Ross Douthat: The Faults Beyond Our Algorithms

The New York Times tells us we have been radicalized pic.twitter.com/sTmThP1pkx

— EMPEROR ‘KINGFISH’ WHITEPILL (@CptBlackPill) June 11, 2019

Ross Douthat:

“In the last month there have been two big profiles, one in this newspaper and one in Washingtonian, of young men who were radicalized into some version of the alt-right and then later abjured far-right politics.

The Washingtonian profile is a mother’s first-person account of watching her 13-year-old son join an extremist internet community and then find his way back out. The Times profile, by my colleague Kevin Roose, follows a 20-something college dropout who has turned to progressive politics after a sojourn as a “tradcon.” Both pieces locate their subjects in a larger sociology, but both are especially concerned with the role of YouTube in accelerating radicalization, and in particular with the way its algorithm, intended to reward videos that prompt intense engagement, is creating a pathway into extremist content by rewarding provocation and letting content purveyors essentially monetize the rabbit hole. …”

The New York Times had a narrative it wanted to push (it is the “far right” that has radicalized, not us) and a political objective in mind when it published the article, which is to say, censor them now!

“And the endpoint of both the Times and Washingtonian profiles, in which personal contact with real-life alt-righters and counterarguments from online left-wingers suffice to pull the main characters away from the far right, suggests that the current Very Online alternative to liberalism is not necessarily built to last. …”

I’ve been here for 18 years now. I joined the cause in 2001 long before the arrival of social media. The same is true of Richard Spencer and other Alt-Right leaders. As dissatisfied as I have become with the movement over the years, it has never occurred to me that mainstream conservatism is the way to go or that woke progressivism is anything but a monstrous ideology.

Lately, I have also become optimistic about our future. I don’t think our time has come yet. I’m looking ahead to the 2020s now. The story of the next decade will be the rise of China, the cascade of job losses in Middle America due to automation and artificial intelligence, the eclipse of the Baby Boomer generation and the GOP’s reckoning with racial diversity. I’m looking forward to seeing how our discredited political establishment manages to navigate all these crises while waging war against us!

“And it’s necessary for them to recognize that the influence of redpillers and white-identitarians reflects their own failure, across the decades of movement-conservative institution building, to create something that seems more compelling to fugitives from liberalism than the Spirit of the Reddit Thread.”

In my view, the future of our movement is doubling down on 1.) critiquing mainstream conservatism, 2.) constructing a better alternative vision to liberalism than we have hitherto offered and 3.) positive accelerationism or crashing the conservative coalition by persuading nationalists to abstain from politics or to vote for select Democrats like Yang and Tulsi.

“Moreover, there is no better example of the technocratic spirit’s moral idiocy than the idea that, with a social crisis in the hinterland and ideological calcification at the heart of educated power, what we need is a better algorithm to prevent people — young men, especially — from getting too restless or rebellious or extreme.”

Well, I agree.

From now on, I’m just going to cite the censorship of social media as proof that there really is a vast Jewish conspiracy against free speech and to rig our politics which is spearheaded by the ADL. Finally, I don’t really see all these old legacy Jewish institutions maintaining their grip on power over the next 25 years as the censorship is a reflection of their weakness and loss of confidence.

Blompf is a con artist and a failed president. The people he represents have changed though. They are all social conservatives and authoritarians now. They are inexorably moving from Right-Libertarianism to Left-Authoritarianism as they are pinched by the loss of social cohesion in their communities and the growth of income inequality. The good news for us is that when you figure out what is driving it (i.e., free-market capitalism) you can see we are only at the beginning of the process.

What is the political establishment going to do with all those millions of White people who are about to lose their jobs? Oh … they’re going to be retrained for the jobs of the future! The free-market will figure it all out!