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Notes -
Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.
A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:
Edit: typo
Those blaming old white men or women have lost the plot IMO. For around a decade, anyone consuming the news was exposed to stories designed to increase concern and love for minorities while increasing only disgust and anger at White men. This was done through daily news consumption which acted as a series of repeated trials, not dissimilar to how a psychologist can train a reflexive emotional behavior in an animal when a neutral stimuli is repeatedly paired with a conditioning stimuli. These repeated trials or iterations were variably scheduled and cross-contextual, by changing the subjects and locations but retaining the same desired response, to maximize the strength of the reflexive behavior. They used emotionally-potent stories to enhance this response, because the pitiable and unusual increases the strength of the memory. They also, perhaps unknowingly or perhaps knowingly, structured these trials like the “misinformation effect” studies, where a person who remembers an event in detail before learning new information about the event will have his memory of the event altered to encode the new information over the old. This was done using the typical format of “you might have heard… here’s why you’re wrong”, and “the rumor… debunked”.
The people who ran the news at this time, and organizations like the SPLC and the ADL who policed the news, effectively brainwashed the public into hating White people and loving minorities. Brainwashing is a real thing. It’s not just a movie trope, it’s an actual phenomenon. If you were to enter North Korea, the citizen’s reflexive response to hearing about America or capitalism may be the same as a 2016 liberal girl’s response to hearing about White men, and this was inculcated in the same exact way, which is repeated trials where something is paired with an emotionally potent “conditioned stimuli”. Except actually, the 2016 person’s response would be stronger because they received more trials.
You wouldn’t blame your sheep if they were eaten by wolves, because they are sheep, they can’t help it. Similarly you shouldn’t blame the average American for falling victim to a highly sophisticated decades-long propaganda operation by those they were supposed to trust. If you always saw through it, congratulations, you’re a news-obsessive or an autist or really neurotic or are just built different. But the average person isn’t like you, they conform to their social superiors. This is the usual mode of human living. You cannot change the fact that most people are conformist, you need to make sure that the people who control how the public is molded are not evil or stupid.
The question is how? And don't say "vote".
You can plan ways to influence billionaires who will go on to buy platforms and pay for influencers; Elon’s purchase of x demonstrates the efficacy of this strategy. That is the only “mainstream” solution because everything in culture is ultimately decided by a billionaire. You actually need one of your billionaires to own a platform before you can even create counter-propaganda, because as we saw in the 10’s, anyone trying to combat left wing propaganda with their own propaganda would be banned upon getting too popular. And it really is just a propaganda war, because (1) the activist Left’s insistence on highlighting their views from the PoV of a pitiable minority is indistinguishable from the conscious development of propaganda, because it’s just as predicated on influence eg exaggeration and sympathy; and (2) the effective way to combat propaganda isn’t “telling the truth”, as that doesn’t lead to engagement and influence, but actual propaganda or counter-propaganda, otherwise you just lose. You might say, “but can’t you still boycott?”, but no, because the only place people find out about boycotts and are reinforced to boycott is on social media. Which is owned by a billionaire. Even if you have a zealot running social media, as in the case of Gab, no one is going to join it unless they see reason to join it which again requires propaganda in the dominant social media ecosystem.
What I think is the more resilient longterm solution, though it would require decades of development, is the formation of a parallel culture built upon rituals and stories of allegiance which create an abiding in-group preference. This would just be taking the most powerful civic and religious rituals of Western history and tailoring them so that they create a in-group preference among adherents whilst inoculating them against those myths of progressivism that inevitably lead to ruin (“everyone is the same”, colonialism, racism, slavery, stolen land — these need to be reproved before someone starts hearing about it in their teens). Only this is enough to combat the influence of algorithms and social media. Theoretically with the right “cultural-ritual infrastructure” you can develop a perfectly fine parallel community which will run on indefinitely.
I don’t think there’s another solution.
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