At last, we are at the end of the series, and fitting that the final two factions be two of the least utility.
I’m sure that I will anger many of my readers for my takes on these topics, as some will be sympathetic to those I criticise. But I don’t want to be audience-captured, and would be doing a disservice if I just played to the crowd rather than giving my actual views.
I do concede that there is a huge problem with the demonisation of healthy masculinity and the promotion of toxic femininity in society today. I also understand why people are distrustful of established scientific narratives, especially when such credentialed authorities have done so little to deserve such trust, for instance their shameful endorsement of draconian Covid restrictions, and most horrifically, transgenderism.
However, the behaviours that these two factions engage in are immensely destructive. There is a difference between being opposed to modern feminism, which I am, and being part of the Manosphere, that is just a pit of sexual resentment that makes the entire Rightosphere look pathetic, crass, and low-status. Conspiracy theorists also make the movement toxic to the high IQ, and are in large part responsible for the crippling lack of Elite Human Capital that plagues the right and why so many people in influential administrative and taste-making positions, who might otherwise be able to be convinced, side with the Woke left.
In order to be ‘high status’, it is very important for a movement to have two things: attractive women and the well-educated, and these two factions seem intent to repel both.
I of course am not seeking to persuade all young women or all of the intellectual class. I know the majority of both groups are a lost cause so long as the Woke regime remains in place and the incentive structure remains towards Woke ideology.
However, that does not have to be a problem if the minority is still large ‘enough’. Elite jobs are competitive, so as a young person on the right, being a minority can be an advantage in terms of being selected for key positions. But when there is virtually no elite capital, and when female movement leaders are being viscerally attacked by rageful men on their own side that are almost goading for them to leave, that is a huge problem.
These two tendencies are the biggest culprits in this enormous self-sabotage. The conspiracy theorist never seeks to ask himself why he believes in this conspiracy and not another. The Manosphere Incel has literally no plan for how the sexes can co-operate except through complaining and hating all women. They almost seem to relish their notoriety and get a kick out of offending the sensibilities of well-educated people. When those well-educated people are Woke is fine, I’m all for offending them even if I’d prefer to persuade them; but when one boasts about how they believe climate change is a hoax and they love polluting the environment, that just needlessly alienates people who could be useful allies.
Anyway, I am obliged to describe them, and so I will do to the best of my ability. I will try to describe some of the key players, what they believe, and then give you reasons why I think both of these don’t do the wider right-wing space any favours.
Manosphere
The Manosphere is an extremely broad grouping that is defined only by its opposition to feminism. There are many subgroups within it; some are religious, some are not. They represent all races and classes of men. But the underlying theme is a criticism of feminism that spirals into a general hatred of women as a whole group.
The term ‘Red-Pill’ outside of ‘The Matrix’ was popularised by the Manosphere, not by Curtis Yarvin, despite them later becoming interwoven with one another. In the Manosphere definition, a man is ‘Red-Pilled’ when he accepts the reality of the dating world being inherently Social Darwinist, and that the feminist view of the sexes being fundamentally the same, and the ‘polite courtesies’ that attractive women tell low-status men such as: ‘oh, you’ll find someone, be yourself’ are all lies.
The Manosphere emphasises broadly accurate statistics that 80% of women go for the top 20% of guys, and that feminism, due to increasing economic and educational parity between men and women, has meant that ‘Chads’ get a highly disproportionate share of sex, because women won’t date or sleep with men lower in status than them (Hypergamy), despite the lie of feminism supporting equality. It’s these double standards, between what feminism claims women want vs what they actually want, that is a core component of the Manosphere.
No doubt, this is all true. It is true that a drive for ‘equity’ between the sexes, meaning ‘sameness in all things’ i.e., obsession over female corporate board representation and the gender pay gap (not actually unequal wages for the same job), has served only to demonise men, and does not take into account the wider distributional range of male value compared to women (no female Mozart because no female Jack the Ripper). It is true that institutions becoming increasingly feminised has meant the rise of safety-ism and harm avoidance within them, as Richard Hanania has described. It is true that there is a ‘sex recession’ particularly amongst men. And it is true that the ‘Longhouse’ exists and is sapping vitality from society with its endless regulation and HR checklists.
But the solutions offered by the Manosphere aren’t real solutions; they just intensify the Gender Wars and turn away women who otherwise might be sympathetic.
Gamergate
I expect many people will be familiar with Gamergate, it was a ‘genesis point’ for virtually the entire online right-wing space, not just the Manosphere, and what kickstarted the ‘Anti-SJW Movement’. I have sometimes remarked that right-wing people of my generation are the ‘Sons of Gamergate’.
To put it very simply, there was this dispute about ‘ethics in game’s journalism’ with some woman doing questionable stuff to get her game a good review. But as somebody who was very much pro-Gamergate, of course that wasn’t what it was really about, despite what we said at the time. It was really about the feminist takeover of gaming culture and society in general.
People like Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) came to prominence in this movement, though he is very much not part of what in the modern day passes for the ‘Manosphere’. He has become a much more intellectual and philosophically-sophisticated figure since the early 2010s however, in many ways reflecting how the anti-SJW movement itself has grown more sophisticated.
A retrospective on Gamergate happened recently on ‘X’. Some of the more ‘wet’ Anti-SJW YouTubers like Shoe0nHead and ChrisRayGun, insisted that it really had only been about ethics in games journalism, and people should stop getting worked up about ‘pronouns in games’. But Gamergate and what it represented was something entirely different to most of their audience; indeed, it was the ‘Red-Pilling’ of so many Zoomer men. The ‘free-speech’ and ‘stop politicising everything’ that some of the original anti-SJWs are still stuck to, rightfully does not wash anymore; we are fully aware of the insidious social signalling tactics that allows the Woke normalise their pollution of our culture, and present us as the politicisers for defending it against them.
Unfortunately, despite the heroic efforts of so many, and a mass cultural movement against the intensification of Wokeism (SJWism as it was known then), the SJWs won. The feminists succeeded in tramping all over gaming culture, purposely making female characters as ugly and as unappealing as possible, almost everywhere, with intensifying and wider-ranging effects on the industry.
I mention Gamergate as a key influence on the Manosphere, having popularised various talking points and allowing it to gain more adherents. However, whilst I think Gamergate was justified, and in fact it should be commemorated as a heroic ‘Lost Cause’, the extreme level of misogyny that the Manosphere promotes is a step up from the relatively innocent, live and let live, 1990s liberalism nostalgia and anti-extremist attitudes of the early anti-SJW movement.
The fact that, despite everything, despite the brief feeling of cultural ascendency, despite the feeling that maybe, just maybe, the pendulum was finally swinging against extreme political correctness, the SJWs not only won, with everything we were concerned about in the early 2010s being turbocharged, but radicalised even further, has understandably led to the further radicalisation of anti-feminism. It is a despairing, broken, nihilistic rage, and justified lust for revenge, that deserves the sympathy of all right-wingers concerned about the desecration of our society.
The Manosphere in its current form is a natural reaction to many men just not being able to take their continued cultural defeats and ritual humiliations in mainstream entertainment any longer. I too feel a sense of stinging betrayal that Gamergate lost; it made me lose my confidence that common sense would prevail without serious political action to root out Wokeism from elite power structures.
But I don’t believe the SJWs, that we now call Woke, can be permanently eradicated from public life, something I constantly wish for, with the Manosphere approach of demonising all women. We must not give into bitterness, but must promote a positive vision that allows both men and women to build a new covenant of co-operation.
Pick-Up Artists
Another subset of the Manosphere, properly a component part rather than just spreading and popularising it like Gamergate, is the relatively mainstream pick-up artistry (PUA) scene. This started in earnest in the 2000s with the publication of Neil Strauss’s 2005 book ‘The Game’. It is a book that gives men tips to enable them to be ‘players’ with women, which has a mixture of good and questionable advice.
The PUA scene grew, with men paying thousands of dollars to learn the ‘secret’ of how to be good with women. Some of these programmes were successful, as an important feature is attracting women is confidence. However, confidence only gets you so far, and if you really are just ugly, there’s unfortunately nothing that can be done.
Some PUA’s genuinely were interested in helping men in the dating arena, and I do believe that they were, and are continuing to do, a great public service. Because of the PUA scene, many can benefit from the numerous dating advice YouTube channels, especially if one has conditions like autism.
However, some of the ideology and sentiment around PUA was toxic. In ‘The Game’, a large part of it was not simply confidence, but making women feel underconfident and inferior to oneself, through the process of ‘negging’. Roosh V was a big advocate in the toxic side of the ‘Red-Pill’ PUA (until he became a fundamentalist Christian, with similar hatred of women). And it’s this belief that attracting women is a zero-sum game, and the sexes are locked in competition, that defines the Manosphere.
The whole idea of ‘negging’, being purposely cruel and doing everything to ‘take a girl off her pedestal’, is just unpleasant. I won’t lie, this attracts some women, as women are often attracted to thugs, but those women are damaged and with no self-respect, and therefore not worth your time. And of course, it only works for a certain type of man, when ugly men tried this, of course women rightfully told them to fuck off.
Incels
A lot of the first Incels (Involuntary Celibates) were people who felt they had been cheated by the Red-Pill PUA’s, and so fell into an online pit of despair and rage at their inability to attract women. Their bitterness always ensured that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, Elliot Roger, who committed a terrorist attack against young women, wasn’t even that bad looking, yet threw away every chance he ever would have had by being ‘Black-Pilled’.
Virtually nobody benefits from the cycle of despair that is the Incel community. If you are one of the ‘natural Incels’, being bitter about it won’t change anything. You may as well be ‘White-Pill’ rather than ‘Black-Pill’, and take pleasure in other areas of life. You could even just save up money to go see an escort; a reason why I am pro-prostitution is that it is able to circumvent Hypergamy for cash, of which the prostitute and client engage in a mutually beneficial exchange.
Yet the entire online right is infected with Incel-type resentment towards women, and it is pushing women who are on our side away, like Alex Kaschuta and Sydney Watson, both of whom have spoken up against it.
On a personal level, I do sympathise, but Incels do themselves no favours by lashing out at women for whom their predicament is not their fault, especially as they often desire women outside their league. Of course, every man wants an attractive girlfriend, but of course those women are going to want somebody equal or above them in value. A lot of this is about physical attractiveness, yes. But life isn’t fair. If you want society to accommodate you and glorify your victimhood, then you should go and join the Woke side. Just like the Woke, Incels push collective guilt onto a group, in this case, attractive women, as a means of venting over their own personal problems.
Before one accuses me of not understanding their predicament, I too am not very successful with women. But I’ve come to realise that all one can do is be the best version of yourself, and no woman is worth changing the core of who you are for. So please, stop friendly firing against right-wing women because they are not ‘pure’ enough for you, a standard which they can never meet, because they are attractive women who as a group you feel resentful towards.
Tatesphere
I actually don’t think all of the ‘Manosphere’ is bad. Jordan Peterson may count as part of it, particularly in his early days. He was outrageously condemned by the liberal feminist establishment as misogynistic, simply for pointing out the fact that men and women are naturally different in terms of their mindset and preferences on average, not just due to ‘oppression’, as well as him seeking to be a role model to young men, whom establishment feminists viewed as undeserving of any sympathy.
I am very critical of Peterson, particularly post-breakdown, but it’s clear that he provided a message of hope and optimism, the polar opposite to those of the Incels, with his book ‘12 Rules for Life’ and various online lectures. What he set out to do was admirable and with good intent.
However, once Jordan Peterson fizzled out, as he became more unstable and prone to outbursts, and therefore a much less appealing figure, the Manosphere took a far more destructive turn. The worst of the Manosphere is personified with people like Andrew Tate.
I don’t believe that Andrew Tate should have been deplatformed, as I think that the Woke-pushed deplatforming is a crime against free speech. In contrast, as per the ‘Paradox of Tolerance’, it should be advocacy of such deplatforming that should be deplatformed. Also, the establishment types screeching how Tate is ‘promoting misogyny to young men online’ fail to see how their day in, day out demonisation of men and masculinity has led to figures like Tate being attractive, especially since Jordan Peterson, the previous iteration, was also demonised. I have no idea whether he’s guilty of what he’s accused of, and he’s clearly an enemy of the regime for promoting certain masculine virtues, so I would be inclined to defend him.
But Andrew Tate is a pimp and a thug. He scams thousands with his ‘Hustlers University’, profits off vulnerable and abused women, gleefully celebrates psychologically and physically abusing women as an example of being a ‘true Chad’, and says that it’s okay for him to sleep around but if a woman does it she’s a whore.
Tate is a truly odious individual in so many ways, but yet by demonising healthy displays of masculinity, the regime has brought people like Tate on itself. His deplatforming only confirms in the minds of so many that he is an underdog deserving of sympathy, and any real arguments against the kind of ‘masculinity’ he promotes are weakened. When you rob a society of healthy masculine role models, Andrew Tate is the result.
Unfortunately, the fact that Andrew Tate has been rewarded with genuine attraction from some women prove that often women in abusive relationships have only themselves to blame. If you as a woman get into a relationship with a man like Andrew Tate, and he abuses you, don’t say you weren’t warned. One should desire a woman with self-respect, not somebody who would ever be prone to falling for men like Tate; he is every father’s worst nightmare for their daughters.
Tucker Carlson having Tate on his X show reveals how the factions of the online right are intermerging in all of the worst ways. But in regards to mass replacement immigration in the West, Scott Greer is correct when he says that ‘Andrew Tate is the Future’. Foreign cultures never held women in the traditional high esteem that the West did, with many non-Europeans prior to the 20th century remarking on the culture of chivalry that was absent in their own societies.
The changing ethnic composition of the West, and the culture that other ethnicities bring along with them, will no doubt transform the culture of the West at large. Unlike the dreams of Sohrab Ahmari and Michael Lind, the ‘multiracial working-class coalition’ is highly unlikely to consist of proud, salt of the earth, community-minded, blue-collar union men, and the return of a romanticised mid-century past. It is far more likely to consist of people like Andrew Tate.
In many ways, being mixed race, he personifies what the ‘new Westerner’, post-demographic shift, has a good chance of looking like, both in terms of physical appearance but also mindset, i.e., the spreading of a Black pimp culture to define the wider society. His conversion to Islam is also hilarious, as he personifies the most thuggish, unpleasant aspects of that society.
But even Andrew Tate is a figure more worthy of respect than Pearl Davis. Pearl Davis is a woman who has made it her life’s calling to demonise other women, saying that all except her are lazy, entitled whores, and that women shouldn’t be able to vote. The fact she is an obvious ‘mid’, to put it mildly, makes her condemnation of other members of her sex all the more pathetic. The psychology of somebody like Pearl is strange, but it’s obvious she’s a truly disturbed woman with serious self-esteem issues, who needs to literally need to sell-out every other woman to make herself feel better. I don’t know who exactly Pearl Davis’ audience is; she’s not attractive enough for it to be men, so it’s probably other disturbed women.
All in all, the ‘Tatesphere’, despite the regime’s attack on Andrew Tate being for terrible, anti-male reasons, is toxic, and is not a positive set of beliefs to instil in young men, though neither is the anti-male propaganda they’re getting from their teachers and wider society.
Conclusion
As I mentioned, I dislike feminism, and recognise it has caused all kinds of modern problems, but the Manosphere does not seem productive.
Mary Harrington discusses how the sexes need to have a strong sense of interdependence and co-operation, and when this doesn’t exist, ‘gender wars’ happen. The Manosphere is a place filled with resentment, despair, and black-pilling. It helps nobody. They do not help themselves, either complaining on the internet or giving money to scumbags. And they make sure to repel women by appearing extremely ‘low-class’.
Black-pilling has no value, true Incels are better off becoming Buddhists or Taoists, and maybe surprisingly get a girlfriend when they least expect it, or maybe not, but still being content with life.
One can say I identify as ‘Purple Pilled’, I accept the reality of the dating market, and think feminism gives a fundamentally false view of male and female nature as it accepts the ‘blank slate’ theory, though I’m willing to work with them when they oppose transgenderism.
However, I think the black-pilling that Incels constantly engage in guarantee that their misery will always be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if they remain incels, there are escorts, and you can find a hobby. Perhaps actually getting involved in developing serious analysis and strategy to overthrow Wokeism, rather than reserving all your resentment for all women, when the vast majority are simply cogs in a machine that has the absolute worst incentive structure, could be a better use of time for the average Incel. But when they engage in the general anti-Woke space, it serves to toxify it and make it a cesspool of sexual resentment.
As mentioned, I also don’t believe that Andrew Tate is a positive role-model for young men. Jordan Peterson’s older work, as well as people like ‘The Roommates’, are much better and more productive. The kind of women who would be attracted to men like Tate are not one’s that are worth your time, they are of low-intelligence and boring.
I’m not saying we should go out of our way to appeal to women by dumbing ourself down, this space will remain a primarily masculine one and in many ways that is a positive. But we shouldn’t go out of our way to repel the women that do share our beliefs. Therefore, as a whole, despite agreeing with some of their sentiments, the Manosphere as a whole is a cesspool.
Conspiracy Theorists
Whilst I do have some good things to say about elements of the Manosphere, certain PUA’s that genuinely seek to improve men’s lives, and older figures that could maybe be considered part of the scene like Jordan Peterson and other self-improvement gurus, as well as of course the memory of Gamergate, I have virtually nothing good to say about the conspiracy theorists. They are an utterly toxic presence in their entirety.
This is the MAGA base, Alex Jones, the anti-vax movement, QAnon, people who go on constantly about Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, people who think that climate change is a hoax, etcetera. Alex Jones is of course the most famous, who can now be seen to be controlled opposition (he, in all his kookiness, is allowed back on X whereas Jared Taylor remains banned). Others include Russell Brand, the cartoonist Ben Garrison, Piers Corbyn, and at the even more looney fringe people like David Icke. People on Substack I would put in this category are eugyppius and Morgthorak the Undead.
The major logical fallacy of conspiracy theories is similar to that of religion. They can’t all be true at once, so why do people believe in anti-vax but not say, that the moon landings were faked, or that entire elite of the West is actually made up of lizards? You are choosing to believe in one conspiracy but not the other. Why?
Here I am going to outline my beliefs about epistemology for the first time, which I will explain in more detail in future articles.
Empirical Falsification
There are a million things that ‘could’ be true, this is the classic ‘problem of induction’ that Francis Bacon, David Hume, and Charles Sanders Pierce all talk about. However, science and rationality is used to point us to what is ‘most likely’ to be true based on the available empirical evidence. This is an epistemology that has served the West well, allowing it to industrialise through the application of science.
William of Ockham, a medieval friar, first developed the principle of ‘Ockham’s Razor’, essential for scientific study, which is that the ‘simplest explanation is the most likely one’. This is a bedrock principle in science; currently established theories need to be tried and tested before complete revisions of our established understanding should happen.
The mindset attached to science when practiced properly, should also be applied to one’s view of society. When it comes to one’s understanding the world, one should not put too much blind trust in any individual or source.
I have been accused of being too trustful of establishment sources, but this isn’t true. Despite my citing of it a lot, it’s clear that Wikipedia has a left-wing bias, relies on sources that are clearly not impartial, and therefore creates a highly establishment-skewed narrative, something Larry Sanger has himself said. And when necessary, I have been scathing of it, like I have been with its coverage of Covid, transgenderism, and Jared Taylor. The level of partisanship on the figure of Donald Trump is also disgraceful, despite not believing everything that comes out of his mouth.
One needs to follow the money. The reason why I struggle to deny climate change, is that the science predates the infiltration of Wokeism into the hard sciences, which only began in earnest in the 2010s, and for decades the incentives were in the ‘opposite’ direction to endlessly downplay it. We can clearly see direct financial links between climate change denial and the fossil fuel industry.
One also needs to cross-reference sources: i.e., a source is more valuable if it comes from people from a perspective closer to the one you’re critiquing, which is why claims of election fraud from Trump himself, with a tendency to never accept electoral defeats, were far less believable than the evidence provided by the Time Magazine story and the Twitter Files, which showed emails from Ro Khanna confirming what had gone on, and being authored by disaffected liberal figures like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi.
A conspiracy theory works on circular reasoning. I am a subscriber to Karl Popper’s theory of ‘Empirical Falsification’, falling under the epistemological ideology of ‘Critical Rationalism’. Empirical falsification the view that in order for something to be scientific, the theory has to be able to be proven wrong; and the scientific community need to admit when such a theory is wrong.
Now, human bias and self-interest will always hinder this, and if such a epistemology was imposed in the 19th century, the Darwinian theory of evolution would never have been accepted. This is why the Hungarian philosopher Imre Lakatos further developed it with ‘Sophisticated Falsificationism’ and the idea of the ‘Research Program’, which posits that, whilst theories can be expansively tested and stuck to despite initial tests seeming to falsify it, a theory that is consistently falsified must be abandoned.
When Karl Popper was talking about pseudoscience, he was talking about stuff like ‘Scientific Socialism’ and the Psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. But a modern example would be transgenderism. The backers of transgender ideology will never allow it to be falsified, the definitions of key terms like ‘gender’, ‘sex’, ‘gender identity’ keep on changing according to convenience to parrot out the narrative, and no matter what the tests show, whether transgenderism is a psychological condition or simply gender expression, all leads back to the same conclusion: transgender identities should be uncritically embraced, including mutilating minors, and ‘non-binary’ is a real identity.
These credentialed scientists are able to justify this by holding to a different epistemology, Thomas Kuhn’s ‘Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962) book. According to Kuhn, epistemology is always changing through ‘Paradigm Shifts’ that supersede ‘Normal Science’, so for instance, empirical falsification should be moved away from as transgenderism represents a Paradigm Shift. However, this leads to effectively an ‘anything goes’ approach, where there are no rules or standards about the scientific process, and always trends towards Epistemological Anarchism.
Hard Science vs Soft Science
Due to the struggle for funding, ‘soft sciences’, aka, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etcetera, always had to bolster themselves as real ‘sciences’, comparable in validity to physics and chemistry. However, as Friedrich Hayek said in the ‘The Counter-Revolution of Science’ (1952), there is a key difference between hard science and soft science, and their intermerging leads to the increasing dilution of hard science towards political ideology.
Hard sciences work on variables that are objective and not subjective, i.e., you are doing a placebo drug test, and the medicine is effective or it isn’t. In physics, the maths adds up, or it doesn’t.
In soft sciences, the definitions and variables change are biased by their very nature, though they are not without value as a means of analysis. For instance, the ‘Democracy Index’, an example of ‘political science’ will use subjective variables on what ‘democracy’ means. When there are formal experiments, for instance with psychology, a large amount of it will fail to be replicated, although psychology is a harder science than purely social sciences like political science, economics, sociology, etcetera. What also needs to be taken into consideration about soft sciences is that their implications for politics are much more immediate, and so there will be incentives to keep coming to a particular conclusion; for instance, a research department studying the ‘effects of racism’ would never publish a report saying that racism isn’t actually a widespread problem, as they would cease to have a purpose for existing. These departments exist to parrot out a certain narrative, and the ‘research’ is just a weaponization of credentialism’.
Now, again, this is how institutions work, and part of human nature. No person is going to want their life’s work to be disproven. However, the way higher education and research is structured means that only one view is constantly promoted.
One could have a public debate between the Critical Race Theorists and Human Biodiversity (HBD) researchers, and have the public interpret the data and arguments for themselves. But it would never happen that way, the former would just call the latter ‘racist’ and would ostracise them from public life, with the backing of the establishment. This is why I do believe that the ‘Paradox of Tolerance’ needs to be reclaimed by the anti-Woke movement to refuse to tolerate Wokeism, which I will discuss in a later article.
So, how does this all relate to conspiracy theories? Conspiracy theorists use circular reasoning. They will not cross-reference sources, only look at sources that confirm their viewpoints. They will take an emotional kneejerk reaction to something, and instead of using Ockham’s Razor to suggest the most likely outcome based on the evidence available, only trust sources that parrot out what they have already decided, what is known as ‘Circular Reasoning’.
Am I perfect in this regard? No. Of course not. I will, consciously or unconsciously, interpret the data to come to a certain viewpoint. But I will try not to. I mostly use establishment sources UNLESS there is significant evidence for why the establishment cannot be trusted, in accordance with Ockham’s Razor. Whilst some may interpret this as adhering to establishment epistemology, I do it to stop myself from jumping straight into the conspiracy deep-end, for there is an infinite amount of stuff that ‘could’ be true, and some source, somewhere, will say it is.
Like religion, there are an infinite amount of conspiracy theories that ‘could’ be true, even if extremely unlikely. The Moon Landings could indeed have been an elaborate plot… it’s highly unlikely, hard to see the benefits from the key actors, and actually going to the Moon would be far easier than keeping something like this a secret, but, with my limited knowledge, it’s ‘possible’. But it’s not the ‘most likely’ truth, and somebody who thinks rationally should base their worldview on what is ‘most likely’.
I would say that the hard sciences are still fairly robust, even though the infiltration of Wokeism into the hard sciences since 2010 has weakened them, and transgender ‘‘‘medicine’’’ an obvious exception, as it is based on unfalsifiable principles. But because hard science can generally be trusted, particularly research from before the 2010s. I don’t believe anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and think that the Covid vaccines were indeed a great technological marvel that saved lives (even though probably shouldn’t have been used on very small children who’s risk of Covid was minimal), and I also support the science of anthropogenic climate change, though what the government chooses to take from that is not the domain of science.
When it comes to ‘human behaviour’ however, for instance, modelling Covid lockdown scenarios or economics, it becomes extremely difficult and will always be biased. They are predicting future events, and it is of course impossible to predict human behaviour in its entirety, particularly something as complex as behaviour in a pandemic or economic activity.
But these ‘experts’ will then interpret the models and data differently, and take the role of politicians. Pro-lockdown epidemiologists and anti-lockdown epidemiologists like Anders Tegnell, Jay Bhattachyra, Sunetra Gupta, and Mark Woolhouse were all qualified medical professionals, but came to wildly different conclusions based on how they interpreted the data, with these being essentially political questions. Anti-lockdown epidemiologists stuck to the actual data and were not anti-vax. Special interests funded both fairly equally; yes, the anti-lockdowners were funded by think-tanks linked to climate denial and libertarianism, but the pro-lockdowners were funded by left-wing NGOs and had the support of Big Tech, who made a killing off of Covid due to the shift online. These were political choices and questions of values, and the West chose to lock up the young to give the elderly a few more years of life, to devastating results, as is now proven without a shadow of a doubt by comparing the excess death rates of Sweden and Norway across the 3-year period.
However, the bottom line is that these were subjective interpretations of imprecise models with a whole lot of unknowable variables. The Neil Ferguson models from Imperial College London presented to the British government did not even take into account behaviour change from a pandemic, instead the media hyped up the ‘worst case scenarios’.
But something like anti-vax is different. It is based on a ‘feeling’ of something being ‘unnatural’, and understandable and justified distrust of the government during Covid. Using a whole bunch of epistemological methods, one can see through the anti-vax movement. Andrew Wakefield, the founder of the modern anti-vax movement, was known to have had financial interests in developing his own, supposedly ‘safe’ vaccines. One can clearly see the correlation between MMR vaccination and the presence of those diseases in the community. Relying on anecdotal evidence about side-effects of vaccines, whilst they should not be completely discounted, are similar to the Standpoint Epistemology of the Woke, that also shuns empirical data and statistics for anecdotes.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is not a plot for a ‘New World Order’. Most of it is actually very boring. Klaus Schwab certainly has the look of Blofeld/Emperor Palpatine, but he actually isn’t part of the Woke vanguard; he even praised Javier Milei, which suggests that amongst the Davos elite there is some flexibility on cultural issues and they aren’t fanatically pro-Woke. They are Woke mostly under duress because they need the managerial class to operate their huge operations, and can only recruit them though credentialed universities, which are Woke.
But conspiratorial elements on the Right just take little soundbites and make it part of a globalist plot, even the most mundane things like ‘15 Minute Cities’. I would argue that the United Nations is a more destructive force in pushing Wokeism than the WEF, the latter of which could be ‘flipped’ quite easily if Wokeism was proven to hurt the bottom line.
Effect of Conspiracist Elements on the Right
In conclusion, anti-vax, climate change denial, hysteria around GMOs and artificial meat, and more wacky conspiracies like the Moon Landings being faked (as people have mentioned, the Moon Landings should be seen as a triumph for the right, all White men and pioneered by Nazi-scientist Wernher von Braun), make right-wing politics toxic to the high IQ and cause the immense elite human capital problem we have, and are also just generally destructive for humanity.
Refusing vaccination causes mass deaths from preventable diseases, climate change destroys the beauty of the natural world, and hysteria around GMOs and artificial meat means we are prevented from utilising technologies that could rapidly increase food production whilst preventing destruction of the environment.
These tendencies, whilst built on an understandable distrust of certain establishment narratives (Wokeism and Covid mandates), add NOTHING of value. It is a shame that, as Scott Greer has said, if there was any faction of the online right that was dominant, it would be the ‘Conspiracy’ faction, with people like Tucker Carlson echoing some of their moronic talking points as he becomes increasingly audience captured.
Conclusion
So, these are some of the most toxic tendencies I’ve spoken about in my opinion, yet because they connect to the uneducated, low-IQ base of the Right, they are probably the two most influential. However, whilst engaging in this stuff may get you short-term popularity, it is a deeply destructive strategy because it repels two groups that are absolutely crucial for a movement’s success: attractive women and the well educated.
It may seem I’m being snobbish, and yes, maybe that’s true. I have intellectual and aesthetic standards that I want to see, and these groups just dumb-down the entire space. These low-IQ followers attracted to this stuff need to be guided in the right direction by people who know better. Elites are inevitable, so they should be good ones rather than pimps like Andrew Tate or lunatics like Alex Jones.
Of course, the online space is a democracy, and people who say what the people want to hear will get to be elites in that space. Whilst Elon’s liberation of Twitter was a godsend in many ways, it did allow the dumbest voices to take up airtime, whereas in the censorship regime more sophisticated analysis needed to be offered to get past the censors. But this is why I’m on board with Walt Bismarck’s project to create a separate movement adjacent to the MAGA base.
We need an adjacent movement which excludes these tendencies entirely, in order to appeal to high value groups who can actually take over the institutions and replace the Woke regime.
What’s so frustrating is that the facts are on our side, so these conspiratorial elements are just so completely unnecessary. They have no benefit.
I am not at all hostile to the working-class, I have a very high regard for the traditional image of the blue collar worker, that somebody like Lee Anderson or Paul Embery personifies. But this isn’t the base of these two movements, and unfortunately, the ‘Old Left’ image of the working-class is a dying class and culture, of which a backwards-facing, romanticised image exists.
The people subscribing to these movements tend to be people with very little to lose, what Marx would call the ‘lumpenproletariat’. Ultra-individualistic, paranoid, no sense of collective responsibility, and not very intelligent. If one looks at incels or conspiracy theorists, their dysgenic character becomes clear.
By all means, take the votes of these people, and work alongside them when common enemies arise. But they should never be able to set the policy and direction of the movement. Allow their grievance to be channelled into something productive. Much of the core sentiment is justified, but if left on its own devices, without a ‘vanguard’, it will not be channelled well and will only manage to repel the kinds of people who could build an alternative.
This series is finally completed. It has been immensely successful and has made me a semi-influential figure in the Dissident Right space, for which I entirely owe the New Right Poast for their mentions. I hope to provide insightful content to those who have subscribed and followed, even if I will give my opinions and they may disagree.
Conspiracy Theorists tend to be environmentally sensitive, but unable to epistemologically explain their phenomenon. Under a humble elite, they would be guided towards an answer that matches the facts to their senses.
Take the Moon Landing Hoax, for example: Did we land on the moon? Probably, by the skin of our teeth. But did we engage in delivering the promises of the Moon Landing? absolutely not. There was an implicit promise that our society would explore and conquer where no man had gone before; There was a real frontier spirit. The inability/unwillingness to go further proves the moon landing to be a hoax.
It was something that was there to trick and deceive the public and all discussions about the moon landing center on the point of “why can’t we go back? Why can’t we go forward?”
This meme leads people to look closer and find incongruities in us even going in the first place.
Conspiracy Theories, when not epistemologically true (occasionally they are), tend towards being mimetically true. The confusion between memes and epistemology lies at the heart of conspiracy. Yes, congress and Hollywood is made up of lizard men, but is it a meme or a fact? Yes, the world has been flattened by rationalism, but is the earth’s real state, a meme or a fact? Yes, there is a cabal of pedophiles running the world, but are these 4chan posts, memes or facts?
In Post-Modernism, The discrimination is tougher than you might think, which is why humility is the main virtue that I would like to see out of anyone who is attempting, especially because memes have a tendency on a long enough time scale to create facts.
I read your section on the manosphere with great interest, as I plan to put something about feminism on substack in the near future and there was a lot of information I was not familiar with (never having spent any time with the manosphere). However, I wondered about your statement describing Roosh V as " fundamentalist Christian, with similar hatred of women."
There are many different sorts of Christians - they are people too you know, and come in different shades, sizes and colors, some not so appealing - but I don't see how anyone serious about the Bible could be guilty of hatred of women. The Bible teaches that God created us male and female - are we to despise what God has made? Paul also points out that men and women both need each other - without women we would not be here ("Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man" I Corinthians 1:11). True, the Bible has teachings about women at home and in the church that are not agreeable to most people today, but that is not hatred.
Plus, I do not thing the hard sciences have anything to say about the existence or non-existence of God, the reality of a life after death, and so on. Science is confined to the material plane, but there are spiritual realities and other ways of being and knowing apart from the sciences. The fact that people disagree about the nature of God does not constitute and argument against his existence in some form or another.