Our Neon Gods

we built the platforms from which we fall

Photo by Ali Mammadli on Unsplash

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This essay discusses many disturbing topics—too many to make an exhaustive list. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

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EDIT: if you pray, pray that these people never make it onto the Joe Rogan show. If they do, that’s it. Game over.

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“And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made.”¹

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We worship what we build, even when it blinds us to what’s coming.

Everything in life is a trade-off. Yes, everything.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder of false positives. My brain is wired to spot threats where none exist—mistaking shadows for predators, flooding me with adrenaline and cortisol, bracing me for a fight when there’s no danger.

Granted. Owned. Acknowledged.

But also true: there’s a trade-off. I can sometimes see real threats that others miss, with startling clarity. Two examples will do.

Twice, I’ve known that female friends were dating men — with none of the obvious red flags — who would eventually beat them senseless.

And the very first time I saw a photo of Subway Jared, I knew what he was.

I can’t explain why. I wish I could. I’d give almost anything to find the words, but I simply don’t have them. This lack haunts me like a fevered dream, serving, at times, as a kind of ongoing self-torture.

What else am I missing, what else is there that I really should be able to grasp, even just a little?

If some god existed who offered me a deal, I’d probably trade a kidney — even with the condition that I could never explain it or write about it — just to understand it for myself.

This essay is about something I’m afraid of, and why.

This time, I have the words.

Maybe it’s another false alarm. Another glitch in the system.

But I don’t think so.

I fear that within two years, pedophilia will be normalized on a scale rivaling the recent surge of Holocaust denial and antisemitism—or worse. By the 2028 election cycle, it could hold the same cultural foothold antisemitism now has on platforms like Twitter.

Right now, there’s a small subset of people who are viciously, openly, explicitly — no innuendo needed — antisemitic. They even explain, without euphemism, how they are successfully working their plan: to go on Joe Rogan and normalize their views (links: here, here, here, and here).

“J-pilling” Joe Rogan is a takeoff on the Matrix plotline of taking the red pill to see reality. J-pilling means Jew-pilling — waking him up to their claimed “truth” that Jews are the source of our problems.

Yes, they are so brazen — so confident that their position is acceptable — that at this point they are openly boasting of how they played Joe Rogan.

There’s a small counter-force that fights back, mostly Jews and evangelical Christians who take biblical commands to love and support the Jewish people seriously. (But not only them.)

And then there’s the rest of us: watching, appalled, but distracted — with jobs, families, inboxes full of unread emails — making us all guilty, as Voltaire said, of all the good we failed to do.

This happened at an astonishing velocity. It started on October 8, 2023, the day the first protests happened, before Israel was done finding corpses and well before military responses. It has only picked up speed since.

I think we are headed for an analogous situation with regard to pedophilia — a flashpoint event that will shift the Overton Window permanently, changing everything with dizzying rapidity.

How will this happen? And why?

What follows are my predictions. I’ll lay out my reasoning in full, with the sincere hope that some of my paid subscribers will convince me, in the comments, that I’m wrong. That my fear is unjustified, a product of a diagnosed mental illness and nothing more.

Something You Probably Believe Is False

Let’s start here: you probably believe the taboo against pedophilia is both deeply rooted and rock-solid.

You are wrong.

The taboo is disturbingly new, alarmingly weak, and quite vulnerable to collapse.

The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in the UK only disbanded about forty years ago, and some of its members from that era are still participants in UK public life today. NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association — which is exactly what it sounds like — only disbanded in 2006.

Think about that. We trust a Western taboo that arguably didn’t fully solidify until less than twenty years ago.

Let me repeat: NAMBLA persisted well into the second George W. Bush administration.

So when I say that I fear the taboo against pedophilia will be weakened or removed entirely, I’m not expressing fear that an ancient, deeply entrenched taboo — like the one against cannibalism — will vanish.

I’m expressing fear that a taboo newer than the one against antisemitism — which arguably no longer exists in any meaningful sense — will be next to fall.

As to how strong it is, well, you tell me.

People, including parents who should know better, now routinely use the euphemism “MAP,” swapping “minor attracted person” in place of the accurate term: pedophile.

When Netflix put out a film called “Cuties,” which featured prepubescent kids doing indisputably sexualized dance performances, it was controversial.

Controversial. Meaning opinions were divided.

As in: otherwise sane people were fine with it.

As in: Netflix still exists — and suffered no real consequences for perpetrating a moral atrocity.

A few years after that, the designer brand Balenciaga put out an advertising campaign that featured young children in bondage gear, with several so-called “Easter eggs” in the photos, including a diploma with the name of a convicted sex offender.

Pictures like this one, of a child putting their hand in an adult’s underwear to pay for having watched a sexualized performance, still appear on Facebook and other places, without fear that custody will be yanked:

Child drag stars are still a thing — and to my knowledge, no one’s gone to prison. No one’s even had their child removed to a therapeutic foster home.

And this photo appeared, uncensored, in a mainstream publication and nobody went to jail:

I think the West has become a culture that is extremely skilled at sticking its collective head in the sand, and that if our goal was to normalize pedophilia as fast as possible, it would be very difficult to differentiate that world from the world in which we live.

These facts alone show the taboo is both new and weak — which means we are inherently at risk of watching it collapse.

It is neither old enough nor strong enough to hold against sufficient pressure.

Weakened vs Removed

Some of you think I’m saying that I’m afraid of a world where pedophilia is removed as a taboo entirely — where people “come out” as pedophiles and no one cares.

And yes, I am afraid of that. But I’m much more afraid of something else.

I’m afraid of what happens when the taboo is not removed but weakened.

And this is harder to explain. So let me give you a personal analogy — not because the situations are morally equivalent, but because the social mechanics are quite similar.

When I was living in the South, it wasn’t uncommon for lesbians to hit on me. Sometimes directly, sometimes with that specific kind of warm, coy flirtation. I don’t wear makeup, I like coding and sci-fi and math, I used to take martial arts, I walk through the world like someone who’s not trying to be looked at. Consequently, I’ve been coded as lesbian for most of my adult life.

Back then, it was fine to play dumb. Pretend I didn’t notice.

No hard feelings, no awkwardness.

Everyone saved face.

Then I moved well above the Mason-Dixon, and the rules changed. Here, that sort of response is considered rude.

It happens maybe twice a year now — and when it does, I feel obligated to make eye contact, smile warmly, and say, “I’m really flattered, but I’m just a butch straight girl. Sorry.”

It’s not a big deal. I’m an adult. And yes — of course — it was actual oppression for a group of adults to be denied the right to form legal contracts with other adults. It was wrong. Marriage equality is right, a move towards greater freedom and the right kind of equality — of opportunity.

But I don’t think this social shift increased the number of people who are actually gay or lesbian in any meaningful way.

Maybe a few bisexual people explored a side of themselves that they otherwise might not have.

Maybe.

But if we had a way to know for sure, I suspect we’d find the change was mostly cosmetic — a difference in comfort, not in orientation.

Here’s what I fear to say aloud: weakening the pedophilia taboo won’t be cosmetic.

It will be formative.

It will create more pedophiles.

I think that within a few years (at most) of the taboo weakening, children will be viewed differently by adults. And at least some of the adults who are, for whatever reason, capable of forming what they experience as erotic attachments to children…will do so.

I think children, most of whom already have sexual vocabularies they shouldn’t — thanks to Woke schools and social media —will start having interactions with adults that hit differently. That feel…off. That leave a residue.

And instead of adults shielding children, I think children will be expected to manage the interaction.

To say something polite.

To smile.

To find their own way to signal non-interest — the way I’ve learned to gently rebuff a lesbian come-on, but without the agency, the understanding, or the language.

That’s the version I’m afraid of most.

Not some monster waving a flag and announcing his desires.

So no, I don’t think pedophiles are going to start bringing casseroles to the PTA. This isn’t that kind of slippery slope.

It won’t look like full removal of the taboo — there are still too many normal, gun-owning parents.

Although, to be fair, as recently as October 6, 2023, I would never have imagined what we see now about another recently-demolished taboo.

If you’d told me on October 6, 2023, that Joe Rogan would fall for a fairly obvious plot to “J-pill” him, or that otherwise sane people would have debates over whether Churchill was the real villain of World War 2 and Hitler was just misunderstood, well, I’d have laughed.

I — a person who understands, fully, that I have an anxiety disorder that is by definition a disorder of false positives — would have thought you in need of help for your unreasonable anxiety.

So it may be that I am not nearly afraid enough of monsters waving flags, announcing their desires, and being met with “compassion”.

But the version of taboo softening of which I am presently quite terrified is not that one.

It’s the slow, sticky erosion of the line that once protected the child from the adult — and now asks the child to protect themselves.

We already live in a world that, at every turn, sacrifices the needs of children for the comfort of adults.

We shut down their schools, their playgrounds, their entire social world — and called it compassion.

We muzzled their faces with masks, knowing it would stunt their speech and emotional growth, but telling ourselves it was “the right thing.”

We handed them smartphones full of porn, predators, and rage — because we were too weak to say no.

We turned their bodies into political battlegrounds, let activists call it progress, and congratulated ourselves for being tolerant.

We let them consent to medical procedures, including the removal of healthy organs, with consequences that they cannot comprehend.

We let them rot in front of TikTok and Netflix, getting fatter, sicker, sadder, dumber — because parenting like you mean it is hard and judgmental and nobody wants to feel judgmental anymore.

So no.

I don’t trust the collective us to do the right thing.

Fuck, I don't even trust us to notice when the line is gone.

Joe Rogan in Context

Before discussing Joe Rogan, a caveat: I’ve rewritten this section repeatedly to avoid insult. I genuinely like him and mean no disrespect. I have no animus whatsoever.

I am completely sure — having asked several people who know him personally — that Joe Rogan is a good person. He’s a good husband and father, a man who has good intentions and honorable motives. None of what I’m about to say is meant to imply otherwise.

He’s street-smart and clever, but that’s distinct from the intellect and context needed to evaluate complex ideas.

It is a simple statement of reality that people have different strengths in different arenas, and his particular strengths — which are many — are not particularly well-suited to curating what tens of millions of Americans will, through his media institution, be exposed to as reasonable takes.

What they will come to think they know, and therefore believe, about complex issues. To influence the decisions that will flow from those beliefs—beliefs that unavoidably start with his choice of guests.

Neither am I, by the way — I’m not claiming superiority here. There are many topics on which I am not the person who should decide a goddamn thing.

For just one of myriad possible examples: if I were unofficially put in charge of curating American musical exposure in a way analogous to how Rogan currently defines the Overton window on political ideas, I would panic.

There is no imaginable universe in which that responsibility should be mine. I am not who you want evaluating singers or musicians; I lack both the ear and the education.

Joe Rogan lacks the education — or the breadth of reading — needed to tell a silly, shallow idea from one that actually deserves consideration and should be presented to tens of millions of Americans as legitimate and serious.

Consider the recent brouhaha over Dave Smith’s appearances on his show, including the debate against Douglas Murray.

The idea propagated by Smith, that there’s no such thing as a just war² — that arguments can and should be made from the premise that civilian rules and state monopolies on violence still apply in wartime — is absurd. It’s the kind of idea that should earn a silent smile between adults, because it’s the philosophy of a precocious and lucky ten-year-old — one so far raised in comfort and safety.

Among all the reasons it’s stupid, one alone is enough to reject it: it’s utterly and predictably gameable. If total impunity to kidnap, rape, and kill forever is your goal, all you have to do is put your own children in harm’s way.

By the shallow logic of Smith and his fans, that’s it. That’s enough. You win!

In a world where over a billion people are adherents to Islam, which praises martyrdom as the highest good, and in which the parents of suicide bombers regularly cry tears of joy that their child has joined Allah in the afterlife, this philosophy is writing a blank check to radical Islam.

It is a greased skid. A slippery slope to everyone living under the caliphate.

It only works in a universe where all people love their children more than they hate their enemies — and among Islamists in the Middle East, that assumption is false.

There are other people who hate their enemies more than they love their children, I suppose, but only one named group comes to mind.³

If Joe Rogan had done a reasonable amount of reading — or even any serious amount of careful thinking — about just war theory, he would never have done more than laugh at Smith’s facile analogies to peacetime.

Libertarians often believe — or profess to believe — that they should be able to shoot people who come onto their private property.

By the absurd standards he is setting, anyone with access to two young children can take everything from Dave Smith or one of his acolytes.

Simply strap on two baby carriers — one each on your chest and back — and move quickly. Smith will not defend himself in any way, because those children are innocent.

Note to any parents of twins who may want his stuff: go get it. Just bring your kids!

What Will Probably Happen

Here’s the version I think is most likely.

At some point — maybe in the next six months, maybe in the next two years — a guest will come on The Joe Rogan Experience who is charming, articulate, and seemingly reasonable. They won’t introduce themselves as “pro-pedophile,” obviously. That’s not how it works.

They’ll be there to talk about something adjacent — criminal justice reform, censorship, trauma, civil liberties, even neuroscience. And sometime during the three-hour sprawl of the conversation, the topic will shift. Just a little. Just enough.

And this person will say something like, “Well, you know, sexual orientation is biologically determined… right? That’s settled science.”

Or: “We have to remember that not all MAPs — that’s ‘minor-attracted persons’ — are offenders.”

Or: “There’s a huge difference between attraction and action. And if we want to keep kids safe, we need to give people safe ways to talk about what they’re feeling. It can’t be dangerous to admit that you’re attracted to children.”

Or: “Actually, there’s very little evidence that childhood sexual experiences are always harmful. Some people even say they weren’t traumatized at all, or that they benefited.”

And Rogan, as happened with Dave Smith, won’t recognize a worthless, discredited idea for what it is. As happened with those now boasting openly of having played him to get their “J-pilling” on his show, he’ll get played again.

He’ll feel the thrill of surprise, mistaking it for something brave, countercultural, suppressed by the mainstream.

Then he’ll say, “Whooooa.”

He won’t call it out. Not because he agrees, but because that’s not his instinct.

Confrontation of that sort is just not what he’s built for. He’s built for longform curiosity, not rapid evaluation and moral triage.

Then that clip — that single moment — will go viral.

And the person who said it will be interviewed elsewhere.

And the response in the mainstream media, which responds to Rogan with all the weight of an institution — because he is one — will calibrate their responses to piss off the right as much as possible, because that’s what they do.

And within days, there will be TikToks and YouTube shorts and Twitter threads defending what was said, twisting it into something defensible, even noble.

Within weeks, there will be thinkpieces.

Within months, there will be books.

And just like that — without ever saying the word “yes” — the culture will stop saying “no,” which will inevitably mean the next logical step: legal protection against discrimination for what will now seem like a poor, picked-on, persecuted minority.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Joe Rogan will spot it, challenge it, bodily throw the pervert out of his studio, cut to ad break, and go on a five-minute rant about protecting kids. God, I hope so.

I would cry tears of joy — and no human on earth would be happier to publish an essay saying I was wrong, wrong, wrong than I would be on that day.

Will This Be Prevented?

I…don’t think so.

Joe Rogan is a media institution — and like any institution, he is nearly immune to outside correction. He’s too powerful, too beloved, and too rich. He owns the whole apparatus, and there’s no one with the leverage to step in and say: stop.

The only people who might be able to get through to him are his wife — or possibly a sibling, if he has one, provided they’re financially independent and their kids’ financial futures are already secure. That’s about it.

Anyone else — any friend, guest, or colleague — will always have at least one eye on the power he holds. Even if they love him. Even if they deeply want to help.

Simple reality: you don’t casually challenge someone who controls a platform that can make or break you. For anyone not already financially set for life, it would require courage so massive as to be plausibly mistaken for suicidal lunacy.

Douglas Murray, an author in his early forties, dared to push back — and is now mocked to the book-buying public for the crime of believing that firsthand war correspondent experience might be relevant in understanding war.

I wonder what message that sends to other guests who might dare to disagree with Joe Rogan about something?

Konstantin Kisin wrote what may be the single clearest and most intellectually honest account of what actually happened in the Smith–Murray debate — and what’s wrong with “Podcastistan” more broadly. It wasn’t a hit piece. It wasn’t unkind. It wasn’t even particularly sharp-edged. But it was honest.

And still, he was vilified for saying things he plainly did not say. A careful, explicit, perfectly clear explanation that he was not calling for censorship: They simply no longer understand the difference between censorship (“this must be banned”) and morality (“this is a bad thing to do”). was read as a call…for censorship.

His piece wasn’t interpreted in bad faith; that’s not what happened. The people who swarmed him really, truly believed they were defending free speech.

They reminded me of something else entirely: rabbinical logic around observing the Sabbath.

Don’t flip a light switch — because that’s kindling a fire.

Don’t operate a machine — because that’s a form of work.

Don’t ask a non-Jew to do it for you — because that’s violating the spirit of the command. Outsourcing your sin.

Layer upon layer of safety buffer.

I get it. I do. If you were banned during Twitter 1.0, or watched friends silenced and blacklisted for saying true things before they were “allowed” to be true, that experience changes you. You stop trusting good intentions.

Your totally understandable emotions override your rationality. You flinch at anything that feels like suppression — even if it’s seven degrees removed. You build in buffers. You stay far, far away from anything that might someday be interpreted as a call for censorship.

And then someone like Kisin says, “Hey, we might want to think about standards,” and it doesn’t matter how gently he says it — the wires are already sparking.

This is the environment Rogan lives in now.

And that makes him, in practice, uncorrectable. Which, given how much power he has, is a difficult and dangerous predicament for the West.

We are powerfully affected by how much a jock — a curious, well-meaning, well-intentioned jock, but still a jock — is able to get right all on his own.

I’m sure he doesn’t want to be a sitting duck for psychopaths.

I would guess that he’s asked—maybe even begged— the people he trusts to tell him if he’s fucking up.

Why would I guess that he’s done that?

Because he’s a decent guy. He knows how much influence he has. Unless he’s in total denial about the fact that his Trump and Vance interviews arguably sealed the 2024 election, he knows.

Assuming he’s not a narcissist, then he must know he needs pushback. Challenge. Hard questions.

But who the hell is going to risk pissing off Joe Rogan?

Only someone in his family, with no ambitions, no dependencies, nothing to lose.

No one else can afford to. He is simply too large to challenge safely.

So no — I don’t think this will be prevented. I think it’s already on the tracks.

In fact, I’ll go farther.

Even if Rogan retired, or vanished, or died tomorrow, the pattern would persist.

The hero worship would just transfer to whoever picked up the mic.

And the risk would remain exactly the same — for the same reasons.

The right has been culturally silenced and shamed for so long that it now clings to any voice that breaks through — not with discernment, but with desperation.

Having their views echoed by someone in the elite class feels so new, so disorienting, they lose the ability to judge. It’s like a poor man winning the Powerball who’s never had money, never learned caution, and can’t tell a good deal from a scam. He hands out trust like cash, idolizes whoever flatters him, and assumes anyone wearing a suit must know what they’re doing.

Until the right learns to wield power like adults — not clutch it like frightened children, not sanctify every charismatic man with a microphone — the danger doesn’t go away.

It just changes hands.

Until critical thinking becomes a habit, not a slogan — until the ability to challenge your allies matters as much as defeating your enemies — the line will stay undefended.

And the worst people will keep finding ways to cross it.

Conclusion

There’s a part of me that still hopes this is just another glitch in my brain.

Another false alarm. Another pattern I’ve misread because of how I’m wired.

But that part is shrinking.

Too many signs are pointing in the same direction. Too much silence. Too many taboos already shattered, too many lines already crossed, too many people already afraid to say what they know.

We are a culture that no longer knows how to protect what matters.

And often, no longer remembers what mattered in the first place. We substitute symbols for virtues, euphemisms for boundaries, performance for protection.

We tell ourselves stories about compassion, when what we’re really doing is retreating from conflict. From judgment. From reality.

We didn’t lose the line all at once. We stopped guarding it.

Then we stopped looking at it.

Then we stopped asking whether it was still there.

And now, when it starts to blur, we’ll act surprised.

We’ll say, “No one saw this coming.”

But some of us did.

I don’t want to be right about this. God, I hope I’m not. I do not want to live on a planet where this thing I’m terrified of happens — and happens as easily as following the pattern that the anti-semites laid out, explicitly mentioned out loud, literally laughing about how easy it was.

But if I am — if we really are standing at the edge of this cliff — I want a record that someone tried to say something before the fall.

If you want something actionable, something grounded in experience, not just fear, I wrote a companion piece about how to protect your kids from predators, based on the one who got to me.

That’s all I’ve got for a positive note to end on.

That, and a desperate prayer that the oncoming light isn’t a train.

But if it is, let this be a warning before we crash.

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1. The only version of this song that should exist is the cover by Disturbed, which you can listen to here.

2. John Spencer, the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, wrote a brilliant — and fairly short — refutation of Dave Smith’s “idea” here.

3. Probably I just can’t think of the others because I’m a hateful Islamophobe. Mea culpa.