Redpill Op

How online White Supremacists ruined 4chan and, accidentally, made me Woke.

This is a little story about early online White Supremacist recruiting, and the odd experience of seeing easily through one militant propaganda veil while being thoroughly enmeshed in another. The self-important part of me wants to think I was unmoved because I'm inherently not a sucker, although the evidence of my life contradicts this, while the part of me that wants to extract some value from my upbringing leans toward ironically crediting my lifelong training in seeing shadowy conspiracies behind every corner. The truth may be that my paranoia and obsessive introspection just made me cynical of everyone claiming to pull aside the curtain for me, the world has a surfeit of hucksters who want to sell you their spin on revealing Oz.

This is going to be a deeply uncomfortable episode, all about the deep dark internet, porn, misogyny, and virulent racism, and I don't know how else to deal with those except to get them out of the way.

To provide a bit of background, I grew up inside Oathkeepers: A right wing organization that recruited police, first responders, and armed forces veterans until it had grown to 40,000 members. As the Org grew, it diverted from its original track as a Constitutionalist political watchdog group over time and transformed into the roving private army that its founder, my father, took to several armed standoffs with the feds before his involvement with the January 6th Insurrection. My childhood, as the prodigal son of shyster, militia general, and future Savior of America Stewart Rhodes, was awful in ways that differ from what is generally expected.

The natural assumption people make is a life of rigorous weapons, tactics, and survival training to prepare for the Coming End, forging me into a sort of off-brand Robert Ludlum protagonist who sacrificed social skills and regular life for the Spartan Way. Unfortunately, effective training for the end times seems to require some sort of functioning home life just as much as any other kind of preparation for life does. My adolescence devolved into a depressed NEET existence, burrowed into the niche interests and communities I found online to shelter from the grim reality of the Coming Collapse (always a year and change away) and balkanization of the United States into warring factions ripe for a UN peacekeeping takeover. Hiding from the looming end of civilization by immersing myself totally in 4chan worked out about as well for me as you would expect.

I had no social skills, no hope for the future, no prospects, no education worth speaking of, and no self esteem. I wasn't even a good survivalist, something I was reminded of when I was randomly yanked out of my neckbeard nest for a militia event interruption, in which I would perform terribly and be ridiculed. I represented the family poorly when dragged along to political events, where I was intended to help hold up the happy family facade in front of the John Birch types, stumbling through interactions with the well-dressed far right political operatives who moved behind the scenes in the GOP. I couldn’t even achieve becoming an Eagle Scout to improve Stewart’s outward facing family image, which seemed to be the main reason I existed.

All other time was spent huddled in dirty blankets atop piles of survival gear that invaded my living space, building my nest on heaped tactical crap in every military surplus color and camouflage pattern, from Olive Drab to Woodland, MARPAT, and Digicam. I constantly, desperately distracted myself from the end times by taking comfort in the digital company of my fellow teenage incels. I was a perfect target for radicalization by any metric.

My brief child prodigy heyday of sounding profound to stoned Libertarians around campfires was long over, as Oathkeepers moved away from rubbing shoulders with activists in tye dye and towards conservative power players, and my awkwardness and conversation-crushing infodumping had become more uncomfortable than charming. Without practice, any shred of social grace I once had atrophied and died. My last peer group interaction had been through a Boy Scout troop I joined at 14, attending meetings over a hundred miles away because the Troop had to be carefully selected for the political reliability of the other parents. I had come out of my shell a little, even earned some merit badges, but only interacting in goal-oriented, rigid, structured, and monitored meetings, attended intermittently depending on my father’s mood, left me with little practice at actually moving in a group setting. Like the John Birch outings, and even the campfires, I was largely following a script for public display, an advertisement to Stewart’s peers of how well our family functioned. Any practice at people skills I could get in side conversations at political or training events came from stolen moments in the margins of the schedule, shallow and brief.

The little bit of camaraderie that came from training in Jiu Jitsu and MMA nearly 40 hours a week (at one point my resting heart rate had been 45) ended when the prohibitive costs, and three-hour round trip from our remote survivalist haven mountain town, ground down my parent's will to keep our martial arts curriculum up. Around the same time, I gradually dropped out of the Boy Scouts for the same reason. I withdrew into myself more and more as all contact with the world beyond the treeline faded away. The internet was my only lifeline, and I clung to it. I took obsessive care of my aging laptop and wifi extender antenna, on the verge of emotional breakdown whenever an outage or equipment damage threatened to cut me off from the digital world. I would browse listlessly until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, sleep far too long, wait through the evening hours while I dreaded hearing a knock on my door that would mean some sort of apocalypse or Oathkeepers task was demanded of me, and do it again. Every day became the same.

So one day, in the infinite gray corridor of meaningless time that develops when you have no schedule or goals in your life, I plugged myself into the social reject playground that is 4chan to discover all of my regular haunts absolutely flooded with black dicks. This was not entirely unusual in itself, many of the boards I frequented allowed NSFW content and others suffered from periodic porn spam, but what was odd was that everyone seemed to be roleplaying. Every thread was filled with posters, often taking on temporary usernames in a practice that anonymous 4chan generally frowned upon, in character as gloating black supremacists while they flooded the boards to near unusability with violent interracial pornography.

To hear them tell it, in prose so awkward that would have been rejected by a paperback erotica mill on sight, the victory of African males over the white man was nigh. Black masculinity had completely crushed the mom-and-apple-pie traditional values of the past, the rants presupposing that black Americans and middle class suburban life were natural enemies and assuming that their audience understood this. According to the pages and pages of spam posted alongside pirated hardcore pornography clips, young white women were growing up inundated with diversity media and rap music (orchestrated by, who else, but the Socialist Jews) that primed them to fall into high melanin arms. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural majority was doomed by the prevalence of Ace of Spades branded merchandise and clothes, the playing card symbol supposedly adopted as a signal of preference for black men by white women in a phenomenon I hadn’t heard of before or since.

Drunk college girls corrupted by the promotion of interracial relationships in mainstream media would soon doom the white race, and the victorious dark skinned interloper reveled in his triumph so many times per hour that my obscure conspiracy theory discussion threads and weekly Star Wars VS Star Trek debates were totally drowned out, along with the raw combat footage, fatal car crash compilations, and any other variety of porn. Of course, given that this was accompanying dozens upon dozens of pages of all other content being crowded out by white chicks and black dicks, every other sentence was an insulting comparison of penis size and semen volume or virility. Nature had decided a victor in a massive, hardcore Peacocking clash of civilizations that we poor white boys didn't even know we were competing in.

The fact that this would be ‘diluting’ the ‘African Master Race’ as well was totally ignored, the posters crowing about coming White Genocide and the Great Replacement (totally displacing Mexicans as the targets of demographic fears, perhaps from a lack of suitable porn clips) seemed to be talking about Whiteness as some magical and incredibly fragile quality that was destroyed on contact with any other ethnic DNA. In fact, the focus seemed to be much more on this special, delicate quality finally being eradicated than on the superiority of their competing Master Race brand’s own genetics.

But lo! Voices appeared in the midst of this ebony onslaught, telling the pitiful pale youth not to despair. This was a calculated attack, a psychological warfare assault meant to desensitize us to interracial relationships, race mixing, ant-white cultural dissolution, and induce apathetic despair. We should hold firm to our pride as Western men, heirs to civilization, and as white people too. You could shorten it to White Pride even, for a slogan. Users began 'ironically' uploading posters and short videos that played off of Nazi propaganda from WWII, simply a counterpunch to annoy anti-white racists and with rallying cry posts exhorting other users to copy and spread Hitler speeches edited to dubstep as a means of fighting back.

The opponents of the porn spammers held the mystical White genome to be just as snowflake special and fragile, accepting the premise of how easily any European traits would be crowded out of a mixed population and that culture and ethnicity were implicitly tied, and simply called for militant resistance. Both sides, it seemed, were speaking the same language to such a degree that it felt like all of my regular online haunts had accidentally walked into a room with a long-running debate in progress.

The dissenting voices began to mass produce nearly as many threads of rebuke as the porn spammers, filling the boards with the raw materials that would mutate eventually into “fashwave,”  edits of neoclassical art and medieval knight imagery overlaid on white supremacist dog whistles and vague promises of violence, as well as racist memes meant to get a rise out of the miscegenation spam posters that performed a second function in educating spectators about racial crime statistics. You know, as a side benefit to the joke. To raise awareness. Overall, the point was that we should all raise our voices as one and reject the extinguishing of the White Race and the torch of Western Civilization. If nationalism, white or western cultural, did not move them, then they were implored to push back just to defend the online haven that was the only homeland many posters felt any loyalty to. Even if they gave up on their own ‘white identity,’ they should hit back just to keep their societal reject corner from being destroyed as collateral damage in the culture war.

My first reaction, as a neurotically insecure white teenager, raised on militant nationalism and impending doom, socially isolated to the point of being crippled in interaction with other humans, despairing that my lot in life was to die alone and shunned by society, was to call it all utter fucking bullshit.

I hadn't had a black friend since I was a small child playing Star Wars in Yale's Grad Housing complexes, but I could call out badly scripted roleplaying when I saw it. The setup and payoff were obvious, the ultra exaggerated attack on the majority racial makeup of the website only challenged by the valiant dissent of huge fucking racists until the mods managed to get a handle on things. The posts by blatant Neo-Nazis rallying for hope and resistance were so obviously prewritten and copy-pasted that it was laughable, the ‘Black Supremacists’ wrote like aliens who had only seen black people, or any human interaction at all, on intercepted TV broadcasts from the 1970s and didn’t quite get how people actually talked. Unfortunately, it seemed like many of the website’s other posters had too little experience talking to any people, black or otherwise, to detect the falsehood.

I'd seen posters from the now fairly infamous 4chan /pol/, or Politics, board raiding other parts of the website in character as minorities or leftists before. Not too long before this attack, they’d swarmed into my regular stop on the traditional games board to drown my safe space of DnD threads and discussions of 70s fantasy novels with false flag identity politics. The wise neckbeards of the board games section had rebuffed the obvious faux-SJW sock puppets instantly, largely because the /pol/idiots openly discussed their reverse psychology “Red Pill Operation” a mere click away from the masses they were trying to awaken, mostly responding with endless copy-pastes of 'go home /pol, you're drunk.' Others derisively asked which ‘Red Pill’ this was, since the Matrix had come out every edgy right-wing philosophy had branded itself as the Red Pill that would let the sheep-like common man see through the grand delusion. White Supremacists, misogynistic pickup artists, monarchist neo-reactionaries, and occultists had all varying claimed that their ideas were the true Red Pill, and everyone else was swallowing the delicious Blue Pills that society offered to keep people complacent. No one unquestioningly choked down more and more varied Red Pills than the drooling userbase of /pol/.

In the complex history of 4chan, /pol/ had been a place meant to corral racism and right-wing content on the website from the start, a 'containment board' known for an overlapping userbase with infamous Holocaust denial forums like Stormfront, but that effort had failed and allowed /pol/ to start encroaching on the territory of every other board. The science and technology board had become so thoroughly spammed with 'race realist' memes that it was unusable, followed swiftly by the history board’s fall to Wehrmacht and Prussian fanboy-ism, with encroachments on other boards that could yield future recruits, like video games or weapons and tactics hobbyists. The literature section was far too insular and self-important to succumb to any outside influence, and remained its own special flavor of toxic in a forgotten corner.

I had an advantage here, a prior awareness of how Stormfront in particular ticked when their minions began filtering onto spaces I frequented. Stewart, feeding his egotistical self-image as the ultimate American hero, considered organized White Supremacy to be a personal enemy and, therefore, fantasized an image of himself as a deadly paramilitary threat that had skinheads fearfully monitoring the Oathkeepers blog. Stewart monitored Stormfront obsessively at times, scouring it for Intel on what 'his enemies' were doing and any mention on their forums of Oathkeepers.

He found posts discussing whether Oathkeepers could be converted, whether Stewart was Racially Aware (a smug self-identifier for being bigoted), emotional personal essays about what their sacred Oath to the US Constitution meant to them by accounts with Hitler quotes in their account signature (these, at the time, seemed to genuinely deeply sadden him). In particular, he focused discussions by local racists in our area reporting that Oathkeepers was a “major force” in the Flathead and Tobacco valleys with a mix of pride and paranoia. These had Stewart seething, enraged when a shiny Humvee loaded with muscular young men with shaved heads in surplus military fatigues would pull into the DMV parking lot ahead of us. Whenever he saw local Stormfront users mention he Oathkeepers, he would start ordering pickup trucks parked to block access to our driveway at night like he always did when in the midst of a persecution fantasy.

This was a product of its time in many ways, much like OK's infamous 10 Standing Orders We Will Not Obey (backed by a thinly veiled threat of violent opposition) covering pretty much every element of the J6 Coup plan that OK would come to support as a paramilitary wing. Stewart maintained pride in his Hispanic identity, loudly proclaiming his 1/4th Mexican blood whenever the question of Oathkeepers as a racist organization was raised or Christian Identity types attempted to make an inroad. White Supremacy had not yet gone wide spectrum enough to welcome in white-passing Hispanics, as it had expanded to embrace Celts and Italians in the past, and Stewart's enmity always felt personal. Underneath the colorblind patriotism and half-formed plans to reach out to black and leftist gun rights groups for joint operations, Stewart kept his venom because he believed he would be considered 'colored' in the event of a race war and had no intention of being caught unprepared.

Behind all this, Stewart remained eminently practical. In public he cultivated his relationship with 3% founder Mike Venderboegh, a complicated man who’d started as a Maoist activist and become a simultaneously anti-immigrant and vehemently anti-racist right wing organizer on a perpetual crusade to cleanse the Militia Movement of White Supremacist infiltrators. At the same time, Stewart also quietly kept ties with figures heavily linked to white nationalist Christian Identity groups, like secret supervillain Matt Shea, so that his options would remain open.

I would not become aware of this complex political game until much later, all that I absorbed, from Mike's tales of confronting Aryan Nationsleaders, and Stewart's obsessive browsing, was an inkling of how the enemy operated and a general paranoia of sinister conspiracies that aimed to deceive and manipulate the common man. Armed with this training, I clocked the manipulation attempt and its authors instantly.

The racism of course fit right in, 4chan board culture prided itself on being utterly insensitive to social norms as a rejection of the society that rejected them. Slurs of all kinds were adopted as everyday terms of endearment, added on to nearly every common word and turning hate speech into slang that nearly lost their original meaning through dilution. This had an odd effect, on a superficial level defanging slurs by effectively using them as everything from verbs to punctuation, while on a deeper level creating noise that concealed the gradual increase in actual White Supremacist propaganda.

The uptick in Neo-Nazi memes and propaganda thinly concealed as irony had not gone unnoticed. There had long been speculation by some users that Stormfront 'shills,' a term for operatives similar to China's 50 Cent Party who attempt to control narratives with mass numbers of opinion posts, were infiltrating and slowly ruining their exclusive nerd haven with their irrelevant racial politics. More than a reaction against the hateful ideology and nihilism of the interlopers, it was an instinctive posturing against any outside influence that tried to alter 'their' board culture for its own ends.

This latest attack had evolved to circumvent that, both on such a large scale that doubting voices were drowned, and by framing the 'black' strawmen as the outside force and the White Supremacist shills as native defenders. The natural defensive response had been hoodwinked, the posters on niche porn and obscure hobby boards closing ranks with the infiltrators against the scourge of those same infiltrators behind spoofed IP addresses.

My rapid-fire rants and desperate attempts to counter with my own 'Red Pill,' the revelation that this entire attack had been staged to align the board cultures with White Supremacy, were buried and ignored. The culture of overt 'ironic' racism had prepared the ground, lowering any barrier tol acceptance of outright Neo-Nazi messaging. I wondered suddenly if that had not been by design, if the Nazis had been here and making an organized effort for years to 'shape the Battlespace' by gradually normalizing the hate speech in their propaganda. It wouldn't have been a difficult task, only requiring patience.

So, I saw my internet shelter slip further into the grip of the right wing fringe; the takeover was not complete, many special interest boards were too niche and isolated to effectively seize, but a constant stream of disaffected young men with interests in guns, politics, history, or science would be drawn into their jaws and be channeled into more extreme messageboards.

I thought a long time on why it had been so successful, why the poorly written and clumsily scripted fight had been at all believable, and I started to gain an understanding of something that I'd missed before: This portrayal of scary, overpowering, sexually superior, and violently aggressive black men worked like a charm because it was already how mass media portrayed black Americans. If there had not been a pre-existing ocean of violent interracial porn that played to fetishized white insecurity, the material for the propaganda blitz would have been much harder to come by. As it was, casual internet users practically tripped over content that was almost tailor-made for Nazi use.

This sent me on a deep dive, pursuing a 'rabbithole' not into a new conspiracy theory or historical episode, but into racism. White Supremacists, in the Militia worldview, were the next deadliest enemy after the Globalist New World Order in the looming dark future, and yet I knew very little about their beliefs or how they appealed to new members. I learned for the first time about 'Black Hypermasculinity' and its damaging effects, and realized that as deep as my own well of self-hatred and bitter isolation was it could be a lot worse.

The script for the sockpuppet ‘anti-white’ strawmen had largely been written for the racist operatives who used them by others, collected from ever-present fetish threads on many of 4chan's boards that eroticized white male fear of losing 'their' women to racially superior males. I looked at these with new eyes, the debased worship I'd ignored and scrolled past, irritated at cuckolds cluttering up my thread catalogs when I was trying to find trainwreck footage and pirated clips from Girls Gone Wild. The users within these threads praised only the traits of aggressive, predatory hyper-sexuality, physical dominance, and 'breeding fitness' that White Supremacists pulled from for their messaging, meaning that their beliefs about black people were fundamentally the same.

On a second look, all the showing of obsessive hatred and fearful cries of white extinction carried an oddly sexual charge in their wording, the self-degrading race fetishist worship similarly carried undertones of deeply suppressed, corrosive anger. The fetishist sexual humiliation was only waiting to transform into violent rage, skinhead emotions going from eroticized jealousy to simmering fury with the closing of a private browsing tab. I read interviews with reformed White Supremacists, who talked about deep general insecurities that would drive them to obsessing over whether spouses had ever slept with a bigger or better lover and ruined relationships, and how this was fixated on black men.

The commonality with the insecurity and sexual inadequacy of most 4chan users was obvious, and easily exploited. The infiltrators had needed only to pick up the pieces that were already there in the board culture, lines that would resonate with the demographic that Steve Bannon would call ‘his’ Rootless White Males. They had only to find gatherings of marks who had masochistically obsessed over their own sexual inadequacy, and give the crowd something to hate outside themselves. The work had been done for them, all that was left was the harvest.

I read and learned, tracing the through line of how American mass media saw black men, as sex objects and threats, could be traced back all the way to Confederate civil war propaganda and Klu Klux Klan leaflets, to Reefer Madness and its dire warnings that marijuana would make white girls attracted to black boys, enforced Square Dance to fend off the evil influence of jazz, and segregationist campaigns: Commercialized, packaged, sold by Hollywood and the porn industry in their quest to exploit every flaw in the human soul. The more I read about Hypermasculinity, the more I felt for the people who were hurt the most by this cultural tide: I imagined what it would be like to be a normal black kid, maybe a social outcast trawling 4chan for a niche subculture to belong to just like I had, measured against a pop culture standard that, positive or negative, universally demanded that you be an all-dominating testosterone monster.

The seething hatred and sick abject worship alike was focused on a vision of animalistic supermen, with no room for anyone who was normal. A skinny nerd with poor social skills, a shy Anime fan, or God Forbid anyone with a normal human penis (of the kind most men have) would be so thoroughly ignored that they might as well not exist. You had to be, essentially, a shaved Minotaur or you would be nothing.

I will admit that only after this pang of empathy for the nerdy black kids in similar life circumstances to mine, who would be hurt so much worse by this attack and its underpinnings than the recruiting targets were, utterly rejected by the home of all terminally online rejects, that I thought about how women were accounted for in all of this. The answer was 'barely’;' white women were essentially used as props in rage-baiting fantasy meant to channel despair and isolation into violence and revenge, they were placid creatures who existed to perpetuate whatever brand of male was most violent and dominant and really only referenced as sex objects and wombs to be preserved from thieves. You didn't ask the livestock what they thought of cattle rustlers, and their opinions certainly didn't matter to the rancher. Black women were totally absent, people whose existence you could logically infer from the ongoing production of black men from somewhere but otherwise overlooked.

Somewhere in this, a clever soul infiltrated the Stormfront private chatrooms and procured screenshots where their operation to seize control of 4chan was openly discussed. (The screenshots were lost when the 4chan drama repository Encyclopedia Dramatica went down, buried in an archive or gone forever) I was ecstatic at finally having the smoking gun, but the response from most users was apathetic and disinterested.

4chan took the Red Pill, swallowing the worldview of Great replacement racists and accepting the move from ‘ironically’ blaming the Jews for every worldwide social ill to just flat out believing it.

So did I, deciding that if I wanted to actually see through the grand illusion I would need to kill my ignorance. Only foreknowledge of the enemy had saved me, and I needed more of it.

I kept reading, frightened by the calculated efficiency of the entire deception. I wanted to understand this ugly cultural prejudice that Stormfront had used as a handy lever to move online discourse to their advantage. I learned about redlining, the true ugly statistics behind prison populations, the Tuskagee experiments, and a host of large and small injustices. I learned the underlying facts that explained this feeling I got from the easily steered discourse of the 'Chans, the sense of society-wide baked-in prejudice and unfairness that made such a neat magician's trick work. I learned about institutional racism, internalized racism, systemic bias, and saw a piece of the lie behind the myth of the American Meritocracy. When Vanderboegh talked about armed protests during the Civil Rights movement, I listened harder and researched more. Slowly, over years, racism would be the point where I would start to break away from 'my side.' The increasing overt racism in Trump forums, the misinformed and willfully ignorant scoffing at 'white privilege' by my redneck Facebook list, the arguments with my coworkers on brushfire engines about whether Black Lives Matter was a terrorist organization or had legitimate grievances.

Seeing how easily race and inadequacy was used as a lever, I finally understood what it meant to be manipulated by fear and anger instead of smugly assuming that my conspiracy theorist training made me immune to all sinister influence. Stormfront had seen clearly that absolutely no one on 4chan was getting laid, and used a scapegoat narrative that mass media had built for them. I began to go from believing in the militia movement as an anti-racist force because it sounded good, to fully understanding what standing against racism would mean. It wasn’t just the men in shaved heads huddled in their mountain compounds, it was the systems that made their arguments for them for dollars and to support the status quo. Small breaks lead to larger fractures, and my time with the Militia Movement finally terminated in the wake of the BLM protests.

I can say that I'm no longer ashamed of anything, except for staying silent too long.

I was hit upside the head by what would later be called the Alt-Right Pipeline in a particular time and place in my life. I was already in a radical fringe movement and I was sick of it, and so radical fringe thought had little appeal in itself. I subscribed to an ideology that claimed vehemently to be more anti-racist than the ACLU, and so rejected it on sight. My upbringing was firmly right wing, so going right wing as a teen rebellion had no draw. I had heard Stewart rant and rave dozens of times about Stormfront users slipping into Oathkeepers, and so I was on the lookout for the patterns. My faith in conspiracy demanded belief in sinister manipulation by unseen puppet-masters behind pop culture, and so I was primed to spot the genuine article. I realized that if I had been hit by this tactic without these beliefs to ground me, I might have been vulnerable. The 4chan crowd, even the edgy parts, had been my people until they weren't. I came to an early understanding that I was not special and could have been tricked, a seed of doubt that would lay dormant until 2017 or so. To avoid being hoodwinked in the future, I armed myself with knowledge.

Tactics like these are still in use. The new wave of young White-Wing extremsists are hip to internet culture, often on the bleeding edge of new trends in the most chaotic online spaces and quick to capitalize on them. Their groups are more connected, more technological, and better schooled in mass manipulation all the time. If you have a son, a nephew, a cousin, who prefers to withdraw into online video games or manga forums, he's probably seen it and you have no idea. Can you imagine, as a young teen or pre-teen, going to your parents unprompted and saying that you were on a website you should not have been on and saw deeply racist porn that upset you? I think very few people can, especially if you don't have the tools to understand what you're looking at: Not just a crass joke, but a sophisticated attack. The Pipeline is ever growing and ever changing, adaptable and vicious, and the only way for today's youth to be forearmed is to be forewarned.

The kids today need to know that they're under attack by bitter, hateful sociopaths who cannot handle reality in more complexity than black and white. They need to know that they're not inferior and inadequate unless they join a cult of machismo and strength, they need to know that they don't have to meet the stereotypes of mass media and porn to be valid, that they're more than incubators feeding soldiers to one side or another in a Clash of Civilizations. They need to know who the real enemy is, and learn to see his tricks. It's going to mean hard, difficult, deeply uncomfortable conversations, and it's going to mean confronting a lot of ugliness.

But we can do hard things.