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