A Normie's Guide to the Dissident Right - Part 6 - 2021 & 2022: The GAE strikes back, The Trumpism Without Trump Moment, MDE Never Dies, Kanye The Wignat, Elon the Redditor Saves The Internet

A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right

& the Culture War Era

The Globalist American Empire Strikes back: the aftermath of J6

After J6, the protestors who entered the Capitol were locked away for years, often in solitary confinement and in poor conditions. They, in effect, became political prisoners. Ban waves swept through the Internet. Groypers were arrested.

Five people who federal investigators say are associated with the far-Right group America First have been arrested in connection with last year's attack on the U.S. Capitol.

-- NBC News, “Members of far-Right group America First charged in connection with Jan. 6 riot” Sept. 20 2022 (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/members-far-Right-group-america-first-charged-connection-jan-6-riot-rcna48664)

Baked Alaska would serve two months behind bars (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/10/baked-alaska-anthime-gionet-sentenced-capitol-attack#:~:text=Anthime%20Gionet%2C%20a%20far%2Dright,%E2%80%93%20participation%20he%20live%2Dstreamed). This was perhaps not surprising, given that he livestreamed himself trespassing inside the capitol. But so was InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, who had gone no further than the capitol’s steps (https://apnews.com/article/owen-shroyer-InfoWars-capitol-riot-sentencing-11cb087e9716061591fd46b6861c4c1c)

Even Meme War veteran Ricky Vaughn, who had largely disappeared from the Internet after being doxed in 2017 by wignats, would be prosecuted for a meme he made in 2016.

A Florida man was arrested this morning on charges of conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.

Douglass Mackey, aka Ricky Vaughn, 31, of West Palm Beach, was charged by criminal complaint in the Eastern District of New York. He was taken into custody this morning in West Palm Beach and made his initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart of the Southern District of Florida.

“According to the allegations in the complaint, the defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one the of most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote,” said Nicholas L. McQuaid, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “This complaint underscores the department’s commitment to investigating and prosecuting those who would undermine citizens’ voting rights.”

-- Office of Public Affairs, US Dept of Jusrtice, January 27 2021 (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/social-media-influencer-charged-election-interference-stemming-voter-disinformation-campaign)

Like “Draft Our Daughters,” the meme was created to look like a real Clinton campaign ad. In the meme, it told voters they could vote “from home” by posting “Hillary” and the hashtag “#PresidentialElection.” Prosecutors said this was “Election Interference.”

“Protecting every American citizen’s right to cast a legitimate vote is a key to the success of our republic,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office. “What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process – by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text – amounted to nothing short of vote theft. It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes. He may have been a powerful social media influencer at the time, but a quick Internet search of his name today will reveal an entirely different story.”

The complaint alleges that in 2016, Mackey established an audience on Twitter with approximately 58,000 followers. A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the then-upcoming Election, ranking his account above outlets and individuals such as NBC News (#114), Stephen Colbert (#119) and Newt Gingrich (#141).

As alleged in the complaint, between September 2016 and November 2016, in the lead up to the Nov. 8, 2016, U.S. Presidential Election, Mackey conspired with others to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages designed to encourage supporters of one of the presidential candidates (the “Candidate”) to “vote” via text message or social media, a legally invalid method of voting.

-- Office of Public Affairs, US Dept of Jusrtice, January 27 2021 (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/social-media-influencer-charged-election-interference-stemming-voter-disinformation-campaign)

However defenders of Mackey say that the meme was obviously meant to be satire. Indeed, people on both sides often make similar jokes, such as sarcastically telling voters to vote on a date that is after election day. For example, comedian Kristina Wong tweeted something very similar on November 8 2016. In addition to telling Trump supporters to vote on the wrong day, it also tells them to vote by text, exactly as Ricky Vaughn did.

Hey Trump Supporters! Skip poll lines at #Election2016 and TEXT in your vote! Text votes are legit. Or vote tomorrow on Super Wednesday!

-- Kristina Wong, Nov 8 2016 (https://Twitter.com/mskristinawong/status/79599905998717337)

Needless to day, Ms. Wong would never be charged with a crime. But Douglas Mackey would not be so lucky, being convicted in March of 2023.

Douglas Mackey, also known as “Ricky Vaughn,” was convicted today by a federal jury in Brooklyn of the charge of Conspiracy Against Rights stemming from his scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote. The verdict followed a one-week trial before United States District Judge Ann M. Donnelly. When sentenced, Mackey faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

--Office of Public Affairs, US Dept of Justice, March 31 2023 (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/social-media-influencer-charged-election-interference-stemming-voter-disinformation-campaign)

There was even a purge of the military:

Last month’s attack on Capitol Hill intensified concerns about extremism within the United States military. Though the number of current or former members of the armed forces who participated in the deadly MAGA riot is unknown, an NPR analysis in late January found that as many as one in five of those charged in the wake of the insurrection had a record of military service. During his confirmation hearing for the role of Joe Biden’s secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin vowed to root out white supremacy and right-wing radicalism in the ranks, though he provided little detail as to how that would be accomplished. “The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies,” he said. “But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.”

-- Vanity Fair, February 4 2021, “Biden’s Secretary of Defense Is Moving to Purge the Military of White Supremacists”, (https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vanityfair.com%2Fnews%2F2021%2F02%2Fbiden-secretary-of-defense-moving-to-purge-the-military-of-white-supremacists)

The Biden administration has told 11 officials appointed to military service academy advisory boards by former President Donald Trump to resign or be dismissed, a source familiar with the situation tells CNN’s KFile.

The officials asked to resign include prominent former Trump officials like former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, former senior counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster. They were appointed to the advisory boards of the Naval Academy, Air Force Academy and West Point respectively.

-- CNN, Sep 9 2021, “Biden administration tells ex-Trump officials to resign from military academy advisory boards or be dismissed”(https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/08/politics/trump-appointees-biden-boards/index.html)

The legal repercussions of J6 are ongoing. In 2023, Enrique Tarrio, former chairman of the Proud Boys, would be sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, in spite of never having set foot in the capitol and not even having been in Washington DC on that day. And of course, Trump himself was indicted in August 2023, previously having been posthumously impeached for the incident on January 13, 2021.

Like Charlottesville, the immediate aftermath of J6 was a shock to the Dissident Right and caused serious damage. However, unlike Charlottesville, the damage was not permanent. Unlike the Charlottesville marchers, the J6 rioters would slowly become seen as martyrs by the entire MAGA movement, both dissident and mainstream alike.

In 2016, the Great Meme War was about trolling Hillary Clinton with edgy Pepe memes. It was all just a big joke. Now, it was suddenly very real. This might be compared to the days after the Manson murders and the Weather Underground during the 1960s counter-culture, a dark foil to the earlier epic wins of the Summer of Love and Woodstock. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a reaction against the Left Wing counter-culture as well, perhaps best personified in the person of Richard Nixon. In spite of this reaction, the ripple effect of the hippies would not be stopped in its tracks in the 1970s and 1980s, but it would instead survive this era. It could not be undone. It was an inevitable part of the dialectical flow of history.

J6 led to a chilling effect on the Dissident Right. Real life protesting would again be discouraged. “Fed mania” would sweep over both the dissident and normie Right. Every person who ever suggested doing anything above and beyond traditional picketing, and sometimes all IRL activism whatsoever, would be met with accusations of “fed.” Boomers in particular would latch onto this meme. From the moment J6 happened, Boomers would swear that the entire thing was a “set up” and claim that Antifa had been in the crowd as agent provocateurs, leading people into the capitol building. I never bought into this theory, having been there at the Million MAGA March. People entered the Capitol because they were angry that the election was stolen, not because Antifa “tricked” them into doing so. It just seemed like convenient Boomer cope, and the inability of normie Republicans to accept their new role as an insurgent, dissident movement, as the hippie counter-culture had once been. It is true that the Right values law and order. But as long as the Right Wing is against the status quo and the establishment, and as long as law enforcement serves as the enforcers of the status quo on behalf of the establishment, they are necessarily at odds with law enforcement for the time being. Even today, this is a fact that more traditional conservatives are loath to accept.

Whatever was left of the wignats online would basically become totally irrelevant after this time, feeling vindicated that J6 proved the futility of IRL activism and that there “was no political solution.” But remnants of them would remain on Gab and the Fediverse instance “poast” until poast was hacked on May 25th 2023 and began to become unpopular.

Meanwhile, what was left of the Dissident Right on Twitter become more and more mild. “Frog Twitter,” a small contingent of accounts that somehow managed to not be banned after the many ban waves, including Scott Greer, Mystery Grove, fans of Bronze Age Pervert, and NRx or Thiel-associated accounts, began to talk to less and less about third rail issues that might see their accounts suspended. While sometimes taking mildly racial jabs at black people, they mostly tended to focus on moderate and generic critiques of the Left, bodybuilding and gym culture, eating wholefoods or vaguely masculine “based” fad diets such as eating raw eggs, mocking pit bull owners, esoteric Right Wing philosophy such as Julius Evola or Carl Schmidt, and other topics seen as safe.

With the wignats barely worth mentioning anymore, and the other factions of the online Dissident Right self-censoring their views, Nick Fuentes’s America First faction, once seen as a moderate alternative to the Alt Right, now became one of the most extreme wings of the Dissident Right.

Cozy.tv: Nick Fuentes, the Banned Man

One of the main figures who was almost destroyed by the fallout of J6 was Nick Fuentes. Fuentes, unlike some of his fans, did not enter the capitol, instead giving a speech to his followers nearby. Nonetheless, he would be investigated by the FBI, his ability to make a living would be utterly destroyed, and he would be betrayed by his close friends.

Having been previously banned from YouTube during the Groyper Wars, he had moved to DLive. DLive was an independent streaming platform, similar to Twitch, where content creators were paid in “lemons,” a digital cryptocurrency. DLive rose to prominence mostly due to PewDiePie, who was the most-subscribed-to YouTuber in the world. After almost becoming a victim of cancel culture due to his own edgy content (including saying the N Word on stream and making an anti-Semitic joke) PewDiePie signed an exclusive deal to only stream on DLive, given its much laxer moderation guidelines.

Many gaming and dissident politics streamers followed PewDiePie to DLive, including Fuentes. After moving to DLive, Fuentes soon rose to become to the platform’s largest streamer. Other America First-aligned or Dissident Right streamers including Patrick Casey, Jaden McNeil, Vincent James, Baked Alaska, Steve Franssen, Jake Lloyd, Ethan Ralph, Woozuh, Loulz, Shallit, and Beardson Beardly also used the platform, creating a tight knit community that would later serve as the inspiration for Cozy.tv. PewDiePie even once “raided” Beardson Beardly’s stream.

After J6, Nick Fuentes, along with most of the streamers just mentioned, were instantly suspended from DLive for “inciting violent and illegal activities.” Their “lemons” that had not yet been withdrawn were frozen by the platform. Some tried to find new platforms to stream on, such as Trovo (another site similar to DLive) but Fuentes feared that if he moved to another platform that not only would he instantly be re-banned, but he would take down all of his fellow streamers with him, as had been the case with DLive.

Fuentes was also put on a “no-fly” list shortly after J6, which he claims was in connection with the event, although others dispute this claim, saying that he was put on the list for an unrelated incident in which he was thrown off of a plane for refusing to wear a mask.

In addition to having nowhere to stream, Fuentes had his bank account frozen as part of an investigation by law enforcement, and he was banned from all payment processor (and even some crypto platforms) making it impossible for him to receive money through superchats.

Many began to compare his rise after the Groyper Wars and fall after January 6 with that of Richard Spencer’s rise during the Alt Right and fall after Charlottesville. But unlike Spencer, Fuentes would persevere through the process and arrive on the other end relatively unscathed, and in fact go on to even greater heights.

Using a small group of volunteer developers, Fuentes developed his own site, AmericaFirst.live, which was little more than an iFrame in which the livestream was embedded. This led to only a week or so of down time, in which Fuentes was not able to stream. The developers used many ingenious ways of getting the stream to work, such as mirroring it from burner YouTube accounts. Meanwhile, Fuentes and his developers started on his own streaming platform, Cozy.tv.

In late 2021, Cozy.tv was launched. The first three channels were Nick Fuentes, Vincent James, and Jaden McNeil. New streamers were gradually invited onto the platform by Fuentes, eventually leading to an impressive roster of over 50 diverse streamers (although a few would never stream a single time after joining the platform). Some notable streamers on the site include: proto-Alt Right YouTuber AltHype, TikTok Right Wing comedian wurzelroot, Ethan Ralph, Baked Alaska, Beardson Beardly, Paul Town, Milo Yiannopoulos (never streamed), Jewish free speech activist Laura Loomer (never streamed), liberal streamer Destiny (never streamed), “MAGA communist” streamers InfraredHaz and Jackson Hinkle (never streamed), Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, Anthony Cumia of Opie and Anthony, misogynist comedian Dick Masterson, anime and e-drama streamer Flamenco, Roger Stone, “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander, Gab founder Andrew Torba, anti-Judaism Catholic writer E Michael Jones, MAGA rapper Bryson Gray, pastor and politically incorrect talk show host Jesse Lee Peterson, Twitter personality Book Cat of the “old book club” Dissident Right faction, conspiracy theorist Ryan Dawson, musician and creator of “incelcore” Negative XP, Republican politician and activist Lauren Witzke, and Right Wing philosophy YouTuber and Irish nationalist Keith Woods. The platform was intended to eventually be opened up to the public, but as of December 2023 this has not occurred, largely due to the cost such an operation would incur.

Fuentes also announced that he intended to continue planning for AFPAC 2, against the advice of many of his allies, including Darren Beattie of Revolver News, Patrick Casey, and Scott Greer. Patrick Casey, organizer of the previous AFPAC, reacted to this on his livestream, Restoring Order (streamed right before America First as a lead-in to the show) in an episode called “Why I’m Not Going to AFPAC.” In it, Casey revealed that Nick Fuentes’s bank account had been frozen, he was under FBI investigation and that he had been put on a no-fly list and was driving from Chicago to the event in Orlando, Florida. Fuentes had not previously revealed any of this information to his followers. Casey, who had previously been involved in Charlottesville, said that in all his years in the Dissident Right, he had never heard of someone being subject to this level of government scrutiny, usually reserved only for drug dealers and terrorists. He also painted a picture of America First as a cult, where one wrong word against the leader would be severely punished and total obedience to Fuentes was the rule (accusations that have been repeated by many America First defectors in years since, such as Jaden McNeil). He ended the stream by announcing his retirement from America First and threatening to leak DMs if Fuentes retaliated. Many of Fuentes’s other allies, including Jake Lloyd (who was once a guest host of America First), Scott Greer, and Steve Franssen also skipped the event.

In spite of this, AFPAC 2 would be a success, an act of defiance in the midst of the uncertainty of a governmental crackdown on dissent. The speakers were Vincent James, Michelle Malkin, Jon Miller of Glenn Beck’s network BlazeTV, former representative Steve King, and featuring sitting congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona as its keynote speaker.

Fuentes himself also gave a speech during the conference:

"White people founded this country. This country wouldn't exist without white people, and white people are done being bullied,"

-- Nick Fuentes (https://www.newsweek.com/paul-gosar-defends-speaking-afpac-white-nationalist-organizer-1572607)

An interesting note is that at the time of the conference, speaking out against anti-white racism was still considered a taboo topic, and Paul Gosar had to disavow it.

Gosar, appearing on a panel at CPAC several hours after his appearance at AFPAC, stated, "I denounce when we talk about white racism. That's not appropriate."

-- ABC News, Feb 27 2021, “GOP congressman headlines conference where organizers push white nationalist rhetoric” (https://abcnews.go.com/US/gop-congressman-headlines-conference-organizers-push-white-nationalist/story?id=76152780)

At about the same time as the end of the Censorship Era, this would no longer be the case. As of 2023, even Charlie Kirk, once the main target of the Groyper Wars, frequently addresses anti-white racism on Twitter.

AFPAC 2 was one of the most successful Dissident Right events of all time, rivaling the likes of Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance convention. AFPAC 3 would be held on February 25, 2022, also in Orlando. Fuentes claimed it was attended by 1,200 attendees, making it one of the largest Right Wing conferences, dissident or mainstream, in the country. It featured four elected officials, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, a rising star in the Republican party who portrayed herself as a “MAGA mom.”

The conference featured four elected officials as speakers: Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, Arizona Senator Wendy Rogers, and Lieutenant Governor of Idaho Janice McGeachin.

...

The conference additionally hosted a variety of far-Right media personalities, including Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Jesse Lee Peterson, as well as white supremacists Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow. Fuentes claimed that Yiannopoulos was responsible for connecting him with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Political_Action_Conference) It says here Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow are “white supremacists,” but this is disputed and I would not consider them to be.

The Vax Mandate

Since the announcement of the vaccine in 2020, many Dissident Right “conspiracy theorists” predicted that it would be mandated, and then used as justification to crack down on political dissent.

This prediction appeared to be fulfilled in 2021, when vaccine mandates were announced for the military, government workers and for companies with 100 or more employees. Thousands of people were fired from their jobs for refusing to get the jab.

Meanwhile, fake Covid vaccination cards began to proliferate on the Internet, eventually leading to forging a vaccine card becoming a felony. In some places, such as Los Angeles and New York City, establishments such as restaurants started banning entry to patrons if they did not provide proof of vaccination.

Many conservatives warned that this was only the beginning. Soon, the government would enact a digital vaccine passport system and make the vaccine passports mandatory in order to get a job, conduct business, or utilize public transportation. They would also use Bluetooth to track your interaction with everyone around you in the guise of “contact tracing” and penalize you for contact with anyone else who refused to comply. This system would then be abused to crack down on political dissent. Political dissenters would have their vaccine passports terminated, thus effectively making political dissent impossible to organize. This Bluetooth “contact tracing” functionality was indeed added to the operating system of all iPhones and Androids. However, the rest of the vaccine passport system was not implemented in Western countries, though it was in China. In China, exactly what was predicted did come to pass in June of 2022.

Over the past two months, thousands of depositors like Liu have been fighting to recover their savings from at least four rural banks in Henan – in a case that involves billions of dollars. In late May, hundreds of them traveled to Zhengzhou from across China and staged a protest outside the office of the Henan banking regulator to demand their money back – to no avail.

Another protest was planned for Monday. But as the depositors arrived in Zhengzhou, they were stunned to find that their health codes – which were green upon departure – had turned red, according to six who spoke with CNN and social media posts.

-- CNN, June 15 2022, “China’s bank run victims planned to protest. Then their Covid health codes turned red” (https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/15/china/china-zhengzhou-bank-fraud-health-code-protest-intl-hnk/index.html)

During 2020-2021, opposition to Covid restrictions (such as mask and vaccine mandates) grew to a fever pitch among conservatives. Provocateur and IRL livestreamer Baked Alaska was especially notorious for harassing employees trying vainly to enforce these restrictions.

Anti-mask streamer Baked Alaska asks employee for mask, throws it on the ground, then refuses to leave until police arrive

–r/PublicFreakOut, Oct 11 2020 (https://www.Reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/j9duzd/antimask_streamer_bakedalaska_asks_employee_for/)

During 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, [Baked Alaska] would film himself trespassing on privately owned establishments that require the wearing of face coverings, while refusing to wear one. He would mock and insult employees of these establishments for wearing masks, and refuse to leave when told to do so

--Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baked_Alaska_(livestreamer))

In November 2021, Fuentes visited New York City to attend a number of anti-vaccine mandate protests. The first of these were mostly unsuccessful. One, in front of Staten Island University Hospital, resulted in Fuentes and his followers being heckled with chants of “fag, fag, fag” (this chant was apparently from Jovi Val, a person I know nothing about but who appears to be a wignat of some sort). Another, outside of Pfizer HQ, was held beside another, New York-based group of protestors, who accused Fuentes and America First of being saboteurs.

“Today organizers completely disavow infiltrators and trolls attempting to link medical freedom with extremist ideologies, namely Nick Fuentes and ‘Vax Watch,’” the local group posted to their Telegram channel. The outright rebuke apparently left a sour taste in the young white nationalist’s mouth, because he quickly tried to sic followers on the rival protesters.

“It’s unfortunate that we had to separate from this crowd over there,” Fuentes stated before joining in with fellow white nationalist “groypers” chanting “boo.” “We were supposed to rally alongside those people over there,” he continued, referring to the local anti-vaxxer crowd that had assembled nearby.

“It’s very troubling because it seems like the people over there, like a lot of people in the city, they hate us more than they hate the vaccine,” the college dropout continued. Fuentes concluded by declaring “shame on you” in the direction of the local anti-vaxxers before partaking in yelling “shame, shame, shame.”

--The Daily Beast, Nov 13 2021 (https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-nationalist-nick-fuentes-followers-clash-with-anti-vaxxers-in-new-york-city)

However, the final protest was a success, becoming a memorable part of the America First saga. Fuentes and his fans assembled in front of Gracie Mansion, where he began to give a speech through a megaphone denouncing vaccines. Meanwhile, Antifa began to gather around the group, clashing with the Groypers. The two groups shouted each other down. “Nazi Scum! Nazi Scum!” chanted Antifa, while the Groypers chanted “Fuck Antifa! Fuck Antifa! Fuck BLM! Fuck BLM!” The police, ostensibly there to protect the protestors and de-escalate any conflict, instead did nothing. Fuentes then turned to chastise the police for not doing their job of protecting the protestors, even though many in the NYPD themselves had been fired due to their failure to comply with the mandates. “Do! Your! Job! Do! Your! Job!” chanted the Groypers. Finally, the police moved in between Antifa and the Groypers. What could have been another Charlottesville, with violent clashes between protestors and counter-protestors, was narrowly avoided. “This is Groyper country!” cried Fuentes at the counter-protestors. “These are our streets.”

Resistance to the vaccine mandate culminated in the trucker protests of early 2022, which were supported by America First, and its Canadian copycat movement, Canada First (led by Cozy.tv streamer Tyler Russell). During these protests, trucker convoys blockaded several entry points to Canada from the United States. They also camped out in their trucks in downtown Ottawa, in a sort of “Occupy Wallstreet” with trucks.

The trucks in Ottawa would honk throughout the day and night as a form of nonviolent disruption. On the Internet, these protests thus became known as “The Honkening.”

The first meme to emerge from the Freedom Convoy discourse was on Reddit. Complaints were voiced on the platform from Ottawa residents regarding the honking within their towns being obnoxious and detrimental to their well-being. This started most notably on January 29th, 2022, in the comment sections of multiple "Convoy Megathreads." One example was posted beneath a /r/ottawa post from Redditor EVEolutionary who said, "Our kitty fear pooped in our bed, among other places. She NEVER has accidents outside of the box. I’m livid. My poor little girl. I feel so terrible for the pets of downtown," earning over 170 upvotes

...

On the same day, the honking complaint comments surfaced on 4chan's /pol/ messageboard, where anonymous users started to post memes about honking and honks. For instance, an anon started a thread on the 29th, leading it with, "THE WORLDWIDE HONKENING BEGINS TODAY." The meme they attached used the likeness of the Clown Pepe / Honk Honk meme. Subsequent 4chan users added to this thread, one of them referencing a screenshot of Redditor EVEolutionary's comment

-- Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/canadian-freedom-convoy-convoi-de-la-liberte)

Elon Musk also tweeted support for The Honkening:

On January 27th, 2022, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted,"Canadian truckers rule," receiving roughly 433,700 likes over the course of four days

-- Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/canadian-freedom-convoy-convoi-de-la-liberte)

The protests were eventually put to an end by force. Justin Trudeau invoked the “Emergencies Act” and police forcibly removed protestors. This included Mounties trampling an elderly woman with horses, dislocating her shoulder (https://thenationaltelegraph.com/national/ottawa-police-are-lying-about-an-elderly-woman-being-trampled-by-a-police-horse).

The main blockade cited as evidence for the invocation was one that occurred on the Ambassador Bridge, a supply route that connects Michigan and Ontario. It was reported that the week-long blockade disrupted $390 million in trade each day.This blockade, and others, caused the act to be invoked, allowing the Canadian government to freeze bank accounts of citizens suspected of sending financial aid to the Freedom Convoy movement. Other measures of the act include limiting civilian travel, the use or disposing of citizen property, policing, fining or imprisoning people, as well as the deployment of the military to halt the protests that Trudeau has described as a "last resort."

-- Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/canadian-freedom-convoy-convoi-de-la-liberte)

Shortly thereafter, especially when it became clear that the vaccines did nothing to stop the spread of the virus, Covid restrictions finally began to be rolled back. Tyler Russell fled to the United States and joined America First, as new Canadian anti-”hate speech” laws passed shortly after the trucker protests effectively made his political opinions illegal.

The Trumpism Without Trump Moment Pt 1- DeSantis

After J6, Trump receded a bit into the background. Several factions of the Right competed over what the GOP would look like now that Trump was no longer in power.

America First and the Groypers stressed the need for the Republican party not to backslide into what they had been before Trump and “return to business as usual.” Instead, Fuentes said, “we must institutionalize the Trump revolution.” He attempted to support “America First” congressional candidates and primary those not seen as sufficiently based. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, did the exact opposite, funding primary opponents to as many MAGA-aligned candidates as possible. None of these America First congressman ever materialized, or if they did, they have never been publicly endorsed by the movement.

On the opposite side, Rick Grenell, anti-SJW content creator Karlyn Borysenko and a small faction on the Right tried to use the opportunity to move away from social conservatism, and create a GOP that was LGBT-friendly and less strident on issues such as abortion.. This faction was supported by gay married “ex-”liberal Dave Rubin and trans “conservative” Blaire White. They argued, somewhat accurately, that Trump had represented a break from the earlier “Religious Right” and social conservatism, towards a more “big tent” coalition. However, critics argued that if it was a “big tent” movement that included LGBT “conservatives,” then it must also include far-Right figures such as Nick Fuentes, Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor, who were officially banned from CPAC, Fox News, and other conservative organizations. Steve Bannon took a similar position, but with race instead of sexuality. His vision was for a populist version of the GOP which he called “multiracial working class populism,” inspired by record turn-out for Trump among black and hispanic voters in 2020. Both the Rick Grenell and Steve Bannon factions were fiercely attacked by Nick Fuentes, and some of his allies such as Lauren Witzke, seeing the retreat from social conservatism as perhaps the worst possible outcome for a post-Trump GOP, and claiming it was impossible to be a conservative who promoted LGBT.

In March 2021, Witzke responded to a tweet from Richard Grenell about a trans woman who had attended CPAC by claiming that transgender people are "mentally ill" and "demonic"

– Wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Witzke)

They also pointed out that while there was a jump in hispanic and black voters for Trump, the overwhelming majority of them still voted for liberals and always would. According to Fuentes, they saw the Democrat party as a non-white party that best represented them for racial and cultural reasons, rather than policy.

Another faction was “Trumpism without Trump,” represented by Ron DeSantis. This was seen as perhaps the greatest threat to Trump at the time. Copying many of Trump’s mannerisms, Ron DeSantis adopted the persona of a “strongman,” fighting back against Covid restrictions and “wokeism.” At press conferences and interviews, he took an aggressive posture against the mass media and their attempts to attack him.

When it came to Covid, Ron DeSantis opened the state earlier and with fewer restrictions than others. While receiving criticism in the media at the time, this proved to be extremely popular in the long run. However, while his Covid policy was more moderate than other states, it was not absolute.

"I was the leader in this country in fighting back against Fauci," DeSantis said in an interview on "The Ben Shapiro Show." "We bucked him every step of the way."

...

DeSantis declared a state of emergency on COVID in Florida before the U.S. had declared its state of emergency. He closed schools in the early weeks of the pandemic just as all 49 other states did; in fact, Florida schools closed to in-person instruction a couple of days before New York schools did.

...

On mask mandates, DeSantis was in the minority as one of 11 state chief executives who resisted imposing the strategy at any point during the COVID pandemic after the CDC started recommending that people wear masks outside their houses in April 2020.

...

DeSantis wasn't the first governor to risk reopening businesses, but he was one of the Republican governors who moved more quickly to do so than health experts recommended at the time.

By April 16, 2020, the Trump administration had released a reopening plan for states that advocated unwinding mitigation measures in stages as cases and deaths decreased — a so-called "gating" strategy.

Shortly afterward, Georgia, Alaska and Oklahoma attracted criticism from health officials and then-President Trump for partially reopening businesses in their states.

...

A week later, DeSantis kicked off Florida's reopening process, allowing restaurants and other businesses to open their doors to a limited capacity. He defended that decision with appeals to the public health strategy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the time.

— CBS News, June 15 2023, “Ron DeSantis wasn't always a COVID rebel: Looking back at the Florida governor's initial pandemic respons” (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ron-desantis-2024-campaign-florida-governor-covid/#:~:text=DeSantis%20declared%20a%20state%20of,before%20New%20York%20schools%20did.)

DeSantis was also popular with many conservatives for attacking “wokeism” in Florida. One example of this was passing the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.

In February 2022, DeSantis voiced support for the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act (HB1557), commonly known as the "Don't Say Gay" law, which prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in school classrooms from kindergarten to grade 3. He said it was "entirely inappropriate" for teachers and school administrators to talk to students about their gender identity.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_DeSantis)

The Walt Disney Company called for the law’s repeal, worked behind the scenes with lobbyists to fight the law, and paused political donations to Florida. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/03/28/disney-says-striking-down-dont-say-gay-law-is-companys-goal-after-desantis-signs-bill/?sh=4fffe78355c0).

Three lawmakers, two Republicans and one Democrat, spoke to the Times/Herald on Friday about their role in Disney’s efforts as the company’s stance spilled into public view. Disney lobbyists set up a series of calls with Senate Education Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, before the bill received a hearing.

-- Tampa Bay Times (https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/03/12/how-disney-worked-behind-the-scenes-against-the-dont-say-gay-bill/)

In response, DeSantis fought back, rolling back special privileges given by the state government to Walt Disney World.

The Walt Disney Company, owner of Walt Disney World in Florida, called for the law's repeal, beginning a dispute between Disney and the state government. In April 2022, DeSantis signed a bill eliminating the company's special independent district and replacing its Disney-appointed board of overseers.He also threatened during a press conference to build a new state prison near the Disney World complex. On April 26, 2023, Disney filed suit against DeSantis and several others, accusing them of retaliating against protected speech.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_DeSantis)

Supporters painted him as a “caudillo” (a strongman type of leader typical of Latin American countries) and a Trump without the baggage of Trump (such as J6 or Trump’s legal problems) who could “get things done.”

This faction had the support of many former Trump supporters such as Ann Coulter, Mike Cernovich and some of “Frog Twitter.” But the attitude towards DeSantis on the Dissident Right was mixed. DeSantis was attacked by Nick Fuentes, Scott Greer and others. Fuentes argued that, unlike Trump, DeSantis was a career politician and not an outsider, who did not represent a clear challenge to the establishment in the way that Trump did. He also was not sufficiently “America First,” supporting policies that put “Israel First” such as laws that targeted speech criticizing the Israeli government, thus placing priority on a foreign country rather than the free speech rights of American citizens. Greer argued that Ron DeSantis was a “nerd” who lacked the charisma of Trump, and was “not as based as you might think,” saying that there was no issue on which DeSantis was further to the right than Trump, thus making Trump the clear choice for nominee, whatever faults he may have.

Many predicted that Ron DeSantis would pose a serious threat to Trump as the Republican nominee in 2023. However, after both candidates announced, and especially after the famous “Trump mugshot,” Trump obliterated Ron DeSantis in political polls, leading DeSantis by 34 points. Even other non-Trump candidates, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, began to surpass DeSantis.

The Trumpism Without Trump Moment Pt 2- Peter Thiel

Perhaps the most interesting faction was the faction of tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel was a homosexual Right Wing billionaire and a “Straussian.” Like the other factions, he picked and chose the parts he liked of Trump and the Alt Right explosion of 2016, while putting his own spin on it. A deliberately opaque ideology, Straussianism believes politicians should have a “private and public position,” or, as Straussians put it, an “exoteric” outward position, and an “esoteric” position intelligible only to those intelligent enough to pick up on it intuitively (similar to “meta-irony,” where the “exoteric” irony hides an “esoteric” sincerity). My interpretation of The Straussian Moment, written by Thiel, is that he wants a small elite of secretly based and redpilled illiberal people running the country and being aware of facts such as race realism, while hiding these heterodox views from the populace in order to preserve the liberal thesis while allowing society to function smoothly (since the people running it will not be basing their decisions on the contradictions of liberalism). Of course, perhaps I am misinterpreting the “esoteric” message of the text.

And then one encounters Schmitt's troubling challenge. A side in which everyone, like Hobbes, values this earthly life more than death is a side where everyone will run away from fighting and confrontation; but when one runs away from an enemy that continues to fight, one is ultimately going to lose—no matter how great the numerical or technological superiority may appear at the outset. Schmitt’s solution to this impending defeat demands an affirmation of the political in the West. Here, however, one must confront an alternative and perhaps even more troubling conclusion. For let us assume that it is possible, somehow, to turn back the clock and set aside our uncertainties; that we can return to the faith of Cromwell and Urban II; that we understand Islam as the providential enemy of the West; and that we can then respond to Islam with the same ferocity with which it is now attacking the West. This would be a Pyrthic victory, for it would come at the price of doing away with everything that fundamentally distinguishes the modern West from Islam.

...

If one agrees with Schmitt's starting assumptions, then the West must lose the war or lose its identity. One way or the other, the persistence of the political spells the doom of the modern West; but for the sake of completeness, we must consider also the inverse possibility, indirectly hinted at in the margins of Schmitt's own writings. For while it may well be that the political guarantees the seriousness of life and that, so long as the political exists, the world will remain divided, there is no guarantee that the political itself will survive.

...

We are at an impasse. On the one hand, we have the newer project of the Enlightenment, which never became comprehensive on a global scale, and perhaps always came at too high a price of self-stultification. On the other hand, we have a return to the older tradition, but that return is fraught with far too much violence. The incredibly drastic solutions favored by Schmitt in his dark musings have become impossible after 1945, in a world of nuclear weapons and limitless destruction through technology. What sort of coherent intellectual or practical synthesis is then possible at all? The political philosopher Leo Strauss attempted to solve this central paradox of the postmodern world. The challenge of that task is reflected in the difficulty of Strauss’s own writings, which are prohibitively obscurantist to the uninitiated.

...

Let us recapitulate. The modern West has lost faith in itself. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period, this loss of faith liberated enormous commercial and creative forces. At the same time, this loss has rendered the West vulnerable. Is there a way to fortify the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

...

That is how things used to work. But we now live in a world where the cat is out of the bag, at least to the extent that we know that the scapegoat really is not as guilty as the persecuting community claims. Because the smooth functioning of human culture depended on a lack of understanding of this truth of human culture, the archaic rituals will no longer work for the modern world,

...

The world of the Enlightenment may have been based on certain misconceptions about the nature of humanity, but the full knowledge of these misconceptions can remain the province of a philosophical elite.

-- Peter Thiel, the Straussian Moment (https://wiki.chadnet.org/files/the-straussian-moment-by-peter-thiel.pdf)

Thiel is also aligned with Curtis Yarvin, better know by his nom de plume “Mencius Moldbug,” the anti-liberal writer of Unqualified Reservations. In the early 2000s, Unqualified Reservations had been influential in the early Dissident Right, especially within the so-called “neoreactionary” or “NRx” faction.

In the 2000s, the failures of US-led nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Yarvin's anti-democratic views, the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis strengthened his libertarian convictions, and Barack Obama's election as US president later that year reinforced his belief that history inevitably progresses toward left-leaning societies.

...

Yarvin believes that real political power in the United States is held by something he calls "the Cathedral", an amalgam of universities and the mainstream press. According to him, a so-called "Brahmin" social class dominates American society, preaching progressive values to the masses. Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment (sometimes abbreviated to "NRx") movement assert that the Cathedral's commitment to equality and justice erodes social order. Drawing on computer metaphors, Yarvin contends that society needs a "hard reset" or a "rebooting", not a series of gradual political reforms. Instead of activism, he advocates passivism, claiming that progressivism would fail without right-wing opposition. According to him, NRx adherents should rather design "new architectures of exit" than engage in ineffective political activism.

Yarvin argues for a "neo-cameralist" philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia's cameralism. In Yarvin's view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose "shareholders" (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure. The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch. Yarvin admires Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism, and the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. He sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions.

Yarvin supports authoritarianism on right-libertarian grounds, claiming that the division of political sovereignty expands the scope of the state, whereas strong governments with clear hierarchies remain minimal and narrowly focused. According to scholar Joshua Tait, "Moldbug imagines a radical libertarian utopia with maximum freedom in all things except politics." He has favored same-sex marriage, freedom of religion, private use of drugs, and written against race- or gender-based discriminatory laws, although, according to Tait, "he self-consciously proposed private welfare and prison reforms that resembled slavery". Tait describes Yarvin's writing as contradictory, saying: "He advocates hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futuristic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and reaction. He is irreligious and socially liberal on many issues but angrily anti-progressive. He presents himself as a thinker in search of truth but admits to lying to his readers, saturating his arguments with jokes and irony. These tensions indicate broader fissures among the online Right.

--Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin)

Thiel was a shrewd political actor, who also had the financial means to put his ideology into action. In addition to financing congressional candidates such as JD Vance and Blake Masters, Thiel also understood the role of technology and its role in shaping culture and politics.

Thiel used some of the remnants of the Alt Right, such as the handful of Dissident Right Twitter accounts that had not yet been banned, to push his message and shape Dissident Right culture. Curtis Yarvin, along with Dissident Right Twitter influencers Zero HP Lovecraft, Benjamin Braddock, and Gio Pennacchietti began a literary journal of Dissident Right short stories, artwork, poetry and essays known as the Passage Prize in 2021 (https://www.passage.press/store/p/prizeone).

Thiel also financed underground music and art shows in New York City, featuring artists such as Paul Town and associates of Sam Hyde, such as BicFlame. In this way, he seemed to be attempting to astroturf the Dissident Right, following a long history of astroturfing artists in order to promote certain politics (such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom).

Most of Thiel’s politicians, with the exception of JD Vance, failed to be elected in 2022. Thus, Thiel’s influence was initially thought to have run out of steam. However, it may be too premature to call this, as he does seem to be having an effect on the new “Dime’s Square” synthesis between the Dirtbag Left and the Thiel Right in New York City which has recently begun taking form. This faction has sometimes been called the “Post Left.”

As of 2023, the atmosphere has changed, and Trump is once again at the center of the party, making these alternative visions of the GOP mostly a moot point for now. The aftermath of the 2024 election will most likely determine its ultimate fate.

The Post Left

Starting in 2020, those on the Left, especially in the “Dirtbag Left,” began to appropriate some aspects of Dissident Right culture. The “Dirtbag Left” was a small faction of the Left based around Brooklyn, and known for the Chapo Trap House, Red Scare and Cum Town podcasts. The Dirtbag Left were democratic socialists, and agreed with the mainstream Left on nearly all social issues, such as feminism, homosexuality, transgenderism, use of drugs and sexual promiscuity, and so forth, but they were more moderate when it came to political correctness. They did not engage in aggressive cancel culture in the same way that “SJWs” did (although they agreed with most of their political opinions). They were also much more savvy and familiar with Internet culture, including the Alt Right, thus they did not make the same types of mistakes as Hillary Clinton did when she, for example, attacked Pepe the Frog. There was some crossover between fans of this scene and fans of MDE or Thiel-sponsored (and thus on the safer side) Dissident Right artists.

During the Covid lockdown, a small area around the intersection of Ludlow and Canal on the Lower East Side in Manhattan (on the other side of the bridge from Brooklyn) became a popular neighborhood in New York City for outdoor dining (since there were Covid restrictions on most indoor dining). Here the “Dirtbag Left” and Thiel-aligned right started to cross-pollinate, creating what is now known as the “Post Left.”

In the last few months, the micro-neighborhood has spawned a cottage industry of hot-takery, from breathless tweetstorms to scatterbrained sociological wanderings to investigations into what’s described as Peter Thiel–backed political machinations to admin reveals of anonymous local podcasters to articles in British weeklies about the neighborhood’s anti-woke schisms.

— Vanity Fair, Jun 13 2022, “ What Was Dimes Square?” https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/06/what-was-dimes-square

First of all, Dimes Square isn’t a square, it’s a triangle. Technically, the infamous headquarters of a hyper-specific, hyper-online scene of overeducated young tastemakers (Artists? Influencers? Rich kids? Whatever) falls at the intersection of Ludlow Street and Canal on New York’s Lower East Side, but metaphorically, Dimes Square occupies both a number of adjacent city blocks and the minds of New York City media professionals, few of whom have yet grown tired of talking about the place.

In the past few weeks alone, the trend pieces and analyses have continued to stack up. On Aug. 9, The New York Times weighed in on the burgeoning Catholicism trend: young Dimes Square acolytes like Wet Brain podcaster Honor Levy are acknowledging their mortal sins and embracing religious ritual, apparently.

…

“Anna and Dasha really helped push the term Dimes Square into the mainstream, more as a joke about dilettantes and fashion vultures than as a sacrosanct political ethos”

…

Phillips-Horst is referring to Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, co-hosts of Red Scare, a cultural commentary podcast that’s either hilariously subversive or blatantly fascist, depending on who you ask; either way, the podcast has become an indelible cultural touchstone of “the dirtbag left” and the perils of Trolling While Hot.

— The Daily Beast, Aug 11 2022, “How Dimes Square Became the New York City Neighborhood We Love to Hate” (https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-dimes-square-be

Red Scare was the epitome of this “Post Left” faction/subculture. Red Scare was a Dirtbag Left podcast founded in 2018, and hosted by Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan. Although supporters of Bernie Sanders in 2020, they were fascinated with the excitement and controversial, subversive appeal of the Dissident Right, and began to feature more Right Wing figures on their podcast, especially those in Thiel’s circle such as Curtis Yarvin. In fact, Thiel’s tentacles may be at work here, too.

In a 2022 Vanity Fair article, conservative filmmaker Amanda Milius described Red Scare's laissez-faire attitude as a "premier example" of the "live-and-let-live place" occupied by the "new right", and reported that Khachiyan had met with billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters. Nekrasova and Khachiyan have rejected this characterisation and denied receiving any funding from Thiel.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare_(podcast))

The crossover between the far-Left and far-Right here is interesting. It seems to be a small niche that liberals can latch onto, having mostly been gatekept out of the Left Wing and not sharing the values of the Right Wing. The Red Scare girls seem to fall into this niche. It allows a space for New York hipsters to enjoy the fun of the Dissident Right from a safe distance, while still allowing themselves to practice a hedonistic, bohemian, liberal lifestyle. They attempt to repackage what is essentially pre-Great Awokening liberalism in “tradcath” aesthetics. While attending a Latin Mass because Novus Ordo is “boomer capitalist Catholicism” (a pretentious way of saying “cringe”) Anna is pro-abortion, defends transgenderism and stands for no discernible conservative views, merely seeing it as a quaint curiosity which she can add to her repertoire of shallow hipster subversion (https://www.theamericanconservative.com/red-scare-and-postmodern-politics/). It is as if they are instinctively attracted to what is true and good and virtuous, and yet still choose to do what they know is bad for them.

-- Post Leftist Anna Khachiyan defends transexualism.

Still, it is an interesting development and I will have to look into this further, as I have not really set foot on the Left side of the culture since my brief time as a Bernie Bro in 2016. Perhaps these initial impressions are incorrect or incomplete, as I have never listened to Red Scare and am unfamiliar with this scene, aside from Nick Mullen.

Nick Mullen’s podcast, Cum Town, while associated with the Dirtbag Left and often featuring guests from the more explicitly socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, is not a political podcast at all. Although the hosts clearly are on the Left, it is strictly a comedy show, in the style of the “vulgar wave” such as South Park and MadTV (which is said to be the show’s biggest inspiration). The show often features racist, sexist, anti-Semitic or otherwise politically incorrect humor. But unlike the humor of the Alt Right, it is entirely ironic, and in no way reflects the host’s true political views. Nick Mullen is a fan of Sam Hyde, recognizing his talent as a comedian, and defending World Peace on the grounds that the offensive humor of the show was no worse than MadTV, South Park, or other offensive comedy of the past. (https://youtu.be/2DBWnyd8VDY?si=pxTq0MKSDYgYrg8S)

Sam Hyde Returns

After the cancellation of World Peace and dissolution of Million Dollar Extreme, Sam Hyde continued to create content apart from MDE. Although banned from Patreon and other platforms, he was still able to sell merch and subscriptions to new content on the platform Gumroad. During this period, Sam would continue to occasionally collaborate with controversial personalities such as Nick Fuentes and incel rapper Egg White (or “Eggy”) as well as create videos featuring some “based” opinions. At the same time, he distanced himself somewhat from politics and was not as outspoken about his views. He also began to discourage his followers from expressing heterodox political opinions, and instead encouraged them to worry about making money and achieving success in their own lives.

Those outside of the Dissident Right also started to become more accepting of Sam, especially in the Dirtbag Left/Post Left faction, and he began to gain some Left Wing fans.

Starting in 2022, Sam Hyde finally began to make his comeback, arguably reaching a new peak in his career. It was the video “The Truth About iDubbbz” on January 8 2022 that would mark Sam’s rebirth.

iDubbbz was a popular YouTuber during the pre-censorship “golden age” of the platform. Like most of the Internet, this age of YouTube was highly influenced by 4chan humor and the “vulgar wave” of comedy. iDubbbz was no different. One of his popular early clips revolved around the use of the N Word.

Tana Mongeau — a YouTuber you’ve probably never heard of unless you traffic in the world of vegan social media — is no stranger to the classic Internet cultural form of Vegan YouTube Drama.

...

This year, Mongeau is feuding with another YouTuber, iDubbbz, who called out Mongeau for using the word “n- - - - -,” a call-out accomplished by attending a meet-and-greet with her at the end of January and shouting “say n- - - - -!” as the two posed for a photo. He later posted a video of the interaction on YouTube, where it has been viewed over 2 million times.

-- Intelligencer, Feb 9 2017 (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/02/YouTuber-shames-other-YouTuber-for-n-word-also-uses-n-word.html)

However, by 2019, iDubbbz was moving away from this type of shock humor to more serious content, in the form of documentaries. In 2020, iDubbbz became the center of controversy when his wife Anisa Jomha created an OnlyFans account, and tweeted that iDubbbz was “very supportive.” This caused an uproar on the Internet, with fans accusing iDubbbz of being a “cuck.” In response, iDubbbz posted a video defending Anisa and sex workers in general. This of course only made him look like even more of a cuck.

Sam Hyde speculates that it was this video that led to iDubbbz choosing him as the subject of his next documentary. According to Hyde, he could sense that iDubbbz had some sort of ill intent in making the documentary, and wanted to “expose” Hyde, figuring that if he could take down a prominent figure of the Alt Right this would redeem him from his reputation as a cuck. In response, Hyde trolled iDubbbz by inviting him to film the documentary, but creating an elaborate fake life. Hyde hired an actress to shave her head and pretend to be Hyde’s insane, junkie girlfriend. He rented a dentist’s office to be his “studio,” consisting of a single cramped room that opened directly onto the street, which was still decorated with medical diagrams on the walls. He gave his crew various other bizarre instructions, such as working on drill rap songs, gathering around a computer screen to watch Hyde’s old vertical videos, dumping supplies directly on the floor of the office in a gigantic mess, leading a chant of “Think it! Dream it! Do it!” in a team meeting at the start of each work day, and other bizarre antics. After days of these shenanigans, Hyde eventually revealed to iDubbbz that he had been trolled, on the very last day of shooting.

iDubbbz never released his documentary. However, Hyde had had his crew filming a “counter-documentary” throughout the entire production. Reasoning that they had spent too much time and energy on the troll to let it go to waste, Sam decided to release his version of the documentary. The video gained over one million views in six days and received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the Internet, calling it his best work since World Peace. It also came at a time when many viewers had not seen Sam’s content for a while and felt nostalgic for the old days of the Great Meme War. Additionally, by now, the Alt Right was firmly in the past, and people were more willing to accept Sam without being deterred by his political opinions (which were not even a part of the documentary anyways).

IDubbbz eventually released his version of the documentary, “Getting Away With It,” one month later. It took a more serious approach, explaining Sam Hyde’s background and his pioneering use of “meta-irony.” The iDubbbz documentary gained over 5.6 million views in a years, continuing to raise Hyde’s profile.

However, the feud between iDubbbz and Sam Hyde did not end there. It would play out throughout the year, raising Hyde’s popularity and establishing his new identity as a now universally beloved “Internet folk hero” while reinforcing iDubbbz’s reputation as a cuck. Part of “The Truth about iDubbbz” contained a scene in which Sam Hyde, who had at some point taken up boxing, forces iDubbbz to fight him in a boxing match underneath a graffiti-covered bridge in an undisclosed location. This would foreshadow the next turn in the Sam Hyde versus iDubbbz saga.

On May 14 2022, iDubbbz and Anisa launched the inaugural Creator Clash, a boxing event between several famous content creators. One of them was Harley Morenstein of “Epic Meal Time.” Originally, Harley had wanted to fight Sam Hyde, but iDubbbz and Anisa shut down the idea during a livestream, saying Sam was “a difficult guy” and fearing he might troll the event. So, instead Sam decided to train Harley.

In an April appearance on the PKA Podcast, Harley would divulge the early stages of the training process. He discusses flying out to Rhode Island half-expecting to become the victim of a practical joke. Fortunately for him, he would be greeted by a very different Sam than what was showcased in the documentary. Harley was promised training, and Sam delivered.

For two weeks, Harley was put through boxing boot camp. He would later post some of the footage to the EpicMealTime channel, showing just how grueling the training was at times. After a parking-lot sparring match, Harley was left physically exhausted. The footage also revealed a side of Sam that few had seen before. He was diligent, accommodating and candid – a significant departure from his prevailing persona. It was clear that for Sam, this training was no joke.

-- Downward.News, May 31 2021 (https://downward.news/boxed-out-why-was-sam-hyde-banned-from-creator-clash/)

Apparently the training was successful, with Harley easily defeating his opponent. However, Harley’s trainer was not allowed to attend. iDubbbz and Anisa banned Sam from the event, after he had already purchased $10k front row tickets. Not only was Sam himself banned, but staff even began harassing fans seen with his merch.

During the second Creator Clash in April 2022, Sam claimed he was going to sneak into the event “dressed in drag.” As a result, several guests were denied entry to the event out of fears that they might be Sam in disguise.

According to YouTuber Jet Neptune, a group dressed in Garfield outfits were denied entry to Creator Clash 2 over the fear that one of them was Sam Hyde in disguise — despite claiming none of them even knew who the Internet prankster was.

...

Furthermore, YouTuber Brandon Buckingham also claimed that the Creator Clash organizers banned the use of face masks at the event — once more due to the fear of Sam Hyde being in disguise.

-- Dexerto (https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/YouTuber-claims-fans-were-banned-from-creator-clash-over-fear-of-being-sam-hyde-in-disguise-2115673/)

Another content creator who was supposed to be featured in Creator Clash 2, Froggy Fresh, was removed from the event after posting content with Sam Hyde.

Leading up to Creator Clash 2, Froggy Fresh, who was meant to fight in the competition against Chris Ray Gun, was removed from the event. This resulted in significant backlash against iDubbbz and Jomha, the co-founder of the event, increasing the spread of the idea that Jomha had "ruined" iDubbbz by changing his views. People also criticized him for suggesting they could take legal action against Froggy Fresh.

Following the fight, iDubbbz posted a video explaining that Froggy Fresh was removed for training with and posting content with Sam Hyde leading up to the fight, while also insulting iDubbbz's wife numerous times online, something Hyde was also doing

-- Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/idubbbz)

These decisions further tarnished iDubbbz and Anisa’s reputation, being criticized by other members of the YouTube community such as Keemstar (a prominent YouTuber and owner of a similar influencer boxing company, “Happy Punch Promotions”).

Keemstar’s company would sign Sam as a boxer in August 2022. While training seriously, Sam Hyde developed an alter ego, “The Candyman” for promotional interviews about the event. With a thick Irish accent and a green, supervillain-like mask, Sam Hyde would give surrealist, nonsensical responses to reporters, and read Riddler-esque candy-themed poems about beating up his opponents.

I'm fine lad don't worry about me, worry about my opponent August 27^th! What's going to happen you're going to see something, you're going to see a reckoning that's been in the works since black 47, when the Irish famine hit and killed millions of people and the English sat back and did nothing! And their cornmeal owners and their sausage factory tycoons did nothing to help the Irish people! I'm going to get revenge!

-- The Candyman (https://youtu.be/UUBlFVPwzgs?si=QFTgoois6GBr12hM)

The Candyman: This is what all Irish people wear every day because it's cold up in Ireland! Don't you know anything about Ireland lad? Have you ever been there?

Interviewer: I've been to Belfast.

The Candyman: Have you seen the suffering? No candy anywhere in the streets! Nobody has any candy in Ireland! That's what I aim to change with this fight! I'll be bringing candy to all the poor children of Ireland, so they can all dress like me!

Interviewer: Why candy?

The Candyman: Because lad, what else is the purpose of life, except to eat candy?

-- The Candyman (https://youtu.be/Nwn2ch0_ICE?si=tSmKO-tpoJCJ-gPo)

Sweet sugary adversaries are perfect for the munching

With a hankering for confectioneries my fists are hungry for punching

I weave my cotton candy web and you fall into my trap

Procure my bib and dessert fork so that I may begin to snack

Should I quench him now or shall I savor every lick

I could punish him slowly or dip and sprinkle him quick

First I'll gingerly ginger snap his candy-coated pretzel arms in half

Then I'll buttery pop gumdrop smack him to the chocolatey canvas with a slap

In the marshmallow ring the ropes look like twizzlers

Body shots to my jelly belly merely give me a snicker

Cookie cups and candy canes sugar plums galore

The candyman with sour patch fists will knock you clean to the floor

I’ll pumpkin crumb cream crunch punch his powder donut head until the juniper

Belly jelly jam comes tumble bumble squeezing out of his neck

-- The Candyman, “Sam Hyde Puts On An Irish Persona For Press Conference Before IAmThmpsn Fight” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pusfkF7RlXk)

After defeating his opponent, iamthmpsn, Sam Hyde switched back into the character of the Candyman to give his victory speech, calling out Leftist streamer Hasan Parker and threatening to kill him.

Interviewer: You got anyone you want to call out in the heavyweight division?

The Candyman: oh you know its lad! You know that Hasan Piker: I'm coming to kill you! In Los Angeles! at your house!

Interviewer: In the ring?

The Candyman: No! In real life! I'm going to stalk him, and become obsessed with him, and wear his makeup and his dresses, and wear his skin as a coat! Like the ancient Irish did!

-- Sam Hyde Calls Out Hasan Piker After His Fight Victory (https://youtu.be/p1vsNu05-v8?si=4mgbsDx2YUW1rug5)

The Candyman’s victory speech went viral on Twitter and became his latest legendary Internet meme, and a piece of Internet history. The meme became a symbol of Sam’s new status as universally beloved Internet folk hero.

Sam Hyde is a national treasure.

— Tipster (@JustSoTippy) August 26, 2022

In 2023, Sam launched “Fishtank Live,” an interactive reality web series created by himself and Jet Neptune. The series was aired on the site fishtank.live that allowed users to switch between multiple cameras and interact with contestants in various ways.

Fishtank Live is a reality web series by Sam Hyde and Jet Neptune where eight contestants live in a fully monitored smart house that is livestreamed 24/7 to viewers for six weeks at fishtank.live with viewers able to prank contestants and determine what happens to them via donations, similar to Control My Room livestreams. A cash prize of $30,000 is awarded to the winner.

-- Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/sam-hydes-fishtank-live)

While “The Truth about iDubbbz,” “The Candyman,” and “Fishtank Live” did occasionally contain references to Dissident Right memes or Internet culture in general, this was a minor part of the comedy. It did not employ the Alt Right inspired, politically incorrect shock humor of Hyde’s earlier era. Although the original Million Dollar Extreme YouTube channel was lost during the ban waves of the Censorship Era, subsequent channels have remained, and Hyde has avoided actions that will cause him additional censorship problems. In addition to support from Left Wing content creators such as Nick Mullen, he also received support from other, more mainstream Internet figures such as Keemstar (he would become co-owner of Keemstar’s influencer boxing company, “Happy Punch Productions”).

As a grand finale of Sam Hyde’s resurrection, World Peace 2 received independent funding in December 2022, and Sam announced that Nick Rochefort would also be returning. After a few back and forth response videos to each other’s streams, Charls eventually reconciled with Sam, and announced that he too would be returning to the show. And so Million Dollar Extreme reformed after 7 years, and World Peace 2 was produced with all original members. As of 2023, production of the series has been completed, though a release date has not been announced.

While it is unlikely to have an effect on politics in the 2024 election, given Hyde’s decision to distance himself from politics, this is still an important part of the historical dialectic. The successful return of Sam Hyde and widespread acceptance of him on both the Left and the Right proves that the antithesis is continuing to be absorbed by mainstream culture, institutionalizing the Dissident Right movement. It is similar to the mainstream Right’s eventual adoption of counter-culture artists and rock and roll.

Choice of Words pt.2

In the next section, we will be discussing some anti-Semitic comments by Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. However, they claim that they are not anti-Semitic and do not hate all Jews, but are simply criticizing what they call “Jewish power.” This term “Jewish power” basically describes the same phenomenon as what Leftists call “white supremacy” or “white privilege,” in which Leftists claim white people are over-represented in areas of power and influence in society and use this power towards their own racial interest. The only difference is instead of whites, they apply this same argument to Jews.

In this text, I refer to this issue as “criticism of Jewish influence in society.” I chose this term because I feel it more specifically describes the issue they are talking about.

I have no problem calling them anti-Semites, because that is what they would be called by an ordinary person, but I also feel this is not an honest or objective description of their views, which are a bit different from a blind, emotional hatred of all Jews (which is a real thing, especially among some “wignats”).

The term “Jewish power,” which they use to describe their own views, has the opposite problem. It is a little too Nazi for my taste. Like “anti-Semitic,” it is not specific, and it is also not an objective term, but implies that I affirm their opinions.

My choice of words is also more factual. There do exist Jewish groups such as AIPAC, ADL, ZOA, etc. and they do influence society, through lobbying and activism. Whether this is a good or bad thing is entirely a matter of opinion. You can believe it is a good thing, depending on your politics. If you believe these groups are necessary to protect the rights of Jews in society, then you would probably believe that it is a good thing. If they try to create a society more aligned with Jewish values, and you agree with Jewish values, then you would probably believe that it is a good thing. Fuentes and others believe it is a bad thing, in part because they disagree with Jewish values, and thus they are criticizing it. Therefore, I think this is the most straightforward way of describing what is going on, taken at face value.

Of course, you may also believe Fuentes is using this as a pretense simply because he hates Jews. Some might say the fact that, since his association with Kanye West, he no longer shies away from Nazi imagery as much as in the past, that this is “proof” that he has been hiding his true views from the beginning. That is possible, but it relies on speculation about Fuentes’s true motives, which cannot be known for certain. So, for now I will take his statements at face value.

In short, if someone wants to call them or their statements anti-Semitic, I think this is reasonable, and outright refusing to do so would be splitting hairs to the point of dishonesty. But I prefer the term “criticism of Jewish influence” because it is a better and more specific, and therefore more honest and descriptive, term. Therefore, this is the language I will be using when this issue is addressed.

The main purpose of this text is to present the views of the Dissident Right, even those that are the most extreme, in a fair way, so that people can understand that perspective accurately. I do not necessarily advocate for any particular view in this text, and leave it to the reader to decide what they may or may not agree with.

Ye the Wignat pt.1: Death Con 3

Kanye West needs no introduction. He is one of the most influential celebrities, designers, and musicians of this century, and one of the richest black men in America.

In a way, Kanye fulfills a similar role as The Beatles did in the 1960s counter-culture. Both have a reputation as musical geniuses who changed and experimented over time, leaving an indelible mark on a rising new musical genre. Both were also the products of the larger dialectical movement of their time, in political, aesthetic, cultural, and various other ways. It is no coincidence that Kanye is a Christian politically incorrect conservative, while John Lennon was an idealistic left-leaning liberal and George Harrison embraced Eastern mysticism.

Kanye came out as a Trump supporter after the election in November of 2016 (although he did not vote for him in the election). In April of 2018, he posted a selfie of himself in a MAGA hat and tweeted support for the President.

“You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought,” West said in a tweet on Wednesday.

The President responded three hours later, quoting the tweet and calling his comments “very cool.”

-- TIME, April 25 2018 (https://time.com/5254664/kanye-west-supports-donald-trump-Twitter/). Trump’s reply would become a meme.

He would appear in the MAGA hat several more times, including during an appearance on Saturday Night Live. He even recorded a song defending his pro-Trump stance, “Ye vs. The People.”

Nick Fuentes, like Kanye a Chicago native, was a life-long fan, even before Kanye’s support of Trump or other political statements. Before being redpilled or involved in politics, Nick grew up with his music in high school. He considered him, along with Trump and Sam Hyde, one of his heroes. He admired his bombastic, provocative personality and his visionary ability to create new things that no one else had ever even thought of before.

In October 2022, Kanye (who had now changed his name to just “Ye”) appeared with fellow black conservative Candice Owens at a Paris fashion show wearing a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt, drawing criticism by the media.

After Monday's fashion show, Owens posted photos of her outfit on her Instagram story. One post appeared to be a screenshot of a story from West's account, which read: "Everyone know that Black Lives Matter was a scam now it's over you're welcome."

...

Hannah Gais, senior research analyst at Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, said in a statement to CBS News both West and Owens "have a proclivity for high-profile stunts designed to troll liberals." and that their "use of rhetoric popular among some on the racist fringe goes to show that these slogans can become normalized and part of the broader right-wing vernacular through repetition."

-- CBS News (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kanye-west-white-lives-matter-shirt-candace-owens-fashion-show-backlash/)

In the following weeks, he would appear on conservative programs such as Tucker Carlson, and became an overnight sensation in the conservative media.

Suddenly, this all changed. On October 8 2022, Ye posted his infamous “death con” tweet on Twitter:

I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE. The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.

-- Ye (https://www.ajc.org/news/5-of-kanye-wests-antisemitic-remarks-explained)

As a result of the tweet, Ye would lose hundreds of millions of dollars. It was also reported at the time that JPMorgan Chase banned Ye from their bank as a result of the tweet, but it appears this may have been due to an unrelated dispute with the artist.

In response to his antisemitic statements, Vogue, CAA, Balenciaga, Gap, and Adidas terminated their collaborations, sponsorships, and relationships with West. Foot Locker and TJ Maxx removed West's products from their shelves. With the termination of his business relationships, West lost his billionaire status; Forbes estimated his reduced worth at $400 million, coming from his "real estate, cash, his music catalog, and a 5% stake in ex-wife Kim Kardashian's shapewear firm, Skims".

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Kanye_West)

Tucker immediately canceled any future planned interviews with Kanye, and conservatives began deleting their earlier tweets praising him.

Since October, a Twitter account run by Republicans on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee has contained a cryptic post that said: “Kanye. Elon. Trump” – apparently claiming Ye, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump as their own.

-- The Guardian, Dec 1 2022, “Republicans delete tweet that appears to support Kanye West after he praises Nazis’ (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/dec/01/kanye-west-ye-republican-tweet-deleted)

Ye explained that the tweets were in response to unfair Jewish “business contracts” that he said took advantage of black artists. He also posted screenshots of his Jewish former personal trainer Harley Pasternak, who seemed to threaten Ye with drugging him or sending him to a mental institution due to his support of Donald Trump and conservative politics, going so far as to invoke Ye’s children in his threat.

I'm going to help you one of a couple ways... First, you and I sit down and have an loving and open conversation, but you don't use cuss words, and everything that is discussed is based in fact, and not some crazy stuff that dumb friend of yours told you, or you saw in a tweet

Second option, I have you institutionalized again where they medicate the crap out of you, and you go back to Zombieland forever. Play date with the kids just won't be the same.

-- Harley Pasternak (https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/celebrities/2022/11/04/6364fb1ae2704ed3928b45b3.html)

“What should be obvious by now is that I was raised to stand for my truth regardless of the consequences. So I will say this again I was mentally misdiagnosed and nearly drugged out of my mind to make me a manageable well behaved celebrity” said Ye in the same tweet containing the screenshot of Pasternak’s message. Note the effect of Internet technology here, automatically creating a paper trail of Pasternak’s message and allowing Ye to easily circumvent the media and tell his side of the story.

While Ye was almost universally condemned, black comedian Dave Chappelle appeared to partially defend Ye, and Jewish comedian Jon Stewart gave a more nuanced take on the controversy.

Chappelle began the show by reading a statement which said “I denounce antisemitism in all its forms and I stand with my friends in the Jewish community.”

“And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time,” Chappelle joked.

He went on to say that Ye had broken “the show business rules” which are “the rules of perception.”

“If they’re Black, then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob,” Chappelle said. “But if they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”

Chappelle went on to talk about the abundance of Jewish people in Hollywood.

“But that doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “There’s a lot of Black people in Ferguson, Missouri. Doesn’t mean they run the place.”

Chappelle said he could see “if you had some kind of issue, you might go out to Hollywood and start connecting some kind of lines and you could maybe adopt the illusion that Jews run show business.”

“It’s not a crazy thing to think,” he said. “But it’s a crazy thing to say out loud.”

-- CNN, Nov 14 2022, “Dave Chappelle’s ‘SNL’ monologue sparks backlash as being antisemitic” (https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/entertainment/dave-chappelle-adl-antisemitic/index.html). This came at a time when another black man, Kyrie Irving, was also being suspended from the Brooklyn Nets after tweeting about a Black Nationalist film which the ADL called anti-Semitic.

Stewart, who is of Jewish heritage, rejected the idea that Chappelle “normalized antisemitism,” and said: “I don’t know if you’ve been on comments sections on most news articles, but it’s pretty fucking normal … I don’t believe that censorship and penalties are the way to end antisemitism or to not gain understanding. I don’t believe in that. I think it’s the wrong way to approach it.”

He referenced Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving’s suspension due to promoting an anti-Jewish film on Twitter. “Penalizing somebody for having a thought, I don’t think is the way to change their minds or gain understanding,” he said. “This is a grown-ass man and to say, ‘We’re going to put you in a time out, you’re going to sit in a corner and stare at the wall until you no longer believe the Jews control the international banking system.’ We have to get past this in the country. People think Jews control Hollywood. People think Jews control the banks. And to pretend that they don’t and to not deal with it in a straightforward manner, we’ll never gain any kind of understanding with each other.”

...

Stewart explained wounds such as racial divides and antisemitism need to be exposed, yet the “general tenor of conversation in this country is to cover it up. Look at it from a Black perspective. It’s a culture that feels its wealth has been extracted by different groups — whites, Jews. Whether it’s true or not isn’t the issue, that’s the feeling in that community. And if you don’t understand that’s where it’s coming from, then you can’t sit down and explain that being in an industry isn’t the same as having a nefarious and controlling interest in that industry.

“Dave said something in the SNL monologue that I thought was constructive as well, which is: ‘It shouldn’t be this hard to talk about things,'” he added. “And that is what we’re talking about. I can’t believe there aren’t a shit ton of people who believe that the Jews have an unreasonable amount of control over the systems and they wield them as puppet masters. I’m called antisemitic because I’m against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians … those [terms] shut down debate. They’re used as a cudgel. And whether it’s comedy or discussion or anything else, if we don’t have the wherewithal to meet each other with reality, then how do we move forward?”

– The Hollywood Reporter, Nov 16 2022, “Jon Stewart Says Censorship Not the Way to End Antisemitism After Chappelle, Kanye Scandals” (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/jon-stewart-antisemitism-chappelle-kanye-colbert-1235263238/)

Needless to say, Fuentes was elated by the news, covering it on his show and praising the fact that such a high profile figure was drawing attention to one of Fuentes’s most controversial views. He also chastised conservatives for suddenly pretending to be fans of Ye, something that Fuentes actually was for his entire life. He also pointed out that conservatives welcomed criticism of every other group (such as black people) and condoned every other type of controversial statement (such as saying “white lives matter”) as “free speech,” but drew the line at any “free speech” that criticized Jews.

Some have interpreted “death con 3,” with its violent choice of words, as a real call to violence against Jews. Obviously, any calls to anti-Semitic violence should be condemned unequivocally. But, other parts of the incident are more ambiguous.

Fuentes is correct that there is a double standard regarding such statements. If Ye had said that white business people in the music industry were taking advantage of black artists with unfair business practices, and wrote “death con 3” against white people, his comments would not be condemned but instead praised. The mere fact that saying “white lives matter” was considered hate speech is proof of this. So it appears that there are some groups of people that can be criticized freely, but some that cannot, and that Jews are one group that cannot. That having been said, it is understandable why Jewish people are more sensitive than white people about this sort of talk, given the history of the two groups. I do not think that they are necessarily wrong for having this sensitivity. It is reasonable. However, it’s simply worth noting that the double standard exists.

Jews criticize non-Jews frequently, particularly Christians. For example, Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, joked on her 2005 comedy special Jesus is Magic that “I hope the Jews did kill Christ. I’d do it again in a second.”(https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=GSrhJGGDqx0)

In 2021, Silverman and another Jewish comedian, Seth Rogan, would go on to produce Santa Inc, an 8-episode series on HBO Max mocking Christmas with scatological humor. Here are some of the top comments on Reddit regarding this series:

I was raised Jewish. I also can see where people are coming from on this. If the roles were reversed, and two white Christians were making a show mocking Jewish traditions these two would call it it out. I watched the first episode, and the “jokes” were just lazy. It’s basically the same garbage that has been repeated so often lately. Comedy is getting pretty bland when you can only “joke” about people that look just like you or white people.

-- Unknown Redditor. This comment was later deleted (https://www.reddit.com/r/HBOMAX/comments/r844pu/seth_rogen_insults_everyone_who_criticized_santa/)

This isn't even roast humour, Dave Chapelle making fun of white people is roast humour and he does it brilliantly and it's hilarious. Santa Inc is just Seth's self professed anti-white activism cloaked in a christmas themed TV series which is why none of the jokes land with an everyman white audience which is the primary demographic of the US and Europe.

-- Unknown Redditor. This comment was later deleted ((https://www.reddit.com/r/HBOMAX/comments/r844pu/seth_rogen_insults_everyone_who_criticized_santa/)

It's even worse when it comes from someone who doesn't actually follow the religion, too.

Can you imagine a movie, directed by someone who wasn't Jewish, critiquing Hanukkah? People generally don't like their Holy Traditions attacked. I said it in another post, too, because there was a complaint about Santa being white: What other color would he be?

It's a European tradition, from European countries about a white European. o.o I don't identify as white, but that's from white culture, and white people are allowed to have their own culture. His surprise only shows how little he understands what he did.

-- Unknown Redditor. This comment was later deleted ((https://www.reddit.com/r/HBOMAX/comments/r844pu/seth_rogen_insults_everyone_who_criticized_santa/)

Critics of the series were denounced by Seth Rogan as “white supremacists.” (https://movieweb.com/seth-rogen-white-supremacists-review-bombing-santa-inc/) (Author’s note: although, to be fair, 4chan raided the comments section on promotions for this series with anti-Semitic jokes, so this is not entirely inaccurate. However, the series was also criticized for other reasons, such as being painfully unfunny)

I did not watch the series personally, so I do not know if the Reddit comments above are accurate or justified. I could not find Silverman and Rogan, for example, specifically making fun of Jesus in this film, but rather Santa (although she did do so in her earlier comments). In any case, it actually is not necessary for making my point whether or not people being offended was “justified.” My point is simply that the offense goes both ways. Likewise, I do not criticize Jews simply for being offended at the comments of Ye. I am only offering a few cursory instances of Jews critiquing Christians and Gentiles, and their culture and traditions. Obviously, there is a plethora of examples and one does not have to look very far. It is a common theme of Jews to criticize white and Christian culture from the perspective of “the outsider,” as is the main theme of Santa Inc. But if Christians or Gentiles criticize Hanukkah, or other aspects of Jewish culture, this is considered “anti-Semitism.”

Of course, Jews are free under the 1^st Amendment to criticize Christians and whites as much as they please, especially in a comedic work. But this same protection also protects Ye and Nick Fuentes, and even Mr. Bond and Moonman (whose work is also intended to be “satire”). While both Ye and Nick Fuentes were banned, Seth Rogan and Sarah Silverman’s comments are promoted on major media platforms. While Ye and Nick Fuentes were financially punished for their comments, Silverman and Rogan are free to monetize their comments.

The Talmud, the book that Rabbis study in order to correctly interpret the laws of the Torah, also criticizes Gentiles. For example, here are some controversial passages from the Talmud:

Onkelos said to him: What is the punishment of that man, a euphemism for Jesus himself, in the next world? Jesus said to him: He is punished with boiling excrement. As the Master said: Anyone who mocks the words of the Sages will be sentenced to boiling excrement.

-- Gittin 57a. In other words, according to Jews, Jesus is burning in hell in boiling excrement (https://www.sefaria.org/Gittin.57a.4?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en)

Scoundrel! Aren't Gentiles called donkeys? As it is written: "Whose flesh is as the flesh of donkeys"

-- Berakhot 58a:15.

This appears to compare Gentiles to animals. Similar to how an anti-Semite might compare Jews to animals

As it is written: "And you My sheep, the sheep of My pasture, are people [adam]" (Ezekiel 34:31), from which it is derived that you, the Jewish people, are called adam, but Gentiles are not called adam

--Keritot 6b:20

And you, My sheep, the sheep of My pasture, are man" (Ezekiel 34:31), which teaches that you, i.e., the Jewish people, are called "man", but Gentiles are not called "man".

--Bava Metzia 114b:2

In these verses, the Talmud seemingly implies Gentiles are not fully human. Or, at the very least, are an inferior type of human to Jews. Isn’t that called racism? Isn’t that the inverse of anti-Semitism, which one might call anti-Gentilism? While all Jews may not interpret this verse in this way, the point is simply that it is an inflammatory passage.

The verse about Jesus burning in hell was taken from the Talmud directly, and I know it is legitimate. The others are from WikiQuote (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talmud/On_Gentiles). Some might argue that these quotes are taken out of context. That very well may be the case. I encourage anyone truly interested in Jewish teachings to consult with a Rabbi so he may understand the quote properly, with its full context and nuance of meaning. However, a Jewish organization like the ADL, as we have seen, is never interested in the full context and nuance of meaning when evaluating the statements of those it claims to be anti-Semites, white supremacists, and racists, so I will hold the Talmud to the same standard.

For a more fair and complete opinion on these controversial verses, as well as others in a similar vein, I suggest watching the video “Religious Jews are asked about the Talmud” on the channel Corey Gil-Shuster. In it, he interviews several religious and non-religious Jews in Israel, as well as Rabbis, concerning what these and similar verses that are purportedly in the Talmud, mean. (https://youtu.be/M60FUPVtq9k?si=YdJWMN1det_kHKyO)

Most non-religious Jews in the video thought the verses were ridiculous, while some religious Jews defended them to varying degrees.

At the end of the video, Rabbi Yiztkah Brietowitz, an Israeli Hassidic Rabbi, is interviewed about verses such as these.

Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz is a world-renowned lecturer and rabbinic authority, who is the Rav of Kehillas Ohr Somayach, at Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem. Rabbi Breitowitz's scope of knowledge, brilliance, as well as a unique ability to grasp complicated material and communicate it clearly to others is legendary. He has lectured extensively throughout the US and Israel on medical, business, and family ethics. He has published numerous articles on bankruptcy, commercial law, medical ethics, & Jewish law.

-- Torah Anytime, “Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz” (https://www.torahanytime.com/#/speaker?l=414)

The Rabbi confirms some verses, such as a verse that says “to eat with a goy [gentile] is the same as eating with a dog,” explaining that the verse was meant to warn Jews against associating with immoral people. Others, such as a verse by Rabbi Rashi that compares Gentiles to dogs, he argues apply only to non-monotheistic pagans. He also says that these verses reflect that some Jews “have a chip on their shoulder towards the non-Jewish world” due to being “tortured and killed,” such as in the holocaust, by non-Jews. He says he disagrees with this sentiment “philosophically” but it was “understandable.” He also says that there is “certainly a belief in Judaism that the soul of the Jew comes from a higher level of holiness” and that Jews had a “higher spiritual potential” than non-Jews, while qualifying this by saying that any particular non-Jew might be more “righteous” than any particular Jew. He unequivocally denies alleged verses that purportedly claimed that Jews could cheat and even murder non-Jews, saying these actions are strictly forbidden.

I include these verses only to demonstrate that there are controversial and potentially offensive statements and attitudes in the Talmud. This is not exclusive to Judaism. Both the New Testament and Koran also contain controversial verses, including verses Jews would consider anti-Semitic.

Jews also frequently make dehumanizing and even genocidal comments towards Palestinians. During the conflict between Hamas and Israel in October 2023, many Jews, including large accounts like @Yakovolf, Joel Pollak (editor-in-cheif of Breitbart News), Avi Yemini of Rebel News, Daniel Bordman of The National Telegraph and others called for violence or in some cases genocide.

A full list of 74 public statements by Jews advocating for ethnic cleansing, torture, crimes against civilians, and the genocide of Palestinians can be found at “Law4Palestine.org”­ (https://law4palestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Database-of-Israeli-Incitement-to-Genocide-LEGISLATORS.pdf)

Genocidal statements towards Palestinians

None of these tweets were taken down or censored in any way by Twitter. In fact, Twitter added a note under some tweets specifically saying that although they violated twitter guidelines, they would still remain up!

Unlike Kanye, the Jews who posted these also did not face any financial consequences.

The point I am trying to make is this. If I am a gentile who is offended by the Jewish religion due to these statements, am I free to cancel my business contracts with Jews? If you believe in “free speech,” then no. Jews are free to say and believe whatever they please about Gentiles, and Gentiles such as Ye are free to say and believe whatever they please about Jews. But, if you believe in “hate speech,” then it’s only fair that Jews be held accountable for their own “hate speech.”

Ye the Wignat Pt.2: Christian Futurism

Meanwhile, Trump would make his extremely disappointing 2024 announcement speech. In it, Trump seemed subdued, old, and out of touch. He repeated basic Fox News conservative talking points and whined about past persecution by the deep state, including the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Fuentes, perhaps Trump’s greatest advocate on the Dissident Right, called the speech, “worse than I expected. A huge disappointment, both in style and substance.”

A few days later, Milo Yiannopoulos was spotted with Ye, and it was announced that he would be Ye’s campaign manager for a 2024 Presidential run. At the time, Milo had become a close ally of Fuentes. Since his days in the Alt Right, Milo had converted to Catholicism and claimed to have “stopped being gay,” thus eliminating any potential conflict of interest and convincing Fuentes that he could be trusted. Nick asked Milo if there was any way that he could arrange a meeting between himself and the rapper.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2022 at Mar-a-Lago, Fuentes would find himself seated between his two heroes.

On Tuesday, November 22, 2022, former President Donald Trump hosted white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at his Mar-a-Lago home. Trump’s willingness to associate with figures who have repeatedly spread antisemitic and white supremacist tropes is deeply concerning and has not gone unnoticed by extremists.

Fuentes, a white supremacist and rabid misogynist who attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, has repeatedly spread racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Despite his history of antisemitism, he has forged alliances with a variety of far-Right figures, including some GOP officials.

Ye, who announced his bid for the presidency two days after having dinner with Trump, has been embroiled in controversy for weeks after making numerous antisemitic and other inflammatory remarks. He was briefly locked out of his social media accounts and lost his partnerships with Gap, Adidas and Balenciaga.

-- ADL, November 29 2022, (https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/extremists-react-trump-dinner-ye-and-nick-fuentes)

There are multiple versions of how the meeting progressed. Some depicted the meeting as set-up by Milo to make Trump look bad, after Milo had made anti-Trump comments in the past. Many establishment conservatives went with this narrative, perhaps in an attempt to run damage control for Trump and distance the MAGA movement from Fuentes.

But Trump may have been walking into a trap in Mar-a-Lago’s gilded halls — one that leveraged his own penchant for spectacle and showmanship against him. Ye arrived with three guests, including white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes.

-- NBC News, Nov 29 2022, “The inside story of Trump’s explosive dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes” (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/story-trumps-explosive-dinner-ye-nick-fuentes-rcna59010)

Later, Milo himself supported this version of the story.

As fallout from Donald Trump’s meeting with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes continues, a far-Right activist has claimed the meeting was a set-up, meant to “make Trump’s life miserable”.

...

Speaking to NBC, Yiannopoulos said he came up with a plan for Fuentes to travel with Ye and hopefully gain access to the former president.

“I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” Yiannopoulos said.

“I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end.”

-- The Guardian, Nov 30 2022, “Milo Yiannopoulos claims he set up Fuentes dinner ‘to make Trump’s life miserable’” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/30/milo-yiannopoulos-nick-fuentes-donald-trump-dinner)

Wignats also supported this narrative:

Some white supremacist leaders argued the dinner was a “hit job” arranged to damage Trump’s reputation. “My brief take on the Trump, Kanye dinner fiasco is that Milo [Yiannopoulos, Ye’s campaign manager], likely working on behalf of big GOP donors, got into Kanye's ear and used him as a mechanism to get Fuentes and Trump into the same room, thereby sinking Trump's 2024 run, making Ron DeSantis the uncontested GOP favorite, and making everyone involved look stupid and ridiculous,” wrote Mike Peinovich [AKA Mike Enoch], a leader of the white supremacist National Justice Party, wrote on Telegram. “Trump would likely never have taken the dinner if not for some Jew donor telling him to. He was set up.”

-- ADL, November 29 2022, (https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/extremists-react-trump-dinner-ye-and-nick-fuentes)

Fuentes denies this version of events. He insisted that it was not a setup, that Ye met with Trump in order to ask Trump if he wanted to be Ye’s running mate (as Ye himself tweeted) and simply asked Fuentes to tag along at the last minute. He also said Trump took a liking to him, exclaiming, “this kid’s smart, he really gets me” after Nick told him to attack DeSantis, take a tougher approach towards other Republicans, and to “let Trump be Trump.” Other journalists support this version of the dinner.

One source who spoke with NBC News told the outlet Trump was taken by Fuentes who: 'presented as statistician'.

They added: 'He was very knowledgeable of polls and Trump's campaign. Trump was very impressed but Trump didn't know who he was.

...

On Friday, Ye also confirmed that Trump was 'impressed' with Fuentes in a video posted to Twitter.

'So Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes, and Nick Fuentes, unlike so many of the lawyers, and so many of the people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he's actually a loyalist' Ye said.

– Daily Mail, Nov 25 2022, “Trump was 'very taken' with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and they fawned over each other during Mar-a-Lago dinner with Kanye West - but former President claims he had no idea he was a white supremacist”(https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11470903/Trump-taken-Holocaust-denier-Nick-Fuentes-Mar-Lago-dinner-Ye.html)

Trump partially, but not fully, disavowed Fuentes, in a series of tweets.

In the days following the dinner, Trump attempted to distance himself from Ye and Fuentes, writing on Truth Social, “This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about...The dinner was quick and uneventful.” In a follow-up post, Trump said, “We got along great, he [Ye] expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on “Tucker Carlson.” Why wouldn’t I agree to meet? Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”

-- ADL(https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/extremists-react-trump-dinner-ye-and-nick-fuentes)

One-time AFPAC speaker Marjorie Taylor Greene also began to condemn Fuentes around the same time, a detail that will become important later.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is condemning white nationalist Nick Fuentes and defending former President Trump after a dinner he had with the rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye; Fuentes and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

...

In a conversation with reporters on Tuesday, Greene said that she agreed with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) statement on Friday that Fuentes’s views have “no place in the Republican Party.”

She said she spoke with Trump and talked with people on his staff after news of the dinner broke.

“President Trump had no idea he [Fuentes] was even coming. So that’s unfortunate,” Greene said.

...

Greene said that knowing what she knows now about Fuentes, she would not have spoken at his conference — but does not regret her message to those in the audience.

...

Also present at the dinner with Trump was Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor who was banned from Twitter in 2016 in connection with a campaign of racist harassment against actress Leslie Jones. Yiannopoulos was an unpaid intern in Greene’s congressional office earlier this year.

“I talk to him [Yiannopoulos] occasionally because he actually lives in Rome [Ga.] in the same town I live in,” Greene said. “I had no idea they were going down there [to Mar-a-Lago]. And I found out about it, basically, like everybody else did on Twitter.”

-- The Hill, November 30 2022, “Marjorie Taylor Greene condemns Fuentes, remarks on Trump, Yiannopoulos” (https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3756423-marjorie-taylor-greene-condemns-fuentes-remarks-on-trump-yiannopoulos/)

Fuentes was appointed “communications director” by Ye, and also brought some of his allies, such as Ali Alexander and YouTuber Sneako, into the campaign. He announced on his show that AFPAC 4 would be postponed and America First put on indefinite hiatus. He, Milo, and Ye then began conducting various news interviews, including Tim Pool and, of course, the infamous InfoWars appearance.

In his appearance on InfoWars, Ye appeared next to Fuentes and Ali in a BDSM-like mask that covered his entire face, and an ostentatious racing jacket covered in logos. Alex Jones attempted to do damage control as Ye performed manic prop comedy mocking Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and praised Adolf Hitler, saying “I love Hitler” and “we’re gonna stop dissing the Nazis.”

Alex Jones stated that people who are not Nazis should not be called "Nazi" and be demonized, which caused Kanye to interject when he said Hitler had some "good things" to him

...

"Well, I see good things about Hitler, also. Every human being has value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler"

...

"I see good things about Hitler. I love everyone and Jewish people are not going to tell me. You can love us and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography. But this guy [Hitler] that invented highways and invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good. I’m done with that. Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler."

…

Continuing on with the topic of Nazis and Hitler, Alex Jones then went on to say that demonizing people by calling them "Nazis" or being against those who said they "didn't hate the Nazis" wasn't right, referencing Arnold Schwarzenegger who reportedly said he liked Hitler and still won acting awards, which prompted Kanye to say "I like Hitler" right before the cut to a commercial break.

…

In another moment from the episode, some online speculated that Jones was attempting to give Kanye an out or further explain his controversial statements when he related Kanye's history with fashion as a reason for his admiration of Hitler and Nazis — particularly noting the brand Hugo Boss and its ties to Nazi Germany at one point. However, after Jones said, "I get the Hugo Boss uniforms … but just because you're in love with the design, you're a designer, can we just kinda say you like the uniforms but that's about it?" Kanye responded, "No. There's a lot of that I love about Hitler. A lot of things"

…

Later on in the show after his comments on Hitler, Kanye then decided to bring out props, including a fishing net and a bottle of YooHoo, as a bit against the former Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. The segment involved him holding up the net and talking as though it were Netanyahu.

-- Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/kanye-west-on-InfoWars)

* Ye reaches under the table and produces a neon orange fishing net and a bottle of YooHoo *

Jones: I’m in the Twilight Zone right now

Ye: Netanyahu, what do you have to say?

Ye (as Net N Yoohoo): It was bad. It was bad for Trump to meet with Nick and Ye! Ok!

-- Ye does an impression of “Net N Yoohoo” (Netanyahu) during the Alex Jones interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzyR0uKfTKs)

So much for optics. The interview was so controversial that Fuentes would be banned from Alex Jones’s streaming platform, Banned.video.

Fuentes had taken a major risk. Ye, like many who become newly redpilled, had become a total wignat, thereby throwing away a brand that Fuentes had built up strategically over many years. However, from his perspective, it is easy to see why Fuentes took this risk. There was a massive upside to this gamble: the ability to work with his hero on a national presidential campaign, on top of massive exposure for himself and his views. Unfortunately for him, after the InfoWars appearance, things began to breakdown.

Thus began one of the strangest feuds in political history. On one side was Nick Fuentes, Ali Alexander, Candace Owens, Sneako, and Laura Loomer. On the other side was Kanye West, Milo Yiannopoulos, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The conflict started as a rift began to develop between Milo and Fuentes. According to Fuentes, Milo had lied about being an “ex-gay.” He tried so sleep in the same bed as Fuentes and offered Fuentes drugs, saying that he took the drugs himself in order to suppress his urge to have gay sex. Fuentes painted a picture of Milo as an out-of-control con artist, flying out with his (supposedly ex) husband to Disneyland, staying with him in a hotel room, and going on unpredictable drug benders. According to Fuentes, Jewish free-speech activist and Fuentes ally Laura Loomer (who might be considered a former member of the Alt Lite), as well as Candace Owens, were constantly warning Fuentes to keep Ye away from Milo. However, this put Nick in an uncomfortable position, as Milo was responsible for bringing Nick aboard, and was known for retaliating mercilessly against those who got on his bad side. Milo apparently also had a beef with Fuentes ally Ali Alexander. Eventually, Fuentes was able to squeeze Milo out of the campaign, and he was fired by Ye.

Milo struck back by attacking Ali Alexander. Milo released evidence that Ali had preyed on young boys, including soliciting nude photos from America First online personality “Smiley,” which Smiley personally confirmed. Milo said that Nick had long been aware of the behavior and turned a blind eye in order to take advantage of Ali’s many political connections. Nick cut ties with Ali over the allegations and removed his Cozy.tv channel, but also defended himself, saying the soliciting of nudes from Smiley happened before Nick was even involved in politics and was still a senior in high school. He also said that, while he had heard about the allegations regarding Ali, he had never seen any definitive proof. According to him, when Milo told him about Ali initially, he said that if he had to cut ties with people over every allegation, he would also have to cut ties with Milo.

Based on the allegations that Fuentes knew about Ali’s solicitation of minors, enemies of Fuentes would accuse him of being a “pedophile” for months after the revelation. As further “proof” of these allegations, they used other controversial comments by Fuentes where he claimed that wanting to marry a 16 year old was not pedophilia and that he wanted a 16 year old wife when he was 30. Fuentes defended himself on the basis that the age of consent was 16 in much of the world, that people should get married when they were teenagers instead of having promiscuous sex for 10 years before getting married, and that younger women were hotter. By now his list of enemies had grown to include a slew of defectors from America First including Jaden McNeil, former interns of Fuentes, and former Cozy.tv streamers Michael Alberto, Big Tech and Ethan Ralph. According to rumors from Michelle Malkin, Tucker Carlson had also been looking into Fuentes, considering painting him as a “fed,” as Revolver News had done to Ray Epps, and blaming him for Ye’s comments.

Ye, for unknown reasons, but probably due to the fallout over Ali, distanced himself from Fuentes and re-hired Milo as campaign manager. Milo then banned Fuentes and all of his people from the campaign. Ye became distracted from politics, refocusing on music and marrying architect Bianca Censori, who allegedly began to act as a handler for Ye. As of December 2023, the YE24 campaign has not been heard from again and has become a flash in the pan.

Fuentes, undeterred, rebranded America First with a new, even more explicitly Christian vision. In it, the influence of Ye can clearly be seen. Fuentes appeared on March 4 2023 at a “Fuentes rally” in a puffy Ye-inspired jacket and sunglasses, with images of crosses, skulls, rosaries, and bombs projected behind him. During the rally, he unveiled his new vision: “Christian Futurism.”

Fuentes said that he had been inspired by Ye to change his approach to politics. Instead of critiquing, he wanted to create. Instead of focusing on problems, he wanted to focus on solutions. Instead of the conservative perspective of looking towards the past and despairing at how far society had fallen due to the corrosive effects of liberalism, Fuentes wanted to look towards the future, and create a “post-Liberal” Christian society.

In the next five years, it is unequivocal, the message goes from “America First” to “Christ Is King.” That has gotta be the new vision. And the reason why is because you could implement all the other things, and it wouldn’t be good enough. You could have an immigration moratorium. You could have free speech on social media. They are now even giving out some concessions to the white people, you see this all the time now.

...

Insofar as you have non-Christians running the institutions, that does not solve the problem. That has gotta be the main mission.

...

Here’s the other thing. So often we as conservatives, I would say even Christians, the message is always something like ‘we gotta go back!’, ‘It used to be so different’, ‘Remember when.’ I don’t call myself a conservative anymore. I don’t call myself even a traditionalist. Because history doesn’t repeat. We can’t go back to the past.

...

We’re never going back. It’s done. All of that is gone. But I would call myself something like a “Christian Futurist” instead. Because Jesus Christ was our past. Before any of us were born or conceived. Jesus Christ is our present now. And Jesus Christ is our future, after we die on Earth.

...

We want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of planet earth.

...

We don’t want to talk about Constantinople, we will build new cities.

-- Nick Fuentes, Fuentes Rally 1 (https://Cozy.tv/aff/replays/2023-03-05)

“Liberalism already happened” Fuentes would explain in an episode of America First that year. According to Fuentes, the good part of liberalism was the compassion, but the error in liberalism was in the accommodation. What we could learn from liberalism was to be compassionate towards homosexuals, transsexuals, immigrants, and so forth, while still condemning sexual deviancy as sinful and protecting our borders and demographics.

Thus, while relaxing his stance on the incorporation of fascist imagery somewhat, and criticizing Jewish political influence more often than in the past, even at its most extreme moment America First was still a more mature movement than the Alt Right, with a complex, nuanced political vision. It continued to employ politically incorrect rhetoric to some degree, while explicitly denouncing race-based violence or cruelty. It criticized Zionism and Jewish influence in society, while at the same time allying with Jews such as Darren Beattie and Laura Loomer (and, before their falling out, Milo). While fighting for the rights of white people and for retaining a white majority in America, it included Mexicans (such as Fuentes himself), black people (such as Cozy.tv streamer Tenryo, Jon Miller and Bryson Gray), and even non-religious Jews. Its most imporant legacy of all, however, would ultimately be bringing God back to the table in American politics.

Fuentes would go on to endorse Trump for the 2024 election.

Elon the Redditor saves the Internet

The real end of Big Tech censorship was instigated by the banning of Donald Trump on Twitter, which finally caused mainstream conservatives to take an active role in fighting it. From that point on, many “Twitter clones” including Gettr, and Trump’s own Truth Social began to become popular.

Even before the Censorship Era, some attempts to circumvent censorship had been created. Parler, a Twitter clone created in August 2018, became very popular with Boomers, who wanted to talk about Q-Anon or Covid without being censored. However, it was essentially torpedoed after J6.

After reports that Parler was used to coordinate the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, several companies denied it their services. Apple and Google removed Parler's mobile app from their app stores, and Parler went offline on January 10, 2021, when Amazon Web Services canceled its hosting services. Before it went offline in January 2021, according to Parler, the service had about 15 million users.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler)

Another platform worth mentioning is Gab. Gab was founded by Andrew Torba all the way back in 2016. Its mascot and icon are a green frog (an obvious allusion to Pepe). It exploded in popularity after Charlottesville, which had led to a ban wave of many Alt Right accounts. Almost immediately after Alt Right accounts began to flock to Gab, it became a target of censorship.

In early September 2017, Gab faced pressure from its domain registrar Asia Registry to take down a post by The Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin, giving Gab 48 hours to do so. Gab later removed the post.

...

Robert Gregory Bowers, the suspected shooter in the attack against a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27, 2018, maintained an active, verified Gab account

...

After Bowers was arrested, Gab suspended his profile, gathered all user data for the account, and contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). On October 27, 2018, the day of the shooting, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Medium terminated their relationship with Gab, and PayPal released a statement that it had it done so based on its review of accounts that may engage in the "perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance". Later on the same day, Gab announced on Twitter that Joyent, Gab's hosting provider, would terminate their service on October 29 at 9:00 am ET. The tweet said that the site expected to be down for weeks.Stripe and Backblaze also terminated their services with Gab after the shooting.

...

Gab returned online on November 4, 2018, after Epik agreed to register the domain

…

Gab turned to cryptocurrency payment processing services after being rejected from PayPal and Stripe in the aftermath of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. In January 2019, Coinbase and Square, Inc.'s Cash App closed the accounts held by Gab and Andrew Torba.

…

On July 4, Gab switched its software infrastructure to run on a forked version of Mastodon, a free and open-source decentralized social network platform. The change attempted to circumvent the rejection of Gab's mobile app from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, as Gab users gained access to the social network through third-party Mastodon apps that did not subsequently block Gab.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network))

Gab is notable for having the most permissive terms of service of almost any tech platform (with the possible exception of the Fediverse) allowing all legal speech protected under the 1^st amendment, except for pornography.

Restrictions on content on Gab include illegal activity, credible threats of violence, promotion of terrorism, obscenity, pornography, spamming, selling weapons or drugs, child exploitation, impersonation, and doxing.

--Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)#Violence_and_terrorism_policy)

In spite (or perhaps because) of this, the user experience on Gab can be fairly poor. When your community consists solely of people who were banned from everywhere else, it creates a filter bubble of extremist and low quality content. It tends to be full of wignats and unironic neo-Nazis spamming anti-Semitic slurs at each other, with little point to them aside from gratuitous obscenity. Andrew Torba, a self-described “Christian Nationalist” and member of the Dissident Right himself, makes the site even more repellent to the mainstream by often personally making anti-Semitic comments. He advocates for Christians to withdraw from the system as much as possible and create a “parallel society.” Because Gab has been able to successfully circumvent so many attempts to cancel it, still being fully operational as of December 2023, it has served as an important pioneer of Alt Tech.

Another Twitter alternative is “the Fediverse.”

The Fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of social networks, which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. ActivityPub, a W3C standard, is the most widely used protocol that powers the Fediverse. Users on different websites can send and receive updates from others across the network. Noted Fediverse platforms include Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, and Pixelfed. Nearly all Fediverse platforms are free and open-source software.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)

The Fediverse can be thought of as a technology with a decentralized structure similar to email. It is a protocol, not a platform. Just as many email services exist that can all send email to each other (Gmail, Yahoo mail, Protonmail, etc.) so too can each Fediverse “instance” see the posts from other Fediverse “instances,” with each “instance” being its own Twitter clone. In theory it is impossible to censor, since if a user gets banned on one instance, they can simply move to another instance (in the same way, if I get banned from Gmail, I can make a Yahoo account and continue to send email). In reality, the ecosystem is not as decentralized as it is in theory. Instances can “opt-in” to sharing information with other instances (called “federating” with the instance) and thus control which instances they share information with. If an instance becomes unpopular, other instances can simply “defederate” with it. This creates a “ghettoizing” effect and cuts one’s potential audience exponentially. The Fediverse became popular with wignats, especially on the instance “poast” (until it was hacked in 2023). Recently, the Fediverse has also became popular with Leftists, who have flocked there in protest to Elon Musks’s acquisition of Twitter.

Some of these “free speech” platforms were in fact not much more “free speech” than Twitter. For example, all platforms, except for Gab and Rumble, either banned Nick Fuentes from the platform or hid some of his content.

Rumble was one of the most successful of Alt Tech platforms. It was a “free speech” alternative to YouTube. Although going all the way back to 2013, Rumble especially became popular in 2021, as a response to YouTube’s censorship of content related to Covid. Rumble also caught the eye of Peter Thiel, who seemingly uses it as another chess piece in his strategy of manipulating online culture in order to influence the political.

Rise of viewership in 2020 has been attributed to Representative Devin Nunes, who accused YouTube of overly censoring his channel. Nunes began posting content on the platform with other prominent conservatives, such as Dinesh D'Souza, Dan Bongino, Sean Hannity, and Representative Jim Jordan, following soon after.

...

Rumble received investment from venture capitalists Peter Thiel and J. D. Vance in May 2021, with that round of funding valuing Rumble at around $500 million. A month later, US President Donald Trump joined Rumble in preparation for recording his Ohio campaign rally. In October 2021, Rumble acquired Locals. On December 14, 2021, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announced that it entered a "wide-ranging technology and cloud services agreement" with Rumble in a statement which also stated that Rumble would operate part of Truth Social as well as TMTG. Also in December 2021, Rumble challenged a New York law prohibiting hate speech on social media.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_(company))

It is interesting also to note this last line. As we have seen, Thiel seems to be orchestrating a two-pronged attack on political correctness and so called “hate speech” laws by uniting the Dissident Right and anti-woke Dissident Left.

While the rise of Alt Tech was an important factor in ending the Censorship Era, the official end came on April 4, 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter.

On the Internet, Elon Musk was once seen as being a personification of Reddit, appropriating popular memes from Internet culture, such as “doge” and making them cringe. Telsa made him associated with the Leftist crusade against “climate change.” These, and other factors, made him popular on Reddit, and loathed on 4chan.

u/WhimsicalFletcher:

Why is Elon Musk so popular on Reddit?

I don't really understand it. According to various articles I read, to me, the guy looks like a standard businessman, but for some reason most people on Reddit keep gobbling up his self-aggrandizing bullshit. He's constantly presented as the smartest, brightest person ever who will save the world, lead humanity to Mars, blahblahblah. A new Isaac Newton, Einstein or something like that. At the moment, the hive mind thinks of him as of an ultimate authority on all things technology. Anything slightly critical of Elon Musk usually gets heavily downvoted.

So why does he have such a high status among Redditors? I don't see many reasons for it. Does he appear a lot on American TV / Printed newspaper? I feel like I'm missing a part of the picture.

u/beanfiddler:

Technology CEO = stem circlejerk

Electric cars banned by government = libertarian / smug consumerist circlerjerk with shades of underdog circlejerk

Rich dude who has interesting personality = lick Tony Stark's balls circlejerk

SpaceX = space circlejerk

Private space exploration = libertarian circlejerk / "I could be an astronaut too!" circlejerk

Company literally named Tesla = Nikola Telsa circlejerk

Seems to be a nerd = nerds are literally oppressed, nerdface circlejerk

-- /r/circlebroke, October 27 2014 (https://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/2kgvjn/why_is_elon_musk_so_popular_on_Reddit/)

On 4chan, he was regarded in the same vein as other “pop science” figures as Neil DeGrasse Tyson. 4chan considered “pop science” to be enjoyed primarily by “midwits.” Midwits were Leftists who over-estimated their own intelligence. They were the type of people who claimed to “love science” while not having a deep understanding of it, bastardizing complex scientific concepts and mixing it with new-agey “live laugh love” style self-affirmation through sentimentalist statements such as “we are all heckin’ star dust!”

However “cringe” Elon may have been considered by 4chan at one time, he has done more for Internet freedom than perhaps any other figure in recent history. Like the rise in Alt Tech after the banning of Trump, this really was the result of overzealousness by the censorship regime.

Immediately after the acquisition, Musk fired several top Twitter executives including CEO Parag Agrawal; Musk became the CEO instead. He instituted a $7.99 monthly subscription for a "blue check",and laid off a significant portion of the company's staff. Musk lessened content moderation, and in December, Musk released internal documents relating to Twitter's moderation of Hunter Biden's laptop controversy in the leadup to the 2020 presidential election.

...

In April 2022, The Washington Post reported that Musk privately claimed that supposed censorship on the platform, including the banning of accounts such as The Babylon Bee, had prompted him to begin the acquisition. The New York Post revealed that Musk's ex-wife Talulah Riley had encouraged Musk to purchase Twitter, specifically citing the Bee's ban. Following the acquisition, he made reinstatement of accounts like the Bee an immediate priority.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Twitter)

On April 11, after publishing several tweets critical of the company, Musk decided not to join the board. Instead, he informed Twitter that he intended to make an offer to take the company private.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon_Musk)

While having previously voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020, Elon began to drift towards conservatism around the same time as the acquisition.

In 2022, Musk said that he could "no longer support" the Democrats because they are the "party of division & hate", and wrote a tweet encouraging "independent-minded voters" to vote Republican in the 2022 U.S. elections, which was an outlier among social media executives who typically avoid partisan political advocacy.He has supported Republican Ron DeSantis for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and Twitter hosted DeSantis's campaign announcement on a Twitter Spaces event.

-- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Politics)

Elon Musk also began to make posts decrying so called “gender-affirming care” (“transgender” child sex change operations).

Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life

-- Elon Musk, Twitter post from April 14 2023 (https://krcrtv.com/amp/news/nation-world/elon-musk-says-any-parent-or-doctor-who-sterilizes-children-should-go-to-prison-for-life-ron-desantis-msnbc-michael-cohen-sex-change-gender-affirming-care)

He also began promoting prominent Right Wing Twitter accounts in the algorithm (on the “for you” Twitter tab that showed curated content) such as Ian Miles Cheong (although he also promotes Left Wing accounts, particularly the Krassenstein brothers). He also announced his intentions to make Twitter a “free speech” platform, and to avoid permanent suspensions in favor of temporary ones.

Twitter brought back a number of banned accounts, including Keith Woods, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Chief Trumpster (a Cozy.tv streamer), The Babylon Bee, Dick Masterson, anti-SJW professor Jordan Peterson, misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, Right Wing investigative journalists Project Veritas, Patrick Casey (who since leaving America First has greatly moderated his views), and of course, Donald Trump himself. Nick Fuentes was also brought back for 24 hours before being re-banned for an unknown reason. Andrew Anglin was unbanned for a while before being banned again. However some accounts were never brought back or were banned by Elon, in particular Alex Jones, Jared Taylor, and many users who have expressed views considered anti-Semitic or critical of Israel, such as evolutionary biologist Kevin MacDonald and National Justice Party chairman Mike Enoch.

Aside from the already monumental, history-bending consequence of ending Big Tech censorship, Elon’s apparent shift to the right and flirtation with Dissident Right figures such as Keith Woods (more on this in the next chapter) is also significant. First of all, it is yet another indication of the slow but inevitable dialectical shift to the Right in American culture, as it slowly permeates through society. Secondly, it gives the Dissident Right its first elite support.

Ever since 2020, conservatives have begun to speculate more and more on the idea of a “national divorce” or “civil war” along ideological lines. Commentators such as Scott Greer, however, have pointed out that this is impossible. In a civil war or revolution, both sides must have elite backing. Even the French revolution was not fully a top-down event. The first half of it was instigated by the nobles (resulting in a constitutional monarchy) before it descended into the truly proletarianized second half (leading to the dysfunctional French Republic and reign of terror). In the American Revolution, the founding fathers were the elites of America, but were outside of the political system of Great Britain, and had much to gain from independence (they also gained support from Great Britain’s adversary, France). Likewise, the Russian Revolution was supported by the German elites and parts of the mutinous Russian armed services. In the English civil war, the revolutionaries were backed by Parliament. In the Spanish civil war, the revolutionaries were backed by the Church and parts of the military. In the American Civil War, the Confederacy pitted state against federal power.

Greer points out that in contemporary America, the Right has no elite. Conservative state governments are not interested in seceding, nor do they have the means to do so, as they depend on federal funding. Additionally, most are internally divided, consisting of blue cities within rural red areas. No major private institutions support the Dissident Right. In 2020, Wall Street donated 51.1 million dollars to Biden, and only 10 million to Trump (https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/25/business/trump-biden-wall-street-campaign-donations/index.html). In the military, while many of the rank and file have traditionally been conservative, the generals are not, such as the infamously liberal Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley. However, Musk (and even Ye to a lesser degree) may indicate a growing fracture in the elite, that would make such a revolution possible.

By 2022, with Alt Tech platforms such as Rumble becoming robust, and Musk’s reversal of the trend of Big Tech censorship, the height of the Censorship Era appears to be in the rearview mirror, although it will probably never return to the same level of free speech as during the Wild West Era. This development is probably the biggest whitepill for any dissident movement. It has smoothened and accelerated the synthesis of the illiberal antithesis.

Part 7 →