I know a lot of you are wondering if I think the assassination attempts on Trump were faked.
Of course they were faked. Have you seen Disclosure Day? Everything is fake now. If he could, Trump, would absolutely fake an assassination attempt. The man spent sixty years converting his own life into professional wrestling promos and hocking gold-plated android phones.
The problem is that the people orbiting him could not successfully organize a surprise birthday party at an Applebee’s.
You see modern day conspiracies assume levels of competence that the actual ruling class cannot sustain for more than eleven consecutive minutes. We live in a civilization where intelligence agencies lose laptops, billionaires post through ketamine episodes, journalists accidentally publish war plans, and half the political establishment learns history from podcasts sponsored by meat jerky companies.
And yet somehow everyone believes there is a flawless hidden script underneath all this. A perfect choreography of power.
No. The truth is much funnier and much worse.
The world now runs on vibes assembled from video clip compilations.
Which brings us naturally to my new obsession with substack & youtuber Joomi Kim.
And her review of the book, The Camp of the Saints.
That sentence alone tells you how crazy the atmosphere has become. Fifteen years ago mentioning Jean Raspail in public conversation was giving the same energy as owning antique phrenology equipment. Now the great replacement theory drifts through Substack videos, podcast monologues, Elon Musk replies, and debates about immigration policy like a ghost that accidentally found Wi-Fi.
The problem with pseudointellectuals of course is Intellectuals will discuss anything if you put the words “civilizational podcast" in front of it and leave them in a dark room with a microphone.
The strange thing is that ordinary people now recognize the emotional architecture of existential anxiety instantly now.
My brother has never read Samuel Huntington. If you asked him to explain The Clash of Civilizations he would probably say it was a Call of Duty expansion pack. Yet after enough Tik Tok shorts, doomscrolling, Joe Rogan podcast clips, and algorithmic psychic damage, he can reproduce the mood of the argument almost perfectly.
Not the theory. Just the mood.
Because nobody reads the source texts anymore. They absorb atmospheric residue. Civilizational exhaustion. Elite betrayal. Institutional softness. “Suicidal empathy.” Cultural drift. The feeling that everyone in charge has confused moral performance for statecraft while normal people absorb the consequences downstairs near the rent payments and broken air conditioning units.
And this is where Gad Saad enters the story.
Saad’s genius — if that is the word — is not that he invented a new argument. It is that he improved the lighting.
The older versions of these narratives were too blunt. Too theatrical. Too openly apocalyptic. The Camp of the Saints practically arrives covered in feces carrying a church bell and screaming that Europe is collapsing by sunset.
Saad’s framing is cleaner. Clinical. Evolutionary psychology. Behavioral incentives. “Suicidal empathy.” It sounds less like a torchlit panic and more like a TED Talk delivered by a man who owns several expensive blazers.
Same emotional climate. Better camera angles.
That is how ideas survive now. Not necessarily by becoming more true, but by becoming more meme-able.
And once Elon Musk starts injecting those ideas directly into the bloodstream of the algorithm twenty times a day, the process accelerates. A theory becomes a meme. A meme becomes ambient intuition. Ambient intuition becomes “common sense.” Eventually your cousin who has never voluntarily read a book longer than a Chili’s menu is explaining demographic anxiety to you in-between cryptocurrency losses.
That's what people still don't understand about internet politics. Your feed does not care about ideological coherence. It cares about emotional compression.
A meme like “suicidal empathy” succeeds because it converts a gigantic messy field of anxieties — immigration, institutional distrust, housing pressure, cultural confusion, elite resentment — into a portable emotional object you can carry around in your pocket like a digital worry stone.
And because life genuinely does feel less stable to many people, the phrase attaches itself to real frustrations. That is why simply screaming “racist” at everyone eventually stops working. Moral condemnation of shoeonhead may still work for Hasan Piker. But it does not explain why suicidal empathy narratives now feel emotionally legible across wildly different audiences.
It's not like everyone secretly became fascists overnight.
It’s that the emotional weather changed and certain old books suddenly look less like alien artifacts and more like primitive forecasting systems.
Which is unfortunate, because the internet is exactly the wrong place for tired civilizations to develop metaphysics. Every historical anxiety immediately gets converted into content. Every mood becomes branding. Every fear becomes monetizable.
A French novelist writes apocalyptic fiction in 1973 and fifty years later it returns as podcast ambiance for men wearing tactical headphones explaining fertility collapse beside ads for testosterone supplements.
That is not history repeating itself.
That is history getting optimized for engagement.
