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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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You’re conflating “having beliefs that appear the same” with “the same people.”

I don't think I am. Neither in Specific cases like Spencer, Yarvin, Unz, Sailer, Et Al. Nor in the more general category of Secular Progressive Blue/Grey-tribe Academics who mostly reside in California.

As I've observed in previous threads on the topic, that the Sunni and the Shia consider themselves to be completely different and often go to war against one another does not invalidate "Muslim" as a meaningful category.

Spencer was an editor at The American Conservative in 2007.

From 2005 to 2007, he was a PhD student in Modern European intellectual history at Duke University. He joined the Duke Conservative Union, where he met future President Trump's senior policy advisor Stephen Miller.[37][39] His former website says he did not complete his PhD at Duke in order "to pursue a life of thought-crime"

Yarvin was a libertarian before he was a reactionary.

In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of the Silicon Valley.[15] Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works. The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced him to writers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin's mind-set.[13][16]

Ron Unz ran for governor as a republican in 1994 and was "He was publisher of The American Conservative from 2007 to 2013". "He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly"

Sailer "Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][12] "

As far as I can tell, you are just factually wrong. These people were not pushing 'DEI' during the 'bush administration'. Which is what you claimed. And their ideology before being reactionary seems to have mostly been conservative.

Even if you were right about those people, it wouldn't matter because you claimed "I don't think it's a coincidence at all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now". If that was true, then there would be around 50x more people pushing HBD. A lot of people were pro-diversity two decades ago.

Also, people change ideologies sometimes. Reactionaries have to come from somewhere if there were fewer of them 20 years ago. But a lot of them seem to have come from conservatism.

Spencer was an editor at The American Conservative in 2007.

And before that he was a student at UC Berkeley and also a self-identified Marxist, ditto Yarvin. The whole "Black Bloc kid gets mugged and starts posting hitler-memes" is such a common origin story amongst NRxers and the dissident right that it's become a meme on conservative forums. It is this archetype that I am referring to when I say that sometimes they are literally the same people.

Ron Unz ran for governor as a republican in 1994 ...

No he did not. Unz ran as a third-party candidate against incumbent Republican Governor Pete Wilson on a "revenge of the nerds" platform and he lost.

Between this and the "race norming" post up-thread where you conveniently pretend that the NFL hasn't been collecting Wonderlic scores on every new player as they enter the league since the late 70s your claims made throughout this thread have just been consistently factually wrong and it is this sort of aggressive confidence in one's own ignorance that typifies the HBD discourse here on theMotte and makes it so insufferable.

curious if you can reply to my comment on your post here? if i'm wrong i'd like to know i'm wrong but i cant find the evidence for your claims

And before that he was a student at UC Berkeley and also a self-identified Marxist, ditto Yarvin.

I do not see anything about UC Berkeley on his wikipedia page. I see

attended St. Mark's School of Texas, then Colgate University for one year before transferring to the University of Virginia.[37][39] In 2001, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago

Can I have sources for Spencer and Yarvin being self-identified marxists in college? I searched for a bit and was unable to find anything for either. If Yarvin used to be a communist then I definitely should've known that. It's not implausible for Spencer, but

no he did not

Wikipedia directly claimed that "He unsuccessfully ran for governor as a Republican in the 1994 California gubernatorial election and for U.S. Senator in 2016" and then

Unz made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the 1994 California gubernatorial election, challenging incumbent Pete Wilson. He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly.[11] He came in second place to Wilson, receiving 707,431 votes (34.3 percent).[12] Newspapers referred to Unz's candidacy as a Revenge of the Nerds and often quoted his claim of a 214 IQ.[13][11][1][9]

Do you disagree with that?

Between this and the "race norming" post up-thread where you conveniently pretend that the NFL hasn't been collecting Wonderlic scores on every new player as they enter the league since the late 70s

I believe they ended up using the same baseline assumed intelligence for black and white players, not individual historically collected scores?