* Except if you read the article carefully, it is clear he was never actually a member of ‘the alt-right’. He was always a leftist who just used to watch alt-light youtube videos and who fancied Lauren Southern.
* No one has ever been a “member” of “the alt-right.”
* Imagine having the high ground in every single cultural institution and this is the best psyop you can do.
* The problem is you can’t just copy youtube. You need a payment processor, and financial institutions fold like a cheap suit when the SJWs get on them. So either you don’t allow “far right” material on your youtube clone, giving nobody a reason to use your site, or you have to use a porn payment processor, meaning the playing field is tilted toward youtube before you even get started.
* The idea of analyzing a data dump of his YouTube history is pretty interesting.
These are the four things that Roose lists as beliefs that Cain accepted after watching “far-right decentralized cult YouTube personalities”:
— Western civilization is under threat from Muslim immigrants
— Western civilization is under threat from cultural Marxists
— Innate I.Q. differences explain racial disparities
— Feminism is a dangerous ideology
Cain did not buy into the following ideas:
— Holocaust denial
— The need for a white ethnostate
His far-right binge led Cain to:
— Identify as a traditional conservative committed to old-fashioned gender norms
— Date an evangelical Christian woman
— Debate liberal friends (which implies he had and retained liberal friends)
Rejecting his far-right beliefs led Cain to:
— Buy a gun
— Start his own YouTube channel with left-wing edgy humor and memes
Props to Roose for being specific about the beliefs of his subject and not exaggerating things. The four beliefs that Cain had seem pretty reasonable to me (depending on a couple of definitions). His resulting behavior seems positive, a girlfriend, doubts about World War T, and a viewpoint-diverse social circle. The things he rejected show that he balanced the evidence and made his own decisions. Not bad for “an aimless young man interested in video games.”
On the other hand, becoming a left-wing YouTuber and buying a Glock seem like unfortunate developments. I wish him the best. I don’t think the YouTube gig is going to pay enough to support marriage to his girlfriend (if she is still around).
* Caleb Cain had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
* All the talk about how YouTube’s algorithms “played into the hands” of far-right creators seems to boil down to “their videos were popular! Damn them!”
* Voxday has started unauthorized tv. It is not exactly like youtube, but it does have some great stuff on it. Owen Benjamin is putting his stuff there, David the Good, and medievalist professor Rachel Fulton Brown is creating a medieval history class that will be on there. It is the ground floor beginning for this option so I am looking forward to see how it grows. unauthorized.tv is the website.
* Have you guys ever wondered if one could ever become un-redpilled?
I mean, once you’ve read about and understood the proofs for race realism and IQ differences etc., is it possible to just go back to believing normie things? How does that work?
I’d think that some of these “former alt-right” guys are consciously lying (i.e. they want to get their jobs/social lives/etc. back), while the rest might never have fully understood the thing at all. I don’t know what the proportions are, but I’d guess the majority is in the consciously lying category.
* A ‘radical’ is of course a leftist, the equivalent on the right being ‘reactionary.’
So the title of the piece, ‘The Making of a Youtube Radical,’ is accurate, if unintentionally so.
There’s room to move in denazification, Caleb! Keep up the good work, comrade.
* Here, to my mind, is the money quote from this garbage NYT article:
“But critics and independent researchers say YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens.”
The problem, you see, is that YouTube is giving people what they want and allowing them to follow their own “personalized path.” We can’t have that!
As usual, the NYT is all-in for a revanchist program that puts people like them back in control of the information people are allowed to see.
* This is analogous to how academia shut down race research. You had to get funded by Pioneer and present your paper at American Reconnaissance’s conference and get published by Mankind Quarterly. No one else would touch you. You had to associate with outfits that were easy for the other side to slime, which meant that nobody ever read your research.
* Most white people want hate speech censured, particularly on venues like YouTube, which is essentially an over the air TV network like ABC or NBC with no restrictions to access. Normal, rational white people don’t want their kids exposed to hateful alt-right dogma. They don’t want their kids to go down a rabbit hole of white nationalist indoctrination and radicalization, which has the potential to ruin their lives.
I own Alphabet stock as do many other people I know. As far as I know, none of these people want to own stock in a cesspool of racism and hate speech. There have been very serious campaigns launched by stockholders and advertisers to clean up YouTube. Beyond that, private companies have always been able to police the speech promulgated on their platforms. This is not even a First Amendment issue, as it isn’t the government that is abridging speech, although the First Amendment too has its limits.
Here is the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The alt-righters that style themselves as strict First Amendment absolutists apparently have never read it. Or having read it, don’t understand it. Because all the clauses therein, with the exception of Establishment, are designed to empower the majority with all the tools it needs to destroy a fringe movement like the alt-right.
Freedom of speech works both ways. They can shout you down.
Freedom of the press is lethal to you. There has been a constant drumbeat of anti-alt-right articles, particularly since Charlottesville. Big tech takes notice.
Freedom of assembly means when you assemble, your opponents can assemble. And they tend to greatly outnumber you.
Freedom to petition the government. Well, I don’t have to tell you that governments at all levels are being petitioned and not in your favor.
So there you have it. The First Amendment you people say you are devoted to is actually your worst enemy.
* Don’t make it too complicated.
Alt Right figures are being deplatformed, blackballed from mainstream society, and driven to the financial ruin.
They’re scared and they want to go back to their old boring middle-class lives, pre-Alt Right.
So they feed all sorts of BS to the media about how they “changed.” Hopefully, after all that, their old employer will rehire them and they can go back to how things used to be.
I’d also say that many Alt Right figures (like Lauren Southern) are grifters. With the money drying up (due to pay services boycotting them), they want to move on to their next con. Roosh, for example, has transitioned from Alt Right PUA to Christian preacher.
It’s not about what they believe. It’s about making a living.
* It’s possible for the right to be radicalized and dangerous, but not possible for the left to become radicalized and dangerous: Marcuse would’ve made a great reporter for the NYT.
Conspiracy theories:
-The Rosenbergs were innocent.
-Rosenbergs persecuted because they were Jewish (tho’ prosecutor and judge were Jewish.)
-The King Alfred Plan
-AIDS was invented or propagated by whites to kill blacks.
-A cure for AIDS was avoided to kill gays.
-There was no infiltration of the US gov. by Soviet agents in the 40’s and 50’s
-McCarthy blacklisted Hollywood communists
-Trump colluded with the Russians
-The cult of Hitler reigns supreme, as the right today is a consumed with white supremacism or Nazism or Neo Nazi. The Hitler of the 1940’s never dreamed he would capture the hearts and minds of his arch enemy – the USA – to the extent that he has in 2019, almost 75 years after his death.
-And finally, the left has no conspiracy theories. They mostly happen on the right.
* My point was that he was an aimless, broke young man. He needs to pull himself together and get a job and a relationship.
YouTube is a time sinkhole that only is a living for a small minority, and even for them you’re a sharecropper on someone else’s platform. Google changes the rules on income all the time. The Panda algorithm update and various AdSense changes have put many websites out of business, and that is even before the censorship problems. YouTube is not a career.
As for guns, I have not problem with owning a Glock or 20. But he bought one based on fear of online death threats, which indicate a certain level of paranoia. When people threaten to kill you online, your odds of being killed have increased about 0.00001 percent, the odds of being hit by a meterorite, and mentally healthy people understand that. And there was nothing in the article about his having trained with the weapon. I want lots of people to own lots of guns, but not him. He sounds like a nut.
* I’m really interested in how Cain did a 180 on the belief “that innate I.Q. differences explained racial disparities.” This is usually a one-way ratchet: One you see the light, you never go back.
In the case of William Saletan, I think he is a combination of trying ot walk-back a case of potential career suicide, socially and culturally not wanting to hang with “race realists,” and obfuscation about what he believes on the factual stuff with a touchie feelie layer.
Maybe Cain just walked back the “innate” part, feeling like Turkheimer and company that the gap is wholely or predominantly environmental. Maybe he thinks that a big part of disproportionate representation in high level jobs is a combination of a cognitive gap and discrimination, not solely the former.
Most people who do not believe “that innate I.Q. differences explained racial disparities” won’t even discuss it and don’t want to hear any facts. That state can only survive in the absence of understanding. Once you learn about it, you cannot unsee it. If Cain is engaging with people online on YouTube, I’d be interested in hearing him on this subject.
* Due to some quirk or some unique circumstances, he might have absorbed the “alt-right” point of view without really understanding what it’s based on, and then kept regurgitating it, until, due to some change in personal circumstances (like a new girlfriend) he started to absorb another point of view (again, without much thinking), and started regurgitating it.
I think this is a big part of it: most people just aren’t very deep thinkers and will eventually absorb what they just happen to stumble across. I myself am unfortunately in this category, and that’s something I’m going to try and change.
But I also think it is more subtle than outright social intimidation. There are a lot of guys on the alt-right that don’t have friends, career prospects, lovers, much of a future life in general to go back to, no matter how ardently they “redeem” themselves, and they know it. Social stigma has little meaningful impact for somebody with no social capital and little concrete prospect of gaining any. I don’t think this guy is quite that bad off, but his life doesn’t seem like a particularly happy, successful one in which he stands to lose a lot. Obviously, if we were talking about some L5 dude at Google on the down-low, it’d be another story.
(Perhaps because they largely consist of the types of people who’ve never struggled to attain social connections, the MSM is comically bad at understanding this dynamic, hence their belief that yelling “SHAME” at ever higher decibels is going to eventually do the trick.)
I believe that it is more whether he genuinely feels like he’s a good person. This can be especially important if you are a guy with not a lot going for you in life and you want to turn it all around, as I suspect this guy might be: if you think you are genuinely scum on top of that, you are going to have a really tough time focusing on improving yourself. It messes with your brain processes. There’s a lot of people out there all too willing to conflate favoring restriction immigration numbers with actually *hating* immigrants, or a willingness to be open to the idea that IQ has a biological component with *hating* different races, or a belief that women are deeply different from men with *hating* women, or whatever. I think the more perspective/intelligent people who comment here (Twinkie, PhysicistDave, LTC, among others) show that this is utter nonsense. But there’s no question that the “real” white supremacist contingent on the alt-right, among other undesirables (incels, Holocaust deniers, that kind of thing), definitely helps confirm that in the eyes of the masses, and as I alluded to, most people aren’t particularly deep thinkers, much of our ruling classes included. As an analogy, most humans aren’t wired to be Origen or Avicenna, bent to justify the faith, most are oriented to accept the faith and not question the details too much, while their day-to-day practice is rather hit or miss depending on the circumstances.
The desire to genuinely believe you are a decent person can be very powerful. More powerful than the desire to actually be one, for that matter. To wax Joachim Fest for a bit, lot of the absolute worst movements in history had, at their core, that very dangerous kind of person with a strong but directionless craving for morality.
* I can easily imagine someone believing that blacks have the same innate abilities as whites – I more or less used to believe it myself. But how can you unlearn it, after having read all the contrary evidence? That’s just incomprehensible to me.
One explanation might be that these “ex-alt-right” people never really understood the evidence, so they held those opinions without much evidence. Due to some quirk or some unique circumstances, he might have absorbed the “alt-right” point of view without really understanding what it’s based on, and then kept regurgitating it, until, due to some change in personal circumstances (like a new girlfriend) he started to absorb another point of view (again, without much thinking), and started regurgitating it.
I still don’t understand it much. If you don’t think much about these things, then wouldn’t just absorbing the socially accepted normal point of view make the most sense? How could someone become “alt-right” without thinking a lot about it? Are there pockets in our society where the “alt-right” is the default position, which unthinking people just absorb?
