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The Redpilling of the American public intellectual?
Being extremely online, using both X and Substacks and having used them for several years, I cannot not notice a process of redpilling of many US-opinion makers, both blue and grey tribe members.
Elon Musk and Marc Andressen are the first obvious examples, with both of them having directly followed and quoted members of the Dissident Rights (Andressen some days ago tagged Covfefe Anon in a post). Musk in particular speaks often with figures like Indian Bronson, Cremièux and Hanania, all of them supporters of the HBD and "liberal-racist" or "liberal-realist" (still fun that we are talking about an Indian, a Jew and a Palestinian).
Then we have the old New Atheism and IDW intellectuals gang like Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt and others. Their contribution to progressive criticism is not new, but from what I see on X, on the wake of the Harvard controversy, they are talking an harder turn. I cannot confirm because it is only an impression from who they interact with on X.
We have the "Silicon Valley Galaxy", the network of Musk-supporters based in California, with people like Mike Solana (another gay man) exorting the virtues of nationalism and communism-bashing on his wildly popular newsletter.
Nate Silver is a very fun example. A gay Jew who, in the last year, took an hard turn against progressivism because of Covid criticism and the purges that came from it, and now on his substack is attacking the left at every turn, attracting the very entertaining hate of the academic crowd on every post.
Also an individual like Noah Smith, while still completely faithful to the Neoliberal project, began to heavily criticize the progressives, saying that they are way more dangerous than the right.
I am sure that there are other names I forgot.
All of this to say that I see a change of opinion of public figures that, in the year 2016, would have been for sure allies of the Democrats against a Trumpian state. Obviously the change of opinion of twitter-based figures, online characters and academic eretics is not a change of opinion of the PMC at large, but for sure is more that the Dissident Right could have hoped for some years ago.
The real question imo is whether the "centrists" will vote for the GOP or if they will still continue to give the progressives they disagree with more power. I'd be a bit surprised if any of them aside from Musk ended up doing so.
It's a question of threat assessment. You can either give the DSA-types more power, or you can give creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly ant-meritocratic racists power.
It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging. In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists. Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair has been pretty condemnatory.
Trying to make the same check on the right for strict abortion restrictions, someone like Stephen Miller being put in charge of immigration policy, etc does not present a compelling case to to change your vote. You can even make a very unflattering comparison by just reading this forum for a bit and seeing how much support explicitly anti-meritocratic and anti-individualistic racism has in even the more intellectual part of the right.
The Democratic Party, absolutely. The few remaining normie Democrats and the Black Church Lady power base rigged the game in favor of boring normie Biden, and managed to keep the PMC libs mostly out of power.
The old Democratic Party is losing control though.
As a meritocratic individualist, I completely disagree. The anti-meritocratic hereditarians here might hate mi abuela, but they still treat me with respect and state their points clearly. Dealing with DSA-types has been an exercise in frustration - try to argue with them fairly and they posture, form social alliances using whisper networks, make emotional appeals, play status games, etc.
I know I will be passed over for promotion due to my race. This isn't due to white nationalists, it's due to DSA-types.
There are people in the HR department who would gladly fire me. This isn't due to white nationalists, it's due to DSA-types.
My ability to earn a paycheck is affected by PMC white liberals in a way that it isn't by white nationalists.
This is a very strong counterpoint, and I definitely understand that my point here is not going to be very compelling to the stereotypical Motte user working at a Bay Area Tech company where they are only exposed to the excesses on the left.
Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).
I'm very surprised by this. I've spent significant time in some of the most infamous universities in the country and I've had a very, very different experience. As long as you can play an elaborate game of taboo---never explicitly saying words like "meritocracy" and instead directly appealing to the core values of MLK-style egalitarianism, I've found those on the left extremely pleasant and rational. I can very easily argue about how standardized tests are good, Harvard's affirmative action policy was bad, Claudine Gay was incompetent, etc. It very much felt like talking with people who had all the right values but were just very confused on some correctable factual points.
Conversely, trying to discuss anything with right, for example on this forum, generally means dealing with many unjustified personal attacks from people very explicitly not on board with individualism and meritocracy. Discussing with the right is useful to do to keep my perspective broad enough, but it is far, far more unpleasant.
I live in a red state, and I work for an enormous faceless company. We have our HR zampolits imported from the mothership.
I've seen red state "censorship", which usually involves a governor preventing some state employees from saying something. This is an entirely different scale of problem compared to all the major tech companies conspiring to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, which likely caused the election to flip. This is an entirely different scale from the HR departments of all major corporations making sure everything you say is AWFL-approved. or you get fired.
Perhaps you don't remember 2020. I do. I remember that you could set a building on fire and that was free speech, but if you said the virus came from a lab that was violence and you got fired. I remember the outdoor mask mandates, the tech companies conspiring to get their candidate elected, and DEI struggle sessions. Like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, I got "redpilled" as the cool kids say.
The DSA types (but not the Democratic Party, I stress), are a direct threat to my ability keep my job, my children's ability to get an education and get a job, and my ability to speak and live freely.
The right? Sometimes they tweet stupid stuff.
I'll care about them when they run the HR departments, the university admissions, and the other gatekeepers of middle-class life. I'll care about them when they set my downtown on fire.
Perhaps you were around the the last few techbro-adjacent normies, and even then you had to play elaborate taboo games.
Not my experience at all, but the DSA-types I (used to) have in my social circle tend to be young, white, female, and single - usually girlfriends/sisters/etc. of my friends. They're shrill, unreasonable, and emotional, and like everyone else I avoid them for my own safety and the safety of my family. Ironically for the white supremacists here, the wokest people I know are all white, and the most reasonable Democrats I know are your usual "Normie Middle Class Black Guy" you find in this part of the country. Hell, I'm technically "LatinX" (ugh) and before 2020 I was a Normie Democrat myself.
I was told "it's just a few kids in college", "it's just the HR department keeping the lawsuits away", and then 2020 happened and we let HR, the health bureaucracy, and universities run the country for a bit, and like everyone else, I got redpilled.
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Name these orthogonal excesses and the parts of the country that are prone to them.
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