politics

I can't stomach reading another entire article about this, but I'm glad they're being written. From what I read (less than half?) the following is the takeaway just like all the other times:

she says, “I was in love with the frisson of transgression.” The online right had begun to engage more explicitly with forbidden subjects: nativism, race science, and gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology. “There was an element of gnosticism to it,” she says, “the sense that you know secret things that other people don’t know.”

Anna’s discomfort with the right’s sexism grew

It's all fun and games and just being "contrarian"about race science until you realize that there are people on the other side being harmed by beliefs and actions you only support because it's "fun". And the only thing that's going to make you realize that is being on the other side of it. 

These are just people with low empathy and/or intellect, that do not care what they or their friends do or say until it affects them. They are STILL doing these things because it lines their pockets. I want to extend empathy, but I often cannot find it within myself. People who aren't "true believers" but refuse to leave are just enablers. It's the 9 nazis at a table. I want to make room for these people, but they refuse to do anything to deserve it. Ashley St Clair has done an ok job, and I hope more women are able to look to that example, but reading this article just upset me.

[Anna] wasn’t attracted to the right by the romanticized aesthetic of “traditional America” — big beautiful houses and bread-making and families with half a dozen children. Rather, she says, “I was in love with the frisson of transgression.”

“The right wing has a Madonna-wh*** complex about its female voices,” Kaschuta says. “If you’re a good woman and if you stick with the program and tell us what we want to hear, then you’re very much with us and we’ll praise you and we’ll tell you you’re a beautiful angel and a credit to our movement. But the second you veer off script or say something that treads on their pieties,” she says, “you are suddenly pressed into the ‘wh*** category,’ and all bets are off.”

These two passages highlight why this fallout was inevitable. If you attract people to a movement based on being le edgy, contrarian, say shit to trigger people politics, then those people expect that they get to do that. If they get attacked and demonized the moment one of their “just telling it like it is” quips stings someone else on the right, then of course they’ll realize they don’t actually get to be contrarian and then leave.

lambs: “It is my natural place to be eaten by a wolf! I live to be a plaything for wolves!”

Also lambs: “Wait? The wolf ACTUALLY ate me?! How could this have happened? Yes, I wanted to be eaten, why do you ask? Just because I want to be eaten doesn’t mean I do!”

What did they expect?

~~why I left the left~~

why I routed from the right

I fucking hate these types of articles and I couldn’t get past the first three sentences but it sort of is impressive how in like a years time the right fucked up their big cultural putsch. Like just a year ago the whole media, including the nymag here with their whole “cruel kids table” issue, was coronating a new hard right cultural shift after years of “woke moralism.” And I could say things like oh it was only ever half the country and oh American culture has always been fascist, but I can’t deny that through the 2020s and especially the 2024 lead up to trump’s election and probably peaking at trump’s inauguration last year, it really did seem like something was in the air that was very different than the whole decade preceding it. And now, a year later, it seems like the right wing has squandered it all. Even my friend who became a Nazi in 2020 is breaking with them (I check up on him on Twitter sometimes just to see how deep he’s gone).

Where do these people go from here is my question. Do they dig their heels in deeper and move on to someone like Nick Fuentes? I could see my friend doing that, but not the woman in this story. Do they just become basic libs? That Clavicular guy seems to be doing that, and Gavin Newsom seems to be trying to court these people. Maybe once they see that the liberals are in many ways just smarter fascists they’ll fall in line. Or do they go in a different direction and become AOC libs? Or maybe the ACP reaches these people and they decide to express their setter fascism that way?

Anyway rant over