Is Cthulhu Finally Swimming Right?

What do we think, Yarvin-bros?

I’ve read a bit of Curtis Yarvin here and there. Most people reading this probably know who he is by now, as his name has recently gained a lot of prominence in connection with Trump Season 2: Electric Boogaloo. Apparently JD Vance talks to him or something! I’m too lazy to Google the exact details. Anyways, one of Yarvin’s quotes that stuck with me the most, and which I think is among his more memorable lines in general, is: “Cthulhu always swims left.”

In this line “Cthulhu” refers to what Yarvin also calls “the cathedral,” and which I like to refer to as “the blob”: The US federal government and the immeasurable, sprawling web of infinitely expanding adjacent entities, including the governments of allied foreign countries (which encompasses most of Europe, plus Australia, Japan, etc.), the university system, the legacy media, NGOs, the list goes on. All of the stuff that comes to mind when you hear the phrase “the establishment.”

The idea that these institutions collectively “always swim left” refers to an idea which is now dominant on the right, but which was pioneered by Yarvin long before Trump ever came along, the observable reality that the past 100 years of American politics have consisted of an ever-leftward drift. At most, you might get one or two steps right, such as during the Reagan years, but such temporary shifts are always sandwiched in between much larger steps to the left. Indeed, many leftist projects continued apace even while Republicans nominally held power, including all the way up through the first Trump administration, which saw an expansion in the popularity and power of “DEI” ideology even while the President was someone who stood in opposition to such narratives.

The Trump era has been defined by this sentiment on the right, the “black pill” feeling that the left always wins, things always get worse, nothing good ever happens, etc. Up until literally the past few months, I harbored those same general sentiments myself. After all, again, if you just look back at US history since the Second World War—it would be hard to deny that social and cultural attitudes have liberalized at a steady pace, with only token resistance from so-called “conservatives.” This trend accelerated up until the frenzied explosion of insanity that followed the death of George Floyd in May 2020.

After the Summer of Floyd and the 2020 election, though, things began to change. It did not happen all at once, but by the time of the 2024 election, everyone agreed that there had been a “vibe shift” away from cultural leftism in favor of relative sanity, which worked out to the benefit of Donald Trump. This is most obvious in observing the changing ideological loyalties of various high-profile public figures who openly defected from leftism—Elon Musk, of course, but also Joe Rogan, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.

Part of this came in response to the extreme incompetence of the Biden administration, but a lot of it was clearly driven by the overreach of cultural leftism. Elon Musk appeared to take interest in buying Twitter after seeing the site censor conservative parody website The Babylon Bee. Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret and frustration over his attempts to comply with the Biden administration’s extreme censorship demands. Countless people who still called themselves “liberals” or perhaps now “centrists” were deeply alienated by the left’s zealous devotion to transgender insanity and “cancel culture.” Obvious legitimate criticisms of DEI became widespread and accepted among many parts of “polite society,” finally pushing past the attempts to contain them by simply calling everyone a racist.

These were all trends and debates that broke out into the open during the first Trump administration, and the public discussions over them never really stopped. Joe Biden campaigned (to the extent that he campaigned at all) as a “moderate” who would get things back to “normal” after the perceived chaos of Trump’s time in office. I think there is a segment of people who wanted to give him (and by extension, the blob) that chance, one last chance to make things right, so to speak. The blob blew this chance spectacularly, with the Biden administration tripling down on leftism and governing as the most far-left administration in US history. After that, it seems that a critical mass of people decided that they had simply had enough.

Is this just another pendulum swing, though? Hasn’t this been the trajectory all along—one step forward, three steps back? Who’s to say that in 2028, or 2032, we won’t get another Democrat who sweeps in and pushes things back further left than ever before? Well, only time will tell. None of us can predict the future. But I think there is good reason to believe that 2024 marks a turning point towards a genuine paradigm shift. Even before Trump’s victory in November, many people (myself included) were discussing the possibility that we had reached “peak woke” in 2020, and that cultural leftist insanity would be on the decline from here on out.

I think in hindsight that this is probably the case. One reason for this is that the trajectory of woke nonsense has not overlapped completely with Trump’s two administrations—during the first Trump administration, wokeness continued to gain steam in culture and society more broadly, despite Trump being the man in the Oval Office. On the flipside, despite the Biden administration being hyper-woke, criticism and pushback to wokeness clearly began to increase during his years in office, with more and more people being alienated by one aspect of it or another and then subsequently turning against the whole project as a result.

This fits with the image of Trump as someone who rode largely pre-existing sentiments into office, twice—which is not to dismiss his personal talent and charisma. Obviously, as a politician, the man has played his cards pretty well. But discontent over these issues is a primary reason that his political career ever got off the ground in the first place. Trump expressed interest in running for President in 2012, only to decline doing so because it was so obvious that his efforts would go nowhere. He has had his eye on politics dating back much further than that.

2016 was his moment because he was able to tap into a preference cascade of dissatisfaction with the establishment—people were fed up with the blob. They were already tired of Cthulhu swimming left. In 2016, instead of woke, we used terms like “political correctness” and “social justice warrior,” but the debates were essentially the same, carried out between the same kinds of people over the same basic differences in values. This was a major factor driving support for Trump in 2016, the perception that establishment Republicans had been impotent in pushing back against “political correctness,” that they were too afraid of being called racist and sexist and homophobic.

The blob proceeded to blow all of its ammo on trying to take Trump down. Despite the fact that so many had become dissatisfied with “the cathedral,” these institutions still had a lot of credibility and political capital left over from the many decades they spent dominating society. They used that as ammo to fuel TDS and, whether by fluke or design, successfully got rid of Trump in 2020. It was a pyrrhic victory, though. This goes back to my statement in my last post that political capital is not infinite—by 2024, these people had chewed through all of theirs and had nothing left in the chamber for the next round.

Transgenderism as the Limit of Cultural Leftism

Another obvious bellwether in the culture wars, perhaps the most obvious, is the trajectory of what I like to call “trannyshit,” that wonderful subset of wokeshit that is concerned with forcing you to pretend that men can be women. I think there can be no denying that this “movement” has been steadily losing steam over the past few years and is now at its lowest point in recent memory, and perhaps teetering on the edge of losing viability entirely.

Transgenderism carries particular significance as being the absolute outer-most, most insane, ridiculous, screwed-up frontier of cultural leftism. Sure, all of cultural leftism is stupid, and bad, and harmful, but the tranny stuff really goes to another level. The level on which it asks people to flat-out deny obvious, basic reality is completely unprecedented, and likewise some of its consequences are utterly beyond the pale (encouraging children to chemically castrate themselves and/or mutilate their own sex organs).

In hindsight, it should perhaps come as no surprise that this didn’t ultimately go over well with the general public. But the fact that it got as far as it did was a monument to the, at the time, seemingly unstoppable momentum behind cultural leftism. I remember a time, only a few short years ago, when the prevailing sentiment was still quite bleak on this issue—people believed that tranny stuff would continue to be forced down our throats forever, that it would eventually be “normalized” in the same way that “gay marriage” has been, and that the left would then move on to some even more horrific frontier next, such as pedophilia or bestiality.

However, this is not what has happened, nor does it seem likely to happen at this point. The fact is that transgenderism never won anywhere near the kind of settled acceptance that “gay marriage,” to a large extent, still enjoys to this day. When was the last time you heard the Trump administration give any signals that they were interested in going after “gay marriage” in any way? Never, because they aren’t interested in any such thing. Anyone who thinks Donald Trump cares about that is high on their own supply.

Transgenderism, though, is an entirely different story. This issue was so divisive that it seems to have played a key role in swaying people towards Trump this year, with anti-trans ads run by the Trump campaign shown to be some of the most effective ads run during the election. What is telling about this issue is that, unlike most other aspects of cultural leftism, it is deeply divisive even within the left itself. More “moderate” liberals have steadily grown more and more opposed to transgenderism, to such an extent that there is now an entire community of people who are basically leftists that don’t like transgenderism (it is known as the “gender critical” community).

I think that if (more likely when) a Democrat retakes the White House within the next 10 years, there will be some degree of resurgence in support for transgenderism. However, I think that this pattern will be the reverse of what we have typically observed during the left’s “long march” to cultural power. We may see brief upsurges in support for transgender ideology, but they will not push it back to the commanding heights that it once enjoyed and will only serve as temporary pauses in its inevitable decline.

I imagine that in a few decades most leftists will prefer to pretend that the entire transgender fiasco never happened at all, or for the ones who turned on it early enough, they will brag about how right they were to do so. This will be a definitive counter-example disproving the thesis that the cultural left somehow always wins in the long run.

Why Did Things Get So Bad, and Why Did They Change Now?

This is just my personal observation and theorizing—I don’t have charts and graphs to back this up. But, like so much else in history, I think that all of this is a story driven largely by technology. In specific, information and communication technologies. The second half of the twentieth century saw a monolithic mono-culture develop across the continent-spanning global hegemon (us, the US) and spread from there all over the world. This wouldn’t have been possible without the new communications technologies that enabled mass media—first radio, then TV.

These new technologies allowed governments and their buddies to spread preferred narratives on a scale previously unimagined. The United States had a vicious civil war over the race issue all the way back in the 1860s, and even though the South was put down by force, the race issue wasn’t actually solved at all, not in the long term—100 years later the same regions still operated on a de facto racial caste system under “Jim Crow.” Why didn’t the ideology of the North spread to the South after the civil war? Why were southerners so stuck in their ways on this?

Perhaps this was because the northerners had no effective means of messaging available at the time. Sure, they could try to talk to southerners in person, but even if they put in the effort, what good would it do? Especially after the civil war, they would’ve been seen as a hostile occupation force—fat chance of anyone wanting to hear them out at that point. Yet 100 years later, when the race issue once again arose in the 60s, the communications landscape was totally different.

Now “the North”—aka the federal government—had a megaphone of unprecedented proportions. Through close ties with the media industry and control over exactly who and what was allowed to be broadcast, the government could beam its version of the truth directly into people’s homes with many of them none the wiser, believing (falsely) that they were simply hearing “objective reporting” on world events.

From this time period onwards “the North” won on the race issue, and it won an ideological victory, rather than a victory in direct warfare—people’s hearts and minds changed. Even today when many right-wingers have begun to re-examine the true nature of the Civil Rights movement, there is effectively no interest in going back to old-fashioned structural racism of the sort practiced under Jim Crow.

Once this phenomenon was in place, it simply snowballed from there, with centralized messaging predictably leading to a centralization of authority and culture. We have basically been living under this paradigm from the 60s until now, and only within the past 10-15 years (arguably even more recently than that) has it truly begun to shift. You can see this in how hard legacy media and its allies tried to defend themselves as “objective” reporters who were simply reporting the truth in an unbiased fashion, engaged in “fact checking” and the like. This sort of talk was still rampant during COVID, only a few short years ago.

The thing that has finally broken it is, appropriately, the next stage in communications technology—the Internet. The entire right-wing ecosystem behind the Trump administration is a product of the Internet and social media. Those of you who’ve been around since 2016 likely remember how stiff the initial resistance to Trump was over at Fox News, the containment corner for conservatives in the legacy media. The libs identified in that same year that “fake news”—social media posts, basically—was responsible for Trump’s first election victory, kicking off a decade of online censorship that has only recently begun to recede.

The average rightoid in 2025 is probably familiar with an endless list of “conservative influencers” whose social media “careers” were only possible due to the Internet—Lauren Southern, Steven Crowder, Candace Owens, etc. He probably doesn’t watch Fox News at all, preferring to call it “Faux News,” or if he does, he’s watching a network that has basically capitulated to Trump at this point anyways. Maybe he listens to The Daily Wire, a company started ten years ago whose success in podcasting and other multi-media is, again, almost entirely Internet-driven. Before social media truly went mainstream, none of this would’ve been possible.

This is my personal pet theory of why the modern right (and with it, the possibility of a genuine alternative to “Cthulhu swimming left”) has emerged at this particular point in time.

What Does This Mean for the Right?

The last topic I’d like to discuss is the implications of this potential paradigm shift for the right going forward. As I like to say, the future trajectory is more important than the current situation, always and forever. The libs are certainly being owned today, but what about tomorrow, and then the day after tomorrow, and so on? I think there are a few possible lessons here:

1. Power is actually up for grabs during elections: After 2020, the prevailing sentiment was that everything is rigged, and this combined with the already-common sentiment that the left always wins in the long run anyways. I have not really seen a whole lot of people update their priors on this or put forward theories as to why only 2020 was rigged but not either of the two elections sandwiching it. In light of 2024, my current prior is, elections actually are up for grabs to some extent. This leads into the second takeaway:

2. The right can no longer claim to be victims: The modern right often takes a “black pill” viewpoint in which it doesn’t matter what any of them say or do because “the deep state” controls everything anyways. I think at this point the entire theory of a “deep state” is discredited, or to the extent that there is a “deep state,” it’s proven to be extraordinarily weak compared to what people liked to portray it as. Anyways, the default mindset of the rightoid is that he has no power and can’t affect anything, so he can essentially say or do whatever he wants—extreme rhetoric, calls to “burn it all down,” talk of a second civil war, and the like.

This behavior was justified by the viewpoint that the left has all the power and they want to kill us all anyways, so anything is fair game, this is an existential struggle. January 6 and the justifications for it are the premier example of this. I think there was some merit to this viewpoint in the past and that most people probably have not updated this prior yet because these sea changes are still so recent. However, I don’t think this “black pill” mindset holds water anymore. Trump and co. have the power now, and they are using it. The right is no longer helpless and impotent. It was never actually true that the left is backed by some sort of all-powerful “deep state” that is capable of rigging everything. This brings us to #3:

3. How rightoids behave actually matters going forward: In the past, concerns about “right wing extremism” were correctly laughed off because the so-called “extremists” had no power and were usually being censored into oblivion. This isn’t true any longer. I have been told many times since the election that Trump is implementing “Yarvin’s playbook” and the like, with the not-so-subtle implication that yes Trump is trying to position himself as a monarch, and That’s a Good Thing, Actually.

My concern here ties back into #1 and #2; how a right-wing regime uses its power while in office will directly affect the next set of elections, which in turn could easily lead to the replacement of that right-wing regime with a left-wing one. When you’re the oppressed censored victim with no power and no voice, you don’t have to worry about getting things right—if you get something wrong, it makes no difference to anyone.

When you’re the guy in charge holding the giant government stick and using it to beat people into submission, the exact opposite is true. Once again, I maintain that a large reason the left fell out of favor in the first place is that they abused this stick too often and too heavily, to the point that a critical mass of people in the middle grew fed up with it. Now that the left is out of power, the right can no longer count on that dynamic to work in their favor, at least until they lose another election.

But it would be better to try and, y’know, not lose the next election. That means using the stick sparingly and with good judgment. Use it when you have to, but make sure you actually have to use it before doing so. If all those squishy people in the middle begin to feel that they simply traded out one set of bullies for another, it won’t be long before they’re back to voting for Democrats. When you are actually in power and are the ones actually expected to govern, it becomes necessary to actually play politics a bit as opposed to staying in tribal chest-thumper mode.

The phenomenon I see playing out here is that when one tribe wins an election, they take it as this broad sweeping opportunity to totally re-make everything in their image, feeling that they now have the “mandate of heaven” to essentially do whatever they like. The reality is that these elections are very close and regardless of who wins, at least half the country is upset about it. The squishy people in the middle—the people whose votes are actually up for grabs—are not tribal loyalists who are happy to see everything burn in the name of their side “winning.” They just want things to be normal and stable and not on fire.

Unfortunately, I do not think that much of the online right shares this assessment. In my experience, many online rightoids still seem to think of elections as fundamentally similar to Internet slapfights. In their view, you “win” by being as extreme and aggressive as possible, to the exclusion of any other consideration. Any analysis of anything else is “cucking” and “selling out” and what have you. I’m afraid this is an unavoidable result of the online echo chambers that most people inhabit these days, so we’re probably stuck with it for better or for worse. Just as with the previous “black pill” narrative that everything is rigged, only time will tell whether this self-serving attitude was really justified or not.