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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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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 true blue progressives- not their moderate hangers on, not the liberals, but the hardcore DSA people- are like actually crazy. That’s been apparent for a while now, but what changed was 1) it became apparent that their actually-crazy ideas have real world consequences 2) the general public doesn’t consistently distinguish moderate from hardcore progressives 3) hardcore progressives won’t moderate. Now could I have told you that soft-on-crime DA’s were a terrible idea? Yes. I could have. But it seems like the mainstream liberal consensus was legitimately that it would blow over before there were any serious consequences.

Gaza is probably the other elephant in the room. Whether you support Israel or not they’re patently not carrying out a genocide, support for Israel is a high-salience issue dividing the hardcore progressives from everyone else, and shenanigans like blocking highways are a pretty big deal that they’ve been allowed to get away with for a while on other issues.

Whether you support Israel or not they’re patently not carrying out a genocide

Israel definitely wants to genocide Gaza and the West Bank

That's an obvious lie, neither Israel (as an official policy goes) wants it nor it's doing it. With overwhelming power superiority Israel has, if they wanted to massacre a million people in Gaza, or West Bank, that would have already happened. There's literally nothing that could prevent Israel from doing that, militarily. But Israel does not want to do it, and didn't.

And please, spare me out-of-context quotes from early 90-s where some Israeli politician said something like "I'd be happy if all Palestinians went to hell". It's not policy, and if you think it has anything to do with the official policy, you are not qualified to have any opinion on any Middle East policy at all.

With overwhelming power superiority Israel has, if they wanted to massacre a million people in Gaza, or West Bank, that would have already happened.

Israel isn't going full auschwitz solely, by what I can see, because of goy morality and power. Without that all non-Jews would be either killed or cleansed into outside borders - whichever is more pragmatic. Any honest assessment of sympathy for goy/Palestinian civilian life in the greater Jewish/Israeli public results in basically nothing. They want these people gone and have zero interest in cohabitation. But even with Jewish subversion of the American government, a hostile USA and/or "West" would be an apocalyptic disaster. So PR still matters. Getting the South Africa treatment alone (even though they are objectively worse) would be catastrophic. If they only had nuclear arms alone to make an argument against Turkey curb stomping them, or even worse, a total unified middle east, it could be all over. Right now is a balancing game in how far they can go without critical consequences, with a heavy experimental lean towards killing as many men, women, and children as possible, while maximizing destabilization.

Now personally, I find the word "genocide" tiresome. It's overly political (in a bad way) and basically amounts to a modern version of what excommunication was in the middle ages. With all the subsequent pointless theology and dishonest motivated reasoning that comes with such.

That said, if we call the Armenian Genocide a genocide I don't see what is so different about Gaza. Only time and, again, the morality/power of the non-Jewish side of the USA is preventing it from even greater realization of the logical conclusion of their deliberate actions. Will they take responisbitly for a food/disease crisis they have created? Will they allow the rebuilding of hospitals? And if they drag their feet to x degree exactly how many statistical deaths will that result in? Time, and power politics within the USA will tell.

with a heavy experimental lean towards killing as many men, women, and children as possible

Except Israel hasn’t been doing that- their civilian deaths have been a lot more like the USA’s than Russia’s.