This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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.
Wow isn't it crazy that somebody would just outright demand that you denounce your racial identity if you want to be considered an ally? That must really be terrible. Jews would never do such a thing to Gentiles. /s
But your post is missing the most important bit of context, which is that both MartyrMade and Dave Smith were on Joe Rogan's show. This might on the surface appear shocking and scandalizing because WWII Revisionism and anti-Zionism are ostensibly being platformed on one of the most important shows in the world. But what Nick Fuentes and many others outside his orbit among the "anti-semitic Dissdent Right" are perceiving is heterodox political perspectives previously monopolized by the DR become appropriated and platformed but stripped of actual criticism of Jews.
Dave Smith and Douglas Murray argue over Israel, but the only thing they agree on is that antisemitism is the most evil thing in the world and Jews can never be criticized as such. This is significant because it follows the dialectical approach that antisemites allege is used to manufacture consensus. You don't maintain consensus on a topic like anti-semitism by just making the pro-Israel side win the debate. You do it by making sure that both the anti-Israel and pro-Israel positions are aligned on opposition to the Jewish Question. So these figures like Dave Smith coming to represent the "anti-Israel" side of the debate is, by their interpretation, a manifestation of the approach used to build consensus on something like the JQ. It's in other words a false opposition. A true opposition would be an anti-Israel perspective that is likewise critical of Jewish behavior as such, but that won't be represented in the public debate because it's supposed to be beyond debate.
With MartyrMade also renouncing the "JQ" it contextualizes the fact he was platformed. And likewise Curtis Yarvin, himself Jewish, also gets platformed as ostensibly the most edgy intellectual on the Internet. He has said, nearly exactly, "everything about WWII was a lie except the Holocaust." Oh really, everything was a lie except the abusrd story of millions being tricked into walking inside death showers? As a result, whether you are on the "most extreme" end of WWII Revisionism as represented by someone like Yarvin or MartyrMade, or on the most extreme end in the orthodox narrative, both sides agree on the critical aspects of the Holocaust narrative and the imperative to denounce the JQ.
Of course BAP is himself Jewish, and he was not upfront about that fact. He adopted a hyper "Bronze Age" and Aryan aesthetic and notably, as you mentioned, he is also essentially opposed to the JQ. It's reminiscent of the biblical story of Jacob putting on a disguise of hairy fur to trick his blind father Isaac into believing he was Esau. BAP, Jewish, presents as Aryan to acquire a certain audience but then is sure to steer his followers away from antisemitism.
The point being, the backlash against MartyrMade is not simply because some Twitter dude stepped out of line on the JQ, it's people like Fuentes correctly pointing out that these historical and social critiques of the WWII narrative and Zionism are being appropriated but stripped of any critical analysis pertaining to the JQ- so we are witnessing a new "boundary" in the debate on these topics but they remain a false opposition meant to protect a social consensus around the perception of Jews.
WW2 revisionism always had anti-american strands as well as anti-jewish ones (perhaps not as prominently in America itself?). BAPists are not taking the serial numbers off your stuff, they are reinterpreting the anti-american versions as being about the blue empire. Being broadly familiar with the european right that sure was what I thought moldbug was doing.
I personally know someone who believes a lot of things about WW2 are lies but not the holocaust, and is also antisemitic.
Yes, but blue empire is not explained by Winston Churchill it's explained by the Holocaust mythos. This is acknowledged by Douglas Murray, who admits that his chief concern with those like Daryl Cooper is not with Winston Churchill per se but it's with young right-wingers rejecting the moral lessons of the Holocaust.
So you have Douglas Murray saying we can't engage in WWII Revisionism because it would threaten to undermine the moral lessons of the Holocaust. Then you have the BAPists and Yarvin who engage in WWII Revisionism but stripped of criticism of the Holocaust mythos. So you have a false opposition, Douglas Murray and Yarvin may as well agree if they both affirm the foundational myth of Blue Empire.
Actually, funnily enough Yarvin just last week on Twitter called himself a Holocaust Denier because he believes Raul Hilberg's estimate of 5.1 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
This is reaching levels of "false opposition" on totally unprecedented levels, with Holocaust Believers trying to frame themselves as Deniers on the public stage. It's subversive.
The culpability of Winston Churchill to the outbreak of the conflict is totally irrelevant to the Western Psyche. So engaging in "WWII Revisionism" without critically engaging the Holocaust is a false opposition to the WWII mythos.
Many such cases, and the function of the "Daryl Cooper vs Douglas Murray" dialectic and the Yarvin "I'm a moderate Holocaust denier because I believe Raul Hilberg" is to keep it that way.
I think you have an inflated sense of your factions importance. Not all is done to address you specifically. This is obviously-to-everyone not serious and edgy for its own sake, which he has done in many directions.
Disagree. The lead-up to WW2 turns into the "warning signs".
Why? Whats the point of someone who believes the holocaust but rejects its moral lesson? It seems to me rather that if its really important to you to deny it, you kind of believe the lesson.
But it's not edgy at all. "I believe Raul Hilberg" is perfectly mainstream. He's trying to take a perfectly mainstream position and repackage it to pose as edgy when it's not edgy at all. So you have the mainstream position - Raul Hilberg, and what is presented as the edgy by the "moderate Holocaust denier." It's the same picture.
It wouldn't surprise me if Yarvin one day actually does take a "moderate Holocaust Denier" position something like "there was clearly a Genocide, but gas chambers disguised as shower rooms? Come on folks." But Yarvin and BAPs highly selective gullibility on the gas chamber story speaks volumes.
It's true that "this is like the lead-up to WWII" is often invoked, but that is always invoked as a nod to the Holocaust and genocide as a terminal impact of not following whatever foreign policy is advocated for by the person invoking this. The "warning sides" leading up to WWII invoked to justify things like the Iraq wars, war with Iran, etc. is always an invocation of the Holocaust mythos to justify aggression against somebody else.
There are incredibly important lessons in the Holocaust mythos. The lessons surround extremely important topics like means and motives for pscyhological warfare, deception, the art of the Big Lie, the way that a religio-cultural narrative can shape not only the moral narrative of a society but radically change the genetic fabric of a civilization within a single generation. It's a hard lesson about a mode of racial aggression and conflict that is imperceptible to an average person who goes to watch Schindler's List in a theater and becomes profoundly moved.
It's not about rejecting the moral lessons of the Holocaust, which can be rejected independently, it's about the lessons learned from a critical analysis of how this modern-day Exodus myth became the bedrock of Western mythology and its moral compass snowballing into Civil Rights, Zionism, tolerance, racial diversity, mass immigration and genetic replacement, wokeism... Yarvin and BAP, with their highly selective gullibility, are gatekeeping those lessons from their audience.
The edgy thing is saying that youre any kind of holocaust denier even when its entirely unnecessary to communicate your position. They are the same picture indeed; I just disagree that anyone is fooled in the way you say, and thats so obvious that it cant have been the intent.
A tightly coupled package is not "all about" the one piece that you love to talk about. Certainly the uses against Putler recently have no even pretend connection to killing jews.
That part at least Im fairly sure can be understood independently. And... look, you have all these smart sounding reasons why its important to talk about holocaust denialism, but youve seen a lot of it, the people writing it and their emotional emphasis etc, and I think you understand why it seems like slave morality to me - so, why isnt it?
I don't understand at all why it would seem like slave morality to you, the Holocaust mythos is the bedrock of Western slave morality. Holocaust Revisionism is fundamentally a criticism of hegemonic Western slave morality, which is why it is treated so seriously by the powers that be. Foremost it's true- the Holocaust narrative itself is untenable in the long run. Millions of people were tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower, then they were all gassed with an insecticide, cremated, and the ashes scattered so there are no actual remains left to corroborate those claims? And all of this escaped any concrete reference in the enormous body of documentary evidence? It's a ridiculous story that lacks even a remotely reasonable level of physical or documentary evidence to support it. Even Grok takes the Revisionist side of some central issues.
Holocaust Revisionism is necessary foremost because it's true, and because it's true it genuinely undermines the Western Slave morality that is predicated on it. Your notion that disbelieving the ridiculous story of millions murdered inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms and then magically disappeared is supposed to be "slave morality" couldn't be further from the truth. The Holocaust is a mythos that elevates Jewish concentration camp inmates as the war's greatest victims and history's greatest heroes who demand eternal holy reverence and worship as representing resistance to European empire. The notion that disbelieving that narrative is slave morality is just ridiculous.
Slave morality is not the belief that you are guilty, its a standard of good and evil. This is usually communicated together with the holocaust story (as well as elsewhere), not because of a logical dependence but because both are needed functionally to get to the "you are guilty" point.
Now, if someone is very invested in the idea that the germans actually passed that standard, and the jews are the evil oppressive ones, then I think he believes in slave morality. Its certainly possible to be a holocaust denier who considers it important in the purely tactical way you outlines above, but that just isnt the impression I have of them, and yes you do know what I mean. (You personally are far from the worst on that front, but it does still seem to be there)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link