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Notes -
The Nick Fuentes interview with Piers Morgan was a good demonstration of how boomers do not understand Gen Z rhetorical tactics at all. One example is the “agree-and-amplify” strategy.
This strategy came from The Red Pill/PUA community. The idea is that girls will try to throw you off your game by making some unfounded criticism, to test how secure/powerful you are as a man. It’s called a “shit test.”
The “agree-and-amplify” strategy says the best approach is to do exact that. Example: Girl says “Wow that’s a big truck, are compensating for something?”
Loser response (no getting laid): “No, my penis is slightly above average! I just like trucks!”
Agree-and-amplify: “Hahah yeah, micropene. 1 inch. It’ll have you screaming tho.”
The latter projects confidence, she knows your joking of if she believes you, you can neg her about it. She made it sexual and gave you an opening. Etc. All in good fun.
Fuentes did the same thing repeatedly, and Morgan just does not grasp it at all.
For example, paraphrasing:
Morgan: “Are you racist?”
Loser response: No, I have friends who are black! I just think [crime statistics]!
Morgan: Sounds like you’re racist.
Game, set, march. Better is the Fuentes agree-and-amplify:
Fuentes : “Haha yeah. I don’t want any black people around”
Morgan: [clutches pearls]
Fuentes: I have black friends though. They are also concerned about [crime statistics]
Morgan: But you said you were racist!
It makes it feel like Morgan is not in on the joke. It denies his moral frame that any hint of racism = bad. He needs to come up with a more concrete argument. When he instead tries fails to re-establish the frame through repetition, it doesn’t land.
I was reminded in a way of the classic Charlie Kirk owning libs on campus. The key is that the libs did not really come into the bait understanding Kirk’s beliefs or tactics, but Kirk understood theirs inside and out. This let Kirk win easily every time.
Morgan is a wiley veteran and won some parts of the interview. But overall he did not know how to handle Nick’s tactics at all.
In the end, it is turning into a debacle for Piers Morgan. As the dust settles, he comes across as the evil defender of a decrepit regime going after some dude’s dad. He was forced to pretend to not understand basic statistics, causing him to appear either stupid or malicious, depending on your gullibility. In many ways, he was the perfect heel employing dirty tactics to get an edge.
And to make matters worse, his decision to focus on the Catholic Nick’s virginity has backfired horribly, with everyone learning about his wife cheating on him with everyone from internet randos to the literal pool boy. How true are these accusations? I honestly don’t know, but they are already cemented into the hivemind’s collective beliefs.
I could really never stand the rambling nature of Nick’s show and never watched more than five minutes, but I agree with most of what he said on Tucker and Piers. On my scorecard, total groyper victory. Curious if others agree.
Yea, imagine some Soviet apparatchik in late stage of really existing socialism defending the system in open, unscripted debate with dissident, even crazy one (or just ordinary disgruntled citizen).
For long time, failures of the system were masked by fact that Western world was legitimately the only game on the planet, the best place to be despite all faults. If USSR liberated the workers of the whole world and imposed its system everywhere, it could also easily swat away any criticism "What are you complaining about? You live far better than medieval serfs!".
Not any more.
Now you can ask: "Why in Dubai or Shanghai people have the same wealth and comfort as in Western cities, and in addition complete safety, where they can walk the streets at any time unmolested and being stabbed or shot by deranged drug addict is as thinkable as being eaten by tiger. Why can't we have it too?" And the system has no answer than "But we have democracy and human rights!" (not much talk about "freedom" these days)
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Just to nitpick: the Red Pill/PUA community, to the extent that it actually existed*, was pretty much a GenX phenomenon, and a ‘90s/’00s phenomenon in particular. All the prominent PUAs are GenXers. I’d be surprised to learn that there are any GenZers out there with any familiarity with it. According to Wikipedia, Morgan was born in 1965, so he’s more of a GenXer than a Boomer. I’d guess he’s more likely to be aware of Red Pill stuff than a young homosexual like Fuentes.
*In a practical sense it’s dead. I discussed it here.
I don't think so. All of these things existed before. For instance the PUA community has perfect overlap with rockstar or yuppie lifestyle from 1970s and 1980s. And of course the archetype is way older than that such as a dashing American soldier picking up young desperate girls in occupied Germany using chewing gum, can of beans and coffee, or even in 19th century literature where young noble or soldier picks up local village girls doing the deed in haystack, and leaving them with bastard babies. Or you can go even earlier with literature of conquistadors and pirates and sailors having harem of wives and lovers in every port - the OG "passport bros", such as no other than Hernán Cortés who allegedly killed his own Spanish wife for nagging him about his harem of lovers and concubines, and for being too low status as an official wife for his elevated position. Andrew Tate is just a pale image of this Chad. It is all over the literature either as a cautionary tale, but also as a tale of promise for young brave men.
It still is structurally quite different. PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery. This wouldn't have worked historically; Men in a social group generally guarded the women against strangers, and the women themselves were often even more wary of strangers. Inside a social group where everyone knows everyone else already, PUA falls apart as well.
The examples you cite have primarily two mechanisms they used: Actual status, and (the threat of) violence. As a peasant, you couldn't openly dismiss a noble unless he very blatantly broke with established rules, the way you would with a stranger. The social status itself also, of course, made the nobles more alluring for the women, and peasant men that would otherwise guard them also might try to curry favor with the noble instead. Not to mention that more critical literature of these individuals often strongly insinuates that their allegedly awesome powers of seduction was to a large part just plain prostitution. This is proven at least partially true by what frequently followed; A peasant women with an accepted noble bastard child would usually get an alimony that far outstrips any other stream of income usually available to her. But also for sex more generally, if a noble offers a women coin upfront, and the sexual encounter is revealed against their wish & expectation, both parties can save face by claiming that it actually just was a seduction. The women becomes a hapless victim, the men an awesome seductor. Much better than a whore & john.
For the soldiers/conquistadors/pirates etc. taking advantage of their physical power, almost everything above holds true as well, just that the arrangement is usually less voluntary in nature.
I agree on 70/80 rockstar/yuppie life. Male hippies, even if they have a different political connotation, behaved in practice quite similar as well. It's all imo quite evidently downstream of the sexual revolution. PUA simply couldn't exist without it.
What a silly thing to say, as if people in the past were so different from people now. Let me introduce to one of the OG pickup artists, one young Venetian commoner, son of two actors back then when the word actress was a synonym for a whore: Giacomo Casanova. In his memoirs he named 100+ women that he slept with in 18th century, ranging from commoner farm girls or courtesans, nuns, through daughters of merchants and patricians to high nobles such as Madame d’Urfé - who was probably not right in her head as she was obsessed with occult and other weird shit, something like modern liberal Wiccan widow of deceased startup entrepreneur.
He beguiled them all using wide range of PUA strategies, which were then rigorously employed by his fans, while retaining his head on his shoulders from vindicative male relatives and rivals. If anything, he played the PUA game on Nightmare mode and "won" by that metric, living to age 73 in comfort and fame. Many other examples like that.
Now you're talking about someone entirely different than you did before, though. I was talking about the people you yourself mentioned: Aristocrats, soldiers, pirates etc.
Secondly, Casanova is someone with a high enough social standing & wealth that his family could afford to send him to study law at a university, at a time when such education was extremely rare. That tells you a lot more about his background than just saying his parents were "two actors". He also is a classic general-purpose con artist, as evidenced by the wikipedia entry you cite yourself. He not only regularly, successfully impersonated aristocracry, he also directly tricked aristocrats themselves. And he evidently was genuinely rich, even if it was ill-gotten & regularly frivolled away. Obviously, such a person can take advantage of a similar playbook as the actual aristocrats.
He didn't walk into a bar at night negging unaccompanied women until they sleep with him. He publicly displayed his wealth and status to the entire greater circle of people around the women, would woo the men around her as well, often played a long game over months that included ripping off entire social groups for money by claiming access to secret, useful knowledge. It's certainly more similar to PUA than the classic, far more common aristocrat, in that it includes social trickery aimed at women, but yet again structurally very different and far more complicated.
And also I have to mention again we're talking about the personal memoirs of a self-admitted con artist. That's really not something I'd take at face value.
Edit: And to make my own position very clear: Solely beguiling women without also having access to some genuine advantages such as high social standing, wealth or power was near-impossible before the sexual revolution due to guarding behaviour by males in her social circles. You had to successfully trick those men as well to even just get access to the women. Casanova does not disprove this position in any way whatsoever; He had a genuinely high social standing, genuine wealth, genuine education, and then also tricked entire social circles.
After the sexual revolution, women would start to regularly go unattended to parties & festivities, which made (a percentage of) them easy prey for the first generations of tricksters in the hippy movement. Since women aren't stupid, this caused a backlash quite fast and they became more wary again, which necessitated the more elaborate trickery employed by PUA. However since it's a formalized movement it's easy to recognize once you know what you have to look for, so it died in the span of just a few years again. But more generally, there still just aren't as many safeguards nowadays; Obviously, tricking an entire social group, including both men and women, over long spans of time is much, much harder than tricking a (necessarily single-sex) lone individual over short spans of time. So the general style of social trickery as employed by PUA artists is still mostly viable.
What? Casanova was as poor as it gets at least in Venetia. He got his degree thanks to a priest who noticed him at age 9 in poor boarding school while his widowed mother was "acting" somewhere in Russia. When he showed enough aptitude for Latin and other subject to pass for priesthood education at age 12. He received his degree at age 15, not at all anything special - something like degree from some mill such as University of Phoenix today.
Nevertheless I agree with the statement that he was well "educated" by experience for life as a con artist, ranging from his actor parents through talking his way through life hardship in his early teens which translated later to his life. Which is exactly what PUA lifestyle is about, isn't it?
No, he applied wide range of PUA strategies. When he wanted to bang nuns, he applied his meager theological knowledge. When he wanted to bang Madame d’Urfé and get her money, he pretended to be an occult master. He was exactly what you in your original reply mentioned as:
Anyways, the point is that PUA is nothing new. You discarded pirates, conquistatdors, minor nobles and other players as somehow unfairly using status and violence to bang hundreds of women in order to be "true" PUA artists. Now you discard Casanova and his ilk for applying social trickery and beguiling his victims from being the same. So what is PUA artist? Only those who fail in life or in seduction of women using their perceived status, money, power, social wit and any other trick that can get them to score? It does not make any sense.
I added my position in an edit since I didn't expect you to answer so fast, so sorry for that. But I think my position is pretty clear:
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Thanks for the reply; I was about to make largely the same points but you were faster.
The explanation is much more mundane, I think. "American soldier picking up young desperate girls in occupied Germany using chewing gum, can of beans and coffee"? Well, yeah. This was happening during a famine. Elaborate pick-up skills weren't exactly needed.
Rockstars? A very tiny minority of the male population. Nothing to conclude about it in particular. There will always be men who stand out of the crowd for whatever reason, and will thus command a disproportionate amount of female attention. Nothing new about it.
The yuppies, as far as I know, were also a strictly GenX phenomenon, by and large. No argument about that on my part.
I'd add two more caveats. PUA as a phenomenon specifically entails men codifying pick-up artistry and teaching it to other men.
Sure. Let me know what you think about OG PUA master named Giacomo Casanova I mentioned in my other reply. Does he fit your criteria of womanizing teacher?
Plus how does picking and fucking desperate girls not fit the disgusting PUA style? I know of a guy who back in oughts created a bot contacting all the women on dating platform with a rude message akin to - hey do you want to fuck - as an experiment. He had maybe 1 in a 1000 response, some of them even from very attractive girls, although I'd wager they were all crazy. Maybe in their manic phase of BPD or some other shit. I know of a guy from the West who rented an expensive car back in early 1990s, and who went on fucking spree in Eastern Europe for pennies, and he even evaded having his teeth kicked in by local village heroes, mostly by copious amount of bribes and rounds paid. But hey, what works works - right?
How does any of this equal paying for sex with canned beans and coffee in a famine?
In the same way inviting some local girl for a drink while flashing you borrowed Omega watches and designer cloths bought on credit works right now in a bar. A promise of stability and bright future of plenty of money/food if only they fuck you, and then discarding them like a dirty rag.
By the way, this whole PUA topic is disgusting to me as I am Christian. But there has to be some reality check.
Stability and bright future of plenty of money/food as opposed to not starving to death. Got it.
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Its not just tactics that Fuentes won on. He won by focusing on topics that he is strongest on and emphasizing facts that support his position. I only have watched the first 20 minutes or so, but the Chicago Mag Mile shooting anecdote + black crime statistics combo that Fuentes pulled out as a response to Piers accusing him of being racist and accusing his dad of being racist was both rhetorically skilled, and appeals to people's common sense. What he does is paint a picture of black youth as out of control, shows an example, then gives backup stats.
This is not just tactics, its just how actual debates are supposed to work. Fuentes has the upper hand, and Piers thinks he has an upper hand, but is actually bluffing (he just doesn't know it). Fuentes has facts and anecdotes that are proximate in time; Piers has what he thinks is a super power word "racist", and the former disarms the latter easily when the former is allowed to speak at all. This is why the left hates Joe Rogan, despite him being on the left, and hates "platforming" on podcasts and podcast-like content, and desperately clings to things like 4 v 1 "moderated" CNN panels where everyone is allowed 30 seconds and the "neutral" host gets the last word. The modern leftist intellectual doesn't have any knowledge about why they think what they think. This wasn't some Harvard professor dressing down a freshman, or even a Steven Crowder embarrassing a campus kid, it was one media figure against another, and the leftist media figure was given a significant handicap, its his own show, he picks the topics, he plays whatever clip he wants, and he's just flailing.
This isn't an isolated incident, its a common occurrence. A realization I frequently share is that, if modern progressives were swapped with 1850s/60s abolitionists, we'd still have slavery today. In fact, they might have made the people of the 1860s pass a second constitutional amendment wherein anyone advocating for abolitionist views without deportation of freed slaves a capital offense. That is simply how bad the arguments around race are coming from that side.
I suppose you meant to write 'advantage' instead of 'handicap'?
Being given a handicap is the same thing as being given an advantage. It might be some British vs. American peculiarity, but I'm pretty sure it's valid.
In a betting parlance I'd agree that 'Giving the Dallas Cowboys a 4-point handicap' implies +4 and therefore an advantage but I've prettymuch never run into giving a handicap in a positive framing outside of that.
It's also used in chess. "X gave Y a knight handicap" means that X, being the stronger player, agreed to play against Y without a knight to even the odds.
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in golf, giving another player a handicap means you're giving them an advantage in your game
the higher the handicap, the more strokes you need to beat them by in order to win
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I don't know, I thought Fuentes was doing the pearl clutching here. All the "low blow" faux-offense. Nick never gave a straight answer.
I think the interview made it clear that Fuentes is, well, actually racist. I think most normies will be turned off. But maybe GenZ really is that different.
What answer is there? That a Chicago working class guy tells his son, that his family is not going to eat "black fare" and this is some sign of extreme racism? This is right in the alley of your mildly racist uncle ranting about how terrible black music is during a family dinner. Exactly as Fuentes mentioned, Morgan tried to use this anecdote to paint the villain story of how Fuentes's dad is some sort of white supremacist doctor Frankenstein, who created some sort of superracist. It is absolutely ridiculous.
Fuentes did not reply, because he did not want to drag his father into this. He did not want to apologize or even explain his fathers behavior, because frankly it is none of Morgan's business. Absolutely rational response from Fuentes.
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It's conceivable that the woke Left has burned up so much social capital that we're at a point where even a significant segment (but not yet majority) of normies aren't that bothered by racism anymore.
It may be better to say the accusation of racism, and thus its ability to decide arguments over things like micro-aggressions which had to be defined below the level of 'typical' racism in the first place.
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I think most conservatives will be turned off, conservatives gonna conservative after all. They're the faction that can afford to be snooty; it's a purity thing (per Haidt).
People who are fed up with conservatives redefining this word to privilege themselves are ambivalent at worst and positive to "racists" at best. This is why conservatives like Morgan, and his age cohort more generally, pearl-clutch about this.
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Whatever gave you that idea? Was it Fuentes saying "I am racist"? How is that not a straight answer?
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I have no further comment.
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This makes me an out of touch old person, but I was under the impression that Nick Fuentes is gay.
If that is not the case, I wonder how I absorbed it out of the noosphere.
The chad gay virgin.
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If it makes you feel any better, he could be a virgin and gay.
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