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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The Great Replacement theory is good at motivating people. However, as is also the case with Holocaust denial, the kind of people that it attracts are about 5% smart, sometimes even quite smart, but 95% very stupid. The reason in both cases, I think, is that it is hard for anyone who is familiar with history and is capable of even somewhat objectively looking at politics to believe that elites are both aligned enough with one another and competent enough to pull off conspiracies of the scale that faking the Holocaust or globally coordinating to destroy whites would require. As for why these ideas sometimes attract smart people, well, smart people's intelligence is uneven.

This, perhaps, is the far right's fundamental problem. It largely attracts imbeciles and literally mentally ill people. Now, this statement might come off as uncharitable, but I think that it is objectively accurate. Look at 4chan /pol/ for example. It is mostly made up of people who are some combination of 1) so ideologically minded that they interpret all politics through a simplistic theory (which makes them incapable of grasping nuance), 2) too stupid to follow even very simple chains of logical argument, and 3) literally mentally ill.

They do have some political strengths. For one thing, their stupidity and emotional frustration makes them doggedly tenacious. For another, they are willing to say some unpopular and taboo truths. However, despite their tenacity it is hard for me to imagine such people being competent enough to take over any society in which their opinions are not already very widely popular. And although they do speak some taboo truths, they shoot themselves in the foot by also being so ideological that they frequently accompany those truths with utter nonsense.

There are subsets of the left that have a similar problem in that they are largely made up of tenacious idiots. However, they have better branding than the far right does because those leftists' declared goals are basically "peace, love, equality, tolerance, and puppies" and to understand why their politics are a problem you have to be smart and knowledgeable enough to realize what sort of damage those people are doing and are likely to keep doing in their supposed pursuit of peace, love, equality, tolerance, and puppies. To understand how and why the far right might cause problems, on the other hand, you basically just have to have heard of Adolf Hitler.

Now, someone might say "but Stalin and Mao...". Yes, they are popular with tankies but very few wokists go around trying to defend Stalin and Mao. When it comes to the far right and Hitler, on the other hand...

Basically: Neo-Nazis and their ilk don't have their shit together. Unlike the OG Nazis, they kind of suck at being bad guys and furthering their agenda.

No, the OG Nazis also sucked at being bad guys. Hitler's leadership style was to deliberately give contradictory orders to different departments, not allow them to coordinate to try and sort out what actually would work, and let "the stronger" agency win.

They were far better at accomplishing their goals than the current crop of Nazis. 'Mustering 50 guys to attend a rally' and 'Running a whole country; very nearly winning a massive world war' aren't even in the same town, much less the same ballpark.