation of being able to directly deal with certain issues they’ve been made to see a certain way. That is to say: you can’t show up and talk about how Trump is “x 1 , x 2 , x 3 , ... x n so he’s junk” without running into trouble (gatekeeping). This is OK. Trump is right 10 Organizations not being explicitly conservative, and not actively gatekept towards those ends, will become left-wing. about things, and those things taken together are instantiations of ideas, and those ideas are related to resources (that’s a gateway). Trump is right to say that we can’t legislate all of our jobs away, and impose increasingly strict cognitive capitalism onto our society. We don’t want the state to endlessly accumulate wards. There’s possibility to persuade there, and a captive audience while everyone waits to be let in to hear speakers. Consider why you were told as a politically interested person to avoid this free harvest. They’re afraid that you might go to these events, and guide people to resources that could change their minds. They can’t control your in-person messaging at large gatherings like they can over Twitter, so they want you to avoid it for your own reasons. These events have great potential for deprogramming people who are on their way to the truth of things. Being outside of an institution, and in a more public space, there’s inherently more license to work the scenario as a gateway. Within a university, a business or something like that, you’ll find additional levels of restrictions applied. The “Macrosystem” of the country you’re under sets the baseline for the hazards you run as far as gatekeeping goes, and individual actors can set additional ones at the organization level. Event-Related Gatherings in Venues with Additional Restrictions If you attend an event at a university, you’re beholden to all of the institution’s restrictions on discourse, and the consequences for you as a student if that’s your current station in life. I don’t need to be the one to tell you that the universities are full of double standards, and that they maliciously enforce speech codes. This necessarily means a move towards gatekeeping, and it does to varying degrees depending on how much you deviate from what the mid-20th century brainwashing techniques (Taylor 2017) are being directed towards at the given point in time. In choosing a venue where people will be congregating within the bounds of an organization 11 , you could say the speaker or organizing party could be acting as a gatekeeper. The extent to which it qualifies as gatekeeping is the extent to which the organization would enforce policies against your aims. It’s never a discrete thing. The age of people involved, and the seasons add an additional set of layers. A clear example of this is that “after party” access to nightlife venues (bars/clubs) outside of the university depends on the age of those going to the event. With a range of ages at the event, you’ll necessarily lose access to some people because the youngest undergrads are around 18-19 years old. During the periods of the year with extreme weather, this venue access is more important as a means to escape the university speech codes. This isn’t a restriction specifically tied to political speech, but it does serve to restrict it. Online Engagement 11 As opposed to a public space The internet is quite a bit different, and in some way it’s more fractionated with random opportunities to deal with issues. In a sense, we can take a website to be a government, and the different platformed communities and channels to be the organizations under them. The website sets the system’s floor for the enforcement of rules brought to its attention through automated, and non-automated means. The individual channels and communities put additional standards onto people that build upon what’s necessarily the case. That’s not to say that all communities are equal in their concerns for the site’s TOS, nor am I saying that each community will have the rules equally enforced against them. Firstly, and most obviously, I have to talk about individual communities. After that, I’ll mention the opportunistic efforts. When dealing with the individual communities , you’re looking at something like the in-person engagement talking to the people in line at a speech in a college. A key point of difference is that you’re not yourself online, like you are in-person. Low IQ people take this to be an opportunity to run around saying all of the unsayable things, and that always leads to a backlash. This stupid licentiousness leads to communities getting quarantined then banned by the platform 12 , channels getting banned, or worse. People acting as “an excuse” are morons, or they’re trying to induce bad behaviors in others. It is zero coincidence that just as the Orthodox Christians on YouTube have started to 12 Quarantine is basically a soft-ban that has been used as a prologue to banning, because it kills the traffic and backlash. gain greater purchase that their live chats are now full of morons purity testing speakers with TOS transgressing demands. The “name brand” figures are absolutely being targetted to participate in anti-semitic messaging to justify counter-measures to dissolve the networks building up around them. Don’t volunteer to be an irresponsible idiot, anywhere, and pass that message on to others. You need to be mindful of the possibility of inducing a platform level backlash (further regulation of discourse), and you also need to be aware of the specific level’s social control mechanisms. The moderators of any given community should be seen as dishonest or plants unless you absolutely have evidence to the contrary. Ask yourself: how many moderators have I met? How many famous reddit moderators disappeared exactly when Maxwell was arrested? Don’t trust any of these people. Only loosely do these snakes provide an idea of what they’ll remove posts and ban users for, as you already know. You might not know, however, that those rules are prone to what all rule-based decision-making is prone to. Rule-based decisions are prone to breakdown when special pleads are made against them, and also when what belongs in one category is broken down into another through family resemblances. If you dance around the line of permissibility, you could gerrymander the authorized discourse in a space across time as long as you slow-walk it responsibly. Slow-walking can’t go anywhere, though, it naturally can’t exceed the word and sentiment filters that would trip a higher level response. As long as you keep yourself on the level of dealing with individual actors who have to use volition, this tactic could work. As an additional tip: soften harsher realities through words that have more syllables. Shorter words are punchier, and move people more. The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Boetie 1577/2011) doesn’t end at the level of the agent. It also applies to the ‘ruler’ himself, since no one perfectly applies his own standards. As long as you don’t trip these responses, you’ll have access to a recurring audience of like-minded people to serially process across time. If you see success with the people who stick around, they’ll even take on some of the work since they’ll have different messaging as their minds change. They’ll even vote on comments differently, which will improve your visibility. It isn’t unreasonable to say that insofar as members and moderators of the community fit the MAGApede mold from the beginning of this essay, they’ll allow you to persuade their community members. The Jordan Peterson sub, before their hands-off moderation led to them being totally inundated with dissent, let you say whatever you wanted. The politics sub, on the other hand, doesn’t allow anything. This extreme gatekeeping would be expected since the users there are the equivalent of “poes” 13 but with bots instead of wacky positions. We’re still people on the internet. Opportunistic efforts: Reddit also offers the opportunity for you to meddle with topics in an ad hoc fashion. Subreddits like AskReddit have users submit questions to be voted on, and comments to be voted on by users. Some of these questions will be 13 A Poe is someone who holds such an extreme position that he can’t be differentiated from a troll. A progressive is undifferentiable from a bot in his attacks on dissent (moderation and cliche responses), so you can’t tell which you’re dealing with. You’ve seen the memes. more or less relevant to your concerns. When those pop up, you can respond to them, and the same goes for the comments. The problem is that it’s not a designated place. You’ll only ever be scrounging for opportunities to speak in front of a transient audience, but you do get around the issue of a potential personality’s designated communities that are maintained by fans or staff. AskReddit isn’t totalitarian in its moderation policies, but it is a highly visible and trafficked space on a major website, so how far you can run before the leash stops you isn’t obvious. Final Thoughts on Online Communities: Personally, I don’t think we should leave things at processing people in specific pre-extant communities. Migrating people towards designated right-wing spaces, that afford certainty in worldviews, should be an additional goal for people involved in this project. A baby step on a given platform from forum to forum is a fine thing to propose, but that doesn’t deal with the platform-wide policies and potential for things to be trashed. A platform controlled by people who agree with us should be the goal for us to migrate users towards. It’s a major improvement to get someone to add Tom Woods to their subscriptions on YouTube, since that will remove their time for other engagement with other positions and views, but that’s not as big as someone using an explicitly moral alternative site to listen to him. Those other sites won’t sell out Christian values in moderation, and they also won’t in their role as a means to search what they platform. On YouTube, you can’t find anything, anymore. It’s all just the degeneracy you’re supposed to see so that they can inundate you with vices and unreality. Why tempt people with this? Conclusion: What I’m proposing is that we “mine” the giant efforts of the oligarchs to piggyback on their power. We can go to the crowds that are gathered, and work to siphon their members off to our controlled spaces. All we have to do is be aware of which veins are worthy of being mined (receptiveness of the audience), and also how well these “people mines” are guarded (gatekeeping continuum). This will fill out Paleo and Christian politics with additional people who can give us more purchase in society. We don’t need to spend all kinds of money to get new members. All we have to do is: 1. Identify populated social spaces with amenable people. 2. Understand how discourses are controlled where they are. 3. Use that understanding so that we can profit off the machinery of others. 4. Be mindful of the possibility of a backlash. 5. Pre-fabricate lists of resources to educate and migrate people off the reservation Postscript: If you found value in this essay, please add it to appropriate Lists on Goodreads, leave a 5 star review, and consider requesting a PDF (Goodreads DM) so that you can forward this to people you know who would like this. If you want, I can also give interviews or presentations on this topic. References: Boétie, É., & M. (2011). The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (H. Kurz, Trans.). Ludwig von Mises Institute. (Original work published 1577) Hammond, R. A., & Axelrod, R. (2006). The Evolution of Ethnocentrism. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50(6), 926–936. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002706293470 Huxley, J. (1948). UNESCO: its Purpose and its Philosophy . Public Affairs Press. Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P. (1994). On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action. 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