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The alt-lite is not alright
tl;dr Nick Fuentes and Lauren Southern are at points where their careers look far less promising now, some words on that
The alt lite was a catch-all term of sorts at a point during the peak of the alt-right which came crashing down post-Charlotessville in 2017. The alt-lite included people who would wilfully ignore the idea of Western identitarianism on the basis of ethnicity and support every other position or offshoots around it. So the kinda folks who would talk about "Western Civilization", "Western values" whilst being more tolerant of the actual alt-right than neocons. The prime example of an alt-lite figure being milo, others included Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern, and Lauren Chen to name a few. There are two people who I will focus on today, both were not explicitly alt-right, in fact were known for fighting with the alt-right.
Nick Fuentes for now being made into a caricature of what the average person thinks is an alt-righter and Lauren Southern who unlike the other members of the alt-lite or alt-right forgot to become a fed, allegedly.
Nick is the leader of a paleoconservative movement named America First which is defined by these values which can be summed as retvrn to 1950s if you want a briefer version. He began streaming around 2015 and was his views crystallised around 2017 where he would argue with people in and around the internet bloodsport. He has been caught with trans pornography opened on his browswer a few times alongside texts and interactions with trans girls. This is well known among his former allies and was brought to light by chris brunet recently in a series of rants against him. This was further compounded by the recent leaks of streamer Destiny being caught on camera sucking a guy off. Destiny is also our bridge to the other character at play here. Again the person in the leaks is obviously not Nick but his previous acts of cozying upto Catboy Kami, watching trans porn, being a literal incel etc dont help his case at all.
Lauren Southern was a big alt-lite figure, she recently worked with Tenet Media which was taking money from Russia, the people working also included Tim Pool though the primary media person involved with the financial side was another alt-lite Canadian Lauren, Lauren Chen. Lauren Southern was down, she had been divorced from her Asian husband who she had a kid with, said husband also turned out to be a literal fed. She was doing fairly well until her hiatus. She made a comeback after her hiatus and it went badly on both personal and professional levels. For starters, she was summoned alongside Lauren Chen and testified in person. The most interesting reaction towards this was by Richard Spencer who like Milo has been outed as being a fed in public court documents. If the threat of jail time is not enough, she also wrecked whatever goodwill she had by having had an affair with the same man Nick Fuentes was being rumored with, Destiny. The leaks are painful to read.
I bring these incidents up not to gossip about two people. People yearn for ideals to strive towards, heroes of sorts. Those studying music look up to Mozart rightfully and would be visibly disgusted upon finding out about his scat fetish accusations. E celebs are considerably dumber and likely worse people than Mozart. Both Lauren and Nick are people who played a game of Motte and Bailey, Nick far more than Lauren, both have had run-ins with the government (Nick was an agitator during jan 6 who was on a no fly list but never tried, whilst people who followed his orders were, go figure) and are terrible people in their personal lives.
The "online right" is being allowed to torch people slightly on its left and it seems to be working. The consequences of being an e-celeb are not for the faint-hearted, most of them end up hiding their issues well. It is also a good reminder as to why putting the weight of your entire "movement" on one man is risky. Nick during 2019 effectively made Turning Point USA shift their opinions slightly to the right after constant harassment via his followers in college campuses during Charlie Kirks speaking tours, his low-status behavior ultimately came through. Marx despite being outed as a person with multiple character flaws did not dent marxism very much as ultimately his ideas were enough to the point where people did champion them in the 20th century. America First lacks any sort of intellectual rigor is simply MAGA but how bad faith actors want you think it is.
I wanted to write at length about the crashing and burning of various e celebs from the post gamergate era yet there is not much to be gained from it. Most if not all of them only served as introductions to the various factions of "the right". The recurring themes were fairly apparent, being an online personality will eventually cause real world harm as you care about what others think online, many people actively run gay ops just to screw you over. Political actions have always had consequences, lowering the barrier to entry does not shield you from them, you won't get crushed by a dictator for being a dissenter but you will get hurt and see people you call "normies" doing better in life, which still hurts a lot. A lust for validation thwarts your internal psyche too. Nick for instance really is not all that different from the alt right and is by all accounts far less aware of his own religious beliefs than atheist Richard Spencer, in some ways he succeeded in hiding his similarities to other identitarians long enough by being fine with current American demographics but his position is built on shaky grounds given birth rates as of this year. Lauren who publicly talked about family values at the time ended up having affairs with many on the right if you go by the words of her ex-colleagues and was cheating on her husband with a streamer. Both of these people would have been better off had they never turned to the internet for validation.
I decided long ago that you should never meet your heroes or role models.
They won't live up to the hype, and they'll inevitably let you down with their behavior.
So mostly glad that I only ever stayed on the periphery of the alternative/indie media scene. Never followed any of them too closely, picked and chose who I thought was actually trustworthy, and certainly never financially supported any of them. I turned out to be consistently right on the money.
As much as I think legacy and mainstream media is corrupt, the problem with independent media tends to be incompetence. They don't have the experience or connections to maintain a positive public image in a high profile environment, so they have to make things up as they go along, and any missteps could blow up in their face. If they didn't have their life together when they became famous, an injection of fame surely wouldn't help them get it together.
So, so many 'prominent' internet personalities from the early 2010's/Post-gamergate era turned into or just turned out to be horrible people. Not worthy to be looked up to as leaders, but somehow given outsize influence over their little corner of the culture. The lucky ones just slowly fade into irrelevance, their content getting <1% of the attention it used to, but still churned out with some regularity.
Except PewDiePie, somehow that dude made his money, found his girl, and got out without nuking his reputation or sending his life into a tailspin. Also JonTron seems to have hit a point in his career where he can spit out a video every few months to a million or so views, and just live his life the rest of the time.
I suspect that the nature of the internet, which is able to bestow some random citizen with more attention and fame than literal emperors in olden times would have gotten, out of the blue (think Hawk Tuah girl, for sure) and most are just not psychologically trained to handle that with grace. Eventually they'll choose to indulge whatever their worst impulses are, and usually their fans will cheer them on because they're just there for the drama. Then its either a slow descent into degeneracy, or possibly a rapid unplanned disassembly. Or, perhaps, the better interpretation is they go through the same sort of travails that most 'normal' people experience, but being broadcast to an audience of hundreds of thousands kind of raises the stakes.
The sort of people who seek to be 'pundits' or leaders of political movements are probably predisposed to be sociopaths or narcissists who will eventually abuse their influence.
There are some exceptions. I really enjoy the Indie Scifi Book Series written by Travis J.I. Corcoran, and I got to spend some time around him and he... is exactly what he represents himself as. Curmudgeonly as all hell, but also unwilling to compromise on truth and is charming in his way.
I also briefly met Larry Correia and he's pretty cool.
How much do you think is were horrible people or were marginal people that got the chance to turn into horrible people. For a brief possibly closed window fairly normal people could luck there way into a bit of fame with few guard rails. For males easy money and easy sex are hard to pass up.
I'd go out on a limb and say its 60-40, 60% good people getting compromised because they are suddenly gifted fame and fortune and happen to fall into some vice or other, and 40% grifters who were ALWAYS in it for the money and fame, and had no morals before getting them.
Milo Yiannopoulos had a seemingly meteoric rise and fall in a fairly short period, he's probably the most obvious of the grifters.
The other amazing thing is how these types will often lash out and drag others down with them when they sense they're about to lose everything. I think that's perhaps the one way you can tell who was ever a good, honorable person. If they quietly accept their fate and remove themselves from the limelight without trying to blow everything up on their way out, vs. pull a straight up face/heel turn and lean into the controversy, desperately trying to stay relevant by picking fights and destroying others reputations in the process.
The funny thing is: Milo seems to have been destroyed the one time he seemed to be totally sincere.
There was no reason for a gay guy trying to redpill millennials and conservatives to talk positively about pederasty. No reason to do it more than once. He dropped the glib act for a few minutes and picked about the worst thing to be honest about/rationalize.
Yep. It was interesting that what nuked him was giving his honest opinion on something that he had actually experienced and wasn't doing it to insult any given target or to troll.
One wonders if he responded by going SO DEEP into his act that he'll never resurface again.
Sure, but even reactionaries are alienated by naked displays of atheism, and that blasphemy not only denies the three most powerful goddesses in the Western pantheon at the same time (safety, equality, and consent), but is fundamentally incompatible with whatever [G/g]od his viewers would have replaced those with.
I don't think it's a surprise he lost his reach after revealing he stood for something truly alien. How could anyone trust he was a voice on their side after that?
Its not the blasphemy that was the problem. It was the inadvertent support for the blood libel. Milo was the victim. Ordinarily you get some leeway. No perfect victims and all that. If anything could be excused as rationalization...
Homosexuality and pederasty is something LGBT activists fought very hard to decouple in the public mind.
Having a gay guy not only say it happens but talking about it in plural, as a good (ish) thing?
Everyone said fuck that. The gays said a hearty fuck that. Conservatives that were opening up to a flamboyant provocateur immediately turned around upon seeing him validate the worst stereotypes. I'm sure gay conservatives were doubly incensed.
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Milo also recently started taking more alt right type positions given X is less ban happy. Most of this has been grifts unfortunately. Baked Alaska is a funny case study in e celeb culture, guy went from normie lib to nearly alt right to back again and then whatever nick fuentes does.
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