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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.
Personally, I consider myself alt-right. I consider TheMotte overall alt-right. Everything and anything can be the alt-right. The one group missing for the alt-right would be Neil Strauss - TheGame - and all the pick-up artists. The psychological insights merged with some writers and ended up on the manosphere which eventually lands you in the Proud Boy ideology.
I would consider the alt-right to be primarily the intellectual counter-arguments against the new elites ideology. So anything against modern feminism, blank-slate race views, woke, sjw, modern Marxism (ideology I would attach to blm).
I would consider the arguments Bill Ackman is making to attack Harvard and Dean Gay as fairly core alt-right arguments.
I also would agree that the left successfully labeled the alt-right as literally the KKK so it’s a dead label. But how I understood the term in 2014-2020 would have been the intellectuals of the right against modern leftists assumptions while dropping the religious arguments of the rest of the right.
The alt-right often uses evolutionary biology arguments to replicate the views of the traditional conservatives on a broad swath of ideas/policies.
I never would have associated the old school kkk types as alt-right because they were in fact old-school and old-arguments.
Generally speaking, I despise the right as much as I despise the left, so it would be pretty funny for me to be considered alt-right. Rejecting wokism does not necessarily make someone right-wing.
The only use I have for social conservatives is for them to be a counterweight that balances out radical leftists and prevents those from seizing a hegemonic position of power. I would much prefer some kind of different counterweight, since I fundamentally disagree with social conservatives about almost everything other than simple matters of fact, but you have to work with what you have.
If somebody wrote an accurate book about the evolution of the pick-up-artist scene and then the manosphere, I would read it. From what I remember, the original pick-up-artist scene, up until the early 2010s I would say, was pretty a-political. It was results-oriented. Figure out what gets you laid and do it. No whining. No excuses that would stop you from taking action. You'd be called a keyboard jockey and mocked if you just sat around complaining about what women are like or about politics.
The manosphere, on the other hand, has a lot of whining about how women should be different than what they are, how politics is against men, etc.
I can certainly see how the manosphere is in part derived from the pick-up-artist scene, but it is interesting that it became so different in a fundamental way.
Is the PUA-scene still a thing?
My understanding of it was that the main message was: Go outside (touch grass), talk to as many women as possible and then you'll catch one or several. Wrapped up with some lingo, florid description, esoteric psychology, and with additional tips for managing multiple relationships/women. Nothing groundbreaking.
I think it did work for the average guy, until Tinder and other apps destroyed the market.
I would expect Covid to be the final nail, what with going outside literally being made illegal in many places.
I'm sure there are still coaches, but even back then it already seemed like too much effort, I can't imagine the sales speech to convince guys to make getting laid their 2nd job.
Online Dating optimization stuff does exist from what I've seen, but I think it's a bit more balkanized since there's more stuff like 'Profile coaching' and 'Profile photoshoots' as opposed to the more direct-line PUA stuff.
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You're right, it's pretty much dead, partially as a result of suppression by the mainstream.
Another aspect is that most of the PUA material the curious are familiar with was written before smartphone use became common among Western women, before Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc. even existed, and as such, it is by now largely useless.
But I'd say the main factor responsible for the decline of PU Artistry is the combined effect of stringent laws around "enthusiastic consent", the #MeToo and #KillAllMen campaigns, plus (and I don't care how offensive this sounds) the general decline in the human quality of Western women, due to the spread of radfem views, the opioid epidemic, rising rates of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, the normalization of fat acceptance and mental illness etc. In other words, the overall risk of engaging in PUA is rapidly rising, whereas the potential return on your investment is ever more marginal. Social reality cannot be ignored.
I mean, as long as there's an agreement on the decline of Western men as well.
What's happened is the end of the middle in both genders. People who would've been, to use the 1-10 scale, many, many 4-7's in 1985, and been perfectly happy either got fat, hooked on Oxy, stopped going outside, got hooked on the Internet or got absolutely ripped/in-shape doing yoga, can do much better makeup/dress better, and so on, and can be seen by more people because of social media. Like in many thing is in life, there's now much less of a middle.
Like, there are random side characters in CW dramas of both sexes that would've been top-tier heartthrobs in 1987.
I believe the sexes evolve in a tandem, basically, with the caveat that, due to the reality of hypergyny / female hypergamy, the behavior of the bottom 80% of men generally has negligible effect on women’s perceptions, at least in the short run, due to them being sexually invisible. When female quality declines, it has a demoralizing effect overall on all men who otherwise would make conscious or unconscious steps to get prepared for the role of the eligible husband. This, in turn, has a similar effect down the line on all women who would otherwise be open to assortative mating, which, obviously, in turn demotivates men even more etc. It’s no wonder we hear so many complaints, with mainstream society’s tacit approval, about there being so few eligible men around, especially in underclass communities. Well, duh. Back when the patriarchy existed, it basically functioned as a sort of life insurance policy for midwits and average people in general, by providing them with mates. Now this is gone, and the long-term consequences are visible.
On a different note, what is a "CW drama"?
Eh, this whole talk of 80% of men being sexually invisible is incel/PUA bullshit. Again, if you look at actual studies of this stuff, yeah, the top 20% are having a lot more sex, but it's with each other. Which hey, be jealous, but this hasn't really changed since the 60's when the Pill was invented. This idea of some random guy with a six-pack swiping right and banging a a homely girl with a low body count who'd be married to a normal nerdy guy if only society was framed differently, doesn't exist, except in very anecdotal evidence. 80% of people continue to have, I think, less than five partners lifetime and that's both sexes (so in that sense, 80% is invisible, but it's 80% of women too), and if we look at the kind of bad data set of the GSS, the percentage on younger people having sex is back to even between the genders after a few weird years probably caused in part by #MeToo backlash, younger single women being more COVID-averse, and frankly, probably some not great data.
I think what's happened in the middle is what has happened with both genders - there's easy access to entertainment that's better than dealing with a bad match. On the male side, why waste a night going out, buying women drinks, to end up with a girl who will be a dead fish in bed who you're not overly attracted too, than who will still either ghost you or be clingy, when you can play Baldur's Gate for 6 hours, then masturbate to high quality OnlyFans/amateur HD porn of any kink you have. On the female side, why waste going out, getting hit on by a bunch of weirdo and douchey guys, maybe end up going home with somebody who won't try for an orgasm or will only not last that long, and then either be really weirdo clingy or stalker-ish afterwards, when you can just watch six hours of Real Housewives, then pull up some Amazon Kindle smut and get off with a really high-quality sex toy?
As far as the CW goes, Second-tier network that was full of dramas full of pretty people - it was the home of Gossip Girl, Riverdale, all of the DC Comics superhero shows, Supernatural. If you were insanely good-looking but mediocre as an actor, it's where you ended up until recently when many of those shows ended due to a change in ownership. As another example, look at Hallmark Christmas movies - all very pretty people, many of whom are objectivally better looking than many celebrities were in the 70's and 80's, because they all do yoga, don't eat steak five times a week, don't smoke, et al, but they also aren't giant stars, the same way a relatively untalented, but very pretty person like say, Farrah Fawcett was in the 70's.
Well, yes - if you add a total of 4 rather important qualifiers to a single sentence, it's easy for it to be true. But it's also sort of irrelevant.
Anyway, let's clarify what words exactly mean here, because it seems to be necessary. "Sexually invisible" means "not noticed as an object of lust/desire", "not perceived as a sexual being", basically that women do not grok your existence as a sexual being. As a consequence, whatever amount of sex you do end up having, will be sex that is, in effect, transactional. That's what it means.
And if you tell me with a straight face that 80% of all women are sexually invisible, I won't even know what to tell you, and I won't bother to respond, because such a statement is that absurd.
And I still don't get what a "CW drama" is supposed to be. Anyway, if your argument is that overall beauty/hotness standards for American TV actors have risen as a result of, I suppose, the Sexual Revolution, than that is something that merits further discussion, I think, but frankly I see no visual evidence of such a trend. Then again, I may have my biases.
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I feel like this is just a haze of unrelated grievances rather than an actual cause of PUA dying.
By any metrics you're claiming, compared to the early 2000s, there hasn't been that much decline, it's been a slow downtrend since the 1960s at least.
Alcoholism hasn't really risen since the 1990s, pill addiction is present in a small minority of the population, 'fat acceptance' has little to do with the actual rise in obesity caused by diet which, itself, was already quite high in 2000, 'mental illness' is rising more as a consequence of greater prominence of diagnosis and therapy than anything else.
Ehhh. The laws around enthusiastic consent govern university campus standards for sexual assault, and are (as far as I can tell) not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture.
note that I didn't address your points about #metoo or the smartphone and internet, which may or may not be true
I wasn’t referring to rates of alcoholism etc. overall, I was referring to rates among women, especially young/single women. And no, I definitely don’t believe that only a small minority of them are abusing prescription pills, anti-depressants etc.
Enthusiastic consent, as far as I know, is already state law in California and elsewhere. It doesn’t just apply to campuses, but even if it does, it doesn’t matter. Saying that it is “not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture” is, pardon me, nothing but a cope, even if it’s technically true. It’s the cultural environment and signalling that matters. The hard fact is that the doctrine of enthusiastic consent is getting open and unilateral support by the priestly caste in mainstream culture, and any persecution of innocent men due to false allegations is treated as a negligible side effect.
Among women, it still seems to be decreasing?
I wouldn't put the % abusing pills above 10%? This site gives 5% in past 12 months.
I was only able to find laws in California about enthusiastic consent for college sexual harassment policies eg here. If it's the law for sexual assault in general I might be wrong, but what law specifically is that?
Well, we're discussing the material causes of the decline of the PUA scene, so I think the law has a lot less of a chance of causing the PUA scene to decline if it isn't enforced enough to matter. It can be somewhat taboo to do PUA stuff and it can still work.
Maybe I misremembered and the legal term is "affirmative consent" instead. Anyway, it isn't important.
The average citizen doesn't know how often and how severely any particular law is enforced. What is known is that legislation is also downstream from culture, so the very existence of such a law is definite proof of overall cultural trends.
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I am not sure how "suppressed" you can claim it is when there are still large communities and people still talking about it, even if mostly negatively.
No, it was already becoming played out before then.
I actually read Neil Strauss's The Game (published in 2005) and one of the things he describes towards the end is how over-franchised PUA material was, until women in all the hot spots like LA and Las Vegas were just openly laughing at PUAs because every dude was using the same sad routines and they all knew the game by now.
So you mean mainstream online feminists and their normie hangers-on, basically? Because that, i.e. when an entire cultural phenomenon (let's call it that) is only permitted to be openly discussed in mainstream culture (without repercussions like cancelling, that is) only by culture warriors dedicated to, or at least sympathetic to, its suppression, delegitimisation, cancellation and banishment, is how social suppression normally works.
No, I mean pretty much everyone except the PUA community. If a "cultural movement" is widely unpopular, it may be because there is some vast feminist media conspiracy against it, or it may be that it's...unpopular, because of the people in it.
That's not how any culture has ever worked.
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