This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link