Two different worlds have occupied my thoughts recently. One is a world in which amoral, degenerate elites treat those under their vassalage as mere objects to be tortured and exploited. The other is the latest Game of Thrones spin-off.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is currently receiving rave reviews from both mainstream and movie-critic YouTube channels. Set 80 years before the main Game of Thrones saga and based on the book The Hedge Knight, the new series is being lauded as post-woke and a return to traditional heroic archetypes and morality.
The story is centred on a big strapping lad who has a heart of gold and fancies himself as an honourable knight. Duncan the Tall (Dunc) is the antithesis of what we’ve come to expect from Westeros and its cynical view of power and human nature.
We’ve been here before, of course. This is essentially the Ned Stark arc.
Seven Kingdoms is far more concerned with life from the perspective of the smallfolk commoners than previous sagas, and Dunc strives to be their idealistic champion. The plot gets rolling properly when a psycho Targaryen prince breaks the fingers of a girl enacting a story on stage in which a dragon (symbol of House Targaryen) is slain. Dunc, disregarding the hierarchy of Westeros entirely, gives the prince a damn good hiding.
Thus, Dunc is upholding the values of the knight by protecting the innocent, and those values are now at odds with the powerful people who rule, and he now faces being executed for it. Luckily for Dunc, his companion is a young Targaryen boy called Aegon (Egg) who can speak up on his behalf.
The stories, then, are a newer incarnation of the good man in a bad world trope with his sidekick, similar in theme to Don Quixote or Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. A somewhat grimmer version is Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.
As of writing, the show is not finished, though it does appear to be gaining in popularity by the week as people realise it isn’t just more misery and cynicism wearing woke lipstick.
Yet, it is interesting to juxtapose the popularity of The Knight of the Seven Kingdoms with real-world political and cultural trends at the beginning of 2026. The show everyone is talking about is philosophically rooted in the heroism of a good man defending the innocent at great risk, while in the real world, our world, we are deluged daily by the latest horrors and sordid details of the Epstein files. Every day is a new revelation of the degree to which our elites despise us, more often than not, a tribal, ritualistic contempt.
When the original Thrones saga aired in the 2010s, people had the luxury of enjoying the spectacle of schemers and cynical players interested only in personal gain. There’s a ruthlessness that can be admired in an abstract sense. We could place ourselves in the role of this or that ruler and mull over the dastardly deeds we could justify, and if that resulted in a few hundred smallfolk being raped and butchered, well, they just have to suffer as they must.
In 2026, however, it’s pretty obvious that we are the smallfolk, and it is demanded of us that we suffer at their pleasure, and for their pleasure, and they’ll video it, and gloat about it in poorly written emails.
Moreover, our tormentors don’t have aura, or charisma, aren’t sharp intellects, and don’t deserve to rule or hold any power at all.
We do not get Tywin Lannister; we get a giggling, lying, moronic sleazeball like Howard Lutnick. We get Peter Mandelson in his crusty undies and Bill Gates’ warty penis. We get a political class that tries to woo us over with promises to put a penny extra in our pockets, while the masses speculate over whether the rumours about eating babies are true. We get pledges to fix the potholes in the roads, while the Palantir surveillance grid they used on the Palestinians is rolled out at the behest of those vacationing on Epstein’s island.
Ours is a society so corrupt that benign words such as pizza, hotdog or jerky come wrapped in an ominous cloud of foreboding and dread.
We have arrived at the meat and pulp-stained gates of suffering as we must.
Small wonder, then, that the cultural psyche has shifted from revelling in cynicism and amorality towards crying out for simple, good old-fashioned moral groundedness. We ask ourselves who the “good ones” are, and more often than not these days, it creates strange bedfellows that transcend traditional political camps that now seem increasingly redundant. Sincerity and authenticity are becoming lucrative forms of social capital because, in an age of unbridled corruption and cynicism, ideology has become the carrot dangled before the eyes of the easily duped.
People will downplay or minimise the grotesqueries of the elite class in the vainglorious hope that in doing so they can eke out a few concessions from them. If you turn a blind eye to your rulers calling you goyim cattle, you could possibly be rewarded by more illegals being deported.
Park your purity spiral and your morals; this isn’t how the game is played.
Yet, despite it all, it feels as if we live in a time when the system has never been more exposed and vulnerable. It turns out that truth actually is a powerful weapon, more powerful than ideology.
In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Dunc is told that he will face a “Trial of Seven” which amounts to a duel between himself and House Targaryen. Essentially, this means that Dunc has to assemble a ramshackle coalition willing to fight the powerful and highly trained warriors of the ruling class, and unsurprisingly, few wish to do it despite being knights with oaths. Fight for truth, against the odds, or kneel before cruel and corrupt power.
Dunc, in his innocence, expects the other knights to rally to his side, and when they refuse, he asks if there is a single true knight among them. There they sit, in their expensive garments, resplendent in their pomp and ceremony, yet they are revealed as frauds and cowards by the man with integrity.
I am of the opinion that there is a synchronicity between where the political discourse is heading, and the popularity of this most recent sojourn in Westeros.
What drives a man such as Thomas Massie onwards to uncover the horrors of Epstein Island, and why hasn’t he succumbed to Zionist money? Why does Rupert Lowe choose to wade through the filth and sadism of Britain’s so-called “Grooming Gangs” and the mass rape of English girls by mainly Pakistani men, when he could retire to his farm?
Perhaps it is related to why I trust leftists such as Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian more than Nigel Farage these days. Fundamentally, we’re all just bored with the bullshit and want truth, even if spoken by people with whom we disagree on other issues, such as demographics or economics.
The currency of the future is honesty and integrity, not spin and narrative.
Contemplating the nature of the Epstein scandal recently, I noticed that, beyond the Jewishness of it all, there was also the total dominance of Baby Boomers. Elon Musk, despite his best efforts, was shunned by the clique, and he’s Generation X. Yet, is it feasible that Millennials would engage in these acts? Somehow, I do not think they’ll be inclined to as previous generations have.
In the often derided Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, the Millennials are allotted the “hero” archetype. They are the generation that will restore trust in institutions. Personally, I’ve often regarded Millennials as a humourless, overly serious and po-faced generation. Yet, perhaps the shift toward sincerity that we may be witnessing is a symptom of them settling into institutional positions as the Boomers finally wither and fade.
As it stands now, we witness only a few hardy souls demanding truth and exposing untruth and venality.
Spenglerian Perspective recently touched on this theme, concluding somberly:
They tripped up Musk while keeping Thiel; they will do the same to Reform as they did to Trump 1.0. Fighting against this purely with an ideological narrative of our own is futile because 1., the age we are entering into is a post-narrative age, and 2., when the establishment is exposed, it only leaves the people to create a million conspiracy narratives of their own which all point to a gnostic second-religiousness that tells us “It’s all too futile to stop them”. This leaves future history back in the hands of elite factions, which steadily consolidate in individual men who are powerful enough to dismantle the system and “restore the republic” through empowering themselves and their families alone, regardless as to how many of us it will hurt. In that grain of knowledge is the path forward.
The prospect of elites of the calibre we have now in the West ruling over us as Caesars, shuffling us into a Palantir digital panopticon forever, is too terrible to contemplate. Yet it is happening while they’re being delegitimised and exposed as never before, and one can’t escape the feeling that it is a race against time.
Truth alone is a mighty weapon; truth with power to back it up is even better.
We will always be ruled by power, but is it really too much to ask that the power that rules us isn’t the scum of the earth?
Alexander Macris (who writes "Contemplations from the Tree of Woe" here on Substack) is a game designer. He wrote and published a comic to help market one of his games, making the deliberate choice to play it straight and turn aside from the Alan Moore school of comics. His heroes are sincere, genuine and wholesome. The villains are not misunderstood or damaged, but wholly evil.
He polled his readership on their favourite characters, fully expecting the rather colourful villains to top the list. Surprisingly, the winner by a large margin was the lead hero, a Superman character who has a family and faith. Macris concludes that the cultural zeitgeist has shifted. People have not seen a genuine, archetypal hero for decades and when presented with it they drink it up like a man stumbling into an oasis in the desert.
I think the Achilles' heel of the elites is demographics. The 3rd world migrants will never kowtow to the Western elites, no matter how many crumbs and pennies are thrown their way. Third world migrants are, by their very nature, a pack of ingrates and, for the most part, lost to them. Where will the depraved elites find allies now? Tucker Carlson is ripping them apart from the right, and a host of leftists are tearing at them from the left.
We have entered a new era.
And it doesn't necessarily end with the triumph of good over evil.
WW3 is on the horizon, and I see the country boys (like me) are disillusioned and angry. We are the men who not only fight the wars, but the very ones needed to win them. And we are not stupid. Not even the draft, conscription, can bring us out now.
I would rather enter a new dark age than submit to these animalistic sociopaths living stolen lives. I'd rather die and take my piece of the taxbase and competency with me.