If you’re finding you have an unsatisfied appetite for hyperlocal provocation and the voyeuristic thrill of watching a man’s life fall apart, that’s because its been radio silence from the Devil You Know, as even after being released from the Missoula County Detention Facility, Travis Mateer has yet to make contact with the new occupying force that took control of Zoomchron.com in his absence.
Our official soothsayer divines that he will prefer to shift gears and spin out whatever new narrative has planted its alien seed in his brain over at his secondary blog One3Twenty.com – which I believe was originally intended to focus on the investigation and ruminations on the death of Sean Stevenson at the hands of Johnny Lee Perry and the Missoula County Sheriff’s office. But if the notes scrawled on the walls of his jail cell in his own excrement are any indication, the complex double-satire of the “no one cares about dead niggers” narrative he’s been trying so hard to weave for the last few years turned out to be accidentally sincere and accurate.
Not only does nobody care, but I and others find attempts to make us care to be hollow and performative.
This is not satire or irony or criticism of you or me or Travis. I’m 100 percent sincere. Nobody gives a shit, and I’m fine with that, and despite what I’ll say later I’m confident Travis always knew that. People die every fucking day. Lots of them violently. The fact that black men die violently at a higher rate (and almost always at the hands of other black men) is a problem for black men to solve. Malcolm X said “The White liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the Black man“. I’ve always found the race-obsessed, white savior compulsion that has cannibalized contemporary liberalism to be a cancer, one that was probably deliberately cultivated to keep faggy college kids from getting their shit anywhere near together enough to provoke, participate in, or contribute to class warfare. I didn’t make any exception for Travis’ well-harped-on obsession with Sean Stevenson and Johnny Lee Perry.
I always found his hyperfocus on them to be an embarrassingly transparent attempt to use a fundamentally manipulative approach to get girls with blue hair and pierced septums to think he was on their side. I never got the impression he really cared about Sean Stevenson or Johnny Lee Perry, and I sure as shit didn’t care about them.
Fuck em. Plenty more bums were they came from.
So if you too have been tired of being guilt-tripped for not caring about a couple dead guys you didn’t know and couldn’t care about beyond a vague performative obligation, rest easy. Its a new fucking era on Zoomchron.com and if your morbid curiosity provokes you to trace the mental deterioration of Zoomchron’s former primary writer, you can monitor his downward spiral on its new arc over at One3Twenty.com
I expect Travis will continue to be legally unable to write about certain Missoula nonprofits as a condition of his misdemeanor probation, but as an independent citizen with absolute editorial autonomy I suffer under no such restriction. Luckily for the nonprofit in question I currently have no reason to give a shit about them, BUT THAT COULD CHANGE. If I get any pushback at all as I cocktease them with hints to their identity and their activities, I’ll start digging up and dumping all the dirt that’s fit to shit.
Fuck em. More nonprofit performative parasites where they came from.
Just to piss them off I’ll probably keep plugging Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF). My main reason for that being that I have uncovered more of his deepest, darkest secrets. They make great fodder to manipulatively tug on your heart strings to fund his crumbling existence, and revealing them to you gives me a sort of exhibitionism-adjacent rush. (Its not quite exhibitionism because I’m not showing my own dirt, and its not quite voyeurism because my thrill comes from YOU looking at it… I guess the best metaphor is that I am a sort of pimp of secrets, and in this case Travis is my ho. You’re the John)
What I’m getting at is that the reason Travis Mateer is the way he is… is because he was sexually abused by a prominent political figure. Someone you’ve known for years. Someone very… very… close to you.
Travis is super fucked up. Give him money and he’ll make sure his problems become your worst enemy’s problems.
– Freeman Tao
I think Travis feels that if he can point out the left’s hypocrisy on race, like their tendency to use “dead niggers” when it suits their political ambitions (George Floyd) and to sweep them under the rug when it might be their fault for another “dead nigger” death, he’ll have backed them into a corner where they’ll have to admit they really don’t care and perhaps have a change of heart.
The problem with expecting principled responses or admittances after a revelation of hypocrisy from people whose only ambition is power (right or left (or authoritarian or libertarian (or in a 3rd dimension of some metaphysical political reality, *wink*))) is that in the pursuit of power, the ends justify the means, always.
I think Travis understands now (or may always have) that the audience for this sort of exposition is not the individual ambitious power-seeking narcissists who are the subjects, but the subjects that ignorantly grant them power in the first place as a reward for this sort of virtue signaling. Using a “dead nigger” as a shield for crappy politics is much more politically useful and productive than convincing a future father of a “dead nigger” that maybe it’s time to be a dad instead of a baller.
But in the factional political wars, even exposing hypocrisy to the ballot casters means little. They’re on board for the party win and what are a few “dead niggers” anyway if we can WIN‽
Travis has worked very hard on this single patch of an entire patchwork quilt of political hypocrisy and law enforcement corruption in Montana. This single patch has been worked over with all sorts of artistic accoutrements from posts to poems to drawings to legos.
It’s hard to see it at this point. It’s grotesque and heavily laden. The other patches of the quilt need to be worked on and joined together.
Sounds pretty much right on to me.
I definitely agree with the assessment about audience and expectations.
It becomes more and more clear to me that your relationship with this particular vector of fringe news and thought (Zoomchron) runs deeper than an interloper executive editor might have guessed at first blush. I’m frankly as curious as I expect you are about what the future holds for this website and in what direction Travis will carry his insight and investigative skills once he’s back (either back here or one3twenty.com or both).
As I said I think your assessment about who Travis was making fun of (race baiting cucks), and what effect he expected to have on their mentality and methodology (none at all), is right on. Over time the “doesn’t anyone care about dead niggers?” narrative became, in my assessment, a sort of performance art piece… Less and less motivated by any expectation of political impact and more a platform for poetic theatrics with a much, much broader scope. In Travis’ theatrical meta-narrative, we are all the dead nigger, discovering that nobody really cares about us beyond the shallow and exploitative way in which it benefits them.
But then again I’m waxing philosophical… Gotta be careful with that state… Start talking like that and it quickly becomes more important that something sound pretty than be true.
A persona is a funny thing… Sometimes the mask wears you.
(This digression COULD be some kind of allegory for how I think Travis has approached the interface of local politics and performance art… Maybe)