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.
I have to admit, I'm struggling to feel a lot of sympathy for Cooper here. When you put out a bowl of honey, you don't really get to complain that flies show up. When you put a bird-feeder in your yard, you don't get to complain when it attracts birds. When you leave your food scraps uncovered, you don't get to complain when raccoons find their way to your bin. Likewise when you make a name for yourself sharing edgy anti-semitic views on the internet, you probably shouldn't complain when you get a following of edgy anti-semites. What did you think was going to happen?
(If anybody is inclined to quibble, I am taking Holocaust denial and sympathy for Hitler or the NSDAP as reasonable public signals of anti-semitism - that is, as views that a person would be vanishingly unlikely to voice for non-anti-semitic reasons. Even if you think that Cooper specifically is a disinterested truth-seeker who for some reason is inclined to doubt the reality of extremely well-attested historical events, there's no denying that what is communicated by the views he has shared is sympathy for anti-semitism.)
What should I do here other than point and laugh? Fuentes and the Groypers are ridiculous parodies of human beings. BAP and his crowd are also ridiculous parodies of human beings. Cooper attracted them. Well then. Let them fight.
I don’t know about Holocaust denial, but sympathy for Hitler on the basis of ‘communism is the literal worse thing in the universe, we erred by going into Berlin instead of Moscow, this is chapter one in democrat’s untrustworthiness on the issue, 6 million Jews would have been a small price to pay to end communism there and then’ is not an opinion that you would never hear from not-otherwise-antisemitic anti communist hardliners.
I feel like the widespread availability of other anti-communist icons means that I would still be quite suspicious of someone who claims to admire Hitler on purely anti-communist grounds.
That is, 1) there are countless other figures you could choose, so the choice of Hitler specifically, given all his other baggage, causes me to wonder about the person's motives, 2) Hitler failed to stop the communists and his tenure ended with a self-inflicted bullet wound to his own head while the hammer and sickle flew over the Reichstag; why not hold up a successful anti-communist instead?, and 3) it seems like most of the obvious reasons why someone would hate communism should also incline one to hate Hitler and Nazism. Do you hate tyrannical governments? Eccentric dictators who kill millions of their own people? Totalitarianism, or rule by terror? The over-centralisation of power and destruction of both political and civic liberty? It seems like most of the convictions that would plausibly make you anti-communist, at least in the 21st century, would make you anti-Nazi as well.
So if I met somebody who was vocally sympathising with Hitler on the basis of anti-communism, I think I would still raise an eyebrow, to say the least.
I think the best case scenario for unironc admirers of Hitler, for me, would be the number of colonial or post-colonial leaders outside the West who've been fond of him. The narrative there is fairly straightforward - he was a nationalist leader of a country defeated by the Western powers who embarked on self-strengthening projects. It does not hurt that postcolonial leaders themselves are often dictators and therefore more inclined to judge another dictator positively. Add in that many such leaders either don't know and don't care about Jews at all (e.g. East Asian leaders), or have some level of anti-semitism themselves (e.g. Arab leaders), and that part isn't decisive for them.
Cooper is not merely angling towards anti-communism (where, as you note, there'd be a number of more successful and less odious icons you could hitch your wagon to). He, as far as I can tell, genuinely favors something fascism-adjacent* and is trying to rehabilitate far-right authoritarianism.
Even extending him the charity of assuming he's merely interested in the hard core right-wing authoritarianism and not the genocide, this is awkward for him in several respects. The first is simply that most of his co-partisans are howling bigots, which is embarrassing when you're trying to come across as serious and respectable. Even if you yourself are immaculately well-behaved, you're going to be tarnished by association. The second is that if you're trying to pitch respectable fascism, the historical record of the Nazis is a big problem. Even people who might be on board for the strict top-down social regulation are liable to balk at the aggressive expansionist wars and industrialized mass murder.
So on the one side, you have him here rebuking other parts of the far-right for being indecorous. On the other side, you have him downplaying Nazi atrocities as a combination of tragic misadventure and "the commies made me do it". The end goal is to move fascism closer to the Overton Window and people like the groypers are an impediment to that goal.
*he seems to be somewhat cagey about his actual preferred political arrangement, but his anti-liberalism combined with some of his other statements plus that very caginess makes me strongly suspect that his actual views are well beyond the pale and he's hiding his power level.
This is going another direction, I suppose, but I also find Hitler an odd choice if your goal is to rehabilitate far-right authoritarianism in a general sense, and if you're not interested specifically in Jews or Germany. There would also seem to be plenty of great examples from the same period - you could always idealise Mussolini or perhaps Dollfuss, but if they're too much of failures for you, there's still Franco or Salazar. If you allow yourself to include thinkers, there are plenty of far-right writers and thinkers in the 20s and 30s who don't have Hitler's baggage.
I recall once knowing someone who identified openly as 'a fascist', but immediately qualified that to explain that she's anti-Hitlerite, and is instead more along Dollfuss' lines, and took heavy inspiration from José Antonio Primo de Rivera. It's possible to adopt a fascist-ish position along those lines, while resolutely condemning anti-semitism.
The problem, I suppose, is that that doesn't get you attention. The moment you say the F-word you are associated with Hitler whether you like it or not, and if you don't say it, well, you're just some weirdo enthusiast for a bunch of obscure thinkers no one's ever heard of. It's optimising for being unique and special in the vast terrain of weird internet politics nerds, rather than for appealing to real people or building any kind of movement.
The reason why you'd want to rehabilitate Hitler (aside from the straightforward reason that you think Hitler had some pretty interesting ideas and gets a bad rap) is that Hitler and the Nazis are by their mere existence are uniquely delegitimizing for the authoritarian right in a way virtually no other part of the ideological spectrum has to contend with.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know how long you've been in hibernation, but no, the problem is that it doesn't work, and gets you called a Nazi regardless of whether or not you use the F-word, or are even anywhere near the ideas you're discussing.
Let me rephrase. Let's consider the possible options here, for someone who is genuinely fascinated by fascist thinkers from the 20s and 30s:
You don't call yourself a fascist. Either: 1) people identify you as a fascist anyway, into the ghetto you go, or 2) people don't identify you as a fascist but you're an obscure weirdo interested in irrelevant niche thinkers from a hundred years ago and get zero attention.
You do call yourself a fascist. Either: 1) people immediately associate you with Hitler and you lose all credibility, or 2) your pseudointellectual protestations of not being that kind of fascist lead to endless obscure hair-splitting that stand in the way of any wide appeal.
The problem is that there is no way forward for this kind of movement. The Hitler/Nazi/fascist brand is completely tainted. It does not work, and no amount of hair-splitting about different kinds of fascism or fascist-adjacent politics suffices to defend you.
The people closest to that space who are most successful - think Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and AfD - have gotten there by vocally distancing themselves from any fascist associations and condemning them. Jean-Marie Le Pen was unelectable; Marine broke up his coalition and condemned his positions and allies. Meloni has distanced herself from and condemned the idea of fascism. If you call yourself fascist, or if you can be credibly accused of fascism, you are stuffed. The most successful nationalist right movements, even the ones that have some genealogical links to fascist movements, have needed to powerfully disassociate themselves from fascism and fascist thinkers.
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