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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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“I am adjacent to the corners of the dissident right from which stuff like this would come. I’m friends with many, many people, who live in that world and know it like the back of their hands. Somehow, nobody has ever heard of these groups that end up in national media. They have no history, they somehow organized themselves to the point of having uniforms and flags without ever leaving a trail on the internet, and weren’t known even by hardcore alt right autists until the day they make their national media debut.”

That’s because these guys aren’t Twitter dissident right, they’re much lower brow working class types, some veterans, some ex-cons, some both, they’re in the suburbs and exurbs in the south and Midwest, well away from urbanite dissident righters retweeting 34-tweet threads about celtic admixture, pictures of Leopoldville in the fifties and graphs about immigration demographics. These guys are on stornfront and lower brow sites, they have tattoos, they’re more interested in fishin and huntin than in Crusader Kings 5 or whatever.

And these are what, likely, the numerical bulk of real life ‘extreme rightist’ antisemitic types are like in the US, most of whom do not listen to Nick Fuentes and who have not read A Culture of Critique.

I haven't looked into this specific case, but I'm pretty sure these guys are twitter/discord dissident right, and claims to the contrary just stem from ... in part the far-right being quite large, somewhat fragmented due to all the censorship, but mostly just a lack of care for accuracy and attention to detail among those spreading the claims that allows the diffuse far-right social networks to amplify convenient-seeming information.

Even so, it’s highly unlikely that they could organize to such a level without anyone knowing they exist. That part is extremely weird, there are known groups. There are KKK groups, Neo-Nazis, National Socialists, Aryan Nations, etc. those groups aren’t ever seen to be protesting. It’s always a brand new group, always men of military age with high levels of fitness, fresh uniforms and flags, always with masks. Once or twice, sure, that could happen. But the two things together — a completely new set of groups and no one from the old guard showing up or knowing about these guys, and these new groups in an age of obesity all being physically fit? It’s not impossibe but it’s so highly improbable that these groups are organic.

Wouldn’t part of that learning be skepticism of new groups and memberships especially ones that require online purchases (and thus credit card information like their name and home address)? Then there’s the travel to appear sudden in Florida.

As far as skepticism goes, if you begin by denouncing all groups as compromised, it's impossible to do anything regardless of context.

The same is true if all groups actually are compromised.

That's just what a Fed would say. Encourage action, and then bring down the hammer for acting.

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It’s not all groups though. It’s extremely new compared to other groups out there, which, again, to anyone in a dissident movement would be a big red flag, especially when they’re selling the required uniform online. the OPSEC of simply showing up with such a group is pretty bad, as there’s no information about the leadership until after 1/6 when the government was basically put on notice that groups of dissident right people exist.

Normal prominent relatively milquetoast people like Jared Taylor can't even travel to Europe. Euros like Martin Sellner, who afaik has never even been convicted of anything, and who had the Austrian government pay his court costs after a lunatic jewish state prosecutor charged him with running a criminal organisation can't travel to either UK or US.

You want us to believe it's perfectly normal someone like that cretin Skullface who's as trashy and poor white with multiple criminal convictions as can be can just waltz over to Ukraine without any problems, and that he's lying when he's saying US government helped him go there?

It's assets all the way down.

You want us to believe it's perfectly normal someone like that cretin Skullface who's as trashy and poor white with multiple criminal convictions as can be can just waltz over to Ukraine without any problems, and that he's lying when he's saying US government helped him go there?

99.9% of dissident rightists can travel freely, a few very high profile figures known to prosecutors like Sellner, Taylor, Spencer had visa restrictions imposed upon them in large part because they publicly announced they were travelling to attend rallies, conferences or other political gatherings (which obviously served as motivation for prosecutors or interior department staff to deny those travel requests). Why would there be travel restrictions on random white trash with nazi tattoos?

And this also betrays a misunderstanding of how this travel happens. The US doesn't impose exit restrictions except de-facto via the No-Fly Scheme, which very few dissident rightists have ever been put on (Fuentes was never on the official scheme, his restriction (now rescinded) was a corporate ban). What happened was that various Western European countries like the UK, Germany, Austria imposed visa restrictions on high-profile dissident right activists. Eastern European countries tend not to do this in part because they're largely under conservative governments, so the 'route' to Ukraine from the US (which typically involves flying to Poland or Hungary) is unaffected. Even in the event of a Schengen-wide ban (uncommon in these cases), flying from the US to Romania (outside the Schengen zone) and then travelling into Ukraine is feasible.

Yeah. I believe Fuentes' presence on a corporate list was due to bad behavior on a flight, it looks like over wearing a mask.

Fuentes is vastly more notorious and has a higher media profile than Taylor.

Given his behavior around january 6th- when he said things far more damning than Trump, it's almost certain the claims that feds have him by the short hairs are true.

known to prosecutors like Sellner, Taylor

Taylor was never prosecuted for anything, as far as I know.

I didn’t mean to say they were prosecuted, just that they’re regularly mentioned on lists of far right intellectuals and activists, and so prosecutors will be aware of them.

The "Blood Tribe" comes off to me as some O9A type thing, which would basically make then "pagan aristocrat" Satan worshippers essentially doing a Nazi larp for their own cultic purposes, if I've understood correctly.

What’s O9A?

Order of 9 Angles, a truly weird and disturbing nihilistic occultist group.

You’re right, they are capital W weird batshit crazy, but where did we get the vibe that they worship satan as opposed to being run of the mill gangbanging Nazis?

And they keep showing being all wHyWoNtYouTaKeUsSeRiOuSlY? ducking cartoon characters..

I can't speak for Stefferi's characterization of them but I understand them to be more LaVeyan Satanist than theistic Satanist. They're anti-Judeo-Christian in their outlook.

I meant the protestors, not order of nine angles. Where’d we get the vibe that the protestors are some kind of self-consciously anti Christian cult as opposed to being run of the mill gangbanging Nazis that got too into their larp.

Ah, I misunderstood. You'll have to ask Steff about that one.

In all likelihood, it'd also make them FBI provocateurs.

Maybe, maybe not, but my point was that there is also a non-FBI-provocateur explanation which would go to explain why their optics are so offputting, why the whole thing comes off as a LARP and why they're not familiar to others in the US extreme right scene.

That’s because these guys aren’t Twitter dissident right, they’re much lower brow working class types, some veterans, some ex-cons, some both

This doesn’t line up with my personal experiences with the types you’re talking about: the kinds of low brow toughs you’re talking about are far too disengaged from politics and history to even really understand what it means to have an ideology, let alone one imported from a regime that hasn’t even existed for 70 years.

Not to say these types can’t be every bit as provocative and antagonistic as actual Nazis. But it would almost always take the form of low level reactive aggression; think randomly attacking a brown guy “cuz we don’t like dem coloreds round here” rather than an ideology an actual fascist transported from 1930s Europe would recognize.

Oh I think most modern day “neo nazis” are an aesthetic LARP rather than an engagement with actual fascist ideology, these guys obviously haven’t read Schmitt and don’t have views on the state and economics beyond that they want the Jews out of them.

My point is more that a lot of these people are real, they’re not wholesale fabricated by the FBI and even if they’re heavily monitored and infiltrated sometimes (the same is, of course, true of the ‘intellectual’ DR) there are probably as many of these lowbrow ‘neonazis’ as there are comparatively highbrow Kevin MacDonald enjoyers etc.

I'd strongly suspect there is a prison pipeline that feeds "Aryan Nation" type ideology, and these types do buy into it.

I mean you’re portraying these people as typical working class red tribers that hunt and fish, but realistically most IRL white supremacists got into it by making meth or going to prison, which is quite a few rings below.

True, that’s the upper tier of these guys. That said, most actual activists of this kind are believers in a way the average prison white gang member isn’t.

The true believer threshold is true as far as it goes, but IME the underclass are antisemites to begin with and racism isn’t a big stretch past their preexisting attitudes.

A lot of the underclass are antisemites by the ADL’s definition because they use phrases like “he jewed me” to mean ripped off, but they’re not necessarily such by the definition of a hardcore antisemite.