The Road to Hell

Gather ‘round, young ‘uns, and hear tell of the days of yore. When I tell younger people that I didn’t start using the internet until I was out of high school (c. 1999), I’m usually met with the look they reserve for great grandpa’s story about trading in his horse-drawn cart for a rootin’ tootin’ Henry Ford Model T. The internet was a different place back then. Most people were still offline, and the early adopters were not exactly a neutral cross-section of the world’s English-speaking peoples. The user base skewed young and male compared to the general population. Social media didn’t exist yet, so the vast majority of users were set to read-only. They didn’t blog, post, comment, or DM, they read articles, looked up information, occasionally bought something, and that was about it. The users who were creating content - posting in message boards and comment sections, blogging, creating their own personal websites, etc. - skewed young and male even compared to the already young and male overall user base. The libertarian, even anarchist, idea of the internet as an unassailable bastion of free expression still held over from the hippie days of Silicone Valley, and it was taken for granted that, short of explicitly illegal activity, there were no rules. People who tried to impose rules were identified and eliminated.

I cut my internet teeth on MMA (mixed martial arts, or “ultimate fighting” for the uninitiated) message boards c. 1999-2002 - the UG, Sherdog’s Off-Topic forum, Ironlife after the crew got mass-banned from Sherdog, and our own board, Upstanding F*cking Citizens (UFC, get it?), after we all got banned from Ironlife. We were a bunch of guys who loved fighting and were fanatical about MMA back when John McCain was still calling it “human cockfighting” and the sport was still banned in 49 states. There was a time when MMA was also known as NHB (no-holds barred), and smaller fight organizations typically had names with “Extreme,” “Blood,” and “Gladiator” in them. The music was “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”-style heavy and nu metal (the UFC still uses a riff that sounds straight off an early KoRn album), roided out fans attended fights “dressed up” in Ed Hardy or Affliction t-shirts, and there were often more fights in the stands and parking lot than there were in the cage or ring. The UFC’s original tagline was: “There Are No Rules!” So, if internet users were already heavily weighted toward the young, anarchic (some might even say antisocial), and male, MMA message board users were the distilled essence of that demographic. We were cruel to each other without any of us ever feeling like the object of anyone’s cruelty. For the last twenty years, I have made fun of my best friend because his mom is deaf; he invariably responds by throwing shade on my dead father. Neither of us has ever felt insulted even though they are objectively outrageous things to say to another person.

These guys started the first, and for a while the only, MMA apparel company, and were small-time celebrities among fans of the sport. None of us is proud of it, but this is where things stood until about 2003 or 2004.

MMA fans and online content creators¹ saw the lack of rules almost as an end in itself. The cardinal sin was to take oneself too seriously; it was not to offend, but to be offended. Five minutes clicking through threads on the first page of the Off Topic section of any message board would expose the average person to more racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, body shaming, support for Nazis, communists, terrorists, serial killers, mass shooters, and war criminals than they had seen in their lives up to that point. It was enough to scare 99% of lurkers away, and that was the point. If you passed through that initial filter, you were in for weeks, even months, of an uninterrupted stream of contempt, abuse, hate, and trolling. The swastika and goatse pic were like the “No Girls Allowed” sign boys put on the door of their treehouse. The rare woman who found their way onto a late ‘90s-early 2000s message board was welcomed with a barrage of propositions, questions about her sexual history, misogynistic jokes, and “tits or gtfo.” None of us, or very few, took any of it seriously, and everyone understood it was an effective means of gatekeeping. The terms and conditions of the early internet were simple: you had to prove you could take it² without losing emotional control over some words on a screen. On a gut level, everyone understood that the presence of just a few schoolmarms tsk tsk’ing the boys would ruin the loose, anything goes environment we all cherished.

Then, one day, everyone’s moms, grandmas, sisters, girlfriends, and wives logged on and found out what the boys had been up to all this time. Almost overnight, our closed-off little world where the only rule was that there were no rules, and the only sin was taking offense, was flooded with millions of new users who never got that memo. Our society has been trying to contain the consequences of this encounter ever since. With the advent of social media, troglodytes like me often had trouble adjusting to the reality that our posts were no longer confined to the intimacy of a self-selected members-only message board where the humor consisted largely of antics meant to shock, horrify, and drive away all but a narrow and specific audience. Suddenly broadcasting to the whole world, on corporate platforms concerned with making every human with a heartbeat feel welcome, and our humor was a bannable offense.

Jocko once told me how, during a wild firefight on the streets of Ramadi, he or one of his guys would kick in the nearest door and take cover inside. Bullets whizzing, grenades exploding, people screaming… and then he looks around the room he just barged into and there’s a mom and dad and two kids hiding under a table. That is similar to how those of us weaned on old school message boards and dorm room Counterstrike servers felt when we moved, with everyone else, to social media platforms. A lot of poor schmucks got themselves a permanent place on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website before they were able to make the necessary adjustments.

The upshot of this overlong introduction is that different people have different reactions to the chaos they encounter on the internet. I am one of the generation trained by hard experience to be shocked, appalled, and offended by… absolutely nothing. Even when we see something that triggers those vestigial reflexes, we pretend to hardly notice while mocking all the n00bs for throwing a fit. I don’t say any of this with pride, and think G.K. Chesterton was probably right when he wrote: “Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked…It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.” Nevertheless, this is the world to which my generation was forced to adapt, and by the time the habitat changed we had already achieved our final form and it was too late.

So much for the trip down Memory Lane. Something was happening beneath the surface that escaped the notice of most of us OG trolls. It turned out that there was more than one way to miss the joke and take things too seriously. Type 1 was easy to spot since it was the prey evolution had prepared us to hunt. Type 2, though, was almost custom-made to evade our detection because, at a glance, it resembled one of us.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Three Jews walk into a bar, and, before they even order a drink an OG troll in the far corner shouts, “Three oven-dodgers in one place? How did Adolf drop the ball so badly?” One of the newcomers wants to fight, and is promptly thrown out by the bouncer. The second huffed and puffed with tears in his eyes before fleeing the place. But, without missing a beat, the third Jew says, “Because Adolf was too busy screwing your grandma before he shot himself like a little bitch.” Some OG like me says, “Ha! Buy this man a drink! Sorry, this bar doesn’t carry the blood of Christian infants.” And the awesome Jew says something like, “That’s OK, you guys have been aborting so many of your babies we’ve had to find alternatives anyway.” I just made this guy up, but I already love him. This is how things worked back in the day.

But then, with furrowed brow, another regular, a younger guy, says, “Don’t buy that Jew a drink!”

“Har har har. He passed your test, leave him be. Don’t be an asshole.”

“Fuck that Jew, and fuck you too if you defend him.”

I say this asshole is a regular because we’ve seen him around, but he actually showed up relatively recently. I look around the bar for support, but I’m met with blank or hostile stares. A lot of my old friends from the bar have moved on. A few told me they left because the younger crowd coming in was hateful and dangerous, so naturally I called them pussies and told them to take a hike. Come to think of it, I don’t recognize most of the faces any more. Anyway, I tell them to give it a rest, he’s cool, but they are not having it. They’re not joking, and things are getting uncomfortable, and so I - and this is the point I’ve come to in real life - I shake the dust from my feet and leave my favorite watering hole for good.

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If you’re a follower of this Substack, you already know I don’t need to be lectured on the history of Israeli atrocities, the abuses of the Israel lobby and other Jewish organizations, or the preponderance of Jews in subversive cultural and political movements. I don’t think the Israelis killed JFK or pulled off 9/11, but I don’t run away screaming when someone tells me they do. I get the arguments - I don’t agree, but I get it. I know about Weimar Germany, and the Soviet secret police, and Jeffrey Epstein. I know that you were viciously attacked for asking simple, obvious questions after October 7th, and I know you watched people you thought were intelligent and humane transform before your eyes into bloodthirsty lunatics baying for Palestinian blood. I got myself denounced by the White House and banned from several European countries for making what I thought was a mild and qualified criticism of the usual World War 2 narrative, so I know, and I get it.

For all these reasons and more, it’s easy to get caught up in the “Jew thing.” I’ve seen it happen a hundred times, and one of the things you notice is that you almost never meet a moderate antisemite. You know, someone who goes about their day like anyone else, almost never thinking about the Jews, except when he’s looking for an accountant he filters out all the the Steins, Bergs, Golds, Silvers, Silversteins, and Goldbergs. If that guy exists, I’ve never met him. The antisemites I know - I know plenty, and to the chagrin of my critics I do not denounce them… in fact, I count many of them as friends - seem to be unable to think or speak of anything else, especially in the early stages when the fever first grips them. I have some theories about why that is, but we’ll save them for another time. This post is a simple announcement that I’m shaking the dust from my feet and finding another bar where people still get the joke. I’ve blocked over 15,000 people on X by now, and I would say that 70% of them were due to vulgar antisemitism. I don’t block people for saying Jews run the media, or that we live under a Zionist Occupied Government, or that Jews have split loyalties, so those 15,000 are just the nakedly hateful, the-Holocaust-isn’t-real-but-I-wish-it-was people.

Hatred will ruin our souls whether or not our target has it coming. That is not to say that Jews deserve your hatred, only that you shouldn’t indulge it even if you think they do. Even if you’re right, it won’t save you, and it won’t make a difference to the real people in your life who need a spouse, parent, sibling, or friend who isn’t seething with anger and resentment over an abstract issue involving people you’ll never meet.

“Mommy, why is daddy angry?”

“Because the Jews are at it again, sweetie.”

This kind of thing happens, and you don’t want to be that person. Your excuses for it are like when Jenny’s boyfriend in Forrest Gump blames his temper tantrum on LBJ. There are ways to be critical of organized Jewish power without letting it consume you. Any voice encouraging you to hate is the voice of Satan. It is your enemy. You’d think that a basic familiarity with the Christian message would make that obvious, but Satan keeps using the same trick because it almost always works.

The story of the Good Samaritan is often lost on modern audiences because most of us don’t have a contemporary equivalent to the deep contempt Judeans had for Samaritans. If the story was written today in Israel, it would be called The Good Palestinian, or, if it was written in Gaza, it would be called The Good Israeli. And if you’ve been sucked into the vortex of antisemitic obsession, the story written to you would be The Good Jew. If that causes bile to pool beneath your esophagus, then you know how Jesus’ audience felt when he told the story the first time.

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I’m really tired of talking about this stuff, and this post is meant to be an explanation of why I’m going to try to talk about it less. If it you pick up a whiff of sanctimony, it’s unintentional and I’m self-conscious about sounding like that. This is a speech I give myself on a regular basis, because I’m as prone to mob up and look for scapegoats as anyone else. I know what it’s like to walk around consumed with anger, and it’s never worth it.

I imagine I’m talking to a few different audiences here, so I’ll close by address each of you directly.

If you have started “noticing,” and felt yourself being pulled into the cycle of conflict, just take a step back. No one ever looked back on his life pleased with the fact that he spent so much of it carrying around anger and hatred over things that had nothing to do with his immediate circumstances.

If you’re thinking “somebody got to Cooper,” or “he’s controlled opposition,” or some other phrase you once saw someone tweet, or if you’re getting angry that I’m trying to dissuade people from following you into the muck, leave or keep it to yourself. I’m happy to discuss this with anyone, especially hardened antisemites, if they’re willing to engage in good faith, but I’m done indulging or ignoring low-IQ vulgar antisemitism. The goal of these people is to conscript everyone else into their conflict, and they won’t be using me or my platform to do it.

If you don’t have any strong feelings about this, God bless you. You’re doing it right, and I love and envy you.

Thanks for reading.

1. I’m using this term to mean anyone who posted, commented, blogged, uploaded or otherwise added to the store of online content, rather than simply consuming it. By this definition, virtually everyone is a “content creator” today.

2. What’s “it”? Anything.