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This started as a reply to @SecureSignals @RandomRanger and others but I didn't want to leave it buried at the bottom of a 20 comment long chain as I feel like it warrants examination on it's own.
I posit that the biggest obstacle to the online dissident/woke/identitarian right gaining influence and a wider audience in the US is not that it is rife with grifters, feds, and cosplayers. (Though it is) It's biggest obstacle is that it doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from the online woke/identitarian left in the eyes of people who are not members of the priestly caste (IE Journalists, Academics, etc...). While I acknowledge that the identitarian right has managed to make inroads within the priestly caste (See Yarvin's recent interview in the NYT), it seems to me that the influence of priestly caste has been waning overall (See the election of Donald Trump).
I get the impression that a lot of commentors here don't grasp just how unpopular identity politics is in "normie" spaces. In fact, I would say that to call it "unpopular" may be grossly under selling it. Leftists often lament the weakness/lack of class consciousness in the US, that the poor, more often than not, do not see themselves as "exploited" as much as they see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed". However I believe that this is a feature rather than a bug if one wants to live in a society with high trust and social mobility, and one of the things that distinguishes the US from other nations.
If the identitarian right and the wider priestly caste are going to hold on to Identity Politics as an organizing principal/value they are going to have to have to confront the fact that the perception of Identity Politics in the popular zeitgeist is that of an ideology for losers. An ideology for people too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy. An ideology for people who could not and therefore "Didn't Earn It". They will also have to overcome the perceived association of Identity Politics with Socialism, Marx, and other foreign (distinctly Un-American) influences. Specifically, those of the Indian sub-continent (IE the worst place on earth) and Europe (IE that socialist shithole our ancestors fled across the ocean to escape, and that we as Americans have expended untold millions in blood and treasure trying to protect from its own worst impulses).
Finally, there is the question of value added. Is the priestly caste even relevant these days? Are the jobs that the priestly caste performs mostly fake? Could we do away with them entirely? If so, is trying to align with them a smart move?
Imagine a sincere white supremacist, a walking talking Hollywood cliche with a shaved head, half a dozen kids, a wife he beats, and the 14 words tattooed on his back. How would you go about convincing him that he would be doing more to secure a future for his children (and his genes) by urging his son to associate with gay Catholics and non-binary/MTF cat-girls, than he would by letting his son date that thicc Latina from down the street?
I contend that these are the sort of issues that both the woke left and the identitarian right are going to have to grapple with if they don't want "Trumpism" to run the table on them, as much of the ground level opposition to wokism as it exists today is in reality opposition to identify politics as a whole.
Normies don't decide what's popular. They adapt to what people with power tell them is. I you aren't yet convinced of this you can look at all the people who will suddenly become fine with Trump and his administration when they are the ones distributing treasure.
The Marine Le Pen strategy of becoming more "normal" can be useful so as to avoid being pinned down in the margins of weirdness, but it's intrumental at best. Successful political movement are both pragmatic and uncompromising on their terminal goals. Lose either and you fail.
I think an even better example of this is Covid. A highly cautious view of Covid and of what measures were appropriate are highly correlated with class status and were particularly unpopular with less affluent, less white and overall less 'priestly' people both in the US and Europe. But at the end of the day, the priestly class still got its will for 1 to almost 3 years, depending on location, and hugely shifted norms of hygiene, social activity and economic behaviors like remote work among the rest of society. I still regularly see people here in Germany, mostly elderly and often of MENA heritage (confusing given that at group level they certainly had the least respect for any of the Covid theater), wearing a mask without covering their nose, and given the medical absurdity of this I struggle to think of this as anything other than an illustration of memetic elite dominance.
Uh, less affluent whites were the main group that hated the covid response, but minorities were big into it.
My impression is that in terms of organized political resistance middle and lower class whites were certainly the drivers of that, but in terms of simply not giving a shit and going on with life regardless of what the state says that's definitely more of a minority thing, at least here in Germany. For the US I'm less sure, but it also depends more on the group. Using vaccine uptake as a vague proxy, Asians were all-aboard, but they're also more affluent on average, Hispanics were more likely than red whites but less likely than blue whites to take the vaccine, blacks were least likely overall. Another example are the riots after George Floyd's death which, while featuring plenty of white people as well, were disproportionately minority, and they were AFAIK the first large scale breakdown of public Covid discipline.
Blacks in the US didn’t get vaccinated because they don’t trust anything and that led to elaborate conspiracy theories about it making your testicles swell up so people would stop masking. Red whites didn’t get vaccinated because we hate the people telling us to. Hispanics were middle of the pack because that’s kind of their thing.
IME blacks held extremely covid conscious views, they just didn’t think that the vaccine was real or contact tracing would work- usually for Alex Jones type reasons. There were lots of demands for ‘everyone stays home for two weeks, even the grocery stores be shut down’. They were big on NPIs.
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I suspect vaccine uptake and masking would give you two entirely different answers. In the US, blacks had lower vaccine uptake, but at least anecdotally (and in some surveys), were more into masks.
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Also, when covid started to spread you officially were a weirdo for being concerned. Pelosi told people to go to Chinatown and hug an asian.
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This statement is false.
If it were true, the 45th president of the United States would have been either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, not Donald Trump.
Hillary and Jeb were both pretty universally hated by the normie class. The reasons likely to do with decades of the priestly class hating on them, sure, but it's the truth.
...and universally beloved by those in power. If normies only adapt to what people with power tell them to, one of them would have become president.
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