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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.

Their goal is to get all Palestinians to leave to other countries they have no interest in a 2 state solution (settlements etc) and are trying to displace them in their own territories. Israel is a genocidal project by definition the only reason they haven't genocided them is because they can't.

That is an obvious lie, Israel spent a lot of effort, lives and diplomacy to implement a separation solution. There would be absolutely no reason to do all that - from Oslo agreement to Gaza evacuation to creating Palestinian Authority to other measures - if Israel indeed wanted to eliminate Palestinian presence. All these measures - which constitute Israeli policies for three decades now - are completely contrary to that goal. You basically ignoring everything that actually happened in service of your insane hatred.

Israel is a genocidal project by definition

The definition of Israel is a state of Jewish people. There's absolutely nothing "genocidal" in it, you lie again.