Getting Up With Fleas

Rightwing assholery is on the rise among media influencers big and small. Just as the left has started to eat its own, so also has the right.

Source: Heute.at

They do cancel culture, they smear people, they lie; the ends justify the means. Now imagine that you had people who were calling themselves conservatives, who act exactly the same way, and they care about different identity groups, like straight white men who are Christian, right to the exclusion of everybody else... And then we come over to the woke right, and we have the same thing. There's a 'system of Jewish power' or there's a 'system of post-liberal consensus', where the true conservative voices, like ours or the Christian voices, are not allowed to be heard.
—James Lindsay on the “woke right”

In my last couple of books, including Underthrow, I warned variously about how ideological polarization pushes people to extremes. As the extremes build bigger egregores, gaining more and more power, they will tend to fracture society.

It’s the Molotov Cocktail Militia versus the Tiki Torch Brigade. Increasingly, they have communication arms.

But “independent” influencers are descending quickly into the fever swamps on both the left and right. On the left, shadowy figures pay meat puppets and furnish them with newspeak, firebombs, and bail money. On the right, indie media is eating itself in a contrarian arms race that brings out the worst in people.

Today I want to look to the right.

The Content of Their Character

Myron Gaines (Amrou Fudl) is no gentleman. He treats women like whores or dogs, expresses loathing for Jews, refers to other African-Americans as ni***rs (hard r), defends Hitler and the holocaust, and tries to out-Tate Andrew Tate, whom he either admires or envies. Dimwitted troglodytes seem drawn to his contrarian commentary and imagine that low-brow insults are the best way to exercise one’s First Amendment rights.

Then there is the sniveling Nick Fuentes, a political commentator from the Windy City (named for its windbags, not its weather) who leads the “Groyper” movement, known for its ultranationalist, white supremacist, and (yes) antisemitic ideology. As the self-styled leader of the Groypers, Fuentes has built a following of incels who disparage women and minorities while advocating for authoritarian Christian nationalism. They reject the principles of the Founding in favor of low-brow misogyny and racism. Yes, I know. Mysogyny and racism are terms with which social justice fundamentalists flog everyone, so the terms have all but lost their sting.

But Fuentes? He’s earned his own stigmata. I suspect if he could just find his way to Boys’ Town and get a little, he’d lighten up.

Fuentes is widely denounced for bigotry, explicit calls for violence, and promoting “white genocide” narratives, as well as the ever-popular Jewish takeover plots. His incendiary remarks and thinly veiled authoritarianism place him among the most notorious purveyors of such nasty rhetoric. In his recent row with Candace Owens, Fuentes accused Owens and billionaire Elon Musk of collaborating in a "coordinated" attack against him. Owens responded by calling him "a sheltered theatre kid,” after which Tucker Carlson said Fuentes has that "angry, gay kid thing going on"—one of the few things Carlson’s gotten right lately.

Feces Sinks, But Fat Floats

Speaking of floating fat, Tucker Carlson was ejected from Fox News during a time when his show was No. 1 in the dying legacy media’s prime time. When the Murdocks kicked him to the curb on the Avenue of the Americas, Carlson launched a Web show. It soared to the top of the indie right-o-sphere. But it wasn’t long before things started to get weird. I use the floating fat metaphor because, increasingly, the show lacks meat. While Carlson hasn’t yet gotten too cozy with the likes of Nick Fuentes or Andrew Wilson, he is instead creating a gully for the gullible.

One shouldn’t mind that Carlson has controversial guests, of course, even the likes of Vladimir Putin, Andrew Tate, or Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran. He ought to interview such subjects with a mix of curveballs, softballs, and fastballs. But if you fill your docket with YouTubers who insist Winston Churchill was the villain of WWII, or more than five of your guests a year are there to point the finger at Israel for everything under the sun, you might begin to think that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a real Jewish takeover plot. Wheel in some mustachioed Greek-Orthodox nun—the sister of George Stephanopoulos living in the West Bank—to cry woe is us while forgetting about the Oslo Accords, and you’ve got about 187,900 Israeli Christians saying WTF?!?

Too much TCN and you might start to think the Book of Enoch is a real account of demonic aliens that have returned to earth to steal our souls and impregnate our women.

If they're spiritual beings, which I believe they are, like it's a binary. They're either, you know, you're on team good or team bad... and I think some of them are bad. And if the US government knows that or elements with the US government know that, then they're serving a bad force. —Tucker Carlson

Too Many Connections

Apophenia is a term for people with the proclivity to see connections in everything. So when I heard that Candice Owens had dedicated eight hours of a documentary series designed to persuade the world that Brigitte Macron has a pecker, I thought surely something had gone wrong. Until somebody gets a team of Nobel laureates to inspect her nethers, Mrs. Macron will have Schrodinger’s Cat. Pussy or no pussy, our beliefs about her junk will do no earthly good in terms of solving real problems. (Isn’t Candice Owens supposed to be America First?)

Another indie media darling besieged by apophenia is Whitney Webb. I quite liked her at first and was certainly lured in by her connect-the-dots tales around Jeffrey Epstein, Robert Maxwell, his daughter Ghislaine, the CIA, the Mob, and Les Wexner. These make for plausible conspiracy theories hypotheses, so I was willing to listen. And it’s true: Most of the Epstein conspirators were Joooos.

But the more she got away from Epstein, the more her connections started losing coherence. She seems paranoid about authoritarian transhumanism and thinks Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are planning to turn us all into cyborgs. I suspect Webb gets a lot right as she taps her web sleuthing talents and formidable inference system. But when I realized she got her start with a rag owned by the ultra-leftist Mnar Muhawesh (now Mnar Adley), I realized that there is something to horseshoe theory, and that Ms. Adley is a rank Hamas sympathizer:

Never forget how the international rules-based order openly supported Israel’s ethnic cleansing plan to forcibly evict Palestinians into the Sinai desert so it can take our gas and build the Ben Gurion canal. These are the modern-day colonialists, settlers & white supremacists. (Emphasis mine.)

Now, if I were a broke young writer, I might be tempted to take some of that sweet Qatari money. And lying down with the likes of Mnar Adley doesn’t necessarily give Whitney Webb fleas. Nor does it make her wrong a priori. But my Bayesian instincts, mixed with well-earned islamophobia, make me suspicious of the association. I’m just *connecting the dots.* With her multi-volume book One Nation Under Blackmail, Webb has enchanted the likes of research bro Ian Carroll, who seems hell-bent on blaming the you-know-whos for everything from “genocide” in Gaza to the 9/11 attacks.

Monarchy Redux

Formerly zealous freedom-lovers mostly went one of two directions in the Age of Trump: they turned a screeching left and became social justice fundamentalists; or they became neoreactionaries for whom return of the king is not a great Tolkein book but a viable political philosophy of the twenty-first century.

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Funny thing, I heard that other neoreactionary, Nick Land, buggered off to China some time ago, perhaps living comfortably and quietly in the bosom of the CCP. Between them, Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin have left a bunch of post-Rothbard knuckle heads longing for a king who will own the libs.

Yes, Racism

Godwords are terms that carry such powerful connotations that simply invoking them is meant to end the argument or signal moral authority. As I mentioned above, racism used to be one of those words. These days, it’s lost its potency. And that is a shame, not because we want to hear it incessantly from privileged white girls who never had to see a black-on-black murder, or get beaten up for no reason by a pack of brothas in a junior high bathroom. It’s a shame because racism has come roaring back at a time when people of color are cultivating personal responsibility and turning on the victimologists. But instead of taking us back to the late nineties or early 2000s, when people were cool to make irreverent, racially-tinged jokes and everybody was fair game—the racists have a) come out of hiding, or b) are being trained up in the sewers of the free speech internet.

As one who has long been sick to death of people attributing all social problems or motivations to RACISM!, the racists seem to be everywhere now, inside Xbox games and apps like X. The ongoing liberation of speech from the Censorship-Industrial Complex is not an invitation to behave like a scumbag or prove the censors have a point. They’re just re-deifying racism as a godword. That lowlifes like Jake Shields are out there running their stupid mouths puts a truthful tinge to every leftwing winge.

So, while the extreme left now openly hates whites and Jews, the extreme right openly hates blacks and Jews. This all comes at a time when, regardless of race, we need to stay in solidarity together around some coherent worldview so that we can become an effective counterpower against the authoritarians. But instead of locking arms around the wisdom of the American Founding or upgrading the ideas of a free people, too much of the rightosphere has become a cesspool. The left started sniffing guano, so the right said, “Hold my beer,” and jumped into it.

The Fracturing

Just as the left began to flail about in its distinct brand of idiocy and strategic projection, the right has started to fracture along the lines of vile influencers.

Some remain pragmatic supporters of Trump, holding out hope that he’ll accomplish some positive things and not turn out to be an Epstein client. Many are unprincipled MAGA cultists who figure out how to rationalize everything the President says and does. A few are chamber-of-commerce RINOs who have secret flower shrines to heroes like Mitt Romney or John Thune. A few remain part of the reptile neocon syndicate, willing to hold their noses for the execrable Lindsey Graham because he sold his soul to the military-industrial complex and has a weird Christian-cult fetish for “Isrul.” Some are MAGA-adjacent WASPs who imagine Ann Coulter is an intellectual, that Vivek Ramaswamy is too Indian to be president, or that there is a big enough gap between Steve Bannon and Lyndon LaRouche to matter. Some showed up with Musk wearing dark MAGA hats, but went back to coding after the Big Bloated Boondoggle made DOGE look like a joke. Grandpa and Uncle Jerry wear tractor hats and believe whatever Fox News tells them. Their grandkids are either engaging in OF onanism or sharing libtard memes from 4Chan. But too many of their buddies are turning into neo-Nazis for the lulz, and they’re not far behind.

What about an alternative?

The libertarians, whose number you can count on fingers and toes, are fractured too. One branch is a remnant dedicated to flogging the non-aggression principle (NAP), another branch sits comfortably in ineffectual beltway jobs, churning out little more than TDS articles and whitepapers no one reads, and a third branch sits around sending their friends Michael Saylor videos so they’ll buy bitcoin. In short, the libertarian movement is thin and useless. Their brand is toxic. Their principles are too abstract. And they have about as much culture as a cardboard box in the rain.

Post-Politics for the Politically Disillusioned

I don’t know which political extreme is more disgusting, but sensationalism gets eyeballs, and some of those eyeballs are attached to ignorant, credulous people. Social media dynamics reinforce social fracturing and push us toward civil war.

An increasing number of people will discover they are disillusioned with politics. Sadly, though, disillusionment is neither a mission nor a means. But frustration with the system is at least a starting point—an impetus to enter the transpartisan, post-political arena.

Post-politics is not so much a way to imagine the world without politics, although that’s nice. Instead, it is a change modality. One acknowledges that there are plenty of people working in the trench warfare of politics, but not enough working in creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. There are enough freedom lovers at the bulwark, so we need more courageous, talented folks to spend their energy building something liberatory. Will they be the next Satoshi Nakamoto, Travis Kalanick, or Vitalik Buterin? Or will they be the next Orwell, Heinlein, or, in film, Terry Gilliam or the Wakowskis? Durable liberatory social change is an iron triangle that includes politics, technology, and culture.

If everyone who wants freedom goes all in on politics, then innovation and culture creation will suffer.