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I mean, just do a search on his profile, it comes up quite a lot (1, 2, 3), and I don't know how you want to invoke his name without either implying authoritarian measures, or being deceptive... and I'm pretty sure Trace is not about to start advocating for the execution of drug dealers.
Yes. I don't care about him starting The Schizm (it was no worse an act than the spinoff of /r/CWR, and no more successful for that matter), nor do I care about him being a partisan (aren't we all?). What bothers me is that I feel like I've been played for a fool by taking his complaints seriously. Originally I understood his grievances were about being mistreated, "muh miserable scolds and ankle-biters", and as far as complaints go it's pretty valid. People got pretty jaded here, there's a background radiation of hostility to anyone with his views, fair enough I wouldn't want to hang out in an environment like that either, if the roles were reversed. So when someone raises an objection like that I try to hear them out, and see if there's a way individual users could do something to make posting here more tolerable (funnily enough I never seem to get much of an answer for the latter, or there's a clear implication of "no - get rid of the background radiation, or bust").
So now some time has passed and I mulled over some of the conversations with him, and my only conclusion is that the mistreatment was at most an excuse, and the grievance was actually about the ideological distance. "Oh noes, you guys didn't like my LOTT hoax (please forget that the B&R audience had pretty much the same reaction to it)", or "oh noes, FC doesn't want to live in the same country as me". When I do the role-reverso on that one I come up empty. If I could politely listen to him as he unironically defended surrogacy, I'm sure he can handle hot takes like "I don't want to share a political jurisdiction with people opposed to my core values".
"Porque no los dos?", you might ask, his issue might both the ideological distance and the mistreatment. Sure, and I'll even grant that the background environment here absolutely is an issue, the problem is that given who he picked to found his "better" alternative to the Motte, we know he doesn't really care about people with other viewpoints being mistreated. This leaves us only with the second complaint, which, as far as I'm concerned, leaves us with nothing. Now maybe it's all a big misunderstanding and I'm a big dum-dum for not noticing what the core of the issue was about, but like I said I feel like an idiot for taking the bait.
I know Trace personally and he is in fact in favor of executing drug dealers. Your inability to understand his politics makes me skeptical of your ability to psychoanalyze him.
Did he ever express that publicly?
In my defense he's not making himself easy to understand. When you get the chance, can you ask him why he's in favor of executing drug dealers, but against lethal self-defense when faced with a lynch-mob?
I don't know if he's said it publicly, but you had it right here, Trace invokes LKY to imply authoritarian measures. You got most of the way to understanding it and I think this was because it was easy.
I think you are strawmanning because I don't understand him to be against self-defense from people faced with a lynch-mob. If I'm mistaken about this you can provide a link to him saying so, but otherwise I'm comfortable assuming this to be another case of you imagining your political enemy to hold beliefs he does not actually hold.
In all his time posting here, he never expressed a sentiment close to anything like "execute drug dealers", whenever he mentions Lee Kuan Yew he talks about bland things like "excellence", and the centrist-liberal audience he's trying to gather would blow a gasket if you recommended such authoritarian measures. I dunno, maybe he's hiding his power level, but I hardly find that interpretation more charitable.
Since you (wisely) demand a link for my claim about his opinions, I hope you understand that I'll need more than your say-so on this one.
Here you go
I asked Trace about executing drug dealers, his words:
That oughta be good enough for you. Now, about that link I asked for? Because I checked his Twitter for Rittenhouse and the literal first result says
You're 0 for 2 here.
Not really. A privately communicated "well not really my top priority, but quite possibly, if more people thought like me", is not exactly what I'd call a ringing endorsement.
It's right there, directly above your comment?
The words "Here you go" are a link to my own comment which is not helpful when I requested a link to Trace saying something.
Oh, I meant to link the same comment later linked by FCFromSSC.
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