Activating Agent Smith: How the Slop Right Matrix Exposed Itself

They say a week is a long time in politics. In the time since my last article ten days ago, “Escaping the Slop Right Matrix”, Agent Smith has been activated and is on high alert. Battle stations! Emergency! If you’re unfamiliar with The Matrix (1999), the movie from which the red pill and blue pill analogies are taken, whenever someone looks to be at risk of exposing the Matrix, all the other people magically transform into Agent Smith in a bid to take that person down.

On the most public and visible level, Agent Smith was activated by the release of the Epstein Files. Like many, I’ve watched with a mixture of disgust and resignation to see mutuals, MAGA advocates, GOP-adjacent operatives, former friends — now compromised and beyond redemption — try to downplay their contents and minimise awareness of the incredibly obvious ethno-supremacist network they expose. It has been incredible to watch significant portions of the “online right”, once supposedly fearless in speaking truth to power, walk in lock-step with the legacy Matrix represented by the mainstream media, in working overtime to limit damage to Trump, the US swamp, and, of course, to Israel. Earlier this week, in somewhat fired up mode, I named some names. If you didn’t get the memo yet, MAGA – where MAGA is an alive authentic dissident force for any sort of genuine change – is dead. It’s an ex-parrot. It has ceased to be. “I think people are realising”, said Marjorie Taylor Greene, that MAGA “was all a lie”. Greene might have an IQ of around 90, but she can still see the obvious, so what’s the excuse of your favourite influencer still carrying the can for all of this? What’s your excuse? Don’t think you can move on next week and slide back into the polite old fictions, you can’t. People like me won’t let you.

This brings me, of course, to the much smaller and perhaps more subtle activation of Agent Smith that was generated by my last article. For clarity, let’s summarise its core argument using five bullet points, I asked an AI to do this to keep it a value-free dissemination of what I said:

• The “red pill” promise of escaping ideological illusion (as in The Matrix) has failed for many on the right; instead of reaching truth, they have entered a new trap called the “Slop Right Matrix”—a fantasy world of performative online outrage, cruelty for clicks, and tweets substituting for actual politics, effectively a “new blue pill” more delusional than the original mainstream one.

• As per Louis Althusser and Plato’s Cave, true escape from ideology is impossible—humans only swap one “goldfish bowl” (e.g., liberal capitalism) for another; the Slop Right fills the innate human “religion-shaped hole” (per David Sloan Wilson) with a deranged, imagination-driven simulation rather than reality.

• The contemporary right is degenerating into “demonic” emotionalism and performative sadism (e.g., cheering kidnapping of leaders, celebrating ICE shootings, erratic threats against allies like Canada/Denmark/Greenland), squandering a decade of built-up moral capital and confirming liberal stereotypes of the right as driven by unthinking hate.

• This behaviour—amplified by platforms like Elon Musk’s X turning into a “sewer” of extremist one-upmanship (“based Olympics”) and fantasy (“Nationalist Narnia”)—achieves no real organizing or policy wins, while creating digital evidence trails that empower crackdowns (e.g., potential X bans) and alienate European allies, threatening NATO and strengthening neoliberals.

• The right is failing a historic test: continuing down this path risks discrediting rightist ideas for a generation, making it appear unfit to govern and putting itself “to bed for a decade”; the only path forward is resisting the easy “slop” addiction to hold onto reality instead of letting the brain “turn into cheese.”

This argument built on my previous articles “The Online Right is Almost Entirely Fake” and “Tuning Out the Clown Show”. The timing of the Epstein Files drop could not have been better for its purposes, because the collective “online right” had one of its worst and most shameful weeks in its sorry existence. Not to mention the fact that the files themselves provide hard receipts for most of my central claims about the real nature of the enemy, moving beyond tired left versus right, or red versus blue pantomimes, and so on. They provided a little glimpse beyond The Matrix where figures as disparate and on different ends of the political spectrum as Steve Bannon, Peter Mandelson, Noam Chomsky and so on, freely mingled in the same social milieu, and were in direct contact with the same perverted powerbroker. All this should totally shatter the illusions sold to you by the media, and yet many on the “online right”, decided somehow to side with the media in the week when it really mattered.

Responses to my article took three forms. First, were people straightforwardly agreeing with it. Well done: you passed. Second, there was low-level name-calling. Those people have simply been blocked. Do likewise. There must be a pitiless weeding out of people who aren’t going to make it. Third, there were longer pieces whose authors decided to take the extraordinary step of actually trying to defend the slop. These pieces are a waste of time. None of them were able in the remotest sense to engage with the core argument as laid out above. I am simply not going to respond to a 10,000-word hand-wringing exercise attempting to lay out the case for why Matt Walsh is doing “good work”. You must be joking.

Picture a man with a sock on his left hand and a sock on his right hand. In an elaborate performance, he starts pretending that the right-sock hand is attacking the left-sock hand. If someone told you seriously to support the right-sock hand’s struggle against the left-sock hand, you would rightly think them insane and probably deserving mockery. When you’re asking me to take Matt Walsh seriously, you are on the level of asking me to believe in the right-sock hand. If you think Matt Walsh is anything other than a right-sock hand what are you even doing here?

Some people, laughably, said my last article would adversely affect my credibility: the exact opposite has happened. Collectively, the online right has lost credibility by repeatedly mashing cow pats into its own face, and now the mother of all cow pats: Epstein. Like I’ve said, you have a choice to make. If your choice is to take the new blue-pill, this is where many of us – and there are MANY of us – must part company. We must be unsentimental about saying “goodbye”. It’s a shame the red pill did not “take” with you, you were destined only to worship false idols.