The Dallas Forum

Last week our generous zcash patrons took a group of us San Francisco eggheads out to Forum's event, a side event held alongside the Republican midterm convention in Dallas. This was a gathering of online chud right people from a few different strands of the movement. There were a bunch of onstage debates on topics like mass deportation and datacenters, basically getting some public figures to argue about issues where there's splits between the technocrat/business right and the populist right. Most of the media coverage has focused on those debates, e.g. https://dailycaller.com/2026/09/15/rooke-forum-rnc-texas-dallas-immigration-ai-data-center/. (Seems the organizers did a good job of lining up some friendly journalists.) From what I heard it sounded like they did a good job articulating each faction's core position, but I spent more of my time talking to the other attendees and have only a loose sense.

My impression was the crowd was something like 1/4 people who spend lots of time reading politics Twitter and 3/4 people who spend lots of time listening to politics podcasts. When I ran into fellow Twitter people I had the usual convention experience—meeting people into similar things I was, running into distinguished poasters who I've admired and talked to online, all that stuff. The podcast people were more salt-of-the-Earth types, a lot more likely to be small business owners who live in Dallas rather than cosmopolitan professionals who flew in from some distant metropolis. tbh it was good for me to get out of my hyperintellectual bubble and talk to a bunch of these guys.

Lots of good energy all around. Everyone understood that we've got a lot of hard work to do and was excited to get at it, from the movement organizers with their grand plans to the elementary school teachers trying to open a few cracks in the educational propaganda. While there were tactical disagreements and cultural gaps, everyone was friendly and making an effort to understand each other. I didn't see any of the blackpilling or backbiting that sometimes infests the online spaces.

Overall a solid conference. I got more of a sense of who our allies are and made a few connections which may prove helpful.

>>5584

I am very jealous of you anon. I wish I could have attended, but such is the life of an unemployed zoomer.

say, care to share the factions you came across?

I was just writing up my own report on it. Here were some of the things I noticed:

The college republicans, at least those who were present, are really into christian nationalism. I think they may have been some kind of schism from the mainline college republicans. I saw them throw a roman salute, and they were quite insistent on their christian theology. They seemed handsome and charismatic, very promising, but I didn't get to talk to them much; they didn't seem interested once they figured out I was an unc who wasn't even christian.

I don't think those guys were catholic, but some other young men very much were. These religious identities seem to be quite powerful among the political youth. Again, insistent on their theology, grouped together as a political and social bloc. I get it; if I believed in it I can imagine being like that too. But as I don't, I also understand those who say the papists are a problem. It's an interesting counterpoint to generally collapsing faith among youth.

Another conversation I sat in on was some local (texas and dallas/irving) politicians, politically involved citizens, and guys from longstanding texas families. The topic of violent resistance to mass immigration came up, with one guy being quite a firebrand. A local politician was meanwhile very careful in his speech, emphasizing that his phone was probably recording while people discussed scalp bounties, militias, and other measures. Others discussed how they had gotten involved in local politics with quite mundane local development priorities. Interesting cross section.

Up on stage, I missed most of the events. Some of them were missable, but some of the ones I did see were quite interesting. Bo French was particularly impressive on the mass deportations panel, and interestingly the most bold and radical despite his co-panelists being younger. He's been stirring controversy with his echoing of the 100M deportations meme, willingness to talk about the Indian invasion, etc. He did more of that here. He's going to be a significant figue I think.

Towards the evening the big events were around AI safety, datacenters, etc. There was a panel with Curtis Yarvin and Jon Stokes with some more conventional AI-skeptical political types, and another with joe allen and joe lonsdale. Yarvin and Stokes were much more familiar with the "doomer" arguments but basically skeptical of them. I felt Yarvin was overly reliant on the premise that AI is just a tool, when to me that's obviously the question under discussion. That discussion otherwise didn't keep my interest very much.

Joe Allen was interesting as a very chud-coded right wing populist AI doomer. Besides his obligatory glass of whiskey and alchoholic-coded phenotype, he had two beats: on the one hand "algorithmic immigrants", a surprisingly cogent framing of gradual disempowerment AI risk in a way that plugs nicely and accurately into lizard-brain xenophobia. On the other hand, the anti-data center case as a "fuck you" to big tech that has spent the last 15 years hating and extracting from the American people, on the theory that whatever data centers represent, it's probably going to be like social media in terms of life pathologies, censorship, and political suppression, but 10x worse. Honestly the tech lords deserve this assessment.

Joe Lonsdale on the other hand was funny to see in person, arguing against this. He made some good points about how many people this employs, how Americas enemies want us to lose this industry too, how the anti-AI psyops are actually just foreign psyops, smart people are using AI with their own kids, etc. He's probably right about those things. But his voice and mannerisms were, uh, "stereotypical" in a way I didn't expect based on his phenotype. That's not a reason to discount his takes, though his obvious financial interest in the matter might be. I think they actually both made good showings despite the clown-world chud circus aspects.

Overall had a good time and met good people even if I was less than impressed overall.