Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
The third paragraph in my post was an attempt at pointing to some of the evidence I have seen of the rightward shift in art and culture. Others would be the podcast The Perfume Nationalist, countless tumblrs I've seen lately that glorify poor white underdog Trump's America type imagery and identity, and so on. Also the Barragan Spring 2023 fashion show, and the fashion brand called Praying. Brandy Melville. Recent Prada.
As I said in my last paragraph, most of the people in the scene are sort of doing this shift covertly and hiding behind a mirage of ambiguity as to what they are doing (for example, the Red Scare subreddits are filled with people who have no apparent awareness of the rightwing nature of most of the talking points presented on the show.) So it makes evidence difficult to point at. Indeed, much of art and fashion is based on "seeming" rather than anything overt. For example, I can look at Nicholas Ghesquiere's recent collections from Louis Vuitton and see his weird ugly belle epoque-meets-18th century panniers as a kind of rightwing trolling misogynistic hostility against modern women, while the same modern and progressive feminist women can look at the same garments and imagine them as empowering pieces to help them be single mothers with, or whatever.
I don't think that art and fashion, or the politics of people who participate in creating culture, is the sort of thing that you can study, so I don't know how I could provide sources other than by relating my personal anecdotal observations. I'm not going to dox myself but I can tell you that in the least, I'm very interested and personally invested in the creative industries and read themotte enough to be able to identify newly emerging rightwing patterns when 5 years ago you would have gotten you canceled to the ends of the earth for the same thing.
As an aside, I posted in the small scale thread because I didn't really want to attract the hostility and pedantry of the main thread but it seems I've attracted it anyway. I enjoy themotte because I think most of the posters are smart and have unique points of view but the aggression can really be a lot to take when I'm just looking for a more friendly conversation sometimes. I wish there was another thread that was more low stakes than this one, but the friday fun thread says it's not for culture war content so I don't know what to do.
Post as a standalone text post. It doesn't get nearly the engagement typically, only the interested people are clicking.
On your thesis, I think the problem with the evidence for "The Creatives are turning to the Right!" is that it's very "The Boy who cried wolf!" if you've hung around the dissident right wing internet for a minute. It's the Right wing equivalent to "Goldbugs have accurately predicted 14 out of the last 4 recessions" or (if you're familiar with fashion blogs) the way between 2010 and 2020 I read post after post calling that the skinny silhouette was over and it was all about loose pants now. The same articles that are written about the stylish RedScare girls were written in 2015-2016 about how Richard Spencer and Milo represented a new, well read, funny and good natured, nattily dressed and undercutted white nationalism. That wave didn't happen.
Now, in the year of our Lord MMXXII both the goldbugs and the loose pants posts have become right, we are seeing ruinous inflation and skinny jeans are "off trend." So maybe they're just ahead of their time, but when it comes to fashion how do you distinguish "ahead of your time" from "just plain ol' wrong?" I'm not sure. And how do you time it? I'm really not sure, or I'd be richer. Fwiw, I'm still not sure inflation is even a valid concept when so many goods are so much cheaper (or higher quality) than they once were, at the same time that other goods are vastly more expensive; I'm not sure we're seeing inflation as much as price divergence, and the internal mechanics of calculating the CPI are going to have bigger effects than ever, so even then the goldbugs aren't really right.
In this case I find the evidence of the shift to the right among creatives to be weak. The redscare girls are cute, but the "big break" their fans are panting over is a secondary character's love interest on one premium cable TV show; not even a starring role off Broadway or something. Righties are dreaming on Kanye and Kyrie as "big gets" for their team. Kanye's best years are behind him, kids conceived when their parents hooked up at a party listening to "Gold Digger" are 17 now; for us oldies it's equivalent to, when I was 17 in 2009, the right wing celebrating getting Eddie Van Halen to shift Right wing. Kyrie's politics just imploded a high priced superteam that was already selling finals tickets. Whatever your thoughts on the vaccine, Shaq had the best line on it from an NBA perspective: "I played with Kobe, I played against Michael; if Kyrie tried that shit on them they would have pinned him down in the locker room and injected him themselves."
Now maybe Dasha gets the Oscar in a big film next year, Kanye comes out with his Blood on the Tracks coming off the wreckage of his marriage like Dylan before him, and Kyrie and Ben Simmons lead some team to the finals and win co-MVP next year. But I'm not sure I see it.
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