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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.
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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