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Notes -
Novel Developments on the Online Right
Certain factions of the Twitter dissident right were embroiled in the latest flare-up in a long running drama this week, as history podcaster Darryl Cooper (‘MartyrMade’) published his long awaited, much anticipated opinion on the Jewish Question on his Substack.
To understand what occurred, it is important to define the two broad factions of the general dissident right. That term is itself very vague, but I’ll define it relatively narrowly here as excluding mainstream new right MAGA (Loomer, LibsOfTikTok), tech-rightists and libertarians, heterodox types, WallStreetBets rightists, Rogan/Portnoy bros and the majority of religious traditionalists of the Deneen type, excluding those who specifically engage primarily with dissident right content.
The two groups have a lot of overlap; many follow and engage with both. Nevertheless, they have substantially different ideological poles.
I - Ideological Context
The first are the Groypers, for whom Nick Fuentes is both the central ideological figure and a kind of mascot, in that even people who make fun of him will acknowledge whether they are or aren’t aligned with him. The Fuentes right maintains an absolute focus on Jews as enemy, and opposition to Jewish influence as the primary goal of their movement. All Jews who do not denounce the Jewish race, Jewish behavior and any Jewish identity or culture with extreme fervour (Unz is, as far as I know, the only one to meet Fuentes’ standard) are the enemy. To a lesser extent, the Groyper right is likely also more sexist than other rightists, for whom homoerotic misogyny is more of a joke. Groypers, motivated substantially by hostility to Jews, are part of that more general constellation of Twitter antisemites, including both Islamists and that specific niche where the extremely anti-Zionist third-worldist left meets the right at the center of the Jackson Hinkle / Glenn Greenwald continuum. It would probably be wrong to describe the Fuentesverse as ‘part of’ the Andrew Tate-sphere in which young, third world men trade insults about the OnlyFans girls they jack off to and lament the state of modern women, but it would be fair to say that aspects of it are adjacent to it. They often have either ‘Christ is King’ or a bible verse about Jews in their social profile. They oppose mass immigration but consider it a secondary problem deriving from the Jewish one. The Fuentes and associates faction have genuinely come around to an organic kind of sympathy for Palestinian Arabs, shared victims of their mutual enemy, will show emotion about the plight of Gazan babies etc and are often fans of Islamic views on women and Jews.
The second faction is the BAPists and a constellation of surrounding figures (2CB, drukpa, 0HPLovecraft). They are descended from the ‘classical’ NrX movement of Land and Yarvin, but are concerned primarily with immigration and are much less serious. While the Groypers are predominantly white ethnics, Hispanics and so on, the BAPists are predominantly Jewish and Anglo. They may be performatively antisemitic or criticize some zionist influence on US foreign policy, but have no affection for the Palestinians and are often implicitly supportive of Israeli policy against Gaza (especially shortly after October 7), even if they think Israel has no real future (as the movement’s namesake does). BAPists are overtly concerned with aesthetics, their homoerotic nationalism and misogyny is essentially aesthetic; in person they and Passage press types are closely linked to the Dimes Square / NYC arthoe scene. They are probably more racist than Fuentes posters, who are performatively white nationalist but often in practice conceive of a kind of multi-ethnic antisemitism coalition. They are more likely to be atheist, agnostic or look down on zoomer Christian wignatism. Both BAPists and Fuentes posters are very concerned by demographic change, especially in Europe, but the former is more likely to post charts and the latter is more likely to post Conor McGregor speeches and videos of riots outside of asylum seeker housing. Neither is overly fond of Trump, but on balance BAPists are better connected in the administration and less likely to go full anti-Trump the way Fuentes did before the election.
Fuentes and allies spend their time calling BAPists Jews, BAPists spend their time calling Fuentes supporters brown (often accurately in both cases), and so the world spins for this strange little subculture. Except, of course, when it occasionally interacts with figures of somewhat greater prominence on the right.
II - The Buildup
The stakes were high, as Cooper has a mainstream-ish young male conservative audience, was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s online show, and recently committed himself to a form of WW2 revisionism that - while by no means fully or even mostly aligned with the ‘traditional’ neo-Nazi / Hitlerite narrative - is certainly much more sympathetic to German war aims and grievances than the mainstream postwar telling (essentially a repeating of Pat Buchanan’s Churchill takedown from the early 2000s). More significant than his day job, though, was his posting history on Twitter / X, which involved frequently retweeting innuendo about elites, Epstein, Israel and Jews that strongly indicated he might have Groyper aligned views. He had also hinted on his Tucker appearance that there were things he couldn’t talk about on the show, to which Carlson nodded sagely then changed the topic, which further suggested that he might, in the eyes of that online audience, be based™️. Cooper had engaged heavily with the pro-Palestine segment of the dissident right on Twitter, and was - while opposed to mass immigration to Europe - also relatively sympathetic to the plight both of Arabs during the 20th century and of African Americans in his long series on Jonestown. While both BAPists and Fuentes types are frequently racist against black people, the former is moreso and the sum of these hints, views and productions suggested he was more on the side of the Groypers than the former.
III - The Opinion
Cooper pulls no punches in the piece. While he acknowledges criticism of some Jewish organisations and the zionist lobby in the United States, the majority of his article is a criticism of his own supporters for being, in his opinion, obsessed with hating Jews.
Naturally, the BAPists retweeted this to them very reasonable and intelligent take, and the Groypers duly declared Cooper a traitor, shill, liar, hack, fed and subversive. The actual impetus behind the timing of the post appears to have been an escalation in a long-running series of attacks by Fuentes and his supporters on Dave Smith, a Jewish libertarian comedian strongly critical of Israel and a personal friend of Cooper. Smith wasn’t hostile to Fuentes, in fact he’d had Fuentes on his show, but then there had been some personal falling out, and then Fuentes had set the Groypers against Smith. Less charitably, Cooper had also been the subject of press attention from the New York Times recently, including an upcoming profile. Cooper’s own audience had a mixed response, some agreed, some were very upset, some asked for clarification. In the comments section, he assured his audience that his ‘Hitler was misunderstood’ take was still very much coming.
The posting war continues, with each side claiming the other is retarded and are shills, Jews, brown or feds as applicable.
I don't get it. Is this just a "narcissism of small differences" situation? "Jews are pernicious,
they should have been gassed, and Hitler wasn't such a bad dude, but that doesn't mean that you should hate them" doesn't really seem like a stable equilibrium.Whose opinion is this?
The first two are the opinions of people that Cooper doesn't block. Since he is blocking views he finds unacceptable, he must find these acceptable, or at least, not beyond the pale.
The third seems to be Cooper's own view, unless his article on how Hitler was misunderstood turns out to be an article about how Hitler was even worse than people think.
I don't see the reason for the one sentence strawman. To reply with a one sentence steelman of Cooper: 'Here are historical circumstance, here's why they came to be, here's the horrible outcome, here's what could have gone differently. By the way, don't hate people.'
I think the issue rests more with people who are unwilling to let go of a pseudo religious otherizing ahistorical narrative, similar to Douglas Murray on his recent Joe Rogan debate, rather than people forming opinions that exist outside the post war consensus.
I mean, I agree, it sure isn't a stable equilibrium for the church to sit idly by as heresy is spread. But I don't see why anyone should be concerned with the church.
It's a curious steelman that fully abstracts away all the details of the claims and the facts. Are we talking about the JQ or why a project went over budget?
And now I've fully lost sight of how this metaphor corresponds to reality at all.
We are talking about Darryll Cooper. I don't see how the steelman is abstracting anything relevant as Cooper, in his own words, describes himself and his viewpoint similarly, though at greater length. What claims and facts you refer to or their relevance, I am missing.
I'm referring to the paragraph written above, where I note that people like Douglas Murray take issue with the viewpoint of people like Daryll Cooper, who allow themselves to exist outside the post war consensus orthodoxy with regards to WW2. I assumed you were in a similar boat to Murray, and that when you referred to Coopers viewpoint as not being a 'stable equilibrium' you were referring to a similar contention, just relating to the JQ, not WW2. I'm happy to hear where I misread you and what you meant by 'stable equilibrium'.
How much of that is cognitive dissonance?
By "(un)stable equilibrium", what I meant is that if one, like Cooper seems to, admits that the following may be true, or at least are not obviously wrong:
Then I don't see how you can draw the line just there, and go no further to reach the obvious conclusion, which is:
And yet he seems to be in this position. I am not saying that he necessarily believes all the things in the first list, but he feels that they are at least understandable or positions that a reasonable person may hold. However, he feels that a reasonable person may not hold the positions that are a natural consequence of those opinions. This doesn't seem tenable to me.
You're morally framing these things. Cooper, as far as I can tell, wants to factually frame them.
The Holocaust was exaggerated
Jews influence a lot of the media
Jews influence the government
Jews have split loyalties
Hitler was not that bad
From there you don't need to hate jews. I don't know what Cooper thinks beyond that, but I would just demand they don't act like they are above the common courtesy everyone else has to show eachother.
For example, stop promoting the ethnic denigration of the people who allowed you to live in their countries. Stop dropping our bombs on your neighbors and then demand we take them in as refugees. Stop pathologizing and villainizing your hosts. Take an active role in caring for their wellbeing rather than being ambivalent about them and their future. If you want to be jewish and care for your people and culture, with the goal of maintaining both, that's great. But you can't do that at the same time as you undermine other peoples and their culture. That action can only lead to conflict.
I mean, if nigh every western leader can go to the wailing wall and proclaim their undying loyalty and friendship to Israel, surely jewish leaders can return the favor sometimes.
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Cooper has never said that the Holocaust was a good thing, or anything even close to that. And he never said that Hitler wasn’t that bad either. It sounds like your knowledge of Cooper’s opinions comes entirely from Bluesky character assassination tweets.
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