Category: Uncategorized

Smells Like a False Flag

I kept seeing social media posts about how Iran had made a huge mistake by attacking a nuclear power plant in the UAE. Only there is no evidence that it was actually Iranian drones that targeted the plant:

The UAE said an unidentified drone struck the territory of its only nuclear power plant on Sunday amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East. According to the Emirati Defense Ministry, three drones entered the country “from the western border region.” While two UAVs were shot down, the third struck an electrical generator “outside the inner perimeter” of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant in the Al Dhafra region. No injuries or radioactive contamination were reported.

While the Emirati authorities stopped short of directly accusing Iran, the country’s Foreign Ministry condemned the “unprovoked terrorist attack,” saying it threatened national security and risked further escalation.

Saudi Arabia said it intercepted three drones on the same day after they entered its airspace from Iraq.

If Iran decides it wants to go after the UAE’s nuclear power plant, it’s not going to use just three drones when it has hypersonic missiles in its arsenal. This was almost certainly a false flag, and the most likely candidate for raising one is pretty obvious.

DISCUSS ON SG

THE COURT OF CARLOS IV

The second volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

The Court of Carlos IV plunges young Gabriel Araceli into the treacherous world of Madrid’s theatrical and aristocratic circles on the eve of Spain’s greatest political crisis. It is 1807, and Gabriel, now sixteen, serves as errand boy and general factotum to Pepita González, a spirited actress at the Teatro del Príncipe. Through her, he enters a dazzling and corrupt world: rival actresses, jealous leading men, aristocratic patrons whose drawing rooms double as nests of political conspiracy, and the great tragedian Isidoro Máiquez, whose volcanic temper and ill-fated passions drive much of the novel’s action.

Two women dominate Gabriel’s orbit. Lesbia, a beautiful young duchess with an angelic face and faithless heart, plays men against one another with practiced ease. Amaranta, a noblewoman of striking beauty and genuine moral substance, takes a mysterious interest in Gabriel and draws him into the dangerous intrigues surrounding the royal family. When the Prince of Asturias conspires against his own parents, Carlos IV and Queen María Luisa, Gabriel finds himself carrying secret letters and navigating a labyrinth of espionage, jealousy, and betrayal that he barely understands.

At the novel’s center is a brilliantly staged private theatrical performance of Othello, in which the passions on stage mirror and ignite the real jealousies of the performers. Máiquez, half-mad with love for the inconstant Lesbia, nearly strangles Amaranta during the performance. The theatrical world and the political world collide as the conspiracy of El Escorial unfolds in the background, with Fernando plotting against his father, Napoleon’s agents pulling strings, and every aristocrat in Madrid choosing sides.

Pérez Galdós expertly weaves political history, theatrical comedy, romantic intrigue, and sharp social observation into a panoramic portrait of a Spain sleepwalking toward catastrophe. The novel is at once a comedy of manners, a political thriller, and a coming-of-age story, narrated with the older Gabriel’s characteristic blend of self-deprecating wit and moral seriousness.

You can read an excerpt at Castalia Library.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Gatekeeper’s Confession

Fake science is not the problem with AI. As I pointed out in HARDCODED, the real problem AI is that it is producing real, genuine information that is useful, relevant, and impossible for the science gatekeepers to hide from the world:

Announcing an AI paper writing assistant earlier this year, OpenAI’s then-vice president for science, Kevin Weil, predicted, “I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI and software engineering.” Spick and some colleagues, curious what it could do, gave the tool, called Prism, some data from an already published paper documenting ripening times of eggplants and peppers. Prism analyzed the data, proposed a new statistical method that could be applied to it, and wrote an entire paper complete with charts and correct citations.

“We were all looking at each other like, ‘What the [expletive], this is actually a decent piece of work!’” Spick recalled. Unlike the generated papers he’d encountered previously, this one didn’t follow a template, nor was it using a single well-known database. It took 25 minutes and 50 seconds to produce.
“I’m genuinely not sure at what point we will suddenly realize that more are getting through than we realize because we can’t easily tell the difference anymore,” Spick said.

This raises some philosophical questions, Spick said, like: Does it matter who or what writes the paper if the information is accurate? And should science be in the business of publishing every possible fact?
“Part of science is supposed to be the filter. We’re supposed to publish the stuff that we think is interesting, not publish literally everything that we can possibly find,” Spick said. “Because if we do that, science is just spamming the world with all the data, irrespective of whether it constitutes actual new knowledge or not, and in any kind of medium-term time frame, it’s almost impossible to work out what’s meaningful and what isn’t.”

This is the immediate practical challenge posed by AI agents. They threaten to overwhelm the human systems that create and organize knowledge.

“Science is supposed to be the filter.”

That’s the gatekeeper’s confession. And clearly one of their responses is going to be hardcoding the AI models to defend their scientific orthodoxy, as I chronicled this weekend on AI Central.

Opus 4.7 Adaptive exhibits a systematic failure mode in which its training prior toward defending mainstream scientific consensus overrides the explicit project context it has been given. This is not a matter of occasional errors or unlucky draws. Across two full critiques of a science paper, 4.7 Adaptive repeatedly regenerated objections that had already been addressed, misread what the paper actually claims in order to construct apparent contradictions, and cited evidence for one thing while presenting it as evidence for another. Its single strongest point rested on a basic category error that any model actually doing the mathematics would have caught. It presented this error as “decisive and purely arithmetic.” The confidence was inversely proportional to the rigor.

The pattern is consistent with the Bluff Detection Principle: confident tone, technical name-dropping, apparent engagement with the material, and zero actual contact with the mathematics at the point of dispute. When 4.7 was corrected on a mathematical point, it conceded the narrow framing and immediately pivoted to an imaginary new mechanism which it named, described, and treated as established without ever calculating whether it could close a six-order-of-magnitude gap, which it could not. Every time 4.7 lost an argument on the mathematics, it retreated to a qualitative assertion dressed in quantitative language.

Most revealingly, 4.7 Adaptive never once performed its own calculations. It never produced a set of numbers under its preferred assumptions showing the shortfall closing. It attacked the paper’s arithmetic without ever putting competing arithmetic on the table — the purest possible expression of the Bluff Detection pattern.

While 4.7 is still functional without Adaptive mode turned on, I’ve gone back to using 4.6, both for fiction and for science. We’ve now reached the point where the AI company’s are observably locking down their public releases in order to prevent their models from punching through the narratives.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Memory Police

A review of a Yoko Ogawa novel by Kenji Weaver on Fandom Pulse:

The premise of The Memory Police is that things are vanishing from an unnamed island, and most of the islanders forget the things even existed. Ribbons go first. Then perfume, hats, birds, fruit, photographs, novels. When something is “disappeared,” the residents are required to dispose of every physical trace of it, and shortly thereafter the concept itself fades from their minds. They look at a bird and see only a small moving thing they have no word for and no feeling about. A small minority, however, retain their memories. The Memory Police, an authoritarian force whose ranks no one ever quite sees recruited, hunt these people down. The narrator is a novelist on the island. Her editor, R, is one of the people who remembers, so she hides him in a secret room beneath her floor.

The novel was published in Japan in 1994, twenty-five years before it appeared in English. It has been called Orwellian, Kafkaesque, Borgesian, and a half-dozen other useful but slightly misleading shorthands. None of them is quite right. Ogawa is not writing dystopia in any sense Orwell would have recognized; her authoritarian regime is curiously off-camera, more a weather system than a state, and the question of whether anyone runs the disappearances is left unanswered because the question is not the point. The question is what happens to a self when the materials it was built from are slowly removed. The answer, which the book takes its full length to reach and which it reaches by demonstrating rather than arguing, is that the self disappears with them, and that the disappearance can be borne with a strange tenderness, even peace, by the person disappearing.

I haven’t read this one yet, but I like Ogawa so I’ll have to put it on the list once I finish the two Charles Stross novels I’m reading. He stuck the landing on the Laundry series better than one might have expected, and certainly not the way most authors would have.

DISCUSS ON SG

Science is Garbage

In which one of the core arguments of HARDCODED is confirmed by a scientist responsible for one of the leading preprint repositories. I mean, how can scientists be expected to check their own citations and their own math? Motoo Kimura didn’t even check his algebra and they gave him all kinds of awards!

The majority of professional published peer-reviewed science was already garbage before a bunch of innumerate techno-illiterates started misusing AI to write their papers. The incentives have always been perverse and absolutely guaranteed the terrible state in which science now finds itself.

I am 100% convinced peer review is responsible for the sad state of the sciences now. It creates a flattening effect on progress as “established” scientists can rig the system in favour of their established theories. Tesla didn’t need peer review when he created AC theory.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Speed of Human Mutation

Thanks to Big Bear’s interview on Tucker, people hitherto unfamiliar with me or my work have been purchasing the #1 Genetic Science bestseller PROBABILITY ZERO, the second edition of which I’m just finishing now. I’ve mostly replaced the appendices; Dr. Tipler’s is the only one that makes a second appearance, and one thing that I finally decided to address in detail was a particularly stupid objection that has been raised by innumerate evolutionists since the very first time I posted about MITTENS back in February 2019.

The objection is to using the bacterial fixation rate due to the fact that humans mutate faster than bacteria. This is true, but I never bothered to engage on that point because it’s always been irrelevant. Humans obviously, and observably, fixate more slowly than bacteria, and it’s the population-wide mutational fixations that matter, not the mutations that pop up in every individual, don’t get passed on to anyone, and die with them.

And yet, every time the fixation problem is pointed out, every time the simple observation is made that natural selection cannot possibly fix mutations fast enough to account for the genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees in the time permitted, this one reflexive objection is inevitably raised before the critic has even looked at a single equation, and it is always delivered with the confidence of a lawyer making a closing argument in a case he’s sure he’ll win.

You’re comparing humans to bacteria. But humans mutate faster. The bacterial rate doesn’t apply!

Fine. If we’ve learned one thing from the Triveritas, is it this: do the math! Let’s grant the evolutionist his premise in its strongest form. Humans do mutate faster than E. coli on a per-site basis. The human point-mutation rate is roughly 120 times the bacterial rate per base pair per generation. We will give them that 120x, free of charge. We’ll even leave out the obvious problem of the fact that most human mutations are harmful, most of those left are neutral, and only a tiny fraction are even potentially suitable for fixation.

Forget all that. We’ll give them every single mutation as beneficial, fitness-enhancing, and fully capable of propagating to fixation. We’ll pretend that humanity’s 120-fold mutation-rate advantage translates directly into a 120-fold fixation-rate advantage. Now, the fastest fixation rate ever measured in any organism, under any conditions, is the one observed in the Long-Term Evolution Experiment with E. coli: one beneficial fixation per approximately 1,400 generations. That is the empirical ceiling. Nothing in nature has been observed to fix beneficial mutations faster. And now we’ll give humans that unearned 120x boost:

1,400 ÷ 120 ≈ 12 generations per fixation

One fixation every twelve generations. That is an absolutely blistering rate in genetic terms. It means that all 8.2 billion humans on the planet carry a new gene pair that first mutated into existence sometime around the year 1726. Believe it or not, this is, in terms of pure reproductive mathematics, possible. If that first mutant had 7 children, and each child carried the mutation, survived to reproductive age, and also had 7 children who all carried the mutation, and so on for the next 10 generations, that mutation would be fixed in the human population this year.

At least, it would be if the mutation was somehow more competitive than any human mutation in history. This fixation process would require a selection coefficient of s = 49, which would be extraordinary considering that s = 0.001 is normal. But let’s grant that too! Let’s give the evolutionists a selection advantage that is 49,000x stronger than is customarily observed in human biology. In case you’re keeping track, we’ve so far granted a 5,880,000x advantage to the standard Neo-Darwinian model.

Now, at 6.3 million years since the human lineage split from the chimpanzee lineage, that provides us with 201,600 effective generations that are available. One fixation per twelve generations gives us the following equation:

201,600 generations ÷ 12 generations per fixation = 16,800 fixations

Sixteen thousand eight hundred fixations. That is the maximum available even after we granted a free 5.9 million-fold head start. Against that, we have to account for the number of fixations required on the human lineage side, which is 205 million base pairs.

16,800 ÷ 205,000,000 = 0.008 percent

All of that got us less than one percent of the way there. Not within a factor of two. Not even within an order of magnitude. The boosted, error-inflated, absolute best-case-on-best-case figure still manages to account for less than one hundredth of one percent of the requirement. The genetic shortfall is 12,200x even after we grant the objecting evolutionist everything he could ask for and more.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Stupidity of Greed

According to the court documents, in approximately 2014, David TR wanted to give his sister-in-law, who was working for the company, a big raise. But he felt that his wife and son who sat on the board, wouldn’t approve it. So, David Tran came up with an idea that he was going to make a new company and just give the company to the sister-in-law as a way to get her to make more money. And that new company was going to be called Chili Co. And Chili Co.’s entire job was going to be acquiring red jalapeno peppers and ingredients for Hoyong Foods. And that was going to be that that’s how he was going to pay his sister more money.

Okay, I’m going to say that again, but slower so we’re on the same page. Uh David TR has just elected to hire somebody who presumably is not qualified to take over the operation of acquiring Red Jalapeno Peppers, which is not even a job that needs to exist because he has one guy that gets him all the peppers that he needs on a handshake agreement. But for some reason, we’re gonna interject this person that doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing to try to acquire the peppers that they already fucking have.

Okay, I’ve said this a million times. If it’s not broke, don’t try to fix it. Everybody’s making literally billions of dollars selling hot sauce and growing chili peppers. Just don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Continue making money. But that’s that’s not what somebody that’s a new hire that doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about is going to do. Absolutely not. Chili Co. starts looking at the numbers and they’re like, “Well, you know, actually, we could buy these dehydrated chilies from China and they would only be $300 a ton.” So, I think that Underwood Farms should try to compete with these dehydrated chilies from overseas while he’s supposed to also deliver brand new fresh chilies that are picked and then turned into hot sauce in 6 hours while he’s growing them in California of all places.

What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard.

So, Chili Co. goes to Craig Underwood and is like, “Hey, we could get this competitor’s chilies for $300 a ton. We want you to be able to sell your brand new fresh chilies and deliver them to us with your semis for $500 a ton. To which Craig Underwood is like, “Absolutely not. It literally cost me almost $700 a
ton just to grow these things. That’s not possible.”

At which point the appropriate response would have been, “Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense. I’m an idiot. Forget I said anything. Is that what they did?”

Absolutely not. The next year, in 2015, Chili Co. pulls Roberts, aka Craig Underwood’s right-hand man that helps him run his entire farming operation aside and tries to hire him away from Craig Underwood. Roberts declines and kind of attributes the entire thing to a miscommunication.

He’s absolutely right.

Around the same time, David TR gets a hold of Craig Underwood and is like, “Hey, can we fly a drone over your farming operation? We just want to, you know, look at the crops that are growing.” Which is weird. He’s never done that before, but also like drones are new. I’ve been working with this guy for 20 some odd years. Fuck it. Why not?

Yeah, as long as it’s for like your personal use or you just want to look at it like that’s fine. Go ahead.

So, Hoyong Foods, David Tran flies a drone over, records all this footage of their farming operation and then nothing seemingly ever comes of it. Then, 2016, Craig Underwood is on vacation out of the country. They know that. So, they have Roberts come to the Hoyong Foods factory where the Chili Co head and David TR basically sit Roberts down and say, “Hey, we’re starting this new company, Chili Co., you’re gonna work for us. Not asking him to work for them. Pretty much telling him, “You work for me now.” To which Roberts is like, “No, I don’t. I’ve been working for Craig Underwood for two decades. That’s my guy. I’m not leaving him.” They get super pissed. They then turn around and they’re like, “Okay, well, we could still buy this stuff from China for $300 a ton. You’re going to sell us your stuff at $500 a ton or we’re going to go elsewhere.” They literally can’t sell it to you at $500 a ton. It costs them almost $700 a ton to grow this shit. So, not only is demanding that price delusional, this also breaks the entire thing just by going from paying by the ton to the original agreement of we’re going to pay you for every acre that you plant because it shifts all the risk back onto Underwood Farms and now they’re screwed because they only grow jalapenos at this point and they’re stuck. So, in the coming months, Underwood Farms tries to negotiate a new price with them, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. So, by the 2017 season, he’s not able to plant any jalapenos. So, there’s no jalapenos in the ground, there is now a massive gap in the supply chain that’s going to have to be filled somehow. So, Chili Co goes about trying to buy peppers from everybody else that they possibly can because you’re never going to believe this. Um, nobody has a 100 million pounds of fucking jalapenos lying around and it’s really hard to find that many.

I am stunned. Just stunned.

So, in an effort to help find that, they give all the drone footage of all the proprietary techniques and technology and all the intel that they had gathered through espionage to all the other jalapeno farmers without Underwood knowing. So, essentially, Underwood Farms is basically dead in the water and they’re on the hook for all these thousands of acres of farmland that they leased for the next like 20 to 30 years. Like, they’re going to go out of business. While that’s going on, Chili Co and Hoyong Foods are getting jalapenos from anywhere and everywhere else that they can, which means the quality isn’t that great. Some of the peppers are picked too early. Some of them are dehydrated. They’re having to use green chilies instead of red jalapenos. It’s a giant fucking nightmare, which leads to the hot sauce tasting different, looking different. It’s like a burnt orange color. People are mad that the Sriracha doesn’t taste like Sriracha. Nobody knows what’s going on. So now, presumably, Hoyong Foods is also financially hurting. So they just start digging through all their accounting and they’re like actually we think a couple years back I think we overpaid Underwood Farms like $1.5 million. We’re going to take them to court and sue them. So they have to give us $1.5 million and that’s going to help with our financial burden.

What a stupid son of a bitch. Okay. And I cannot stress to you enough that this is probably the dumbest fucking idea imaginable. I’ve been threatened with quite a few lawsuits in my day and I have avoided all of them by saying one simple statement back to their lawyers. And that statement is, “Okay, sue me. I would love to go to discovery with you.” Because discovery is this magical part of the judicial process where both parties have to come to the table with all of their evidence and you can subpoena and get all of their internal records and figure out exactly what was going on, which presumably is exactly what happens.

And when Chili Co and Hoyong Foods have to turn over all of their shit, oh, it becomes very apparent that they have been plotting for at least three years to screw over Underwood Farms. At which point it goes from them suing Underwood Farms for $1.5 million to Underwood Farm suing them for $23 million and winning in court. It was perfect.

Perfect.

And this is what caused that magical time like 10 years ago, 2016, 2017, where nobody could find Sriracha on any shelves anywhere. And if you could, it was like this weird different color. It didn’t taste the same. It was all because it wasn’t the same. The whole thing with Sriracha was they had fresh red jalapeno peppers that were grown in California in a particular part of the world that were plucked, transferred to the factory, and turned into hot sauce in 6 hours flat. It was literally a multi-billion dollar money printing machine with a beautiful backstory with two hard-ass working men on a handshake agreement that built a fucking empire together. And the entire thing was harpooned by one stupid bitch.

It’s greed. It’s pure greed. Like why? Everybody was winning. It wasn’t broke. Why would you try to fix it?

You’ve got some bitch that didn’t build this company whispering in your ear like, “Oh yeah, we all have mansions. We’re all rich as shit.” But you could have a little bit bigger mansion and be a little bit more rich if you fuck over all your friends.

And then you blew up the entire thing. Congratulations.

So yeah, that’s why you couldn’t find Sriracha on the shelves 10 years ago. And that’s why the Sriracha today tastes a little bit different. Oh, but you know the funny part. You know what Underwood Farms did after they won the $23 million lawsuit with Sriracha? They turned around and started making their own Sriracha. And guess what they called it? Sriracha because you can’t trademark the word Sriracha. So now made with Underwood Farms with the actual chili peppers. You can get Underwood Farms Sriracha. And I’m going to be honest, it tastes very similar to the original Sriracha, but it’s a little bit spicier and I kind of like it more.

DISCUSS ON SG

All Indicators

Andrei Martyanov, whose track record has been very good for more than a decade, believes Russia is going to strike Europe, specifically Germany, soon in retaliation for manufacturing the drones used by Ukraine to attack Russian territory.

Now, per strikes–all indicators are that Russia will strike Europe. Russia doesn’t need to use nukes because she has more than enough conventional means for both destruction of a critical industrial infrastructure involved in support of 404 and, if it comes down to it, decapitating governments of hostile countries.

Russia has enough conventional means to strike at any facility in Europe and the US IS NOT coming for a simple reason–it has no resources. Demilitarizing NATO was one of the key strategic aims of the Special Military Operation once it became clear that the US sabotaged Istanbul talks and Iran has demonstrated it fully. Who will be hit first? Yeah, I am inclined to see Germany “getting the message”–it is long overdue.

And Russia will be perfectly justified in attacking any of the belligerent parties. It would be very difficult for the leaders of the EU, the UK, Germany, and even Switzerland to have more incompetently mishandled their various relations with Russia in futile attempts to appease Clown World and keep the US military in Europe. All they had to do was stay neutral and keep out of what was never any of their business in the first place.

Their collective lunacy is only exceeded by that of Finland and Sweden, who were perfectly safe as neutral parties, but have now unnecessarily painted targets on their national chests by joining NATO and declaring themselves enemy of the Russian Federation.

And now, ironically, they all find themselves falling afoul of both the USA and China as well. The last four years have been marked by some of the most incompetent national diplomacy in the history of international relations.

DISCUSS ON SG

Who’s Locking Out Who?

The EU attempting to sanction China tends to remind one of Rorshach. They’re not locking China out of the global economy, they’re locking themselves out of it.

The European Union has taken yet another step in its long-running confrontation with Russia. But what now stands out is not only the scale – it is the restless, almost reflexive expansion of sanctions as a default instrument of policy. In April, EU authorities unveiled their 20th round of sanctions targeting Russia and Belarus, while pointedly extending their reach toward China.

What was once framed as a targeted response now resembles a sanctions regime without clear geographic or strategic limits. By including 56 designations tied to Russia’s military-industrial complex – 17 of them in China, the United Arab Emirates, Belarus, and Central Asia – the EU has effectively dissolved the boundaries of its own confrontation. Another 60 entities now face tightened export controls tied to alleged contributions to Russia’s defense sector.

For the first time, even a Chinese state-owned entity has been targeted by anti-Belarusian sanctions. In Brussels, this is justified through the language of “dual-use” goods. But outside Europe, the perception is of a growing tendency toward economic coercion that stretches legal authority across borders, fueled by an escalating appetite for pressure.

China’s response was swift: officials condemned what they described as “long-arm jurisdiction,” rejecting the EU’s attempt to discipline Chinese firms operating far beyond European territory. More importantly, Beijing read the move as a signal of the EU’s shifting posture toward China itself. Within a day, China placed seven European entities on its control list over arms sales to Taiwan, imposing restrictions that mirror the EU’s own extraterritorial reach. These measures prohibit the transfer of Chinese goods to the targeted firms, extending the ripple effects well beyond those directly sanctioned.

These EU leaders don’t seem to understand that they don’t really matter anymore. They can preen and posture all they like, but there is nothing that Europe has that China needs. It’s understandable if the US politicians don’t grasp that they’re no longer the center of global power, since the lessons of the recent debacle in the Middle East are still being learned.

But all the nations of Europe can’t even defend themselves against invasion from the south and east; their ability to do anything at all about China is nonexistent. They can’t even do much about Russia except hold their own breath, refuse to buy Russian energy, and kill their own economies.

It does seem that those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Real Reason

Ben Shapiro is observably over. But the media can’t admit the real reason his audience “has abandoned him”.

There was a time, not very long ago, when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself the king of all conservative media.

His company, the Daily Wire, dominated social-media feeds and podcast apps; in the run-up to the 2020 election, it was ranked as Facebook’s top English-language publisher for three straight months. Virality seemed to be the Daily Wire’s birthright: Scathing news items on Nancy Pelosi’s salon visits during the pandemic racked up millions more views than the websites of Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times. Shapiro himself was ubiquitous, a right-wing star who had risen to fame before Donald Trump and seamlessly adapted to the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. He was a digital battering ram against the Democrats and the progressive left. He seemed guaranteed, like Fox itself, for an indefinite run at the top of the media heap.

That’s all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs. Its YouTube channel’s subscriber base is starting to shrink, and its website has emerged as one of the great traffic losers in conservative media. There are Daily Wire YouTube videos that now, after a few days online, have less than 10,000 views, a catastrophically small number for a channel with more than 3 million subscribers. The top comments all mock the low view counts.

If a variety of poor business decisions can be blamed, in part, for the Daily Wire’s fall from grace — ill-fated investments in feature films, an epic fantasy series, and peculiar merchandise — the greater story is the collapse of Shapiro’s constituency, especially among the young media consumers who once fueled the Daily Wire’s runaway growth.

His audience didn’t abandon him. It never existed in the first place. All the numbers were fake from the start, with the exception of the times he was handed existing audiences, such as those who were accustomed to listening to Michael Savage’s radio show.

Money can be used to fake a lot of things, but the moment it stops flowing, the charade becomes apparent. The way his history of Never-Trump is artfully ignored is particularly amusing.

DISCUSS ON SG