Saturday Commentary and Review #145

Spain's Worst Post-Franco Era Political Crisis, Xi-Biden Summit and Expectations, US Armed Forces in Disarray, Lebanon Nearing Failed State Status, Twitter Legend Dril

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

I chose to wait an extra day before publishing this weekend’s SCR because I wanted to see if there were any new developments in Spain since yesterday. The answer? Yes.

For those unaware (western media has been somewhat muted on this bit of news), Spain is currently being rocked by protests against the PSOE (Spanish Socialists), as they have managed to cobble together a proposed governing coalition thanks to a very, very controversial deal that they have struck with two separatist parties from the region of Catalonia.

In 2017, the separatist government of Catalonia held an illegal referendum that saw a majority of the voters who turned out vote in favour of separating from Spain. Not only was the referendum illegal under Spanish laws, but the turnout for the referendum was only 43%, as the majority of Catalonia’s population ignored the illegal vote. Catalonia’s leaders declared independence (but quickly “undeclared” it too, hilariously), making their actions criminal. Hundreds of pro-independence figures were arrested, charged, and imprisoned for sedition/violating the Spanish Constitution. The architect of the illegal referendum, Carlos Puigdemont, fled to Brussels, serving as an MEP for Waterloo. He attempted to set up a “Catalonian Government-in-exile”, while there. Even though the EU came down strongly on the side of Spanish unity, Puigdemont was not extradited to Spain.

The PSOE, struggling to find enough coalition partners to form the next Spanish Government, struck a deal with the two Catalan separatist parties. The details of the deal have left much of Spain up in arms: not only would all Catalan separatists receive amnesty for their crimes, Catalonia itself would be permitted another independence referendum. Spaniards see PSOE as violating not only the rule of law, but acting unconstitutionally as well. Their deal, which they can pass thanks to the control of the Cortes (Spanish Parliament) and their tight grip on the Spanish Constitutional Court¹, would make legal what was once illegal, and open the door to Catalan secession.

The first demonstrations targeted PSOE’s headquarters in Madrid, but are now spreading across the country. Police have been heavy-handed against demonstrators, losing support of those sitting on the fence, or those who supported the demonstrators but chose to stay at home anyway. The centre-right PP and the right-wing VOX are criticizing this amnesty deal as not only unconstitutional, but as a legal coup d’etat. This is the worst political crisis in Spain’s post-Franco history.

It’s been a bit tough finding a proper English language take on this political crisis, so I am sharing this piece which is rather complex to those not too familiar with recent Spanish history and politics. It will have to do for now.

How Spain got to this point:

Although the race’s winner, PP, grew by 3 million votes and 47 seats, the alliance with the woefully underperforming Vox — which dropped to 19 MPs down from 52 — yielded four votes short of the required absolute majority (172 vs. 176), as was predictably showcased when the PP’s leader got his procedurally pointless chance at forming a cabinet in late September and failed. Sánchez’s surprisingly resilient PSOE, for its part, was stuck with one main partner that had lost out, too — the far-left — but could aspire to form another investiture coalition by reaching out to Junts pel Sí, the liberal-separatist party of Catalonia’s former President, Carles Puigdemont. He oversaw the region’s 2017 illegal independence referendum, then flew to Brussels and has since served as an MEP. It turns out the screws on Frankenstein’s brain could be tightened further. As if four years ruled by a ring of socialists, communists and separatists of various stripes hadn’t been enough, the unionist bloc’s worst fear this time was that Sánchez would wheel and deal his way to re-election through a potentially lethal blow to Spain’s territorial integrity. The price for Junts’ seven votes would be, at a minimum, horse-trading an amnesty bill to exculpate those prosecuted for their role in the 2017 coup d’état.

The centre, centre-right, and right wing argument:

Worse than a constitutional own goal, such an anti-democratic get-out-of-jail-free card would amount to a national murder-suicide. The 2017 coup was a unilateral, minority-led boondoggle price-tagged at €4 million, much of it billed to the Spanish taxpayer. It was shunned and boycotted by the region’s silent majority, which views Catalan nationalism as socially exclusionary, culturally parochial and economically suicidal — to say nothing of the 40 million non-Catalans whose sovereignty an eventual secession would effectively abolish.

The coming danger:

Sánchez now has little time to hash out the deal’s details — and there are many — before his confidence vote sometime before November 27 (the law dictates a two-month span between a failed attempt at cabinet formation and the next one; the repeat race, were Sánchez to also fail, would be held around January 14). For one thing, the left-separatists of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), whose seven votes will also be decisive and who claim to pursue a “total solution” to the conflict more radical than Puigdemont’s, are asking for three “carpets” (or tracks to the talks), of which amnesty is merely the first. Although it may not be legislated immediately — for good political reason — the second and more radioactive track is removing the roadblocks to Catalonia’s “self-determination”, which in effect would mean a repeat referendum, this time sanctioned by Madrid. This would in turn vitiate the first track by making the whole package worse than amnesty, for the word — from the Greek “amnesia” — implies a commitment not to incur the crime anew, which Puigdemont and his associates evidently lack. The last “carpet” concerns yet another round of financial pork-barreling for Spain’s second-wealthiest region under the rubric of “social welfare”, which would include further giveaways on several budgetary items (two of them, fully devolving oversight of Catalonia’s trains and condoning €15 million of Catalonia’s debt, have been already agreed).

The deal would give amnesty to those who committed the crime in 2017, and then permit them to repeat the same action again. This is where the rule of law comes into question:

Whilst a pardon exculpates the convict without erasing the charge, amnesty implies, per the UN, “the retrospective annulment of a previously determined juridical responsibility, disallowing the trial”. Spain’s transition was built on letting Francoism off, but the moment it passed, the 1978 Constitution put amnesties of any kind off the table. In his power-seeking conceptual gymnastics, Sánchez now claims an amnesty will necessarily comply with the Constitution. Yet conservative jurists claim it would violate seven of the charter’s articles, mostly dealing with the document’s primacy within the legal order, the equality of all Spaniards under the law in all parts of the territory, normative hierarchy, retroactivity of sanctions, the independence of the judiciary — and more.

Political violence has already taken place btw:

The infamy we all feared took shape on Thursday, with Madrid celebrating its patron saint and constitutionalists further aggrieved by the murder attempt on former PP MEP and Vox founder Alejo Vidal-Quadras for as-of-yet unknown motives.

Now here’s where it gets even more interesting from the perspective of the rule of law:

Spanning from 2012 to 2023, the language on amnesty proved the bomb’s detonator, for it foresees creating parliamentary committees tasked with discretionally granting amnesty to individuals deemed victims of “lawfare”. The term carries a two-fronted assault on the separation of powers that the assaulter — the governing PSOE — oversees. First, it presumes that court rulings handed down around 2017 were not statutory interpretations but politically motivated ambushes. Second, outrageous though its passing would be, an amnesty law should be applied by magistrates alone — not lawmakers, especially not if their case is on the docket. Unsurprisingly, all unions of judges and prosecutors of every stripe suspended their customary political quarrels to unanimously howl the second the deal dropped, which they view as an “infringement upon judicial independence and an assault on the separation of powers”.

Where is the EU? This is a matter of the rule of law. They keep hammering Poland and Hungary over it.

Where this is all headed:

Beyond national dismemberment and the erosion of rule of law, this unholy alliance will then doubtless turn its eyes on the monarchy that just pre-anointed its successor. At this pace, the slippery slope could soon culminate in a Bolivarian banana republic in a shrinking portion of Iberia. If they don’t oppose it, Spaniards will wake into a country changed beyond recognition come December. It will no longer be Spain.

The PSOE plays to win, while the PP (centre-right) has relied on appeals to principle. This is a running theme in western liberal democracies.

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The USA has its hands full as two of its client states are now at war. The Americans want to hand off responsibility for Ukraine to the EU and shift their attention to containing China, but Hamas decided to spoil that plan by launching its raid on Israel a little over a month ago.

There is no real danger of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan at present, but if they were to launch such an attack, it would most likely be one too many wars for the USA to handle simultaneously, as its attention, resources, and capabilities would be stretched too thin, despite some claiming that it could manage all three conflicts.

On Wednesday, China’s Xi will be meeting with President Biden in San Francisco. The city has managed to clear out all the homeless people/drug addicts from its streets in a little under 48 hours, to clean the city up for Xi’s arrival. Xi will arrive in a state of mind where his counterpart is actively trying to contain him in his own neighbourhood via military and economic means. What will come out of this meeting can only be speculated on, so I will turn to the somewhat controversial David Goldman (aka Spengler) to give us his version of what the summit will seek to address:

First, the collapse of Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces and its commander’s admission that the war is a “stalemate” is a setback for America’s strategic position and a gain for China, which has doubled its exports to Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

Second, the US tech war on China has flopped, as Chinese AI firms buy fast Huawei processers in place of chips from Nvidia and other US producers.

Third, the Gaza war provoked by Hamas on October 7 gives China a free option to act as the de facto leader of the Global South in opposition to Israel, an American ally. China now exports more to the Muslim world than it does to the United States.

And fourth, the US military wants to avoid confrontation with China in the Northwest Pacific region as well as its home waters in the South China Sea, where the PLA’s thousands of surface-to-ship missiles and nearly 1,000 fourth- and fifth-generation warplanes give China an overwhelming home-theater advantage in firepower.

Growing global instability could lead to a clash:

A prominent advisor to China’s Communist Party, Renmin University Professor Jin Canrong, told “The Observer” on November 9, “The world today has entered an era of great struggle: the old order dominated by the West. It is disintegrating, but the new order has not yet been established.” Jin compared the world situation to China’s bloody Warring States period (475 BCE to 221 BCE). 

A major concern on the American side is the expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal to a projected 1,000 warheads by 2030, from just 220 in 2020. A November 10 commentary in Foreign Affairs warns, “Chinese analysts are worried that the United States has lowered its threshold for nuclear use – including allowing for limited first use in a Taiwan conflict – and that the US military is acquiring new capabilities that could be used to destroy or significantly degrade China’s nuclear forces.”

Goldman suggests that the US-launched “Chip War” against China is failing:

America’s restrictions on high-end chip exports to China failed to prevent Huawei Technologies from offering a new smartphone as well as Artificial Intelligence processors with performance comparable to or close to what’s achieved by the products of Nvidia and other US designers. On November 7, Reuters reported that the Chinese Internet giant Baidu had ordered 1,600 of Huawei’s 910B Ascend AI chips, reportedly on par with the Nvidia A100 Graphics Processing Unit, the most popular AI processor.

Nvidia, meanwhile, has offered a new set of chips for the Chinese market scaled down to conform to new Commerce Department restrictions announced last month. As Semianalysis, a consulting firm, reported on November 9, “To our surprise Nvidia still found a way to ship high-performance GPUs into China with their upcoming H20, L20, and L2 GPUs. Nvidia already has product samples for these GPUs and they will go into mass production within the next month, yet again showing their supply chain mastery.”

“Leading the Global South”:

With its leading economic presence in the Muslim world, China sees the Gaza war as a rallying point for sentiment against the United States and its allies. “The voice of the Global South has become louder and louder, the Arab world in the Middle East is moving toward reconciliation, and the voice of the Third World continues to grow on the international stage,” wrote Jin Canrong in the cited ”Observer” piece on November 9. “China can be seen in these landmark events, and these countries have increasingly high expectations and calls for China.”

I have my doubts as to how willing China is in leading a “Global South” outside of its entry into BRICS, but this is for another time.

On America:

China’s perception of American intentions has changed in the meantime. In his November 9 “Observer” interview, Jin Canrong added,

Although the world order is chaotic everywhere, the most dangerous element by far is the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Ukraine is an agent and puppet of the United States. American politicians and media have publicly called the Russia-Ukraine conflict a “Proxy War.” There are 193 United Nations member states and more than 200 countries and regions on the planet, but the ones that truly have strategic independence and the ability to destroy each other are China, the United States, and Russia, two of which are in a state of military confrontation.

China is indeed becoming more active in the Global South:

Some observers are pinning hopes on some kind of ‘detente’ being struck between Xi and Biden (or at least a first step towards it), but the Chinese know full well that they are the main target of US foreign policy planners. I don’t expect much from this summit other than a symbolic deal with little actual meat on its bones.

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One of the many data points that people who believe that America is in decline will draw attention to is the difficulty that the US Armed Forces are experiencing with respect to recruitment. This is a very fair and solid point to make, because it is easy to measure. It clearly indicates a decrease in willingness to serve the country while being put in harm’s way. There is no way to spin this positively.

The rot goes beyond recruitment targets not meeting their goals. The overall pool of recruits is not fit for action, as they are too fat and dumb. Zoom out further, and the weapons tech sector is suffering as well, as the very polemical (and fun) Scott Locklin explains:

So, the US lit off a Minuteman-3 recently. This system, with origins in the 1950s, is the land-based part of the US nuclear deterrence triad. The test didn’t go well; it blew up right after launch, probably from rotten capacitors. The google machine tells me this isn’t an isolated incident; the last time we tried lighting one off, the same thing happened. We do have a sea based ballistic missile deterrent in the Trident-2. The US hasn’t had any problems with them yet. The British have, and they draw from a shared pool with the US. The other arm of the triad is the B-2 and B-52; the B-2 can’t fly when it’s raining, and the latter dates from 1952. There are plenty of nuclear tipped cruise missiles; fortunately most of those were designed in the 70s and 80s when America still mostly had its shit together.

OTOH, Russian and Chinese ingenuity:

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the Russians have figured out they can mass produce cheap drones with parts they scrounge from AliExpress and old washing machines and grind down Ukrainian forces that way.  There are supposedly effective defenses against them. Raytheon has some giant klystron thing you can fry consumer grade electronics with. It’s not clear how well they work, but the US isn’t going to find out because …. well I don’t know why they don’t manufacture and deploy the things. The Russians are a lot better at microwave technology than the US is, so I assume they have something that could also work in the same way, but as far as can be told in the fog of war, they haven’t deployed yet either. Maybe they’d be giant HARM beacons or something. The US government seems to have lost interest in Ukraine in general; like a psychotic toddler who gets bored with a video game he’s losing and flings it away.

Speaking again of submarine nuclear deterrence: the Russians have a decent fleet, with more modern types, some of which have capabilities unmatched by the US. The Chinese have a half dozen each attack and ballistic missile submarines as well, effectively the same as the US Los Angeles class (26 of which are still in service). They also have a really good anti-ship missile. Mostly though, if the Chinese want to destroy the US, they could simply stop shipping us stuff in return for T-bills. I assume they’re for helping get Taiwan back or threatening the Indians. While the US has a dominant Navy, the concept of it is kind of inherently stuck in the early 20th century: it’s to protect US world exports which no longer exist. Protecting US imports doesn’t work if your trading partners are mad at you.

On the USA’s lack of production capabilities:

On the bright side, we have a chick as Chief of Naval Operations; so America’s prime directive has been fulfilled. The ability to project power via a powerful navy is useful. The ability to sustain a war with the one we have is questionable though. Since the US shipped most of its manufacturing abroad, including the ability to manufacture things like warships, we’d be kind of screwed in that scenario. Just as the Ukranians are finding out, the ability to mass produce objects used in warfare is still pretty important, and the US is terrible at this. This despite all the futuristic solid printing computard nonsense the MIC and procurement is always babbling about lowering costs and increasing production.

Young Americans are “fat, dumb, and retarded”:

As for the Army,  77% of military aged kids are ineligible because they’re too fat, too mentally ill or too retarded. And the standards are considerably more lax than in yesteryear when the Army could still fight some semblance of a ground war without full air superiority. People who have their shit together enough to pass the Army’s standards are mostly finding other things to do. Patriotism also isn’t taught in schools much any more, and at this point, I actually agree with this: America is fucked up and whatever there was to be proud of is gone.  The Army are offering special benefits so more people train for the hellish duty of telling family members their soldier relations are dead, presumably because they’re foreseeing lots of casualties in the next few years. People with long family military traditions are advising their sons to not enlist. The Army is considering reinstating the Draft. They’re so desperate for qualified useful personnel they stopped making advertisements featuring lesbian mommies, and they’re starting to make ads so lily white the Waffen SS would approve. There’s talk of making girlbosses register for the draft; it almost got out of committee. Ominous signs for certain. I’d almost enjoy the spectacle of delusional American womanhood being forced to join the Army, except I like my young female relatives.

Failures in innovation:

Most of the innovations in weapons systems of the last two decades have been abject failures; from Zumwalt and Littoral Combat Ships, to the F-35. Even more humble projects like the KC-46 tanker (a Boeing 767 to replace the KC-135 which are basically 50s era 707s) have had a hard time. There are no new wunderwaffen in waiting, and the manufacturing capabilities of the US probably aren’t capable of building any if we were to come up with a good idea.

Emphasis being placed on all the wrong things:

Bringing it back to the Minuteman failures, these failures are representative of the country in general. Our missiles don’t work, but we sure do have fancy over produced websites about our missiles. The current goblins in charge inherited something which was functioning pretty well, looted it, let it rot, and expects it to continue to function because they think technology they see all around them is something that just happens naturally, like sunshine. I bet more people got promoted making this cool website than making the missiles work; Mandarinates are always more concerned with appearances than fact. Simple things like town infrastructure are rotten (outside the beltway which hilariously still has nice roads). Even the biological material of the nation is decaying: the people are ridiculously obese and mentally ill, and life expectancy is declining. Institutions which should be impartial are politicized, and politicians are more interested in controlling what people say on twitter and facebook than they are in fixing the roads or the nuclear missiles. Everyone hates each other and everything is fake, gay and falling apart. But there’s a lot of stuff left for entropy to digest and dipshits tell us the economy is doing great, so nothing changes.

We just spent 20 years dropping expensive bombs on Afghans for wanting to be Afghans and live life their own way. In that period of time, their population doubled. Fertility rate of native born Americans (and allies), by contrast, is about half replacement rate. The people who fought the war with Afghanistan will be halved in population. That’s the optimistic view, assuming the Russians don’t nuke everyone in a fit of pique, and assuming we can convince some of the zoomers to fuck each other in the normal front-hole way. Dying America is still dangerous, like a lunatic who inherited his father’s arsenal, but it sure ain’t what it used to be.

The last bolded line dovetails very nicely with my essays on how the USA is both transforming and getting increasingly aggressive on the world stage in order to protect its standing.

We have a lot of people here who are well-versed in both tech and the military, so I am eagerly anticipating their takes on what Scott has written.

Lastly, Scott is always an entertaining and enlightening read. You should bookmark his site.

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The late British journalist and correspondent Robert Fisk titled his book on the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) “Pity the Nation”. A small, multi-confessional state located in one of the world’s toughest neighbourhoods, Fisk would be saddened (but not surprised) that it continues to be a failed country. Non-functional, divided, broke, and with little prospect of getting better, Lebanon is a story of unrealized potential and total failure.

Lebanon is now reliant on international aid and donors, inviting the beast known as “dependency” to settle on its land. Sam Heller explains how even though this aid helps prop up the gaps in state administration and public services, it comes with a heavy, heavy price attached to it:

International donor assistance is addressing some of the crisis’s worst effects, in ways that Lebanon has never experienced. For years, aid agencies have supported Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Now, however, the international community is increasingly providing humanitarian assistance to vulnerable Lebanese as well. And donor support goes even further, propping up public institutions. Donors are helping pay for Lebanon’s public education, health care, social assistance, security, and more—even sponsoring partial salaries for teachers and soldiers. It’s the type of aid, donors told me, that ordinarily goes to countries devastated by war.² In 2022, UN agencies alone provided $300 million in assistance to or through Lebanon’s public institutions—a quarter of the size of Lebanon’s public spending for the year.³

This aid addresses humanitarian needs in Lebanon, but it also comes with serious drawbacks, and it might be creating other long-term problems. Lebanon increasingly relies on this assistance, as its own state and institutions show signs of atrophy. This aid also risks perpetuating exploitative elite rule, solidifying new relationships of dependency, and further diminishing the country’s already impaired sovereignty. International donors, by choosing where to direct their aid, could be effectively deciding which of the country’s public institutions survive.

The dilemma:

Lebanon faces a vexing dilemma: how can it receive aid to address a genuine national crisis, while also avoiding a downward spiral of aid dependency and state breakdown? Lebanon and its foreign supporters, including the United States and other Western donor countries, have mostly avoided an open and honest accounting of the many ad hoc streams of aid, and a serious conversation about the trade-offs involved. They now need to wrestle with uncomfortable questions about whether current assistance makes sense; whether it is contributing to the development of the country and its institutions; and how to square the interests of foreign donors, the Lebanese government, and Lebanon’s people.

Will Lebanon remain a basket case?

Some background:

Lebanon is not just suffering an economic collapse. It is undergoing a more multidimensional crisis of its politics, society, and economy—and its state.

Decades of economic mismanagement led to Lebanon’s present disaster.⁵ The country’s rentier economic model relied on continuous capital inflows, but by 2019—despite Lebanese authorities’ increasingly gimmicky, unsustainable attempts to attract new money—those flows had reversed. Then, in October 2019, massive anti-government protests prompted the country’s already weakened banks to shut their doors and deny depositors access to their savings. This attempt to preempt a bank run prompted a crisis of confidence that rendered the country’s interlinked state, central bank, and commercial banks all insolvent.

Lebanon proceeded to suffer one blow after another. In March 2020, the country defaulted on its dollar-denominated external debt. It was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, and then, on August 4, 2020, by a massive explosion at Beirut Port that devastated the capital.⁶

Since then, Lebanon’s crisis has only deepened. International donors have conditioned much-needed rescue funds on structural reforms implemented as part of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) program.⁷ The country’s ruling elites have not carried out those reforms; they evidently prefer an alternative, non-IMF course.⁸

Lebanon’s GDP has contracted by almost 40 percent since 2018, wiping out 15 years of economic growth.⁹ GDP is projected to contract a further 0.5 percent in 2023.¹⁰ Lebanon’s currency, the lira, has lost 98 percent of its value. More than half of Lebanon’s population is now believed to be living in poverty.¹¹

Lebanon’s private sector has recovered, somewhat. Imports returned to precrisis levels in 2022, at $19 billion—although this was seemingly due to businesses hoarding goods ahead of an anticipated increase in customs duties.¹² Likewise, the real estate sector has improved from a low in 2020.¹³ Luxury shopping reportedly witnessed an upturn this summer, during a more successful tourism season.¹⁴

Lebanon’s public sector, on the other hand, has not recovered. Public expenditures in 2022 fell to an all-time (nominal) low of $1.2 billion, down from $17.6 billion in 2018.¹⁵ In real terms, public expenditures and revenues are on track to decline by 88.8 and 84.3 percent, respectively, between 2018 and 2023.¹⁶ The World Bank has called it “a massive hollowing out of the state.”¹⁷

A failed state and a failed bureaucracy:

Lebanon’s crisis has devastated its state institutions and bureaucracy.

After the end of Lebanon’s 1975–90 civil war, Lebanon’s political factions used the state and its civil service mainly to reward their supporters and clientelist networks. The division of Lebanon’s civil service according to a postwar power-sharing arrangement yielded a state that was simultaneously larger and less effective.¹⁸ Over time, it grew even less capable; capital expenditures were crowded out by personnel costs, interest payments on debt, and transfers to the country’s spectacularly wasteful power utility, Électricité du Liban.¹⁹ A controversial 2017 law increasing public sector salaries further destabilized the country’s finances.²⁰ The government imposed a public sector hiring freeze in 2018, but that only led to a shortage of dedicated staff and the increased use of noncontract daily workers and outside consultants.²¹

Public sector wages and pensions now dominate public spending. Lebanon’s public sector today includes an estimated 250,000 workers and 120,000 pensioners.²² Among the country’s public sector employees are 80,000 personnel in the Lebanese Armed Forces, and a further 25,000 police in the Internal Security Forces.²³ Between 1995 and 2017, personnel expenses ranged between a quarter and third of public spending. That jumped in 2017 and then further increased with the onset of Lebanon’s present crisis. Since 2020, personnel expenses have represented more than half of public spending;²⁴ in the government’s draft 2023 budget, they are set to increase to roughly 60 percent.²⁵

This is a very, very long report, but is one that is well worth reading to see how easily a country can collapse into despondency and dependency.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a profile of Twitter legend “Dril”. If you’ve ever spent any time on Twitter this past decade, you will automatically see Jack Nicholson’s smirking visage in your mind:

With 1.7 million highly engaged followers, Dril is one of the more powerful Twitter users and, by default, one of the more powerful figures on the internet. Active since 2008, the Dril account—simultaneously known by the profile name “Wint”—with its grainy Jack Nicholson avatar, has been responsible for countless viral posts, just as beloved for the vivid scenes they induce as for the baffling grammatical and spelling errors they contain. Many of his tweets have become part of the permanent online lexicon: “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob”; “issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them’”; “i am selling six beautfiul, extremely ill, white horses. they no longer recognize me as their father, and are the Burden of my life.”

To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.

For almost 10 years, he was entirely anonymous. Like a decent number of the people in the so-called “Weird Twitter” scene that Dril is still vaguely a part of, he doesn’t put his real name on the account—but as time has gone on and his popularity has grown, it’s become nothing short of miraculous that he’s kept up the mystery. He’s a pyramid-obsessed phantom. He’s banky. Still, over the years, some of his digital curtain has begun to part—largely spurred by his being doxxed in 2017, when his identity was revealed to supposedly be that of a man named Paul.

Click here to read the rest.

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1. edited to change from “judiciary” to “constitutional court”