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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.
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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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