RadixJournal - The Peacock's Tail

00:00:00.000 Yes, I kind of chose the self-isolation hermit life,

00:00:04.120 but having been on Twitter since the very beginning,

00:00:07.400 I joined in March 2011, so I was very early on Twitter,

00:00:12.300 and I built my entire career on Twitter.

00:00:15.460 If it wasn't of Twitter, I wouldn't have become somewhat known,

00:00:20.340 I wouldn't have attracted the kind of respect that people can give me,

00:00:26.840 not everyone, but certainly a part of the population.

00:00:30.180 And when you do that play of being a controversial thinker,

00:00:33.560 you're betting on the fact that even if 99% of people hate you,

00:00:38.960 there's always going to be enough in that 1% to support you to go forward.

00:00:44.060 And it's a risky bet.

00:00:45.600 When you lose your Twitter account, you lose a big part of that bet.

00:00:50.060 You end up really cancelled on every account, and that is very hard to take.

00:00:56.980 However, I had moved on.

00:00:58.640 I had accepted that I didn't have a Twitter,

00:01:01.560 and I went to produce a smaller show on the Odyssey,

00:01:05.660 and I've been enjoying my life.

00:01:07.400 So it's a bizarre feeling to be back.

00:01:10.480 But certainly, you know, being on Gab for a year,

00:01:13.920 it's another world.

00:01:15.720 There's much less people, much less engagement,

00:01:18.420 and it's good to have a fresh feed that tells me really what's happening

00:01:24.180 in the last hour, rather than having a feed that tells me on Gab

00:01:28.400 what the Christians of America think in the last eight hours.

00:01:33.900 Whereas Twitter gives me a picture of what the world thinks in the last 30 minutes.

00:01:38.960 Right. So a couple of things.

00:01:41.940 First off, Twitter is, in my estimation, the most important social network.

00:01:48.280 Yes.

00:01:48.800 And I think other people recognize that as well.

00:01:52.480 And I might even include YouTube as a social network in this competition,

00:01:57.100 even though Twitter, I believe, has something like 220 million users around the world.

00:02:04.480 So it's dwarfed by Facebook, which is well over a billion.

00:02:09.160 It might be even over two or three billion.

00:02:11.260 I don't know.

00:02:12.420 And there are other social media platforms like Snapchat that have many more users as well.

00:02:18.580 But I think Twitter, because of its public face, I mean, I don't know the last time I read a newspaper

00:02:27.560 where someone quoted Facebook or something like that.

00:02:31.580 But it seems like if I read, say, 10 articles in a mainstream newspaper,

00:02:38.780 two or three of them will have an embedded tweet or reproduce someone's tweet.

00:02:44.700 So there's just this kind of like, are you alive?

00:02:47.980 Do you have a heartbeat quality to Twitter that I think is really remarkable?

00:02:54.140 And I think other people feel this as well.

00:02:56.160 It's not just a kind of like elite platform for news junkies and journalists or whatever.

00:03:01.300 I think it's much bigger than that, actually.

00:03:05.500 But I am curious.

00:03:06.780 It's a public ledger.

00:03:07.520 It is.

00:03:08.340 When you make a public statement, you make it on Twitter.

00:03:11.740 If you make it on Facebook, you're making it to your followers.

00:03:14.880 But that's a specialized thing.

00:03:17.000 And that's where YouTube doesn't have this feeling of public ledger.

00:03:21.580 It's because for YouTube, you need to listen to a whole 20 minutes of someone.

00:03:26.480 And in my case, a whole show of one hour to get to their point.

00:03:30.440 Whereas on Twitter, people will compress to fit that character limit, which is the genius and the disadvantage of Twitter.

00:03:41.280 The character limit is what forces people to compress their statement to the essence so that people know where they stand.

00:03:48.940 And it will stay there forever.

00:03:51.100 A tweet is photographed, screenshot if it's controversial, and there's no getting it away.

00:03:56.400 So what was it like being on Gab?

00:04:00.320 Because I remember being very enthusiastic about Gab in 2017.

00:04:06.760 And I was actually banned from Twitter for about a month in 2017.

00:04:12.800 And it was a big thing.

00:04:14.560 It's kind of forgotten now because I, you know, knock on wood, I think I'm here to stay.

00:04:21.360 And it was just a different time.

00:04:22.920 In the, excuse me, it wasn't 2017, it was the fall of 20, or the fall, winter of 2016.

00:04:29.000 But I was very enthusiastic about Gab because I kind of felt like, well, at least we'll have something.

00:04:35.920 Like this can almost be a universal platform.

00:04:38.460 You can cross post, but this will never go down.

00:04:41.960 And so on.

00:04:42.900 I had, and maybe even it would, you know, outpace Twitter.

00:04:46.460 Who knows?

00:04:47.180 But as the years went on, I didn't use Gab at all.

00:04:53.160 And then seeing the post of Andrew Torba, I found Gab to be just a huge turnoff.

00:05:03.280 And it just seemed to be like an echo chamber where you probably are exchanging comments with some guy who's likely to become a mass shooter.

00:05:17.660 Maybe that's, maybe that's a bit much, but you understand my point.

00:05:22.040 It's just, yeah.

00:05:23.060 There's a kind of like Gab became kind of like a movement, not just an echo chamber, but a kind of weird movement.

00:05:30.180 And so Torba would say all these wildly contradictory things, like we're the ultimate free speech platform and blah, blah, blah.

00:05:37.900 And then he'd also be like, only Christian nationalist allowed, you know, Episcopalians, you're going to get banned or something like, I mean, you know what I mean?

00:05:48.940 And in his anti-Semitism and so on, it just became this kind of like, all right.

00:05:53.720 I mean, I don't want to hang out with you guys, basically.

00:05:57.340 Yeah.

00:05:58.080 Well, I really am respectful of Gab.

00:06:01.820 I appreciate that having a home simply for sanity's sake and for the people who wanted to follow me.

00:06:09.880 And they were on Twitter and they were not seeing me anymore.

00:06:12.340 They wanted to have a spot where they can get the same updates about where I'm at and my show and everything.

00:06:19.720 So I really appreciate Gab and I really think that Gab still has a role.

00:06:24.820 Even if everyone was to be unbanned from Twitter, we must keep Gab because I think we must credit.

00:06:33.320 And I would like to welcome you to this thought because I don't think you've thought about it, but I think you should.

00:06:39.880 Andrew Tarba caused, through leverage, caused the current re-rise of Twitter and the takeover of Elon Musk.

00:06:49.720 Ultimately, if Andrew Tarba is not there with an alternative, it's not the same thing.

00:06:55.900 And it doesn't call for that much of an intervention with that much money for Twitter.

00:07:01.980 And in a way, having this kind of alternative power, in the same way that the existence of Russia kind of makes Western Europe stand together more,

00:07:12.660 the existence of Gab has led to true liberals and free thinkers and freedom lovers to take over Twitter and liberate it.

00:07:23.140 I actually agree with a lot of those sentiments.

00:07:31.120 I think truth social might have played a bigger role or even parlor, but I do think that part of the motivation was to cut off the alternative,

00:07:43.280 which even if it couldn't surpass Twitter, at the very least would take a huge chunk of it away.

00:07:52.800 And I, yeah, I agree with that.

00:07:54.860 Now, all that being said, with all the respect due to Andrew Tarba, it's a, it's torture to be on Gab, to be just on Gab.

00:08:05.040 Because I'm surrounded with people who think way too much like me, who, you know, my kind of humor that I can appreciate would be considered dark humor by normie standard.

00:08:16.820 But on Gab, I'm considered a normie because I want to, because I'm not a proficient user of wood chipper memes and other violent memes.

00:08:29.580 And so you kind of get radicalized in the sense that at this point, after one year of Gab, it takes a really seriously dark joke to make me laugh.

00:08:42.860 I have become totally insensitized.

00:08:46.800 Wow.

00:08:49.360 Yeah, I feel that.

00:08:51.620 I think there was definitely on, on Twitter in 2016.

00:08:56.000 I don't, I don't think this exactly has returned, but there, there was just a, an intoxicating insanity to Twitter.

00:09:06.380 Like I, I would just, you know, Trump would win a primary in Indiana or something.

00:09:12.320 And then you'd see these just totally wild, you know, 80s synth wave plus Japanese anime plus, you know, gas chamber memes.

00:09:25.080 I mean, I'm, I'm not quite endorsing them because I, I do think they're, they are childish and it's probably something we should get away from.

00:09:33.900 But there, when we were all captured by that feeling of winning, there was something just insanely intoxicating about it.

00:09:43.680 And, and just like no boundaries, every envelope will be pushed, you know, just, just total madness that I, you know, again, I look back on it kind of skeptically and maybe even cynically, but there, there was something, there was something going on.

00:10:00.160 It was, it was a moment in time that was pretty remarkable, maybe unique.

00:10:04.860 Like, well, it depends on how you interpret it.

00:10:08.160 If you look at it seriously, well, of course it's, it's not making you look serious if you engage in this kind of mimetic, but it was a time and it was relevant at the time because we were demonstrating our power level in a way, which is a meme in and of itself.

00:10:25.240 But we were showing just how far we can go on the internet that previous models of communication couldn't go there.

00:10:34.960 And in a way, a little bit like the peacock displaying its tail is showing just how long of a tail he can carry while handicapping himself with the difficulty with regards to predation and other difficulties in life and that the increased nutrient needed to feed that tail.

00:10:53.680 But he's doing it to show how strong he is to the female.

00:10:58.240 And I think that a lot of the mimetics around 2016, the edgy stuff was to show, look how much we don't care.

00:11:05.540 Look how much we see cancel culture rising in front of us and we run to it and we say, try me.

00:11:12.680 Yeah, that's an excellent comparison.

00:11:16.060 And, and you could see that in like the alt-right in general, you could see that in Hale Trump and all that kind of stuff.

00:11:21.860 It was just this, uh, throw caution to the wind.

00:11:26.420 You know, I'm such a bad-ass, I can fly mentality.

00:11:30.980 You know, I, not that we might've grown a little bit too big of a tail, uh, but because you, you ultimately, I mean, the peacock's tail is from a strict, hard evolutionary standpoint.

00:11:44.860 It's bad, you know, you could, you're more likely to be killed.

00:11:49.380 But as you say, on a, on a second level of evolution, it's, it's a way of showing your genetic fitness.

00:11:56.100 You're so fit that you can grow this thing.

00:11:59.420 And so I think that there's an equivalent to the legitimate use of the peacock tail.

00:12:04.000 There's an equivalent to the legitimate use of the edginess, which is we were signaling to the system.

00:12:09.880 We're not purchasable.

00:12:11.360 We're going to self, we're kind of going to play scorched art with our own careers and we're not going to be ever purchasable.

00:12:18.500 And you won't ever want to purchase us.

00:12:20.880 And that's a necessary signal sent to the audience.

00:12:25.080 It's a demonstration of courage, which unfortunately has disappeared a lot from current society.

00:12:30.860 You know, when do we hear about courage being a value at all these days?

00:12:35.020 Well, we demonstrated courage back then, and that's why we earned respect.

00:12:39.680 And I think that's the legitimate part of the signal.

00:12:42.880 I agree.

00:12:43.720 So did you just randomly try to reactivate your account or was your account reactivated at the request of Twitter?

00:12:55.300 I'm curious.

00:12:56.000 So I've spent the last year basically refiling an appeal every week.

00:13:01.300 And every week they would tell me an email that says, we've stacked your current appeal on your old appeal because we haven't addressed your old appeal.

00:13:09.920 And the cases seem to be related.

00:13:11.980 So basically it was about detecting, okay, this guy just keeps appealing.

00:13:16.460 We're going to stack the cases.

00:13:18.620 And I started appealing even many times a week in the last month.

00:13:23.020 What I also did is on my show with a small audience, I was telling my people, clip my request to Elon Musk.

00:13:32.000 And I was sending messages to Elon Musk, and they were clipping it and publishing it as Twitter video.

00:13:38.960 Basically, every two or three days, I was complaining and yelling at Elon Musk and telling him that his amnesty general was a fake thing and that as long as I wasn't banned, this was all a lie.

00:13:50.700 So I made a lot of pressure so that he couldn't publicly affirm really that he had given general amnesty until he liberated my account.

00:14:01.960 Now, did he pay attention to those clips?

00:14:04.120 I don't know.

00:14:05.100 But eventually, a week that many clips like this were being shared and retweeted on Twitter, it eventually got unlocked.

00:14:15.880 And I got unlocked at the same time as Stéphane Molyneux.

00:14:19.900 So that makes me think I was maybe part of a batch of libertarians or maybe Twitter had some Canadians, maybe, absolutely.

00:14:30.140 Maybe Twitter had put me in some box and they were waiting to make a decision.

00:14:35.100 But since I'm back on Twitter, I've also published a list of accounts that I would want to be unbanned, about 25 accounts that I've spotted.

00:14:43.640 And I've demanded Elon Musk unbanned them before I declared that amnesty general has been achieved.

00:14:51.040 And already three of them were unbanned 10 hours after I tweeted about it.

00:14:57.960 Interesting.

00:14:58.600 Yeah, I mean, I do think that if Elon is serious, there has to be a kind of, there has to be, not even a general amnesty, there has to be a bill of rights, so to speak.

00:15:14.060 Yes.

00:15:14.440 Where you know why you're banned.

00:15:19.840 And I also think that a permanent, a death sentence effectively is unfair.

00:15:27.440 Absolutely.

00:15:28.160 In the sense that, you know, you can definitely ban someone for, you know, posting a death threat or something.

00:15:34.800 But even in the legal system, if you post, if you threaten someone's life, you know, you might, will probably go to jail for some time, but you are released at some point.

00:15:48.380 There just are certain crimes that don't, most all crimes don't reach the level of the death penalty.

00:15:57.060 And I think that should be taken into account.

00:16:00.540 There just has to be something.

00:16:02.700 What do you think Elon is after?

00:16:05.280 And what's your take on Elon?

00:16:07.260 I might be more cynical than you are.

00:16:10.560 Well, I think he's a genius.

00:16:12.240 And I think he's reawakening an internet that I thought was lost to forever.

00:16:19.440 And so I want to commend this genius.

00:16:23.120 He is creating a form of life, basically.

00:16:27.060 I think that Elon pretty much approaches the net as a biologist.

00:16:31.800 He, you know, he sees life and he didn't feel life anymore on Twitter. 0.79

00:16:37.980 That's when he keeps complaining about butts.

00:16:42.280 Ultimately, we're talking about the creepy line between butts, artificial intelligence and real human beings, which is constantly blurred these days.

00:16:53.880 But Elon Musk didn't feel that there was the normal life of the internet anymore on Twitter.

00:16:59.960 And he reawakened it already.

00:17:02.680 I can feel the difference because even when I was banned, I still had my account.

00:17:07.760 I could browse.

00:17:08.700 I could see what was going on on Twitter.

00:17:10.540 And I think Elon Musk approaches it from a diversity of thought, humanitarian perspective, and ultimately, perhaps a megalomania goal of having an X platform, the software of all software.

00:17:32.140 That may be his ultimate dream, but for now, what he's interested in is reawakening the life of the internet that he has known as someone who was an early adopter of the internet world.

00:17:44.660 Now, of course, this is all subscribed in a global kind of political goal, because he's also admitted recently being a Republican.

00:17:57.400 So I think that what he saw in 2016, as much as the big tech leftist keeps saying we should never redo 2016, never again.

00:18:09.060 I think that Elon is saying, yes, again, let's do it again.

00:18:12.720 Right. I guess I'm a little bit more ambivalent towards doing it again than you are.

00:18:22.880 But I think you were traumatized. I think you carry trauma from 2016. Is that correct?

00:18:30.420 Well, sure. There might be some truth to that.

00:18:34.360 The main thing is that if it's going to be done again, it will be done.

00:18:40.360 We already saw it. It would be like you're up at bat in the big game, and it's the ninth inning.

00:18:51.720 I'm sorry for the American sports metaphor for a French-Canadian, but follow along if you can.

00:18:57.340 You're up at bat and you strike out, and then you go home and you start pretending to hit a home run and swinging away and going to the batting cage and hitting all these homers and imagining that it was real.

00:19:12.240 Because what I mean is that we've seen this thing, and it didn't exactly work.

00:19:21.680 And there was some trauma involved. There were some things that shouldn't be repeated.

00:19:28.800 And I do get the sense from a lot of alt-right Twitter that they desperately want to reinvent 2016.

00:19:36.820 And kind of like a programmer, they're trying to put the pieces back together.

00:19:42.440 It's like we saw this experiment.

00:19:44.340 If you put hydrogen and oxygen together in a tube and you light a match, boom, you get water.

00:19:50.100 So let's reproduce that experiment.

00:19:52.240 Well, that's not how history works. 0.88

00:19:56.520 And I feel like if they reproduce 2016, it would just be some massively dumb Candace Owens version of Ron DeSantis' campaign. 0.99

00:20:08.640 And I almost would rather – yeah, I would obviously rather Joe Biden win again.

00:20:16.000 I think Joe Biden's been pretty good.

00:20:18.240 Absolutely.

00:20:18.640 You would still stand with Joe Biden.

00:20:20.900 Oh, yeah, 100%.

00:20:22.680 Joe Biden – well, we could get into a debate about this if you like.

00:20:27.220 Yeah.

00:20:27.900 But you understand my point.

00:20:29.940 They're trying to reproduce an experiment as if it were in a laboratory, but we're not in a laboratory.

00:20:36.060 You don't reproduce these things. 0.77

00:20:37.560 No, I think you're absolutely right.

00:20:40.020 And if we were to go at it too much from a position of redoing exactly 2016, that would be cringe.

00:20:49.500 And it's a little bit what Donald Trump – it's the same cringe that I feel when Donald Trump goes with his I love America type of speech in 2023, 2022,

00:21:01.160 and where it doesn't kind of catch like the 2016 because we all know it's a pale copy of who he's been and who he's been projecting to be.

00:21:12.000 So if you go just from a nostalgia perspective, it will suck.

00:21:16.140 But I think that the path that Elon is allowing, which is much cleverer than this, is let's make a chaotic situation again and let's see what happens with the world once freed.

00:21:30.600 Because I think that there are certain ingredients that haven't been mixed in properly in 2016.

00:21:38.820 And I think that the redo of the experiment will lead to different results.

00:21:43.280 For example, in 2016, I think that the whole discourse of the Democrats, this kind of radical anti-far right,

00:21:55.160 stemmed and succeeded at making things like Charlottesville really labeled as extremist things.

00:22:04.380 And in a way, this is all constructed.

00:22:07.320 This is a kind of fiction, if you want my opinion.

00:22:11.020 Now, why has this fiction rooted itself into people's mind?

00:22:15.800 It's because of media control.

00:22:17.780 It's because of elitism.

00:22:19.600 And it's because of leftist anger and the anti-Trumpism of them.

00:22:24.760 Now, I think that if you redo some of the ingredients of 2016 again in 2024, and if it's not Trump and it's someone else,

00:22:35.280 and if Elon controls Twitter so much that there is this kind of natural, organic action on Twitter,

00:22:44.100 rather than this controlled discourse and controlled algorithms, I think you might get a different outcome.

00:22:50.920 And I think that simply the fact that people have been desensitized to the idea of white discourse or white positive discourse,

00:23:01.020 at some point, you know, it's not going to trigger them just as much.

00:23:05.060 And I think some of the ideas that didn't quite make it then, they can make it now.

00:23:10.680 Didn't we already see that?

00:23:12.940 I mean, wasn't January 6th a kind of reboot of Charlottesville in a way?

00:23:18.460 I mean, it was not the same people.

00:23:20.280 There's some overlap, say, Fuentes and Baked Alaska and some other characters.

00:23:27.040 But overall, it was different people.

00:23:29.680 But don't you think that was a kind of reboot?

00:23:31.740 That was the final triumph of the optics debate of, like, we're going to wave flags and be patriotic conservatives?

00:23:39.440 No, to the contrary.

00:23:40.840 I see the takeover because the January 6th events occurred under the same type of mediatic elitist control.

00:23:48.280 I think, to the contrary, that the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk is the beginning of the end for this form of control of the discourse,

00:23:59.300 and that things that will happen from here will have a kind of fair window to express themselves through a truly organic population of individuals on Twitter.

00:24:11.040 That's why this fight against bots and is kind of a principle of you have a Twitter account, you're a human, and we won't promote the liberal talking point systematically.

00:24:24.860 All of this creates very fertile ground for innovative stuff to happen, stuff that we can finally look at and be surprised.

00:24:33.120 Because I'll be honest, it's been seven years that I haven't been surprised by the world.

00:24:39.900 Maybe if you put out the yay stuff, because yay kind of came out of nowhere and surprised me.

00:24:46.720 But I want some excitement.

00:24:48.780 I want some things to happen that is not controlled by CNN, MSNBC, and stuff like this.

00:24:56.120 I agree.

00:24:57.400 And I agree with a general positive attitude towards yay, even though it's not what I like or what I would do.

00:25:06.640 I agree there is something just disarming about the love speech.

00:25:14.800 And I love Bibi Netanyahu, but I really love Hitler. 0.89

00:25:19.180 I mean, it was something that captured that crazy Dionysian energy of the alt-right.

00:25:29.820 You might be underestimating the degree to which the alt-right was somewhat synthetic, though.

00:25:36.640 And also, it wasn't just a kind of pure spontaneous order.

00:25:44.220 But anyway, that's maybe something we can go to.

00:25:47.840 Well, that's interesting.

00:25:48.820 Educate me about this.

00:25:51.280 What are you referring to?

00:25:54.000 Well, there's no doubt that many of these bots that you're lamenting, and I agree with you,

00:26:00.120 and Elon has expressed his lament, that many of those kinds of things played into this.

00:26:08.040 And I don't think that the...

00:26:11.680 I mean, the alt-right is gone in a way.

00:26:13.920 I mean, it was a phenomenon of yesterday.

00:26:15.880 I think what's happening now is different and should be distinguished.

00:26:20.500 But there were also...

00:26:24.780 I got sniffs, let's say, of foreign actors being very interested in the alt-right and so on for their own means.

00:26:37.700 So it wasn't just a kind of spontaneous order.

00:26:40.620 You know, it served certain ends.

00:26:43.980 And let's also not forget that all of those, you know, CNN, New York Times, etc.

00:26:50.780 I mean, a lot of the criticisms of me do have a kernel of truth to them, even if they are given in bad faith and kind of silly on some level.

00:27:01.440 This idea that the mainstream media actually loved the alt-right and promoted it.

00:27:09.880 I mean, that was one of the interesting dynamics is that Bannon and, you know, Bannon obviously has his connections.

00:27:19.340 He wanted to get the alt-right as basically the Breitbart comment section.

00:27:26.200 And if they were racist or even anti-Semitic or certainly if they're a misogynist, they were welcome.

00:27:34.940 But it was ultimately kind of serving his end.

00:27:38.160 I mean, as he said famously, you know, Breitbart is the platform for the alt-right.

00:27:43.300 He said that to Sarah Posner.

00:27:45.220 And what I read from that is that he wanted to channel it.

00:27:49.320 And even if you look at like Milo's article on the alt-right, I think from like June of 2016, it was this total whitewash.

00:28:04.780 It was, you know, it didn't get into the stuff that you're interested in of Darwinism and evolution and the future of intelligence, all that kind of stuff.

00:28:17.380 It dispensed with that.

00:28:19.960 I don't think my name was mentioned in it.

00:28:22.540 And it was basically these guys are like paleo conservatives.

00:28:27.460 And it was a whitewash.

00:28:29.240 And it was an attempt to channel that energy.

00:28:33.600 I mean, none of them believed any of this, particularly Milo, who knew everyone in the alt-right.

00:28:38.920 But it was this way of channeling that energy towards Donald Trump, who was at that time, by the midsummer, ultimately the Republican candidate.

00:28:51.160 And I think they are very much trying to do this again in the sense that there's less and less of a differentiation between the mainstream right and the dissident right, if we want to use that term.

00:29:04.720 So back in 2016, the mainstream right had declared war, absolute war on the alt-right.

00:29:13.000 And the alt-right was just like, yeah, bring it on. 0.99

00:29:15.160 You're a cuck. 0.99

00:29:15.660 And that was the dynamic. 1.00

00:29:18.540 And the remarkable thing about it was that Trump won.

00:29:21.220 So Trump did an end run around the – and I'm not talking about like CNN or the New York Times.

00:29:26.980 I think CNN and MSNBC helped Trump immeasurably, in fact, despite the fact that he called them fake news later on.

00:29:34.360 Like indispensable component of his campaigning was going on CNN.

00:29:38.680 But I'll leave that aside for now.

00:29:42.400 The Republican establishment did not want this.

00:29:45.220 They want, you know, multicultural libertarianism or whatever the hell they want.

00:29:51.680 Tax cuts.

00:29:52.200 Yeah, not even libertarianism.

00:29:55.080 Tax cuts for Indians. 1.00

00:29:55.920 Yeah.

00:29:56.600 Who knows?

00:29:58.560 And they declared war, but we kind of won via Trump.

00:30:03.840 But at some point, the dynamic changed.

00:30:07.240 And Hillary Clinton was attacking the alt-right and kind of inflating it while she was attacking it. 1.00

00:30:16.260 And it was like, let's use this.

00:30:19.400 And at this point, I mean, you know, if you go and look on Twitter and someone says like public school teachers are groomers and they want to take away your gas oven and their demons and whatever, you don't know if that is Andrew Anglin or like a Republican in Congress.

00:30:41.940 You don't know if you don't know if you just read those lines.

00:30:45.440 But see, that's white bidding. 0.79

00:30:46.700 That's a victory.

00:30:47.480 Well, there are certain costs to that victory.

00:30:53.240 There are costs, but I see it as a victory that basically every single point of the alt-right in 2016 has been recycled in one form or another.

00:31:05.420 Basically, the alt-right was disembodied and cannibalized and its cadaver was recycled in every possible way.

00:31:15.980 This means first that there was some good stuff there.

00:31:19.160 And it also means that a relatively organic, although I will agree with you, I've seen the butt problem.

00:31:26.080 I was a streamer forever.

00:31:27.500 So, I mean, I've been at the forefront of distinguishing between what's a true audience and what's a fake audience.

00:31:36.020 And through the super chats, in a way, I've learned that the butts don't have much money. 0.99

00:31:41.680 And so eventually you can tire them off.

00:31:46.640 But yeah, so I think there's so much victory to be celebrating.

00:31:50.280 And I see it as much broader than just the question of the evolution of the alt-right toward its death and the current state of this segment of the population.

00:32:00.060 I look at the whole Internet and I see vaccine resistance movement.

00:32:04.620 I see freedom resistance movement.

00:32:06.680 And I feel life in all of this all at the same time.

00:32:10.460 And they were all squashed under the censorship control in the last three to four years.

00:32:15.980 Because it might just be a situation where we have different perspectives and those different strategies.

00:32:24.980 I mean, look, the alt-right was obviously a lot bigger than me.

00:32:30.960 And it was something that I couldn't control.

00:32:33.200 I mean, that's clear.

00:32:34.080 But I genuinely wanted to ride this out-of-control horse in a different direction.

00:32:43.640 And that was impossible.

00:32:45.000 And I don't support the direction that the horse has gone.

00:32:48.720 So, you know, on some level, we just simply have different perspectives on the matter.

00:32:53.160 And that's obviously good.

00:32:54.540 Yeah.

00:32:55.160 We're hashing it out.

00:32:56.360 But even if I did embrace, say, anti-vaccine animus and a lot of this stuff, I would even then be a bit skeptical of Charlie Kirk mouthing all my lines.

00:33:16.740 And, I mean, look at the difference between, say, the alt-right and QAnon.

00:33:22.000 And as I've said, I've stipulated that the alt-right was manufactured in all sort of complicated ways.

00:33:29.820 But I'm going to let that go for now.

00:33:32.700 Look at QAnon in the sense that it was much wilder than the alt-right.

00:33:37.440 And arguably, kind of, you know, the alt-right would do a gas chamber meme with Hillary Clinton or whatever.

00:33:47.160 Or QAnon would organize.

00:33:49.660 Right.

00:33:49.960 Have a holocaust. 0.98

00:33:51.360 Yeah.

00:33:51.540 QAnon would, like, create a gallows for an actual politician. 0.72

00:33:55.640 I mean, there's a different, I mean, it's arguably, like, much worse, much more popular as well.

00:34:03.540 Because the alt-right was kind of like, okay, boomer.

00:34:07.280 I mean, I think, I wouldn't be surprised if the alt-right, like, invented that meme on some level.

00:34:11.460 There was a ton of anti-boomer stuff, almost over the top and stuff I don't support.

00:34:16.240 But anyway, it was antagonistic.

00:34:19.520 The QAnon was able to call upon kind of, like, pre-existing hangups of Republican voters and many non-Republican voters.

00:34:31.480 And it was able to channel it towards the Republican Party.

00:34:35.400 So it was like the alt-right on steroids.

00:34:38.500 But then in this weird way, it was like Alex Jones in a business suit.

00:34:44.740 And what I mean by that is that it was much more just objectively, functionally conformist.

00:34:52.560 Because it said, trust the plan.

00:34:54.480 You're anonymous.

00:34:55.240 Trump is doing it. 0.98

00:34:56.100 Trump's killing all these people in the CIA as we speak. 0.99

00:35:00.460 They're, you know, they're going to be hanged in center of town square. 0.95

00:35:04.640 And so it was a kind of, like, just vote Republican, believe in God, and wave the flag.

00:35:10.460 And that's how we'll win.

00:35:12.420 Even though the ideology was total lunacy and was a kind of weird Christian Gnosticism, it was hyper-conformist in this odd way. 0.70

00:35:24.180 And it also had probably more, no, definitely more casualties of the alt-right.

00:35:29.400 Now, granted, it's a lot bigger.

00:35:31.120 But not only the deaths, like, Ashley Babbitt is someone who's clearly, whether or not you think the shooting of her was justified, and, you know, I could hear arguments the other way.

00:35:43.440 I'm okay with that.

00:35:44.640 Whether or not you think it's justified, there's no question that her mind was warped.

00:35:49.880 I mean, her final words on a live stream were a quotation of a Q drop.

00:35:55.180 Like, there's no question, like, what am I doing here?

00:36:00.000 How did I, this kind of, like, goofy girl from the Air Force or wherever, and has a pool cleaning company, how did I end up invading the Capitol?

00:36:10.280 I mean, that's a remarkable story.

00:36:13.340 And there were kind of, like, more casualties along the way.

00:36:17.020 So I guess I'm just more cynical towards these things.

00:36:20.780 I think these things can be weaponized in ways that are bad.

00:36:25.220 And I'm, I don't know.

00:36:28.680 I feel, I guess maybe also I have a bit of a tendency of, like, yeah, the alt-right, that's so 2016.

00:36:35.240 Like, we've got to move upwards and onwards.

00:36:37.140 Like, no one was praising me for writing alt-right content in 2010.

00:36:44.300 You know, all I got were attacks from the conservative establishment, but I did it.

00:36:48.300 And then there's a point where, you know, I, you know, I'll just say it with the stuff that Mark and I are doing.

00:36:58.720 It's like, you guys are going to be saying this in 2030, whether you like it or not.

00:37:04.900 You're going to, so, like, we've moved on.

00:37:07.640 And when I see people just, like, in a trench or a rut, I just kind of, like, you know, I don't see it as, like, a new freedom awakening or something.

00:37:20.200 Go on.

00:37:20.600 Yeah, I just want to be clear that I'm not suggesting that we should bring back the alt-right.

00:37:28.360 I'm saying let's bring back the ambience of liberty under which something like the alt-right showed up and rose.

00:37:38.360 And let's see what happens then.

00:37:40.240 I'm not saying to bring back even any of the arguments or elements of the alt-right.

00:37:45.120 I'm saying I can finally feel that something will happen, something great, something fun, something challenging for the mind.

00:37:54.360 And I can't wait for it to happen.

00:37:56.480 But it couldn't have happened under the fully controlled social media landscape of the last two years.

00:38:02.820 So that's why I'm cheering.

00:38:04.940 What happens in particular, I don't really care.

00:38:07.760 I want it to be as big and as beautiful and as life-changing because you mentioned the comparison between QAnon.

00:38:14.960 I agree with everything you've said between QAnon and the alt-right.

00:38:18.880 But QAnon will have literally zero cultural impact, whereas the alt-right can be argued to have one of the great, one of the events and one of the groups with the greatest cultural impact in the history of the last few decades on America.

00:38:35.380 I think that's actually true.

00:38:37.880 The only thing QAnon has left us are really bad t-shirts.

00:38:42.720 Yes.

00:38:43.280 Like double XL American flag.

00:38:44.740 And terrible memes.

00:38:46.320 Punisher mask.

00:38:48.300 I can sniff a meme from QAnon.

00:38:52.560 It's terrible.

00:38:53.360 I see them and I'm like, this was written by QAnon boomer.

00:38:59.220 That is definitely true.

RadixJournal - January 13, 2023

The Peacock's Tail

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