April, 2017 I ended up in the Covenant House youth shelter. My six months there was mostly a positive experience of humility and getting my act together. I had nowhere to go, and it was the only place I could go. For most young people there (18-21, mostly) that wasn’t the case. When there wasn’t trash blowing in from off the street who no doubt had been there several times before, it was wild card schizophrenic kids, young people whose parents wanted nothing to do with them and were using this as some lesson (can only think of a couple but man I gave those dudes hell. Low IQ wigger types), wannabe gangbangers, whores, etc.
The success rate of youth shelters is something like 10%. People don’t make it out of there much better than they started off. They are most likely going to end up on welfare for life, working a low-end job for years before they finally get something a tad bit better, etc. Most people there were directionless black kids whose main goal was sex with each other, getting weed and cigarettes, and not getting a job. For the ones who weren’t total troublemakers but couldn’t get a job, the shelter would take pity on them and pay them for doing menial work. For others, they’d go to the residential job training program funded by the gov’t — the Job Corps (sounds like hell) to get a trade. Most of the time, these youth didn’t do much with what they were given. They wanted a reason to sit around and feel sorry for themselves.
Past all that, I was quite friendly with most of them. Other than that white boy you see for a couple seconds in the lying mini-doc MTV did about Hurricane Harvey’s impact on the shelter, I was the only white dude. People really just knew me as the chain smoker white dude who minded his own business. Only time I got into any issues was early on this black trannie dude was acting neurotic and loud about someone taking his shit or something and I called him a faggot and to shut his mouth. They said anything like that again and I was out lol.
The way the shelter works is actually tiered. There’s the entry people who are vetted for a couple weeks then let into a prison-like environment called “the program” where they are for a few months. If they are on good behavior they get sent to the last phase which only a few people get. I got that last phase because I took care of my shit, got a job, and minded my p’s and q’s. Felt kinda good if that’s the only accomplishment you ever had. Some of those youngsters in the program were almost compulsive losers who could never lay down a little bit of pride for a second to get ahead. There’s a deep petulance in all pride.
What I realized in my experience of this was a notable behind the scenes experience with liberal propaganda. Every week there would be a class everyone had to attend hosted by some nonprofit or some college kids talking about how we should wear condoms and take plan b pills so blacks don’t have too many illegitimate kids.
Other ways it was funneled through the onset gay acceptance mantra that was being hastily rolled out by all public institutions in light of the alt-right, Trump bandwagon that was in full swing. I remember a gay white dude early on who was becoming a registered nurse and talked about how being a flamboyant fag just made it easy for him to get whatever job or gov’t assistance he wanted. He knew his degeneracy was societally rewarded. Just like blacks have known for a long time.
Nothing quite cut to the core of how controlled we were than towards the end of my stay at the Covenant House what looked to be some news crew had come over for a few days. I didn’t pay much mind to them. It was only when I finally saw the documentary after I had left and gotten an apartment that I was given the first experience of what it was like to see abject lies presented as truth to the unwashed masses.
I know every single person in this documentary, but without divulging too much personal info about my connection to them, let’s just say none of them were at the Covenant House for reasons given, none of them succeeded in bettering themselves during or afterwards, and this documentary was a short-term way for them to justify their own personal narrative of why they were losers.
This mini-doc proudly features Sam, for who all intents and purposes, was a compulsive liar who couldn’t hold a job, and nobody liked him other than he was a weed hookup. Once he was kicked out for selling weed, he would still meet up with people still at Covenant House in discrete locations to sell them weed. He was the exact low life who led people away from their potential and I hated seeing these people fail time after time. My whole experience of 2017-2018 was a time of hardening cynicism I’d eventually break out of, but Sam was really a good example of someone with no moral accountability that hardened my heart.
However, to the facebook scroller viewing this doc, he was a nice young man just caught up in the residual effects of white supremacy that keep a brotha down. Consumption of information in the hyperreality is like taking a ritualistic primitive pagan psychedelic trip, except for everyone it is a daily venture, rather than something very occasional. Instead of treating it as a spiritual provocation, it is like a digital rabbi of sorts who gives proclamations of truth. A Jew doesn’t question the wisdom of a rabbi, just as the consumer doesn’t question the info rolled out by corporate powers such as MTV (Paramount Global). And what tools do you have other than intuition or anecdote to treat propaganda like this for what it is? You don’t. Most people don’t. It is yet another tale of victimhood that is just simply not true. The Covenant House was not hit bad at all by Harvey, but this mini-doc acts as a great piece to use against any governing body that provides it public funds. Anytime they need to use this for leverage, they can. “The Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats never wanted to help these poor left behind youth!”
The modern world is full of Don Quixotes who are taking fantasy as truth and running wild with it. The sociological impacts have not panned out yet.
Hell, I was watching some of Joe Pera’s recent comedy special, and the audience was full of young millenials of all strides. They see him as an attempt at old school authenticity; every time he makes even a noncomedic pause they’re laughing. Why? Because they simply don’t know what is authentic comedy anymore. We’re going through the motions of hyperreality, and having been witness to its worst aspects, it is most certainly an anthropological filter as my friend David Wayne put it in our recent podcast. Only few will make it through this era of human history unscathed or better off. For the people I knew at the Covenant House using their short 15 minutes for glorifying their own false victimhood, they don’t see much past the deeper effects of the evil committed by mass lies. All they can see is their immediate interaction, just as the viewer of these types of mini-docs are only just interacting with what they assume is the thing in and of itself, but they don’t realize they’re already two or three standard deviations from authenticity into simulation.
There is no real experience of the authentic thing in hyperreality which impedes our own interface with it for the betterment of the subject. For the typical consumer of hyperreal information, they are inoculated, and nothing that happens in hyperreality can be immediately translated to reality itself. Just as a tutorial on YouTube can help someone figure out how to wire a circuit even if they have never done it before, they still require their own imagination, courage, and will to realize their capability of wiring this circuit.
But you cannot expect that of the passive consumer. They scroll through hundreds or thousands of bite-sized bits of information that then seep right into their subconsciousness without even knowing it. That is what is so immediately detrimental with the info wars that happen in hyperreality — no one except plotters and psychopaths have the upperhand rhetorically. That is why liberalism can be applied so well. Liberalism is an actualization of will in a power play, with no spiritual component considered.
What optimism I do have that ultimately overpowers my disdain for hyperreality is the tendency for ultimate Truth to dominate millions of ephemeral mini-lies tossed around by demonic forces operating within the accepted science™ and Big News. As michaelangelo-of-pol put it — the machine has angrily forced itself into becoming the subject and us the object. But what happens when the tools of propoganda and technology are put right back into the hands of humanity?
“But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.”
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (1962)