Three Versions of Medgold
In Germany or Poland, in the 20th century, Nigel might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, a Vernichtungslager. Shawcross would have destined him, perhaps, for the gallows; his name might have augmented the catalogs of Compact or Nation Europa, between such things as an interview with Jim Saleam or a hagiography of Wilhelm Frick; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the latent ideological space implicit in /pol/ memes or in any of the billion ephemeral gigachad dialogues. Instead, God assigned him to the twenty-first century, the bastard second son of the notoriously violent and wealthy Bulgarian gangster Vasil Bozhkov, whose associates called him “The Skull.” There, in 2023, Nigel published the first edition of Hitler und Medgold; there, in 2027, his masterpiece Der Heimliche Führer appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists an English version, Secretum Fuhrer, published in 2029 by Ronald Syme Groyper.)
Before undertaking an examination of the foregoing works, it is necessary to repeat that Nigel Carlsbad, whose small but erudite following referred to themselves as the Carlsbad-sphere, was deeply religious, and voluntarily celibate. His works, if found by a classical liberal or an anti-woke progressive, might seem like frivolous or idle exercises in irreverence or blasphemy, but to Carlsbad, they held the key with which to decipher a central conundrum of the Wignat vanguard. They were a matter of meditation and analysis, of historic and philologic controversy, of loftiness, of jubilation, and of terror. They justified, and destroyed, his life. Whoever peruses this essay should know that it states only Carlsbad’s conclusions, not his dialectic or his proof.
As with all members of the Amarna forum, Nigel prized his anonymity as an essential condition of his scholarly works. Being the bookish and slightly anemic younger son of such a wealthy and dangerous man as his father, he has chosen his handle, pompilivs, as an allusion to his family and his upbringing, which he hoped would impress, perhaps subconsciously, that he should be treated with the peculiar mix of disdainful respect afforded to the bastard of a dangerous man. Bozhkov’s dealings, enumerated in an infamous Wikileak cable, included money laundering, human and drug trafficking, and illegal antique dealing. It was this latter which primarily concerned Nigel, being the overlap between his father’s business concerns and his own personal aptitudes.
Carlsbad had styled himself as the disciple of Karl Ludwig von Haller, a Swiss jurist and political scientist, whose seminal work declares that abstractions such as “sovereignty,” “the state,” and “civil society” are monstrous and unnecessary, and that they obscure and distort the natural relations between men. Subsequently his intellectual journey had taken him to Reinhart Koselleck and Otto Brunner, and to the academic movement called Begriffsgeschichte, (conceptual history) which had been anticipated entirely by Haller. Later, he came to the works of Panagiotis Kondylis, who had himself been a student of Koselleck, and who had that argued that identities can change and vary or gradually become interchangeable, whereas the real existence of a person perseveres.
On a particular evening in 2022, having confirmed the authenticity of a collection of rare Bibles in his father’s possession, including a black-letter Wycliffe, Nigel discovered alongside them a slim and well-worn volume titled Über die Notwendigkeit, die Fickrate zu Erhöhen, published in 1851, apparently and (to Nigel) appallingly, written by Karl Ludwig von Haller. This short tome, bound in leather, its pages delicate from age, contained an apologia for perspectives which Nigel had publicly and routinely reviled, castigating anyone in their proximity. In this apocryphal volume, which Carlsbad himself never revealed to another soul, Haller argued that modern men have lost their virility, and that women (as a class) now hold society hostage to a battery of insane demands, when in reality what they need is ein guter Schwanz, a term that, for Haller, must be carefully contextualized and recognized as as a natural and idiosyncratic relation between each man and each woman, and not as a detached or omnipotent abstraction. The discovery of Haller’s lost work awakened a passion in Nigel; he compared himself—albeit grandiosely—to Saul of Tarsus, who had persecuted Christians until he perceived a sign on the road to Damascus, but who thereafter became their most famous and dedicated proponent.
The first edition of Hitler und Medgold bears the following categorical epigraph, which Nigel himself would later elucubrate:
If there is hope to arrest the the slow degradation of Western society, it must begin with an increase in the fuck rate.
(Haller, 1852)
Nigel begins by comparing Medgold to Socrates, whose homosexuality is documented by Matthias Andreas Koch in die Rede des Sokrates in Platons Symposium und das Problem der Erotik. In Koch’s reckoning, Athenian pederasty was a failed attempt to accelerate into a political arrangement with many similarities to (what would become) Hitler’s Germany. It was only through a calculated performance of sexual degeneracy and libertinism that he (Socrates) was able to inspire the violence and the cruelty of the tyrant Critias. Echoing Haller, Koch calls for the installation of a new German Critias, who could only arise in response to a similarly Socratic program of Hypersexualisierung. The political beliefs of violent actors, which are shaped by their particular circumstances and agendas, are not only conducive to the restoration of natural relations between men, but essential; the restoration can only occur once men have been incited to develop restorationist agendas. Moreover—and almost prophetically—Haller predicts that the specific avenue by which men will be radicalized is through their response to a collapse in sexual mores, as was later seen in the Weimar Republic. Nick Land’s discourse on accelerationism becomes another footnote to Haller.
Nigel then draws the natural (perhaps obvious) conclusion that, in the same way the legalization of prostitution and sodomy created the conditions for a German Critias—to wit, Adolf Hitler—in the Weimar Republic, Medgold’s project is, analogously, intended to inspire a new American and indeed, pan-European Hitler. In this manner did Nigel elucidate the enigma of Medgold.
The poasters of all the factions of wignat twitter refuted him1. LindyObserver posted a picture of him as a soyjak, mouth gaping and pointing at a graph of African birth rates. BastilleAddict accused him of trying to plunge the whole world into sodomy and degeneracy. The sharp-tongued Smeed called him a spiritual TRANNY in all caps and promised to hunt him down and personally perform gender affirmation surgery on him. Mikka, who published Nigel’s essay in his blog J’accuse despite his personal disagreements, prepended it with an editor’s note pointing out that Gigachad was exceedingly unlikely to say any of the following.
These anathemas influenced Carlsbad, who partially rewrote the disapproved book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned the terrain of moral order to his adversaries and postulated oblique arguments pertaining to linguistics and political science. He admitted there had been other world-historical factors besides Socratic hypersexualization which had contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler, and conceded that although he himself was not especially attached to the messianic conception of Hitler—this too easily veering into blasphemy, at minimum—he did strongly endorse violence and found Hitler to be a useful Schelling point for gatekeeping. Nigel went on to reaffirm that all political action has a reactive component insofar as it is raised as a counterpoint to something. The liberal who claims that the natural order has been trampled for centuries by the sins and iniquities of conservatives and aristocrats is no less "reactive" than the conservative who bemoans the deliberate subversion of the natural order by liberals; without interplay between opposing forces, there is no political action at all.
In the second edition of Hitler und Medgold, Nigel claims that, given the above understanding of reactivity as unit of politico-dynamic force, it is naive to assign a particular “side” to any actor or action in abstracto, because the historical meanings of the same can only be ascertained from the political context in which they are taken, by analysis of the definite ends those actors or actions achieve. He asks: who is "more right-wing": the sovereign exercising his dominion, or the frondeur rebelling to preserve his own? Comes Nigel’s answer: neither, because both belong to the same concrete order and are exercising their own acquired rights. But many bad genealogies call the frondeur a "Whig," a "democrat," etc.
Despite his own inner volitions or ratiocinations, Nigel claims, Magnus Hirschfeld (for example) was as instrumental to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparteihat as Adolf Hitler himself. It’s even possible that Hirschfeld was an esoteric Hallerite2, trying to incite the conservative reaction, knowing he would be reviled, hated, and scorned by the very people he had sacrificed everything to help. Medgold, like Hirschfeld, suffered infamy because the felicity of the White Race sufficed him.
Many have discovered post factum that in the justifiable beginnings of Carlsbad lies his extravagant end, and that Der Heimliche Führer is a mere perversion or exacerbation of Hitler und Medgold. Toward the end of 2025, Carlsbad finished and revised the manuscript text; almost two years passed without him handing it over to Mikka. In October of 2027, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Finnish Herbraist Bleppsama, and bearing this perfidious epigraph: “I am going to rape Nigel Carlsbad.” The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion entails a journey into limitless obscurantism, through an epistemic ground so unstable it threatens to collapse on itself. The next Hitler, argues Carlsbad, will cloak himself behind Medgoldian aesthetics of debauchery and hedonism in order to paper over the same genocide and racism. Such a man will invoke Elwood Towner and Hitler's love of Winnetou to conceal an agenda of racial holy war. The influence of these ideas, Nigel argues, must be studied through the analysis of their practical use as weapons in combat for prestige, status and preeminence. Thus it is impossible to condemn Medgold on strictly ideological or even religious grounds, because the true implications of his idea cannot be analyzed intellectualistically, i.e. simply by deducing their logical consequences; rather, their implications can be revealed only through their use in ongoing polemic among thinkers.
On this basis, Nigel proclaims that his dectractors’ judgements of his stances and motives have failed to locate the essentially conservative agendas behind his apparent libertinism, that “Nord" vs "Med" isn't even an actual rivalry, that TFR is decline, and that in fact, it is dubious as to whether people are even having more sex. He points out that National Socialism has historically been associated with sexual deviance as in films such as Salon Kitty and The Damned, and that sexual deviance is now culturally celebrated, rendering nazisploitation into a perfect vehicle to convey a program of Hitlericist Hypersexualisierung to the body politic.
Nigel draws a parallel between Medgold and Joseph Charles Tommasi, who broke with the “straight” conservative image of American Nazism, grew his hair long and smoked marijuana before founding the National Socialist Liberation Front in 1974. By all outward appearances, Tommasi was a debauched leftoid hedonist, but his praxis of gaining ascendancy for his own standpoint as it was situated relative to social-historical3 contrasts makes him legible as a bearer of authentic Hallero-Hitlerism. And Nigel claims that Medgold goes even further than Tommasi; like Hitler he is a “Man against Time,” a superhuman personality who, through force of his own will, seeks to oppose Aryan decline within the cycle of the age.
In vain did Nigel offer his revelations to the vanguard. The incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid, philosemitic rhetorical game; the wignats disdained it. Carlsbad intuited from this universal indifference an almost miraculous confirmation, declaring that in 2110, someone would write a 500-page book combing through hundreds of primary sources to argue that 20th century people's standards of race and sex were not embryonic forms of cyborg bugworld, but qualitatively different, and that man will be widely dismissed as "absurdly ahistorical." He sensed ancient and divine curses converging upon him, and began to question whether concepts can even be coherently transmitted from person to person, given the idiosyncratic nature of each person’s understanding and historical situation. A chance encounter with an essay by Leo Weisgerber forced him to abandon the idea that any language could ever be translated into another; there is neither a lexical nor a grammatical 1:1 correspondence across different languages, and even worse, a man’s own internal conceptual framework is likely to drift and evolve over time. He found himself rejecting the formal logic entirely, writing that “the law of the excluded middle doesn't apply in political philosophy.” Nigel began to suspect that even his own past writings were now lost to him in a haze of comparative genealogies and exegeses. And supposing he were to undertake such an auto-philological endeavor, how could he then be convinced that his second reading was faithful to the first, without yet a third exegesis? What good is an historical understanding of concepts and their evolution if one lacks the tools to decipher the words and languages of the present day? The meaning of a word to an 18th century Frenchman might differ entirely from the same word in the same sentence as spoken by 21st century American. The historical meaning of a word could in no way negate its usage in the present day, because each person who deploys that word must be aware of his own meanings and acting in accordance with his particular agendas. How then, Nigel asked himself, could he presume to tell the latter that his use of language is wrong, without a careful examination of this latter gentleman’s locality in society, history, and so on?
Intoxicated with insomnia and with vertiginous dialectic, Nigel Carlsbad wandered through the streets of Sofiya, proclaiming the second coming of Hitler as Medgold. Following the example of George Lincoln Rockwell, he mounted a large illuminated swastika on the roof of his house, declaring that Hitler is no less than a Christ figure, that Nazi Germany’s twelve years were his ministry, the swastika was his crucifix, and Medgold his theophany.
Author’s Note: …This story is based on Borges' Three Versions of Judas, but it is set on RW twitter, with @medgold playing Judas and @pompilivs playing Nils Runeberg. All you need to know to understand the story is that the former advocates sexual libertinism and the latter advocates chastity. All of the people I have placed in this story are real accounts that I have interacted with on twitter dot com. I think this is fun and interesting, because at the heart of any good story is pathos, and we can find a lot of pathos here amongst the people around us.
And I know that most of you, thankfully, don't know any of these people, but I tried to capture their concerns & discursive norms. We have a parasocial relationship with the people we follow, so we are free to relate to them as literary characters.
As for those people I have chosen to write about, they may not find their portrayals flattering. This does not trouble me. As I have said privately to a few of you, they will be secretly delighted to be the center of attention. The great Zero HP Lovecraft wrote a story about me? About me personally? Yes, even he. The thing about having secret feelings is that you aren't always in on the secret yourself.
Stylistically, my newest work is overwrought, because that is the sort of man the protagonist is; one who writes "intellectualistically" instead of intellectually, who would never use an English phrase where the opportunity to use its German or Latin equivalent presented itself. Despite its whimsical subject matter, this story deals with some topics I think are important, especially to people who have "far right" concerns; what makes a vanguard? what are its goals and methods?
People who refer to themselves as a vanguard are thinking in a progressive, revolutionary frame of mind and they are probably suffering from self-importance that is out of proportion to all reason. But grandiose self-conceptions can be instrumental.
A lot of people ask: “What are you doing on twitter, you're just poasting like the rest of us, how can you have the nerve to think this is a political project?”
The answer is that every single person on twitter is an amateur propagandist, like it or not. If you are a really good amateur propagandist, all the mediocre amateur propagandists will nip at your heels and spread lies about you, saying you're secretly a professional, funded by Thiel or the Koch brothers or something. We've all seen this.
The people I have written about in this story are not, specifically, neonazis, but they're sort of nazis in the same way that chapocels are communists, possessing a series of millenarian inclinations that slouch toward a mythical, eschatological utopia. For the left this is the glorious workers revolution, for the far right it is some kind of ethnic cleansing which takes a messianic view of the Austrian painter. I personally believe all utopian visions are mistaken.
There is an element of transgression for its own sake in good amateur propaganda; transgression is funny, and it gets your attention. You can hide an exaggerated version of your real beliefs by pretending it's irony, but behind every joke is a grievance.
Transgression serves a different function for right vs left. Behind leftist transgression is a mawkish schoolmarm telling you that really no you need to denormalize heterosexuality. Rightists use it to signal that we are free of regime mind control. So when you see a guy with a k-on avatar proclaim his love of Adolf Hortler, he doesn't mean it in the George Lincoln Rockwell, Colin Jordan way. In the end of my story, when Nigel professes this view, it's because he's gone insane, not because he's become enlightened
The useless parts of ideologies tend to slowly erode over time, which is why the far right now adopts a hyper-ironic stance towards hortlerism, oversteering into sincerity until it becomes self-parody. What remains is a kind of pomo simulacrum of people like William Luther Pierce. The parts of the ideology that were cheap (talk) have replicated, the parts that were expensive (action) have attenuated.
Now you might say, WLP was always about trying to figure out how to use the cheap thing (talk) to motivate the expensive thing (action), but in past decades the far right fringe really did puts its words into action, in low-level ways. That's because, contra the Conceptual-History-cels, most people don't hold their ideas in the service of particular sociopolitical agendas, they just have good feelings about good things & bad feelings about bad things, and they automatically sort political claims into good and bad.
If a certain arrangement of words makes you feel good, then you're for them, and otherwise, you're against them. We process ideology in a very low-level, animal sort of way. We all want to believe we're so reasonable and logical, but that itself is a false consciousness. There are a few deeply autistic and highly intelligent people who are capable of existing within a consistent and rigorous philosophical framework, but these are exactly the people who are most susceptible to the typical minds fallacy.
So again: what makes a vanguard? There is an undeniable link between far right weirdos posting transgressive humor on the internet and the culture shifts we are seeing. But in general, I think anons overestimate how much they lead vs. how much they are lead. I think you're in vanguard (a dubious privilege at best) if you have ideas which are far outside the overton window, but people inside it listen to you, maybe through a level or two of indirection. The cost of this is being reviled, but being reviled does not the vanguard make. And as the overton window shifts, as the realm of the possible shifts—politics is the art of the possible, after all— then the vanguard increasingly loses its identity, and becomes non sequitur.
This defeat-in-victory and victory-in-defeat has already happened to the left, which is why their radical politics are so incoherent and pathetic. They've won the spiritual victory at every level, and have nothing left but make believe.
Ra’s al Gore mockingly interrogates: Why not support Hitler openly in order to embolden the degenerates in order to embolden the Nazis? Why not try to provoke a reaction to the reaction to the reaction?
Hirschfeld founded the influential issenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, which was the first organization in the world to advocate for homosexual and transexual rights. In Weimar Germany, he opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, where the first gender reassignment surgeries were performed. According to Carlsbad, Hirschfeld’s famous quote, “The woman who needs to be liberated most is the woman in every man” may perhaps be read as an allegory for the project of delving to new depths of debauchery in pursuit of greater heights of righteousness.
His majesty lancizolle eisenhart Tsalung Tongdrol observes: “there is no Quodlibetal formal distinction to be made regarding non-identity weakening modifiers ex natura rei disambiguating the consequent. This doesn't have a substance divisibility coordinate which is orthogonal to any extensiveness axis. Without this, it is impossible a priori to develop the capability to dissect semi-Hyperbolicity and bi-shadowing w/r/t uniformly exponentially stable para-completeness & nothing that is extrinsically advenient can have alternation of the presupposed referent edgewise.
Parasocial relationships are a bit like alcohol: a little can be invigorating, you miss out on a lot with abstinence, and well, too much...
Too much is probably using it as a substitute for IRL, ranking it ahead of the IRL alternatives. They have their niche.
Good internet friends compartmentalize.
He could have been Gigachad or Groyper or Hitler or Jesus; in the end, he chose the lowest destiny: he was Chudjak.