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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I’m not sure if the premise is reasonable enough to even consider. The richest man in the world just spammed Twitter with stats about the Rotherham gangs, and weeks later threw a “Roman salute” at the inauguration. DEI is being dismantled. Major social media posts that mention Israel are inundated with Israel-critical commentary. January 6th protesters were unilaterally pardoned. Deportations are occurring. Fertility concerns are mainstream. How can I take —

the degradation of the online right

seriously as a premise? They’ve never been less degraded. “Moneyed interests” have been phenomenal for the “online right”. And it’s never been easier to get your thoughts disseminated, you can just post on substack and gain a following. Factions are also just how reality works, nothing wierd about that.

My own fear regarding the right is that the Zoomers are not sufficiently radicalized. They are the brainzlop generation raised on even more addicting media and games, having rap shoved down their throat like never before. They are true nihilists, not going down rabbit holes online. They haven’t received the sacred texts the infographics and documentaries. But I really have no idea if this intuition is correct, because I’m not in their social ecosystems, which afaik are fractured discord spaces rather than an image board or something. Maybe they’re doing fine actually.

The zoomers in the US are less than half white. Israel posts on social media have been responded to with hardcore anti-Israel replies for 20+ years, the only thing that slightly varies is who is criticizing who. Musk’s salute was a weird autistic thing and Bibi came out swinging by saying he’s a huge friend of Israel, as did the ADL. There’s no plan to deport more than a few hundred thousand illegal criminals and do more border pushback, NOBODY has a serious plan to build the infrastructure to deport 13+ million illegal migrants including those in the US for 10/20/30/40 years. The Rotherham posting did nothing because Labour has a large, unassailable majority in the British parliament until 2029. Fertility concerns are mainstream in every developed countries from Norway to Korea to Canada, but given that even highly aggressive plans like Hungary’s have been only very very modestly successful and they’re still well below replacement it seems unlikely anything’s going to happen in the US soon (especially because any viable plan will likely be very costly). So again, dr x types don’t seem to be winning much yet.

Your points mostly boil down to, “things aren’t good because things aren’t absolutely perfect”, but for a variety of important reasons this is not the correct mindset to have. Things are 10x, 100x better for the “online right”. They are in the ear of Musk and the President, they aren’t cancelled online, their points are regurgitated to the masses on Twitter and Tucker and podcasts. The trajectory is all anyone should care about, and not just in politics but as a general principle. If we are playing a skill-based longterm resource acquisition game, and I just took the controller from my retarded younger brother, I don’t particularly care if my opponent has obtained 70% of the resources, because in just a few turns I’ve acquired 25% more than before, and this is iterative and compounds. The “online right” is gaining permanent resource acquisitions, from which they can generate and regenerate more units, after being frozen and isolated in their Valley Forge moment. New Overton Windows are broken daily.

Now, if you are rightwing and want the acquisition to continue, you need “morale”, a concept studied to death in business and sports and war and child prodigies. What maximizes right wing morale? Obviously not what you posted or the weird OP post. Morale is maximized when reasonably high expectations of individual output are maximally reinforced, when the variety of evolutionary output modifiers are aligned to a collective interest. Essentially, is every milestone to the correct desired result fully celebrated and appreciated? This requires recognizing improvements. Just like if you’re trying to raise a child prodigy, you celebrate his performance of twinkle twinkle just as hard as you celebrate his double thirds etude at 16. So, yes, deporting more illegals is just as important to celebrate as deporting all of them. This is how morale works. (And actually this is still an issue with the Right, I don’t think they’ve grasped that they can utilize morale at a population level to further accomplish cultural goals).

Now to nitpick,

Israel

What I’ve seen is that they have never been criticized as much as today, outside of astroturf factories like front page Reddit. Tucker having Sachs on to talk about Israel controlling our foreign policy is also highly significant as a development.

Rotherham

This posting was for us, not them. You’re not going to persuade me that hundreds of millions of Americans reading about the mass rape of British by Pakistani Muslims isn’t significant lol

Fertility

Genuinely I feel that this is a solved problem. We know it has to do with how we raise girls and how we mete out status. This can be overcorrected in a generation, and if the Right is smart, they will correct it only amongst themselves.

You’re not going to persuade me that hundreds of millions of Americans reading about the mass rape of British by Pakistani Muslims isn’t significant lol

Yeah I don’t think it’s significant because hostility toward Muslim immigration and dislike of Pakistan is likely extremely common amongst Americans who saw those tweets and has been since at least 2001. Speaking of related events we can look at the way that the ‘Muslim ban’ went in 2017, or indeed the fact that even that excluded Pakistan.

Essentially, is every milestone to the correct desired result fully celebrated and appreciated? This requires recognizing improvements. Just like if you’re trying to raise a child prodigy, you celebrate his performance of twinkle twinkle just as hard as you celebrate his double thirds etude at 16. So, yes, deporting more illegals is just as important to celebrate as deporting all of them.

Or, as many have suggested, it’s some limited meat for the base (much of it, see the birthright citizenship thing, will be held up in the courts or stopped outright) before two years of business as usual, the likely losing of the house and then an excuse for two more years of nothing before someone else is elected.

Or, as many have suggested, it’s some limited meat for the base (much of it, see the birthright citizenship thing, will be held up in the courts or stopped outright) before two years of business as usual, the likely losing of the house and then an excuse for two more years of nothing before someone else is elected.

A few years ago all they had to look forward to was being cancelled from the internet, debanked, and left to post on 4chan while eating beans out of a can bought with pennies from a sock.

Things are looking up.