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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts. Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types. Beyond them, there is an overwhelming surplus of righties telling kids to buckle up, lift weights, learn to cook, invest, mew, code, read, write, train, work, learn, mog. If you step outside academic credential and op-ed circles, it's hard to find right-wingers who aren't talking about such things.

Hanania's definitely pro-agency. On this particular topic, see him talking (well, until a paywall) about his becoming not fat due to willpower, and encouraging the same.

I can't think of any reasonable way to draw the lines which would lump Richard Hanania in with Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens. They're almost polar opposites.

There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts.

Fair enough, I confess to not reading BAP and I've never heard of Cernovich. I'm surprised you wouldn't mention Joe Rogan or JD Vance, but I know the phenotype you're referring to.

Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types

Well, also the vast majority of the Trump administration, people like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones (I guess he hawks his supplements) and other conservative talk radio hosts, red coded media (fox news, OANN, Breitbart), most of the local commentariat, most any public figure on the right whose schtick isn't self-help/redpill/MGTOW style. You know the rhetoric I'm referring to, right?

Sure, Trump isn't telling people to lift weights. What generalization do you want to make? That makes all the difference. The GOP isn't running on a platform of gym access and diet subsidies. If that's what you mean, I agree with you. But there are plenty of influential right-wingers with millions of followers -- BAP, Cernovich, lots of the guys Rogan brings on -- who are talking about these things.

Hanania tells them to buckle up. But since Trump’s ascension in 2015 this has been the minority position.

I guess. He's not really telling people to lift weights or invest or make their lives better. I do think he would just tell cons to suck it up when policies he likes cause bad outcomes, instead of trying to change policy.

So... No elected Republicans, nobody who is part of mainstream conservative politics. Just to be clear.

Who defines "the core messaging of the right"? OP included "right-wing influencers". Those people are overwhelmingly discussing self-improvement. Politicians? Nobody is running on lifting weights and eating clean but there is absolutely a culture of "personal responsibility" and individual freedom. Whats's fair? Donald Trump isn't talking about it, but there are plenty of things that fairly characterize "the left" that Democratic politicians aren't running on either.

Who defines "the core messaging of the right"?

The core message of the Right could be defined as the message that is important to a majority (or perhaps a large fraction) of Americans who identify as Right of center or who vote for Right of Center politicians or support Right of center causes. Those people are the actual physical Right in real life. When describing what the Right is, rather than what we might like it to be, the description has to reflect the actual people who support the thing.

BAP, whose work I enjoy more than most here, has 143,800 twitter followers. Sean Hannity has 6,500,000. Tucker has 12,600,000. And it's fair to say that Twitter is a much more important playform to BAP than it is to Hannity or to Tucker! (For reference, Taylor Swift has some 95,000,000 and Lebron has 52,800,000) Ben Shapiro, who you brush aside casually, has 6,600,000. To point to a tiny portion of the Right as representative is like using /r/swoletariat (30k subs) as your standard for the left.

The Marxist left has its delusional fantasy of the movement as a vehicle for the proletariat, the working class straining against Capital; it can't cope with the reality that the socialist left in America is mostly a vehicle for stoned college students and those who never really graduated. The Right has its own fantasy of itself as the noble, bootstrapping, individualist heroes; and can't cope with the real life coalition that puts right wing politicians in power.

Here in Ohio, we elected J.D. Vance, the Hillbilly Elegy guy, to the Senate.

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