Recently there have been a lot of interesting drama, moods, and moments on X. It feels like many factions are re-aligning and winds are shifting in ways which are difficult to predict. New currents are potentially arising, especially in light of the American election this fall which we have every reason to believe could be historical.
Read on if you are interested in a sort of “digest” of the latest.
Two months ago, I wrote the blog post “Just to state the obvious, Elon’s takeover of Twitter is a world-historical event”, which estimated a consolidation of the Dissident Right position underneath Elon Musk’s management of X, given that he appeared to actively sympathize with and endorse Dissident Right positions and curate its leadership. Things have changed very quickly. At this point, the Dissident Right coalition seems shaky and fractured and far more likely to collapse entirely on X than to sustain itself in a coherent and vigorous position.
The current flamewar, started by an X app user Meta Prime, but then signal-boosted by the notorious streamer Nick Fuentes, is between a faction of the Dissident Right which we can call Thielite-Yarvinite (which is not to suggest that this faction is organized in a puppetmaster manner by Peter Thiel himself, something which people often inaccurately project upon it from the outside). This group is characterized by being savvy with media, cosmopolitan, libertine, hedonistic, associated with cryptocurrency and other new technologies, and being involved with Sovereign House in New York City. Then on the other hand, there is a Fuentes faction which is mostly characterized by being racially identitarian, involuntarily celibate, and sympathetic to forms of National Socialism.
This schism essentially boils down to master-morality versus slave-morality, or, roughly equivalently, elitism versus populism. Both factions of this schism are fairly incoherent in their views — in the sense of neither one having a specific defensible thesis which can properly be evaluated on its own terms. The Thielite-Yarvinites are incoherent because they are operating out of the notion that we need a new American elite which is just generally “better” in the sense of renewal of nobility gestured at by Plato, Nietzsche, the fourth turning thesis, etc. They want to be part of this elite or seek its patronage. Being media-savvy, they are very flexible about which message this “elite” should send to the masses to angle towards its control. (For instance, Yarvin himself is currently doing this bit where he’s now endorsing the Democrats and Joe Biden for president, in some kind of ironic rhetorical contrarianism which is presumably highly amusing to him.) On the other hand, the Fuentes faction is incoherent because it is mostly negatively defined by vulgar scapegoating and bigotry — against Jews, immigrants, and queers. While the Thielite-Yarvinite faction also platforms racist thought, its racism does not conduct itself in the same manner, being more of a process of observing differences between groups and making value judgments about them, rather than a process of projecting all of one's woes onto a group of people to exorcise.
This text which history is writing is getting quite literal at this point. The vulgar populist faction are getting angry at the Sovereign House aspirant elites because a transsexual hangs out at Sovereign House and the populists believe that if the elitists were serious about rightism they would not let a transsexual into their parties. The transsexual in question is a kind of Christian performance artist provocateur type who who decided to name herself “Pariah” — and again, the demand from the rural populists and bigots is just that she literally be ostracized and kicked out of the parties by her friends. Fitting that this highly Girardian situation would be playing out within the Thiel crowd.
It is interesting to look at the figure of the Bronze Age Pervert, who is a lynchpin caught in the middle of this. If there is a single name which is synonymous with the Dissident Right and responsible for its growth, it is the Bronze Age Pervert. In this current flame war, Bronze Age Pervert endorsed not ostracizing Pariah, which struck many of his fans as disappointing, who would have preferred him to be transphobic. BAP plays an interesting role where, in terms of his allegiances, he is friends with the Thielite-Yarvinites, but his rhetoric is more aligned with the nationalist racial identitarian populists.
This is because BAP is a Straussian esoteric author, and as such, his texts contain two messages superimposed, one for the sheep and one for the goats. For the plebeians, the message is to be a racial identitarian nationalist who eats healthy and works out. For the initiates, the true message is a more complicated Jewish Ivy League thing. To me, Bronze Age Mindset is sort of an elaborate Jewish joke being played on gentiles, like “this is what you goys want, don’t you?” — identitarian national socialism wrapped in this ridiculous ostentatious homosexual pervert’s jester’s cloak.
So Fuentes is in my opinion right to be paranoid that the Thielite-Yarvinite faction is “Jewish” and not aligned with his interests. However, it is also the case that the Jewish Ivy League elitists are basically superior people to Fuentes and his cohort of retards in most conceivable ways. There is also a literacy divide here: the Thielite-Yarvinites are people who read articles, blog posts, and occasionally even books, whereas Fuentes fans are people who get home from work or school and watch three hour rambling video streams.
So BAP is kind of a mediator where he plays the populism-inclined like a fiddle and steers them towards pseudo-elite interests. However his position doing this might be becoming unsustainable and it’s not clear where he goes from here, though he certainly seems like a savvy person who may adapt to the swinging moods.
This brings me to the next bit of Dissident Right “drama”, which is not actually drama at all because it led to more of a chorus of unified assent than a mood of disunity. This is the unmasking of the anonymous Dissident Right X account “Lomez” by a bottom-feeding journalist in The Guardian. Choosing to publish this story is completely embarrassing for The Guardian, as it’s impossible to justify it as newsworthy as opposed to merely a petty information-warfare hit job against a sympathetic character. Throngs of accounts joined in the moment to praise Lomez’s good character, but more vehemently his good looks, his athleticism and his handsome features, in a display of public mass sublimated homosexual lust typical of the Dissident Right.
Lomez is going to be an interesting man to watch because not only is he apparently universally liked but he is also running Passage Press, a new book publishing house which is entering into print the blog archives of Yarvin, Steve Sailer, and Nick Land with competent campaigns of generating interest and allure around these controversial (ie racist) writers. In other words, Lomez has the role of being the appointed curator and canonizer of Dissident Right texts — a role which would be coveted by those desiring to determine the movement’s historical destiny.
This strategem of entering into bookselling aligns with a near-future necessity for the Dissident Right to gradually move from online spaces into physical spaces, if it is to continue its growth and normalization. The Dissident Right has historically praised the value of remaining “anon”, specifically in its stewardship under BAP who would always insist that activists remain anonymous. However, people are realizing that Lomez is a far more impressive and charismatic figure now that he has been de-anonymized. This suggests that Lomez is a perfect transitional figure to represent the pivot from online politics into the real world. It is even possible that Lomez, who is sort of an honest elitist but also has a very affable form of politics friendly to “normal” suburban conservatives, could be come a new figurehead to bridge the elitist-populist gap intrinsic to all politics in the manner that BAP was once able to. Dissident Right men clearly have a psychological need to find other men to blindly rally behind and idolize for their politics and Lomez seems as good of a candidate as any to me. Obviously, this may or may not actually come to pass, but all I am saying is I am bullish on this guy.
As far as X app goes, it seems as if it is not in fact going to be a deliberate cooking pot to coalesce the Dissident Right, as Elon seems to be moving away from his intense flirtation with these politics into a organizing around a Reddit-y centrist technophilic “accelerationism” — a regression to the historical mean as far as he is expected to behave. Therefore I expect the Dissident Right to become more algorithmically fragmented and confused on X, while becoming more coherent in real life — and as it does so, probably dispel itself of a lot of its radicalism and settle into a new form of neoconservatism, which would operate by carefully mediating with the interests of racists and paranoiacs rather than centering them.
The left seems to be going through a collapse in a synchronous manner to the Dissident Right, but in a different fashion. As we all know, the main tension within the left is the struggle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly on college campuses.
The boomer Zionist liberals espousing principles of justice their whole lives now endorsing the mass slaughter in Gaza are undoubtedly repulsive in their hypocrisy. However — again — the Zionist elites are incoherent as masters whereas the protestors in the encampments are incoherent as the weak.
As I described myself opining to Mike Crumplar in my recent autofiction in which we visited a pro-Palestine encampment together, the dominant tendency among the pro-Palestine left seems to be a kind of “one struggle thought”, under which Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, and the pro-Palestinian cause are all somehow assimilated into being “basically the same thing” as a solidified “resistance”. The incoherence of this form of politics is papered over, particularly the gross incoherence of unifying Islamic jihad with the demand for enthusiastic displays of the queer lifestyle. It is not actually the case that minority or disempowered groups automatically share the same interests solely by virtue of being minorities.
The right-wing populism might be a form of slave-morality, but what the leftism is coalescing into is actually slave-morality as such — ie there is no principle other than taking side of the weaker party in any conflict, and then encouraging all the weak parties to unify against extant power — essentially a radicalization of Christ’s proclamation that the meek will inherit the earth.
In the past, the left has certainly been vigorous and had principles — Marxism-Leninism obviously has principles, the New Deal coalition did, etc. Even wokeness sort of is principled in a perverse way, being mainly a project of aggressively enforcing linguistic norms to prevent drift from a loose New Left consensus set by media and academic elites. In this sense, the Zionist coalition is more “woke” than the Palestinian coalition, as it hypocritically defends its barbarism by making impossible demands on the Palestinian coalition whereby if their language lapses into anything considered a dog-whistle of an anti-Semitic canard, their entire cause must be held illegitimate. So the woke maneuver belongs to the Zionists now, and as such, the Palestinian coalition is moving even beyond wokeness.
The slave-moralist endorsement of weakness in the left is now so extreme that they now seem to me to be not even able to attain the basic position of strength necessary to produce coherent speech. There are no major leftist figures with identifiable, definitively defined and strong stances, who would for instance be capable of debating someone. As a leftist, you are obliged to be ready to immediately abandon your position and replace it with that of someone weaker than yourself, whose stance is thus axiomatically more legitimate. Things like being physically ugly or having a mental illness are now considered to be “systematic oppression” in leftist ontology, so if someone who’s fat or schizophrenic or is really messed up because they have a terrible life or a lot of trauma gets mad at you and you’re a leftist you have to spend a bunch of time hearing them out and revising your position, thus leading to a dynamic where it’s impossible for any competent person to attain and hold a firm mantle of leadership — I don’t see how there could be a left-wing parallel to the Lomez moment analyzed above anytime soon where some attractive competent intelligent person gains a natural mantle of leadership.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t something very honorable in the pro-Palestinian protestors’ demands for justice and for the USA to act in accordance with its stated principles, but most thoughtful people I talk to seem to be in the awkward position of finding the pro-Palestinian cause in-itself just while simultaneously finding the general tenor and behavior and underlying attitudes of the protestors as profoundly unappealing, even counterproductive.
Also: given that the general tenor of this post is to comment on rising and falling intra-elite factions, it is worth noting that the protesting dynamic on Ivy League campuses seems profoundly embarrassing to the reputations of these campuses due to the actions of both parties. On the side of the Zionist administrators, as already mentioned, the hypocrisy around principles of justice heavily threatens the legitimacy of these institutions. On the side of the protesting students — there is a sense that total embrace of the standpoint of the weak among the left has turned these students into something far removed from the image of capable leadership which elite institutions are in principle intended to forge. The rumor I have heard is that companies are now starting to view a degree from a state school as more value-connoting than an Ivy League degree, given that the former could be expected to have drive and work hard, whereas the latter are decadent rich children who are antipathetic to their own society.
Anyway, given that this form of coalition-building is definitionally only appealing to losers, I don’t expect it to have energy and I think the left will sort of fizzle out into the background of discourse in comparison to recent years when it utterly dominated. However, I don’t expect that the sentiment which gives rise to it will disappear — rather it will become a sort of mere mood which is appealing to a large subset of the population and might continue to organize social life in cities, but won’t really be vigorously political. This brings me to the next part of the analysis.
Given that coalitions are fragmenting, what it is next? Some people predict an overall depoliticization and a “new 90s” in which Americans get along with each other, agree on basic values, and feel optimistic about the future, but this seems ridiculous to me given the sheer amount of escalating crisis vectors in the global situation. There is no reason for people to become apathetic about questions of world history and the role of the state.
Nor does it seem like new coalitions will form to replace the old due to a weird kind of bad ecology which has formed on social media under which it is now not possible for any new culture to arise and become popular. This is to me happening for two reasons 1. pervasiveness of criticism 2. the sheer amount of intelligent people now calculating around how to gain traction in the attention economy, to the point where if a new successful strategy for generating attention emerges, it will be immediately dissected and widely copied, thus becoming ineffective.
The era in which Americans are highly “tribal” and social life is demarcated by signaling allegiance to either the Democrat or Republican coalitions could end. However people will not stop discussing political questions on social media. What could happen is that clusters loosely filter based around pre-political existential moods, which then distinguish themselves through linguistic affect.
The Dissident Right on X perhaps should have ideally remained a pre-political existential mood, as it mainly seems to be focused around exasperation with the language policing of the left in a childish way in which they lash out by saying slurs and does not have any collective material demands which could be turned into policy (with perhaps the exception of the “Claremont conservatives” who seem articulate and serious while being firmly Dissident) but it was organized into an ambitious political coalition by some people who took it really seriously. Conversely, the new thing Elon is curating of “accelerationism” or “techno-optimism” will probably remain an affective register and mood for posting primarily, although some people are already trying to organize flesh-and-blood political groups advocating for policy change under these labels.
One new affective register I see everywhere is what I call “millennial haterism”. This is characterized by
• Leftist orientation
• Media hermeneutics
• Posting in all lowercase
• A desire to show off the speaker’s sophistication, both in an academic and intellectual way but also with cosmopolitan taste in regards to going to the right restaurants and so on
• Consumerist tendencies
• An insistent sense that everything under the sun today is horrible, getting worse, that culture is incapable of producing anything valuable, and seething contempt for anyone who is attempting to break from this status quo by producing new culture
Millennial haterism is maybe the replacement for the old “Chapo left” or “irony left” on X. However the Chapo left was a populist discourse which would falsely affect working-class jargon in a minstrel-like fashion and defined itself via vulgarity. On the other hand, the new millennial hater discourse has an elitist tenor due to its insistence on sophistication. However, it lacks any kind of self-assured possession which may characterize a confident elite speaker but instead is saturated with impotence and resentfulness. The class-analysis here is potentially that if the Thielite-Yarvinites can be said to represent the interests of an ascendant elite associated with tech and industry, the millennial haters represent the interest of a class associated with obsolescing forms of media and bureaucracy which are perhaps soon to be displaced.
The millennial haters were out in full force for the release of the debut book by Honor Levy, a gen-z literary it-girl associated with the Thielite-Yarvinites via her social cliques but who does not seem overtly political herself. (I have not yet read this book but purchased a copy and intend to.) The primary claim to importance of this book seems to be that it is the first full-length book written in an affective register associated with the internet but is now also in print, a new literary style often described as “edgelord”, “gen Z”, and “adderall-brained”.
Matt Gasda has written an intelligent short article about the outpouring of negative sentiment around this book. It is clear that the people who are critical of Levy have not yet read the book and are thus not reacting to its contents. Rather they are reacting to the circumstances which produced Levy’s success thus far — out of a mood of jealousy — gossiping about cliques and public relations agents and which bars people attended. It seems obvious that an ecology of “critics” so focused on interpersonal gossiping and rivalry above reading texts terrible from the perspective of cultivating actual literature, and that something must change.
The millennial affect is to be “anti-Tik Tok” whereas there is a wider pressure towards the Tik Tokification of all media into a single register, even across text — fragmented, dadaist, libidinal, centered in daily experience and the body. The “take economy” which characterized Twitter for so long in the millennial podcasting era seems probably poised to collapse in favor of a new way of speaking. The characteristic of the millennial hater is always to be reposting TikToks onto X with some angry commentary. These people all want to be Adorno and try to say some scathing shit about how some clip of a blonde girl dancing with a Stanley cup really Says A Lot About Our Society — but actually, the successful TikTok creators are usually more savvy and intelligent than these people are and are operating on new registers of play and performativity which are going over these petty critics’ heads.
Is culture truly and irreversibly stuck? No, there are all kinds of opportunities and resources for those with the vision to create new memetico-political assemblages, but it cannot be done through aping the old means. As we are becoming less choked out by weeds, flowers are inevitable to bloom. 🐲💯