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The trilogy is complete.
This is the third time in my life that a professional pundit has made a shocking political transformation, I found out about it after the fact, and I'm left wondering how it happened. You'd think there'd be some drama YouTuber recapping these stories in a well-edited highlights reel, but it's all just spread out over many, many hours of streams.
First, it was shoe0nhead. I stopped paying attention to her completely after her feud with ShortFatOtaku, and then I heard about her getting involved with BreadTube (yuck) through Sargon of Akkad, and now she's... making really based tweets about current events that keep finding their way to me? I asked what happened, and people say she's not a socialist anymore and has a trad right boyfriend. I'd love to know how that last shift happened, because I've never seen someone go that far left and then pull back.
Then, it was Red Scare. I never paid attention to Red Scare, but I knew they were a sister act to Chapo Trap House and that prominent celebrities listened to the show, and I knew about the "Sailor Socialist" incident where the InfoWars reporter rudely accosted Dascha but asked totally reasonable questions, which Dascha responded to with dismissive quips, which meant she won in the eyes of the internet. Now the hosts are tradcaths, one of them got kicked off an HBO drama for being anti-woke, and they're doing right-wing tribal signalling. I don't know when or how that happened.
But now I just found out about the MOST INSANE one of all.
I remember the groyper wars from four years ago. The one good thing Nick Fuentes ever did. But the groypers lost, right? Covid killed all their momentum. This year, AFPAC died because Fuentes lost all his fans. Even the Kanye West bump didn't save him.
But today, on Twitter, I saw Charlie Kirk (rightfully) defending Elon Musks's statements on Da Jooze. In the replies, someone pointed out that over a month ago, he interviewed Steve Sailer on his podcast.
For one thing, I'm shocked that I didn't hear about this immediately when it happened. But also, HOW did it happen? Kirk's organization was blacklisting people who got near Unz or VDare.. heck, people who just admitted to reading them! He's part of Con Inc! Now he's okay with it? What changed? How did this happen? I thought the groypers lost! Was this a downstream effect of Musk taking over Twitter? How the heck???
Looking over at this post, I spent too much of this post talking about show and Red Scare. The reason I'm posting tonight is because I want to know if anyone understands why Kirk is suddenly breaking bread with the people who were his enemies just yesterday.
Was Dasha actually kicked off of Succession for her politics? It's my understanding that she was just playing a fairly minor character, and those often get written off of tv shows for no particular reason.
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It's called a pivot, reading the room, going with the currents, etc.. Kirk realizes that if Elon and Tucker are the bellwethers of post-Covid conservativism, he ought to imitate that.
really? isn't he popular on telegram and video still?
Tucker sure, but fwiw I’ve never been convinced that Elon genuinely views himself as part of “conservativism” or even more broadly “the right”.
I would agree there’s been some definite shift in his public persona, where he seems to have pivoted from the “real life Tony Stark” to an almost parody level Chud Inc. persona. My best guess and working theory here is the shift is more social than political. As it nearly coincides with his move Texas and when he first started appearing on Joe Rogan, displaying a public interest in firearms, smokers, and all the other stereotypical interests of a Texas Chud type person r rather than a Silicon Valley scion.
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Anyone very online who spends all day on that specific corner of Twitter is part of the same general social grouping, the specifics of the ideological program are less relevant. So of course you can transition easily between ‘far left’ and ‘far right’, the same way an 18th century Boston gentleman moving between two similar clubs on the same street that happened to have a different political affiliation was not particularly shocking. It’s one of the areas where Hlynka is partially correct, in that this is all one ideological milieu.
I’d also caution against conflating a bunch of things you conflate in this post. VDare / Derbyshire was never cancelled for antisemitism, in fact Derbyshire has occasionally revealed rather philosemitic views even if he doesn’t like neoconservatism. Derbyshire was cancelled solely for anti-black racism, which mainstream figures like Kirk and Carlson won’t go near (evidence for the progressive stack, I think). The taboo around HBD and crime is stronger today than it was in 2017 even, post-2020.
And Unz (assuming we’re talking about Ron personally) isn’t even close to the boilerplate views expressed by Kirk, Musk and so on, which were actually less taboo on the right of the ‘90s than a lot of people seem to think. Stuff like American Pravda, in which Unz blames every single bad thing that has happened to the West on alleged Jewish treachery is pretty far away from what either of them were saying.
It shows that the "very online Dissident Right twitter" is having an effect. The actual hub of Online Dissident Right social circles is ghettoized on telegram, and I've never seen a Chapo or Breadtube type in any of those channels. They are most likely receiving influence from Dissident Right twitter, it's just not true though that they hang out in the same online social circles.
I was partly with you when you were downplaying Matt Walsh flirting with DR rhetoric earlier this year. But now with Musk, Kirk, Candace Owens, Walsh, and Tucker Carlson now directly endorsing important aspects of DR talking points I don't think a trend can be denied, and it's not just passive osmosis from people moving across clubs.
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I meant Unz the outlet, not the person.
You say there's a stronger taboo against anti-black racism now than there was a few years ago, but if that's true, then that's all the more reason why Kirk interviewing Sailer makes no sense.
The problem wasn't ever what views an individual had, it was what clique they're associated with. It's why Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes for excommunicated. Sailer is definitely associated with the dissident right, and he writes all about HBD and crime. That's his beat. But now Kirk is associating with him.
I get the feeling you don't remember the Con Inc. climate in 2018, have a refresher.
HBD is finally gaining mainstream attraction and even approval among well-connected people. Sailer is no longer as fringe. Musk is aware of all the big figures now; he even follows @cremieuxrecueil. it took a while but it's finally happening to some extent at least. E-acc is a bridge between HBD and mainstream, too. Elon buying twitter was the biggest gift to the right in generations.
Yes, I also get the feeling that HBD is starting to go mainstream. For example, Bryan Caplan's "Let's Ban Discrimination: A Socratic Dialogue" includes this gem:
Looks like the whisper network paid off.
Bryan Caplan has always been shouting this stuff from the rooftops. He hasn't been whispering anything. He's usually subtle just saying stuff like if we control for IQ and criminality there is little evidence for discrimination instead of making a point of saying blacks are low IQ or criminal, but it's always been there in his writings.
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Who the hell is this and why is he significant?
If someone like myself — by all accounts an “extremely online” person compared to your typical man in the street — does not know a thing much less heard of this person/thing then it’s pretty much a given that any scandalous association you seem to think this implies won’t amount to anything with your typical reality TV addicted swing voter (i.e., the ones who ultimately swing elections one way or the other).
my point is that he is aware of HBD , as @cremieuxrecueil is a major hbd figure.
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I’d say Kirk himself moved to the right. And I’m not sure if you’ve watched the interview with Sailer, but from a skim watch it seems that he tempered or qualified some of his views, a lot was generic conservative policy. Sailer was always much less openly racist than Derbyshire, he considers himself essentially in the Cochran school, and his policy preference is basically colorblindness. I’d say today Sailer spends almost as much time criticizing dissident rightists as he does the left, I really think he considers himself almost a quasi-Buckley type figure, more mature and polite than vulgar and base DR types.
And again, The Bell Curve made the cover of The New Republic in the Late 90s, Sailer isn’t even much to the right of Andrew Sullivan.
Gavin was excommunicated because his multiracial boys’ group got involved in a bunch of federal cases that nobody wanted to get caught up in, and he was never much of a genuine conservative anyway. Yiannopoulos was excommunicated because he was perceived as having defended gay sex between 13 year old boys and adult men. In neither case was it because their (conservative) politics were too far right.
I see your point, but man, rightists sure loved getting involved with the less defensible J6ers.
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Sailer was never really far-right, more like a liaison between the neoliberal-left and the non-mainstream right. He pushed for the vaccine, sends so much traffic to the NYTs that they probably give him a Christmas card and free lifetime subscription .
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I coulda sworn a big thing with the bell curve was that it was basically respectable when it came out, and it took a few years before the 'pointing out statistics is racist' idea fully took hold on the left. I remember some big name black journalist who, in a retrospective, talked about how he found it personally disgusting that other people at the Atlantic(maybe?) wanted to have dispassionate scientific discussion about those ideas, and he had to nod and smile along, etc. I would model the change as, in the 90's, racism is bad, but statistics are not racist, into, those types of statistics are actually racist, into, maybe but those statistics seem correct and frankly I don't care anymore if you call me racist.
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How do you mean? The far left and far right follow completely different people and stories. They might occasionally pass each other in the comments of some “what color is this dress”-type post. The only time they come in contact with an opposing belief is if one of their own is making fun of a particularly bad take.
I don’t think I have ever seen this happen to someone past the age of 18. The closest is maybe Richard Spencer? In his case I think he’s now an intelligence asset. The only transitions I think are common are from more radical positions to more tempered ones as a person gets older. The “Red Scare Podcast” transition is only rivaled in its novelty by the “Ben Garrison” transition.
they share many key similarities, like a distrust or dislike of American institutions, society, and capitalism, and desire to either tear it down and rebuild or the creation of a new society altogether.
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I know multiple people in real life who’ve been through ideological transitions on this scale, and during the more ‘happening’ periods of European politics (especially 1890 to 1939) it wasn’t common for public intellectuals to jump between traditionalist religious, fascist, socialist, liberal, social democratic, anarchist, Christian socialist and other ideologies.
Spencer’s ideological transition is overstated. I guess maybe he’s somewhat aligned with Hanania now, in that he likes trolling the ‘orthodox’ dissident/alt right, but then again so does BAP. Have his views actually changed? The main trigger seems to have been his divorce (?) and then going all in on Ukrainian nationalism, but it’s not there isn’t a substantial hard-right pagan/SS LARP element to Azov etc, even if ‘as a whole’ the hard right is probably pro-Russia.
This isn’t true at all. Different podcasters interact all the time in that weird debating verse around the streamer Destiny. There’s a direct through line from the DSA through to Chapo Trap House, Cumtown and then Red Scare. The language used is the same, the style of comedy / the bits are the same, the slang is all descended from chanspeak, memes use similar or identical templates and go through the same phases. Almost everyone on avowed, unrepentant tankie communist communities like TrueAnon, GenZedong etc knows about figures like BAP and Moldbug and Sailer. Many even know about this place. When they’re not discussing political programs they have a lot of the same takes or bugbears with popular ‘liberal’ or ‘mainstream’ culture (marvel, games, funkopops, consoomerism etc).
The ‘very online’ community is essentially one contiguous zone, there isn’t a hard border and you often see figures on the far left and right comment on each others’ tweets even if derisively, which they wouldn’t do if they never saw them.
I wouldn’t really say “same takes” so much as inverted or mirror images.
E.g., with all those you’ve got one side — the left in case of these specific examples — with almost a parody level enthusiasm for marvel/funkopops/etc and the other side with some over the top curmudgeonly hatred for some harmless hobby (in this case literally plastic trinkets).
It goes the other way as well. There’s no shortage of ultimately harmless right coded interests/products — NASCAR, bodybuilding, country music, etc — that seem to get treated like punching bags for the left.
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No one on the alt right / far right / whatever term we use now watches or cares about Destiny. Destiny has his own unique audience and a culture centered around debate, and some of them (they’re all teens I’d bet) will wind up being persuaded by a given speaker, but to say that online rightists share a space with Destiny is to misunderstand how it all works. Yeah, they might tune in to see Fuentes debate Destiny, just like an Andrew Tate fan will see him debate Piers Morgan, but they exist in entirely different social ecosystems. (Ask some of the far rightists here if they know anyone who watches Destiny. I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet they don’t.)
The “break” is really just red scare, Chapo is firmly left and cumtown is firmly center left, none of these people would ever consider voting right or throwing themselves in with the right generally.
This tells us nothing, even in contentious revolutionary France the members of the opposing side knew the primary thoughtspeople of the other side
This containment zone is more influential on the public than whatever happens in Academia. You have the internet and you have Academia, and I’d say that academia is the containment zone whereas the internet is what has been changing opinions since ~2008. JBP the academic maybe influenced 500, JBP the viral internet guy influenced 5,000,000.
Red Scare’s hosts aren’t particularly reactionary in their own lives and the subreddit isn’t majority conservative, and certainly not majority dissident right, though. I think it’s genuinely ideologically diverse, and there are absolutely a lot of StupidPol users who have drifted rightward over time.
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Like coffee_enjoyer said, yes there are hard borders. I never see Chapo Types on DR telegram, and I never see DR rhetoric on those breadtube subreddits. There is absolutely a hard border, with Twitter being the only real opportunity for interaction, which is why Musk's acquisition may have a real impact on political dialogue.
I’ve seen both on the RedScarePod subreddit.
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Hold on. Even when she was involved with BreadTube, she didn't really go pro-woke (she toned down her criticism for a while, and then went "aah, fuck it"). She still is socialist as far as I can tell, and anyone claiming that her trad-right husband moved her away from it, doesn't know what they're talking about, because the dude is one of those Catholic economic-left types. You could nationalize all the Fortune 500 companies, and he'd shrug or maybe quibble about some technical details.
Basically, socialist/communist and social progressive are separate axes, even if the right tends to hate them both and thus views them as largely confounded.
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So she's not doing streams with Vaush anymore? Is she part of any specific YouTube niche now?
I don't watch Vaush, so I don't know, but if he couldn't hold on to his BFF relationship with Destiny, I doubt he could handle Shoe.
I think she kind of hangs out with anyone. She made a few haha-only-serious jokes about the key to her survival in Cancel Culture being having a fanbase consisting of 3-4 ideologically opposed groups that hate each other, so I think she deliberately avoid falling into a neiche.
How are you guys aware of any of this? I googled and it appears you're talking about literal teenage girls. 'shoeonhead' is literally a teenage girl who looks like a titty streamer. 'Destiny' is literally a fat beardo gamer kid. Is this really the forefront of public discourse now? If so, is there anything left to save? Nick Land was right.
I watch her videos and read her tweets, they're funny. I'll go so far as to say she's a better comedic writer than any hack hired at SNL, John Oliver's, Steven Colbert's, and the rest of the John Stuart Industrial Complex.
We apperantly now have literally teenage 32 year old women. As far as I can tell, she never used her body, in the way you describe, to get attention on the internet.
That one admittedly is a guilty pleasure, and I only check him out when he gets into some big drama with someone.
No. I have no idea how you even came to the come conclusion that this is anywhere close to what I believe.
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Ah ha, this is my take. I expect to not know about stuff on the internet, but as you say, is this the level large sections of the online world are involved with? It sounds like celebrity gossip and petty rivalries of the most lurid reality tv type serial.
If there is lineage, as someone suggested, from 4chan, then this would explain a lot. Nothing good can grow from nihilism. Is internet just no good for popular communities to develop that actually lead to meaning-making as opposed to cynical audience appeal (and subsequent audience capture).
Is larping, hot-takes and terminally online self-referencing not wearing itself out by now?
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They're one of the more popular youtubers/streamers that focuses on political content. If you only read news/articles you probably don't encounter these people, but they're prevalent on youtube/twitch/tiktok. Watch a few political videos and they start showing up on your recommended page. It's where a lot of young people get their political opinions and news from nowadays, since they aren't watching television news channels as much.
The Israel/Hamas conflict has actually been getting Destiny a ton of traction since he has a middle of the road take, and a lot of the political left-leaning streamers have a pro-Hamas take, so there's tons of videos/clips of arguments around the Israel/Hamas situation. Honestly not worth your time for anything but entertainment since it's incredible just how poorly informed and horrible some of their takes are. You can ignore them and not miss much, but it is a bit worrying that many people are getting their political opinions from people that are in no way qualified to be speaking about these kinds of situations.
As opposed to what, the infallibly virtuous philosopher kings who ran the media in previous generations? At least these people aren't pontificating from atop a heap of fraudulently-acquired positive affect.
At least there used to be some sort of journalistic standard, and it was a major scandal when major news publications pushed outright lies. Opinion pieces were always a thing, but normally major news stories would at least have sources and there was an attempt to at least present the facts, even if it's in a dishonest manner.
You could argue these streamers also "pontificate from atop a heap of fraudulently-acquired positive effect" since you know, a lot of them create echo chambers by banning all dissidents, they tend to only promote other people that agree with them politically, and they present themselves as experts and speak in an authoritative manner on subjects they know nothing about. Having nuance actually outcasts you from the community. Destiny is a great example of someone who because he is willing to show some nuance on the Israel/Palestine situation gets shit on by a lot of far-left leaning political streamers.
You seem to be saying that these political streamers are superior sources of news than traditional mainstream media. There may be some standouts, but you can't seriously be telling me someone like Hasan Piker is a better source of news and a role model for political opinions than the mainstream news media.
If you have to compare her to someone, it should be comedic political commentary shows like the Daily Show. If you think they spell our doom as well, fair enough, but the "journalistic standard" died decades ago.
Yeah, but it's damning with faintt praise.
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I think I understand what you mean by a "journalistic standard", but it seems to me that this standard does nothing to prevent deceit on the part of journalists, and only exists to insulate them from the necessary consequences of that deceit. It does not impede them from routinely deceiving their audience, but only codifies a method to enact that deceit with perfect legal and social cover. It seems to me that such standards are actively harmful to the public at large; we would be better with no standards at all, and a concomitant increase in public skepticism.
To me, the term "major scandal" means an incident that causes or at least threatens severe consequences for the people involved. I can think of lots of times when the media has been caught pushing outright lies, many of them resulting in dire real-world consequences. I can't think of a single time when this evident malfeasance resulted or even plausibly threatened severe consequences for even a single media organization, or even an individual journalist. It seems to me that a "major scandal" for the media means that they may have to publish a news story about how they've totally fixed the problem and it can't possibly happen again, they swear, and even this level of consequence is a rarity compared to the base rate of naked deception.
The fact that you possess this attitude toward Hasan Piker is exactly why I would prefer people generally to get their information from Hasan Piker and others like him. Your assessment of his credibility seems reasonably correlated to his actual credibility, so it seems unlikely that he could successfully lie to you, and very unlikely that he could do so in a highly consequential way. Even his most diehard fans are not going to presume that his credibility, impartiality and correctness are common knowledge society-wide. He does not have the power of "sure it's true, I saw it on TV".
Legacy media, by contrast, have also created echo chambers by banning all dissidents, only promote people who agree with them politically, and present themselves as experts on subjects they know nothing about, and routinely eschew the very concept of nuance and balance. In addition, they are deeply integrated into our centers of social and political power, and they secretly coordinate their reporting to maximize partisan control over and political advantage within those centers. Their record of mendacity is appalling, as are the accumulated consequences of their lies. Piker is, at worst, an amateur liar. Journalists are professional liars, working in an industry optimized from the ground up to produce precision falsehood on an industrial scale.
The above would be bad enough, but most people assume whatever they say is true, with the result that they have a considerable degree of control over the conversations it's possible to have, even among those who know they are not trustworthy. The New York Times really does set the nation's agenda, even for those of us entirely aware that they're fundamentally, murderously untrustworthy. That is what a "heap of fraudulently-acquired positive affect" looks like. By comparison, the Hasan Pikers of new media are working off old pennies they found in the couch cushions.
If you measure "honesty" in Lawyer-speak, journalists are reasonably honest. If you measure "honesty" by the variance between the plain facts of a matter and the impression the author intentionally conveys to the reader, Journalists are one of the most dishonest groups of people living.
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Pretty sure she's in her 30s.
We have not yet begun to defile ourselves.
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Shoe has never been ideologically committed, even when she was larping as an atheist with her then atheist boyfriend. I know this might be sexist but you'll notice women tend to adopt the politics of their boyfriends instead of picking their boyfriends based on ideology.
I have noticed this to be true about socially conservative women, yes.
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I haven’t noticed that. Plenty if men go to church/go vegetarian/ etc because of the girl they’re now dating.
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Does this mean I can date a leftist woman and "fix" her?
No. You are responding to an inaccurate and sexist observation.
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I can't find a reference to it, but I once heard this Irish fairy tale about a dude that got abducted by the faeries. His gf / fiancée / wife wanted to get him back, so some wisewoman / witch / etc., told her she has to wait until Halloween or thereabouts when the faeries have their parade, grab her man, and hold on to him no matter what. That's what she did, and as she grabbed him, the guy started changing into scary/dangerous things - a wolf, a giant snake, perhaps even a goddamn dragon at some point, but I may be filling in some details with my imagination - but she loved him so much that she could hold on to him, no matter how terrifying the experience. The faerie parade passed, and he was back to his normal self.
All this to say: you can, but you're in for a ride.
The story is called Tam Lin.
Sweet! I was worried I was imagining (or badly misattributing) the whole thing for a second.
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This is a common meme, but if it was actually true I am not sure that the discrepancy in voting patterns between US men and women would be as large as it is.
Have you bothered to look at voting patterns of single vs married women?
Good point, though this might be partly explained by how voting patterns correlate with age and also by how likely women of different political views are to get married, as opposed to how likely women who are married tend to get certain political views.
Relevant, but not particularly probative. A continually growing share of increasingly older women have never married.
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Horseshoe theory is when the far-right and fat-left become indistinguishable because they're both demanding human rights violations in order to achieve pie in the sky goals. This sounds like something totally different.
And by "based", I don't mean anti-Semitic. I'm Jewish and pro-Zionist (with some reservations about how the Palestinians have been treated). I just mean that they're not going "ewwww, icky low status person with low status beliefs, get away" or demanding people be blacklisted.
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You're not responding to anything OP actually said. A few years ago Charlie Kirk was going around the country proclaiming we should stamp a green card to every college diploma. Here is an article about how he changed his mind at the time. https://bigleaguepolitics.com/victory-charlie-kirk-now-opposes-stapling-green-cards-to-diplomas-after-tucker-america-first-push-back/
Charlie Kirk is also quite famously radically pro-Israel, to the point that he historically either refused to associate with or openly denounced anyone who even flirted with the JQ. He was almost hilariously 'color blind' a few years ago. Now he's JQ'ing on his own show of his own volition. https://nitter.cz/pdabrosca/status/1725317383340835198#m
But wait, there's more. Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro. Mr. 'I don't give a damn about the browning of America.' Is JQ'ing on his own show of his own volition https://nitter.cz/unlimited_ls/status/1725229724912205993#m
This is a tidal shift. There are no words
Again though, you seem to be conflating Musk’s criticism of some Jewish communal organizations like the ADL with Kevin MacDonald tier antisemitism.
What Musk, Kirk, Shapiro etc are saying in the things you link isn’t fundamentally different to what Alana Newhouse says in her editor’s column in Tablet this week, it’s just phrased in a more tabloid, more incendiary way.
You overstate MacDonald-tier antisemitism. His entire thesis can be summed up with "Elite Jews throughout the 20th century have engaged in radical critique of Gentile culture, morality, and ethnocentrism while at the same time rejecting any critique of themselves as anti-Semitic pathology. This is how they engage in ethnic conflict to secure their ethnic interests." This is the exact thesis which has been directly accepted by Elon Musk recently.
Kevin MacDonald’s analysis of the role Jewish intellectuals have played in Western 20th century history, and his theory on group selection, isn’t really what I’m talking about when I discuss KMac antisemitism. I disagree with his theory, and I think it’s motivated by antisemitism, but I’m talking about his actual politics and those advocated by himself and his writers on TOO etc.
I do think it’s interesting though, that it’s unclear whether the criticism is that Jews engaged in radical criticism of ‘gentile culture’ (the traditional gentile culture they were critiquing was not substantially different in many social, sexual and moral dimensions from the traditional Jewish culture pre-Haskalah) at all, or that they engaged in it and didn’t criticize their own pathology. The latter (that critical theory could be turned on the left, turned on itself) was actually a major objection of orthodox Marxists to Derrida etc.
The key premise is that their criticism was motivated by their Jewish identification and was perceived to be in their ethnic interests, like their criticism of race science.
Specifically, it was the pathologization of White ethnocentrism which was identified by Kevin MacDonald while many of the key intellectual figures in that effort themselves engaged in Jewish ethnocentrism- a common pattern that an increasingly-large number of influential people are now calling out. To me this is the essence of "KMac antisemitism" and how to deal with that politically is an open question and I wouldn't even know what you mean by the "KMac solution."
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I started following Shoeonhead in maybe 2015 or 2016, and I haven't followed her since like 2018, but even back then she seems like she was all about the based takes, mostly ridiculing leftists. When did you know her as a socialist? Was it before I started following her, or after I stopped following her? She started dating Armored Skeptic (whom I'm guessing you're referring to) during the time I was following her and also got engaged to him, but she seemed pretty anti-woke to me before that happened as well.
They divorced some time ago. The socialist arc was a couple years ago when she was hanging out with Vaush.
They broke off their engagement, I don't think they were ever married.
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More or less exactly after you stopped following her. 2018-2019 was the rise of Breadtube, and she went full-socialist around that time. She had a brief moment where she toned down her anti-SJW shtick, and I think I remember her saying she was actually trying to be nice to "these people" but it all it resulted in was constantly increasing demands, so at some point she went back to her old self. She's still a socialist though, as far as I can tell.
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Her YouTube page says
Is it satire?
‘Left wing populist’ includes the classic StupidPol antiwoke stuff and arguably even Red Scare, which isn’t ‘really’ trad per se.
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The description? No it's pretty accurate.
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I think that, in a nutshell, leftoid attempts to censor rightoids failed. 4chan, cultural driver of much of the Internet, reached critical mass and for some reason never got shut down. Trump was a disappointment for committed rightoids but made being a rightoid fun again. Musk buying Twitter was the follow-up blow. Genuine rightoids are running wild over the Internet and grifter non-genuines have also come in, sensing a niche. Rightoids are winning at meme warfare because they care less about propriety and current year moral norms than leftoids do, which makes them better at making people laugh, plus since the majority of widespread modern culture war taboos on free discussion of reality are leftoid, rightoids have the advantage of somewhat more often being the ones who are puncturing bullshit in favor of truth. Which is not to say that rightoids wouldn't turn into censorious authoritarians if they somehow got power, they absolutely would try to do that. But for now the situation is as I have described. Moderates and rightoids who fled censorship managed to fight back and even, more or less, to make their own Internet. I can't think of any effective way for leftoids to fight back without somehow managing to impose China-level censorship, and they do not have enough social capital for that. Even Russia, which is an authoritarian shithole, still has an Internet that is connected to the rest of the world's Internet and where loads of people criticize the government. I doubt that the Internet will be successfully censored in the US at any time in the near future.
That's what I thought was happening in 2016. Then "anti-SJW" content got replaced by communism, best personified by Ethan Klein of h3h3 removing his podcast with Jordan Peterson, apologizing for it, and then making Hasan Poker a co-host. A safe edgy variant of the left won the youth. Or so I thought.
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"Did not succeed at the 100% level" is not "failed".
One could argue in this particular case, less that total censorship is worse than nothing.
Sure life has been hard for the Based Brigade and kiwis have to constantly hop from one host to the next, but ultimately a right wing counter-elite is forming and the left is now more divided and on a worse footing than the right, which is precisely what the censorship was trying to prevent.
Time will tell if this means anything to the status quo, but I'm allowing myself vain Thermidorian hopes at this point.
I'm not sure I'm seeing it. The landscape would look a lot different if social media were still a free for all. Even if it all ultimately falls apart for the left, these few years allowed them to hold on to the young Millenials and Zoomers long enough to convince them they're anti-establishment even as they have full support from every major institution. What you're describing is a lot closer to 2014-2017 than it is to today, which is why the establishment freaked out so much back then.
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