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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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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.

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.

Kevin MacDonald tier antisemitism.

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."