When we discuss culture, the inevitable themes of money, influence, and violence arise. These all interact with culture and one another: money pays for cultural creation, but cultural artefacts can be quite profitable. The influential are born of culture and simultaneously shape it. Culture can inspire or prevent violence, and great violent acts can inspire (or kill) new culture.

They are all different manifestations of power, which is both the universal means and end. Consider: independent theater troupes (as suggested by Aeneas Tacitus Minor) would transmute funding from RW patrons into cultural sway, much like a solar cell turns light into electricity. Like the cell, the artist can be inefficient, bleeding money in obscurity.

Cultural power, being both upstream and downstream from the other types of power, cannot be acquired in isolation and exclusively through cultural warfare. Winning a culture war means acquiring and exercising power in all its forms, preferably simultaneously.

Some forms of power are simply applications or distillations of others, and the hierarchy looks something like this:

Physical > Political > Financial > Cultural

This is a direct analogue to the hierarchy of hard sciences:

Mathematics > Physics > Chemistry > Biology

First they shame and psyop you, then they ban/cancel you, then they legislate against you, and finally they kick down your door and arrest you. We need to work our way down the hierarchy as well. Being rich helps with being influential, and projecting political power is impossible if we can’t even feed ourselves.

The contest is quickly moving from more abstract to more concrete forms of power contest. No wonder — our problems are also getting more real. Cultural battle is giving way to financial contest.

During times of plenty, it’s easy to be divorced from reality. Our comfort has been so overwhelming that we’ve come to invert all natural values, glorifying weakness, victimhood, mental illness, and unbounded compassion. That time of material safety is ending for a variety of reasons, and before things get better, they will get much, much worse.

Once the money and hot air run out, the masses and elites will stop chasing ghosts and search for safety. Whoever can project the most power will be the umbrella to huddle under. This status, this position of strength, means your opinion is law. Your culture wins by default. The culture war is not about convincing, but about surviving — it is not even mostly about culture primarily.

As we gain money, strength and status in our other battles, our artists should mediatize the hell out of those wins. This revolution will indeed be televised, and livestreamed, and tweeted… but the content must be made before it can be distributed.

Who is this content aimed at? Do the masses matter or not? Culture in this conversation is referring mainly to high culture, which always trickles down from an inner core of aristocracy through the layers of society, finally reaching the base of the societal pyramid in its most diluted and popularized form.

Where is this aristocracy? Where are our nobles? Definitely not at Burning Man, that’s certain.

True nobility means two things: human quality (applied eugenics) and willingness to fight (true sovereignty). Our elites have neither.

The nobility required for the flowering of high culture simply doesn’t exist today. Sadly, we are fated to remain in the muck of shitposting, psyops, and propaganda — this is just a function of our moment in history.

Cancellation is the looming risk. Economic murder. It can even happen to entire countries — remember Russia? Exclusion from the economy, a denial of professional pursuits. Lost business opportunities. The rich and powerful are not immune, which is why RW would-be patrons are not openly funding legions of independent dissident cultural productions.

The real question of taking the fight from the cultural to the monetary (and later political) realm is how to get funds where they are needed without issue.

Parallel institutions and exit are long-term goals, but in the here and now, we still have to operate behind enemy lines, in the dark. BAP states that many of us will have to enter the underground, the nightlife, the “floating world”, and inhabit it without allowing it to corrupt our hearts. Wield power from inside and beneath. This is a *very bad idea* and will only ever end in excessive fornication, or worse.

Much better to remain in the large contingent of normie-friendly, fully-tax-compliant, overground elements. Far removed from any shadowy elements, never interacting with the underground machinery in any way.

I suggest studying the history of Las Vegas and who really built the Strip. These people were building hotels and casinos, funding cultural venues, and keeping it as a thing just between each other. “Our Thing”, they would say. Not a very nice bunch, and definitely not to be emulated.

There are no real solutions for the cultural funding issue, since one should always remain fully transparent and leave a paper trail. Large sudden inheritances from long-lost relatives are suspicious and should be avoided.

Travelling groups of journalists, photographers, or novelists documenting the world should exclusively be bankrolled by private persons in regime territory to avoid attracting attention. Don’t even consider small companies registered on a certain islands. Specially if tracing the ownership of said companies would not be worth the authorities’ time.

Cryptocurrencies, altcoins, and esoteric online barter are useless as methods of money transfer. Too difficult and all honeypots. Only chronically online weirdos use them.

Remember — we are the Good Guys, not dirty criminals. We should emulate the keepers of order and defenders of justice with our own counterintelligence program: COINTELBRO.

Our fed heroes really showed it to the communists, anti-war hippies and Black Panthers: spreading false rumors and gossip, forging documents and letters, creating and promoting rival/splinter groups, using informants and agents provocateurs, not to mention the occasional honeytrap prostitute armed with LSD — or was that MK-Ultra?

In this modern world full of easily accessible and self-hosted AI models, ubiquitous digital communications, dubious online money, and very low barrier of entry to use technology, none of these strategies (or similar modern analogs) are really viable anymore. It’s a safer world for it, though. I can rest easy.

It’s simply impossible to go offline nowadays, and there aren’t really any non-digital alternatives. Who is even doing IRL stuff anymore? Luddites and losers who rely on word of mouth instead of written evidence. These schmucks even read old spycraft books, thinking it might teach them something about so-called “federal infiltration”.

Who needs numbers, secure communications channels, technical expertise, and most of all, operational security? We can rely on the greatness of our spirits alone. On the strength of our internet culture. Cryptographic protection and evasion methods are all useless, so things like steganography and Cybergem’s Hide a Gem project are pretty much irrelevant.

We have to stay online. After all, it was on Mongolian basket-weaving forums and bird apps that we congregated in the first place. Starting companies with internet friends and becoming wealthy IRL is only playing to our weaknesses. Besides, we wouldn’t be able to get the money to our friends without breaking the law or through some form of disgusting secrecy.

We are the Good Guys, after all.

Remember: culture is at the abstract top of the power hierarchy (just above money), surviving catastrophe with power means automatic cultural victory, aristocratic high culture is for after the collapse, and funding problems have (still unclear!) creative solutions.

This war will not be won by “just being an artist”, sowing seeds and waiting for the next “Dark Elves” to rise up in 20 years. The poet must first be a warrior. Aeschylus, the father of tragedy and one of the greatest Athenian playwrights, never mentioned any poetic or literary achievements in his epitaph.

Only that he had fought at the battle of Marathon.