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Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
I have observed the pendulum swinging back the other way...the rise of what I have called normcore-right ,since 2021. These are people who are strongly anti-woke but at the same time hold mainstream (or normie) views, like about vaccines or even Ukraine. They sometimes take extreme views on otherwise mainstream positions, like Richard Hannia on the death penalty. Or supporting open borders in the case of Caplan. It's a subset of the un-woke who have carved out a niche of signaling high-status beliefs appealing to a well-educated, high-SES audience who are anti-woke but also strongly inclined to reject conspiracy theories , extremism, or tribalism. It's close to the IDW but more traditionalistic and less secular. NRO columnist Kevin Williamson started this in 2016 by opposing Trump and also strongly opposing economic populism, and in one of his more famous articles taking an especially incendiary or hard-core tone in which he said that downtrodden, white-working class towns “Deserve To Die”', which at the time generated some controversy.
That's just the online right returning to pre-2020 form. Someone like Steve Sailer never changed his views, people are simply realizing he was right all along now that billions of people haven't dropped dead from the "clot shot," Russia has not saved Christendom, and black crime and immigration are still pertinent issues.
It hard to peg what Sailer is. He's not really right but not left either. He's not a centrist. He's more like a social critic, a more left-wing version of Ann Coulter, who has one foot in both sides. He does not reject the NYTs crowd completely.
To go on a tangent a bit, I remember having this debate a while back, but I think the focus on black crime overlooks committed by other groups which may be worse in some respects, in part because crime committed by non-blacks, like identity theft, fraud, etc. tend to have many victims per perpetrator. (Every single person who lost money with FTX is a victim.) So this offsets to some degree the lower crime rate among non-blacks. Imagine how many American have been victims of call center theft or computer crimes, particularly targeting elders or computer-illiterate (It's so bad the FBI has dedicated an entire part of their website to it). I know people who were victims of this. I recall a Podcast in which the host interviewed a prolific conman, Brett Johnson (real black sounding name, huh) and over 10-year period until he was finally arrested he stole millions of dollars from probably hundreds or thousands of people and businesses, but all of it would technically be rolled up as 'one crime' or 'one count of fraud' even though it had hundreds or thousands of victims just from this one person. The crime stats do not make a distinction between someone whose crimes have thousands of victims or just one. Mr. Johnson and 'the random hoodlum who holds up a store' would both technically count as a single entry in the stats, yet Mr. Jonson's crime had way more victims over much longer period of time.
How is Sailer not right-wing?
I think HlynkaCG explained it well a while back on Reddit. I initially thought he was wrong but upon closer inspection it seemed he was right. Sailer is someone who otherwise adopts the culture and trapping of the left but rejects some of the parts he deems too far left. He's too cosmopolitan. But his posts are mostly on point anyway, like about HBD anyway. Same for Charles Murray. He's a conservative cultural critic but not right-wing. Same for Moldbug.
How is he adopting the culture and trapping of the left? Is the argument that he's blue tribe?
You know Hlynka: no one is right wing except him. He's eternally internally consistent.
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yeah pretty much except for some of his political views . I think he's closer to grey tribe. Being 'red' means choosing to reject the blue tribe completely. Steve has not done that. Neither have I.
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