I think the first rule of law is only fight when you can afford to. Have your people supplied. The second rule is not to attack where people are strongest. The left ignore both, and fail.

Nerds have bulldozed Hollywood’s monopoly on culture, and rendered it all but completely dependent on them for what little revenue stream their fetish for innovation and efficiency will allow Hollywood’s outmoded business models.

And it’s not just Hollywood. Academia has come under assault, too, with some of the most powerful voices for reform of higher education coming from the tech sector. California venture capitalist Peter Thiel has been probably the most outspoken assailant of academia, and has even taken to literally paying promising STEM students not to attend college and instead giving them money to get into business. Unless you’re an elite school with a well-established and deep pocketed alumni network, or a tech school, or both (as in the case of MIT), this is going to cut into your capacity to attract alumni who might actually make money.

Furthermore, the crisis of student debt has cast serious doubt as to whether the modern university, with its endless studies departments, safe spaces, and speech codes, can provide any actual value to students in exchange for its exorbitant tuition rates. Add in the fact that STEM-oriented gadflies are some of the most vocal and successful critics of squishy postmodernism in the humanities, and you can see where traditional academe would be threatened by the rise of that group’s status. Most tech workers and STEM people still have college degrees, of course, but that probably produces even more resentment among their classmates hawking Pumpkin Spice lattes at Starbucks.

In short, the rise of Silicon Valley, geek chic and focus on STEM has seen an attendant decline in status and economic viability for America’s most inefficient, politically correct, conventionally Left-wing sectors. The hipsters are dead; long live the nerds.

How did this happen? The answer is long and complicated, but to put it simply, no person with a knowledge of political history should ever bet against the nerds. For all the sneers of the New York Times and their fashionable partners in the media elite about the “hyper-whiteness” of the nerd identity, the fact is that those forged in the crucible of anti-intellectual injustice simply will not break. Alex Jones is wrong about almost everything, but he is right to label nerds “the most dangerous people in this country, because they end up running things.” And indeed, today more than ever, to be an intelligent, creative, free-thinker is to be the type of person who ends up on top of the heap.

The latter-day Carrie Nations opposing them should have seen this coming. When comic books were first labeled dangerous, nerds spearheaded their rush to acceptance and broke the censors. When role-playing games were vilified by histrionic, uneducated mothers looking for scapegoats to cover their own lack of parenting, it was nerds who blew the whistle on their ignorance and fraud. The United States was founded by its most highly educated, and the same class built the progressive era in the early 20th century before undoing it in the 80’s through finance, and then ushering in the information age through computers. They put a man on the moon, Silicon Valley on the map, and the world on the internet. You have to get up very early to put one over on an intellectual elite, and it’s dubious whether those who have tried to do so this time ever stop hiding from imaginary triggers in their beds. Small wonder they are losing so badly.

It is not just America where this is happening. Globally, the left is in retreat. David Cameron has crushed the lisping avatar of contentless teenage angst known as Ed Miliband, while Benjamin Netanyahu has frozen out his enemies with the cold reality of geopolitics. Soon, the only place that is left (in both senses) will be your average college campus, and it won’t be long before men like Peter Thiel snatch all their prospectively wealthy students away to innovate, leaving only the army of baristas and mental hypochondriacs that populate the various “Studies” departments. And the more the media caters to them, the more irrelevant it will be.

And the tears flow, because the hipsters, the SJW, know not how things work, and want to control that which they do not understand.

So far the activists have gelded and made irrelevant the world council of churches, most political parties, most publishers, almost all TV, and most of hollywood. They have almost destroyed comics. They are losing with science fiction and gaming. And… when they try to regulate the internet one corporation at a time the conversation just shifts to another platform. They add not to the signal. They are just seen as noise, and they will pass.

But truth will get through.