Whenever I see updates from Substack authors breathlessly tracking their increasing follower counts, I instinctively think, “Wow, what a self-congratulatory fag.”

Well, my time to be a self-congratulatory fag I guess, as I recently hit 1,000 subscribers.1 Thank you guys.

I originally created this Substack in order to draw attention to my other Substack, which may be (?) unique to the platform as an essentially self-contained manifesto about the privately owned central banks and the egalitarianism that gave rise to it. Without an already established following, I needed regular, consistent updates and engagement with the Substack community to draw attention to it, hence The Neo-Feudal Review. And I think this strategy is slowly having an impact, maybe.

I had sat on the contents of that long-form essay for a long time after taking about a year to write it, afraid of negative repercussions from posting it. After all, publishing something anti-globohomo is a dangerous thing; free speech in America is a farce and an illusion and they can target their enemies at whim. But as Julian Assange argued,

“I think first it’s necessary to have an understanding that one is either a participant in history or a victim of it, and that there is no other option. It is actually not possible to remove oneself from history, because of the nature of economic…and intellectual interaction. Hence, it is not possible to break oneself off….Because no one wants to be a victim, one must therefore be a participant, and in being a participant, the most important thing to understand is that your behavior affects other people’s behavior, and your courage will inspire actions. On the other hand, a lack of courage will suppress them.”

And:

“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.”

And as Theodore Dalrymple said,

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

It was Russian dissident2 Igor Strelkov who said while facing looming potential criminal charges something along the lines of that he accepted the consequences of his words and that sometimes there is a price to pay for speaking truth to power. A brave and heroic man. He now rots in prison, forgotten. This isn’t to argue that I’m anything like Strelkov or Assange, but rather the act of posting one’s thoughts publicly is a fundamental difference from sitting on the sidelines.

Anyway, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for reading. The audience is small (but growing), but the online relationships I have developed with you via comments, restacking, etc., is important for keeping my sanity in this atomized globohomo Hellworld, and the feedback received has also strengthened and challenged my perspectives. I am touched that my essays have found an audience, which are all long, complicated and dense – the shortest is a ~15 minute read according to Substack metrics, while many stretch over 30 minutes – and the takes are usually highly pessimistic which is understandably unpopular. I didn’t and don’t expect this Substack to grow fast or large as a result; people want optimism, they want promise and hope no matter how false, and they want short soundbites. I havn’t been really tempted to try to offer that product although I understand those who do. And I deliberately have only a very minimal Twitter and Gab presence.3

I would especially like to thank those readers who have offered a donative; my paid subscriptions are turned off because I don’t want the pressure of meeting reader expectations and I want to follow my inspiration wherever it leads, but it means a lot that my writing impacted a number of you to the point where you proactively offered to pay for the content. Thank you.

Here are some (faggy) hard-earned lessons learned from the Substack journey so far for those of you seeking to grow your own audiences:

1. Most people don’t click links. Use them if you need to for citation purposes, but generally they should be used sparingly. I don’t follow my own advice on this.
2. Use photos or pictures to liven up an article. Seeing a huge screed of text without breaking it up with visual images is intimidating and turns off readers. John Carer is great at providing ample visual content.
3. Shorter posts are usually better; it takes a special group to read through a 30 minute screed. There is an huge deluge of information out there and one’s attention is pulled in too many directions. Be short and succinct. I also don’t always follow my own advice on this.
4. Start your post with a couple sentence summary of what is to follow. This will allow the reader to decide if the topic, description and summary interests them to continue reading or not.
5. Break up posts into smaller sections. It is much easier to read small sections with breaks in it than to read a whole rambling screed.
6. Post less often. I had to unfollow various authors whose work I otherwise enjoy because my mailbox got too overwhelmed, and I paid more attention anyway to those who posted higher quality content weekly instead of daily.
7. Time and day chosen for posting also has an impact. People are out and about on weekends, for example, so it seems somewhere between Monday and Thursday and early morning posts may be the sweet spot. I like to post on days when I don’t get a lot of Substack emails from others.
8. Write in your own words. People want to hear your voice, not long quotes by others.
9. Try to write at levels above the level of day-to-day politics. Writing about perennial issues will create more of an element of longevity for your posts which others may discover down the road. Regular politics posts have a short shelf-life.
10. Consider selectively submitting your stronger pieces to Revolver News (tips@revolver.news). Darren Beattie or whoever checks that Tips email has posted the link to two of my articles which drew a significant amount of attention compared to baseline. Thanks Darren and Revolver. I would also like to thank Dudley Newright of the New Right Poast for highlighting some of my posts unsolicited which I also appreciate. (Meanwhile, Ron Unz has not responded to a couple of emails sent his way, but he’s a very strange duck).
11. Comment on other’s posts in a respectful manner and offer constructive feedback to them, engage on Notes, and restack posts that you find interesting. We’re all in this together to an extent and the more goodwill you generate by boosting others the more they may return the favor and boost you. On that note make sure to check out Theodore Atkinson’s excellent Substack.
12. It’s not clear which posts will be popular or not ahead of time; posts I thought would be bangers had less attention than I expected, while others that were cranked out with less effort were sometimes much more popular. Perhaps the ease of writing is suggestive of clarity and flow. My most popular post was on living below your means and lowering one’s material expectations as the bad times ahead are going to last for a very long time, decades or longer, and it was one of the easier ones to write. Perhaps practical posts are more popular than theoretical or esoteric ones.
13. Post the links to your latest posts onto Twitter or Gab if you have a presence there. My presence on these platforms is minimal because social media rots your brain, but I still post the links there.
14. Try to keep your main page uncluttered. I find the newspaper style with a bunch of photos and links to be distracting.
15. Fill out your “About” section with something short and succinct about the core things you are trying to achieve with the Substack.

If you have suggestions for growing one’s Substack that I’ve left out or I’m missing I would love to hear them in the comments.

Lastly, I’m not sure where this journey will lead; inspiration is a curious thing and I could wake up one morning and be done with all this, I don’t know. My original inspiration hit me as a flash of light, an almost spiritual epiphany when I read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, something I was not expecting and still am kind of shocked it had such an effect on me. It changed everything for me, where there was a before and after in terms of my thinking. It answered the fundamental question I had, where I have looked around for decades like an aspergery alien wondering: why are people so obsessed with egalitarianism to the point they discard all reason and logic in pursuit of it? Where does this come from? What am I missing? I am trying to be true to that flash of light, that emotional and perhaps spiritual catharsis, even though I don’t know where that path will lead. Everyone is on their own unique journeys and I don’t expect it to have the same effect on you that it had on me. As Ernst Junger wrote in his War Journals, January 28, 1942, reading is first a filtering process where we take what interests us to further our own personal development:

Reading through a text, my personal sensations and thoughts are always at work like an aura imparting a luster to this strange light.

In some sentences or images thoughts come to my consciousness in profusion. I then deal with the first one and leave the others out in the waiting room, but occasionally I open the door, just to see if they’re still standing around. All the while, I continue reading.

While I’m reading, I always have the feeling that I am essentially dealing with my own material. This is what an author is supposed to produce. In doing so, he serves himself first, and only then, others.

And in his September 14, 1942 entry, he describes the riddle of the world as a reflection of the riddle of life:

The riddle of life – before it, blocking the way, hangs the combination lock of the mind doing its job. The outrageous aspect of this job is that the contents of the safe change according to the method applied to gain access to it. If the lock is ever broken open, it evaporates.

Doucement! [Carefully!]. The more delicately we finger it, the more remarkable are the combinations that are revealed. By the same token, they also become simpler. Ultimately, we begin to sense that we are gaining access to our own breast, to our self, and that the riddle of the world is a reflection of the riddle of life. The treasures of the cosmos now pour in.

Anyways thanks for following, I hope this was helpful in some way, and see you at the next post.

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1 This is an important metric because it shows “over 1,000 subscribers” when someone comes to the main page of the Substack. Given people’s herd mentality, the thought is this will allow the Substack to grow faster moving forward.

2 As Russia is also controlled by globohomo.

3 As social media is cancerous click-bait, lacking nuance and subtlety, and blows out your dopamine receptors, even excluding the fact that Twitter is controlled by the CIA and FBI and Gab is an astroturfed ghost town.