by Raw Egg Nationalist
“The thrill is gone,” crooned the late great bluesman BB King.
These days, I share that sentiment, but not about some cheating no-good ex. Well, not exactly. I feel that way about X or, rather, the website formerly known as Twitter.
I suppose it was always going to be this way, given how long I’ve been on the platform. I started posting anonymously in the fall of 2019, after hanging around—“lurking” as it’s known—for some time before that, thanks mainly to a poster by the name of “Bronze Age Pervert.”
My profile was initially called “Turning Point Gobëkli Tepe”—a reference to my firm belief that the Agricultural Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race—but soon morphed into the persona I still half-occupy today, “Raw Egg Nationalist,” when I’m not writing under my own equally silly real name.
For four and a half blissful years I posted anonymously and built up a huge following and a body of work that included a raw-egg cookbook and a health manifesto, The Eggs Benedict Option, described by a senior member of the Trump administration as the “blueprint for MAHA.”
I also featured—anonymously, thanks to a stunt double—in the 2022 Tucker Carlson documentary, The End of Men, which inspired my most recent book about the political consequences of testosterone decline.
My identity was revealed in June 2024 by an activist group in the UK called Hope Not Hate, which specializes in “doxxing” people on the right, probably in collusion with Britain’s security services. Two weeks before I was doxxed, a Business Insider journalist, Katherine Long, somehow located the farm where I buy raw milk and sent the owner an email asking him to reveal my identity, because obviously he should be concerned about an anonymous right-wing influencer buying his produce. She later went on to doxx Marko Elez and “Big Balls,” two young workers at DOGE, in the Wall Street Journal before disappearing to some deep-state black site in the Guatemalan jungle.
The frisson that came with anonymity, with disguising one’s identity because certain opinions really are dangerous, disappeared overnight, although it took maybe a couple of weeks to register. The fact that I wasn’t bundled off by Britain’s social-media police doesn’t mean my opinions are any less dangerous to hold in these benighted isles, just that the authorities tend to focus on people they think are likely to go out and do something like smash the windows of a migrant hostel or block rubber dinghies from landing at Dover. People are still persecuted for social media posts here: more than in Russia, in fact.
Maybe that’s when the excitement died—when I became “legit,” as gangsters like to say. It’s never quite the same as cracking skulls and pulling heists.
But it’s not just that my situation has changed. The platform has changed considerably since Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, acquired it on October 27, 2022, for the kingly sum of $44 billion. The X rebrand took about nine months, but otherwise the changes came thick and fast.
Verification policies changed. Out went the old legacy “blue-check” for libtards in the mainstream media and in came paid subscriptions. A new payment-for-posts system, the Creator Revenue Program, was brought in, offering posters a fat slice of the advertising revenue associated with their content. Of course, like any big pot of gold on offer for jumping through a set of clearly defined hoops, the Creator Revenue Program became subject to massive scamming. Instead of doing the one thing that would actually work—banning accounts from the subcontinent and Africa from applying—X just changed the goalposts. (One of my firm beliefs now is that a geogated internet—an internet that resembles the internet of 2006, when most users were in America and Europe—is the big product to sell. You’d make billions. I know I’d pay for it.)
Musk has never been quiet about his ambition to turn X into “the everything app,” and that means making it more like TikTok and Instagram. All the incentives now line up to promote “content” that looks less like the Twitter threads and posts of old, lovingly crafted and written, and more like the drivel that’s liquefying toddlers’ brains faster than a directed-energy weapon.
Some of the biggest changes took place to the platform’s moderation and censorship system. I’ve written about these changes already for American Greatness. Rather than just outright banning people for saying verboten things about Hunter Biden’s laptop and mRNA vaccines, as used to be the policy, Elon proclaimed “freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach.” This wasn’t actually a middle finger to European governments that have spent years trying to censor their own citizens and impinge on Americans’ rights under the First Amendment. It actually turned out to be a sop. The algorithm now actively censors people from the get-go, before any do-gooder in Brussels or Berlin even has to file a report. They still do file reports, though, and X has to provide detailed compliance paperwork to the EU to show how it keeps track of “harmful” content.
In many respects, the new way is actually more insidious than the old, because you can easily end up trapped in digital limbo for reasons that are far from obvious. Although X now lets you look “under the hood” at labels attached to your account, that information doesn’t really mean much, as far as I can tell.
But still, the censored posts remain on the platform, which is a big difference from before. I guess that’s freedom of speech. I guess.
These algorithmic changes have been capped by the introduction of Musk’s signature xAI, which somehow or other ranks and sorts posts and has life-or-death power over them, over what goes viral and what doesn’t. It also decides what you should see on your timeline, but in a totally retarded way that only an experimental technology could. Milliseconds of attention can be the difference between a timeline that almost gives you what you want and one that’s completely unusable.
Just the other day, I spent perhaps one second too long laughing at a meme of Vivek Ramaswamy as Abraham Lincoln, and then for the next 24 hours that was the only thing I saw: Vivek Ramaswamy as George Washington, Vivek Ramaswamy as Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Vivek Ramaswamy as a whole multitude of film characters.
No Country for Indoor Plumbing was pretty good. But still, 24 hours of it was too much. I gave up.
Every time something goes wrong, it’s just customary to blame the algorithm now. But nobody really knows if that’s the case—and I suspect that includes the engineers at X too.
As a genre, “I quit Twitter and so should you” is a firmly liberal one. It’s mostly left-wing authors and commentators who have renounced X and written at length about it, as part of a wider exodus of left-wingers from the platform. Many of these people have migrated to Bluesky, where they’re free to fantasize about murdering prominent right-wing figures and to cannibalize one another for minor infractions of their increasingly recondite speech codes.
(I also think this, paradoxically, is another reason X isn’t what it used to be. Before, there were more clearly defined enemies, and we all knew who to attack. An external enemy inspires solidarity, every canny leader knows, which is why we’ve always been at war with East Asia. Now, however, like a body kept in a sterile environment, the immune system attacks itself for want of a genuine foe. I have no doubt the right-wing infighting we’ve seen online over the last 18 months would have been far less vicious if the demographics of X hadn’t changed so much.)
I know I’m not the only right-wing person to feel this way about the platform that helped me become the minor-minor internet celebrity I am today. I see it on the timeline, and people talk to me about it in private too. Many are frustrated; there doesn’t seem to be any decent alternative. Some talk about establishing an internet forum, maybe invite-only, where serious discussion can take place again. Nothing happens, though. They all just keep posting, including me.
And yet—there’s still something to be said for the platform. X remains, for better or for worse, the global digital public square and a bulwark against tyranny.
We get reminders of the platform’s enduring value every now and then, and last weekend was one of those occasions. In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk attempted to purge the country’s Constitutional Court while the president was on a flight to Africa, and nobody would have been any the wiser if it hadn’t been for X.
Hermann Tertsch, a Spanish member of the European Parliament, put it nicely in a Xeet.
“Without X, no one in Europe would have found out about what happened in Poland tonight,” he wrote.
“The head of government Donald Tusk carried out an attempted coup d’état, taking advantage of the state head Karol Nawrocky’s trip abroad. He stormed the Constitutional Tribunal with the police and tried to remove the president and vice president of the Constitutional Tribunal with a loyal judge without competencies.”
Tertsch is right. It’s taken days for the mainstream media to catch up with events in Poland. While they were unfolding, in real time, the newsmen and -women might as well have been under anesthetic. But thanks to X, whether you were in Warsaw or Wisconsin, you could see live video of Prime Minister Tusk in the Constitutional Court with his henchmen. You could see President Nawrocki forcing his way into the court, despite the best attempts of Poland’s own Ruth Bader Ginsburg to stop him. You could see protesters using angle grinders to cut through chains on the gates of the court. Presumably, many of those protesters wouldn’t even have been there had it not been for the coverage on X.
The coup, as far as we can tell, failed—for now.
The Democrats are gunning for Elon Musk. He’s one of the principal targets in their plan for retribution that’s been dubbed “Project 2029.” That plan will be put into action as soon as the midterms are over if the Democrats win back the House and, with it, control over the powerful committees. As I noted recently for American Greatness, Democrat lawmakers have already been sending letters to partners of the Trump administration, including Elon Musk’s companies, warning them that “oversight” is coming.
The Democrats are targeting Musk because he’s Trump’s most powerful backer, indeed the most profligate political donor in American history, but also because he controls X, and that means he still has huge power over the flow of information and public opinion.
At the very least, if things have gone badly in the midterms for the Republicans, the Democrats will spend the next two years subjecting Musk and his companies to unceasing scrutiny, backed up by the force of legal threat.
In 2029, under a President Newsom or, God forbid, a President Harris or AOC, the Democrats would obviously go much further. Antitrust proceedings could be used to pry X and other companies from Musk’s grasp—and then what?
We may already have lost a platform where dudes with silly names can talk anonymously about the Count de Gobineau’s theories on race and rare Soviet steroids extracted from Arctic crustaceans. Soon we could be in real danger of losing something far more important than that.
Photo: TOPSHOT - This video grab taken from a video posted on the Twitter account of billionaire Tesla chief Elon Musk on October 26, 2022 shows himself carrying a sink as he enters the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Elon Musk changed his Twitter profile to "Chief Twit" and posted video of himself walking into the social network's California headquarters carrying a sink, days before his contentious takeover of the company must be finalized. (Photo by various sources / AFP) (Photo by -/Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP via Getty Images)
Raw Egg Nationalist is Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale, an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated historian and anthropologist. He rose to prominence as “Raw Egg Nationalist.” He has a large social media following, is a bestselling author, has appeared on national television, and has influenced debates on health, fitness, politics, and culture. His latest book is 'The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.'
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/11/04/the-thrill-is-gone-but-x-still-remains-the-worlds-digital-public-square-and-a-bulwark-against-tyranny/
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