Conan the Librarian
Conan the Librarian
When I was in my mid-teens, I became interested in Human Rights. Or, more accurately, I became interested in a girl who was interested in them, which is the usual circuitry of such things. I joined her chapter of Amnesty International, where I wrote letters to foreign tyrants demanding truth, justice, the American way, and so forth.
I recall that in one of these — I think it was to Mobutu — I mentioned that the movie Rambo was based on a real dude, and that we were sending him, so he should bend over and kiss his fat ass goodbye. Letters we wrote were sent out as templates to be hand-copied by younger members. I don’t know how many Rambo-threats Mobutu received, but I imagine they all got burnt in a trash pit anyway, alongside the corpses of political enemies and the like.
Back to the “usual circuitry” for a moment; the dirty little secret behind many so-called social justice movements is that for every true believer, there are probably ten poseurs just decorating their resumes, and a hundred guys just trying to get laid. The graph explodes outwards from there into thousands of folks who just nod along politely at anything the sounds nice-enough on paper.
At birth, the institutions don’t always reflect this motivational curve. While not quite reversed, I suspect it begins in a much more flattened shape. The ACLU in its crib may have been loaded with communists posing as free speech advocates (or vice versa), but the proportion of men who were only in it for the pussy was probably much lower. Even your average anti-Comstock lawyer probably wasn’t a porn addict himself. There were principles at stake, in other words, even if they weren’t always the ones advertised to the public.
People often say we live in the New Dark Ages. Sometimes those “people” even include me, because many of the similarities are hard to ignore. But other times, I think the better analogy is the Hyborian Age of Robert E. Howard’s writings, or perhaps some murky span between Neolithic and Bronze. A world where people still commonly wore the skins of the animals they killed.
While these pelts would later be transformed beyond recognition of the species who first wore them, there was undoubtedly a time when such recognition was the entire point. “Look how big a bear I killed! Look at the size of its paws on my shoulders, its fangs across my brow.” If sorcery was in vogue, perhaps the pelt-wearer would even boast some of the powers the animal possessed in life. At the very least, he’d probably attract the attention of a few chicks.
In our current model, the beast is the form of the old, well-established institution, the hunter is its neo-Marxcissist infiltration unit and the chicks are… well, grant-writers, political campaigns, NGOs, global financiers and other rackets. They’re also children, of course, who continue to be marked as fair game for indoctrination by pelt-wearers like Amnesty International, the ACLU and NAACP. In their case, there’s the old aphorism to consider:
If you’re not a socialist before you’re twenty-five, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after twenty-five, you have no head.
But unlike the bestial version with its storm of genuine passions, the skin-walker is ultimately a fraud. He’s not Hercules wrestling the Nemean lion. He is a coward who spent weeks slowly poisoning the lion’s food while it slept.
The NAACP might be the most despicable version of this fake hero. Or maybe that title belongs to The New York Times, a paper I once consumed regularly but would not use to wipe up dog turds now. Or Time magazine for that matter. Remember Time? While it wasn’t ever as sophisticated or prestigious as those dramatic 1980’s TV spots suggested, try cracking open a copy of the current skinwalker version for comparison.
Here’s a tasty excerpt from the #1 article of their “Most Read” section:
“Medical Residents Are in an Uproar Over the 'Ethics' of The Last of Us Finale”
But another, more specific, debate also took off—this time, between medical residents online.
“After watching the Last of Us finale did anyone else do the math that the doctor performing the surgery was probably a resident when cordyceps took over? Like he’s not more than 50 so he was no more than 30,” posted one user on the r/Residency subreddit.
“Also is it ethical to perform a nonsurvival surgery on a minor to save mankind from cordyceps?” the self-proclaimed anesthesia resident continued. “And why not a spinal tap and see if it grows cordyceps and use that for your vaccine?”
It was the post that launched a thousand ships. Or at least a hundred replies. Reddit users—presumably medical residents, given the subreddit—began a spirited discussion over the accuracy and plausibility of the events of episode 9. Ellie was supposed to save the world, but now it seems, humanity may be doomed.
If you’re confused, the article refers to a foofaraw on Reddit.com about a TV show that’s about a video game that’s about a fictional fungus that transforms people into mushroom-zombies. But hey, cut ‘em some slack! At least they’re not publishing some fluffy advertainment piece about an 81-year-old park bench socialist who’s never held a productive job in his life ranting about capitali… whoops, never mind.
There are too many strong candidates to run through them all. What about Doctors Without Borders? Surely that collection of brave men and women couldn’t be transformed into Stone Age activewear/mushroom-zombies, right?
Let’s hear what its president Christos Christou said to NPR (ahem) about the organization’s priorities in 2020:
In an interview with NPR about the letter, he questioned how widespread incidents of outright racism are across the organization's dozens of missions.
But he says there is no question the organization is built on a problematic model. "It's this idea of the white savior — the white doctor going and providing assistance to the people in Africa and especially to little African kids."
Christou says it's time for a total revamp:
"Being clearly anti-racist in this organization is not just about dismantling and overcoming all these barriers that may have been created over all these years," he says. "It's about rethinking the humanitarian model: The whole way of distributing the decision-making power and also the resources."
Good thing he’s rethinking the model. Clearly physicians who voluntarily insert themselves into active war zones should learn a thing or two about checking their white privilege.
In some ways, it is as it must be. The old and venerable institutions were often overpraised to begin with, as seen through the rose-tinted glasses of our youths. But they are certainly old, which always incurs a bit of debilitation. And maybe that’s more the trick than poisoning; the new NAACP killed the Nemean Lion version, but the beast was so ancient and weak that it was on death’s doorstep already, and lost without putting up a fight.
The victory is still cowardly in its way, and certainly nothing to brag to the chicks about. But at least it’s in line with this world’s natural order of things. The old are killed or starved by the new, who then pretend to absorb the victim’s powers through their flayed skin. That’s the Barbarian Way. Conan would be proud.
Still I think what we’ll see — what we are already seeing, in many ways — is a steep slope of diminishing returns.
ESG and DEI initiatives can be studied from a variety of angles, but one of them is stop-loss. The ACLU promo card I snapped above was one of many, scattered carelessly near some garbage cans that were in spitting distance of a middle school. Maybe it was the kids themselves who dumped them there, their crime of littering even more pronounced since the garbage was a few feet away. Maybe not. But I would bet good money that those kids don’t know anything about this new ACLU, let alone about the original beast and its legendary power.
The same goes for the card’s pilfered language, which twists the Constitution’s preamble into a vile communistic sentiment. The kids don’t know or care where that came from either, or what’s implied by the mutated form. The kids might not even be trying to get laid anymore, 1 like I was back when I was threatening warlords with Stallonic retribution. They won’t staff their skinwalker operations. More importantly, they won’t fund them. And neither will their parents. Not voluntarily, at least.
Back in 2014, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation famously handed the ACLU $50 million to address “Incarceration Reform.” I don’t know what they did with all that cash, because Sugar Daddy Soros blew another $140 million in 2021 to more or less directly install his preferred brand of “See No Evil” prosecutors throughout Urban America. Sure, all those cities suffered massive crime spikes as a result; but everyone knows you can’t make a Open Society omelet without breaking a few store windows. I mean eggs. I mean jobs, neighborhoods, families and lives.
But the point is he didn’t waste it on the skinwalkers, who have been rendered too lame, corrupt and incompetent to hunt even the most diminished of prey. The money pump will soon run dry, because — mini-bumps like “OMG Trump is the new Hitler” donor drives aside — the market for social justice middlemen is also drying up.
As the Enemy unmasks itself, what it reveals is a face which no longer pretends to want to persuade you to volunteer or donate. It plans to take from you, violently if necessary. Behind every human law is the implicit threat to kill or starve, and that’s precisely what the enshrinement of ESG and CBDC will do — threaten to take everything from us neo-peasants on a whim. That’s why Klaus Schwab can make bold pronouncements like “You will own nothing and be happy,” to an audience of jet-set kings and queens, because they know very well that “you” does not include “them.”
But just as the American Civil Liberties Union sees no need to defend civil liberties anymore, neither will their paymasters see a need to keep them on the dole. Social justice will become turnkey, a matter for the bank officers and the police. Worse, a generation who remembers the lion-form that might’ve stood up to these tyrants in the past is swiftly dying off, and the ones behind them will be both too impoverished and depressed to care.
The youngest of those have been taught that most of them are victims of some form of -ism or -phobia, and the rest are straight male honkies like me. Neither will be in the mood — or even the position — to fork over cash to a bunch of lefty lawyers cosplaying as superheroes, cosplaying as ferocious beasts of the ancient world.
Conan the librarian will die on his stool, in other words. Slowly starved to death in his empty book-lair, as his demands for silence grow ever more raspy and feeble, and his pelt more rancid and decayed. He has been reduced to a confused, shrunken and dischevelled wretch, unaware of the irony that he now spends his days banning the books that his prey defended.
Meanwhile. the library cards will flutter down outside like confetti, or like an issue of The Washington Post that was shredded to line a hamster cage, somehow missing all those trashcans where they belong.
Somewhere, an Italian-American-Indian actor weeps. But no one recognizes him anymore either.
Which is a big problem in itself, in my opinion.
