site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24164 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

Everyone understands sarcasm. Zoomers didn't invent it.

The problem is that Piers Morgan sees himself not just as vastly intellectually superior to Nick Fuentes, but in a completely different league. He underestimated Fuentes so much, he didn't even see the need to listen to him. He thought all he had to do is research, present the evidence, and it would be an automatic win. That's why he didn't even consider the possibility that Fuentes was being sarcastic.

Just consider the moment when Fuentes said the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust could have been 7, 6, 8 million... maybe 100 times more. If Morgan paused for a second to listen to what Fuentes just said, he would realize he was being trolled, but he didn't, because the possibility that he was going to be intellectually outmatched wasn't on his bingo card.

There were around 500k Jewish people in Germany at the time, so how could the number of dead be 600k?

I've seen this happen countless times. For example when Paul Krugman commented on a post by Scott Adams, underestimating Adams' intellect and not even considering the possibility that he was being trolled.

Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer. Zoomers are just taking advantage of the Boomers' overconfidence, and having a laugh about how stupid it makes them look.

I think this is the result of different strategies that Morgan and Fuentes had with this interview. Fuentes came there with his bloodsport debate style, which is about listening to your opponent and constructing arguments. Morgan came there with tabloid style gotcha questions, moralizing and shaming/guilting - complete with random segues and topic switching whenever he thinks that he got what he wanted.

It was also seen specifically with the part you mentioned, when Fuentes obviously sarcastically admitted that he is "Holocaust maximalist". Morgan did not listen to Fuentes in order to form his own counterargument, he jumped into a gotcha of we know how many Jews were slaughtered. It's at least 6 million. Uh, what's interesting to me is that you appear to now concede that. Which may be news to your regular viewers. So again, even if Morgan thought that Fuentes offered a concession, he immediately went on attack satisfied that he proved Fuentes as a liar for his viewers. It is a different style of discussion, not a debate.

In a sense it was a battle of styles with each side utilizing different tactics, it was almost like a parallel streams with little to no substantive engagement from any side.

Yeah, but the problem is that Fuentes' style does require listening, so he was responding to what Morgan actually said. The audience is also listening to both. Morgan is the only one that wasn't.

That's why the little jabs that Fuentes did proved to the audience that Morgan wasn't listening, because he didn't respond or engage, he just continued with his script.

There's a reason why in 2025 people prefer the long-form podcast style: because it's harder to fake.

At the end of the day Fuentes' style feels much more authentic. Nobody likes Morgan's style anymore.

I wholeheartedly agree, although even this may be a different game. There is a strategy of clip farming, where you may look like a moron in a debate, but as long as you can produce couple of viral 20 second clips, you may have been successful in your mission when it comes to certain audience. Here it would be something like Fuentes admitting that he is a racist or whatever.

Like Fuentes said, Morgan is tabloid journalist. All he needs is to create controversy and produce some smears and he may be "successful" in this specific subgame despite losing the overall 2 hour debate. If it is a viable long-term strategy is questionable, but at least it worked for years when it comes to Fuentes alone.

The effectiveness of agree-and-amplify is context dependent though. It makes sense in dating because the two of you are not discussing the merits of whatever insult the woman throws at you. You are either showing how you handle a curveball, or you are simply both joking around and having fun by making absurd statements.

I would argue it makes a lot less sense when one party is entirely serious about the insult. If the girl genuinely believes that big truck = small dick, agreeing and amplifying will just make her think she is correct.

A debate setting is serious, and it is expected that both parties argue in good faith. In that situation, agree and amplify will either convince the viewers that the accusations are correct or show them that you do not care about the rules of the debate. If one party defects this way, then the intellectual value is pretty much lost. From my perspective, either Nick Fuentes is an actual racist or he is so obtuse that I cannot know what his views are, because at any point he might be joking.

So the only thing he manages to do is show of his authority or his frame, by showing the viewers that he is composed even when under pressure while managing to throw off the frame of his opponent. I admit this is a good goal to have in a debate, but it doesn't do much for me personally when he otherwise comes off as either racist or untrustworthy.

A more charitable read would be that by blithely denying the label and then agreeing dismissively and moving on he demonstrates a level of disdain/apathy for the label. He doesn't care whether he technically meets the dictionary definition of the word "racist". It's a word. He cares about [crime statistics] and object level concerns. Having the confidence to take one for the team and say "if you're going to derail the object level debate and go on some unimportant tangent about whether I'm a "racist" then fine, I'll let you win this point, since I don't expect any of my audience to care anyway, so we can move on to something worth talking about."

He's not taking it seriously, but in 2025 taking a debate about whether someone is "racist" or not seriously is pointless. Everyone just uses it to mean people they don't like. I would argue that Morgan defected first by bringing it up in the first place, so a sarcastic dismissive reply to that particular point and then a transition back to something that actually matters is an appropriate debate tactic that doesn't make me trust him less.

finally got around to watching the interview. On balance I think Fuentes out performed but made a lot of errors. On the school shooting thing I think he needed to explain the per capita thing, when the fact check came back from Morgan and he said they both do school shootings at about the same rate he should have said "so your example of whites misbehaving is the one area the behave as poorly as blacks" I was baffled by him not making the point.

I do not know what else should he do especially in the face of "school shooter" argument being such a tangent. Fuentes wanted to say that his argument of 5% blacks being murderers is vastly larger than whatever proportion of whites are mass shooters, which supported his earlier argument of how white people should avoid black people or whatever. Fuentes explained himself clearly at least twice: first by saying that it is something like 0,0000001% and second by literally asking Morgan to calculate "number of all white people as a denominator vs number of white school shooters as numerator". Morgan did not understand what was asked of him.

Maybe this is too mathy language for some people to get, but it was as easy as elementary statistics goes.

It's just rare to be able to slay someone in their motte and Piers had exposed the soft underbelly of his motte.

You don't understand reaction strategy. Nick Fuentes doesn't need to explain anything, he just needs to say something provocative for other people to react. And that's exactly what happened.

If you watch reaction videos, pretty much everyone is saying the same thing: 1 in 100 is still pretty bad.

It's exactly the same when somebody makes a typo in a title. It's engagement baiting. "Oh, you got me, I'm so bad at spelling".

No, you just don't understand the moves that are happening.

I was shocked he didn't know the black vs white homicide rates off the top of his head. Any self-respecting internet racist should.

You can't just say the words "per capita" and act like it resolves the question. You need to say the actual per capita numbers. That is what resolves the discussion.

In some parts he had clever prepared responses and seemed to navigate the conversation pretty well, but that's such a basic thing. It's like watching someone sink tons of three pointers but can't even dribble.

It's like watching someone sink tons of three pointers but can't even dribble.

Which in turn feeds the narrative regarding Fuentes being a "Fed"/"Trojan Horse"/"Controlled Opposition" that you'll see in more conservative aligned spaces. The fact that this interview is coming from a nakedly progressive partisan like Piers Morgan only fans those flames.

Is piers Morgan a nakedly progressive partisan? My understanding is that he's what passes for a respectable centrist type in bonger land.

I don't know what he was like before coming to the US but my understanding is that he's a normal establishment progressive by the standards of Europe which puts him well into "far left" territory by the standards of US Politics.

I first became aware of him during the the 2012 election while he was at CNN where he described Mitt Romney as a dangerous far right authoritarian and claimed that the republicans were going end women's suffrage if they won. He was a outspoken supporter of woke cancel mobs and social media censorship through Obama's second and Trump's first terms, and nothing I've seen from him to date has made me think that he doesn't still hew to those views.

Piers Morgan is a little bit complicated. He's middle-class, but not really upper middle-class. He's not as posh as he sounds, turns out he's half-Irish (so ironically both he and Fuentes were raised Catholic, at this stage I am starting to believe in the Papist World Domination Plot given how many in the public eye turn out unexpectedly to be "yeah Catholic background/raised Catholic") and only gets the double-barrelled name from his stepfather, who was a pub landlord:

Piers Morgan was born as Piers Stefan O'Meara in Guildford, Surrey, on 30 March 1965, the son of Vincent Eamonn O'Meara, an Irish dentist, and Gabrielle Georgina Sybille (née Oliver), an English woman who raised Morgan as a Catholic. A few months after his birth, the family moved to Newick, East Sussex. His father died when Morgan was 11 months old; his mother later married Glynne Pughe-Morgan, a Welsh pub landlord who later worked in the meat distribution business, and he took his stepfather's surname.

So while "Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan" sounds rather posh, he's not really. He's probably personally a liberal, but he worked for the Murdoch newspapers so publicly he pushed a somewhat down-market pro-Tory line and mostly adopts whatever will grab headlines, so that means controversial/clickbait takes, be that very to the left or very to the right, whichever sells best at the moment. Here's a typical example of him talking out of both sides of his mouth:

Morgan identified as a supporter of the Conservative Party in a 1994 interview, saying he was "still basically a Tory", but expressed admiration for the recently elected Labour Party leader Tony Blair, saying "he's not radical, speaks well and makes sense".

Seemingly he's voted for both Conservatives and Labour candidates, depending on whatever the phase of the moon at the time was (or something):

Morgan voted for the Animal Welfare Party in the 2015 general election due to his low opinion of all the main party leaders. He voted against Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum but voted for the Kensington Conservative candidate in the 2019 general election because of Boris Johnson's commitment to honour the result of the referendum. Morgan has also previously voted for the Labour Party. Following Labour's victory in the 2024 general election, he called leader Keir Starmer "a good, decent, hard-working, self-made man". In November 2024, he identified as a centrist, adding "woke liberals are too loony-left for me".

So he started his career in journalism working for the Murdoch press, which is working-class/down-market pro-Tory right-wing. The News of the World was a pure scandal sheet, in my childhood during the late 60s/70s it was vaguely disreputable, racy type of paper you wouldn't admit to reading but bought on Sundays for all the scandal-mongering:

The News of the World concentrated in particular on celebrity scoops, gossip and populist news. Its somewhat prurient focus on sex scandals gained it the nickname Screws of the World. In its last decade it had a reputation for exposing celebrities' drug use, sexual peccadilloes, or criminal acts, by using insiders and journalists in disguise to provide video or photographic evidence, and covert phone hacking in ongoing police investigations.

Morgan began to work as a freelance at The Sun in 1988, at this point dropping his double-barrelled name. He told Hunter Davies in December 1994 that he was personally recruited by Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie to work on the newspaper's show business column "Bizarre", his first high-profile post. Although he was not a fan of pop music, he was considered skilled at self-publicity and became the column's main writer.

...In January 1994, he became editor of the News of the World after being appointed to the job by Rupert Murdoch. ...In this period, the newspaper led with a series of scoops for which Morgan credited a highly efficient newsdesk and publicist Max Clifford.

Morgan then leaves the centre-right paper for a centre-left paper, claiming he resigned of his own accord but more a case of "jump before he was pushed":

Morgan left this post in 1995 ...The incident was reported to have contributed to Morgan's decision to leave for the Daily Mirror editorship.. Morgan's autobiography The Insider states that he left the News of the World for the Mirror of his own choice. It asserts he was an admirer of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for most of her period of office, making the appointment surprising as the Mirror is a Labour-supporting title.

...[Is involved in several mini-scandals, including allegedly profiting from insider trading stock tips from business journalists for the Mirror, then] In the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, Morgan was sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror "with immediate effect" on 14 May 2004, after refusing to apologise to Sly Bailey, then head of Trinity Mirror, for authorising the newspaper's publication of fake photographs.

He moved into television presenting, and has continued his chameleon-like style of being friends with/never heard of them (according as the wind blows) regarding various celebrities and public figures, e.g. "Morgan was briefly a friend of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex before she became the Duchess of Sussex, but said she cut him off early in her relationship with Prince Harry. He has been a regular critic of the couple since then, alleging they are hypocrites and claiming the Duchess is a social climber."

He wore out his welcome in UK media circles, hence the move to the USA. Mostly he has a good nose for controversy and isn't afraid (whether deliberately or not) to look like an idiot in his pursuit of headlines. Because he is such a chameleon, I would say not to take very seriously any stance he holds on any topic, since give him ten minutes and he'll swing to the opposite position if that's more tenable for public interest/attention.

Piers Morgan's a leftist, but not a progressive partisan. Like Bill Maher, he's very critical of the excesses of the far left (anti-white racism, misandry, trans women in sports, etc.).

That's implausible because the two red lines for the feds are... extremely conservative attitudes towards women and antisemitism. Nick is, as far as I can tell, completely genuine- he's an antisemite, closeted homosexual, simply doesn't have the same concern about Hispanic immigration as the far far right(which is often hung up on stupidity like deporting a third of the country anyway).

Each party to the debate is speaking to his own audience. This is often an under-appreciated dynamic in this kind of situation.

The problem is, Piers Morgan’s audience is mostly going to be dead or in nursing homes in five to ten years.

Agree-and-amplify style approaches are much older than Gen Z or pick-up culture. In his Enchiridion, Epictetus says:

33.7. If anyone tells you that such a person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: "He does not know my other faults, else he would not have mentioned only these."

Part of the secret of ancient Stoic therapeia (midwifery of the soul) is to replace the usual motivations of pro-social actions (like desire for social approval and status anxiety) with the pursuit of virtue in itself, a sense of duty, and a feeling of connection to the cosmopolis (city of the Cosmos.)

I think this is the purpose of a lot of the so-called Stoic paradoxes. In Stoicism, phrases like "all virtues are equal", "all vices are equal", and "only the sage is free" serve a similar psychological role to Christian sayings like, "only God/Jesus is perfect and sinless", "we have all sinned and fall short of God's perfection", and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Properly internalized, both philosophies will make it impossible to feel fundamentally better or worse than anyone else, and changes your point of comparison to a perfect ideal instead of something a mortal human is really capable of achieving in this life.

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.

While I hardly think Nick Fuentes is a Stoic sage, I think the power of denying a moral framework is bigger than this. It isn't that you're refusing to be moral, it is that you are refusing to give in to the coercive element of moral socializing, for better or worse. In the best cases, this frees you up to do the right thing in spite of what society's worst impulses might try to get you to do, like when Socrates refused immoral orders while serving the Athenian military under the 30 tyrants, and in the worse cases it enables you do a bad thing in spite of any social censure you might face.

I haven't watched the debate, so take this with a grain of salt.

I think it's easy to rhetorically defeat an opponent whose main argument against you is moral by simply rejecting his moral frame. So if Morgan was unprepared to focus on logical arguments instead of moral ones, that's incompetent of Morgan. I don't have Fuentes' level of quick rhetorical thinking and experience with public speaking, and I think even I could defeat a moralizing opponent in such a situation without too much trouble.

That said, I think that in the long term possible public support of Fuentes has a pretty hard cap, and he will find it difficult to ever truly turn his movement into something mainstream, so I'm not sure that these easy wins really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

I don't think it's realistically possible to openly say that women should lose the right to vote and ever achieve any sort of dominant position in politics in a Western country. Women's suffrage is, barring a massive civilization-altering catastrophe of some sort or the kind of genuinely total demographic replacement that great replacement theory people worry about, never going to be repealed in the West in any sort of foreseeable future. And if Sharia law supporting Muslims become the majority in the US somehow, they're not going to support Fuentes types either, despite agreeing with them about women and Jews, and white groypers are not going to be happy in such a future.

At best, Fuentes can stay what he is now, a gadfly and proselytizer, maybe a relatively minor player in the entire right-wing coalition, but groyper influence in politics will not grow above a certain threshold.

Fuentes also, despite his quite formidable rhetorical abilities, has plenty of weaknesses that can be exploited by a competent opponent. He just hasn't gone up against one yet on any sort of big stage, at least as far as I know.

Fuentes can stay what he is now, a gadfly and proselytizer ... groyper influence in politics will not grow above a certain threshold

My gut tells me you're right, but these various beliefs of his evidently have massive support among the up and coming, politically active right-wing youngsters, like those that staff congressional offices, think tanks, the White house, regional and university young republican orgs, etc. Claims that these are fringe views and are therefor only held by the fringe look to be untrue. And thus the idea that these views will never achieve escape velocity might have less support than imagined.

It's going to be quite the coup when Fuentes brings all those people over to the Democrats. I don't know why the right falls for this every time.

Or Levin and Shapiro are going to bring their people over to Democrats when their hold over Republican elites is broken, though one wonders how many geriatric followers they could actually flip.

Can't speak for Levin, but if some personal skepticism of zionism was a brightline for Shapiro he wouldn't have hired so many trad Catholics to work for him. Granted, not the crazy antisemitic schizo ones, but still, by all appearances Shapiro is more invested in social conservatism than Israel.

Not everyone he hires is ultra pro-Israel but not one dares cross the line into being anti-Israel and the one who did was famously kicked out.

If Ben Shapiro is more invested in social conservatism than Israel then why is he so much more tolerant of and willing to converse with social liberals, even the most extreme "defend trans kids" types, but he has a total firewall around hiring, debating or publicly interacting with any kind of anti-Zionist? By all indications the former is simply a fig leaf for the latter.

Probably because zionism is more difficult to have a debate about. You can destroy trans narratives with facts and logic pretty easily; zionism is not based on that.

Women's suffrage is, barring a massive civilization-altering catastrophe of some sort or the kind of genuinely total demographic replacement that great replacement theory people worry about, never going to be repealed in the West in any sort of foreseeable future.

To borrow from the Matrix, by the time it becomes feasible to end women's suffrage, it will no longer be necessary.

Fuentes: I have black friends though. They are also concerned about [crime statistics]

Granted, I’m not familiar with Fuentes and I don’t know if he was doing some 5D metairony here, so I may be getting whooshed (what if the boomer is calling from inside the house?!).

However, Fuentes’s statement is A) still buying into the progressive framing that the opinions of non-blacks on racial matters (or perhaps any sort of matters) can only be legitimized (and even then, only partially) to the extent they have black friends. This is also B) still buying into the progressive and mainstream conservative (progressives driving the speed limit) framing that crime is only a problem insofar that blacks are the primary victims of it.

I think not. It's more like challenging the assumptions most progressives have that (a) you cannot be even a little bit racist and still have affection and friendship for members of that race. The whole reason "Some of my best friends are black" became a boomer-cringe punchline is that it was actually true for a lot of people! They did have black friends, and yet they also had racist opinions about blacks in general.

Southerners would often argue that Southerners could be friends with individual blacks but disliked the black race, while Yankees claimed to love the black race but couldn't stand to be friends with blacks, and I think there is truth to that.

See also: "one of the good ones" and "a credit to your race." Obviously most black people are not going to think highly of someone saying, basically, "I think most of your people are trash, but you're okay." But it is in fact possible to believe [crime statistic] and even that this says something about bell curves and HBD, and still think individuals can be fine.

The progressive framing makes that distinction impossible: if you are concerned about [crime statistic] or you believe the Bell Curve is true, then you are a racist and cannot actually like black people, and no black person should trust you, period.

This has often struck me in stories from the way back, early pulp fiction, Victorian, and even medieval tales. You'd have Christians in existential war with Saracens and yet an individual Crusader might make friends with a Moor. They'd be brothers, despite the fact that their entire worldview said the other one was a servant of the Devil. Jews in early literature are often depicted terribly, and yet individual Jewish characters are represented as sympathetic and people who probably think Jews in general are jewy Joos would be their friends. (SS will now come along to rant about how inserting a sympathetic Jewish character in a book is part of the Joo-spiracy, Anthony Trollope was probably ZOGed....)

And pointing out "Black people are also concerned about [crime statistic]" breaks that frame that "Only racists who hate black people talk about that!" Yeah, a lot of black people are concerned about black criminality. They might not agree that this is because black people are congenitally criminal, they might disagree about the cause of the dysfunction in black society that produces these statistics, but it's not wrong to challenge the framing that it's inherently racist to look at facts.

I don't know exactly how Fuentes genuinely feels about blacks. From what I've seen of his speeches, it's something like "Blacks are mostly low-IQ animals and they need to be controlled, but some of them are okay." Which is racist by any reasonable definition. But he's still perturbing Morgan's assumptions by saying (a) no, I don't hate every single black person, and (b) black people can also recognize and be concerned about uncomfortable truths.

I don't like Fuentes (having watched a few of his videos- ye gods is he an annoying, insufferable, smug little prick who looks and sounds like someone who spent his high school career getting swirlies in the boy's bathroom), but I think he understands what he's doing better than you do. I can even somewhat agree with the framing he is trying to break, as I personally believe [crime statistic], Bell Curve, etc., are real things, and yet also we should not be hateful and oppressive to black people as a class. I am pretty sure my conclusions are more charitable and my solutions more generous than what Fuentes would propose, but it's really telling to me that the people who truly, viscerally hate black people and Jews also hate someone as overtly, proudly racist and anti-semitic as Fuentes and even accuse him of being "controlled opposition" because ... he's not racist and anti-semitic enough.

If you're waiting around for a mainstream character who's openly calling for holy war and genocide, well, KulakRevolt is auditioning hard for that role, but I don't see him getting much traction.

I don't know exactly how Fuentes genuinely feels about blacks. From what I've seen of his speeches, it's something like "Blacks are mostly low-IQ animals and they need to be controlled, but some of them are okay." Which is racist by any reasonable definition. But he's still perturbing Morgan's assumptions by saying (a) no, I don't hate every single black person, and (b) black people can also recognize and be concerned about uncomfortable truths.

One way to put it is the difference between patriotism and chauvinism: one is expression of sympathy or love or other positive emotion toward your group, while the other is declaration of superiority. In that sense you just ascribe positive or even negative attributes to your identity which does not preclude doing the same for other groups. You may still like jazz, black basketball players etc. It is just a view from the standpoint of other culture.

From my meager experience with Fuentes during latest slew of interviews, this is what he preaches: Multiculturalism is over. Even the mild one such as "judge based on content of character and not based on your skin". Whites should stick together, foster positive relation toward their white identity and become a tribe. This will be especially important as whites will become minority majority. They do not have to be necessarily hostile to other groups, they can let's say be allies toward East Asians, especially if there is a common interest let's say when it comes to education reforms etc. But they should acknowledge that they are distinct group with their own history, culture, religion etc.

Paradoxically this is what Fuentes also says about other groups, especially blacks and Jews. They are Americans, but they also have their tribal/national identity which enables them to band together and promote these interests. Whites should do the same. In this sense I do understand why people adhering to liberal worldview such as James Lindsay call people like Fuentes as "woke right". Although it is interesting that they do not have the same label for other people such as Ben Shapiro, who is also on the right and who also has tribal identity which is sometimes in conflict with general liberal ethos.

The whole reason "Some of my best friends are black" became a boomer-cringe punchline is that it was actually true for a lot of people! They did have black friends, and yet they also had racist opinions about blacks in general.

Why the past tense?

I think not. It's more like challenging the assumptions most progressives have that (a) you cannot be even a little bit racist and still have affection and friendship for members of that race. The whole reason "Some of my best friends are black" became a boomer-cringe punchline is that it was actually true for a lot of people! They did have black friends, and yet they also had racist opinions about blacks in general.

What progressives ever made that claim? The whole point of "some of my best friend are black" being a punchline is that it's not evidence of not being racist. That is, tokenism is still racist.

Nowadays, saying "Some of my best friends are black" is kind of cringeworthy because it's such a boomer punchline, and it sounds like something Archie Bunker might have said. Of course some people who said that were just trying to deflect from their actually racist beliefs, but some genuinely did not think of themselves as racists and were trying to defend themselves with what seemed like a legitimate point - if I'm a racist, why are some of my best friends black?

Unfortunately, the progressive bailey today is that all white people are racist, anyone who claims not to be racist is in denial about their racism, and mentioning black friends is just proof of how racist you are (because if you weren't racist you'd know you're racist and that having black friends is no defense). It also condenses attitudes into a binary: you are racist or not-racist. (Or "anti-racist" as Ibrim X Kendi would say.) If you are not "anti-racist" then you are racist, no matter how non-racist you think you are and no matter how many black friends you have, and functionally there is no difference between you and Nick Fuentes.

A progressive generally will not actually put it like that, of course, but that is very much what I get from modern progressivism.

Nowadays, saying "Some of my best friends are black" is kind of cringeworthy because it's such a boomer punchline, and it sounds like something Archie Bunker might have said.

Note that Archie was canonically of the WWII generation, two generations older than the boomers.

Everyone older than ~Gen X is a boomer

I look forward to about 10 years from now when 20-something Gen Alphas start calling Gen-X "boomers"

I can't believe I have to explain that I know Archie Bunker the character was not a boomer. Archie Bunker the character was entertainment for boomers. Hence his lines being things Boomers thought were funny.

SS will now come along to rant about how inserting a sympathetic Jewish character in a book is part of the Joo-spiracy, Anthony Trollope was probably ZOGed....)

C'mon, this is uncharitable, isn't it? Shouldn't you know better?

C'mon, this is uncharitable, isn't it? Shouldn't you know better?

Yeah, imagine confusing Trollope with Dickens who was prevailed upon successfully to change his depiction of fictional Jewish characters, from the criminal Fagin in "Oliver Twist" to the saintly Riah in "Our Mutual Friend" after a Jewish lady wrote to him.

I am offended that you would think I don't know Trollope from Dickens!

Perhaps OP meant a different trollop 🤣

My two cents is that this forum isn't really the place for disparaging misspellings of opponents' arguments (da joos, freeze peach, da menz etc), but I've reported it a few times and nothing has come of it, so I guess the mod-team disagree. That's fair.

disparaging misspellings of opponents' arguments

That's not the part I was calling uncharitable. I'm referring to @Amadan dragging @SecureSignals into this — without even having the decency to @ him — to put words into his mouth.

I mean, if in the middle of making some right-leaning argument, I were to drop a parenthetical about how "magicalkittycat will now come along to rant about how un-ironic literal Nazis are everywhere, the GOP will probably declare the Fourth Reich in 2028...", or something like that, I would not at all be surprised to get a mod warning at the least — and deservedly so.

I thought we're supposed to engage with the arguments people actually make, not the arguments we preemptively imagine them making.

Southerners would often argue that Southerners could be friends with individual blacks but disliked the black race, while Yankees claimed to love the black race but couldn't stand to be friends with blacks, and I think there is truth to that.

I’ve heard this phrased: “In the South, the Negro can get as close as he likes, as long as he doesn’t get too high; in the North, the Negro can get as high as he likes, as long as he doesn’t get too close”

Ever-relevant Land:

Consider John Derbyshire’s essay in infamy The Talk: Nonblack Version, focusing initially on its relentless obnoxiousness, and attentive to the negative correlation between sociability and objective reason. As Derbyshire notes elsewhere, people are generally incapable of differentiating themselves from group identities, or properly applying statistical generalizations about groups to individual cases, including their own. A rationally indefensible, but socially inevitable, reification of group profiles is psychologically normal – even ‘human’ – with the result that noisy, non-specific, statistical information is erroneously accepted as a contribution to self-understanding, even when specific information is available.

From the perspective of socially autistic, low-EQ, rational analysis, this is simply mistaken. If an individual has certain characteristics, the fact of belonging to a group that has similar or dissimilar average characteristics is of no relevance whatsoever. Direct and determinate information about the individual is not to any degree enriched by indirect and indeterminate (probabilistic) information about the groups to which the individual belongs. If an individual’s test results are known, for instance, no additional insight is provided by statistical inferences about the test results that might have been expected based on group profiling. An Ashkenazi Jewish moron is no less moronic because he is an Ashkenazi Jew. Elderly Chinese nuns are unlikely to be murderers, but a murderer who happens to be an elderly Chinese nun is neither more nor less murderous than one who is not. This is all extremely obvious, to obnoxious people.

To normal people, however, it is not obvious at all. In part this is because rational intelligence is scarce and abnormal among humans, and in part because social ‘intelligence’ works with what everyone else is thinking, which is to say, with irrational groupish sentiment, meager information, prejudices, stereotypes, and heuristics. Since (almost) everybody else is taking short-cuts, or ‘economizing’ on reason, it is only rational to react defensively to generalizations that are likely to be reified or inappropriately applied — over-riding or substituting for specific perceptions. Anybody who anticipates being pre-defined through a group identity has an expanded ego-investment in that group and the way it is perceived. A generic assessment, however objectively arrived at, will immediately become personal, under (even quite remotely) normal conditions.

Obnoxious reason can stubbornly insist that anything average cannot be about you, but the message will not be generally received. Human social ‘intelligence’ is not built that way. Even supposedly sophisticated commentators blunder repeatedly into the most jarring exhibitions of basic statistical incomprehension without the slightest embarrassment, because embarrassment was designed for something else (and for almost exactly the opposite). The failure to understand stereotypes in their scientific, or probabilistic application, is a functional prerequisite of sociability, since the sole alternative to idiocy in this respect is obnoxiousness.

I’ve always thought of this in terms of the “yes Chad” jpg meme. There’s no caricature or attack that can’t be defeated by more or less saying “yes”.

“You’re a communist who hates America!”

“Yes”

“You’re a holocaust denier who thinks the Jews are running the world”

“Yes”

Etc. etc. It works because we’ve lost consensus about what things we’re supposed to believe as a nation.

Better yet, 'Bring the movies'.

Etc. etc. It works because we’ve lost consensus about what things we’re supposed to believe as a nation.

I don’t think it works because of that, since if anything there I’d say it works because of the consensus that communists and antisemites are bad. It works because it shows social dominance and control of the interaction by calling out bad faith intercolution in an unaffected, playful way, tossing down a reverse uno card to parry and deal 2X damage.

It can also be applied more broadly to deal with rhetorical tricks or attempted gotchas in general, not just American culture war topics (hence the possible origin from dealing with women’s shit-tests). For example, loaded questions:

“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

“No, it’d be cruel to deprive her of the violence she craves.”

I suspect its origins are far older than PUA knowhow, though, even if PUA put a name to it and helped popularize it.

Thanks for teaching me how to deal with culture war shit tests. From now on if anyone asks me if I'm racist I'll reply: "Yeah man I'm racist as fuck. My black friends are hella annoyed by it"

"Yah I'm homophobic as fuck. I get gay panic anxiety every time I come at the gay bath house"

"Yeah I'm islamophobic as fuck..."

My conspiracy take is legacy establishment figures like Tucker and Piers at least to some extent agree with Fuentes's message and are intentionally amplifying it by inviting him on their shows to be slain by him. In the words of Mycroft Holmes (from the British TV series): "This is a battle we must lose, because they are right and we are wrong."

That said, it's kind of a shame that Fuentes is the best the dissident right can produce. He has a lot of problems, certainly not the least of which being that he complains without proposing any serious solutions. Take the illegals question: what is the actual proposal here? There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin. Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them? Because apparently saying "They trust me. Dumb fucks." is not a compelling enough signal for the masses to not cede their entire social infrastructure to that person.

My personal take is there is no serious way to solve the problems Fuentes names. For a country that never got itself into these situations in the first place, like Poland, sure. Fuentes's ideology can work. But for countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, this is not feasible. The best they can hope for is a non-bastardised implementation of classical liberalism: maybe actually put the criminals in prison for once, instead of releasing them on some harebrained pretense of "the Pakistanis don't know rape is bad." Bukele, basically. But any notion of "retvrn to ethnostate" is fundamentally non-serious. And I mean that in a deeply practical sense: I don't think any amount of "the secret is just be evil" makes it realistic.

There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin.

It was Richard Spencer of all people who repeated his view on alt-right podcasts that anything that was done without violence can per definition be undone without violence as well. In other words, illegal immigrants entered the US due to incentives without force; change the incentives, and they will leave peacefully. You don't necessarily have to agree with him of course, but this argument surely has some legs to stand on.

It was Richard Spencer of all people who repeated his view on alt-right podcasts that anything that was done without violence can per definition be undone without violence as well...but this argument surely has some legs to stand on

What? That's obvious nonsense that couldn't stand up to any scrutiny. Either it's using the novel expansive definition of "violence" where it just means "bad actions", or else finding counterexamples is trivial.

  • I can non-violently scramble an egg. Good luck unscrambling it.

  • Libel/slander is not a violent crime, yet the harm is often irreversible and can only be punished and compensated for.

  • Robbery and fraud are often not violent, but recovering stolen goods practically requires the use (or at least threat) of violence.

They might be able to stem the tide without needing any enforcement, but that's a long ways from actually reversing it. I think this is obvious enough that the argument would get shut down before it got any real traction.

Scrambling an egg is technically a violent act because're breaking the egg first, acording to the dictionary definition of the word as well. Also, robbery necessarily entails at least the threat of violence. But anyway, my point is that illegal immigrants didn't appear by forcing their way in, and it's not like they're trying to stay by threatening violence either.

I’ve made this point a million times. Deny all benefits to illegal immigrants. Strictly enforce their inability to work. Tax remittances heavily. Put a harsh jail sentence for catching an illegal. Turn off chain immigration.

Illegals go bye bye.

Unthinkable program in a managerial democracy. All your donors employ illegals or rely on people who do.

You need a coup, or a referendum, which is the same thing.

campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking

The reconquista took > 700 years and then only in retrospect.

Pelagius wasn't 'trusting the plan', as others have said it's incremental improvements

Then as now it will look more random walk than trend at times. You need the macro view to see the arc.

A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memor

"It's hard so we shouldn't even try" is a pretty common rhetorical tactic that I see on this topic, and I'm going to take this opportunity to address it.

It's a pernicious mindset that argues that there is no value in incremental improvement. It's akin to saying that since you can't shove an entire cheeseburger down your gullet in one bite, you might as well curl up in the fetal position and starve to death. To quote Barack Obama, it's letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good".

The Trump administration, for all its flaws, allegedly managed to deport 605,000 people who were not legally residing in the US in 2025 alone. This does not count individuals who returned to their home country without any state interaction. These 605,000 individuals were deported over the strident objections of institutions all across the country, which attempted to use legal strategies and manufactured public sentiment to stymie those deportations to the fullest extent possible.

You can argue that those 605,000 deportations were bad on the grounds of morality or realpolitik, but it's difficult to argue that they are not happening. You can say that you would like them to happen faster, but you cannot argue that 605,000 is orders of magnitude larger than what had happened from 2020 - 2024.

It's fairly clear that the US has the state capacity to do something here, because they're doing it.

"It's hard so we shouldn't even try" is a pretty common rhetorical tactic that I see on this topic

I don't do rhetorical tactics. I'm not a streamer, I have no fanbase or audience to pander to. I'm not going to lose my ad revenue if I say an oopsie.

I say it's not realistic because it isn't. To engage in the deportations of 15+ million people is ludicrous, and as I mentioned, that's not even the bailey: the bailey is a white ethnostate, which would require 40+ million deportations. That's either a chart-topper in all world history or very close, in terms of quantity of people relocated by a government. The notion that the United States, in anything like its current incarnation, could engage in 1930s Stalin-level population migration is not realistic. You would need a Julius Caesar-tier figure, and that's not the sort of political personnel you can pick up the phone and order from CATO.

And to the perfect being the enemy of the good: I'm not sure "good" is the word to use here, so let's use the word "partial": does reducing the quantity of non-whites by, say, 3 million, change anything at all about the trajectory of the country? Not really. You still have tens of millions of non-whites. All you've done is inflame a bunch of racial animosity among the still-very-much-muilticolored demographics of the country. And make no mistake, these people aren't just going to sit there and let you do this: if millions of coloured people actually believe they're under serious threat of deportation, you will have major political instability--not the BLM sort, the full-scale civil war sort. And you still have sub-replacement white fertility and a massive generation of retiring boomers.

Further, I don't trust the Trump administration's numbers on deportations, mostly because I don't trust them on anything else. They seem to be outright fabricating economic numbers (with the not-so-subtle intent to bully their own central bank), so I'm certainly not going to trust their remigration numbers.

In my estimation, there are only two realistic routes to a white ethnostate for Americans: major economic collapse, which might shake things up enough that large numbers of people who don't have some connection to agriculture (which is mostly white) flee the country as refugees, then hope the Mormons and Amish can form new state(s) and rebuild everything. Or you try the Israel tactic, of gathering some sort of white identity community, flying off to a hopefully-not-already-inhabited piece of land somewhere (cough), and make your ethnostate from scratch. Both of these are extremely uncomfortable, but the former is something that occasionally happens even without anyone trying to make it happen, and the latter is quite literally how the United States was founded.

With this sort of thing in mind, how many voters would choose any of the above over Gavin Newsom and AOC running in 3 years, promising a return to the regular old world of 2013?

Semi-Forced remigration via economic and legal means is the only way to make this happen at a large enough scale. And is definitely possible. It’s what the right should be aiming for.

The thing is you have to force economic conditions that are worse than the place they came from -- sufficiently worse to overcome the activation energy to get up and move again, at an older age than they did the first time!

In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place. But the time to do that was decades ago, back when.. US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.

Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants, and many of them are on welfare, this is a much easier matter.

No you have to force economic conditions to suck for immigrants. Strictly enforce e verify. Heavily tax remittances. Harshly restrict benefits to immigrants. Turn off chain migration.

In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place.

No one knows how to do that. I mean, if Trump really does get rid of Maduro that will likely help, but only a little bit.

It's tricky, but the premise does seem to hold: checking out the El Salvador emigration data, we can see it's 5x lower than it used to be. And it dropped by a factor of 2 the moment Bukele took office!

Now that Bukele has shown that you can, in fact, just put the violent criminals in prison, maybe others will give it a shot.

I mean I'm given to understand that tattooing 'I am evil' on your face is pretty specific to el salvadorean gangs and so it's a lot harder to replicate that strategy elsewhere.

More comments

No one knows how to do that.

Oh no, the US has Manifest Destiny, but their founding myth also kind of involves them not being an empire so they don't want to. Plus, the pro-Empire faction is too busy trying to establish a domestic successor empire to bother with taking over other countries in this way.

Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants

Europe is in a much, much worse position when you consider the ages involved. The Muslims are disproportionately young adults and children, and the middle aged and elderly dying people are disproportionately white.

The thing is the US is already so non-white. Whites account for around 50% of US births, which is pretty bad compared to most of Europe, as far as I can tell, although it's a bit tricky to compare numbers due to how data is collected and classified.

And Eastern Europe is mostly okay (I mean, they still have cratering fertility. But at least it's not buoyed by third-world migrant births).

Sure, but the different non white groups may not like whites, but they hate each other. The blacks meeting an indian(or oriental, but that's a lot less likely) boss will beg for the klan to come be in charge again. The Hispanics often won't accept a black manager. Etc, etc.

But in America, the different ethnic groups are held in tension with one another. In Europe there’s one mostly contiguous ethno-religious block waiting in the wings to seize power.

US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.

Sure, but without US intervention Latin America would have instituted Communism in a bunch of places, and it's extremely difficult to imagine they would have been any more economically prosperous under Communism.

There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin.

Maybe, but there are a lot of potentially-billion-dollar-bills laying on the sidewalk which the US political system won't pick up for various reasons.

  • highly taxing/regulating remittances
  • vigorous enforcement of H1B and other educational/employment visa requirements
  • ramp up of enforcement of existing Orders of Removal / hiring more IJs to help clear the case backlog
  • increasing workplace audits/lawsuits against bad actors in immigrant-heavy employment sectors (agriculture, food processing, construction, hospitality).

Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them?

Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective, as well as just a general grass-roots push against the more obnoxiously-obsequious Israel focus. Barring that, just wait a generation - most of the well-assimilated liberal ashkenazi will just die off or fully submerge into the general population through intermarriage without any/many kids in a generation or two anyway.

Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective

As Randy Fine noted in response to Fuentes a couple of months ago on this subject, to his knowledge (and I think he’s probably more accurate than not) no Jewish congresspeople are Israeli citizens. In the same way, very few Jewish American billionaires or otherwise powerful figures are Israeli citizens. Zuckerberg, Ellison, Altman, Iger, none of these people have Israeli passports in all likelihood (I say because it’s possible they do in secret, but it’s very unlikely - there is no reason for them to).

Technically speaking, all Jews are Israeli citizens, no? It's kinda meaningless when you haven't gotten an Israeli passport, but it's a handy piece of antisemitic rhetoric.

It's worth noting this isn't unique to Jews; a surprisingly high percentage of native born Americans are technically citizens of a foreign country(I would imagine Italy is slightly ahead of Israel here) through descent.

The of return is an application rather than an entitlement, it's subject to the whims of the Israeli state and can be denied for many reasons at the relatively arbitrary whim of the state. Israel doesn't consider non-Israeli Jews to be, legally, citizens. In that case it's closer to 'ancestry visas' for e.g., great grandchildren in countries that support them, like Portugal, England and others. Italian hereditary citizenship (until earlier this year) was automatic for subsequent generations, you applied for recognition of citizenship, not for citizenship or a visa itself.

There was a weird interview with Bernie Sanders years ago. A journalist asserted he was an Israeli dual citizen in lead up to a question. He cut in and said he is not an Israeli citizen. The journalist pushed on reiterating that he is a dual citizen and tried again to ask Bernie about his foreign loyalties. He couldn't answer and just repeated that he is not an Israeli. Such an awkward exchange.

The demand for 'ZOG' exceeds the supply. People want an explanations such as dual citizens with divided loyalties composing a significant portion of Congress. That's not true in a factual sense, but it feels right to them.

The demand for 'ZOG' exceeds the supply. People want an explanations such as dual citizens with divided loyalties composing a significant portion of Congress. That's not true in a factual sense, but it feels right to them.

Only the most unsophisticated of ...zog-demanders? would actually claim that the reason for Congress' divided loyalties is due solely to a large proportion of dual citizens. The actual claim on the part of people who believe in ZOG is that Congress is thoroughly corrupt and gridlocked, which grants AIPAC incredible undue influence over American politics. One of the primary examples these people point to is Ted Cruz, who openly stated that he went into office for the sole purpose of serving Israel - despite not being an Israeli citizen himself. These people are very obviously correct, which is why you have to twist their argument into something like "it is solely the Israeli dual citizens that are the problem" before you can actually defeat it.

Then I guess I'm confused about who Fuentes is talking about....because a lot of the most obnoxious pro-Israel activists, even to me, a Zionist-sympathetic secular half-Jew, either have dual citizenship themselves or have close family who does who they talk about incessantly. I'm thinking of chattering class people like John Podhoretz, etc. I didn't realize that Iger, Altman, etc. were viewed as being particularly Zionist.

I think even if all these were implemented tomorrow, the US would not look meaningfully different in 20 years.

That said, it's kind of a shame that Fuentes is the best the dissident right can produce.

Why? The best the left can produce is Hasan Piker, and the best the neoliberal center can produce is Destiny. Seems like everyone's roughly on par.

The best the left can produce is Hasan Piker

Zohran Mamdani got elected Mayor of New York on a DSA/third-worldist platform. Hasan is just modern-day left wing Bill O'Reilly. AOC, KBJ, Randi Weingarten, Brandon Johnson - all of these people hold significant office and/or policy influence.

To be clear, I don't actually think either of the people I or Soteriologian mentioned are "the best X can produce", that was kinda my point. Sorry for the snark, but I didn't appreciate someone from the other side declaring who is supposed to be my champion.

Understood. Sorry for not reading the room. Lol.

Maybe they're all feds from the same school.

Or if rumors and videos about Fuentes and Destiny are true, the same bathhouse.

Take Contrapoints, for example. Beneath the tongue-in-cheek pizzazz and glamour, and modulo the enormous blindspot of his/her own sexuality, there really is a person who has deep affection for western philosophy and art. Almost scholarly. There is nobody remotely comparable on the dissident right.

There’s a strong case to be made that Contrapoints to some extent agrees with core aspects of the Blanchardian hypothesis. Not in its entirety, but they understand that they approach life in a certain context as a performance and that gender is part of that.

There are trans forums where they dislike Wynn for this reason, because they understand that there’s an acknowledgement, on some level, that it’s drag.

Yeah, the reason I call it a blind spot is how unable to acknowledge the traditional roles (s)he is: as soon as you open your analysis to timescales longer than a human lifespan, the tradcon worldview makes a lot of sense. It's not arbitrary. It's not silly mysticism on par with a shaman performing rain dance.

Even if you find the traditional arrangement infuriating, at least have the basic intellectual honesty to acknowledge that this is how humans reproduce, and you need both pieces for this to work. In the words of Augustus:

If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure.

Today, one might label him gay (although I don't like applying modern labels to ancients), but the point is he's at least clearheaded enough to acknowledge the underlying mechanics of why society is the way it is, rather than gaslight himself and everyone else into thinking some weird degen lifestyle is totally equal to traditional marraige.

Lomez has an entire company dedicated to publishing abandoned books, and manages to do so without pizzas, glamour, or talking about his sexuality. Next!

Destiny is also left. You could call him neoliberal left, I suppose, but there's nothing center about him.

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.

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)

Shanghai people have the same wealth and comfort as in Western cities

I worked there for a bit. No they don't.

and in addition complete safety

One of my coworkers got robbed in Shanghai.

Points well taken about the lack of drug addicts wandering around.

And I'm way, way freer than them. Let's have some perspective here.

Why in Dubai or Shanghai people have the same wealth and comfort as in Western cities

You picked the wrong examples. Dubai is a soulless worthless hellhole. Shanghai is a nice place in many ways, but it's quite poor, crowded, and not very comfortable compared to many western cities.

Maybe so, but that’s not the impression many Americans get through social media (only a tiny minority will ever visit in person).

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.

Morgan is British, and no, "everyone in the world born between the years X and Y, so Piers Morgan is GenX by virtue of being born in 1965" is not a meaningful criteria for a cohort. Morgan would only recognize Gen X culture in an academic sense (and probably not much even in that sense). Meanwhile, Fuentes, by virtue of being chronically online, almost certainly is more familiar with Red Pill discourse than Morgan.

Britain had its own baby boom, but it was bifurcated into a wave in the late 40s and one in the early 60s, with an era of postwar austerity in the lean 50s in-between. America had more of a consistent boom.

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 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.

There was also a rather banal and evident factor at play. In the old days the average young woman was either pregnant or caring for small children. Both situations render her vulnerable and dependent. For the man that is her provider, this makes Game unnecessary and for other men it makes it ineffective. Game is basically a modern response to female infertility.

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.

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.

Difference is, if you read anything by Casanova, he seems to genuinely have liked women. The famous Don Juan, by contrast, in his fictional portrayal seems to have treated women as notches on his bedpost and to have regarded them with contempt.

Being able to end on friendly terms with your exes will save you from a lot of "they then went to their male relations and claimed he had violated them" vindictiveness, hence why he was able to live to be 73 😁

Yes, he was such a genuine "liker" of women, like when he knowingly slept with his own daughter Leonilda in threesome with her mother, who was his previous lover. Excuse me if I do not share this vision of love and respect for the gentle sex. If anything, it is vastly more degenerate than that of Don Juan.

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.

It's important to differentiate trickery from fraud here. PUAs never promoted such illegal acts.

Gonna be real here and say that this sounds like saying that feminists never promoted misandry. I'm sure many PUAs said that they didn't promote that, and most of them probably even meant it, but that's not the same thing as a perfect or even very good track record for a large and loose movement, even if we're being generous.

I'm pretty sure that no, actually not one PUA ever promoted acts that legally count as fraud.

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.

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. He showed enough aptitude for Latin and other subjects 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 degree 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?

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.

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:

PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery.

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.

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? 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:

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, but was not in the past.

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.

Pickup artists are predators. They do not have to go after the most secure and difficult prey. While in the past it may be so that women had in general more protection from their families, they were also more gullible in absence of internet and other channels. There were widows, women with sick parents etc. In addition even if men held dominion over their women, then the path led through those. You could just get into a good grace of dominant men in order to get to women in their care.

Plus again, you have a very self-defeating definition of Pickup Artist. It seems to exclude any man who either starts or during his life gains status, wealth, social trickery or any other resource. What is your stance then? That "true" pickup artists are only losers who never start or end with money and status and who never get laid?

So again - who is PUA artist in your eyes? I just googled for the list of most famous modern Pickup Artists, not that I know any of them:

  • Julien Blanc

  • Ross Jeffries

  • Mark Manson

  • Erik von Markovik

  • Neil Strauss

  • Roosh V

  • Eric Weber

According to AI, the average net worth of all of those is in range of millions of dollars, often due to their courses etc. Are they by your definition not Pickup Artists - because the can get to fuck women solely based on their fame and wealth?

More comments

Thanks for the reply; I was about to make largely the same points but you were faster.

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.

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.

PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery.

I'd add two more caveats. PUA as a phenomenon specifically entails men codifying pick-up artistry and teaching it to other men.

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.

More comments

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.

The modern leftist intellectual doesn't have any knowledge about why they think what they think

Modern intellectual leftists (the ones who get repeatedly booked anyway) often have a very elaborate theory of why they believe what they believe. Maybe it doesn't hold up but they can spin those assumptions out enough to fill up the time in a debate. And they'll at least have a set of anecdotes about why black people commit crime or the Middle East is a basket case because of the US. They'll at least have a filibuster. Piers sat around pretending to not get per capita.

I don't know if he's even a leftist, I think Piers is just a boomer from a genteel time when We Don't Discuss These Things (and, from his perspective, they weren't really major problems yet). And not a particularly smart or reflective one. My understanding is that his main talents are shamelessness and social climbing. Things have gone well for him, so why would he really think too hard about anything?

Piers is an entertainer. He's not that smart, but that works because the audience isn't. He's plays a normal person's caricature of a smart person. His main appeal is he's non-threatening.

In the UK we would think of him as leaning a bit right wing, not a leftist (and not an intellectual either, he's more of a morning TV show host, though he has edited newspapers and is influential in the media industry).

he's more of a morning TV show host

Yes, he was! You just reminded me of this excruciating clip.

I'm doubling down on my "just a bit thick" diagnosis.

I suppose you meant to write 'advantage' instead of 'handicap'?

They are synonyms in this context.

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.

I see. Thanks to you all for clearing that up.

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

This is in fact the older meaning, an advantage given to someone in a sport or game in order to level the playing field when the players are not of equal skill. The sense of 'disability' came out of that.

going after some dude’s dad

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.

There's subtlety: the big appeal isn't that he is a racist/antisemite; it's that he refuses to lend moral authority to these labels in the first place.

His "anti-black racism" mostly just boils down to "put the criminals in prison," which is not actually racist by any sensible definition.

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.

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.

Fuentes made it Morgan's business by putting it out there. Sorry, he pussied out. This was, to use OP's language, a shit-test where he didn't agree and amplify or even deflect, he just got angry and all of that Zoomer irony and unapologetic energy fell away.

Morgan did more harm to his cause than if he was muted but it's kind of absurd to think that we can't question a man who admits he's racist about potentially racist statements his dad made that he publicized and how that might have shaped his worldview from the start.

Fuentes made it Morgan's business by putting it out there.

Also around year ago there was a crazy guy who showed up in front of Fuentes's house with a gun. After the police was called, the guy was shot to death in Fuentes's backyard only to be found, that he actually murdered his roommate in other city before appearing at Fuentes's doorstep . Yeah, it is a complete mystery why Fuentes wants to keep his father's name out, when there are literal crazies looking for victims.

By the way Piers Morgan also mentioned his wife Celia Walden numerous times on his show. He literally mentioned his sons during this show, showcasing how empathetic and upright they are. Does this mean that Morgan's family is now fair game for any future discussion with him? Anybody can now demand Morgan to explain unempathetic behavior of his sons, dig up their racist tweets, or maybe showing how one of them visited a strip club or something like that, they are now cleaned for the chopping block - right?

Oh an it is not to get under Morgan's skin, it is just to have an honest discussion about what he said and an opportunity for Morgan to expand on hist stance. He may be asked about his wife or sons and their misdeeds five times in one interview even if he is visibly uncomfortable. In the end it is he who brought up his sons and wife into public spotlight.

By the way Piers Morgan also mentioned his wife Celia Walden numerous times on his show. He literally mentioned his sons during this show, showcasing how empathetic and upright they are. Does this mean that Morgan's family is now fair game for any future discussion with him?

The behavior of his wife is literally one of the main rebuttals being used by Fuentes fans right now.

And? Are you for or against that? I'd wager by your logic Celia Walden is now a fair game for all crazy groypers now, and it is all Morgan's fault for bringing her up in the past. In my eyes it is a low blow.

Obviously no one should go to her house but it's not that hard a case. They're both public figures. He spouted off at the mouth, she did so too, multiple times. I don't know that anyone outside of groypers care but you can obviously bring up the state of his marriage if he's bringing it up and putting others down.

His sons are what would give me pause but I can't recall what context they were brought up in. I'd hope young kids could be kept out of it.

Assume Nick Fuentes was some rando leftist, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, would it be fair to bring up things his dad said about politics when asking about his own left radical views?

His sons are what would give me pause but I can't recall what context they were brought up in. I'd hope young kids could be kept out of it.

The context was Morgan saying how Fuentes was antisemite, Fuentes said it was because Morgan is a boomer and he is representing a new young wave. Morgan then said that his sons are around Fuentes's age, and that they are empathetic and good people very unlike Fuentes. So now I guess it would be fine to have Morgan's sons under microscope and digging up any potential problematic antisemitic, misogynistic and racist behavior if they are such exemplars of uprightness. From now on to forever.

Assume Nick Fuentes was some rando leftist, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, would it be fair to bring up things his dad said about politics when asking about his own left radical views?

No. I think that it is a distraction and a low blow. I think it is a normal gentlemen's agreement not to bring family into such a debate, even if people brought their family up before themselves. Morgan himself said that he has literally thousands of interviews. Fuentes has thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of hours of his show. It may be that both of them mentioned their family at some point, but still it should be a taboo. Maybe it is my sensibility here, but coming after someone's family to win debate points is absolutely vile tactics.

Especially here, Morgan got what he wanted, which was Fuentes admitting that he is a racist. Morgan just wanted to go one step further somehow proving that Funetes's dad is racist based on this one clip. It is such a stupid shit to pull off - maybe Fuentes hates his father and he would gladly smear him. His father was not there to defend himself about such a wild speculation and accusation. It is just not right.

More comments

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.

I think most normies will be turned off.

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).

actually racist

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.

Nick never gave a straight answer.

I think the interview made it clear that Fuentes is, well, actually racist

Whatever gave you that idea? Was it Fuentes saying "I am racist"? How is that not a straight answer?

I mean on the dad question in particular, which something to the effect of "did you grow up with racism in your household and if so, do you think it affected your current outlook." (That's not actually a quote, just my remembered paraphrase.)

The idea is that conservatives (progressives) will try to throw you off your game by making some unfounded criticism, to test how secure/powerful you are as a (classical) liberal. It’s called a “shit test.”

I have no further comment.

And to make matters worse, his decision to focus on the Catholic Nick’s virginity has backfired horribly

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.

If it makes you feel any better, he could be a virgin and gay.

If he's a Catholic gay virgin and refraining from sex to be celibate and chaste in line with church teaching, you have now made my opinion of this person (whom I know nothing about) zoom way up.

By contrast, all I know of Pierce Morgan is that he well deserves the Private Eye nickname of Piers Moron and I am surprised anyone is watching/listening to his shows.

The balance of evidence suggests that Fuentes is a closeted active homosexual. He has been warned by his bishop and is likely to be subject to church discipline in the medium term future due to his political activities.

Interesting. I've been exposed to this character only recently with his media blitz. He gives me ace vibes. Would one be exposed to the "balance of evidence" for his active gay lifestyle by watching his daily show?

Probably not, but there's been some high profile clips of him acting in very, uh, non-het ways with other men.

That he's even got a bishop involved is still a lot more attachment to the church than I would have expected. Imagine (let me pull someone's name out of thin air) Gavin Newsom getting a rap on the knuckles from his local bishop; although Gav was allegedly raised Catholic, I don't think I've heard bishops rapping Gav over the knuckles even the way Pelosi was rapped.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats