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Excellent post and I really enjoy your point, but something I think you are missing in your overall argument: everyone who is heavily involved in politics, especially the extremely online and out of the Overton kind like MartyrMade, are categorically losers. Normies just don't get involved in that kind of thing. I've been to GOP fundraising lunches and ProgressiveCoalition fundraising dinners in the last year, and both were full of freaks and geeks.
To move out of high school movies and to Tolstoy instead. Fat bastard Pierre Bezukhov is political, nerdy, reading, questioning everything around him. Legitimately born young nobles and military officers Prince Andrei and Nikolai engage in none of those activities, they merely do what they are told to do, their politics are their parents' politics or their teachers' politics or their classes' politics. Your political types are going to identify with Pierre, the weirdo, the nerd. Whether they are right wing or left wing, that's the archetype of the vast majority of political writers/commenters/tweeters/bloggers.
MartyrMade's Darryl is, affectionately, a weirdo. There's something delightful about listening to him talk to Jocko when they podcast together, the contrast between Darryl who has every weird conspiracy bullshit theory on tap and Jocko who's like "really bro no fucking way I didn't know that!" His perception of society is still anchored in that high school identity as a nerd/loser.
But so was any leftist hack podcaster! They were both the dorks in the back of the classroom! The class of people who write about politics all perceive themselves as primarily dorks.
Sorry to hijack a little.
One of the miracles of my life was becoming aware that I was a weird nerd at the end of High School, realizing it was a life sentence of neurosis, and very deliberately Chad-ing it up in college (Frat, did a sport). Fuck "be true to yourself" nonsense. I had leaned into maladaptive behavior for all of my adolescence and it didn't make me feel good. So, I changed it.
What's jarring to me in professional life now is seeing people who did something similar (albeit with maybe less conscious direction) flip their persona like a light switch based on the immediate social context. Product Managers in Big Tech, generally speaking, are much, much more likely to be MBA Chad/Stacey types. Yet, the second they don't get their way or face some sort of adverse group dynamic, they start sperging out with statements like "I know I don't "get it" like all of you do, I'm just trying to do my best here with what's a really awkward situation for me!" Contrast this with one of the better PMs I've ever worked with - a literal ex college football quarterback - who would often wrap up meetings with "Cool, cool! Computer dudes get after it!" And they would. Happily. Because he was being honest.
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