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Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, Hanania was right again *
Two months ago, Richard Hanania predicted that Nick Fuentes and the groypers would become a major force in mainstream Republican politics. At the time, there was a fair bit of TheMotte discussion (including by me) which could be described as dismissive. Some choice quotes:
Yeah, about that... A few days ago Nick Fuentes did a full interview with Tucker Carlson. This was a mild surprise at most, given that Tucker has been dabbling in less-than-sympathetic viewpoints on Israel and Jews as of late. A lot of people thought that this would be the nail in the coffin cementing Tucker as a fringe figure, and that his days headlining major conservative events would end.
This appears not to have happened:
The Heritage Foundation is the Conservative Establishment think tank. It doesn't get more mainstream than them. What is striking is that the statement doesn't just contrast America with Israel, it contrasts Christians with Israel, a tacit acknowlegement of the legitimacy of Christian discomfort with Israel specifically because of their rejection of Christ. This isn't quite total groyper victory, but one can see it on the horizon.
From a realpolitik perspective, I think this is bad. The groypers are right that Israel doesn't act in America's interests and that many American Jews have dual loyalty. That's how coalitions work. A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side. Rooting-out infidels might be a good strategy if Christ is King, but if he isn't, and it turns out we're all alone on this big round rock, then the groypers are blowing-up the conservative intelligentsia for no good reason.
*Apparently this is a series now.
What do they do with international finance and global media, exactly?
Finance has busily furthered DEI, deindustrialization of the West, financialization of the economy, toxic housing bubbles and rapid development of China.
The media whips up racial hysteria, worsens relations between the sexes and spreads grossly misleading racial narratives about policing. They've spread panic about climate change that has had all kinds of horrible effects, mental illness, people refusing to have kids 'for the climate'. Not to mention popularizing energy and environmental policies that have wrecked industry. Everyone constantly complaining that enforcing borders is fascism, that's the fault of the media. The media problematizes national myths and culture, delegitimizes identities like 'white' in favour of 'Black' or 'POC'. And the media goes out of their way to insult and humiliate white men. See here: https://x.com/StupidWhiteAds
If the argument is 'American Jews control finance and media, therefore they shouldn't be upset since they're bringing in more than they cost' then the premise is wrong because finance and media are not helping out. International finance and world media have been massively toxic and aggressively unhelpful for at least the last 30 years. They've been especially opposed to Christians and conservatives. A disproportionate amount of these sectors are Jewish (Blackrock and NYT for example), much is not.
What has the 'conservative intelligentsia' actually done for conservatives? Have they brought huge victories, or did they just help implement mass immigration, Pride as civic religion, diversity quotas to achieve their real goals - tax cuts and regime change in the Middle East?
I would much rather have my financial sector run by some honest, hardworking midwit who tries to advance national interests and develop our industries, than a 160 IQ financial genius who uses his vast talents for private profit, asset-stripping, offshoring and demanding share buybacks over investment.
I would rather have patriotic journalists with tedious prose and limited abilities than charismatic, excellent writers who hate me and attack me and my ancestors, systematically pursuing my disempowerment in society.
One of the wisest things the US could do is to crack down on media and financial elites, put patriots in charge of these key institutions so that they're coordinated to further US interests. That goes for whoever's running America. But it should be 10x more important for conservatives/MAGA to recognize that these people are, (generally speaking), not their friends!
Peanut butter enthusiasts lobby for more people to eat peanut butter! Man with hammer thinks most problems can be solved by smacking them! News at Eleven!
...More seriously, I think I generally share your feelings about the finance industry. But this was funny.
True, but media has also been undergoing a major structural disruption due to the internet for the past twenty years; they're desperately trying to do whatever it takes to keep eyeballs. What's getting pushed out (e.g. in the NYT) is what sells - entities that don't keep up, like Newsweek, Time, many mid-major and local papers, etc. - die.
Also also, the idea that newsmedia are amoral gossipmongers lying and ginning up hysteria to goose sales isn't exactly new
Perhaps there is a third option between "people foresaw and intended these results because they are evil" and "people would achieve alternate results because they are good", which is "people intended well, but were wrong."
I'm not going full mistake theory - people tie their egos to their opinions, rationalize and dig in, and usually aren't amenable to being convinced by dispassionate arguments. But that doesn't get rid of the fact that people tend not to think like cartoon supervillains.
"whatever it takes" notably didn't involve breaking the story that the President was mentally incompetent, and before that it didn't involve breaking the story that the president's son was selling access to his father to foreign interests. In fact, there's no shortage of stories that could have earned the news corps an avalanche of eyeballs that they passed on for clearly ideological reasons. This argument that the media class is fundamentally mercenary and are just seeking to maximize attention and ad revenue might have been weakly plausible in 2014, but at this point it is pretty clearly an undead argument immune to any degree of contrary evidence.
Correct, because those stories would have pissed off their current readers, without necessarily gaining them eyeballs among other, new customers.
Nowadays media makes money by feeding people's epistemic bubbles, not puncturing them.
If socmed metrics are anything to go by, drama sells. Also mainstream companies have proven time and again they will pick ideology over profit.
Social Media is free; NYT is trying to get people to pay money to subscribe, and precisely by picking ideology - i.e., reinforcing their reader's pre-existing biases and telling them that they are correct about the world but moreso, and in fact have they considered being even MORE worried about their particular boogeymen?!? - has racked up millions of subscribers.
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