Never Go Full Ukraine: PMC's Red Pilled as War Propaganda Falters

The war in Ukraine was the first war since W. decided to work out his Daddy issues on Saddam Hussein that saw a lot of people go full retard. But this was far worse than Iraq. This was post-social media and that’s a whole different level.

Added to the front porch flags and sidewalk stencils that are customary among a population in the throes of a war frenzy, we were subjected to the obligatory fill-in-the-cause digital variety, with blue and yellow tinted personal profiles and a deluge of posts whose sole intention was to signal to all and sundry, I SUPPORT THE CURRENT THING.

These people have always been with us, tying their ribbons, wearing their pins, hanging their signs, and just generally, desperately, jumping up and down screaming, “I believe, I believe, I believe!”

A Ukrainian flag flies in the upscale Marigny section of New Orleans, taken by the author (September, 2022)

When I was coming up, we called these sorts plastic or programmed, but the 4channers coined the perfect description for the MMOG era: Non-Player Characters, or NPC’s. In video game parlance, these are the background extras that have no agency or impact on the story; the pixelated figures that dive out of the way as the muscle car barrels down on them in Grand Theft Auto or stand by helplessly as troops move through their town in Call of Duty.

Many have attempted to define and redefine the strange politics of our historical moment, in which Republicans like Jim Jordan often sound like Jimmy Stewart speechifying in a Frank Capra movie about threats to the 1^st Amendment, while well-known sunscreen activist AOC calls for journalists to be jailed for revealing those threats to the public. Tucker Carlson channels Eugene Debs as he opines on our Dollar Store economy, and Bernie Sanders transforms into Ben Gurion whenever someone presses him on the genocide in Gaza. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

But maybe we’re coming at this thing all wrong. Maybe this isn’t about right vs. left, or a re-ordering of what those terms mean. Maybe it’s really just a fight between NPC’s and those who are acting with awareness and agency. And maybe that’s why you’ll often find that talking to a MAGA voter is a lot more organic and real than any conversation you’re ever going to have with your Lib relatives. Because whatever you think of their solutions, they usually have a better handle on what the problems are, so that you’re at least starting from the same premises. You don’t have to get through six layers of corporate media crazy before you can even begin to have a discussion, because they’ll have figured out long ago, as you have, that the media is only the place where they distribute the lines of code that you’re supposed to insert in place of your human personality and critical thinking skills.

The power of the NPC’s is in their numbers. Much like a zombie horde, they may be slow and stupid, but if you get enough of them together, all moving in the same direction, they can be almost impossible to overcome. The art of politics and propaganda is, and has always been, the art of moving the NPC’s in a particular direction. This is true whether they’re called the equestrian class, the petite bourgeoisie, the professional managerial class, or any of the other names they’ve been known by across the long ages. They can always be found wherever people have just enough to have something to lose and not enough to risk drawing negative attention to themselves. Societies that have a lot of them are relatively stable because the need for elite approval makes them easy to control. NPC’s will absorb and regurgitate whatever the acceptable ideas of their historical moment may be, and much like Orwell’s Oceanians, they have the remarkable ability to forget all about opinions they held only yesterday, if someone in authority tells them to believe the opposite today.

This is how a war criminal like George Bush was so easily recast as a defender of democratic institutions, and how Europe’s most corrupt nation was able to field Nazi battalions, while portraying its struggle against Russia as a noble fight for freedom. The success of these efforts all relies on the flexible programming code of the NPC’s, and the ease with which it can be rewritten as needed. 

The problem our political leaders, professional propagandists, rapacious corporations, and 21^st Century robber barons are having in the current year is that in a country where 57% of the people can’t afford a $1,000 emergency, there aren’t enough citizens left benefitting from the system to keep them invested in its narratives. To use another phrase popularized by the 4chan crowd, this time by way of the Matrix franchise, too many NPC’s are getting red pilled.

This is why every object of ruling class scorn becomes wildly popular, whether it’s Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, or Donald Trump. Conversely, every endorsement is a kiss of death, whether it’s yet another doomed attempt to make Kamala happen, or a positive Rotten Tomatoes critics score of the typical Hollywood cringefest.

The result is a broad disconnect between the ruling class and a population slowly waking up to the fact that the American Dream is a carrot at the end of a stick that’s never going to make its way into their collective mouths. The reaction from elites has been the kind of darkly hilarious sputtering outrage that is always on full display among an aristocracy in its final days. The perpetually infuriated-with-the-peasants collection of nepo-babies and guillotine bait on Morning Joe have made it one of the funniest shows on television, with Joe and Mika’s creepy 50 Shades of Washington vibe playing increasingly as self-parody. And when Joe Biden mumbles something about the long-term dividends that courting WWIII will pay to the national balance sheet, it seems like the gag about a senile leader in charge of the world’s deadliest arsenal it would be if the horror weren’t all too real.

When all is said and done, revolutionary moments are the moments in history when there aren’t enough NPC’s invested in the system for its rulers to overwhelm the forces of change by leveraging their mindless momentum against it. Too many have now either switched sides or grown apathetic as the car, the house, and the social status that were supposed to come with them, have disappeared into a cloud of dating apps and lifelong debt. “What’s in it for me,” has become the cry of the working class and the credentialed alike and the lonely elderly who think they’d like to have Chris Hayes as a grandson aren’t numerous or vital enough to brace up the crumbling edifice of ruling class legitimacy all on their own. 

However it ends, this will be the last election that bears any resemblance to the elections of old, whatever their failings and limitations. Yet another contest between two people that nobody likes is going to prove one red-pill too many.  And when the red-pilled outnumber the NPC’s, it can end in Nuremberg, the Tuileries, Potemkin, or any shit in between, but the status quo can never survive a population that’s truly woke.