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What ancient Internet history can tell us about the rise of the Woke Right
A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of the Woke Right! We've discussed it before ourselves, opinion range from "it's an op" to "there might be something to it", but one way or the other, a decent chunk of the anti-woke coalition it's an issue that needs to be addressed.
Recently Douglas Murray went on Joe Rogan and had a conversation with Dave Smith about, among other things, the responsibility of influencers with huge platforms to the public. Smith and Rogan took the familiar position of "muh marketplace of ideas", while Murray believes that people with so much influence should be a bit more selective, because exposing the public to bad ideas will lead to some part of the audience uncritically adopting them.
The conversation made huge waves and sparked a massive discussion, articles by Konstantin Kisin, tweet storms by James Lindsay, follow up conversation between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, between Peterson and Lindsay, and more recently between Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. In short, though not all of them might put it in the same terms, some on the anti-woke side fear that following Trump's victory the right "got it's mojo back" and now some of it's more extreme ideas are entering the mainstream discourse, so the centrist liberals want to prevent the "pendulum swinging back"...
...and all I can think is "I've seen it all before"...
First as a farce...
Let me take you back to the year of our lord 2017. It wasn't that long ago, and yet the vibe of the time was so different it almost feels like it was all a dream. Back then the way to make money on big SocMeds was to clown on Social Justice, so everybody and their dog had to have a cartoon character Youtube channel deboonking Buzzfeed. The situation was so dire for SJs that any video trying to put their position forward would yield and endless stream of critical responses which, to add insult to injury, would end up filling the recommended feed of the original pro-SJ video. Trump has also just entered office for the first time, so in that atmosphere it felt like anti-woke liberalism is unstoppable. And then a few things happened:
With so much online hype in the air, a person going by the name "BasedMama" decided to take the anti-SJW phenomenon to the next level, and host an IRL event. I still unironically think this was a great idea, even now the Dissident Right regularly talks about the importance of real-world organising, and with a guest list consisting of massive influencers from Tim Pool to Sargon of Akkad, the event had the potential to be a huge success. I can't point to anything specific now, but I distinctly remember the SJWs genuinely unnerved by the prospect of it taking place...
...but luckily for them it crashed and burned at an astonishing pace. First, the invited guests started complaining about demands to sign NDA's and non-compete contracts. The smaller ones went along with it, but the bigger ones, many no strangers to the conference circuit, said they're having none of it. Tim Pool publically dropped out with a video to his fans, explaining why he's not going to be at the event. The organizers' attempts at damage control only exasperated the backlash, causing even more guests to drop out. It even turned out that the guest list announced during the crowdfunding campaign was a "fake it 'till you make it" thing and some of the big names never actually signed on.
More relevant to what I want to discuss here: the whole event was marketed as a "free speech" conference, so naturally it attracted the attention of "witches": HBDers, Alt-Righters, and others with ideas rejected by polite society, and as it turned out, by the organizers themselves, who were on record expressing sympathy for the ideas of Social Justice, just thought that their current iteration went too far. That's all perfectly valid as far as I'm concerned, no one is entitled to a slot at a conference, but the usual way to handle this sort of issue is to say "you're welcome to come, but golly gee, we ran out of time/space to host any more speakers/panels", but BasedMama et. al. decided to handle it in the worst possible way: announce the witches will have their panels to get the crowdfunding / ticket money of their audiences, and only then say "oopsie, we ran out of slots". What's worse, people quickly joined the dots and realized that it's only people with a specific kind of views that there seems to be no time for. The "free speech" event was quickly seen for a sham, and all except for the most diehard supporters dropped out. An event that could have plausibly attracted thousands ended up get 20-40 attendants, from what I recall.
Back in the online world the youtuber KrautAndTea decided it's time to balance out his usual dunking on feminists and Muslim-immigration-enjoyers with dunking on the more extreme elements on the right. He started accusing various B-List youtubers of being cryptonazis, of trying to lure people in with relatively inoffensive critiques of society, and then radicalizing them into the Alt-Right. Also, with videos like "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics (and Maths)" and "The Alt-Right is too Dumb for Genetics and Physiology", he decided to take on the Big Kahuna - HBD, or what was then going by as Race Realism.
What he did not take into account, however, was the possibility that the academic establishment sold him a bill of goods, and the actual science is much more on the HBDers' side than he expected... Various Alt-Right youtubers like Alt-Hype and JF Gariepy proceeded to take turns taking the piss out of him, and pointing out each and every way he was wrong. The familiar dynamic of critical responses appearing, and becoming more popular than the original "deboonking" video was now unleashed on Kraut. It did not go well for him. He ended up crashing out, got caught red-handed coordinating to flag Alt-Right videos, and coming up with some convoluted Discord schemes to humiliate his opponents. Long story short, he ended up having to take a hiatus from the internet, and to rebrand upon comeback.
Back before anyone really heard of influencer marketing, an amazing new app took the internet by storm - Candid, an online forum promising to host uncensored anonymous conversations. All your favorite youtubers were shilling it. It was the Raid, Shadow Legends of online forums... until it was all taken down by a single autistic NEET...
A youtuber going by HarmfulOpinions decided to take a deeper look at the app, and quickly found out that rather than being uncensored, Candid's moderation was powered by a woke AI. What is now accepted as a fact of life was enough to spark a massive controversy back then, not only against the company, but against the influencers that failed to do their due diligence before shilling a product. The CEO's attempts at damage control were hilariously inept, and only resulted in the hole being dug deeper, but more to the point, starved for cash in the wake of the Adpocalypse, the anti-SJW influencers decided to circle the wagons around Candid. Some realized they backed the wrong horse, and exited gracefully, but others tried using their superior numbers (both in terms of videos and their reach) to discredit HarmfulOpinions and paint him as a conspiracy theorist.
This too did not go well. Candid collapsed as a company, and the influencers involved in shilling it to the bitter end took a massive hit to their credibility.
If you want a glimpse into the past as I saw it, you can watch Mister Metokur's Tales of Trout, and the archive of Harmful Opinions' Candid series. I don't know if I actually recommend them unless you really have nothing better to do. I used to find them hilarious, but they just don't land the same way anymore. I will say they are interesting as a time capsule, and Harmful's videos in particular feels like a sign of things to come - scammy Indian CEO's, AI training to surveil and censor dissidents, conspiracy theories that are, in hindsight, naive to not believe in - that series has it all!
There was more to the story than these 3 events, of course, but those are the broad strokes of what I remember. The end result was pretty much a total collapse of the Youtube anti-SJW sphere, and gave rise to another trend called "Internet Bloodsports", aiming to center authenticity and direct confrontations over fake politeness and highschool Mean Girls games, but ended in whoring yourself out for superchats and brandishing firearms on the streets of Florida, while singing what might as well have been Kanye's latest hit.
More importantly, it was followed by the rise of BreadTube and nearly a decade of darkness, as far as internet discourse is concerned.
...then as a tragedy?
Now, it may seem like I'm putting all the blame on the left-liberal faction of the anti-woke / anti-SJW sphere, and as much as I have issues with them, I want to give them their due. Kraut was right about cryptonazis luring people in with more inoffensive stuff. We regularly see it happen right here on the Motte, with that dude that keeps nuking his accounts, so Douglas' Murray's "be careful what you're watering" argument is not wrong.
I’ve also seen enough crowds being manipulated that I can even understand his sudden turn towards trusting the experts, especially if you keep the previous argument in mind. The antidote to bad speech might be more speech, and sunlight might be the best disinfectant, but if there are crypto-authoritarians on the loose, who have no qualms about presenting themselves dishonestly, they might be able to win the crowd over long enough to take political control, and shut off all opposition. This is essentially what the woke left did, and it’s what some are afraid the woke right might pull off as well.
The problem is that the entire legitimacy of liberalism rests on the free exchange of ideas. This is especially true for the anti-woke ones, as they spent the last 8 years fending off accusation of Nazism themselves, and begging for a seat at the table. If they want to shut off the secretive and the dishonest that’s fair enough (though I will have question about Murray's quiet mumbling when his support for a new war in Iran was brought up), but they have an obligation to directly confront the open and the honest, even if they find their views disgusting.
I don’t mind being called “woke right”, if you can actually address my ideas head-on. I’ve said it before - it’s perfectly natural for liberals to attack me with all their vigor, because I oppose their fundamental values. It would be sad and disappointing if this didn’t illicit the kind of visceral reaction they are showing. However, I do mind being called “woke right” if it’s just a way to shut me out of a conversation, by slapping a scary label on me.
Actually, forget about me minding anything, the argument I’m trying to make here is that it will be a disaster for the liberals, if they keep trying to win by gatekeeping. It will be like training an AI on it's own output. A reasonable concern about about the pendulum swinging too far back, will end in declaring that wanting the economy to serve the people is fascist, finding racism in ham sandwitches, and deranged theories about angel summoners. And if you position yourself as an expert and spend all this time complaining about all these clowns hiding behind comedy when confronted on their takes about serious issues, maybe come up with a better argument then "people love talking about Paul Wolfowitz because his name starts with a nasty animal, and he's Jewish".
I reversed Marx' famous quip, because it's all fun and games when the story involves cartoon avatars, and characters with names like BasedMama and KrautAndTea, but when I see Conservative Inc. playing the same "you are wrong, and dumb for believing this" game that Kraut did, the same "we're for free speech, but you shouldn't be given such a big platform" game that Killroy did, and the same whisper networks that would try to psy-op you into believing someone's an insane conspiracy theorist now coordinating to make "Woke Right" a thing, I don't really feel like laughing. I've seen how the story involving a bunch of online autists ends, so when I see these dynamics play out on the scale of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, I get a bit nervous.
I would like to jokingly suggest just owning this one
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Woke right is not a thing: it never was a thing, because actual Nazis, fascists, and white nationalists don't use or accept critical theory. Any resemblance (da joos vs da whitey) is coincidental: the true similarity is that both wokism and fascism are illiberal, but for completely different reasons.
Let us use argumentum ad Hitlerum to demonstrate what I mean. Hitler is uncontroversially a Nazi, a fascist, and a white nationalist. To call him 'woke' is a definitional collapse. He's not building a intersectional coalition against Zionism and its supporters. He has a particular volkgeist and conceptions of ethnic superiority that is not postmodern in the least. (This is why hoteps aren't woke, despite arguably being the originator of the term: they're particular, not universal.)
It's dumb. It's dumb, lazy thinking: liberals playing definitional games and labels as if they mean anything. If you have a problem with white nationalists and cryptonazis, you can say so: that's a popular opinion in normieland. You don't need to invent fake terms that only you and a particular clique define.
Neil Shenvi has a few examples, surely? He cites Stephen Wolfe recommending using CRT's premises, and taking his opponents' weapons and growing stronger by them, and he explicitly refuses to abjure a critical theory approach. Shenvi also cites Abrahamsen to the effect of there being a 'Gramscian right', and credibly cites people like Sam Francis or John Fonte acknowledging Gramsci's influence on their own work.
That seems like a pretty reasonable prima facie case that at least some far-right or white-nationalist-adjacent people are genuinely influenced by critical theory.
I would make the argument that Gramsci's tactics are, by their nature, apolitical: and they are successful enough that even his most hated ideological enemies have adopted them because they are effective and they work. It is impossible to describe what the woke right is without describing it as a reaction to the woke left: its shadow and anima. Perhaps it was inevitable that the right absorb the insights of the left, and not stay static forever. It is an active dialectic, after all.
Note that rightists who know who Gramsci is a vanishingly small clique in any case.
But nevertheless, I wouldn't oversell the impact for 'A Case For White Nationalism' and other works like it. They are very clever works, throwing the prevailing orthodoxy's own logic against it. They have the benefit that woke structures do, in fact, exist to disenfranchise white men, and all they have to do is Observe while their opponents try to explain why their racially discriminatory policies are actually Equitable to a increasingly cynical audience. The woke right only exists in the imaginations of vanguardist liberals, kicked out of the progressive sphere but eager to gatekeep the populist right back to liberalism.
It won't work. But why it won't work is a whole essay in of itself.
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Normies are pretty burned out on accusations of nazi and racist and so forth. Also, the target pretty clearly isn't the normie masses, it's an inter-activist fight within what was until now a big-tent coalition on the right.
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Douglas Murray spent the first, like...hour of the podcast talking about how Darryl Cooper, the noted Winston Churchill historian, had spent his career tearing down Churchill and "just asking questions" about why Darryl is devoting so much of his time to focusing on Churchill.
Except in reality: Approximately a year ago, Cooper spent about 2 minutes making a throwaway comment about how he takes a devil's advocate position about Churchill with his friend, a big Churchill fan, as a way of riling him up and playing around with him. Douglass couldn't do 10 minutes of actual research into this topic before then spending an hour talking about how only experts, people who really understand the topic, should be allowed to talk about things publicly. Darryl Cooper in reality is a podcaster who puts out 30+ hour long series about things like: The Formation of Israel, The Civil Rights Movement/The People's Temple/Jim Jones, World War 2 from the perspective of the Germans[1], The History of Slavery, and The horror of war (a standalone episode called "The anti-humans".
[1]: His whole point with this, stated explicitly, is that Germany didn't just wake up one day and decide to be the Nazis, one of the most evil institutions to ever exist, and then at the end of the war just decide to stop being the Nazis. It was a long process of humans making (bad) human decisions. The implicit point here, and with almost all of his work, is that good people can be talked into doing really bad things, and to be cautious around "movements" (like The Peoples' Temple, or a lot of the civil rights groups) because they can slowly-then-suddenly turn into a nightmare.
Douglass showed his cards, and it turns out that he's an idiot with a nice voice. The Strange Death of Europe was a good book, but it turns out the person behind it is probably a fool.
The problem for Douglas with the DR is that he spent years doing talks and debates against mass immigration and anti-western thought where he based his whole rhetoric around the fact that, ultimately, 'we killed Hitler'.
When the foundation for that is questioned and the roles of good and bad are muddled or ignored, Doug has to respond.
It's a hallmark of what I would call, in the spirit of our new term; the faux Right. Every pontification towards what is good for Europeans has to be grounded in some form of bargain of what is 'fair'. And what determines fairness is generally just progressive morality from 10-20 years ago.
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I was surprised by this as well. All he had to say was, "I'm not familiar with Cooper's work." Heaven forbid Douglas Murray not have an opinion on something. My weak-man take is Murray made an ass out of himself, but I only watched snippets and reactions. Rogan is too long and meandering for my tastes.
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World War II is basically the world’s secular creation myth now. Implying that this vastly destructive war that killed 60 million people could or should have been handled differently or, God forbid, avoided is basically heresy. It’s like saying “maybe Pontius Pilot shouldn’t have signed that one guy’s death warrant, because letting an angry mob override the fair application of law and due process is wrong”. In any other context a reasonable and good thing to say; but given the specific chain of events that came after and what they mean, unthinkable.
That would be a pretty anodyne statement in Christian society. Pilate is not considered a positive figure precisely because he was derelict in his duty and put Jesus to death.
But if Jesus wasn't killed, he couldn't save everyone, right?
If He had died by very slow decay, would that have counted as a sufficient sacrifice by God Incarnate?
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Isn't it a pretty wild idea that the torture and execution of a good man "saves the world"? What's the mechanism there? Sounds a bit like human sacrifice and scapegoating doesn't it? With some magic thrown in.
Unironically yes. The Bible depicts it as a sacrifice: though those who killed Jesus didn’t intend it that way, Jesus did. And if you do a quick search, you will find a million sermons with titles like “Christ our Scapegoat,” referencing the literal scapegoat in Leviticus.
Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, offering himself as a sacrifice to God the Father on behalf of sinners is the mechanism. It’s the core of Christian belief.
Maybe I should try reading the Bible at some point. Is it good literature? :P
There's some novelty in that particular human sacrifice: instead of the victim being labeled evil, he gets labeled god. Which kinda puts a finishing touch to the whole tradition instead of having to find new a new scapegoat at each turning. In theory, at least.
Afaik aztek human sacrifice tradition also held many of the victims in high regard.
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It's kind of cliched.
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Yeah basically God sacrificing his son patched out the sacrifice dependency.
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Yes. But the Christian position is that even though the outcome was good, the act was still bad. I've never heard anyone seriously try to argue that killing Jesus was good on a consequentialist basis, anyways.
There have been people who've taken that line historically. That's the line of the Gospel of Judas, for instance: that Judas was a hero because he caused the Crucifixion, which saved the world.
However, this is obviously heretical, and to my knowledge orthodox Christianity has never had any time for it. The Crucifixion may have been the means by which the world was saved, but it was still nonetheless an evil deed.
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The Gospel of Judas did.
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I've heard about some ancient Gnostics who argued exactly that. They got excommunicated as heretics.
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I do because it propagates a dangerous misconception about what 'woke' means.
'Woke' is having become awakened to the 'reality' that all differences in hierarchy are unjust, i.e. Marxism. If someone makes more money than someone else, or one group is healthier than another, or people from one neighborhood go to jail more often than people from the next neighborhood over, the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions. The explicit demand to 'heal' these 'historical inequities' is to feed the golden geese that are white (and sometimes Asian) males to everyone else until no distinction in outcome remains. That's wokeism. Unfortunately, in real reality, this victory condition is impossible and the whole thing is a road straight to hell.
In contrast, leftists would have you believe that 'woke' means 'interested in ethnic solidarity'. That's not woke. That's just how human beings naturally operate without a lifetime of indoctrination teaching us that preferring our own kind is evil.
To be fair, there is a relatively small but quite loud subset of right-wingers who believe exactly this about Jews. And there are quite many right-wingers who really overestimate the degree to which leftists make their decisions out of deliberate maliciousness and really underestimate the degree to which leftists make those decisions out of a combination of ignorance and pathological empathy. Some right-wingers have even adopted a Rousseauian "man is innocent in the state of nature" attitude, except their idealized pre-modern utopia from which humanity has fallen is some kind of amalgam of ancient martial cultures, 19th century farmsteads, and the 1950s.
That’s a good defining aspect of the woke right.
The discrimination against whites and males, that is on the books, enshrined in government contracts, jurisprudence, harvard. Explicit. Not woke right.
To justify the octopus conspiracies otoh, they have pamphlets from the 19th century, hinting at early life bios of successful people, coded parentheses, jewish media interpretation, and aryan studies. It's all implicit mystery knowledge, like the tenets of scientology. You then become clear, awaken, put on the 'they live' glasses, get a superpower where you don't have to check early life section anymore.
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Can you name people who actually have this as their ideology except random anon accounts on Twitter?
I sense that people like Lomez are probably the closest to what you mean, but he's published enough books that contradict this reading profusely that it seems specious.
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When people refer to the "woke right" they're referring to right-wing people who behave like woke people in the sense that they try to censor, cancel, and thought-police those who disagree with them. They aren't saying the woke right is politically woke, they're saying they use the same illiberal tactics as the woke.
Do the illiberal tactics include trying to scare away Joe Rogan and other people with big platforms from having conversations with certain people? Do they include lumping in people you don't like with nazis? Do they include complaints about online abuse when people start commenting on how you're being ridiculous?
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Not at all, what they are referring to is people on the right wing who do not buy into liberalism.
Otherwise you're going to have to explain to me when Auron McIntyre has ever done any of these things for Lindsey to coin the term to go after him and his ilk.
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Except if that definition were operative it would make no sense for guys like Lindsey, Murray, Kisin or Peterson to talk about the woke right. All four take up the mantle of 'concern for where the discourse is headed' if people they don't like are allowed to speak freely on topics they disagree with.
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'Anti-liberals use illiberal tactics' is a silly kind of thing to complain about.
But also, I don't think it's apples to apples. IME when people on the right are doing this it's often simply trying to get leftists held to any kind of sane standard at all -- saying 'kill all white people' should not be tolerated in polite society, but generally is. Whereas the left, again IME, is generally happy to ruin lives over much less, e.g. refusing to create art celebrating gay 'marriage'.
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These strike me as different claims. Wokeness as originally defined was really more about the second one. The moral truth that inequality is unjust was taken for granted from the start; it needn't be "awakened" to. Woke in the original sense was very much about "awakening" to the pervasive-systemic-oppression theory of why inequality of outcomes arises. The two different claims can be believed independently. And more importantly, believing both still doesn't inherently require you to be in favor of censorship/cancel culture.
I think at this point "woke" in colloquial Internetese long ago ceased to have anything to do with the original meaning, and means something more like "leftist Political Correctness thought-policing" whether it's about racial equality or anything else. This is the meaning of "woke" that is then applied to "the woke right" when it begins engaging in similar anti-free-speech behavior for partisan gains.
There's a slight problem here, because from my point of view the
Jedi are evil"anti-woke" are the ones doing this. Trivially: who's the one whinging to Joe Rogan that he shouldn't have so many people with [insert opinion] on?More options
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Well, I'd be worried about this more if I thought the tame came about as a result of a genuine misconception. When I'm worried this is used to shut out my ideas, I prefer to play the reverse of the "Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand" card, and say "ok, I'm woke right, now address my arguments". It cuts to the chase, puts the ball in their court, and arguably actually lowers the chances of any misconceptions being spread.
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The Dissident Right is bigger now than the alt-right ever was in its heyday in terms of engagement with ideas and content and influence. Matt Walsh is only the most recent of a long list of big-C Conservative influencers who now essentially adopt 2017 alt-right talking points on race and increasingly, maybe Israel even.
The irony of those like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray trying to spread moral panic over the platforming of "Woke Right" is that it actually describes themselves better than it does the DR. Peterson, Murray and Woke alike are in alignment over high values like anti-racism and individualism, they just have different criteria for how those values are achieved. But both the Woke and Peterson will be scandalized by the DR critique of those values and the DR's rejection of this Boomer moral paradigm which they all pretend is centuries old but only goes back to, like the 60s at the earliest.
The Boomer consensus is essentially an anti-fascist dialectic- fascism is the most evil thing in the world and whether Right or Left, the operative question is how do we optimize to prevent Fascism, and both Conservatives including Peterson and Douglas Murray and the Woke are playing their part. What neither of them can stand is the Dissident Right which openly flaunts the anti-fascist norms enforced by both the Conservatives and Woke. The DR is a rejection of the Boomer Consensus and a rejection of the entire "Conservative v Woke" dialectic.
There's no going backwards. The "Conservative v Woke" dialectic that Peterson desperately wants to save is going by the wayside thanks to an Avant-garde Right wing which is terrifying to both Conservatives and Woke.
Edit: Just a few days ago, Matt Walsh reposted a crypto-Swastika on X (if you don't see it at first, try squinting). I believe he knew what he was doing. Not to say Walsh is a Nazi or anything, it's the flirtation with the edgy right-wing humor and symbolism that is novel compared to the Conservative puritans who call the DR "woke".
Saying he "reposted" a swastika seems like a bit of a bait-and-switch. Matt replied to a guy's tweet. (The guy could have been a troll, whatever).
Arguments over if Matt noticed the swastika; and if not, should he apologize; are all assuming that the swastika imagery has some sacred evilness that means Matt needs to drop whatever he's doing and point it out and condemn it. He doesn't. You know those silly Facebook engagement bait posts that say, "children of the Devil will scroll past this" and its a picture of Jesus or whatever?
This whole swastika discourse is just the libtard version of that. Matt scrolled past a picture of Jesus and people are hounding him over it. I guess you're right that he is flaunting the norms. I wish he'd make a Shiloh-tier video about this instead of just putting out the one tweet.
Yes, literally says he was trolling.
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I doubt it. It's not at all easy to notice unless someone tells you it's there, and the guy Wash is replying to (the one who posted the picture, I assume) is making a leftist argument, which Matt is rebutting. There's no tongue in cheek winking or anything like that.
In what world is that a leftist argument? Is it even an argument at all?
What would you call it? It seems to be a statement made to make a point of some sort, based on Walsh's reply I would assume it is coming from the political left.
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Yes, but the Dissident Right is a broader category than the Alt Right. I have the feeling you're implying that the Boomer Consensus is anti-fascist, therefore the Dissident Right is fascist or fashy, whereas I would say it's merely anti- or non- liberal.
My post already got way too long, but I was considering a whole section comparing and contrasting the recent Triggernometry interviews with Deborah Frances and Lily Phillips, with a conversation between Konstantin Kissin and Benjamin Boyce. The first one is a bit stand-offish but Kisin and Foster are defensive if not apologetic, quick to assure that "we certainly don't hold that [insert right-wing opinion]". The second one is friendly and the tone is nearly giddy. Sure they ask some critical questions, but it's hardly what I'd call confrontational. This is in stark contrast to the conversation with Boyce, which is agrressive with a constant tone of moral outrage, for the high crime of thinking that maybe Churchill wasn't a good guy. Call me crazy, but I think people believing Deborah Frances' brand of feminism, and Philipsesque OnlyFans prostitutes have done far more damage to society than people with an axe to grind against Churchill, but it's the latter that get the moral outrage.
Well, I certainly hope you're wrong. If you want to argue for nazism, argue for nazism, don't hide behind this "hee hee, I'm just a silly edgelord" bullshit. This sort of behavior is about the only thing that would justify the anti-"woke right" freak out, in my mind.
The problem here is that the definition of Fascism is functionally non-liberal, Right Wing. You can argue that shouldn't be the operative definition of fascism, but the DR is fashy by nature of being Right-Wing and post-liberal.
But the point is that poking the eye of the Boomer Consensus with edgy stuff like does not mean Walsh is arguing for Nazism. It's just flaunting a disrespect for norms enforced by Conservatives and Woke alike. In fact that would be my criticism of Walsh, he's trying to have a foot in both camps. He's trying to synthesize the Daily Wire Conservatism with some of the Race stuff from the DR + some edgy flaunting of political norms. Where does his actual thinking lie? I don't know.
In the broad popular imagination, it might be, but fascism is a distinctly modernist/progressive ideology, and vast swathes of the Dissident Right have no love for modernity.
A distinctly shortsighted tactic, that ruins the discourse for anyone trying to take things seriously, including those on the DR.
Why not just make jokes about cheddar cheese like other normies?
I'd imagine that someone as high up on the influencer ladder as he is, would know it's not a game that you can play sustainably.
My view of the Dissident Right is that it's an evolutionary memetic algorithm generating a post-postmodern Right Wing. But it will be regarded as Fascist by conservatives and Woke alike, whether or not that is the proper academic use of the term.
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Matt Walsh’s dislike of Candace Owens(for being a schizo) will prevent him from being an early adopter of anti-Zionism or anything else JQ related.
I also really don’t think the swastika was intentional on his part- very probable someone trolled him. I certainly didn’t look at it and see ‘swastika’.
If it was unintentional he would at minimum delete the tweet, and probably send another tweet apologizing and insisting it was a mistake. Leaving it on the timeline, where it has 3.5 million views now despite the fact he is no doubt well aware of the nature of the image, points to him being intentionally provocative.
https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1923128567996780750
It's pretty clever, on my computer I wouldn't have seen it if someone hadn't said something. I could tell it was AI though. When the image is small it's clear as day. He didn't tweet it, he didn't even retweet it, he replied disagreeing with the person who posted the picture and statement.
DESPITE... usually being a Noticer, I couldn't see the swastika either upon opening the image, but the squinting trick worked for (on?) me. Kind of a small mindfuck. Maybe I am a normie (marvel_vision.jpg).
I'm unfamiliar with Walsh beyond the vague baseline awareness he's some sort of right-coded influencer, but this makes me like him—instead of bending the knee—going with the McGregor "I'd like to take this chance to apologize... to absolutely nobody" and also (possibly) calling out mainstream conservatives for being progressives driving the speed limit, although the quotes around conservatives could be in reference to progressives posing in a "hello, fellow conservatives" kind of way.
I saw the image that Walsh replied to on 4chan several days ago. The swastika is much more noticeable in a 4chan thumbnail before you open the full size image.
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That makes no sense. Why would he do that if it was unintentional?
"Matt Walsh posts Swastika on Timeline" is not a controversy that someone generally wants to be involved in. Like the Sewer Ben Shapiro telling him he can't post that, along with pats on the back from others in the reply. This stuff just isn't on the timeline of people who aren't being intentionally provocative.
On the other hand, if the sharks smell blood, they'll rip you to shreds. "Never apologize" has been the standard advice by people who observed these controversies with any amount of care, right-wing or otherwise.
Vox Day's books also come to mind (SJWs Always Lie, and SJWs Always Double Down).
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