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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30996 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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It's crazy Charlottesville was only 4 8 years ago, many on the "Dissident Right" were blaming Richard Spencer for forever tarnishing right-wing politics for that disastrous event. But that movement has evolved and frankly is ascendent in the meme-sphere in a way nobody expected in their most optimistic projections.

Isn't this such a validation for Elite Theory, or the High-low vs. middle dynamic? You really do just need a few, true elites on your side to turn the tables of a culture. Marching on the streets in protest, bad idea. Influencing a billionaire with memes- good idea. The people saying "we just need to use memes to get a couple billionaires on our side" are vindicated. Elon is speedrunning the 2016 Alt-Right progression.

Charlottesville was 99% a hoax story, so it required the old media system to keep up the facade.

Musk is just trying to cover for his extremely pro-H1B views by coming out as performatively against low-skill subcontinental immigration.

There's more to that going on, Bari Weiss posted this yesterday for example:

What’s happening in Canadian politics is not happening in a vacuum. It is a symptom of a much broader phenomenon. Call it the great crack-up of the old consensus.

The old consensus held that immigration was an absolute good, with multiculturalism the end goal. Arguments contrary to progressive social attitudes was “disinformation” that must be combated by robust online censorship. People would quickly adjust to massive changes in social attitudes around sex and gender because objections would be seen as bigoted. And anyone who said anything that questioned the consensus would become a pariah.

This consensus is being rejected across the West...

Wow, that sounds familiar! It sounds word-for-word what the Alt-Right said a decade ago. What are we to make of Weiss now assimilating these talking points? Obviously I think her angle is different from the Alt-Right, and more self-serving than pro-white. But it's not Musk trying to stay in good graces, although that's part of it. There seems to be an actual realignment towards the DR in some capacity.

Weiss also signalboosting the Paki grooming gang story, again another decade-old talking point recycled word-for-word from the Alt Right:

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s

And I don't think Bari Weiss can be said to using this as a distraction from H1B issue.

It's perhaps uncharitable, but one of Bari Weiss's motives is likely out of her pro-zionism stances. She has throughout her career framed Israel's flagging US approval as a PR issue and become increasingly defense over even the most anodyne or factual criticism of Israeli actions in MENA. There is a large surge of Islamophobic writing on the right currently due to the NOLA attack and this is a convenient way to try to continue splitting Muslims from the liberal coalitions in the US and UK.

The timing of this surge in interest, when we've known many of the facts about the rape gangs for a decade, suggests to me that both Bari and Elon are using this opportunity to deflect. That doesn't mean they're deflecting for the same reasons though.

I certainly believe that's the case, I said it was self-serving rather than pro-white. It still represents a realignment on the issue towards the old Alt Right talking points about the failures of multiculturalism, etc. Ditto for Eric Weinstein coming out with a passioned defense of the European tribe (!).

I do think the adoption by these figures of 10-year old Alt Right talking points is self-serving and a reaction to anti-Zionism from MENA in the West. But I also think it's an actual realignment that will have real-world political consequences.

Sure, but I think it remains to be seen how much will change off the internet. Migrant numbers will fall under Poilievre, but they’ll remain high in historic terms, and there are unlikely to be any major deportations. Labour is in power in the UK until 2029. Miller will do some good things for immigration under Trump, but nowhere near what some people will suggest, and I think H1Bs will continue to be issued and renewed at rates similar to today and that major illegal immigration across the southern border will continue, albeit at a moderately lower pace.

In the first Trump admin, H1B rates fell. It’s reasonable to think that might happen again.

Sure, that remains to be seen. But I think we should move past the "oh it's just an internet thing" at this point, I remember everyone saying that about proto-Woke stuff on Tumblr. And it became real very fast. My guess is that Musk and Weiss and many others actually do represent a realignment on these issues. Not giving the DR 100% of everything, but a big movement in that direction.

Isn't this such a validation for Elite Theory,

I disagree. The competing theory (at least how I understand it) is that changes in material conditions have continued to get worse. The extremes of both sides of politics generally recruit from disaffected and suffering people, losers in the race for prestige/elite positions. The Biden administration went all-in on the policies of the pre-Trump consensus (vast amounts of illegal immigration, encouraging outsourcing, etc) and their policies made those material conditions get substantially worse. The established left in America is hopelessly compromised and wedded to the same "elite" worldview - look at how happy they were to get Dick Cheney's endorsement, and how they believed that would actually support their cause. People just stopped giving a shit about Charlottesville and January 6 because it doesn't matter how much the people on CNN talk about decorum or about how great the stock market is going when your own material conditions continue to deteriorate - and the idea that you have to support your continued immiseration because the other guy is rude and says mean things just isn't viable anymore. I highly doubt a majority of Trump voters would support Charlottesville, but what's the alternative?

As for the tech right, I think recent events have actually demonstrated their lack of power. Elon tried to talk down to the base about how they need to accept infinity Indians, and as far as I can tell he's only damaged his relationship with Trump and his base. Furthermore, I don't think Elon seeing a bunch of memes was enough to make him switch - it was the Biden administration's deliberate efforts to destroy the tech industry. Elon was facing lots of politically motivated prosecution and persecution, and Pmarca directly stated that the reason he supported Trump was the Biden admin coming in and letting him know that they were going to crush the startup economy and just pick their own winners while using regulation to strangle competition.

Most people to be honest don’t actually care about either one. The people who care, for the most part care for the reason that the prosecution on 1/6 is overboard and despite the whining from the status quo elites probably did almost no damage to the public at all.

What has done damage to the median American is the status quo. They’re paying a lot more for goods, having to tighten their belts. Often their city is less safe than in years past, and they’re more concerned with the education their kids are getting in their schools. I think even had the 1/6 event resulted in 4 more years of Trump, the general public would be much more concerned about mundane concerns like gas/food prices, indoctrination in schools, the money shipped to Ukraine, Ashville and the hurricane relief, and dozens of other real world concerns.

To be brutally honest, I think that very few people actually care what form of government they have or who runs it. What they want is peace, affordable living, safety, and freedom from too much intrusion into their private lives. If they could get that with democracy, they’d enjoy it, but if ending democracy made their material life better, they would not care.

I agree Elon was mostly looking for a nearby weapon to bash the Dem establishment's head with, and he has grabbed essentially Dissident Right rhetoric. Alt-Lite at least, recycling many talking points directly from 2016. His son becoming trans seems to have radicalized him as well.

But it does speak to the utility of having a presence and continuing "useless online discussion", or being someone like Jared Taylor and spending decades repeating the same arguments. Point being, the people who were saying "no, we don't need to IRL organize like Charlottesville debacle, let the memes flow and hopefully they get picked up by powerful people and then the ball gets rolling" turned out to be correct.

His son becoming trans seems to have radicalized him as well.

I agree with this too. That definitely had an impact.

Point being, the people who were saying "no, we don't need to IRL organize like Charlottesville debacle, let the memes flow and hopefully they get picked up by powerful people and then the ball gets rolling" turned out to be correct.

That was absolutely the right strategy, but I don't believe getting "elites" to look at those memes was the actual winning approach. What gave the right so much more power, in my opinion at least, was that they completely owned online culture. The left just gave up on gaming and online communities, and then the next generation grew up with right wing/4chan memes as just the general background noise of their culture. The language that used to be restricted to the darker and more forbidden corners of the internet (not talking about super secret hacker forums here, but places like Heartise, 4chan and MPC) is now the lingua franca of the youth. The reason that these memes and ideas reach the elite is that they are common knowledge among huge swathes of the population, and that's also where they get their power - I'd be willing to bet that in an alternate world where only Peter Thiel ever saw all these memes their impact on politics and culture would be substantially reduced.

I'm not sure on that -- it might well be more a symptom than a cause.

When Musk learned of his daughter's transition "he was generally sanguine," according to Isaacson, but after Jenna became a "fervent Marxist" she cut Musk out of her life.

When Jenna filed a request to change her name so that it would better reflect her gender identity, she wrote that she was also requesting a name change because "I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form."

Musk claims, according to Isaacson, that when his daughter "went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil" she severed all communication and relations with him. Isaacson says the "rift pained" Musk "more than anything in his life since the infant death of his first child, Nevada."

Maybe that's the sanitized and self-deluding version, and it's not the frame Wilson takes -- putting cutting ties as a culmination of a distant parent -- but I think it's a little more plausible than most expect. I've seen more than a fair share of techie people where trans (or LGB) stuff will get a kid kicked out of the house, but there's also a lot of this story that I've also seen where individual stuff was just awkward until Everything Leftism put friction into everything.

The left just gave up on gaming and online communities

I'm sorry, what? The left as a whole has been hammering and pushing for great and great control and censorship in online spaces and gaming for years now, both by forum admin takeover(both on reddit and elsewhere) and worming their way via DEI hiring into actually developing the games themselves.

I'm not going to argue against the rest of your point, but if it happened, it happened in opposition explicitly because of the rampant takeover of leftist ideology in a lot of online spaces.

The left just gave up on gaming and online communities

I don't know if this is the right way to describe it. Certain kinds of leftists sure wanted to make those kinds of communities their own, but they irrevocably cleaved them apart.

Agreed on the rest, though. Musk at least sure made it seem like he was encountering DR talking points for the first time well after everyone else, after he bought Twitter.

That's a good point. My understanding was that those certain kinds of leftists tried to stop this, but were hamstrung by the problems in their own ideology and personal lives. They preferred keeping in step with the largely unpopular ideology of the then-elite (social justice) to actually reaching people, and they chose to give up those communities rather than give up their own ideology. I don't think those communities have really been cleaved apart either - I'm in a bunch of them and I can see people from all over the ideological spectrum in most.

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