The Musket Mindset
Why the Little Elons won't listen to me
Last night I finally subscribed to
.
I normally prefer to subscribe only after I’ve read a large number of articles (or even the author’s entire output) and can be sure there is considerable overlap between the author’s views and mine. But what little I’ve read of Michel’s output so far is so impressive that I broke my own rule.
I thought I had known pretty much everything wrong with Trump … until I started reading Michel’s Stack which opened my eyes to the crypto aspect of his story. Even a total financial ignoramus like me had heard about TRUMP and MELANIA, but those turned out to be the tip of the iceberg: e.g.,
It’s also worth mentioning that Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong was one of the largest overall donors to the 2024 election. The super PACs he and his broligarch buddies funded contributed to the election of both Donald Trump for president as well as something like 120 of the 538 members of Congress, all hand selected with the explicit goal of legalizing memecoin scams.
I still am in contact with MAGAs who are in love with DOGE. I doubt they know anything about Gauthier ‘Cole’ Killian:
Do they know that
Tether’s banker has become the chairman of Trump’s transition team, meaning he will pick who runs things like the American Department of Justice and thus agencies like the FBI.
Or that
somehow not only was the cryptocurrency industry making massive political donations, it was actually donating more money to American politicians than the tech industry, the pharma industry, the defense industry … or even the pharma industry combined with either of the other two.
Why aren’t the MAGAs mad at Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big War also mad at Big Bro? Or about the other revelations in this article?
Before I found Michel, I was a fan of
, the first writer I’ve seen online who shared my skepticism toward crypto as well as Trump:So the combination of both Bitcoin, Tether and the people who support BTC and USDT that Trump is surrounding himself with, seems extremely Swampy and totalitarian in nature, yet most people continue to pretend that Trump is ‘one of the good guys’ and that he will drain the swamp.
Once Trump introduces similar [crypto] legislation, the Trumptards don’t need to worry though, it will ‘all be for the greater good’ and will “Make America Great Again,” it will be more “3D chess” and it’s all "part of “The Plan” that Deep State PsyOps sites like ZeroHedge and Xitter (Twitter/X.com) have been pumping into the heads of the ‘conservative’ Useful Idiots.
When it comes to cognitive dissonance and living-in-an-echo-chamber, the MAGA and BTC Cultists are very similar and will probably thank Trump for it:
Why have my attempts to share Michel and Fulgurite’s work gotten zero traction?
What have I been doing wrong?
Yesterday while reading Michel’s “The Crypto Grifters Of DOGE”, I realized the answer.
I am ‘wrong’.
Wrong about crypto? No. What I’ve been doing isn’t wrong. The problem isn’t the facts or even my presentation of them. The problem is who I am. The problem is me. I am ‘wrong’ from the perspective of the Musket Mindset. I am not Konvincing.
I admit I’m financially illiterate. (At least I’m not broke or in debt.) That’s why I sometimes find Michel’s writing hard to follow. But that’s the least of my problems.
A bigger problem is that I’m no Teknoman.
And not because I can’t grow a suit of armor around me.
I’m a humanities guy - what you’re not supposed to let your kids become in the age of STEM. Every parent’s worst nightmare.
Replace “stamp” in this song (at 1:17) with “STEM”. “STEM, STEM, STEM …” is the song of our time.
I do not have a tech background. At least not enough of one to matter.1 Tech and I do not mix. The simplest things frustrate me. Like trying to set up a Substack account last year. Tonight without warning, Brave cut itself off from the Internet, so to my horror, over an hour of work on this post had been unsaved. I had to copy and paste my draft into - shudder - a less ‘secure’ browser. Notepad constantly crashes on me, input methods fail (right now Chinese character selection isn’t working), lowercase and uppercase switch places, I often can’t type numerals and punctuation, Macs and Cygwin … you can guess.2
So - shocker - I don’t understand the Kode that the Teknomen indulge in. Michel describes it as
the strange word salad of tech speak, gibberish, and avarice that the bros use to communicate with each other.
The Kode is not just for Teknomen. It’s a common tool to build ingroup solidarity while also impressing the outgroup. Some of the MAGAs I know are quite fond of The Jordan’s Kode. Sample just part of one of his definitions of God (he has others):
“God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence of an action of consciousness across time; as the most real aspects of existence manifest themselves across the longest of time-frames but are not necessarily apprehensible as objects in the here and now.”
Nathan Robinson can see The Jordan’s word salad for what it is:
Obscurantism is more than a desperate attempt to feign novelty, though. It’s also a tactic for badgering readers into deference to the writer’s authority. Nobody can be sure they are comprehending the author’s meaning, which has the effect of making the reader feel deeply inferior and in awe of the writer’s towering knowledge, knowledge that must exist on a level so much higher than that of ordinary mortals that we are incapable of even beginning to appreciate it.
Obviously, The Jordan is no Teknoman. But he does have his Kode.
So maybe I was wrong - in the sense that it’s not just me who’s the problem. Maybe I’d get more ‘respect’ if I resorted to obscurantism. But I refuse to stoop to such word games.
And even I did, that wouldn’t be enough to make me Konvincing. There’s more to a Teknoman than a CS degree and the Kode.
Like the technooptimism. Optimism is soooo Murrican. So not me.
Maybe most important of all is the Krassness. Also very Murrican - very un-me.
How can I convince MAGAs that Gauthier ‘Cole’ Killian of DOGE is dangerous when they wish they were him (or married to him)? Killian is their idea of a ‘winner’. He
has worked on or with a litany of financial cringe that includes tooling for NFT scams, building “DeFi” yield farms, failing to see the Terra/Luna ponzi for what it was, and a tenure working with the creeps at Jump Crypto should be banished for life from the financial services industry tout suite. What they should not be doing is tinkering with the plumbing that drives the entire global economy and/or beaming Americans’ confidential data up into the great Elon in the sky. But that’s where we are.
If Killian is a winner, the “great Elon is the sky” is a WINNER. The Teknoman of Teknomen.
If I attacked Elon - if I showed them this sticker I saw when I went to the Punahou Carnival two days ago - they would take that as an attack on them.
Because they are Muskets3. Little Elons. Would-be winners don’t listen to losers like me.
Because the Muskets agree with the Misfits. Winning is everything.
Their idea of winning isn’t mine. Or that of the Jains, whose name means ‘of the winners’.4
They haven’t won big time yet - they’re not billionaires - but those temporarily embarrassed millionaires are convinced they will win. With crypto.
Which I don’t have. I have no skin in their game. What could I possibly know about it? I’m no TekLord.
![By William Shatner Tek Lords (Jake Cardigan) (Reissue) [Mass Market Paperback]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R7S4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F005b371b-1939-4018-aba2-f80e8d485248_301x475.jpeg "By William Shatner Tek Lords (Jake Cardigan) (Reissue) [Mass Market Paperback]")
Nothing I could say could possibly help them win their game. Make more money. Be more like Musk, who is singlehandedly cleaning up government, getting rid of all the useless people and programs. Unlike them. They are special. They are TekLords. Teknomen. Muskets. Survivors of Darwinian capitalism. Chosen by the freeee market.
Their lane is high above mine. They are high nerds, whereas I am a
loser cliqued loser, the lowest of the low, the most socially awkward, the worst performer financially, the eternal outsider, [who] can discern the truth of the state of society and dream of a course correct. It is indeed the only thing they are good at. This is because when other cliques [including nerds] achieve financial success or academic prominence or excel at sports - really any activity not associated with being a loser - such success comes with strings attached that require one to compromise one’s views in order to retain their social status. Only the loser, lacking any success at all, can afford to grasp and promote viewpoints that lack social status.
I love
’s writing as a whole, but that passage speaks the most to me out of his vast body of work. It justifies me.Only by ‘losing’ can I win in a way that really matters to me. Win in the Regime’s mindwar on me - on us all:
There is a reason the globalists spend so much time, effort and money infiltrating both the political and social media arenas—because they are fully aware these arenas are the battleground. They take great pains to legislate everything they do, and concurrently, they flood the media zone at all times with extensive propaganda.
Murrican ‘winners’ would dismiss the above as a rationalization, an excuse I use to live with my loser self. They turn away from me in disgust and go back to smoking hopium that they buy from their favorite Kurators - filterers of information.
I was trapped in a Kurated Kage until last year when Substackers opened my eyes to criticisms of Trump that would never be expressed in the $afe Zone.
I doubt any MAGAs I know have ever seen this video:
Or this photo:
I can imagine their reaction: “NBC (Nothing But Communists) nonsense! Deepfake! Photoshop! The Great Orange God fooling our mutual foes! Oh, if only we had His ability to trick Epstein and Obama.”
They don’t realize he’s tricking them. Posing as their messiah in the greatest performance of his life.
They love CON men like Trump. That’s why they “elected a con artist as the leader of the free world” in Michel’s words. If I showed them all the legal problems with Trump ‘University’, they’d dismiss them as “lies” and/or “politicized” even though they predated The Escalator Ride.
MAGAs who aren’t Jew-haters would have loved Sam Bankman-Fried if only he were CONservative like them. On Team Red. Then his imprisonment would have been spun as the oppression of innovation under Biden. The unjust persecution of a real-life John Galt,
a man whose sole claim to fame is that he built a rigged offshore casino to financially rape the underclass of countries less important than our own [i.e., losers like me who ‘deserve’ to be fleeced by winners like SBF!] and used the money to bribe politicians.
They wouldn’t describe him the way Michel did in that quotation, of course. Also via Michel, an ad from The New Yorker:
Give SBF a haircut and a suit - a Kostume - put a Murrican flag in the background, and MAGAs would love FTX as much as Fox News. “You in?” asks the ad. The MAGAs would be in. Just like The New Yorker, which “published a laudatory biopic on Samuel Bankman-Fried at the same time as they took millions of dollars of his ill-gotten gains to run this ad”.
The line between MAGAs and the liberals they hate is thinner than any of them could ever admit. Almost nonexistent from my loser’s perspective. Both love their Kognojail and the Kurators who keep them there. Michel writes,
editors at every single one of the above publications [including Fox News as well as its kayfabe opponents] (and, as far as I can tell, literally every English language publication in the free world except for London’s Financial Times) fell all over each other trying to show the world who could most effectively suck Satan’s [i.e., SBF’s] teat was shocking.
Always look for Konsensus across the $afe Zone. Then question why. And wonder what the Kurators left out - what’s left for independent writers like Michel to suss out. Lots of terra incognita for me to explore on his site alone: e.g., who might the ‘Satoshi’ be?
I reject the Musket Mindset. The cheerleading for TekLords. A narrow definition of education as a means for money - credentials or a computer language to add to one’s CV.
I embrace
’s stance:The best we can do at this time, from what I see, is educating ourselves and others about the actual structure of our global system, refuse to fall for the Current Thing or give it our attention, continue our individuation processes and try to live beneath our means financially.
I will continue to try to educate “others about the actual structure of our global system,” even if their Musket Mindset makes my efforts futile. I can’t fake faith in CON men.
And I can’t give up on people I care about.
I did write a Gundam video game in BASIC for myself to play in 1984. Perhaps the first of its kind in English.
A classmate’s Walkman would malfunction in my presence. He theorized that I have a disruptive magnetic field. You do not want me anywhere near the controls for a nuclear arsenal.
The word musket is a diminutive - hence the -et. The root musk- is ultimately from Latin musca ‘fly’. Now I’m thinking of Musk as the monster from the Cronenberg film (which I still haven’t seen) and his admirers as little flies buzzing around him.
Jain is from Sanskrit Jaina ‘of the winners’, an adjective derived from Jina ‘Winner’, the Jain term for someone who has won against their own kaṣāyas (passions) and karma. A Teknoman is no Jina; he indulges his passion for money via technology. He is a winner in a Murrican context, but not a Jain context. He has not won (ji, the verbal root of Jina) against at least three of the four kaṣāyas: greed, ego, and deceit. Three ‘virtues’ in the USSA today embodied by its leader, the Great Orange God. Note the overlap between two of the kaṣāyas (greed and ego) with the M (money) and E (ego) of MICE.