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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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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:

even as someone that is entirely anti-nato to the point I would turncoat in a second if i had a chance to damage the alliance

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.

The 'dissident right' does not refer to catturd2, who is a relatively normal conservative twitter person. Dissident right refers to like, moldbug or bap. Although the broad statement about the DR is still mostly true.

"These tweets are dumb" isn't a good toplevel post (unless you start there and go somewhere else interesting), almost all tweets are dumb.

I'll answer to "it's not representative; it's just some dumb tweets" in this post, as it was point of @anti-dan, @Gaashk and some others' replies.

Are people like Tucker Carlson, Max Blumenthal, Trump Junior, 'America First' caucus, Jordan 'Do you even know about Holomodor' Peterson et al — are they all nobodies? They use the same talking points when talking about events abroad, displaying the same solipsism demonstrated in those screenshots I took when checking replies to some tweets and top level 4chan pol posts. They ARE representative.

catturd2, who is a relatively normal conservative twitter person

Well... shit. I had better opinion of "normal conservatives". I still prefer to think of him as a fringe pushed by Elon's algorithm and frequent endorsements.

I don't follow Tucker Carlson, Max Blumenthal, Trump Junior, or "'America First' caucus" very closely, so am not sure what they said about it, and don't see any specific thing they said here, so it's hard to judge. It would be a better post if it had started with "Tucker Carlson said [wrong thing], at [link]this is why it was wrong, this is how it is destructive."

I do follow Jordan Peterson on and off -- more off since he's started mostly interviewing campaigning politicians and alternative currency salesmen. The last time I heard him discuss Ukraine, this past spring, he was talking to some American representative (glancing at the descriptions, maybe it was Senator Mike Lee), who was basically just explaining why he saw it as in America's interests to get involved and the situation from the perspective of the American establishment, which Peterson did not really question or push back against.