Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: successfully fighting SJWs

HS writes to tell how SJWADD helped her rout an SJW attempting to converge her neighborhood’s site:

Just wanted to send my thanks for your great primer on fighting SJWs.  Today on a social networking site used in my neighborhood I saw an attempt at an SJW convergence.  I instantly recognized the technique from reading your book about SJWs, and used the methods you described to stop it.  Of course she used the SJW argument about “civility” and “inclusion” but I was able to predict and rebut her arguments, and those of her white knight.  My instant fighting back and strong rhetoric encouraged others neighbors to attack her, and she ended up leaving the site.  I’m glad I read your book because I would probably have argued in good faith and not been aggressive, and we may have lost a great tool my neighborhood uses for security, recommendations, and finding services.  It was really amazing to watch how she argued exactly as you said she would, it was like being psychic.  Thanks for your effort in fighting these people!

This stuff actually works because it’s real and it is battle-tested. It’s not all just theory and hypotheses.

Mailvox: the furrowed brow

As I pointed out in Cuckservative, it doesn’t matter which side the moderates say they are on. They will always, always, always prefer to virtue-signal by shooting at “their” side. Either you’re too impolite or you’re insufficiently inclusive or you’re too extreme or your bow tie is tied improperly. Regardless, they are always irrelevant and serve no purpose except as speedbumps for the side they nominally support.

A Castalia House blogger notes that the moderates have discovered Alt★Hero.

There’s another outraged blog post about Alt★Hero, this time from Kasimir Urbanski. He claims that what you’re doing is just like SJW Marvel. I read the post, and he behaves exactly as you said moderates do — they shoot at their own side, saying that we have to behave more civilized than the opposition, all in some attempt to avoid charges of being too mean instead of backing up people who actually take action. They expect to both fight the SJWs and follow the (im)moral standards SJWs set, standards the SJWs happily ignore.

Let’s see what this gentleman has to say:

And that’s what bothers me about Alt-Hero. We certainly could use someone coming along and making a new comics universe that was ABOUT THE COMICS in the same way the OSR is about the games. One that didn’t ignore politics completely, or shy from moral lessons, or push a leftist agenda, but that wasn’t just a facade for right-wing propagandism either.

 I would love to see a universe that had heroes that actually embodied heroism, that had moral values, that were patriotic, that believed in family, that stood up for classical Enlightenment values, who saluted the flag. And this would have the “Aleena Effect” of SJWs protesting against a hero in a US flag, and everyone who likes US flags abandoning the SJWs.

 But above all, that it would focus on the comics. Instead, Alt-hero has every appearance of being something that will involve someone who is fundamentally not really all that into comics (at least, not enough to value the subculture) injecting ideological propaganda into the medium of the comic, with the comics’ conventions being largely an afterthought to sledgehammering their political agenda.

 That means Alt-Hero looks like it’s going to be pretty much just like SJW Marvel.

That is pure textbook. One of the reliable marks of the moderate is his total inability to distinguish tactics from objectives. The ironic thing is that to ignore something like the SJW invasion of literally every aspect of society would be to inject ideological propaganda into the comics, as it is one of the most significant aspects of our society today. Omitting that, or immigration, would be like pretending the Cold War wasn’t happening during the 70s and 80s.

But this is good news, in my opinion. The more the moderates are concerned and even upset, the more likely it is that Alt★Hero is going to be effective.

Mailvox: If this is failure

I suspect success might go to my head.

I actually put off reading the Throne of Bones series because I figured your fiction couldn’t possibly be any good. Why? Well, nobody can do everything well! You’re a clear political writer and superb thinker, you even had a band at one point. You’re an immensely creative organizer, you started your own publishing house… “What are the odds for this guy also being a good epic fantasy writer?” I asked myself. Also, the title, Throne of Bones kind of put me off. I thought you were referencing G.R.R. Martin. Well, I finally read it, and was delighted. Sea and Summa followed in due course. Your writing has the key characteristics that I value in excellent fantasy: resonance and novelty. There is a sense of familiar mythic themes, but rendered in a new and surprising way. Elves and orcs and dwarves and Romans! Oh my!

I noticed a mention that you will come out with a revised book (Sea?) soon. I’m wondering, why revise? Why not write another one? (Please?) Will the revision be an expansion where I can just start reading the new stuff, or will I need to read the whole thing again to find the additions? (Not that this would be a dreadful fate!)

Now that F&SF has become a loathsome wasteland of Social Justice and Abused Pronouns, we need more writing like this.

Actually, it’s not a revision, but an extended edition. By Amazon’s reckoning, A Sea of Skulls will go from 430 pages to 924 pages. I don’t quite see how that is even possible, since by my count, it will go from 165,000 words to 297,500. None of the existing story will be excised or even modified; I have no reason to change anything, and besides, I don’t have the time.

And don’t forget, The Last Witchking & Other Stories is now available in audiobook. I waited years to put any of this out in audio because I was waiting for the right narrator, and Jeremy Daw is just that.

An excerpt from “The Last Witchking”.

In the eyes of the villagers of Pretigny, Speer Gnasor was a boy not terribly unlike any other. He was taller than the other boys his age, but someone has to be the tallest in every village, and no one ever appeared to think it odd that at nearly thirteen years of age, the top of his father’s head barely cleared his shoulder. Speer was quick-witted but not remarkably so, although he was both envied and mocked by the other boys for his ability to read.

He participated in their games, albeit in a desultory manner. He was not unpopular, and if he had exerted himself even a little, he might well have made himself a leader of one of the little packs that divided the children of the town on lines roughly conforming with their fathers’ occupations.

Per Gnasor, his father, raised bees and made candles, and his mother raised the small flock of geese and chickens that provided him with his daily egg, and on feast days, the fowl for their little family. His two passions were fishing and books, and it was said that he had read every one of the twenty-eight books in the village at least twice.

The Gnasors themselves were said to possess seven books. By Pretigny standards, this amounted to a family library of almost mythic proportions. He dutifully attended the small church of the Immaculate twice each week, and if he ate the wafer and drank the wine given to him by the priest with little thought for what it represented, in this he was no different than any other boy in the village.

He was not an unhappy lad, and he was entirely content with his life as he found it. He did not, like some of his youthful acquaintances, chafe at the smallness of their familiar surroundings or dream of one day seeking his fortune in what, from the perspective of Pretigny, was considered to be the great city of Niederholen. Even the rumors of the riches of distant Stalchwil on the banks of the Ghlêne more than a ten-day journey away held little fascination for him. He learned to tend his father’s bees, to twist wicks and shape wax, and slowly, but surely, he even began to take notice of the butcher’s daughter. She was a tall, slender girl with a wide mouth and pale blue eyes who was nearly of a height and an age with him.

Left to his own devices, allowed to pursue his homely dreams, it was likely that Speer Gnasor would have married the butcher’s daughter, learned the butcher’s trade, and eventually become a fine, upstanding pillar of the local church and community.

But on his thirteenth birthday, everything he knew about himself and the world around him was forever transformed by a letter from his father.

After a dinner that featured rare treats such as Valoyan sausages and the sweet cheese called Niederholt, Per Gnasor sent him into the forest armed with nothing more than his warmest coat and a small shovel and told him to unearth his birthday present one hundred paces north of his favorite tree.
Both excited and confused, he lost little time in finding the peculiar oak with a thick lower branch that twisted over its leftmost neighbor, and paced off the distance. He had to dig a hole that was deeper than his knees before he struck something hard. With a little more work he saw it was a small wooden chest. His heart beating faster, he extricated it from the ground and opened it.

The first thing he saw was a letter written in an unfamiliar hand. Despite the shadows cast by the looming trees, there was just enough light breaking through the leaves to permit him to read it.

To my son and my heir,

You are not what you think you are. You are more, so much more. Kings and princes would tremble and scour the earth in search of you were they to hear even a rumor of your existence. It was to save you from their wrath that your mother sacrificed herself. It was to protect you from their vengeance that you were hidden away even from yourself. The man and woman you believe to be your parents are my true and loyal servants, and they have raised you at my command, even as they release you now to your destiny as they have been instructed.

You will be told many lies about your true kind, we whom the vulgar and the frightened wrongly named witchkings. But this is nothing more than fear. It is the shameless perversion of history by the vicious little minds of its victors.

As you will learn, we Wahrkönigen were simply dedicated to the truth and only the truth, regardless of its consequences and heedless of its costs. And what was this fearful truth, this dark god that struck such terror into the hearts of Men and Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves? Only this: There is no Good and there is no Evil. There is only what Is. Nothing more. Have the courage to grasp this fearful truth, and you shall be a worthy successor to the long line of kings before you.

I have prepared the means that you will require to learn both the Lesser and the Greater Arts. Master them well. An arduous task lies before you, but I know you will succeed, for you are my son and you will surpass me. And in the place that has been prepared for you, you will also find the answers to your inevitable questions, including your true lineage.

You are a phoenix raised by sparrows, my son. Now it is time for you to fly. When you have grown into your strength and become worthy of your heritage, you will set the world on fire.

These are the three charges that I lay upon you, my son. Instruct the Elves. Break them of their ancient pride and shatter the remnants of their kingdoms. Humble the Northmen. They must pay a tithe of blood for their treachery. Harry them throughout their islands and drive them into the sea. Preserve the Blood. You must not be the last of your line. Father many children, on many women, but instruct only the most worthy in the Wahrkunst. The Blood will tell.

You are young and you are alone in a harsh and unforgiving world, but never doubt that you were loved as few sons have ever been loved. For your mother and your father so loved you that they died for you, not once, but twice. We allowed ourselves to perish and we erased ourselves from the minds of mortals, so that you might live.

Your enemies, and they are many, will not find you until you are ready to be found. Be brave, my son, be strong, and never permit yourself fear. For you are a true Wahrkönig, and in your veins flows the pure blood of the greatest and most powerful sorcerers the world has ever known. Embrace your greatness, my son, embrace the Blood, embrace the challenges I have set before you, and one day, you will teach the world that you are harsher and more unforgiving than it could ever dare to be.

Avenge me, my son. Avenge your loving mother. Avenge your noble race,

Mauragh, son of Thauragh
King of Thauron, Nordandir, and the Wolf Isles

Mailvox: The Origins of the Alt-Retard

A Generation X reader sent me this analysis of the Fake Right Clown Posse, which somehow manages to be both sympathetic of the plight being faced by the young men of today and contemptuous of what some of them have become in response. I think he is largely correct, and explains why their attempts to defend their race and their nations so often go awry.

We have no choice but to help them. The challenge is that the only answer to ignorance is information, and as we know, as we have witnessed, there are some who cannot be instructed by information.

The Origins of the AltRetard

I’ve been pondering the origins of the AltRetard. Who are they, and why are they? They are, by and large, young white men, probably middle to lower class, who are the products of the environment and culture that they have been raised in. They know that this environment and culture is broken, is pozzed, and they are seeking an alternative. They are seeking health and well-being in a sick world, and this is good. But they haven’t found it yet.

I have some sympathy for these young men. Their condition is largely not their fault. As a GenXer, my own working class childhood situation was far from ideal, and things have only gotten worse for this demographic since then. We all stumble around in search of knowledge and wisdom that we don’t have, because they have not been passed down to us as they should have been.

“Tradition” means “that which is passed down.” The Western tradition – Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy – teaches us how to be in the world, teaches us what we are and what to do with what we are. But this tradition has been systematically removed from the education system for the vast majority of Americans and Europeans. Only those whose parents have the foresight and the money to send their children to private schools that still teach the Classics and the Bible have learned much about it. And those men, because they have financial privilege, have mostly sold out for the sake of their own comfort. They have not handed down the tradition.

When my boomer parents and GI grandparents were young, they had to take Latin in high school. They had prayer in school. They learned about the history of Western civilization, its principles, its heroes, its triumphs and tragedies. The average public high school graduate from 1960 knew more about Western civilization than most graduate students today.

As for me and my GenX classmates, not so much. We had the beginning of today’s anti-Western education, not quite as bad as now, but bad enough. As for Millennials and Gen Z (or whatever they’re called), what have they got? Those that are “woke” are only awakened to just how bad things have gotten. But because they have been cut off from their native tradition, they do not have the intellectual tools with which to think things through and find solutions. They are not grounded in anything real.

So they become extremists. Partly because the problems are extreme, and the times themselves are extreme, but also because they lack the wisdom, gleaned from a knowledge of history, that extremes seldom produce good results. Extreme reactions to extreme problems often just become a new problem.

The German National Socialists of the 1930s could only have emerged from the Weimar era – in other words, from a thoroughly pozzed and degenerate environment. That’s why they had so much degeneracy within their ranks, in spite of their public opposition to much of it. The Nazis were not a traditionalist movement, and they were not a Western movement. They were not pro-European, but were German chauvinists, at the expense of many other European ethnic groups. They were not pro-Christian, but were either outright pagans or embraced heretical versions of Christianity such as Alfred Rosenberg’s gnostic-Catharist ideas. Lastly, they were not truly based upon the Greco-Roman tradition and Western history, but upon a dubious, revisionist version of European history that was cooked up by the Ahnenerbe in order to be used as propaganda, a kind of Tacitus-inspired We Wuz Kangz pseudohistory which even Hitler found embarrassing, and wished that Himmler would knock it off already.

You can see the continuation of this sort of non-thinking in much of today’s Alt-Reich, which embraces all kinds of strange conspiracy theories, up to and including the Flat Earth theory of Eric Dubay.

Similarly, the extreme elements within the Alt Right, who openly espouse Nazism and Fascism and any other extremism that they think will get a rise out of people, are the result of a thoroughly pozzed and decadent society not unlike Weimar (hence the oft-used Weimerica theme). They are a reaction to it – an understandable reaction, but not a healthy one. Since they have no moral or philosophical grounding (which, again, is not their fault) the only thing they can think to do is the opposite of whatever the culture is doing. So the solution to anti-fascism is necessarily Fascism. The solution to Jewish influence and power is blanket anti-Semitism. The solution to anti-white racism is white chauvinism. The solution to feminism is “white sharia” misogyny. And since Nazism is held by the dominant culture to be the supreme evil, it must, ipso facto, be the supreme good.

But it isn’t. It wasn’t the supreme evil either, and to that extent it’s the (((media’s))) fault for creating such a powerful taboo in the first place. But while it may feel good for hopeless young men to meme out images of Schutzstaffel Pepes gassing hooknose rabbis, at the end of the day it’s just reactionary child’s play that produces nothing and leads to nothing – nothing for the young men themselves, and nothing for the Western civilization which needs to be not only defended, but first rediscovered by generations of miseducated young men that have been denied their birthright and their spiritual home.

Mailvox: so just give up and die?

I have to confess, I find the defeatism of some of the critics of my advice to scratch and claw and stay occupied with genuine work to be more than a little mystifying.

Actually, I’ve been reading this whole comments section as well as the original post in fucking amazement, mouth agape.

For someone like VD who espouses this Lex Luthor type UHIQ evil genius his advice is comically out of date, but not surprising. When you run in rarified air feet usually not touching the ground this is not uncommon.

I know highly qualified people scratching out a living and just getting by who had this whole “keep your chin up, be strong, blah blah” mentality and it has been dragging on for half a decade or more in some cases.

Those days, quite frankly, are over. In the land of the eternal victim and the affirmative action hire your “just be busy and take any job” fantasy is about as relevant as thinking you are the most qualified candidate actually matters.

It is like these people are living in some odd alternate reality where they can -clearly- see the pozzing of the culture at large, but somehow think that in the job climate, there is still something resembling sanity, rationality, or logic.

Odd that… this is one of the worst articles I’ve ever seen here actually.

The thing is, in every single case, the individual criticizing the advice completely fails to suggest an alternative. Crime? Welfare? Suicide? More education? Kidnapping the relatives of HR executives?

I’m genuinely curious if they actually have anything to offer, or if my suspicions are correct and they are simply young, college-educated gammas who have no idea how to find or create a job. The fact that this particular gentleman is talking about “highly qualified people”, “most qualified candidate”, and “affirmative action hire” tends to indicate that he does not understand the distinction between corporate paper-pushing and actual work.

Look, we Generation Xers know what it is like to be prepared for one labor environment only to discover that all of one’s preparation has proven to be useless and misguided and generally inapplicable. The situation is what it is. So, what are you going to do about it? Cry, complain, and give up? Or make your own way?

Mailvox: of scraps and subscriptions

An email today from a sane man who finds himself caught up in a crazy world:

I want you to know I appreciate what you are doing. I’m in tech and the number of pozzed out SJW folks I interact with on a daily basis in that capacity is nearly unbearable. It feels like fully 1/5 – 1/4th of all articles, blog posts, and podcast episodes I see out there on most feeds are identity politics bullshit these days. There seems to be an overbearing need for virtue signalling from guys that make six figures and can’t get an attractive girlfriend. It goes all the way up to a number of well-known blogger/podcasters who should have their lives together, based on the amount of income they bring in, but yet continue to white knight for fairly dubious (aka, low value) scraps of female attention.
I must also relate a story. I recently had dinner with a silicon valley startup dude (I say “dude”, because he was allegedly a founder, but not particularly successful) regarding the possibility of Silicon Valley startups outsourcing to other parts of the US (particularly the deep south and rust belt). I pointed out that low ping times, similar timezones and laws, and better optics around outsourcing might eventually make the numbers work well enough for at least some companies to try it out. It was at this point that I was subjected to an extended rant about how his company would never do that as (summarized) “we don’t want to hire people who are going to be bringing racism into the office and wanting to take time off in the fall to duck hunt and f#$% their sisters”. This individual stated this, loudly, in front of numerous witnesses without a hint of fear of consequences. It is this sort of behavior and the cucking I described in the previous paragraph that makes me believe that the alt-tech revolt is just getting started – I know dozens already who are hopping mad about this sort of thing and I send them to your blog. I certainly am motivated to help grease the skids for it.

That is a great observation on the driving force behind Silicon Valley virtue-signaling, and it indicates that it is going to be possible to red-pill some of the seeming SJWs. They are operating on a false paradigm, and moreover, they have to, on some level, know it. I mean, it just isn’t working for them, is it.
But regardless, the Alt-Tech revolt is just getting started. We’ve set the Voxiversity launch date to September 11th, the Alt-Patronstarter site is already fully functional, and I’m putting the subscriptions together now. There will be six levels of monthly subscriptions, from $5 to $500, and while I have most of the rewards identified, I’m interested in hearing additional ideas from those of you intending to support this foray into video production.
The Alt Hero kickstarter will be launched two weeks after Voxiversity. It will not be a subscription, just a straightforward fund-or-kill 30-day campaign.
Share your thoughts.

Mailvox: whoop-de-damn-do

TB is concerned about the fact that I am being criticized:

Holy shit, Mike Enoch went off on VD on their podcast from yesterday. I came here expecting a response. Your move, Vox.

I’ll pass, thanks. Mike has a right to say whatever he thinks of me. And I’m not interested in his opinion, least of all concerning a subject I know superlatively well. I see no need to listen to his criticism much less respond to it.
RD informed us that “the TRS guys were quite unhappy that you pointed out Spencer isn’t of the Right.”

In their latest podcast, TDS185 (which is paywalled), they spent from 1h:27m – 1h:44m railing against you (and Cernovich), as they feel betrayed.  They talk about how they respected your work, but that they believe you’ve turned on them since the unfortunate events in Charlottesville.
I can’t help but kind of like those guys.  They’re funny, and they have a lot of energy and have reached a lot of people. But Mike Enoch simply refuses to accept that their cock-up in Charlottesville provided a pretext for the current wave of literal iconoclasm and grave desecration.  And they really don’t have a firm intellectual understanding of actual National Socialism and why it’s defunct.
At the same time, they say they’ve accepted your advice that Nazi flags and so forth are bad optics, and must be avoided.  But they don’t credit you with it.

The truth is what it is. This sort of “Jenny, did you hear what Billy said about Suzy” drama is of zero interest to me. I don’t know what they said. I don’t care what they said. I’m not attempting to curry favor with them or with anyone.
I’ve never been a movement guy. I don’t play particularly well with others, in part because I simply try to do what I think is right at the time. I don’t worry at all about what X is going to think about my opinion of Y. I stand by my friends, not because I agree with them or I believe their ideology to be flawless, but because they are my friends. That may not be enough for you, but it’s enough for me.
Also, I would point out that I have been the object of considerably more criticism than I have meted out. I’m not offering that as an excuse or a reason because it is neither; the criticism was merited regardless of the source. But I do think it suffices to dismiss the idea that I have betrayed anyone.

Mailvox: the Pope of the Alt-Right

WS complained about my detached and contemplative approach.

Maybe Vox figures he’s the Pope Benedict of the Alt-Right: the one who leads a contemplative life and assures us of his thoughts and prayers as we’re getting the snot beaten out of us.

I found it mildly amusing that she thought I was thinking about them at all. There is a reason why I didn’t know who Jason Kessler was until yesterday. It was because I paid absolutely no attention to the rally in Charlottesville, despite apparently having been invited to speak there, until it made the news.
Neither Clausewitz nor van Creveld ever commanded in the field. Karl Marx was considerably more influential as an author than as a labor organizer. And it seems unlikely that Alexander the Great’s astonishing military success was entirely unrelated to the fact that he happened to have the greatest thinker in Man’s history as his personal tutor.
In light of the surprising discovery that the front man for the so-called “Unite the Right” rally was a left-wing Obama voter, I’ve been giving some thought to the assertions of some of the petty self-proclaimed national socialists that they are too of the right. In this vein, I thought it would be profitable to consult Leon Trotsky on the matter. His thoughts, expressed in the dramatically titled, but perceptive essay “The Fascist Danger Looms in Germany” are thought-provoking, if less useful than one might have assumed.

In order that the social crisis may bring about the proletarian revolution, it is necessary that, besides other conditions, a decisive shift of the petty bourgeois classes occurs in the direction of the proletariat. This gives the proletariat a chance to put itself at the head of the nation as its leader.
The last election revealed — and this is where its principle symptomatic significance lies — a shift in the opposite direction. Under the blow of the crisis, the petty bourgeoisie swung, not in the direction of the proletarian revolution, but in the direction of the most extreme imperialist reaction, pulling behind it considerable sections of the proletariat.
The gigantic growth of National Socialism is an expression of two factors: a deep social crisis, throwing the petty bourgeois masses off balance, and the lack of a revolutionary party that would be regarded by the masses of the people as an acknowledged revolutionary leader. If the communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Precisely in this sphere the election revealed the opposite picture: counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat….
Fascism in Germany has become a real danger, as an acute expression of the helpless position of the bourgeois regime, the conservative role of the social democracy in this regime, and the accumulated powerlessness of the Communist Party to abolish it. Whoever denies this is either blind or a braggart….
The danger acquires particular acuteness in connection with the question of the tempo of development, which does not depend upon us alone. The malarial character of the political curve revealed by the election speaks for the fact that the tempo of development of the national crisis may turn out to be very speedy. In other words, the course of events in the very near future may resurrect in Germany, on a new historical plane, the old tragic contradiction between the maturity of a revolutionary situation, on the one hand, and the weakness and strategical impotence of the revolutionary party, on the other.

Now, there is without question a social crisis across the West. A severe social crisis of historic proportions, arguably more serious than the one of the previous century. But in every case, the big bourgeoisie is allied with government bureaucracies and the ur-communists in revolutionary hope while both the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat are increasingly inclined towards counter-revolutionary despair. Moreover, the class metric is largely irrelevant, because the dividing lines are far more clearly identified on identity grounds than on class grounds.
In other words, from the Trotskyite perspective, we’re in new territory here, and more sophisticated philosophical tools are required for useful analysis and prediction. But it is already clear that neither simple identity metrics nor conventional ideological metrics will alone suffice.

Mailvox: IT in a converged company

It will be poisonous if the tech right feels compelled to not only hide their beliefs but also to actively pretend to believe in progressive diversity values. This pretending will embitter them, probably pushing many to the more radical alt-right
This is EXACTLY what happened to me!
One HR director in particular was hard-core SJW and good friends with one of my managers so I was stuck.  One of the things she did that still sticks in my mind was an online training/brainwashing course where 1) we HAD to pass it in order to remain employed and we were told that this was because it was the company’s responsibility to demonstrate nondiscrimination in order to meet federal requirements – which was, first of all, bullcrap, and second, a way to shift the responsibility for the nonsense onto the employees. 2) it contained questions such as “Check the boxes next to groups which are discriminated against” and “white men” was an incorrect answer.  You could select it, and it would just make you redo the question over and over until you gave the “right” answer.
I wasn’t familiar at the time with Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” but he totally nailed what was going on: the point wasn’t to make us believe something we didn’t agree with, the point was to make us complicit.
My reaction – which SHOULD have been to quit and find another job, but I wasn’t wise enough yet – was to manipulate my own responsibilities and the work that needed doing such that I could get everything done for the week in a couple hours, then spend the rest of the time goofing off and surfing the net.  Not a good use of time on my part; a worse use of employee resources by the people in charge.  My morale basically went to zero for several years as a result of these sorts of policies, and the value they got out of me correlated.
I’m out of IT now.  I’ve gotten the impression this sort of problem is too widespread for me to want to put up with it.

Imposters at Google

CG has a theory:

Mr. Damore has managed to spark the largest inflammation of Impostor Anxiety in recorded history.
Impostor Anxiety is not Impostor Syndrome as the Syndrome is associated with failure to recognize actual achievements while those suffering from IA are aware of their diminished ability relative to those around them,
They do not suffer from Dunning–Kruger though it may appear so from the outside sometimes. They are knowingly hiding behind a futile “fake it till you make it” facade that can sometimes carry them so long as resources remain flush.
Sufferers will sometimes mask over their Impostor Anxiety by trying to claim that they suffer from Imposter Syndrome. However this is self defeating as it only amplifies their anxiety due to knowing that at least some people around them know their true skill level, even others who also suffer from Impostor Anxiety and see through the charade.

It makes sense. Just as AA beneficiaries know that they do not merit their places at the universities where they find themselves intellectually overmatched, tens of thousands of the more-recent hires at Google are perfectly aware that they would not have been good enough to get a job there just a few years ago.
James Damore has unmasked them for the inferior employees that they are, which is why they are both panicked and furious.