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 -
Did the alt-right ever even exist? I remember when Trump first came on the scene and people were freaking out, there were articles everywhere and people making tons of YouTube videos about the alt-right and how they were recruiting people. Nobody ever asked the question recruiting them to what? Could you even join the alt-right?
Seriously, from what I can gather, the alt-right was basically some podcast networks (TRS) and then Richard Spencer's tiny organization. His NPI conferences had maybe 500 people. Other so called members of the alt-right like Jared Taylor had already been around for decades with American Renaissance. Even when they got together at their biggest event with Unite the Right in Charlottesville, there were barely 1,000 of them and they were vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters. And a bunch of these were old school white nationalists like David Duke who came on the scene over 30 years before that.
As far as I can tell, nobody has ever seen or heard of a gathering of more than 1,000 of them together at one time. There is no alt-right to join or be recruited to and is not an organization. It has no leader or leaders. It basically doesn't exist. The mainstream media and Democrats basically made it up either as a psyop or just convinced themselves that it exists. It's probably a mix of both. This wasn't like recruiters online targeting vulnerable Muslim kids to go fight for ISIS where you could go literally join ISIS which was an organization that actually controlled land and had an army. You join the alt-right and do what exactly? Shitpost on 4chan and post edgy memes on Twitter?
Their strongest argument probably is that there were some lone wold terrorist attacks. But there were already lone wolf white nationalist attacks before Trump like the OKC bombing. And none of the closest things to leaders of the alt-right had ever committed and violence as far as I can tell. And I would argue that the mainstream media's reporting on this issue did much more to create lone wolf shooters who they gaslit into thinking we were on the cusp of a race war and gassing the Jews than any alt-right "recruiters" did.
Am I crazy here? My theory is that the Hillary Clinton campaign saw they were a good boogeyman to scare people about Trump and then the media ran with it and people convinced themselves of something on a societal level that never even existed. It's actually insane if you really think about it.
The “alt right” was hyped up as a threat, but they did exist and today you can see their influence all over — in the normalization of anti-Judaism on Twitter, in people like Jackson Hinkle, in the reblogs of Elon Musk, in Vivek Ramaswamy posting about a mysterious “they” preventing candidates from winning, in Tucker Carlson’s writers, in the trending trad Christians, in “14% memes” getting 200k likes on tik tok, you name it.
There is no centralized alt right superstructure because the Feds and Media Apparatus in their Infinite Wisdom shut down or infiltrated or had propped up most of the orgs that attempted to do this. And that ensured an organic and implicit cultural cell structure developed in its place, which plays out in tens of thousands of boys’ group chats or discord groups or college republican parties or whatever across the country, with its sole hierarchy being memes / ideology that go through thousands of unique points of evolution and divergence and are consequently filtered into mainstream culture as it has been since 2008 4chan.
So while the alt right does not exist as some kind of third space pseudo-paramilitary group of young men (for very good reason, this would be bad for everyone and pose a threat to the state), it existed and continues to exist as organically-grown ideology factories that affect the mainstream in mostly indirect ways, using nothing but the power of Pepe and persuasion.
Largely agree, though Hinkle seems as much an ideological descendant of the anti-war left as he does the alt right, most of his posting is indistinguishable from what conspiratorial leftists were posting in the late 2000s.
In general a lot of understanding of this movement seems incomplete without an acknowledgment of the often very popular anti-Iraq War anti-Bush 9/11-conspiracist peak oil sphere that was publishing 15-part ‘documentaries’ on YouTube back in like 2007. Alex Jones also grew in this world, which was itself related to more out-there conspiracies of the David Ike variety but which also pushed Rothschild and Soros conspiracies very heavily and was often very much anti-Zionist, and was sometimes relatively close ideologically to the ‘just asking questions’ kind of Holocaust revisionism. This crowd weren’t white nationalists, typically, and may even have identified with the left. But they represent part of the history of the DR that’s often overlooked.
We could say that the 2007-2011 Zeitgeist began with Zeitgeist the documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist_(film_series). This was very influential at the time.
IMO the “original” alt right was not pro-war. Back in 2011-13 there was criticism of Obama’s influence in the Middle East and lots of defense of Assad.
Yeah agreed, I was definitely thinking of that whole Zeitgeist era. Agree that the right during the 2011-2013 phase was often pretty isolationist, although so was a lot of the left, war had become a centrist thing by then. Not to necessarily go full neocon, but I also think that at least some of the more left-aligned peak oil antiwar stuff was directly funded by the Iranian government, Ahmadinejad was prescient with a lot of this and had a good understanding of the western public, started various film festivals to which were invited various Western conspiracists, started and then hugely expanded PressTV in the West, which gave a platform to a lot of those vaguely dissident voices and so on.
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