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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.
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.
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.
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