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I know it's beating a dead horse at this point, but this whole Prigozhin situation made one fact crystal clear: American dissident right (and "anti-nato left" by extension) is extremely solipsistic, much more than other factions in American culture war. Just take a look at some of those takes which are prevalent among this crowd
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Essentially, their model of the world looks like: here we are, honest god-abiding Americans, and then there are "elites" — Biden, Hillary, DNC, Podesta, Bill Gates, World Economic Forum. How then do you view something that lies outside your usual experience and ideology? If you are dumb, you deny it altogether:
"Ukraine War is fake, all of it is CGI, Zelensky and Hunter Biden siphon gajillions dollars from American taxpayers to buy mansions in Bahamas"
For those people Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Finns, Prigozhin, Zaluzhny, Macron, Scholz, ... do not exist.
If you are smarter, you align yourself with perceived enemies of the elites: Putin, Xi, Orban, .... You say things like:
totally oblivious of cases like this
https://zona.media/online/2023/06/22/sko
being a regular occurrence in Russia, when a girl is sent to prison for putting anti-war slogans on price tags in a shopping mall. Of course they'll have prepared a long list of grievances with "elites" that are intended to persuade you that whatever happens in the US is much worse than repressions in Russia or China. And, sure enough, all of it "glownigger propaganda" anyway.
You might say: "Well, I don't care about anti-Putin Russians, unfortunate pro-Putin Russians who became victims of the regime, neutral Russians, Ukrainians, Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, ... all I care is that my children don't get castrated and turned into trannies". Fair enough. But then please don't take a high moral ground. You are just as evil as "elites".
Whatever patience I had with American "anti-establishment" right-wingers, it ended. I guess Hanania is the only one I keep reading/listening at this point.
A low effort comment follows:
This kind of blatant QAnon retardation bothers me a lot less than the supposedly smart groyper dissident right types who spend all day posting obscure remixes of old memes behind a dozen layers of irony who believe that they’re fomenting some kind of actual uprising. The former are just kind of dumb, Alex Jones listeners. The latter sometimes have actual intellectual potential, but they waste it on feeling superior.
Say what you will about Russia (and I agree with the general consensus that this entire war and the last decade of Putin’s presidency has been disastrous), stuff is happening there. American dissident rightists don’t believe in making anything happen, even on a localized level they’ll shirk responsibility to, say, get married young and have a big family. These people are, as Karlin (ironically) accurately suggests, detestable. It’s the entire BAP mindset of laughing at your enemies while (with great effort) curating an air of impossibly grand smugness. Blah blah Ancient Greece blah blah masculinity blah blah semi-un-ironic gayposting blah blah all our enemies are evil and satanic blah blah mocking other people with almost the same ideology for not being radical or cruel enough blah blah [thread]posting about how everything is so much worse than you had imagined blah blah imagine engaging with mainstream politics lmao what a loser etc etc etc… If I was Robin DiAngelo herself I could not have imagined a better vehicle to destroy any hope for the Anglophone right than the void of promise that is dissident right twitter.
The big lesson for Western rightists should be simple: get off twitter at all costs. As a platform it encourages insincerity, vindictiveness, needless pile-ons (most importantly within movements) and wanton posturing over genuine promise.
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