Loyalty

A virtue

Want to know what this is? Start here.

---

There’s a six and a half hour video documenting the drama of Cozy following revelations of Ali Alexander doing scandalous things with boys under 18, leading up to Ethan Ralph being kicked off the platform.

I’m not going to go into the content of it, you can watch for yourself and decide what you think.

In the video, there’s a section where Nick is talking to Big Tech about loyalty:

I’ve thought a lot about loyalty over the past few years.

You can never understand what it means to be loyal to someone until it costs you something to do so, and you never know if you’ll do it until you’re tested.

I thought my test came when a man I dated 20 years ago in college, someone who I genuinely considered to be one of the loves of my life, went to prison for 8.5 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

I knew he didn’t commit it. Everyone in my life knew he didn’t. Everyone in his life knew he didn’t.

Even the government that railroaded him to plead guilty to things he didn’t do until the threat of spending the rest of his life in prison at 24-years-old…even they knew he didn’t do it. My friend was originally going to go to trial to prove his innocence. He wanted to fight. And when he did that, the government moved the venue to an extremely unfavorable area so that the jury pool was such that there was an 80% chance of conviction.

They knew they couldn’t get him with a jury pool that understood how the internet worked (this was a long time ago, remember), so they changed the venue to change the jury pool.

My friend once told me he signed his soul onto that piece of paper when he lied to take the guilty plea.

I thought that was the test of my loyalty. Would I stick by someone that I absolutely knew was innocent in the face of this?

It’s so easy to turn your back on someone in prison, to write them off, to forget they even exist.

But I didn’t. I stood by him. And I have no regrets about that.

I stood by him when he got out.

And then, maybe six months to a year after that happened, we got into a massive fight. I think that was in 2015. I don’t think he ever really forgave me for getting married while he was in prison. But the reality was (contrary to any rumors on the internet), we weren’t in a relationship when he was in prison. It was all just messing around to trigger our families.

Anyway, we didn’t speak much after that fight. I didn’t trust him anymore, and he knew it.

Every once in a while, we would share a text message or a DM (“hey, how are you” sort of stuff), and we went out for drinks when I went to NYC in 2020 before the world shut down, but that was really it.

I bring this all up because, ironically, the real test of my loyalty came years later, in 2022, when a narcissist who’s obsessed with me went through 15 years of my social media history to unearth something he could smear me with to try to destroy me.

And he dragged my friend - a private person, someone I had barely spoken to in 7 years - through the mud to get to me.

I wasn’t involved in anything my friend was doing that landed him in the hot water he did. We weren’t even in the same state - I was in Vermont, and he was bouncing back and forth between Boston and Sweden, where he was living with his girlfriend.

But, of course, on the internet, that doesn’t matter.

When the smear campaign started, my friend messaged me and said, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I told him I would never turn my back on him.

That was the last time we spoke.

This was the real test of whether or not I was willing to sacrifice to be loyal to someone who I knew had been wronged.

Again, this is someone I’ve barely spoken to in years. We both moved on with our lives. It would have been so easy for me to tell some tale about being lied to or deceived, he’s obviously guilty, I denounced him, burn the witch, blah blah blah…

It never even crossed my mind as a possibility.

You assholes think I’m going to stick by someone for 8.5 years in prison and then throw all that away because you’re crying on the internet about something you know nothing about?

Oh, the documents say he did it? Do you understand that pleading guilty to a crime you didn’t commit necessitates lying?

You complain all day about the government, and feds and this and that…but THIS TIME, the government’s telling the truth? Does that make any sense at all?

The truth is the internet doesn’t care if it’s true or not.

The point is to get you to break.

I didn’t fucking break. And I came out stronger for it on the other side. If anything, it made me more determined to tell these ridiculous people to fuck off and crave my own path.

So I passed the test. Here’s what I learned:

You do not know if you will pass that test until you face it.

It’s not something you can prepare for.

It’s a character trait, and the only way to find out if you have it is to be pushed to the limit without breaking.

You are either loyal, or you’re not.

The drama stemming from Nick’s orbit is…well… ridiculous.

It’s overwhelmingly ridiculous.

Grown men so deprived of pussy that they turned into an entity worse than any mean girls you ever encountered in high school.

I think that Nick has the right idea when it comes to loyalty.

The problem is that there is no incentive on the internet to be loyal to anyone.

It’s either a character trait that you have or you don’t.

And if someone is willing to be disloyal to one person (without cause, of course), they will be disloyal to you.

Nick has planted himself in shark-infested waters, except the sharks circling him are people whose entire character is telling them to eat him alive.

The only incentive they have to be loyal to Nick is that they believe that doing so will benefit them in some way.

As soon as that perception changes - they won’t believe they can ride Nick’s coattails any longer to wherever they want to go - it will be like smelling blood in the water.

The bar for assessing whether or not someone has been disloyal should be high. It’s not something you just throw around at anyone who says something you don’t like.

In the example above, the larger conversation was about if Big Tech had been disloyal to Nick for publicly admonishing him over his relationship with Ali Alexander and Milo.

I don’t believe Big Tech was disloyal to Nick.

He was imperfectly loyal.

He was loyal in a way that Nick didn’t appreciate.

It was done with positive intent but perhaps could have been done differently.

He’s entitled to that prerogative, but what Big Tech did was a misdemeanor, not a high crime.

I also think he was testing Nick to see how he would react.

That might be inconvenient for Nick, but that’s not disloyalty.

Disloyalty is a high crime, something that is truly undeniable.

But once it happens, I think disloyalty should be punished with unrelenting fire.

Not only should it be fiercely fought, there should be retribution. That retribution must be undeniable.

Disloyalty is never forgotten.

Maybe you smooth things over at some point if it’s beneficial to do so, fine. Use them for what you can.

But never let your guard down.

If someone fucks you over once, they will fuck you over again, no matter how many sweet nothings they whisper in your ear.

Loyalty is a character trait.

It is innate.

It’s built-in.

I think the great challenge Nick will face is that loyalty is not incentivized in the game he’s playing.

That’s why he has so many knife-shaped wombs in his back.

The game he’s playing is built on people of low character, and the more disloyal they are, the more money they make.

In an arena where people benefit from low-IQ bullshit, those who insist on offering loyalty to others only ask to be destroyed.

Believing that people in the game will be loyal when they have proven no capacity to do so is a mistake.

It’s like adopting a wild animal and believing that giving it love and food means it won’t eat you someday.

Of course, it’s going to eat you.

It gains more from eating you than it gains from your love.

Sometimes, it’s better to be a loner. You don’t have to spend as much time looking over your shoulder.