“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...” - Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, 1995

I am a 90s kid. I like to sit down at a desktop computer and type on a full sized clacky keyboard instead of using a phone. I still watch Saturday Night Live - actually live on NBC - and wish there were only 30 channels on TV instead of the infinite amount of streaming garbage there is to wade through now. Summers are for riding bikes and going to pools. If I still had a go-kart, I’d be go-karting so hard. One of my most cherished possessions is my childhood Nintendo 64. It’s hooked up. I still play it.

There isn’t a grand mystery as to why I prefer these things. I’m old. I grew up in the 90s - and like Agent Smith says to Morpheus in the 1999 film The Matrix “it was the peak of your civilization.”

Hauntingly, I think he was right.

The 2020s have been weird, dude… They began with a once in a century global pandemic which forced us all inside for months, killed millions of people, and perhaps most damningly, completely broke all of our brains. I don’t even want to illustrate how it did so or to what extent it did it, as I feel that it’s plainly evident. Then we had racially motivated civil unrest and a political coup-de-tat back to back. There were economic booms and crashes on scales that I don’t think anyone has ever experienced before. AI is a thing now - we blew straight past the Touring Test and right into Terminator, all gas and no brakes. Companies are now worth Trillions of dollars, not just Billions anymore. We have a living Trillionaire. Fascists started coming out of the woodwork - not just people who are hardlined, no - actual fascists that don’t believe in equal rights for women and minorities - actual white supremecist / ethnostate authoritarian nationalists.

They’re freakin’ everywhere.

A term I see thrown around a lot when describing our present hellscape, and the demons there running amok, is “reactionaries.” For the longest time, I thought that just meant someone who reacted, abruptly and misinformed - which social media seems particularly welcoming of. But no, the term “reactionary” is a lot deeper than that… And like a lot of what’s going on these days, it goes back to the French Revolution.

Some AI Slop I found on a Medical website for some reason

Once, long ago, in a magical land called France, which may or may not exist - I don’t know, they got themselves into a bit of a le pickle.

In the 18th Century, France’s population grew by 7 million people, most of whom were middle class. While the prosperity of the nation overall increased, the living standards and wealth really only improved for those at the top. In the late 1780s there was a recession, an uptick in unemployment, and food prices went through the roof.

I’ve never heard of anything like that…

The French Revolution ultimately came down to taxes - how to make them fair, distributed evenly, and representative to all of the French People. Eventually this led to the end of Feudalism in the country, the rise of the National Assembly, the capture and beheading of the monarchs, and the eventual conquest of Napoleon Bonaparte to become the first Consul. It gets entirely too complicated for me to explain (or even comprehend) here, but a good font of knowledge on the subject would be The Revolutions Podcast if you’re interested.

What I’d like to focus on here is the linguist aftermath. The terms “liberal democracy,” “left & right wing,” and “conservative” all come from the French Revolution. It’s literally the starting point for modern political discourse. When the French Assemblée Nationale gathered, their president sat in the center, the ones favoring reform and progressive improvement sat on the left, and the ones favoring religious tradition and loyalty to the king sat to the right. This eventually led to the “innovators” on the left, the “constitutionalists” on the right, and moderates in the center. This is still the framework we use to describe politics over two centuries later.

So what’s a reactionary then?

On the right, then in 1799 and very much still now in 2026, a reactionary is someone who doesn’t just want to keep the status quo, but wants to go back to a fabled time before. A lot of American Fascism can be seen as a desire to return to the simplicity of the 1950s, when a man could work a job in the city and come home to his wife and three kids in the suburbs. Thriving off his single income, his wife could stay home and tend to the children; and everyone was white and Christian and everything was perfect. You know: like a fantasy.

This has never been the case in America. There have always been racial tensions, marches for equality, and threats to the status quo; perhaps especially in the 1950s. That was the era of the Cold War, Jim Crow, and nonexistent Women’s Rights. The entire reason there was such a thriving middle class is because we had devoted our entire national budget and industries into manufacturing to fight a war, a war that killed millions upon millions of people, and left all the other industrialized nations utterly destroyed. If you look back upon the 50s with nothing but admiration and wanderlust, then it’s truly remarkable how easy it is for you to ignore all the blood, fire, and violence that created it.

But that is seemingly what a Reactionary does.

It’s delusional, to say the least. The lifespan of a normal person a few hundred years ago was around 35. They were eating nothing but organic and free range back then, too. They weren’t worried about their testosterone levels or frame mogging, whatever the hell that is - they were too busy dying of dysentery. There was no germ theory. There was no knowledge of anti-biotics or proper hygiene. I don’t want to join any of these morons back in their fairytale bullshit past - I don’t think I’d like the smell.

Like a lot of aging millennials, I’m very nostalgic of my childhood in the 90s. Bike rides, swimming pools, Nintendo 64. But there were a ton of bad things that happened in that mythical decade too. I don’t want to go back to it and negate all the growth and learning that I’ve undergone since, to have to go through everything all over again, to learn all the same hard truths and relive the same heartaches, to lose all those already lost again - just to relive that time I sat on the front porch in the summer of 1995 reading an X-MEN comic book while my dad tended to the yard…

But I wouldn’t mind taking a day trip to it…

I suppose that’s the real impetus to reactionaryism - to just get a taste of what things may have been like, no matter how delusional. I’ve written before about how nostalgia is a sort of sickness, not just of the mind but of the soul itself. To be a reactionary is to be a malignant tumor of such a illness. You can’t even define what you want - there is no actual basis outside of your imagination after all - but you want the world to bend to your will for it. Together we need to see this obvious impairment, not just in each other, but in ourselves too. It might actually help us truly progress as a society.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Page 72 is still in the inking stage. I’m still swamped with work (I’m trying to do something about that though) and I simply haven’t had the same amounts of time I used to devote to drawing as I’ve once had. I’ve also started tinkering around with ideas of what I’ll do after I finish the first episode - should I animate something? Should I try to make a video game? Should I do full time live streaming? Whatever the future holds, I need to realign a bit… Make some adjustments. Today is a good time of year to think about such things.

Today is the Summer Solstice, Twenty Twenty Six.

The longest day of the year.

Godspeed, friends. Let’s all go touch some grass.