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Notes -
The Nick Fuentes interview with Piers Morgan was a good demonstration of how boomers do not understand Gen Z rhetorical tactics at all. One example is the “agree-and-amplify” strategy.
This strategy came from The Red Pill/PUA community. The idea is that girls will try to throw you off your game by making some unfounded criticism, to test how secure/powerful you are as a man. It’s called a “shit test.”
The “agree-and-amplify” strategy says the best approach is to do exact that. Example: Girl says “Wow that’s a big truck, are compensating for something?”
Loser response (no getting laid): “No, my penis is slightly above average! I just like trucks!”
Agree-and-amplify: “Hahah yeah, micropene. 1 inch. It’ll have you screaming tho.”
The latter projects confidence, she knows your joking of if she believes you, you can neg her about it. She made it sexual and gave you an opening. Etc. All in good fun.
Fuentes did the same thing repeatedly, and Morgan just does not grasp it at all.
For example, paraphrasing:
Morgan: “Are you racist?”
Loser response: No, I have friends who are black! I just think [crime statistics]!
Morgan: Sounds like you’re racist.
Game, set, march. Better is the Fuentes agree-and-amplify:
Fuentes : “Haha yeah. I don’t want any black people around”
Morgan: [clutches pearls]
Fuentes: I have black friends though. They are also concerned about [crime statistics]
Morgan: But you said you were racist!
It makes it feel like Morgan is not in on the joke. It denies his moral frame that any hint of racism = bad. He needs to come up with a more concrete argument. When he instead tries fails to re-establish the frame through repetition, it doesn’t land.
I was reminded in a way of the classic Charlie Kirk owning libs on campus. The key is that the libs did not really come into the bait understanding Kirk’s beliefs or tactics, but Kirk understood theirs inside and out. This let Kirk win easily every time.
Morgan is a wiley veteran and won some parts of the interview. But overall he did not know how to handle Nick’s tactics at all.
In the end, it is turning into a debacle for Piers Morgan. As the dust settles, he comes across as the evil defender of a decrepit regime going after some dude’s dad. He was forced to pretend to not understand basic statistics, causing him to appear either stupid or malicious, depending on your gullibility. In many ways, he was the perfect heel employing dirty tactics to get an edge.
And to make matters worse, his decision to focus on the Catholic Nick’s virginity has backfired horribly, with everyone learning about his wife cheating on him with everyone from internet randos to the literal pool boy. How true are these accusations? I honestly don’t know, but they are already cemented into the hivemind’s collective beliefs.
I could really never stand the rambling nature of Nick’s show and never watched more than five minutes, but I agree with most of what he said on Tucker and Piers. On my scorecard, total groyper victory. Curious if others agree.
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.
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.
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.
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