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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.
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.
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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