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Everyone has heard the adage “The Internet is not real life.” This mantra was a typical reaction to the small factional fighting of hyper-niches on the internet that impacted maybe a dozen people, but felt world-historical to its participants. For a while, the stereotype of the maladjusted hyper-online poster taking refuge in anonymity had reasonable predictive power. While a subset of successful people got their jollies off by riling up random people online, he likely didn’t have his crap together if evenings were spent making unhinged rants on Facebook. On the corollary, if one had reasonable online etiquette, he may not be successful but likely could function in society.
In the anonymous space, there’s still the go-to assumption one’s political enemy a loser in real life. If a man, he’s a dumb incel. If a woman, she’s a whore with daddy issues or a tranny. This was a tradeoff, as one could be far more abrasive and outspoken without worrying about one’s livelihood if under an anonymous mask. One didn’t have to worry about alienating real-life friends and could walk away from a digital avatar forever. This increased freedom led many in the right-wing sphere to assume as suspect anyone who was not anonymous, believing that institutional power influenced them and they withheld their genuine opinions. Hence the crude phrase “face-fag”.
Whether a public or a private persona, it was understood the digital and material spheres were different realms that waxed and waned with how much one impacted the other, and navigating these nebulous interactions broke many people. This cognitive breakdown, whether you call it a “crashout”, “trooning”, or various other amusing terms, points to someone whose ability to navigate the digital realm has deteriorated to the equivalent of screaming incoherently on a street corner. Usually this culminates in leaving the internet altogether or completely rebranding one’s identity.
Over the years, many anonymous influencers have come and gone over the years. Some leaving in spectacular fashion and some withering away. People rebrand all the time. When trying to gauge the winds of fickle social media algorithms, it’s inevitable. Progressives decide they are reasonable centrists and conservatives spend all their time attacking their own side. Then there’s the cohort that goes from a public pundit in the realm of mainstream political discourse and delving into the realm of crazyland. As a general rule, those who started out as online hard-core edgelords had more tumultuous personal lives, while those who had more mainstream views before slowly getting unhinged had relatively normal personal lives. Unfortunately, just like species that have adapted to one environment do poorly in another, the psychological pressure of a different world brings dark, bottled-up pathologies into view.
The mainstream to unhinged pipeline is an interesting point of study, as it shows the memetic power and drug-like nature of social media in utterly upending one’s mental model. While there are many examples, few reach the spectacular self-destructive lengths of former Republican congressional candidate Paul Nehlen.
Paul’s political aspirations were always a longshot, taking on the powerful incumbent and former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan in 2016. While Paul Ryan has essentially left public politics now, at the time he had the backing of all the establishment circles and presidential candidate Donald Trump. While his odds were abysmal, Nehlen’s policies proposals were grounded. He was a respected businessman and accomplished engineer, having several patents under his name. During his campaign, he worked hard to maintain an outsider persona. His press releases and appearances were professional as he hitched his wagon to the fledgling MAGA movement.
The first campaign was a flop, with Paul Ryan easily trouncing him. While Nehlen lost in the polls, he got traction among online edgelords, becoming the darling of influencers at “TheRightStuff.biz”. From there his diplomatic, if confrontational, public face fell apart as he picked fights on Twitter, especially against Jews. In one famous incident, he told media pundit Jon Podhoretz to “Eat a Bullet”.
This made him the darling of hard-right groups, though horrible optics for a political candidate. He went on hard-right podcasts, thinking he could use this energy as a political tool. Unfortunately, catering your message to 0.1 percent of the population is not a winning strategy. He was denounced by old allies, including Breitbart, as it became clear he was going off the rails.
His rhetoric went from edgy to outright genocidal, earning a ban from Twitter. He moved his posting to Gab, and soon banned there also. While one can be a free speech absolutist, basically every reasonable person understands that if you get kicked off Gab, you did something horribly wrong.
Probably the saddest part of the saga was his doxxing of Douglass Mackey. Not only did Paul ruin his livelihood, but the betrayal kickstarted New York’s lawfare against the famous Twitter poster, leading to his conviction in a kangaroo court. The lunacy continued into 2019, where he was recording an audiobook of SIEGE and maintained contact in edgy podcasts before disappearing in 2020.
One would think this wild and unhinged saga would show up in his life now, but after becoming a hated national laughingstock, he seems to have continued on to normal life. One would have thought such a monumental crash-out would affect his personal life, but he seems to have just moved back into his professional career by founding a water filtration company. Hilariously, while he was banned from every other social media site, he still has a LinkedIn profile.
Paul Nehlen is a Christian business executive and inventor. Nehlen started out on the factory floor, and through God’s grace, grit, and determination rose to lead Fortune 500 manufacturing businesses around the world. Today he designs and builds the highest rated water filtration systems on the planet. He lives in Delavan, Wisconsin.
Honestly, good for him. Getting banned and ostracized from politics was probably the best thing that happened to him. At a certain point the rhetoric he spouted wasn’t what he believed, but a performative game for his unique brand of followers. It falls from a sincere recitation of values to word games that had no correlation to anything outside a bubble of the internet. Thank goodness too, since if it was sincere, he would probably be in prison for shooting up a synagogue instead of working on water filtration systems.
By all accounts, Nehlen is a very smart guy. So what feedback loop happened in the online space for him to seemingly shred 30 IQ points and start ranting and raving like a high-school dropout who just watched “Europa: The Last Battle”? What goes through a guy’s head to throw reason to the wind and seek validation from the most noxious parts of society? At least the left-wing pundits have the excuse they’re paid well. Something was unleashed that was pre-reason, a likely unconscious impulse that, once fed, consumed all other considerations.