The right is enamored with conspiracy theorists and the like. The left is currently swayed by crazed social justice warriors. It’s like the most sane prominent faction in politics is old school boomers representing the stodgy establishment wings of the republicans and democrats.
I think this is the right’s psychological tendency. They see themselves as rightful winners, so if they are not actual winners, then nefarious forces conspired to keep them down. Hence, they see a world full of conspiracies. The left thinks they are victims. They see oppression everywhere. They never blame the decision making capacity of their designated marginalized groups.
Anticommunism got a paranoid streak after being purged from mainstream social discource and forced to inhabit the sphere of military intelligence associates.
No free-thinking person can remain a Republican for long without a daily dose of conservative media propaganda.
For me taking a month-long media break after Obama won the election in 2008 changed everything. I had so much conservative-media driven anxiety about Obama's win that I was hardly able to function. My one month break was so pleasant that it turned into two years of avoiding politcal news. And when I returned I was no longer a reliable conservative stooge. I just barely voted for Romney in 2012, and that was the last time I've ever voted for a Republican.
So yes, I totally agree. The fiscal conservatives lost the party to the bigots a while ago. Trump only solidified the win.
Buchannannite paleocons do not get their conservative media propaganda drip, they have to actively seek it out, often from phtsical newsletters than cost $15 for a quarterly issle, by mail.
Democrats regularly bus puerile to protests. Their pundits don't do this, because their pundits are rarely party-affiliated, while almost all GOP organizers moonlight as pundits. So for party-based bussing efforts, so-called pundits wound have to be involved, just not in their capacity as pundits.
In any case, the only "organizer" of J6 was Trump himself, so the bulk of the blame has to fall in him. Wheras Charlie Kirk was simply ascting as the loyal de facto GOP youth wing leader, a position that hasn't existed since barry goldwater (one of the main conservative youth geoups, YAL/YAF (young Americans for liberty/freedon) consists primarily of the remnants of the Barry Goldwater campaign. Pre-nixon). It needs to be stated that Kirk wasn't simply another pundit, he was a major party leader, and he was killed in that capacity.
If you're going to postulate an understanding of Kirk's message it's incumbent upon you to know what he actually did and said. On 'white nationalism' you got it completely backwards: Charlie kept them out, not in. He rejected Nick Fuentes and the Groypers. He famously stood up for Rob Smith, a black conservative gay, when a Groyper attacked him on religious grounds and insisted that he should not be part of the coalition. He hired Candace Owens, before she went crazy, and Brandon 'Officer' Tatum, not exactly paragons of the white nationalist front. The Tucker Carlson Charlie knew would never have laughed at Jimmy Dore making fun of his wife and also inviting Nick Fuentes on his show who Charlie despised and categorically rejected morally and ideologically. So if you're going to use the guilt by association card you need to explicate Tucker's devolution on a curve, from Fox News Tucker to unhinged conspiratorial nut job who blames everything on the jews. I'm not sure Charlie would recognize the current incarnation of Tucker, as many of us don't. On election malfeasance, one doesn't need to believe in hacked electronic voting machines to understand there was unethical and virulent interference. The media bias alone would suffice, but add unprecedented mail-in voting, social media suppression and banning of accounts, the laptop fiasco and the 51 intelligence operatives claiming it was Russia! Russia! Russia!, a literal collusion redux. Biden used this data point at a very pivotal debate. I could go on. Charlie was a great man, irreplaceable and an unambiguous good for the conservative movement. He engaged in good faith conversation, the Socratic method and reached out earnestly for understanding and connection. We are still spiraling a year after his death and pulp fiction essays like yours don't help.
Charlie Kirk was a triangulator first and foremost. He recognized Fuentes personally as an agitator and or compromised, while generally acceeding to groyper-style narratives to the point that groypers had to start recruiting from left-wing pools in order to maintain an antisemitic agenda post Oct 7
I’ve never seen anyone make this argument before but wow, you’re completely correct. By the time 10/7 rolled around, antisemitism was one of groyperdom’s only distinguishing features. CK kept “Christian Nationalist” types in the tent by folding in parts of the odd quasi-traditionalist stuff and a few pinches of anti-immigrant sentiment while holding the line on Israel. Real TPUSA observers know.
Just two or three days before his horrific murder, Kirk tweeted 'Islam is the sword the Left is using to slit the throat of America'. Just unbelievably inflammatory conspiratorial nonsense.
I agree that it is extreme rhetoric and not his most conciliatory moment but the claim of ‘conspiratorial’ seems a bit odd given what happened on this day 25 years ago.
The most conspiratorial part is the idea that 'Islam' is being directed or at least facilitated by 'the Left' to 'slit the throat of America'. What does 'the Left' mean here? It seems to me the suggestion is the whole of the left, including centre-left mainstream Democrats. Do you agree with that? If so, how are 'the Left' using Islam and how is Islam 'slitting the throat of America'?
Muslims, American or otherwise are not controlled by 'the Left'. For me, that's pushing a conspiracy.
I appreciate your balanced take. It's primarily the far left, eg, DSA, but they are no doubt pushing the rest of the party closer toward Islamic empathy. Why? The oppressor/oppressed binary. That's their rai·son d'être. We just had the governor of New York unironically rocking a hijab. Hasan Piker is ascending. Dearborn is lost. I just hope we don't follow Britain into the dark and unsavory weeds.
Sure, but that wasn’t due to Tucker’s influence (who, if anything, has been friendly to Islam for the past two years). It’s just silly for Hanania to say Kirk’s promoting of Tucker Carlson was the ultimate proof of CK becoming less mainstream when Kirk was further down the “based” path than Tucker was pre-2023. Similar to wokeness, this nonsense is bottom-up, not top-down.
Right. I wasn’t a fan of Kirk when he was alive, but it’s evident that Charlie’s shift toward Based Ritual posting and trad-dom was an attempt to keep right-leaning youth in the movement while keeping Fuentes out. Moreover, CK’s shift started in late 2021, two full years before Tucker became captive to conspiratorial nonsense.
"I consider 2020 election denial to have been an important watershed in what happened to American conservatism."
All the way back in October 2020, Jonathan Last of the Bulwark predicted this would happen and that Trump would be the 2024 nominee as a result. He's the smartest analyst in politics and it's not even close.
"Ruining conservatism", you still seem to think conservatism is worth preserving? I don't know what to say, Richard, besides the fact that the right-wing base is no longer animated by "socialism sucks" and low taxes are good narratives, which were largely contingent on a confluence of factors which no longer exist, most notably the fear of communism. Not to mention these economic issues were a way of sublimating white racial resentment at civil rights, which was always there under the dog whistles about welfare queens. The idea that there's a hallowed and venerable tradition of respectable bow-tie conservatism is false. The hallowed three-legged stool of cuckservatism has been torn apart and used as kindling. I am not mourning its loss.
The GOP base going from "socialism sucks" to "communism sucks" is actually quite humorous. And even if you were a leftist your denunciation of the RINOs would still be hilarious.
Ehh, this really has nothing to do with Tucker Carlson. Like the worst aspects of wokeness, conspiratardation is bottom-up. It started with sweaty, fat groypers showing up to TPUSA events and asking inflammatory questions during Kirk’s AMAs. Eventually he too caught the conspiracy/trad/downscale mind-virus—and much earlier than Tucker did, as evidenced by TPUSA’s 2022 programming.
An honest and grounded assessment. I didn't know much about Kirk, and was shaken by the assassination and the crazed, bloodthirsty reaction to it. But from what I saw, he never expressed critique of Trump's threats to election workers, and other such threats to the democratic system. It was always selective.
Kirk was a party apparatchik, nit an independent pundit or elected official. It wasn't his place to criticize the Party Leader in public. Doing so would have divided the party.
A fairly reliable indicator of non-thought is the avidty with which empty phrases and blatantly biased labels are embraced. "election denial(ism)" is a good example, and so one has yet another reason to charge Mr. Hanania with empty-headedness. The scandal of the 2020 election is not only that no one knows who would have won if all and only legally cast ballots were counted (and note that there are many, many ways in which a ballot can fail the legality test) but also, and actually much worse, that almost no elites, whether in law, media, academia, or electoral politics, showed any interest in the maturely formulated question, despite the well-known fact that unprecendented changes had been made in response to Covid. I doubt Mr. Hanania has read the legal brief filed in Georgia. Very similar briefs could have been filed in the other swing states, but not even in Georgia did judges or office holders want to open the door to an honest trial on the merits. Here's a choice: (1) track down the brief I mentioned and look for thoughtful, informed people who maintain that the 2020 election was disturbingly inadequate and that reform is needed, or (2) shake your head and tell yourself I'm an "election denier". Choice (2) takes no effort and probably makes one feel good. That's non-thought for you.
Paleoism is Trumpism and has always been Trumpism, conservautism is not "cool," and Libertarianism is a coherent ideology, sort of. The German FDP are libertarians. It's just respectable economic classical liberalism. You can just call it liberalism, and stop letting democrats steal the liberal title from people who actually believe in private property.
Thank you, again and again, Richard. H, for your courage in speaking out on support of policies necessary and benaficial for our shared planet Earth. Much needed and appreciated.
How do you know Biden was legitimacy elected? The media suppressed the true Hunter Biden Story, and we a massive number of votes done by mail. And record low abstension rates going back to 1900
If you people really think an election was stolen and you were ruled by an illegitimate president for four years and all you did about it was post on the internet, you are a huge pussy and a coward. That’s the tell. If anyone ever seriously believed this, they would have mounted a genuine armed resistance. Even the people pushing it know deep down that Trump lost and denying it is just preserving Trump’s ego and showing loyalty to him.
We can never know anything. After the 2020 election there were over 60 investigations, looking for irregularities. Many of those were managed by people biased to find fraud. The only thing found was a few illegitimate votes for Tump. Not enough to change anything. But you are right, the absence of evidence doesn't mean there wasn't some fraud. For that matter, how do we know the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus aren't real? Just because nobody has ever seen them doesn't mean they don't exist.
My point is that there is enough fishy stuff to suspend judgment. So you can address what I said or we can agree to disagree. I'm not even saying is was stolen
As I said, there are enough reports from kids' of sightings of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy that nobody should dismiss those reports without further consideration. I'm not saying they are real, but there is enough fishy stuff to suspend judgment.
The right is enamored with conspiracy theorists and the like. The left is currently swayed by crazed social justice warriors. It’s like the most sane prominent faction in politics is old school boomers representing the stodgy establishment wings of the republicans and democrats.
Hate to tell you but the right is inherently that way.
I think this is the right’s psychological tendency. They see themselves as rightful winners, so if they are not actual winners, then nefarious forces conspired to keep them down. Hence, they see a world full of conspiracies. The left thinks they are victims. They see oppression everywhere. They never blame the decision making capacity of their designated marginalized groups.
Anticommunism got a paranoid streak after being purged from mainstream social discource and forced to inhabit the sphere of military intelligence associates.
It's like the right's IQ died with Friedman in 2006
Nah, they just all became Democrats.
One can trace a line from the current conspiracy movement back thru Buchanan to the Birchers and Fr. Coughlin and ever further on back.
No free-thinking person can remain a Republican for long without a daily dose of conservative media propaganda.
For me taking a month-long media break after Obama won the election in 2008 changed everything. I had so much conservative-media driven anxiety about Obama's win that I was hardly able to function. My one month break was so pleasant that it turned into two years of avoiding politcal news. And when I returned I was no longer a reliable conservative stooge. I just barely voted for Romney in 2012, and that was the last time I've ever voted for a Republican.
So yes, I totally agree. The fiscal conservatives lost the party to the bigots a while ago. Trump only solidified the win.
Buchannannite paleocons do not get their conservative media propaganda drip, they have to actively seek it out, often from phtsical newsletters than cost $15 for a quarterly issle, by mail.
I consider Kirk Bussing in people to the capital riot about as bad of a behaviour a pundit could possibly exhibit.
Wheras for a democrat community organizer, it is simply a matter of course.
What?
Democrats regularly bus puerile to protests. Their pundits don't do this, because their pundits are rarely party-affiliated, while almost all GOP organizers moonlight as pundits. So for party-based bussing efforts, so-called pundits wound have to be involved, just not in their capacity as pundits.
In any case, the only "organizer" of J6 was Trump himself, so the bulk of the blame has to fall in him. Wheras Charlie Kirk was simply ascting as the loyal de facto GOP youth wing leader, a position that hasn't existed since barry goldwater (one of the main conservative youth geoups, YAL/YAF (young Americans for liberty/freedon) consists primarily of the remnants of the Barry Goldwater campaign. Pre-nixon). It needs to be stated that Kirk wasn't simply another pundit, he was a major party leader, and he was killed in that capacity.
If you're going to postulate an understanding of Kirk's message it's incumbent upon you to know what he actually did and said. On 'white nationalism' you got it completely backwards: Charlie kept them out, not in. He rejected Nick Fuentes and the Groypers. He famously stood up for Rob Smith, a black conservative gay, when a Groyper attacked him on religious grounds and insisted that he should not be part of the coalition. He hired Candace Owens, before she went crazy, and Brandon 'Officer' Tatum, not exactly paragons of the white nationalist front. The Tucker Carlson Charlie knew would never have laughed at Jimmy Dore making fun of his wife and also inviting Nick Fuentes on his show who Charlie despised and categorically rejected morally and ideologically. So if you're going to use the guilt by association card you need to explicate Tucker's devolution on a curve, from Fox News Tucker to unhinged conspiratorial nut job who blames everything on the jews. I'm not sure Charlie would recognize the current incarnation of Tucker, as many of us don't. On election malfeasance, one doesn't need to believe in hacked electronic voting machines to understand there was unethical and virulent interference. The media bias alone would suffice, but add unprecedented mail-in voting, social media suppression and banning of accounts, the laptop fiasco and the 51 intelligence operatives claiming it was Russia! Russia! Russia!, a literal collusion redux. Biden used this data point at a very pivotal debate. I could go on. Charlie was a great man, irreplaceable and an unambiguous good for the conservative movement. He engaged in good faith conversation, the Socratic method and reached out earnestly for understanding and connection. We are still spiraling a year after his death and pulp fiction essays like yours don't help.
Charlie Kirk was a triangulator first and foremost. He recognized Fuentes personally as an agitator and or compromised, while generally acceeding to groyper-style narratives to the point that groypers had to start recruiting from left-wing pools in order to maintain an antisemitic agenda post Oct 7
I’ve never seen anyone make this argument before but wow, you’re completely correct. By the time 10/7 rolled around, antisemitism was one of groyperdom’s only distinguishing features. CK kept “Christian Nationalist” types in the tent by folding in parts of the odd quasi-traditionalist stuff and a few pinches of anti-immigrant sentiment while holding the line on Israel. Real TPUSA observers know.
Retail politics at its finest.
Just two or three days before his horrific murder, Kirk tweeted 'Islam is the sword the Left is using to slit the throat of America'. Just unbelievably inflammatory conspiratorial nonsense.
I agree that it is extreme rhetoric and not his most conciliatory moment but the claim of ‘conspiratorial’ seems a bit odd given what happened on this day 25 years ago.
The most conspiratorial part is the idea that 'Islam' is being directed or at least facilitated by 'the Left' to 'slit the throat of America'. What does 'the Left' mean here? It seems to me the suggestion is the whole of the left, including centre-left mainstream Democrats. Do you agree with that? If so, how are 'the Left' using Islam and how is Islam 'slitting the throat of America'?
Muslims, American or otherwise are not controlled by 'the Left'. For me, that's pushing a conspiracy.
I appreciate your balanced take. It's primarily the far left, eg, DSA, but they are no doubt pushing the rest of the party closer toward Islamic empathy. Why? The oppressor/oppressed binary. That's their rai·son d'être. We just had the governor of New York unironically rocking a hijab. Hasan Piker is ascending. Dearborn is lost. I just hope we don't follow Britain into the dark and unsavory weeds.
Sure, but that wasn’t due to Tucker’s influence (who, if anything, has been friendly to Islam for the past two years). It’s just silly for Hanania to say Kirk’s promoting of Tucker Carlson was the ultimate proof of CK becoming less mainstream when Kirk was further down the “based” path than Tucker was pre-2023. Similar to wokeness, this nonsense is bottom-up, not top-down.
Well said.
Right. I wasn’t a fan of Kirk when he was alive, but it’s evident that Charlie’s shift toward Based Ritual posting and trad-dom was an attempt to keep right-leaning youth in the movement while keeping Fuentes out. Moreover, CK’s shift started in late 2021, two full years before Tucker became captive to conspiratorial nonsense.
"I consider 2020 election denial to have been an important watershed in what happened to American conservatism."
All the way back in October 2020, Jonathan Last of the Bulwark predicted this would happen and that Trump would be the 2024 nominee as a result. He's the smartest analyst in politics and it's not even close.
Moldbug basically predicted it by inventing esoteric bidenism.
"Ruining conservatism", you still seem to think conservatism is worth preserving? I don't know what to say, Richard, besides the fact that the right-wing base is no longer animated by "socialism sucks" and low taxes are good narratives, which were largely contingent on a confluence of factors which no longer exist, most notably the fear of communism. Not to mention these economic issues were a way of sublimating white racial resentment at civil rights, which was always there under the dog whistles about welfare queens. The idea that there's a hallowed and venerable tradition of respectable bow-tie conservatism is false. The hallowed three-legged stool of cuckservatism has been torn apart and used as kindling. I am not mourning its loss.
The GOP base going from "socialism sucks" to "communism sucks" is actually quite humorous. And even if you were a leftist your denunciation of the RINOs would still be hilarious.
Ehh, this really has nothing to do with Tucker Carlson. Like the worst aspects of wokeness, conspiratardation is bottom-up. It started with sweaty, fat groypers showing up to TPUSA events and asking inflammatory questions during Kirk’s AMAs. Eventually he too caught the conspiracy/trad/downscale mind-virus—and much earlier than Tucker did, as evidenced by TPUSA’s 2022 programming.
An honest and grounded assessment. I didn't know much about Kirk, and was shaken by the assassination and the crazed, bloodthirsty reaction to it. But from what I saw, he never expressed critique of Trump's threats to election workers, and other such threats to the democratic system. It was always selective.
Kirk was a party apparatchik, nit an independent pundit or elected official. It wasn't his place to criticize the Party Leader in public. Doing so would have divided the party.
A fairly reliable indicator of non-thought is the avidty with which empty phrases and blatantly biased labels are embraced. "election denial(ism)" is a good example, and so one has yet another reason to charge Mr. Hanania with empty-headedness. The scandal of the 2020 election is not only that no one knows who would have won if all and only legally cast ballots were counted (and note that there are many, many ways in which a ballot can fail the legality test) but also, and actually much worse, that almost no elites, whether in law, media, academia, or electoral politics, showed any interest in the maturely formulated question, despite the well-known fact that unprecendented changes had been made in response to Covid. I doubt Mr. Hanania has read the legal brief filed in Georgia. Very similar briefs could have been filed in the other swing states, but not even in Georgia did judges or office holders want to open the door to an honest trial on the merits. Here's a choice: (1) track down the brief I mentioned and look for thoughtful, informed people who maintain that the 2020 election was disturbingly inadequate and that reform is needed, or (2) shake your head and tell yourself I'm an "election denier". Choice (2) takes no effort and probably makes one feel good. That's non-thought for you.
does 'sponsored by mechanized' mean it was generated in whole or part by AI?
Paleoism is Trumpism and has always been Trumpism, conservautism is not "cool," and Libertarianism is a coherent ideology, sort of. The German FDP are libertarians. It's just respectable economic classical liberalism. You can just call it liberalism, and stop letting democrats steal the liberal title from people who actually believe in private property.
Thank you, again and again, Richard. H, for your courage in speaking out on support of policies necessary and benaficial for our shared planet Earth. Much needed and appreciated.
You misspelled John Birch
How do you know Biden was legitimacy elected? The media suppressed the true Hunter Biden Story, and we a massive number of votes done by mail. And record low abstension rates going back to 1900
If you people really think an election was stolen and you were ruled by an illegitimate president for four years and all you did about it was post on the internet, you are a huge pussy and a coward. That’s the tell. If anyone ever seriously believed this, they would have mounted a genuine armed resistance. Even the people pushing it know deep down that Trump lost and denying it is just preserving Trump’s ego and showing loyalty to him.
All presidents are illegitimate, I'm brazilian, you didn't answer any of my questions, next
I can’t believe I wasted my time responding to a Brazilian. That’s enough of that.
Exactly, next time you don't have anything to say just STFU
We can never know anything. After the 2020 election there were over 60 investigations, looking for irregularities. Many of those were managed by people biased to find fraud. The only thing found was a few illegitimate votes for Tump. Not enough to change anything. But you are right, the absence of evidence doesn't mean there wasn't some fraud. For that matter, how do we know the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus aren't real? Just because nobody has ever seen them doesn't mean they don't exist.
My point is that there is enough fishy stuff to suspend judgment. So you can address what I said or we can agree to disagree. I'm not even saying is was stolen
As I said, there are enough reports from kids' of sightings of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy that nobody should dismiss those reports without further consideration. I'm not saying they are real, but there is enough fishy stuff to suspend judgment.
You are not an honest actor, this I know for certain. Have a good day.