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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.
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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