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There's no real risk of jail time. SDNY filed an indictment against two RT employees in Russia. They notably didn't even charge RT, which is an important tell. The corporation could have sent lawyers to fight the charges without sending anyone who could actually be arrested. So the DOJ is carefully avoiding being put in a position to prove the charges in court.
To put Southern in jail they'd have to go to a Canadian court first with all of the documentation proving the full money trail as well as an explanation of how Southern specifically broke both US and Canadian law to extradite her.
Even Chen is at little risk, as the trial would be in Middle District of Tennessee and those courts aren't as rubber stampy as SDNY is.
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I heard of Nick Fuentes, and only barely saw scattered video with Lauren Southern. She was young, cute, and over reacted to everything. I remember she went to some protest in the UK in 2014-2015ish, and started screaming for her life the moment things got mildly impolite by UK standards.
But it is remarkable the intellectual shredder e-celebrity is. For the longest time I attempted to have a carefully curated diet of center left and center right media. Maybe a skosh further right than left. Over time every center left person I enjoyed "drifted" right and wound up, if not endorsing Trump, screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were not the lesser of two evils. Many straight up lost their mind.
I enjoyed Tim Pool doing on location reporting. Now he has a doomsday bunker in West Virginia and just does lame news reaction podcast. I enjoyed Crowder for ostensibly being a topical comedy show. His incessant need to center himself as a victim in every story, talk about himself over his guest, and act like he was filming in a doomsday bunker in Texas pushed it beyond all watchability. I enjoyed Dave Rubin circa 2014ish as a reasonable center left voice, and sometime around 2017 he went full "Trump is the answer to all things", which was just repetitive and boring. I don't know if he got a doomsday bunker in Florida. Once upon a time I enjoyed the Breaking Points team, Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball. Saagar brought a Realpolitik perspective to the chaos of the Trump campaign and then admin, and Krystal was able to criticize Trump's policies without lapsing into Trump tourette syndrome where every segment begins with the verbal ticks of "racist, sexist, xenophobic". Saagar is hanging in there, but Krystal has lapsed into far worse verbal ticks, just haphazardly throwing out "convicted felon, Arnold Palmer's dick, Elon Musk, island of trash" no matter the topic at hand. The show borders on unwatchable.
Joe Rogan is still keeping it real. Although he does have a doomsday bunker in Austin... I've been enjoying Triggernometry, but this election pushed them firmly from centrist to "The Democrats are not fit for purpose", almost their exact words. I don't think you are allowed to have a doomsday bunker in the UK, so I look forward to them emigrating somewhere that does. I've enjoyed Bridget Phetasy, and I'd hope someone with her sort of lived experience proves a bit more resilient than your run of the mill 20 something e-celebrity. I hope her sobriety is rock solid though.
I guess if I've noticed a trend, it's that reasonable centrist condemn the DNC as the greatest threat to America, go insane, and buy doomsday bunkers. I'm not really aware of a single centrist that drifted left versus right. Which more or less matches those charts we see of how insanely far left the DNC has gone.
Yeah, the 'reasonable centrist' or 'sane rightie' niche seems to eat people's personalities alive. Mentally, you probably get pulled in so many directions that eventually you'll suffer a break in some direction or other. Every person you mentioned is somebody that I enjoyed listening to at some point or another, but over time lost the qualities that actually made the stand out as notable.
ShoeOnHead seems to have avoided the worst possible outcomes.
You know, I forgot about ShoeOnHead. I think a credible argument could be made that she drifted left, even if she harbors a hatred and disrespect for the DNC. Bitching about RINO's doesn't disqualify someone from being on the right after all.
She did get married and have a kid though, so we'll see how well that leftward shift holds up.
I'm not even sure Shoe ever "drifted" left, she was a Bernie supporter and complained about the "Liberal Voltron" formed to block him in 2020.
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There would seem to be lots of people who might qualify as "center-left" nowadays that haven't drifted right. They are perhaps more willing to share heterodox takes today than in the bad old days.
Some examples: Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, etc...
I haven't seen it personally, but I could see how one would become captured by his audience. Until recently, there was a shortage of any content that was not rubber-stamped by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. So posting anything with even a tinge of red was a great way to build an audience (if you didn't get canceled first). Of course, the redder your posts, the more engagement you got! And so it would be easy to drift in that direction.
In any case, I don't know why we talk about Nick Fuentes, Milo whatever his name is, or all the other obvious grifters that the terminally online seem obsessed with. It's trashy.
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Explain like I am a 55 year old non-American non-4Chan non-always-online person?
I think I know who Southern Lauren is back from Gamergate (but searching her I find a video that she fled a tradwife life because of her horrible husband?), and I sometimes hear about this Destiny guy (why is it noteworthy that he is gay?), but I have no idea what he is or for what politics he has (was he some StarCraft streamer?) and Nick Fuentes seems to be some rightwingnut troll? What does it mean “to be a fed”? Is this just a diss or a really serious allegation?
I think there should be a more extensive KnowYourMeme or outOfTheLoop explanation?
Lauren Southern and Nick Fuentes are both minor celebrities (for a given definition of "celebrity") who made thier bones out of trolling the woke. While both try to paint themselves as very trad, both come fom very liberal "blue" backgrounds.
The accusation of being "a fed" comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's known habit of using honey-pots, entrapment, and controlled opposition to target would-be dissidents/criminals. That Fuentes seems to be able to publicly advocate for an engage in illegal and anti-social behavior without suffering negative consequences has resulted in suggestions that he must at least have "friends" in FBI, or amongst the wider powers that be, if he isn't actually working for them directly.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Basically that.
"I like our political advocacy group, but what if we also committed violent crimes? In fact I have some bombs. Let's start bombing." <- That person is a fed.
"you're going to spy on your neighbors for us or we'll throw you in prison for sawing the barrel off of this here shotgun, don't resist or we'll kill your wife in front of your kids"
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Yes, he was, years and years and years ago. He streamed League of Legends, too, for years after leaving Starcraft. He's been doing political debate (talk-radio, basically) for quite some time and has made that his main content focus.
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"A fed" is someone working for the federal government. In this context, it's an accusation either of being a federal informant or a federal agent, most likely the former, and is an allegation being made seriously.
I wonder if we'll ever get an "FBI files" similar to the "Twitter files" when Elon aired all of Twitter's dirty laundry?
Probably not because they'll classify everything, but I really hope so.
"What is the weirdest American tradition?"
"The secret police regularly declassifies a bunch of documents proving that yes they were up to all that no good shit that you suspected all those years ago and nobody can or will do a damn thing about it."
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No if they're any competent. Spook agencies have shredders for reasons.
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To add some more context in right wing circles (I would also assert this) many of the most prominent "kinetic" actions of extreme right wingers seem to be full of "feds" if not majority feds. Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping both probably started with more feds than not. Similar with a lot of the Islamic terrorist plots that the FBI "foiled".
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Fuentes is not alt-lite, the alt-lite is not alright because alt-right talking points are now fairly ubiquitous on X. Things like remigration and "Great Replacement" and "anti-white" are all essentially mainstream. The alt-lite doesn't have a market anymore because the alt right is going mainstream, and that was the entire purpose of the alt-lite, to try to grift on the parts of the alt-right that were congruent enough with the mainstream to not get banned.
I'm not sure if you're just gullible, but it's absolutely not Nick Fuentes in that Destiny leak. That is a claim which has been made mostly by the "Dissident Right" figures surrounding the BAP/Peter Thiel network who all hate Fuentes because Fuentes calls them out as crypto-Jewish dissemblers who adopt an Aryan Twitter aesthetic and then try to orient the Alt-Right in a pro-Israel, Kosher direction. So they have no problem lying, I guess, to hurt Fuentes in a scandal he's not involved in whatsoever.
The online DR is as fractured as ever, as someone on DR twitter yesterday made an apt comparison to Gangs of New York. But the "rumor" about Fuentes and Destiny is just a lie perpeatured by the left-wing and especially BAP factions of X, who are knowingly lying. But burning their credibility to get at Fuentes is worth it for them, I guess?
I say this as someone who doesn't like the Christian Nationalist project of Fuentes, for basically the reasons given by Richard Spencer.
What are his reasons/where to read them?
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Yeah. Going mainstream as a part of the platform of people devoted to preserving American power so it can protect Israeli interests.
Musk's photo-op in Israel after he said something stupid? Him now being close advisor to Trump, the guy with a record-breaking amount of Jewish family for a non-Jew?
I'm not that happy with that term either but it does fits: it's the capable parts of the US deep state, Silicon Valley which can sell them toys and new industrialists who will want those weapons contract to keep the world safe for Israel and democracy. After all, legacy arms industry is almost completely fucked and blinkered, so if US wants a prayer of a chance to win against Chinese, they'll have to do everything right.
What more do people want? A reasonable government and a chance to bend their backs in service to a monumental, meaningful task -saving the planet from Han domination, just as their grandfathers bent their backs and took over the world so communists couldn't do it.
I'm thinking that that won't make you very happy. The Rufo-Reich. It won't make Holocaust denial socially acceptable, though it might successfully clamp down on public black dysfunction.
Most people will be pretty happy with it, I believe.
Which is only a problem if you explicitly believe the replacement and opposition to whites is happening because of Jewish influence, instead of being done by elite progressive white people who hate their co-ethnics.
Can't it be both?
Sure, I don't doubt that there are a lot of Jews in powerful positions who agree with the point of view and have pushed it along. But my belief is this is due to their eliteness, not their Jewishness.
And I believe the same thing would be happening if there were no Jews in positions of power whatsoever. I believe elite Jews are mostly indistinguishable from elite gentiles in the west in terms of their worldview; they're mostly atheists with vaguely-to-decidedly progressive beliefs, just with a somewhat more intense radar for antisemitism.
This is likely true now. The eliteness of the premoden elites appears less Jewish.
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I actually think it's entirely possible that the Zionists aligned with Silicon Valley and Musk/Trump are also going to adopt a nearly-alt right stance on immigration and remigration and race writ-large. Mostly because they are seeing with their own eyes the impact of diversity on their cultural and geopolitical interests. I do expect they are going to slow down or even reverse the overt anti-white hatred. It's already happening. They are going to just hand us most of what the "alt right" has been asking for, or at least enough of a veneer to satisfy or even deradicalize people. It's one of the downsides of Trump winning, I wish this chaotic "Dissident Right" sphere had 10 more years to incubate and evolve but I think they are going to be placated by the major pivot that is going to happen away from wokeness and open borders.
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Come on, no serious credibility is on the line here. When I bullied the autistic kid in high school was I seriously asserting he was homosexual? No, it was fun because it caused him to sperg out.
I think the credibility is fairly serious, they may have bullied Nick Fuentes but they have also made fools of all their followers who believed them. I don't like Nick but the gayops are offputting. Some liberal progressive like Destiny gets involved in a pretty big scandal and that sphere of Twitter makes it all about a false accusation towards Fuentes? Seems pretty stupid.
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I’m not sure I buy this, and it seems like an isolated demand for purity. If I’m basing my political beliefs on you, the only part that matters is whether or not you are consistent and correct on that thing. If it’s music, I don’t care about your personal life as long as the music is good. I think unless what you’re talking about is a serious felony, personal conduct outside of your own domain is irrelevant. I’m into Elon Musk because he’s building cool rocket ships and internet satellites. Do I really care if he’s banging a trans chick while hanging from a trapeze? No. It has absolutely nothing to do with Space X or Tesla.
I’ll also note here that from my point of view, only the right is really expected to have these high hills of purity to climb. I’ve never heard anyone rag on the leaders of left leaning people over their impurities. And some of them are much more connected to the issues at hand. BLM leadership siphoning money from donations is directly related to whether or not they’re good leaders. Fuentes banging a hooker doesn’t connect to anything else he’s talking about. Fuentes fans are supposed to drop him over porn. BLM supporters are not supposed to care how much money the founders are paying themselves.
He claims to be a Catholic Integralist. If you're going to say that people should be held by the state to religious standards of behavior, you damn well better be sure you're following them yourself.
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I recall one of our old conservative grandees, from before the move to reddit, either BarnabyCajones, Hlynka, or FacelessCraven making the case that these "high hills of purity" were what distinguished the right from the left. A man on the left is allowed to have "no enemies to the left" and no values beyond the pursuit of politics. But a man on the right expects, and is expected, to be judged against some higher power or virtue. Some of more vocal NRX and Alt-Rightist(Alt-Litists?) In the comment section like E. Harding, Vox Day, and The Dreaded Jim felt they had been called out and caused something of a furor.
Sadly (for archival purposes) Scott appears to have memory-holed many of the old culture war conversations from those days, but i also can't say that i blame him. The original discussion leading up to and surrounding, The "You're Still Crying Wolf" "This Blog Endorses Anyone but Trump" posts got pretty heated.
That would definately not have been me. Probably Hlynka or Barnaby.
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I mean, in large part that's because my tribe cares. We can overlook some spousal infidelity on the basis of 'politicians aren't often good people', but homosexuality is a bridge too far.
I posit that there are things liberals/progressives could be caught doing which would impede their credibility for moral reasons. Everyone has ritual purity standards. I don't know what would be a serious violation of them in a progressive- trying to pray away the gay? Marrying a teenager? But I am confident that they exist.
Now I've never been a Nick Fuentes fan. But among IRL people with actually far-right beliefs, being gay is disqualifying from having an opinion.
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I decided long ago that you should never meet your heroes or role models.
They won't live up to the hype, and they'll inevitably let you down with their behavior.
So mostly glad that I only ever stayed on the periphery of the alternative/indie media scene. Never followed any of them too closely, picked and chose who I thought was actually trustworthy, and certainly never financially supported any of them. I turned out to be consistently right on the money.
As much as I think legacy and mainstream media is corrupt, the problem with independent media tends to be incompetence. They don't have the experience or connections to maintain a positive public image in a high profile environment, so they have to make things up as they go along, and any missteps could blow up in their face. If they didn't have their life together when they became famous, an injection of fame surely wouldn't help them get it together.
So, so many 'prominent' internet personalities from the early 2010's/Post-gamergate era turned into or just turned out to be horrible people. Not worthy to be looked up to as leaders, but somehow given outsize influence over their little corner of the culture. The lucky ones just slowly fade into irrelevance, their content getting <1% of the attention it used to, but still churned out with some regularity.
Except PewDiePie, somehow that dude made his money, found his girl, and got out without nuking his reputation or sending his life into a tailspin. Also JonTron seems to have hit a point in his career where he can spit out a video every few months to a million or so views, and just live his life the rest of the time.
I suspect that the nature of the internet, which is able to bestow some random citizen with more attention and fame than literal emperors in olden times would have gotten, out of the blue (think Hawk Tuah girl, for sure) and most are just not psychologically trained to handle that with grace. Eventually they'll choose to indulge whatever their worst impulses are, and usually their fans will cheer them on because they're just there for the drama. Then its either a slow descent into degeneracy, or possibly a rapid unplanned disassembly. Or, perhaps, the better interpretation is they go through the same sort of travails that most 'normal' people experience, but being broadcast to an audience of hundreds of thousands kind of raises the stakes.
The sort of people who seek to be 'pundits' or leaders of political movements are probably predisposed to be sociopaths or narcissists who will eventually abuse their influence.
There are some exceptions. I really enjoy the Indie Scifi Book Series written by Travis J.I. Corcoran, and I got to spend some time around him and he... is exactly what he represents himself as. Curmudgeonly as all hell, but also unwilling to compromise on truth and is charming in his way.
I also briefly met Larry Correia and he's pretty cool.
How much do you think is were horrible people or were marginal people that got the chance to turn into horrible people. For a brief possibly closed window fairly normal people could luck there way into a bit of fame with few guard rails. For males easy money and easy sex are hard to pass up.
I'd go out on a limb and say its 60-40, 60% good people getting compromised because they are suddenly gifted fame and fortune and happen to fall into some vice or other, and 40% grifters who were ALWAYS in it for the money and fame, and had no morals before getting them.
Milo Yiannopoulos had a seemingly meteoric rise and fall in a fairly short period, he's probably the most obvious of the grifters.
The other amazing thing is how these types will often lash out and drag others down with them when they sense they're about to lose everything. I think that's perhaps the one way you can tell who was ever a good, honorable person. If they quietly accept their fate and remove themselves from the limelight without trying to blow everything up on their way out, vs. pull a straight up face/heel turn and lean into the controversy, desperately trying to stay relevant by picking fights and destroying others reputations in the process.
The funny thing is: Milo seems to have been destroyed the one time he seemed to be totally sincere.
There was no reason for a gay guy trying to redpill millennials and conservatives to talk positively about pederasty. No reason to do it more than once. He dropped the glib act for a few minutes and picked about the worst thing to be honest about/rationalize.
Yep. It was interesting that what nuked him was giving his honest opinion on something that he had actually experienced and wasn't doing it to insult any given target or to troll.
One wonders if he responded by going SO DEEP into his act that he'll never resurface again.
Sure, but even reactionaries are alienated by naked displays of atheism, and that blasphemy not only denies the three most powerful goddesses in the Western pantheon at the same time (safety, equality, and consent), but is fundamentally incompatible with whatever [G/g]od his viewers would have replaced those with.
I don't think it's a surprise he lost his reach after revealing he stood for something truly alien. How could anyone trust he was a voice on their side after that?
Its not the blasphemy that was the problem. It was the inadvertent support for the blood libel. Milo was the victim. Ordinarily you get some leeway. No perfect victims and all that. If anything could be excused as rationalization...
Homosexuality and pederasty is something LGBT activists fought very hard to decouple in the public mind.
Having a gay guy not only say it happens but talking about it in plural, as a good (ish) thing?
Everyone said fuck that. The gays said a hearty fuck that. Conservatives that were opening up to a flamboyant provocateur immediately turned around upon seeing him validate the worst stereotypes. I'm sure gay conservatives were doubly incensed.
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Hmm. This sentence clings to me. What's going on here... lets see... yes. This sentence was just an aside. An example to further your point. Really a completely irrelevant thing to make my response about.
However to me it was a discontinuity. A confusion. The above sentence is treated like a "as we all know". But I totally missed the memo.
Why would those studying music be disgusted by their idol having gross kinks? I can see how you could likely elicit that disgust with any unsolicited claim of "Famous_Name has a scat fetish"- to someone that themselves is not into scat. But then- it wouldn't be about their Hero it would just be about the scat.
Maybe a better example is "Isaac Newton was a genius about physics and calculus but a complete crank about everything else"? Though I guess that's a bad example too, being a crank is kind of a sign of genius to me
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Fuentes is and was always controlled opposition, I suspect originally introduced to disrupt Turning Point USA. He wasn't supposed to have staying power.
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Ecelebs seem to reach a certain level of fame and just become a reality show of incestuous dating, relationships and breakups. Like Sam Hyde after losing his Adult Swim show has since retreated to "Fishtank Live" which as far as I can tell is a literal eceleb reality dating show and he routinely makes videos featuring has-beens like Star Wars Fatty and iDubbbz and attempting to "call out" others like Hasan.
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