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Notes -
I appreciate this post and your sentiment of encouragement. And indeed, Hanania is someone I had in mind who is anathema to a lot of people on the hard-right, partially for exactly the reasons that you outline.
My concerns here are primarily about the need for cross-promotion - the need to appear on the YouTube/Bitchute/etc. channels of other content creators, to get retweeted and looped into Twitter dialogues, to have your work linked to in other writers’ Substack pieces, etc. As you mentioned, the online Right is a Very Big Tent, and that means that there are a number of different “factions” or “silos” who don’t actually interface much across boundaries, except to snark and hurl invective. Given my opinions about race especially, but also about other topics such as religion, I’m naturally a terrible fit for the “tradcon” tribe, and would be a far more successful participant in more harder-edged circles, where guys like Hanania have no traction and are largely treated as a joke. I’m not saying that this corner of the right doesn’t tolerate gadflies of any stripe, but there are definitely certain topics that seem to be so inflammatory that if you say the wrong thing about them, you’re now one of the guys that people tweet about being a “crypto-Jew” or “confirmed homosexual” or “subversive” or “cuck”.
Right now, I’m still in the stage of figuring out, “What are the areas of discussion where I not only have something Interesting to say, but also care enough about them to be comfortable standing by my opinions even if I’m taking a significant amount of criticism and am risking alienating a significant amount of people?” Hell, maybe it’s the sort of thing that you just need to discover as you go, by being as authentic as possible at all times and being willing to own whatever shit you step in as a result. I wish I could believe that, but the patterns I unfortunately observe in the particular corners of the right wherein I mostly dwell suggest that right now the cool thing is to purity-spiral and compete to be the most glib and hardcore about every issue at all times.
Honestly, talk to @KulakRevolt. You can aspire to be a scene player fitting into one of the silos, or you can just do interesting enough things that you catch the attention of a lot of silos and build your own specific audience, cross-promoting and jumping between scenes as you see fit. Kulak twittermaxxed and grabbed the attention of everyone from Scott Alexander and Tyler Cowen to Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson in short order. By the time you're at the stage where people tweet about you being a homosexual crypto-Jew, you've already won. If they care enough to slot you into a role in their mind, they care enough to pay attention when the people they like notice something you say. Let them tweet. The people they read will still link you whenever you say interesting enough things about the things they care about.
I dunno. I think basically anyone honest will alienate large swathes of people in their natural circles at times, but that's when you find out which ones are interesting and which are simply tiresome. Heaven knows I've done and said enough to alienate plenty, and as my profile grows I can't imagine that pace of alienation will slow down, but you don't want to be an ideological foot soldier, and interesting people don't want to hear only from ideological foot soldiers.
This was a very encouraging post and I appreciate it!
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Ah, the Shoe0nHead Gambit. Seems to work as far as I can tell, but is probably hard to pull off.
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