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Scott Greer writes about the differences between the millennial "Online Right" and the Zoomer right:
This is essentially the Richard Hanania low human capital theory. While Hanania screams it from the rooftops with the subtly of a hammer pounding on an I-beam, Greer packages it more carefully, reminding his readership that the tatted-up MMA guy podcast-ranting about 5G giving him cancer is not a historical part of the Right; the Right needn't tribalistically defend his antisocial behavior.
Ironically this hypothetical Zoomer conservative sounds a hell of a lot like the archetypal Boomer conservative.
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Greer does a good job of Noticing the existence of the FanDuel American, but a bad job of understanding or describing him. ((The pattern of doing a great job of Noticing but a bad job of Understanding is a sight gag here))
Values are best modeled as aspirational in seeking a Red/Blue divide among normies. The important question isn't what you do, it is what you wish you did, or did more of.
Using Church attendance as a jumping off point: in a few weeks I'm going to go up to my in-law's beach house, and go to the local church for Easter Mass. Many of the people in the pews will be Easter-Christmas Catholics, who go to Mass maybe three times a year. Some of those Easter-Christmas Catholics will be liberals, and some will be conservatives; the difference will be not in how often they go to Mass but in how often they wish they went to Mass. A liberal blue triber wishes they went to church less often than they do, a conservative red triber wishes they went to church more often. The blue triber is sitting through Easter Mass thinking "I wish mom didn't drag us here, no one cares, and we have so much to do before dinner!" while the red triber thinks "I really ought to go to Mass every week, I've been trying to go but, work, and chores, and early football games, and hangovers..." The Blue Triber resents the presence of religion, no matter how minor or major the inconvenience; the Red Triber thinks religion is good and vaguely wants more of it in his life, even if he makes pretty weak excuses as to why he doesn't do it.
This pattern can be extended across many fields. The Red Triber uses pornography or OnlyFans, but thinks that the models are trash people, and might vaguely wish he didn't use it; the Blue Triber thinks the models are good people, and vaguely tries to seek out pornography that women claim they enjoy making. The Red Triber wishes he was more involved with his kids; the Blue Triber thinks single moms are just fine. The Red Triber thinks drug users are scum and is vaguely uncomfortable with them, even if he makes an exception for himself because [reasons]; the Blue Triber thinks that drugs are fine and that hallucinogens sound cool and vaguely thinks he should try them even if he himself barely drinks. The Red Triber thinks black people aren't ultimately as good as white people, even if he makes exceptions for his friends or his favorite athletes or rappers; the Blue Triber thinks Black people are as-good or better than YTs and diversity is our strength, even if he doesn't have any actual black friends. The Red Triber wishes he made more than his wife, or that she didn't work at all, and that she was more obedient and he more authoritative; the Blue Triber wishes that his wife made as much as he did, and that she didn't defer to him as much as she does.* The Red Triber who doesn't own any guns really thinks he ought to get one and totally plans to any day now; the Blue Triber that does own a gun makes a dozen weird excuses as to why he specifically likes them and offers extensive explanations of how safe he is in the storage and handling of the firearms.
To a certain extent, this is normal: humans are imperfect and moral ideals are perfect. We could probably play this game in Classical Athens with guys who wish they slept with fewer women and more boys, and guys who wish they slept with more boys and fewer women; or in Tolstoy's Russia with nobles who wish they had fewer serfs and nobles who wish they had more serfs. It's nothing special that the majority of American conservatives and liberals don't live up to their political ideals. But you can't understand people just from what they do, you do have to consider what they want to do.
*Thinking about these couplets personally: I wish I went to Mass more even though I go frequently and I wish my wife would consent to at least vaguely learn about our banking and bills instead of just depending on me to handle all money matters. C'est la vie.
Eh serious YMMV there. There’s red tribers with white supremacist ideas even if they won’t call it that(and won’t use the term ‘hbd’ either). There’s also a lot who genuinely aren’t racist. Most have a strong belief that the black community is screwed up by liberal social policies and bad culture(to be fair, African American culture is pretty bad), and that they need to move away from this. Most think making fun of blacks shouldn’t be off limits unless it’s seriously offensive or not funny. But whites are better is not a general rule.
You're mostly right. Maybe the "even" should have been reversed there.
My point is the direction of aspiration; it's red tribe to wish you interacted with fewer black and brown people regardless of how many you interact with, it's blue tribe to wish you interacted with more Black and Brown people, regardless of how many you interact with.
Neither attitude is essential to either tribe, but you can't hold the other tribe's attitude.
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I think Greer might be overfitting "TikTok users to "Zoomers." My tech illiterate lifelong Republican MAGA mother regularly sends me boomer-humor tier TikTok clips and she is obsessed with "based Black MAGA conservatives" spouting GOP talking points or praising Trump (sidenote: it is truly bizarre how civil rites fetishism is so prominent in the generation regardless of political leanings). I get similar stuff from my aunts and uncles. I think @Stefferi is right when he calls this as "normies vs fringe," although instead of fringe I'd say "nerds."
"This guy would presumably be on the other side due to their demographics or status but is on our side instead" has always had great appeal, what's weird about it? Put the other way around, it's how Jackson Hinkle can have mass appeal in the Third World.
First, it's a matter of degree. If I saw a black guy with a MAGA hat on YouTube, I would think "huh, interesting" but I wouldn't instantly subscribe and share his videos to my friends and family. Second, at least in my experience, it's only blacks and, every now and then, a homosexual man. I never get videos about based Asians, or Native Americans, or lesbians, or trans people, or recent immigrants from the third world. And that makes sense to me, because the normie idea of Civil Rights seems to be "MLK did some stuff and we realized we should treat black people nicely, and then a few decades later some... other people did some stuff and we realized we should let gay people get married.". So those two groups are the most salient to normies.
"Ex-Muslim who dunks on Islam" is basically a stock character among the European right at this point, at least.
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I think Stefferi is correct. I can give you just one example - Dave Rubin, a homosexual conservative star who together with his husband bought their children from surrogates. A lot of conservatives use him as a proof that they are not homophobic or whatever. You have more, like Elon Musk or Joe Rogan or lately even Bill Maher. Or take as an example of narcissist OF prostitute Nala Ray, who recently landed a soft interview with Michael Knowles about her newfound faith, and apparently is now some sort of a saint going around and preaching to conservatives how to be proper Christians. Or how J.K. Rowling or other old school leftie ultrafeminists are now conservative heroes, just because of their one particular stance against transgenderism.
If you take it at face value, none of the above deserve to be anything approaching to conservative role models, but conservatives love it if they see even fake semblance of their values reflected by their former opponents. I can guarantee you that if let's say Destiny or Hasan Piker declare that they are now officially conservative, they would be immediately launched into conservative stardom with conservatives gushing all over them - even if they do not even curtail their values and degeneracy. In a sense it is kind of happening with Ana Kasparian already. It is strange.
I don't think that Rowling was ever an "old school leftie ultrafeminist" (if she was, one would have expected her books to have some other plotline than a traditional male-hero-saves-the-day-and-gets-the-girl one that they actually had). Even before the TERF thing she was basically a lib-centrist Blairite and occasionally criticized by actual lefties for the same.
The Overton Window shifted around her, and she did try to keep up.
A lot of the left-wing criticism she got was for publicly supporting left-wing causes after the fact without making it explicit in her works (like saying Dumbledore was gay, or supporting the casting of a black Hermione by pretending she didn't write Hermione as white).
She tweeted as a 2015-era wokester but her writing was normie feminist and didn't actively try to transgress boundaries at the expense of the work.
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From what I know about Rowling's past, I think the "ultra" part is overselling it, but not completely unwarranted from a certain point of view. But the bigger question is, is "so infected with ideological brainrot that they can't help but overtly infect their fictional stories with their ideology" just a part of the definition of "old school leftie ultrafeminist?" I feel like that's more a characteristic of the modern variety.
I don't know what Rowling was thinking when writing the books, but I figured she wanted to tell a good and market-appealing story first, which in this case involved a boy protagonist, and she did put in bits of 90s-feminist messaging like the hypercompetent Hermione as one of the core supporting cast. Like how the Disney cartoons in the 90s were clearly generally feminist but sometimes involved a male protagonist getting the girl as in Aladdin or the female protagonist finding love with a man as in The Little Mermaid.
This is actually worse in the films which were later and managed by WB and male producers and directors (though Rowling had a strong say), interestingly.
Hermione was always competent (this was supposed to be balanced by her neuroticism and Harry's more instinctive skill at some things) but Ron in the films is less appealing and she even takes some of his moments so she becomes even more important.
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Ok, I can even grant you Rowling, although she is at least a liberal. "Fortunately" there are many others, like Camile Paglia - self described admirer of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and all that shtick, who is now supposedly on the right making interviews with Peterson because of her cat fight with Judith Butler and 3rd+ wave of intersectional feminists.
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‘Black conservatives’ also play into the widely held suspicion that blacks will fix all their problems with Republican-coded lifestyle improvements. The black millionaire business owner with one baby mama that he’s still married to is advertisement that this deal works and black conservative pundits are advertisements that it still exists.
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We apparently graduated from "you guys are a bunch of dum-dums that need to be led by elite human capital", and moved on to "you guys are the elite human capital, why don't you cut loose the dum-dums?". Much like with other entries in the genre of "advice for my enemies", I'll have to ask you to go first.
How is Greer your enemy?
I was under the impression that you're just using him as a reference to put forward your views. If that's not the case, and you want me to have a "conversation" with Greer with you as a proxy, I have to say I don't quite see the point.
"This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases."
What does that have to do with whether or not you believe in the argument you put forward?
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Isn't this just a normie vs. fringe problem? Greer and his politics are fringe. Whatever appeals to millions of normie zoomers is almost by definition going to be normie, just like with all generations, millennials included.
I've sometimes referred to what Greer calls "FanDuel Americans" as "lifestyle conservatism", ie. conserving a certain lifestyle that was common and aspirational in, say, the 90s, perhaps the 80s depending on generation. Apart from anti-immigrationism this sort of a thing seems to form the bulk of the politics of the local right-wing populists.
Support a (relatively, compared to the local baseline) free market, since this offers an aspirational vision of being wealthy enough to obtain a good lifestyle and material goods (a nice car, nice housing, good food, beer and sports, trips to the Mediterranean in the winter etc.). Oppose environmentalism, since a lot of environmentalism is about restricting your access to those things, whether it's limiting driving or making flights more expensive or advancing veggie food or whatever). Oppose feminism, since it restricts (men's) social access to other things, like worry-free casual sex or naughty jokes and so on. And so on, and so on.
The more fringe right-wingers commonly dunk on this sort of lifestyle conservatism, noting that it poses a natural limit to how far they can go, eg. it can be combined with "can you BELIEVE what they're trying to do in Brussels now?" style light euroskepticism but not actually going as far as to leave the EU since that would make travel harder, it can be combined with restricting asylum seeking but not actual They Must All Go style total anti-immigrationism since that would mean no Filipino nurses to keep the health system underpinning the unhealthier parts of the lifestyle (and as potential marriage partners for some). For others, the problem is it can at most be combined with cultural Christianity but nothing more hardcore (let alone more esoteric doctrines) and so on.
Not to mention that if one really believes that this country might be facing a WW2 style war in the future, well, the stated numbers of willingness to fight are high (even higher than before 2022), but if one's politics are based on good living, how far will they actually be willing to go to endure the required amount of hardship...?
In Finland haven’t almost all of these guys actually been in the military before?
Sure, but that's still different from wartime, and is usually done around 19-20 when you have yet to be used having had decades of personal freedom and independent income.
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It's not about how far you can go, it's about where you can go. Another common criticism - "progressives driving the speed limit" - implies they'll take you to the exact same place, just slower.
I'd also say the target of the fringe's ire aren't the normies themselves, as much as the establishment leading them.
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I disagree with the notion that the dissident right has a weak presence on tiktok. I am seeing lots of dissident right content on tiktok and the comment sections are on fire. Tiktok has more freedom of speech than most big tech platforms and has an algorithm that makes it a lot more likely for niche content to go viral. There is a reason why tiktok is overrepresented in producing memes and trends. Tiktok is more interconnected and users are less siloed into tiny communities than most other platforms.
The group that is missing on tiktok isn't dissidents, it is the mainstream republicans, never Trumpers and American enterprise institute types. These groups need to seriously take a look in the mirror and have a long think about why their message has a non existent resonance with tiktokers. Just because Dick Cheney wears a suit doesn't make him respectable.
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