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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:


print 'Eat the rich'  # or some other lefty slogan

I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?

Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.

Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.

Because people saying nazi slogans mean it, while people saying communist slogans are LARPers in clown costumes.

No one is afraid of contemporary communists, everyone, and especially the rich, knows no world worker revolution is coming, no one is going to seize means of production, no one is going to expropriate the expropriators.

The class war is over (ending on the right). Deal with it.

But realistically everyone knows that David Duke or Nick Fuentes would also not leave mass graves behind them, they’d implement outside Overton window policies that are either popular or barely underwater(like immigration restriction, or hard bans on affirmative action).

No one on the left is really worried about David Duke or Nick Fuentes because they are the controlled opposition. The woke correctly identify them as woke-leftists in all but name. The enemy will always tell you who he is afraid and in this case who the woke left is afraid of is obvious. It's people like Rogan, Gabbard, DeSantis, and of course the unholiest of the unholy Trump.

Trump was president, what did he do to help conservatives/reactionaries?

Nick Fuentes literally went to tell him he has to stop whatever he's been doing since being elected and stick to what he was saying in 2016 but harder, as the situation has already considerably worsened.

What does controlled opposition even mean?

Is Ye (Kanye West) controlled opposition when his products get removed from the shelves and his media appearances cancelled?

Trumps efforts to disperse growth unquestionably helped conservatives and arguably bought the Republic a few years. Reactionaries like Fuentes opposed this because they didn't want to see the Republic maintained or restored. On this topic "Conservatives" and "Reactionaries" are not allies as much as they are blood enemies.

"Controlled" in this context refers to existing within and furthering the goals of the left-wing academic memeplex/GloboHomo Agenda/Davos Crowd/Cathedral or whatever you want to call them.

Kanye West is being attacked, and his media blacklisted because he is not controlled.

'disperse growth'? Economic growth?

Kanye West is being attacked, and his media blacklisted because he is not controlled.

If Fuentes is controlled then West is as well, since Fuentes works for him.

Fuentes would be his handler.

Fuentes' media is also blacklisted. He was reinstated on twitter 2 or 3 weeks ago and banned again the next day.

Fuentes in particular seems to have been spun up to foil Turning Point USA, though I suspect that one is controlled opposition also.

Realistically no one thinks they're going to leave mass grave either.

Because they are the controlled opposition.

Trump is very definitely not controlled, not by the DNC, not by some NWO thing, not even by himself.

My bad, I thought you were talking about Duke and Fuentes.

What? Duke and Fuentes? The ADL describes fuentes as a "white supremacist leader, organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP". Wikipedia describes duke as "an American white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, far-right politician, and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan". What are you talking about? Who on the 'woke left' identifies them as woke leftists in all but name? How?

Yes. Duke and Fuentes.

A pair of "far right" political figures who just happen to always seem to come down on the side of woke democrats when push comes to shove. The guys that Ryan long was making fun of in his infamous bit

Nick Fuentes believes in a genetic basis of IQ/intelligence that contributes to most of the racial IQ gap, and a total ban on immigration.

Wikipedia claims he has said "Who runs the media? Globalists. Time to kill the globalists" and "I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged because this is deliberate.". He opposes feminism and LGBT, is a Christian who opposes atheism, believes in the importance of the "white demographic core" of the US, thinks jews have too much power in the US, and is a "holocaust denier". 'He has stated "You're either a Catholic or you're with the Jews"'.

In March 2022, Fuentes stated that he is a reactionary who supports autocracy and called himself "a 12th century man", adding "Catholic autocracy? Pretty strong. Pretty strong record. Catholic monarchy? Catholic monarchy, and just war, and crusades, and inquisitions? Pretty good stuff." Fuentes also decried democracy, saying "You know what democracy has given us? Obesity. Low rates of literacy. It's given us divorce, abortion, gay marriage, liberalism, pornography. That's what democracy has given us. Ghettos and crime and political correctness. Diversity. Yeah, the track record of democracy? Not so good

He also opposes COVID vaccines. He often jokes about hitler.

How does he "happen to come down on the side of woke democrats when push comes to shove"?

The joke in your video is that the 'woke' and the 'racist' come to dumb conclusions on similar issues. Wokes want to hires more blacks, racists want to hire fewer blacks, so they're "both opposed to discrimation laws". A woke thinks 'white privilege' is bad (i.e. white people fundamentally hurt black people), a racist thinks it's a 'privilege to be white' (i.e. white people are better than black people). These aren't at all the same!

How does one come to believe this?

The difference is that while within the context of northern protestant Christianity the difference between a Lutheran and a Episcopalian might seem really important, from without it really isn't. From the perspective of a Catholic, Muslim, or Jew, Protestantism is Protestantism. Or in this case, a democrat who espouses id-pol infused socialism with a post modernist framing is a democrat who espouses id-pol infused socialism with a post modernist framing. I would contend that whatever animosity the people of hair-color might hold towards weirdly neotenous white nationalists largely comes down to the narcissism of small differences.

Like I said, the enemy will always show you who they are afraid of and they are very clearly not afraid of Fuentes.

More comments

Hlynka is a true believer - East German Christian Democrat. He thinks the Socialist Unity Party has corrupted the pure communism found in the writing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Martin Luther King), and that if they only stopped being so corrupt, exaggerating the capitalist threat to mask it's own corruption, and shooting people; we would suddenly live in a happy classless society. That violent repression, and permanent revolutionary rhetoric is necessary to avoid the collapse of the inherently dysfunctional communist (colour-blind) regime, escapes him. He will go to his grave claiming that the rare capitalists he stumbles accross are actually Stasi.

Do I get it right.. ... are you accusing Hlynka of being a right winger of the 'democrats are the real racists' school that is quite prevalent among right of center Americans ?

People who think racial disparities in achievement or criminality would disappear if blacks had the right culture / were properly motivated etc ? I don't think he is - he's far too online and clever for that, but it's a type that exist, and I've no idea what to do about them.

He is an anti-racist (not the Kendi type), anti-white identitarian conservative, basically the meme of a “based black man” civic nationalist