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The Alt-Right is Our Misfortune
Kali Yuga Logbook, entry #30 — October 27th, 2022 — A Comment on David Cole and the dumbing down of the Right
Dear Logbook,
In his recent article at Taki’s Magazine, David Cole talks about Kanye West’s anti-Jewish rants and the downward spiral of the Right. Here are my own comments on the matter.
First Cole makes fun of Tucker Carlson for saying that Kanye West is not crazy.
Says Carlson: “Is he crazy? No, he’s not. He’s not crazy at all.”
It’s obvious that Kanye is insane.
I only managed to get through a few minutes of the discussion between Kanye and Lex Fridman, because both are so mind-numbingly stupid that I had to turn it off.
It’s like listening to crazy homeless people ranting about their pet theories…
Fridman talks slooowly slowly in an effort to sound intelligent, to cover up that he doesn’t have anything intelligent to say.
Kanye spews meaningless gibberish in an attempt to seem profound. At one point he says, “I am Jew, not Jewish. Jew-ish means ‘like Jew’.”
He’s like a child. (Child-ish, perhaps?)
It’s all very embarrassing. And I’m sorry to say I’ve heard weirdos on the Right come up with similar garbage.
The dumbing down of the Right
Then Cole moves on to the most interesting part of his article, which deals with the dumbing down of the Right.
Conservative and far-Right fanboys are swooning with joy: “Kanye speaks the truth! At last, someone willing to take on the Jews!”
(Quick side note: It’s quite possible to see value in Kanye starting a public discussion about this topic without being a fanboy. That’s not what we’re talking about here.)
Says Cole:
You know a movement’s dying when it has to rely on the mentally ill for its spokespeople. This is something nobody on the far right likes to talk about, but the fact is, the thought leaders who can rationally and persuasively write about issues of race (not just Jewish stuff but matters involving IQ heritability and race and crime) are aging out, and no one’s replacing them. Where’s the new generation of Taylors and Brimelows? […]
The young generation of far-rightists are LULZers who can’t (or have no desire to) discern between a Jared Taylor book and a Kanye rant; the intellectualism is dying off with the intellectuals.
These are some inconvenient truths. Although I disagree with Cole that “nobody on the far right” likes to talk about them.
I’ve been relentless in calling attention to this problem (but hardly anyone else has).
In the late ’90s and early 2000s, I looked up to people like William Pierce.
Who will the next generation look up to?
The far Right is 10x bigger than 10 years ago, but it doesn’t have 1/10 of the competence. There has been an impressive increase in numbers and an obscene drop in quality.
Indeed, where’s the new generation of Taylors?
Mark Weber and Kevin MacDonald are in their 70s. Who would be qualified to take over as editor of The Journal of Historical Review (now defunct) and The Occidental Quarterly?
“BronyEmperor88” from Twitter?
It’s even more inconceivable that any such journals would be started today. No one would read them, let alone write for them or edit them.
Don’t get me wrong: The problem is not primarily on an individual level. Many of the new, young people on the Right are intelligent and dedicated.
And it’s not a problem that we have average people talking about average things…
The problem is that the movement itself has deteriorated. That is, its guiding principles and values have gone down the drain.
The Right no longer has a clear sense of direction and purpose. It mostly consists of a confused mass of “LULZers”, as Cole calls them.
No room for analysis
As an example, it seems that the current Right doesn’t have the attention span to come up with a credible analysis of anything.
“Research” is a word that doesn’t exist anymore.
This became painfully obvious during the last two “current things”: Covid and the Russian attack on Ukraine.
The deterioration of intelligent discourse has been on full display.
Covid “plan trusters” just assumed that our elites are doing what’s best for us.
Covid “deniers” just repeated the most sensational worst-case-scenario claims they could find in the least credible sources.
I’m rather proud that I recorded some “fact-checking” discussions with JF Gariépy in an attempt to rectify problems on both sides.
Hopefully it made some difference. (Self-congratulatory, I know.)
With the Russian war it is even worse… mostly contrarian NPCs — “I oppose the current thing” — combined with memes and talking points planted by anonymous Telegram accounts.
A complete lack of independent research and analysis. Just a narrative propped up by memes and slogans. Facts be damned.
This time I haven’t even bothered with the tidal waves of sewage coming out of Right-wing social media… There aren’t enough hours in the day.
The credibility of the Right collapsed as a consequence of this lack of intelligent discourse.
I am confident that we would have performed better 20 years ago.
Now, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if there was also a serious movement — in addition to the goofing off.
But all intelligent voices are drowned out by the Jerry Springer Right.
Cole again:
I saw the same thing happen with Holocaust revisionism: The smart guys whose hard work attracted the attention of people like Christopher Hitchens and John Sack either got chased out (as I did) or died off, leaving only the lunatics and retards
Intelligent voices are chased out or just so embarrassed that they start backing out of the room…
Just growth pains?
One of my readers objected: As ideas become popular and get adopted by larger parts of the population, we’ll get more people of moderate intelligence. When we win, dummies will be our biggest supporters.
A perfectly reasonable comment.
It’s true that as an idea becomes successful it attracts more people, including folks with lower IQ.
But that doesn’t mean that the movement itself has to be dumbed down. It doesn’t mean that everything must be reduced to the lowest common denominator.
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with unintelligent people… but there’s something wrong with allowing them to set the tone.
Cole:
[L]eftism, by virtue of having so many “intellectual” Jews in the upper echelons, is top-down. […] Rightists, on the other hand, are bottom-up: It’s the base that tells the “intellectuals” what they need to believe. “I can’t trust that guy unless his manias mirror mine. Satanic possession! Cookie-monster Holohoax! Energy-controlling weather-weapons! You better agree with me about those things or I’m not supporting you, you cuck, you controlled opp.”
I’ve said many times that “tall poppy syndrome” is more common on the Right than on the Left, although we like to pretend the opposite.
Sam Dickson said it better:
The Left is egalitarian in theory, but elitist in practice; the Right is elitist in theory, but egalitarian in practice.
Social media is our misfortune
I blame the online “Alt-Right” — the version of the Right which came into existence through social media in the mid-2010s.
Social media is the worst thing that ever happened to the Right.
I was blissfully unfamiliar with that “community” until 2-3 years ago. (Sure, I was aware it existed but I wasn’t interested.)
I’m talking here about the “movement” on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, etc.
It wasn’t until the lockdown that I started paying serious attention. We were cut off from the real world, so I had no choice…
At first I had a charitable attitude:
These new folks in social media will study the intellectual Right and pick up its qualities, I thought.
It’s just a learning curve, I thought.
This will be a good addition to the real Right, I thought… A vehicle for spreading more profound insights later on.
I was wrong.
The social media Right did not become an extension of the real Right — it replaced the real Right.
It completely ignored the intellectual tradition of the radical Right and created an online echo chamber for goofing off.
So what we have left is a low-quality, fast food version of the Right.
The medium defiles the message
Again, this downward spiral can’t be blamed on the individuals involved, because the game is rigged.
You see, social media is a social credit system that rewards stupidity. It builds incentives for dumbing down everything you say and do.
“Likes” and “shares” become the measurements of quality. And the dumber a post is, the more popular it will be.
(Remember that the average IQ for whites is around 100. That means a substantial chunk of the population is around 100 and below.)
Consider how many follow Alex Jones vs. how many follow Mark Weber.
If Lauren Southern has more followers than Kevin MacDonald, then she is somehow more important…
In Nationalist Narnia, the idiot is king.
Cole again:
[O]f course these guys embrace Kanye. The nuttier he gets, the more “based” he is. The more he kamikazes his career, the more he can be trusted. Rightists prefer cocooning away from the “normies,” whereas leftists try to remake the normies (and therefore society) in their image, by persuasion, coercion, or force.
In other words, the crazier you are… the less you make sense… the funnier you are… the more popular you will be in social media. That’s how the medium rigged the game.
In summary
Every intelligent person should find this alarming. The consequences are predictable and disastrous.
This downward spiral is at least as dangerous as the great replacement… because if we don’t turn it around, we won’t be capable of doing anything at all.
On a positive note: Being aware of the problem, we can start planning to move away from social media and establishing some elitism again.
And make no mistake — the only thing that will turn this negative process around is strict elitism. Quality over quantity, which used to be a principle that everyone on the Right took for granted.
There’s more that could be said about other claims in Cole’s article, but I’ll stop here.
End of rant.
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12 comments
“Who’ll succeed the elders?” I don’t think the picture is quite as bleak as you paint it. Greg Johnson comes to mind as an intellectual heavyweight with a well-established platform. Gregory Hood is a fine writer and charismatic orator who would probably be capable of succeeding Jared Taylor within Amren…..(10 minutes later) You’re right. Those are the only people I can think of, and Greg Johnson is not universally popular. But don’t rule yourself out!
Thank you. (But Greg is no spring chicken, either — nearly the same generation as Weber and Taylor).
Really? I thought he was in his early fifties.
No matter his actual age, my point is that he doesn’t belong to the new generation of the Right. But yes, Jared has been involved for a decade more, at least. And in Mark’s case, it’s even much more than that.
Zman’s blog and podcasts are the best analysis and original thought from the dissident right. The comments section has many astute regulars who add value.
Thank You Frodi,
I heard a podcast a while back with You and Semiogogue mentioning this. I am close to 60 and the generation Gap is unavoidable and I no longer mix with ‘youngsters’ but when I did the ‘Gamer’ culture/generation had strong leanings to what I consider natural states of being.
Perhaps finding and interacting more with promising young people is what is required.
Thank you for your comment. It’s true that people have always said “young kids today” — but in this case we’re dealing with something more than that. New technology has changed the way we live our lives and interact with other human beings. So it’s more than the regular generational gap that’s at play.
I am afraid that Frodi’s aphoristic dismissal of the anti-war position as delusional (‘Narnia hypothesis’) and his uncritical adoption of the neocon narrative of the war suffers to the nth degree from the ery symptoms he complains about (+ an astonishing lack of self awareness).
Nice try.
That’s what I’m talking about.
Faced with an opposing view we don’t try to interrogate and understand it, but we label it a hostile attempt to disrupt and undermine.
No discussion can proceed in this way.
“we label it a hostile attempt to disrupt and undermine”
Yes, it would seem you do. Such as calling it an “uncritical adoption of the neocon narrative”.
If you wish to contribute something of substance, you are welcome to do so. If you wish to continue posting bullshit, you’re spam from now on.
You’re right, I retract this claim since I cannot delete the message, it’s not true anyway. Maybe you should just delete the whole thread including this post.
I will try to contribute in the comment section of the Semenyaka interview.(Besides, the Jones and Collet debates were a disaster. The first was about metaphysics and the second about political systems. Neither provided any useful insight into the conflict itself.)
But I need your help. I need for someone to play Devil’s advocate.