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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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I remember the Obama era narratives of the “Coalition of the Ascendent.” If demographics were truly destiny, Republicans wouldn’t touch the Presidency again. Obama’s “resounding” 2012 victory prompted the infamous Republican “Autopsy.”

This narrative ignores the numbers, though. 2012 wasn’t a triumph for Democrats, but a warning – while the Republican candidate had gained just under 1 million more votes than the 2008 Republican candidate, the Democrat had lost a little over 3.5 million voters. While Hillary Clinton eked out a plurality of the popular vote,* this trend continued in 2016: the Republican candidate gained about 2 million more votes than in 2012, while the Democratic candidate lost ~60k votes. A minor number, to be sure, but a trend nonetheless. 2012 wasn’t a victory lap, but instead a demonstration that the “Obama coalition” was a mirage, a flash in the pan – a demonstration that we all missed at the time.

As the 2024 election is mulled over by pundits to see what, exactly, went wrong, I wonder if we are missing similar “warning signs” in trends. The Bernie-Bro-turned-Trump-supporter pipeline a la Joe Rogan could be symptomatic of voters aligning more along an axis of “insiders vs. outsiders” instead of policy preferences, education, age, or race; while there are correlations with each of those things to an “insiders vs. outsiders” axis, none of them are definitive. Are we similarly looking at the 2024 election the wrong way, especially as we make judgment calls while several million votes have yet to be counted?

Some of the most prominent Republicans right now identified as Democrat-aligned during the Obama era (Trump, Vance, Elon, Tulsi; I’d throw RFK in there too but I’m not sure that he views himself as a Republican). Republicans are winning over tech bros and unions, and bleeding college-educated voters. There’s talk about this just being a Trump thing, it’ll go away. It was a big anti-incumbency year, worldwide. The elite will reclaim their rightful place as the only right, correct, egalitarian way forward. Etc.

*Talking heads bicker about how Trump “only” receiving a plurality of the popular vote decreases his significance, even while clinging to Clinton “winning” the popular vote in 2016 despite also receiving a plurality, and not a majority. The semantics are amusing from a culture war perspective – the war on language continues – but ultimately meaningless.

There's an image by https://x.com/patrickjfl that shows there's been a realignment between 1996 and 2024, but it has no dataset attached. To summarize (summarizing a tweet, lol), the parties have switched places: the GOP is now relatively more popular with the plebs, while the Dems have become the party of choice for the PMC.

There's another chart in comments by Kyle Saunders, with even less hard data on it, that shows that the cleavage line on the good old political compass has been rotating since 1960: it used to separate socialists from capitalists, but now it separates progressives from conservatives, with the GOP/Trump side becoming slightly more pro-redistribution that the Dems.

I think the real lesson from 2012 is that pundits are wont to proclaim realignments, because they desperately want to live in interesting and historic times. But seldom is it really so. The last realignment happened slowly over the course of several decades and is still ongoing.

Something approximating the left-right divide has now been with us for approaching a century, and it's not going away easily. This is something I think the reality of another term of Trump governance will expose. Left-disposed 'outsiders' are mostly not going to like what they get, which will probably consist of the usual Republican fare with the exception of tariffs, which will probably be as haphazard and anti-climatic as his first effort, and a higher degree of meaningless culture war bluster. Maybe he does meaningfully roll back support for Ukraine, but plenty of 'outsiders' are actually pretty pro-Ukraine, including the vast majority of former Bernie supporters.

I think the real lesson from 2012 is that pundits are wont to proclaim realignments, because they desperately want to live in interesting and historic times.

We've just seen, for only the second time, the re-election of an American President who lost an interim election. We're still seeing the echos of the fall of the Soviet Union (e.g. the Ukraine War). We recently got over a global pandemic causing worldwide oppression. We ARE living in interesting times.

We're going to have a divide, but subgroups have switched from one side to the other before (e.g. blacks in the 1960s) and they will again.

People have at least discussed this, although I don't know how much it's been internalized yet. Matt Yglesias had an article about the crank realignment, Hanania had an article about voters who see conspiracies everywhere, and Meskhout had this article.

In short, both sides have become dominated by delusional partisans screaming in echo chambers. The left have become experts in infiltrating institutions and corrupting them to woke ends, while the right have become eternal dissidents who are great at critiquing the left but terrible at actually building better replacement institutions. The left was a bit ahead of the right when it came to radicalizing, but it's also deradicalizing now in a way that will likely happen to the right in a few years. Around 2020 was "peak woke" after which things slowly calmed down. Now we're approaching the summit of "peak crank" on the right, which will also hopefully calm down.

All these articles about "cranks" to me are just wordgames. Radical/progressive/woke left believes in their own conspiracy theories, the main one is what I call as universal leftist conspiracy - courtesy of James Lindsay. It is really simple:

There are two groups of people: purple and beige. Purple people have access to some special attribute or property - let's call it purpleness. Purple people use this property to oppress beige group. Purpleness also helps purple group to create and reproduce system of purpleness, which reproduces oppression over to the next generation. Liberation from oppression and true equity will only happen if we dismantle the system of purpleness.

This is the most simple and primitive form of conspiracy theory which you can apply to mainstream ideas that for some reason are not considered as low status conspiracies. Some examples:

  • There are men and women. Men have access to male privilege which they use to oppress women. This system is called patriarchy and women will never be free unless we dismantle it.

  • There are heterosexual people and the rest such as queer people. The former group has ability to define what is normal, they have access to heteronormativity which they use to oppress nonheterosexual people. We will not have true liberation until we will not dismantle patriarchy.

  • There are white people and the rest, especially Black people. White people have access to whiteness to oppress other races. There can never be true equality until we will not dismantle white supremacy.

  • There are capitalists and workers. Capitalists have access to capital and they exclude workers from access to it, reproducing the system of *capitalism. There can never be true equality unless oppressed workers do not have access to means of production which is the first step to dismantle capitalism.

These are all the simplest and crudest forms of conspiracy theory which if applied to anything else would be identified as some uncouth theory only stupid people believe in. Except these conspiracies are high status so they are fine to utter even in a good society. This universal conspiracy can also be applied to many other popular leftist systematic conspiracies, just define new groups and systems of oppression be it handicapped people or fat people or tans people or many more. This type of "analysis" is in my opinion absolute farce, people who believe in these things can identify racism and sexism everywhere - from knitting to hiking. Which is the point - once you are woke to this systemic conspiracy thinking, then you will see sexism, racism and white supremacy even if you see somebody throwing a bugger from his car as he waits on a red light.

A conspiracy theory typically involves some shadowy group doing something in a centrally planned way. Your bullet points are all just badly worded versions of perfectly reasonable observations about uncoordinated human behaviour.

A conspiracy theory such as flat earth or Qanon are in a completely different category.

What is the patriarchy or whiteness except the ultimate in shadowy central planning? With it white men crushed and destroyed the natural inclination of society to employ black women in every leadership role and it wasn't until about a decade ago that we finally realised that and ushered in the current age of milk and honey.

Uncoordinated behaviours wouldn't involve making up entire branches of science to trick people into thinking your ethnicity and sex is superior, and yet that is apparently one of two possible reasons white men do better than their counterparts on iq tests and tests of strength - either a shadowy cabal of evil white men engineered hyper specific tests that look like general knowledge testing or a strict measure of weight lifting while actually biasing these tests on behalf of other whites and guys, or every white just knows in their racist hearts how to pass an iq test the same way every man knows the secret sexist trick to win at arm wrestling.

The only reason q anon or flat earth is different is because it doesn't have the backing of the so called experts. But the experts have been peddling conspiracy theories for decades and the right have been pointing it out the entire time. Don't confuse holding institutional power for actual expertise. Progressives do not deserve endless charity and conservatives do not deserve endless scrutiny.

What is the patriarchy or whiteness except the ultimate in shadowy central planning?

Depends on how it's cashed out and elaborated on. I believe it to be patently obvious we live in a patriarchy that has been making slow-motion improvements, but that this fact is just a reflection on millions of people's net behaviours over time rather than something anyone has ever nefariously discussed in a group.

Yeah but when people are railing against the patriarchy they aren't taking issue with patrilineal descent, they do assume nefarious motives.

They rely on the same blurred understanding of intent and agency as the q anon types, in that the more thoughtful among them will, when you really get into it with them, call it a prospiracy in the ssc sense of an aligned group having the same motives and therefore moving towards the same goal without the need to coordinate, but then go to back to using language that implies deliberate action when speaking generally.

You present the 'prospiracy' as the machinations of society and I agree, but the crank sees it as the reason their life didn't live up to their expectations. In my experience that is a better delineation between the crank and the conspiracy theorist than the status of their conspiracies.

  • Innocent black men are routinely killed by corrupt police in large numbers, and the murders are covered up.

  • Donald Trump is a Russian Asset, controlled through Kompromat.

  • The Russians hacked the 2016 election

  • Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, and the Republican machine helped him cover it up.

It seems to me that these four fit your definition of "conspiracy theory", do they not?

So the second one sounds like an example of a conspiracy theory – it's not just an exaggeration but implies a shadowy cabal who's really in control. Unless the speaker just means Trump is a 'Russian asset' in the minimal sense that his existence is of value to Russia (rather than in the spycraft sense).

The others seem a bit more like rash overclaims than complete fantasies to me though it really depends on how the speaker elaborates on what they mean when questioned. Russia did interfere with the 2016 election, for example, but it does not appear at all likely it made a significant difference to the outcome.

Unless the speaker just means Trump is a 'Russian asset' in the minimal sense that his existence is of value to Russia (rather than in the spycraft sense).

...What specific beliefs of the purported "Gribbles" are both widespread and remain preposterous when granted this level of charity? I do not think Flat Earth is a belief held by an appreciable percentage of Republican voters. Ditto for Qanon, which as a diffuse meme has the added benefit of being almost entirely undefinable. What specific Qanon claims are widespread among Republican voters, that we might compare to specific beliefs among Democratic voters?

The others seem a bit more like rash overclaims than complete fantasies to me though it really depends on how the speaker elaborates on what they mean when questioned.

This is a Russell Conjugation: I raise good points from a skeptical perspective, you rashly overclaim, he is a conspiracy crank.

Let's take something pretty spicy: One prominent point in the constellation of Qanon memes is that elites are abusing children and covering it up at scale. Or, alternatively, we could phrase it "Nancy Pelosi is raping and murdering children in a basement under Memories Pizza to harvest their adrenochrome". Now that more specific formulation I just made up; I have no idea if any specific person has ever used it in the wild, and my prior that it is true rounds to zero. But the former formulation is just straightforwardly true, as Diddy's prosecution is now demonstrating. It seems to me that the way you are using Qanon is meant to imply that the specific, explicitly ridiculous formulation is the central example of a Red Triber belief. It seems likely to me that to the extent that Qanon has ever been widespread, the most widespread versions of it have been the least specific and the most plausible, while the least widespread versions of it have been the most specific and least plausible. This should not be surprising, and is not unusually centered in Red Tribe even in the present.

Innocent black men are routinely killed by corrupt police in large numbers, and the murders are covered up.

With the inclusion of the word "routinely", this moves straightforwardly into the realm of conspiracy theory. Certainly there is at least one and perhaps as many as a dozen cases a year in a nation of ~350 million, but Blue Tribers routinely overestimate the number by two to four orders of magnitude, speaking as though this is how the vast majority of homicide against Black people is committed. It is not hard to find prominent Blues feeding the fantasy within the last few years. Nor is the conspiracy element extricable from the structure of this belief. The narrative is that cops routinely kill innocent black people and get away with it, despite obvious formal mechanisms to catch and punish such actions. Major changes in policy have been implemented nation-wide on the basis of this belief, both formal (body cams), semi-formal (the Defund the Police movement) and informal (biased rumor-mongering and disinformation, which remains endemic). The effects of this conspiracy theory have been devastating: nation-wide riots and a collapse in the effectiveness of policing, resulting in a serious violent crime wave and tens of thousands of additional deaths, most of them among Black people.

The Russians hacked the 2016 election

The central example of the claim I'm citing is that Russians hacked the voting machines and changed vote totals to ensure Trump would win. That is very clearly an example of a conspiracy theory. Then we have a motte and bailey where the motte is "Russia engaged in hacking relating the 2016 election" (true, and as you note irrelevent) > "Russia hacked the election, deciding the outcome" (not true and highly deceptive, but with a fig leaf of unfalsifiability) > "Russia hacked the voting machines and changed vote totals" (flatly false.)

Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, and the Republican machine helped him cover it up.

Two of the three accusations against him were proven false and withdrawn. The third, original accusation was repeatedly proven false on specific questions of fact, only to be serially altered into unfalsifiability. The reality is that there is no credible evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist or an abuser of any kind, and there is no evidence that the Republicans ignored to secure his confirmation. The beliefs of a large portion of Blues shares no overlap with this reality. And again, conspiracy is implicit here; they're claiming that an obvious truth is being concealed by a definable hierarchy of people for nefarious ends.

Russians hacked the voting machines and changed vote totals to ensure Trump would win. That is very clearly an example of a conspiracy theory.

So here I for sure agree with you. Phrased like this, it's on a level with QAnon and flat earth.

The others not so much. That Kavanaugh for instance was a sexual abuser is nothing close to a conspiracy view, he was accused by a professor. This doesn't require any kind of nefarious shadowy cabal, it requires Democrats to be more disposed to 'believe women' and some motivated thinking, and the Republicans to see plausible doubt that he did anything at a party decades ago, certainly enough that they can give their ally the benefit of the doubt. There's no specific coordination, no outrageous nefariousness, just a he said/she said that's split along lines of self-interest.

Anyway, I agree that both sides use ambiguous and provocative claims, only for many to retreat to more reasonable specifics when under pressure. My only point is that such motte/bailey strategy should be separated from off-the-reservation beliefs that are different in kind because they include implausible specifics, usually to do with central coordination or schizo leanings that the believer is very special. That a pizza restaurant is a paedophile market. That a government higher up is speaking to you directly on the dark web. That the space landings were faked.

I maintain that's a useful distinction.

Innocent black men are routinely killed by corrupt police in large numbers,

Not a conspiracy theory, just a retarded belief.

and the murders are covered up.

Are there (a significant amount of relevant) people who believe this?

Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, and the Republican machine helped him cover it up.

This also seems like a strained framing, a lot of blue tribers believe that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist (unlikely but unknowable) and believe that Republicans don't care about it because they hate women/whatever (wrong, Republicans just don't believe he is a rapist).

2 and 3 are one point stretched into two. But it's true that Russiagate stuff is definitely conspiratorial thinking, but it's miles more believable than QAnon (so is the Stop the Steal stuff, for whatever that's worth).

Not a conspiracy theory, just a retarded belief.

But is the term "conspiracy theory" not already used in a pejorative sense, such that it can be defined as "retarded belief" in the minds of many? To put it in fewer words, these are one and the same, to some.

Maybe, but we're not many, we're few and (usually) subject ourselves to a higher standard. There is such a thing as conspiratorial thinking, which is distinct from just being stupid, and it could be that, as of right now, it's more prevalent on the right.

Now, I'm of the opinion that Richard Hanania and his consequences have been a disaster for the rat-adjacent discourse, but I wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand.

I think the "peak woke" line is cope on the center left and right for different reasons. The center-left keep writing these articles as a smokescreen to let their radicals reload, and the people on the right are just deluding themselves that the extremists will give up and/or that the center-left will ever side with them.

Do you have any evidence that wokeness is still peaking, or has not yet peaked in the short to moderate term? I've gotten a lot of pushback from people on this site claiming how ridiculous it is to think wokeness has peaked... yet they kind of just handwave that as an assumption. By contrast, people like Noah have pretty good evidence in articles like this (non paywalled version available here)

I haven't seen any evidence that puberty blocker hormone prescriptions are down or anything of the sort.

Wokeness has lost a lot of battles, particularly in court recently, but that doesn't mean it stopped trying. Its just more land they still need to conquer.

I haven't seen any evidence that puberty blocker hormone prescriptions are down or anything of the sort.

Is there any data on this anywhere? The way you're wording this is a bit sus, making a claim without evidence, but implicitly demanding evidence of a specific kind for any rebuttal.

That is simply an example. But before I would consider wokeness to be in decline I'd like to see good hard data on real world results. Decline in trans prescriptions would be an interesting one; several prestigious colleges admitting 0-1 blacks in their freshman (or 1L law school) classes; several other tech companies following the Musk Model and firing 80% of the employees (the retained being overwhelmingly male and white+asian). Maybe you can think of some more, but those are ones off the top of the head.

Noah claims that progressives were in favor of immigration primarily, if not only, because Trump was against it, and that the right in general is against immigration on racial grounds. It's hard to take someone seriously after this kind of statement; The left has been very strongly in favor of immigration in general since the 90s, and this has been the case worldwide. The backlash to immigration has likewise happened worldwide, and for near-identical reasons: The number of immigrants were much higher than expected, the strain on the welfare systems, increased crime, etc.

Maybe it's because I'm in academia, but all the extremely woke people here haven't actually changed their opinion, and they haven't actually lost their positions, either. If I read the university newsletter, it's still full of "how to appreciate our diverse gender presentations" and very thin on hard science. If I walk around the campus, it's full of "critical orientation week" advertisements, which is exactly the kind of "critical" you'd expect. The university provides rooms for this week, which ostensibly is against the university, completely free of charge, of course. It's not even very long ago that the university kicked out a right-leaning moderate because "university is not political" and that the university should not "provide resources to political groups".

And this is the core problem imo: If there is a conflict and the right-leaning side is losing, the left will often successfully take away positions up to and including booting them out entirely. If the left loses, they just keep everything they try again after a while. Universities are still de-facto purging themselves of even moderately right-leaning people and promoting quite frankly completely insane people, so long as they are sufficiently far left. Unless we start kicking out far-left cranks the same way we do for the right, I don't see the general trajectory changing much. Sure this or that particular DEI statement gets discontinued, but the next thing is already being implemented.

The relevant line from Noah is here:

In the 2010s, immigration went from a technocratic consensus to a progressive cause célèbre. This happened for two reasons. The primary reason was that Donald Trump and his reactionary movement were against immigration, probably on racial grounds (though they never explicitly admit this). For many progressives, that made fighting for immigration a way of fighting against racism. A more minor reason was that many progressives either implicitly or explicitly bought into the idea that immigration would create a permanent Democratic majority.

This all seems broadly correct to me. The Gallup chart he posts indicates the left really did become much more pro-immigration during Trump's presidency, likely due to thermostatic equilibrium. They're WAY more pro-immigration than, for instance, the 90s as you say. And while not all people who oppose immigration (like me) oppose it on racial grounds, there are many (including on this very site!) who do.

While some schools may still be quite woke, the first derivative on DEI efforts overall is negative. The NYT published a very long hit piece on UMichigan's DEI efforts, for instance. There will still be some schools that are holdouts, but that's to be expected given academia is where wokeness was born and where its staunchest advocates came from.

I think of wokeness today like I think of evangelical Christians in the late '00s or early '10s. They still have some residual power, but they're losing on every front. Your perspective from academia is like someone from a megachurch telling me nothing has changed to evangelicals.

What will it take for you to acknowledge you are wrong about this? People just like you were saying that political correctness had peaked in the 90s, and that it was totally fine to stop noticing it (with the implicit threat that bad things would happen to you if you kept noticing anyway)

Can I quote stats on university hires? The percent of federal "science" grants going to DEI programs? The massive lawsuits against companies and agencies for having basic literacy standards? Is there anything I can say to get you to acknowledge that the giant elephant standing right in front of us isn't getting any smaller?

Can I quote stats on university hires? The percent of federal "science" grants going to DEI programs?

Ooo, please do. I'd be interested.

I don't think anyone's claiming that SJ is fully or even mostly gone. Certainly, I would tell anyone claiming this to extract head from own anus and take a look around. The claim @Ben___Garrison and @MadMonzer are making is that the six-metre two-tonne croc has lost a few centimetres and a few kilos, and (in BG's case) that the trend will continue. It's definitely still very big.

I would rather say that the croc is retreating back into its cage, which is only mildly reassuring because it has already escaped the cage twice in living memory.

Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy. I'm not saying it definitely will make a comeback in the next few years - it's no longer got either stealth or an aura of inevitability, and that's a big deal - but it's premature to definitively say it's peaked; I'll believe it's decisively defeated when the SJ party here in Australia (the Greens) either falls below 10% of the vote or recants its hair-raising "let's ban politicians from taking anti-SJ positions" policy (relevant part's on page 5).

holds the high ground of the academy

The academy is the "high ground" in the sense that a defeated tribe can hide out in the mountains and wage guerilla war until a suitable opportunity arises (like Hilary wanting a way to attack Bernie from the left) - not in the sense that it is the key strategic terrain being fought over. That would be the government and corporate bureaucracies that actually implement cancellations.

A bunch of stupid nominally left-wing politics was defeated in the late 1970's, hid out in the academy for a decade, came out again as 1990's political correctness, lost again, hid out again, and came back as wokestupid in the 2010's. But wokestupid doesn't come out of academia - it comes out of tumblr - the changes from PC to wokestupid are very obviously driven by the need for social media virality. Academia was just a place where a parasite could be kept on life support until a new host turned up. If wokestupid is retreating into academia, it has been defeated (but not destroyed).

The academy is the "high ground" in the sense that a defeated tribe can hide out in the mountains and wage guerilla war until a suitable opportunity arises (like Hilary wanting a way to attack Bernie from the left) - not in the sense that it is the key strategic terrain being fought over.

No, it's the latter also. As @magic9mushroom points out, it can effectively gatekeep a large number of professions, and it can provide anointed Truth.

The academy is the "high ground" in the sense that a defeated tribe can hide out in the mountains and wage guerilla war until a suitable opportunity arises (like Hilary wanting a way to attack Bernie from the left) - not in the sense that it is the key strategic terrain being fought over. That would be the government and corporate bureaucracies that actually implement cancellations.

I think we're largely in agreement. I called it the high ground because it's relatively hard to conquer, because as the legible-qualification-providing institution it can fairly-effectively gatekeep a large number of professions with power (i.e. bureaucrats, middle managers, executives, lawyers, and less-directly schoolteachers), and because as the legible-fact-providing institution it's hard to stop listening to it without getting stuck in a whirlpool of insane delusion and losing effectiveness. It is, indeed, not the prize being fought over... but it's a mountain directly overlooking it. Cf. Moldbug: "Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in."

Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy.

Wokey-wan Kenobi: It’s over, Elonakin, I have the high ground!

Elonakin Blueskywalker: You underestimate my power!

WK: Don’t try it!

All three of these articles about "cranks" on the right parse as: People who disagree with right-wingers think right-wingers are wrong. I am not a crank -- I'm right about everything!

I think this is an unfairly low effort dismissal. I don't like all the people above, but they are thoughtful and making more of an effort at fairness than you suggest. Read Ymeskhout's if you haven't and look at things like Trump's post about AI crowds that were included in it. I understand the traditional Motte argument that Trump lies like a used car salesman and Democrats lie like lawyers and there is certainly some truth to that. And I agree that at the moment Democrat lies are more dangerous precisely because they have a veneer of respectability and acceptability by institutions. However, I don't think that changes the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality. It is a very particular kind of mindset that is a not insignificant portion of the electorate and it has become increasingly partisan in recent years particularly since Trump and doubly so since COVID.

However, I don't think that changes the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality.

This seems like a strange comment in the wake of an election in which one of the most commonly talked about theories about why the Democrats lost as much as they did is that the electorate rejected their embrace of a massive conspiracy theory that has very little grounding reality, i.e. CRT, "wokeness," identity politics, social justice, etc. I think it's more accurate to say that Republicans have become the party of choice for low status conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality.

Read Ymeskhout's if you haven't

He's my friend, I have a cameo in the article. His belief is that Republicans are going crazy, he respects my intelligence but thinks I have a reality distortion field that makes me irrational about Trump. Sure, he can think that -- and I think he's wrong! The theory is that we're wrong about everything, we're conspiracy theorists, we're cranks, we're crazy, we believe things without evidence, etc. etc. etc. Most of these guys don't actually know anything about the evidence: I sincerely doubt Hanania could give a steelman of RFK's position about vaccines, or Corona, or a steelman about anything, frankly. Yassine, at least, has been very patient in having these kinds of conversations, but I don't think he would really accept any of these arguments as legitimate: he isn't convinced, and he's not convinced anyone else should be convinced. So they're not just wrong arguments, they're crank arguments, conspiracy arguments, etc.

the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality

Democrats are the party of people who act as if there isn't a Replication Crisis. I see the worst nonsense taken credulously just because it was in a study somewhere. Corona came from wet markets? Puberty blockers are reversible? I can go on bluesky right now and find people arguing that Kamala won the election and has all the evidence and will coup Trump any day now. Please, please, I cannot stand to hear more about how I need to carefully consider the people who call me crazy because they didn't carefully consider me. The right does not have a monopoly on nonsense and that is so apparent that it's embarrassing to be told otherwise.

I think the left adopts this view because their self image is that of being the experts (by which they mean credentialed). The replication crisis strikes at the heart of this view. So they pretend it (and all of the other mistakes by the experts) don’t exist.

However, I don't think that changes the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality.

I just don't know man. What percent of people believe in Russiagate still?

Let's be honest. We're all cranks on some level. What percentage of people are religious? And for the atheist left, it's arguably worst. They seem to have replaced the religion sized hole in their hearts with a grab-bag of semi coherent belief systems.

What percentage of people believe in astrology? How many believe in bad luck?

I think what we're really noticing is that the left credentializes its cranks while the right does not. We have a (now resigned in disgrace) editor of Scientific American saying that the only reason male athletes beat female athletes is societal bias. The scientific establishment has been colonized by the left, who have used it to give a scientific sheen to many of their wacky, incorrect beliefs.

At one point, people who believed in antiseptic medicine were cranks. People who believed in plate tectonics were cranks.

But (going further back now) doctors of the church who calculated the age of the Earth using Biblical text were not cranks. They were credentialed experts.

I think what broke a lot of people (myself included) was the disastrous and anti-scientific response to Covid, which every step of the way was blessed by the so-called experts. It's not really about magical belief systems (which the Left has in plenty). It's about power.

I think what broke a lot of people (myself included) was the disastrous and anti-scientific response to Covid, which every step of the way was blessed by the so-called experts.

To add to this, if "conspiracy theory" was used in a neutral way instead of only being used against right-wing beliefs, then supporters of the mainstream response to COVID are conspiracy theorists. After all, they believe, without evidence, that masks stop covid, in the same way that a tinfoil hat might block mind control. They believe, without evidence, that imprisoning the entire population in their own homes, for just two weeks, with a "real" lockdown, will make covid go away. And they believe that governments that don't do this, such as Florida under DeSantis, are conspiring to commit mass murder while covering up the true number of deaths. Similarly, they treat all opposition to policies they support as motivated by criminal conspiracy (by some combination of Trumpists, Russians, the religious, or far-right) rather than by differing opinions or priorities.

While there are still serious concerns about how wishy-washy Trump is on Russia, that's a separate issue from "Russiagate" which was related to specific coordination possibly through blackmail. It might seem like any criticism of Trump's position on Russia is synonymous with "Russiagate", but when properly disambiguated I'd say not many Dems really believe in the crazier takes (e.g. Trump is a KGB plant).

I also think you're not really understanding what I (or the writers I linked) mean by "crank". A crank isn't just anyone who believes in stuff that isn't supported by science or evidence, it's specifically conspiratorial views like QAnon or "Bill Gates is microchipping us through vaccines" or "global elites want open borders to genocide white people". It's distrust of amorphous undefined "elites", who are perceived to have a secret evil agenda. Someone who believes in religion or astrology is wrong, obviously, but I wouldn't call them a crank.

Pretty much every crank view on the right has an equivalent on the left, just couched in academic language and with institutional support. There's plenty on the left that believe in a "Trans Genocide" or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, to state the obvious equivalents to white genocide conspiracy theories. And as for broader conspiratorial worldviews like QAnon, critical theory is just that: a conspiracy theory. Just one that's popular enough in academia that it dodges the definition.

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza

You cannot seriously say that this view is anything like QAnon or Pizzagate. As Ben Garrison was saying, “crank” doesn’t just mean someone that’s wrong.

Someone claiming Israel is committing genocide might be guilty of using an overly expansive definition of genocide for motivated reasons, but there’s nothing crazy about the claim, there’s nothing detached from reality.

The White Genocide conspiracy theory can also be steelmanned as people using an overly-expansive definition of genocide for motivated reasons, akin to the one originally proposed by Lemkin:

Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.

And then the flaw of the steelman is that if we were to revert to Lemkin's original wording we'd have to reclassify a lot of stuff that isn't treated as genocide as such, and then would inevitably need a new word to replace genocide to describe the narrower meaning.

but when properly disambiguated I'd say not many Dems really believe in the crazier takes (e.g. Trump is a KGB plant).

It sure didn't seem that way back when it was discussed on the subreddit during Trump's first term. Maybe they honestly changed their mind, but it just feels like they got quiet after seeing they won't make a lot of hay with it.

I also think you're not really understanding what I (or the writers I linked) mean by "crank". A crank isn't just anyone who believes in stuff that isn't supported by science or evidence, it's specifically conspiratorial views like

"The police are hunting down innocent, unarmed, black men like they were animals"? "Patriarchy"? "Rape culture"? "Systemic racism"? Before you try to do a motte-and-bailey on these, bare in mind that there's no shortage of people actually believing the bailey.

Also how do true conspiracist beliefs enter into it? Were people who believed in Epstein's Pedo Island For The Elites back in, say 2018, cranks? Am I a crank if a believe in a conspiracy of Queer Theorist clinicians and academics to normalize and promote various forms of body modification? Am I a crank for believing children walk into gender clinics identifying as inanimate objects, and gender clinics are happily affirming them with little to no pushback? Am I a crank if I believe some global elites are coordinating to promote LGBT acceptance, including putting pressure on politicians through private channels, if the the pushback from the local culture turns out to be too high for them to take a stand publically?

If the term "crank" includes true beliefs I have to question it's usefulness. If it doesn't, how do you handle cases where the truth of a given belief is uncertain? Are people who thought it's plausible for Imane Khelif to be male cranks? What about people who think Epstein didn't kill himself?

How do your resolve these questions in a way that doesn't boil down to "people who disagree with me are cranks"?

How many headlines showed up, pointing to random studies, calling right wingers dumb or conspiracy-prone?

How many left figures show up now and imply that the left rejects grifters and grift in a way that the right does not? Perhaps this point is worth its own high-level post.

Maybe I get this impression just because I avoid leftist spaces like the plague, but it really does seem like the right is more inundated with obvious, low-quality grifters. I attribute this to the fact that Republicans have become more heavily dependent on the less educated, but also because a lack of established media orgs leads to grifters fulfilling the demand from an underserved market.

Maybe I get this impression just because I avoid leftist spaces like the plague, but it really does seem like the right is more inundated with obvious, low-quality grifters.

Since the left holds the high ground of academia, their grifters are defined as higher-quality. Ta-Nehisi Coates comes to mind. Nikole Hannah-Jones (1619 Project) also.

I think this probably comes back to one of the points Scott made in "Can Things be both Popular and Silenced?". If you're a woke person or a leftist and want to hear woke or left opinions, you have an entire media ecosystem made up of hundreds of thousands of extremely qualified writers, journalists, academics etc. If you have more unorthodox opinions, you are not nearly as well-served, and so the bar is lower for a writer or journalist trying to gain a foothold. A woke person trying to make a living as a blogger or journalist is going up against The New York Times; an anti-woke person trying to make a living is going up against a bunch of other small fries with Substack accounts.

I think this argument is applicable not just to honest people acting in good faith but also to "grifters", broadly defined. If you want to make a living by cynically parroting woke opinions or selling obvious woke-inflected bullshit you don't really believe in, the competition is so stiff that you have to be really good at it to do it at all, so it tends to be a long con (perhaps as much as ten years' training in academia before you set up shop as a "corporate diversity consultant" or whatever). Whereas for anti-woke grifters, the demand for comparable content is just as high but the competition isn't as stiff, so just about any idiot who can string a sentence together can start a podcast and be inundated with Patreon subscriptions within the year. Candace Jones can literally wake up one morning and announce "hi everybody, I'm black and I hate wokeness!" when she was a woke person quite literally the night before. That option is not open to Ibram X. Kendi - he must put in long hard hours in postgraduate degrees and speaking engagements before people are willing to throw money at him for doing nothing.

Are you talking about quantity or reach? Because the lowest quality grifter with the most reach in America is Ibrahim X. Kendi. Next you have the 1619 project, all BLM related orgs, etc. RW orgs with that much reach are people like Daily Wire and Vivek. You might not like their positions on everything, but those aren't grifters. One is a legitimate media business that has really innovated in the space, and the other is a serious politician and thinker, although odd.

It's a recent move, and the Left's grift is still there, however, they've started to tone things down in the advent of the ascending accelerationists. Granted, sites like Salon and NewRepublic seem to exist to prove the strawmen visions of the Democrats correct to a degree that feels deranged, even if one were to find the American Russophiles and Sinophiles unpalatable.

Yeah that will definitely have a selection effect, not just because you aren't seeing as many leftists, but also because people of all political persuasions generally hide their craziest beliefs unless they know they are in good company. So you hang out with rightists and they get comfortable with you and tell you their metaphors that they secretly believe, but are so rarely in a space that is comfortable for leftists that you don't hear their metaphors that they secretly believe.

I avoid leftist spaces like the plague, but it really does seem like the right is more inundated with obvious, low-quality grifters.

Probably true if we confine our examination to X.

But, literally, there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of people who are employed in DEI. They are being paid billions of dollars each year to grift in an official capacity. I think we should probably tackle the taxpayer-funded grifters before worrying about random Twitter bros.

I do agree that it's a great time to be a right-wing grifter, but only because it's a growth industry. The number of people making money off left-wing grifts still exceeeds the inverse by a factor of at least 10.

Ymeskhout called it a crazy conspiracy theory to think progressive prosecutors were using procedural manipulation to favor BLM rioters. It is absolutely a weaponised term.

As the 2024 election is mulled over by pundits to see what, exactly, went wrong, I wonder if we are missing similar “warning signs” in trends. The Bernie-Bro-turned-Trump-supporter pipeline a la Joe Rogan could be symptomatic of voters aligning more along an axis of “insiders vs. outsiders” instead of policy preferences, education, age, or race; while there are correlations with each of those things to an “insiders vs. outsiders” axis, none of them are definitive.

I'm on the record as saying that this has been coming for quite a while now. Google is broken and not finding my posts on the old subreddit, but I said this 10 months ago (https://www.themotte.org/post/842/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/181915?context=8#context)

That said I think I go a bit further - I think Left/right as a meaningful political divide is going to either go away or simply transform into pro/anti regime/establishment, because neither of them can offer anything which actually helps people deal with the problems they're facing in their daily lives. Trump is just the early foreshadowing of that realignment.

because neither of them can offer anything which actually helps people deal with the problems they're facing in their daily lives

I think I agree with you, but I'd like to hear you elaborate: if we could snap our fingers and generate political capital for things that would help pepole deal with the problems they're facing in their daily lives, what would those things be?

The answer for me would be:

  1. Crime;
  2. Education;
  3. Immigration.

Most things that are expensive right now (and even pre-Covid) are not so because the are inherently so. Most cities and areas are not like SF/Silicon Valley. More are like Chicago and DC where a large part of the COL is caused by crime. Your groceries are more expensive because the store has 10% losses via theft and breakage, your commute is 100% longer because close to your work is a bunch of burned out homes from the 1940s occupied by squatters, your house itself is on more land that you need because property values need to be high to keep your kids safe, and because parks can't be kept safe.

Similarly education is expensive. We spend so much for so little, all you can possibly get is a good peer group by, again, paying for it with property values or tuition. And sometimes that doesn't even work (we are having trouble getting our son separated from a problem child despite all this). And that is just standard ed. Higher ed needs to be gutted. People are rightly feeling exploited. People dont understand the loans; or the degrees, and graduate feeling entitled to something they were sold but never actually deserved/earned. The people most affected want a handout, but that will only marginally help them and would make the problem worse. What we need is metaphorical arson.

And last is immigration. It causes problems with the first two, plus social cohesion. The cost of ESL in education and society is enormous. Immigrant populations routinely shelter criminals (very common crime being covered up is sexual exploitation of minors in my experience) and make policing generally more difficult by just committing so much low level crime it cant even be policed (think the 2001 New England Patriots defense, but as a whole community littering, setting garbage fires, having 100 free range cats, etc). There is then the signage, the court and other legal costs they add up.

For part 4) Id just end all transfer payments to people not injured on the job. Of course, that makes 1-3 (already impossible IMO) appear modest. The two biggest problems in the US are Medicaid and Welfare. Social Security and Medicare are a close 3/4. The only reason the feds should be cutting someone a check is if they got a limb blown off in Iraq or cut off while working in a factory. And ideally we restructure the factory portion of that so the factory is paying that shit.

That's a complicated question, and I don't think I can actually provide an answer for Americans because I am not one. I can tell you what those policies would look like for the country where I live (Australia), and those policies would probably look something like this.

  1. Cost of living adjustments - dramatic reductions in property values, dramatic reduction in immigration intake, increases in the amount of money provided to jobseekers/welfare recipients, muscular antitrust enforcement against major supermarkets engaging in price-fixing and collusion, nationalisation of toll roads run by overseas firms. I'd have to do some research and planning, but ideally I'd like to burst the real estate bubble while confining as much of the pain to the obscenely wealthy rather than the battlers who managed to get onto the property ladder despite the shithouse conditions.
  2. Actual taxation of the wealthy - creation of a petroleum resources rent tax, removal of all fossil fuel subsidies from major corporations, crackdown on tax avoidance by multinational firms and a full audit of everything PWC has ever done with public money. The entire fossil fuel sector in Australia contributes substantially less to national finances than payroll taxes on nurses and I think this is morally wrong (and not just inefficient). I'd also implement a progressive taxation system on income generated by real estate, with every property after the first getting taxed at increasingly ruinous levels.
  3. Muscular and substantial anti-corruption proceedings. Empower an actual body to go after incidents of government corruption and malfeasance, without being connected to the existing major parties and deeply compromised like the current NACC. There are a lot of scandals and naked corruption in Australian government and there's not going to be any trust in the government until that gets dealt with, and a lack of trust in government means there are a lot of good policies you just can't implement or pursue because the people don't trust government to do them fairly.

Re: 2, bear in mind that energy underlies everything we do and so energy costs propagate to everything in a way that others don’t. Ideally energy should be very cheap.

That's a very complicated question I've spent a lot of time posting about on here - but luckily, Australia is so comically corrupt that it is a lot simpler down under. Previous government leaders signed ruinously, comically bad deals that fucked over our national economy for personal profit. We're exporting natural gas during a domestic natural gas shortage, because corrupt deals were made that essentially result in us subsidising companies which extract fossil fuels then sell them to Japan at below cost so that Japanese middlemen can profit from the deal. Destroying all of that would actually lower domestic energy prices.

Fair

Ideally energy should be very cheap.

Good thing Australia has a bunch of uranium lying around!

Republicans are winning over tech bros and unions, and bleeding college-educated voters.

Unions sure, but I'd be surprised if Republicans were winning more tech workers than they did in 2012.

I'm sure there have been some converts, but I don't doubt that there have been enough progressive young tech workers joining the field to more than balance them.

Random theories about this election I’ve seen discussed so far:

We have left-wing musings that the failure to reach low-propensity voters comes from a “lack” of a left-wing media ecosystem, which makes me scratch my head somewhat, given the disproportionate skew of media to the left. There doesn’t appear to be any introspection or soul-searching here. The issue might not be a lack of left-wing media, but a lack of trust in that media; becoming more online creates a healthy level of skepticism about what we consume, especially as AI becomes more prevalent.

Some pundits are decrying the existence of right-wing echo chambers as corrupting our young men while fleeing to Bluesky and Threads so they don’t have to interact with conservatives. Bluesky “block lists” of conservative voices appeared almost overnight, to overcome the lack of algorithmic protections.

And, of course, everyone’s bringing up their favorite culture war issues as the “reason” why Trump won, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s not that factory workers in the rustbelt are transphobic, it’s that factory workers in the rustbelt are tired of someone’s pronouns being given more attention than their grocery bills. Abortion received a ton of support on referendums while their states still went to Trump; is it because we made having children a “women’s issue” instead of an economic one? Telling women they should lie to their husbands who they voted for isn’t a great way to win over men who already feel scorned by today’s society.

I also don’t understand how the party who claim to be championing women and minorities is also the party fighting so hard for mail-in ballots. Secret ballots are a feature of the system, not a bug. Filling out the ballot at your kitchen table makes it really hard to hide it from your husband, or your employer. The weird creepy ads about “people can look up your voting record and won’t date you if you don’t” also don’t help with this, especially when several of these ads didn’t clarify that while whether you voted is public, who you voted for is not. The social stigma of voting Trump is still high, as people get uninvited from Thanksgiving with their own families for leaning conservative.

In the meantime, my guilty pleasure is watching liberal election-denier conspiracy theories. arr “SomethingIsWrong2024” displays a shockingly bad grasp of data analysis, because “all my neighbors had Kamala signs!!” and the like. I feel like I’m in an alternate reality when I see things stated “Vance was a bad pick, no one was excited about him” because I remember the enthusiasm for having someone young and capable on the ticket. Maybe I’m just stuck in my own echo chamber, and don’t realize it; I should do my own introspection.

The weird creepy ads about “people can look up your voting record and won’t date you if you don’t” also don’t help with this, especially when several of these ads didn’t clarify that while whether you voted is public, who you voted for is not. The social stigma of voting Trump is still high, as people get uninvited from Thanksgiving with their own families for leaning conservative.

The Republicans were unfortunately no better on this front, though their social pressure went straight to registered Republican voters and so was less visible than the Democrats’ efforts. Here’s one of several texts I received in the days leading up to the election (emojis and text formatting are original):

🗳️Voting records are public—your friends, neighbors, and family will know if you stood with Trump when it mattered most. 🇺🇸🔥

Hi Lewis, this is [X] with the [state] GOP. Tomorrow is Election Day—your 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 to make a difference. Whether or not you vote is public, and your community will see if you stood with Trump or stayed home. Don’t let your country down when our 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞.

I received a few more that included variants on the same veiled threat. I wasn’t and still am not very happy with that approach, but I imagine it probably is effective, given that both sides were trying it.

We have left-wing musings that the failure to reach low-propensity voters comes from a “lack” of a left-wing media ecosystem, which makes me scratch my head somewhat, given the disproportionate skew of media to the left. There doesn’t appear to be any introspection or soul-searching here. The issue might not be a lack of left-wing media, but a lack of trust in that media; becoming more online creates a healthy level of skepticism about what we consume, especially as AI becomes more prevalent.

People who seriously identify as left-wing would often dispute this. Many on the left see the Democrats as a right-wing party, and the mainstream media as centrist, liberal, centre-right, or something else other than left. There is a sense among dedicated left-wing partisans that they are a tiny minority.

Like most of the narratives that people tell themselves about their own political tribes, this is probably false or at least illusionary, but the point is that when people complain about the absence of a left-wing media ecosystem, those probably are not people who regard most of the media as currently on the left.

People who seriously identify as left-wing would often dispute this. Many on the left see the Democrats as a right-wing party, and the mainstream media as centrist, liberal, centre-right, or something else other than left.

This is certainly true, but I think when Democrats are talking about this in the context of losing the election they literally believe that the Democrat-aligned media is lacking, not communist-aligned media. I see this all the time on Reddit.

I believe your average non-communist Democrat sees it this way. Republican-aligned media like Fox puts party support above all else. They put no value on truth, morality or fairness and just spew misinformation 24/7, anything to help Republicans. Meanwhile the NYT is primarily concerned with Truth, Justice and Objectivity. If this shakes out to favoring the Democrats that’s just because “reality has a liberal bias” and “it’s not politics just basic human decency”, the NYT only favors the Democrats by this convergence of their values but they would not lie, cheat or steal if it helped the Democrat cause. So the NYT doesn’t count as Democrat aligned in their mind

I’ve seen many Dems on reddit lamenting the whole “when they go low we go high” strategy and wishing they could fight dirty as they perceive Republicans are.

In general, both the Republicans and Democrats are centrist parties. And more ideologically-driven members of both parties are, IMO, correct when they say that "RINOs" or "neoliberals" are weaksauce versions of their ideologies.

Trump talks a big game about deportation and immigration, but will accomplish very little. No mass deportations will occur during a Trump presidency any more than under a Harris presidency. Trump also talks about repatriating trade, but will only implement tarriffs that will increase prices without increasing US manufacturing. Republicans also talk a lot about how great of a pro-life success Dobbs was, but as far as I can tell, handing control over abortion policy back to the states has resulted in a more pro-choice regulatory landscape than under the status quo. And there's a lot of discussion of "law and order," but the streets are unsafe even in red states, and forget about riding public transit.

Likewise, Democrats talked a big game about defunding the police, and while there were definitely areas where budgets were slashed, no actual "defunding" or "abolishing" took place. They've also talked about healthcare reform for a long time, but since 2010 have accomplished approximately nothing. Redistribution of wealth in any appreciable sense has never happened, and entitlements continue to be soaked up by boomers with fat wallets while the poor and disabled are still means-tested to the bone. Significant movement on workers' protections hasn't happened; instead delusional baristas are setting up labor unions, because when I think of exploitation of labor, I think of not putting up rainbow flags. And not, you know, what's going on in Amazon warehouses.

But while the serious economic and philosophical problems of the US continue to fester, we keep getting distracted by irrelevant culture war issues like weird sex and gender identity things and whether or not Trump is literally Hitler. It's good to know we're focusing on the important things!

DeBoer does this:

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/clinton-and-obama-gave-us-trump

when the far-right party and the center-right party both move right, guess what direction the country goes in?

The Marxist left thinks of the left-right in economic terms and considers anyone not explicitly socialist/communist as being right wing, the reactionary right considers the divide mainly in cultural terms and thinks anyone not based is essentially left wing.

I was thinking of Robinson. I always remember an incident in his debate with Chris Rufo:

Robinson: But then I open the leading leftist magazine in the country, Jacobin, and I look at the headlines, and they are about things like the writers’ strike, or they’re about the fact that you can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment working full time.

Rufo: But would you say that Jacobin is representative of the—

Robinson: Of the left?

Rufo: Would you say Jacobin is the ideological force behind the largest movements of the left? I don’t think so.

Robinson: It’s the leading leftist magazine in the country. I think they’ve got a higher circulation than any other leftist publication.

Rufo: I don’t know about that.

This seems absurd, because it's obviously only possible to consider Jacobin "the leading leftist magazine in the country" if you have an extremely idiosyncratic definition of what counts as "leftist".

Whereas I'd say that most people would use the word 'left' to mean 'of America's two big political factions, the one that is further to the left'.

We have left-wing musings that the failure to reach low-propensity voters comes from a “lack” of a left-wing media ecosystem, which makes me scratch my head somewhat, given the disproportionate skew of media to the left. There doesn’t appear to be any introspection or soul-searching here. The issue might not be a lack of left-wing media, but a lack of trust in that media; becoming more online creates a healthy level of skepticism about what we consume, especially as AI becomes more prevalent.

Legacy media is left wing. New media isn't conventionally left or right, but the most popular versions tend to lean republican.

Now make no mistake, Rogan and Trump are allies of convenience. But they are allies nonetheless and arguing with him about dragons just makes democrats look shrill and out of touch(Rogan's audience, like most normies, answers esoteric paranoid schizophrenia with 'interesting, so, uh, did you see the game last night? How about that weather we're having, huh?).

Legacy media is left wing. New media isn't conventionally left or right, but the most popular versions tend to lean republican.

These are related. Just like how Fox News was the biggest cable news channel, despite being a drop in the bucket overall. They were the only people putting out a product lots of people wanted. In addition to that effect, the current crop of left wing views cannot sustain themselves in a questioning environment. Joe Rogan and the podcast sphere didn't start on the right, they slowly walked there because that is what happens outside of the left wing censorship regime.

New media isn't conventionally left or right, but the most popular versions tend to lean republican.

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers

The total media dominance in print, tv and web news and the monoculture turned everyone even mildly dissenting to alternative pastures. And there was demand for right wing content and the market delivered.

New media isn't conventionally left or right, but the most popular versions tend to lean republican.

They do? Social media, except X, is all on the left too.

Certainly themotte didn't leave Reddit because Reddit was censoring Democrats.

I used imgur the other day (because someone couldn't see a catbox link), and it's literally worse than reddit. Then you go to funnyjunk or iFunny and it's all zoomer holocaust jokes. Same with the old forums, resetera vs rpgcodex(?) etc.

Social media is totally pillarized at this point, but it seems obvious to me that the leftist ones reach far more people. It's just that the leftist extremism has gone way too overboard to actually help the Democrats; they're trying to run a "we're normal, they're weird" campaign, but their entire youth wing is posting "glory to the martyrs for stomping magat colonizer babies to protect trans kids" memes.

Youtube comments sections have gotten signifigantly further right over the last 3 years. That's basically social media.

Youtube comments sections have gotten signifigantly further right over the last 3 years. That's basically social media.

You'd still get banned for saying "you cant be a woman and have a penis" so its still far left of the center.

Youtube and Facebook and to some extent Instagram are weird that way. Moderation is obviously slightly woke but the commenter base is definitively anti-woke. Places like Reddit, 4chan, X have a more typical convergence of leadership and userbase.

Reddit will ban you for such statements as well

The fact that the YouTube comments for Kirby's Air Ride: Item Bounce haven't been closed yet is proof that YouTube doesn't have complete control over ideology on their platform.

It’s interesting the Dems have been focusing on “we have to figure out a way to get our message out” and not on “maybe the problem is the message.”

The Democrat rank and file seem to have have largely convinced themselves that the Democratic party message is Just Being A Decent Human Being. It's hard to pivot from that to the message being a problem.

“SomethingIsWrong2024” displays a shockingly bad grasp of data analysis, because “all my neighbors had Kamala signs!!” and the like.

All my neighbors had Kamala signs. I mean, not all, but there were a lot of them. In my neighborhood of several hundred households, I counted exactly one Trump sign. My county went about 3:1 for Kamala, and since it includes Newark I would be very surprised if my particular neighborhood was worse than that (I don't know where to find precinct-level results, unfortunately). So there's likely lots of Trump supporters keeping a low profile.

I saw very few yard signs at all this cycle. I thought everyone simultaneously realized they were cringe.

One house on my street had a single sign that just said "Kamela". Every single one of the others had multiple signs, banners, and flags. One at the intersection had a big banner of trump snarling with some slogan about the face of stupidity, racism, and fascism. Most others also got updated What This House Believes signs with the new firmware.
They all popped up within a week of the Kamelanomicon being opened.

Suspect I'm on a list for not having one. With the neighborhood going 80D-15R it's pretty easy to spot the dissidents.

Wow, where do you even live? I live in Seattle, which is probably also 80D-15R and while there was a conspicuous lack of Trump signs (thanks Antifa!) there were not a lot of Harris signs either.

Putting up a Harris sign is a pretty cringe move in a place like Seattle, which is probably why so few people did it. Who puts up a sign to say "Yay Regime"?

My immediate neighborhood had very few signs, but there were absolutely places within a 15-20 minute drive where loads of houses had signs for one or the other. Roughly speaking, the places with quaint, walkable mini-downtown shopping area had mostly Harris signs, the people who seemed like they frequently used their pickup trucks to actually haul stuff had mostly Trump signs, and nice suburban houses with big lawns could go either way. (Location: Pennsylvania)

I don't know where to find precinct-level results

Link

Ah, thanks. My district actually IS worse than that, close to 4:1... but still, there's a lot less than 20% Trump support visible.

What is this place?

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. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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