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Twitter saw Elon go full alt-lite on the British government after the Rotherham incident where he has been tweeting about it for the past week and it is glorious to see it. Leftists of course do not care about those girls getting raped and deflect the accusations outright by denying that the rapes happened in the first place.
Keir Starmer, the British prime Minister, made a statement on this going after Musk. In an interesting turn of events, Andrew Tate started a political party named Bruv with the intent of becoming prime minister of the UK while still not having had approval from the Romanian government to leave Romania.
Musk's talking points are positive for anyone who likes the truth, He pointed out the inflated numbers of sex offenders being Muslim migrants in other parts of Europe and has shown support for AfD in the past which is a centre-right party in Germany. The tech right seems to be bending the knee to the traditional right, in a way musk fighting for the h1b made others on it stick with him and similar people like Joe Lindsdale are now posting similar things.
This is very surface-level info, I post this because we are currently in the midst of what one may call a thermidor of sorts where people stopped using pronouns in their bios online and saw a rise of post-censorship worldview, the slop by James Lindsay which got him recognition gets him trashed whilst Musk posts Keith Woods on his timeline. The attempts by the online right got derailed badly post Charlottesville and Jan 6, the latter happening exactly 4 years ago. My main aim here is to get some perspective as to how things were during these two incidents during 2017 and 2021.
Edit - forgot to add Moldbug came up with a new piece directed to alon against the H1B and the O1 that was surprisingly not passive, I quite agreed with most points in it. Elon also gave a meek nod to Tate's LARP of a political run and posted memes about feds on Jan 6 and even questioned the deaths of officers on that day, to the point where the llm embedded in twitter tells you that the people listed all died of natural causes. Interesting times on Twitter.
Edit 2 - Musk tweeted Could what happened to the Yazidi people one day happen to Europe? and the 13 52 for Europe, are we back in 2016? His tweets led to inbreeding advocate Mohammad Hijab to go full mask off and talk about outbreeding native brits
Dude is speedrunning the alt-lite pipeline to a much darker form of enlightenment hopefully.
It's crazy Charlottesville was only
48 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.
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.
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 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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