I no longer recall the first time I heard about Mencius Moldbug. I want to say it was seven or eight years ago, but I’m not sure. What I recall is someone asking me what I thought of Mencius Moldbug and not having the slightest idea what was meant by the question. I was soon reading through his blog, skimming mostly. The person who had asked about it was younger than me and a fan of Moldbug, so I felt obliged to thank him for the link and say some nice things about it, even though it was really not my thing.
My first impression was that it was for young males who were part of third wave internet culture and gaming. By third wave, I mean those who came along with mobile computing and immersive on-line gaming. The second wave were the folks who came along with the PC revolution. The first wave were the people who built their own computers, started a dial-up BBS and enjoyed hours of free long distance, courtesy of phone phreaking. I fall somewhere between the first wave and the second wave.
I would read the Moldbug blog a few times a month and maybe read some of the other guys in the NRx thing when I had the time or interest. I’m guessing that peak neo-reaction was half a dozen years ago. That seems like when the term was popping up all over the internet, associated with the phrase Dark Enlightenment, which I think was coined by Nick Land. Since then many of the bloggers big in the movement have closed up shop and the terminology has mostly fallen out of usage. NRx seems to be dead.
For those unfamiliar with Moldbug, looking to kill a few days reading his work, his blog posts are archived here. I’ll caution you that they tend to be long and meandering, bordering on stream of consciousness. For a shorter and more concise reading of Moldbug and the core of NRx, you can read this retrospective at Thermodor. People in the movement may quibble, but it strikes me as a clean and concise summary of Moldbug and the NRx movement in general. The criticism at the end is also worth reading.
As far as criticism, the most potent and accurate is the simple observation that Moldbugism, and to a lesser extent NRx, was not able to outlive its creator. Once Curtis Yarvin gave up blogging, the internet movement he created quickly faded away. Maybe a better way to state it is that it was quickly gobbled up by the alt-right, alt-lite and other manifestations of dissident politics. My guess is a fair share of his fans simply went back to the safety of techno-libertarianism. Regardless, Moldbugism is no longer a thing.
As an aside, an indication of just how out of touch and superfluous the Buckley Right has become is the fact that they never felt the need to disavow NRx. In fact, they were largely unaware of its existence. Instead they were still obsessed with rounding up the remaining paleocons and casting them into the void. National Review finally got around to addressing neo-reaction and Moldbug, when their in-house homosexual took on the topic, confusing a bunch of things, in the process of trying to make sense of Buckley Conservatism.
Anyway, there are two possible explanations for the end of Moldbugism. One is that his arguments were not original, just stated in a new way. His assertion that Progressivism has its roots in Puritanism, for example, is not new. I was making that point 25 years ago in Usenet debates and I know I’m not the first guy to notice it. His criticisms of democracy have been around since the Enlightenment. Old ideas restated in modern terms eventually just fade into the tapestry of the intellectual movement that spawned them.
The other possibility is that the people attracted to Moldbug’s ideas, including Moldbug, came from the Left ideologically. Young people raised on Progressivism were attracted by the subversiveness of these old ideas. They moved right into Left-libertarianism, then Right-libertarianism and then eventually dissident politics of various flavors. Put another way, the Dark Enlightenment guys were merely going through a phase as they first experienced the outlawed ideas from the outlawed past. Now, they are onto other things.
Moving from libertarianism, often Left-libertarianism to the alt-right is something you hear a lot on the alt-right. Mike Enoch, of The Right Stuff, has talked about his political evolution and it matches this pattern. He was in a Trotsky movement at one point, then moved through libertarianism and eventually to the alt-right. Maybe neo-reaction is like withdrawing from heroin. Going cold-turkey from Progressivism leads to all sorts of reactions, but eventually they fade and the patient can begin a normal intellectual life.
In this regard, Moldbugism should be a cautionary tale for those into dissident politics, particularly the alt-right. Discovering outlawed ideas from a bygone era is liberating and exciting, but there is a reason that those ideas were outlawed. The reason we find ourselves in a Progressive theocracy, is that those old guys with all of their sound ideas about human nature, lost the fight with the Left. Studying their failure will probably count for more in the coming fights than digesting and internalizing their philosophy.
Another angle here is that Moldbugism never got much traction from paleocons, paleo-libertarians and Southern populists. If like me, you were a Buchanan man in the 90’s, NRx felt more like an echo than a calling. Further, neocameralism has a whiff of libertarian dreamer about it that biological realists find ridiculous. Therefore, the more potent minds in dissident politics were never attracted to Moldbug. Long after many NRx bloggers were onto other things, guys like Steve Sailer are still going strong.
In the end, Curtis Yarvin should be remembered as an important part of this thing, if for no other reason than he normalized and made interesting, the critique of the prevailing orthodoxy for a generation of smart people. By calling into question some of the shibboleths of the ruling elite, he helped make it possible to question all of them, including their most cherished beliefs. Whether or not Yarvin gets all the credit for that is debatable, but he was part of an effort to get smart people asking questions about this stuff.
The lesson of the Left’s dominance is that they institutionalized a critique of Western civilization. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, it has been hip and cool to question the culture and customs of the West. Like water dripping on a stone for a century, the Left has eroded Western civilization with an endless stream of small challenges. If this counter-culture we see forming up is going to succeed, it will have to develop a culture of endlessly questioning and challenging the prevailing orthodoxy.
I didn’t discover Moldbug or most of NRx, Neoreaction, or other variants until they had almost run their course. Still had a positive effect on me- I can’t view US, “FREEDOM!” or “DEMOCRACY!” propaganda through quite the same lens and I can see when they start to change their semantic content.
Moldbug’s system did strike me as the most peculiar possible fusion of the authoritarian and the libertarian, the corporatist and the statist. Strangely internally logical but unworkable. Though not more so than the theoretical forms of any other political philosophy.
I wouldn’t even say I would think his system even desirable.
But to be reminded that things change was useful.
Moldbug broke my conditioning. I know longer respond to pro-US propaganda.
I will be forever grateful.
I tried his work
General assessment
Moldbug talked too much and said too little
You’re probably too low IQ to be commenting about this. And clearly very ignorant.
One example: interesting how writing which would have been considered accessible to the average reader in 1890 is “meandering” to someone used to a 4th grade reading level like you.
The inane belief that NRx has gone away is evidence you need to write less and read more.
Not to be disrespectful, intelligence is unrelated to morality and knowledge is over-rated. You’re dumb and far too liberal still but you have the right direction. But your garbage may be misleading to your readers.
Is this a joke?
Curtis, is that you? If so, I hope that the wife and kids are well!
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Is Steorts the only gay man at NR? I sometimes wonder about KW.
Asexual as nothing can stick out of or get through all that fat.
One of Moldbug’s many assertions was that the Neoreactive movement would only see success when ambitious young elite Brahmins (or was it Optimates? It’s been a while since I read it) joined up.
And that they would do this partly as a way to signal their higher intelligence than the currently ruling prog elite, and because doing so would be a shortcut to power that bypassed the institutionalized prog system.
If one of his goals was to make anti-Prog thinking a marker of higher status, then his writings have been a roaring success.
Think of all the things that an ambitious young intellectual wants people to think he is: fearsomely intelligent, tremendously well-read, esoterically knowledgable, intimidatingly verbose, and most of all super-duper EDGY. Like so edgy that Boomer college professors pee in their pants at what you say.
Moldbug showed how a smart guy (it’s always going to be a guy) could better be all those things on the neoreactive, Carlyle-reading Right than on the tired, institutionalized, professionalized Left.
The hyper-smart shitlords sprinkled among the alt-right are at least partially due to this revelation. And though the high-status Brahmin/Optimates haven’t started defecting to the alt-right yet, when they inevitably do Moldbug will have helped blaze their way.
Good stuff- it reflects on Z’s deep insight that that which gives the ruling class legitmacy may be the essential fulcrum of the society’s tone.
Libertarianism is obviously nonsense, anarchy with markets whose integrity is enforced by — what, exactly?
In my view, the Leftist culture of critique is inevitable because the core of the Left is individualism. That is: each individual wants to be equal to those above them.
For that reason, they destroy anything that competes with the individual, including but not limited to religion, culture, heritage, caste (!!!), sex, age, identity and civilization itself.
Hmmm… thoughtful.
Maybe this will help me understand why that whole self-organizing dynamic of “life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness” is such a crock. It’ll never lead to anything good, I’m sure.
It is a mistake to analyze Moldbug’s effect as a “movement”. He was not looking for mass impact, and he did not achieve it. (Indeed, as you note his ouvre is intentionally gated to exclude people with short attention spans.) He was looking, to the extent he had goals beyond entertaining himself, to affect the elite. And as to that effect, well, like the effect of the French Revolution I’d say it’s too soon to say. Just about every month now, there is a new piece out on some highbrow magazine damning him.
I don’t think Curt was trying to convert any elites of the leftoid persuasion; more likely he was trying to reach some already at least partially red-pilled individuals educated and attentive enough to tweak their brains and get some kind of conversation going on about those issues. In that regard I think he was pretty successful.
I think you’re mostly right about Moldbug. My one quibble, and this is probably because I’ve read most all of his blog, is that you don’t credit him for exposing communism and communists in America. I don’t think anyone else has as well chronicled the pre-war collusion and alliance between the US government, the US left, and the Soviet Union.
I am an admitted fanboy here, but I maintain this is the best blog post in the history of blogging:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare.html
If you only ever read one blog post in your life, read that one.
“When the story of the 20th century is told in its proper, reactionary light, international communism is anything but a grievance of which Americans may complain. Rather, it’s a crime for which we have yet to repent. Since America is a communist country, the original communist country, and the most powerful and important of communist countries, the crimes of communism are *our* crimes.”
Moldbug was an outstanding diagnostician of our current disease, and I still enjoy going back and reading his old posts, especially the earlier ones. Unfortunately, his remedy was pure quackery. He remained a libertarian at heart, and it showed. Moldbug was smart enough to see that AnCap couldn’t possibly work as stated, so he attached a territorial component to it to make it slightly more plausible, and called it “Patchwork”, but it was still obvious nonsense, with its assumption that transactionalism and the cash nexus were enough to overcome the human desire for political power. At some level, I think that he knew this, which is why he quit blogging. But he was an important figure in the development of the Alt-Right, and I wish him all the best.
I have heard that every good author has one good story in him, maybe two or three, and the rest of it is covering the same ground over and over again. Perhaps it applies to bloggers as well, and a perceptive blogger realizes when he has said his piece, and it is then time to close up shop and move on to the next thing. Steven den Beste comes to mind. The chops earned from his political blogging encouraged me to pay attention to his anime commentaries, and introduced me to some things I liked, in a genre I would never have looked at otherwise.
Loved den Beste. But I don’t believe he shut down political blogging after having said his piece. He was getting drawn into some vicious online disputes and that, combined with health challenges, prompted him to focus on something he could enjoy.
Moldbug’s post may be pretty good but the best chronicle of the pre-war collusion and alliance between the US government, the US left, and the Soviet Union is Diana West’s book American Betrayal
Thanks- I see Russia’s (((Soviet))) overthrow as the ‘bad cop’ to camoflauge the quiet infiltration of the Anglosphere as the ‘good cop’.
Harnessing Empires to own goals- I cannot help but admire such superior strategy.
One so long lasting and well-worn can only be instinctive, the instinct of chauvinsm and self-belief.
Born to rule and to be resurrected in a perfected world, as the religion says.
Such vision!
Update: Judas Preist. No wonder I never read such meandering, Talmudic tripe. Moldbug is posing for the retired-on-government-pension class, our leisured class.
Good grief, get to the point.
Who has time for this?
Give me Zman’s severe Jesuitical clarity any day. Ta, Moldy!
I read all of UR (as it then was) over night watch duty shifts on an Iraq deployment in 2007, which started my journey towards loss of faith in Western ideology and observance of Judaism.
The most parsimonious explanation of the decline of Moldbuggery is:
1) His posts were intentionally long, and written in a style that takes effort to follow, because he was targeting readers of a high minimum intelligence.
2) As his ideas filtered their way down the IQ gradient via PUA and mainstream alt-right blogs (I recall Ace of Spades etc were popular back then), they became more popular and dumbed down.
3) NRx then hit Eternal September-the dumbshits hit critical mass, and it was no longer profitable to post really thoughtful long form stuff-most of the target audience was no longer capable of reading it, or interested. NRx got bigger and bigger, and dumber and dumber, to the point where it came to resemble the FoxNews scene from Idiocracy, culminating with the 2016 Meme Wars For President Camacho.
4) His blogging work done, his ideas having gone from obscure and barely phraseable heresy to mainstream heresy verging on accepted truth in many circles, Yarvin moved on to Urbit as a means of political expression.
>>The lesson of the Left’s dominance is that they institutionalized a critique of Western civilization. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, it has been hip and cool to question the culture and customs of the West. Like water dripping on a stone for a century, the Left has eroded Western civilization with an endless stream of small challenges. If this counter-culture we see forming up is going to succeed, it will have to develop a culture of endlessly questioning and challenging the prevailing orthodoxy.
I would argue that the lesson of the left’s dominance is that free shit carries the day. The left put in place a positive political agenda that provided basic economic security to the masses–social security, medicare, medicaid, SSDI, SNAP, HUD, etc. Pacify the masses and you can raise a lot of hell in the cultural space without much resistance.
Large numbers of blacks hold culturally conservative views but 95% of them still pull the D lever in the voting booth for economic reasons (Audacious Epigone has a great data-driven post on this), thereby enabling the cultural rot they purport to disdain. Ditto for Hispanics, lower-class whites, and single white women, aka the Democratic Coalition. Free shit carries the day.
This is entirely rational behavior. If you are worried about your kids eating because their deadbeat baby daddies are behind on child support then you probably don’t have the time or inclination to worry about whether the SJW English faculty at State U is ditching portions of the Western Literary Canon.
The biggest downfall of the alt-right (or dissident right or neoreaction) movement is that they lack a positive political agenda. What do they want? What type of society do they propose? Is anything they want achievable?
I’ve been reading the dissident right for almost 10 years and I have never seen a clearly articulated vision for America in accordance with their worldview. Without a positive political agenda, these movements start to look more like old white men shouting “get off my lawn.” That’s why the movements flame out in short order.
Guest… I’d argue it’s not the free shit… it’s telling folks they are a victim and carving out special stuff just for them. They get to say stuff others can’t say and get to organize “their kind”. Also, the education system, via the left, actively attacked western civ and othered it. Zman’s point is dead-on here.
So if you’re hip and cool and in-the-know… you know that everything that western civ gained was on the backs of minorities. Ill gotten gains. If not for the lash and slavery, Africa would be a great nation of industry and finance… but no… they were tricked from day one not to believe in themselves and they were tricked into Christianity and western ways..to their eternal inability to live for tomorrow and invest. No , live for today and do what you need to do to get by… today… because because and western civ is bad. Why, after all these years is Haiti such a pathetic hell-hole? ( Whitey did it )
Guards and overseers always get privileges.
While it has been hip and cool to question f Western civilization, the specific institutions targeted have changed. Once an institution is fully infected, goes from being a target of ridicule to a revered source of truth and justice.
Examples include the Episcopal Church, the IRS, Ivy League Universities, and the United nations.
The truth is that most of these alt right “intellectuals” are white men terrified of a world where white men are not given preferential treatment
Leonard Pitts writes frequently on this topic. He points out that white men have had 500 years of affirmative action
One good thing is that the demographics are changing and white men (their kind re anyway) will see justice done
For many American blacks, especially elite blacks like the Obamas, nothing exists outside their own blackness. Their blackness is endlessly interesting, endlessly fascinating to them. They can never get enough of thinking about it, talking about it, reading and writing about it.
If they write a book, it’s about their blackness: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, for example. If they write a college paper, it’s about their blackness: Mrs Obama’s Princeton thesis, for example, the seven words of whose title contain the word “black” twice. If they read a book, it’s about blackness. I’ve spent many, many hours riding the New York subway. Sitting next to a black person who’s reading a book, I take a peek: two times out of three it’s some black author writing about blackness.
Black black blackety-blackety-black. It fills their consciousness and absorbs their attention. What on earth must it be like to so trapped like that, such a prisoner of your own skin? I can’t imagine. I guess, just as the T-shirt slogan says: It’s a black thing; I wouldn’t understand.
–John Derbyshire
Derb has their number. 9/10 black writers can’t break out of the black hole of their own blackness.
All of which makes me sympathetic toward the late Anatole Broyard ( https://infogalactic.com/info/Anatole_Broyard ).
“After his death, Broyard became the center of controversy when it was revealed that he had “passed” as white as an adult, when he wanted simply to be accepted as a writer…As the writer and editor Brent Staples wrote in 2003, “Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer — and not just a ‘Negro writer’ consigned to the back of the literary bus.”[4] The historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote: “In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy.””
It’s so bad that everyone who teaches Intro Anything can recite The Slavery Paper, pretty much word for word. It doesn’t matter what you’re teaching — unless it involves getting the right answer with math, every black student is going to turn in The Slavery Paper for every assignment, every time. If I’m ever the Dean, I’m going to mandate that Af-Am Studies majors have to take a course in Medieval Viking Literature, just so I can get a good laugh at The Slavery Paper about the Prose Edda.
My Celtic ancestors wuz kangz until damned Germanics came in and enslaved us. Reparations!
I remember Christopher Hitchens (by no means much of a race realist) reading Mrs. Obama’s essay and saying that it “couldn’t be read” in the conventional sense of the word. Her husband is at least moderately intelligent, but she is obviously dog-dick dumb and knows it (find any photo of her where she’s not posing or she’s caught off-guard and you can see the rage). She had some kind of no-show affirmative action job where she made money by running a scam on poor black patients.
I’ve read a million papers like that. The sad thing is, I often get smart, diligent black students and they STILL turn in The Slavery Paper for every single assignment. They’re the best-written, most comprehensively-sourced Slavery Papers you’ll ever read, but they all still boil down to Blackity Blackity Black. It’s enough to drive you to drink.
Barak Obama always struck me as smart, but narrow. He has an oriental mind, in the British sense of it. Michelle is obviously quite stupid. I tried reading her thesis and it was shockingly bad.
Sailer (as usual) has the best take on Obama, that he isn’t someone you want to overthink, that he’s a moderately intelligent guy who likes sports and doesn’t like hard work (but you can’t say that, because it implies he’s a shiftless negro looking for a tree against which he can lean while spitting watermelon seeds). Dinesh D’Souza has made a lot of money off fear-mongering Obama the post-colonial avenger super villain, but I don’t think Obama is smart or hard-working enough to pull off world domination. I’ve heard that he just wants to get in on Clintonian hustles now and cash in on being the first black president, but Valerie Jarrett and the rest of the mulatto mafia are gassing him up to fight Trump.
In other words, he’s the Black Bill Clinton. That was my impression of him way back when I first laid eyes on him, and nothing has changed that. I don’t think, as Derb apparently does, that he’s fascinated by his blackness; I think he just writes about it because he can make a lot of money writing The Slavery Paper and calling it an autobiography.
Mediocrity though he may be, I have to give Neil DeGrasse Tyson credit for pursuing an interest that way transcends blackity blackness.
Hey Tiny Dick how it’s going? That hemmoroid problem clear up?
“The truth is that most of these alt right “intellectuals” are white men terrified of a world where white men are not given preferential treatment”
This guy should do standup. He’s much funnier than Moldbug
It’s a strange world indeed when “leave me alone to live my life as I see fit” is “preferential treatment”.
I thought the black man was the “original man” and Africa is the cradle of civilization? Seems then that the black race had the head start. Also, I remember Pitts is the one who, in the wake of the Knoxville Massacre invited his white readers (assuming he has any) to “cry me a river.” Let me know when he dies, and I’ll make sure to piss on his grave. If his burial site is near Trayvon’s I’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone.
Chuckles.
It’s not affirmative action when you have to build, pay for and run it all and even the manual labour input by others is limited by sector and geography, and you have to put in the hard work of compelling all that labour.
If the armies of Mansa Musa had swept across Europe and then instituted a jobs program to boost the self esteem of European men, that would have been affirmative action.
I was improved by reading (scanning) Moldbug and also very well served by Yarvin’s literary links, which were extensive; never had more fun than reading the great British Imperial writer Froude on Google. What was at the heart of Moldbug was a worthy personal search for a space free of Universalist. Hence, Seasteading. It would work as a metaphor, but they were not seeking metaphors. They were seeking the real thing, and in that form–Seasteading–nothing could be more patently ridiculous. More would be solved in a bar fight than a roomful of intellectuals intellectualing.
One of the prevailing orthodoxies that is due for challenge is the notion that we can talk our way out of the current mess we’re in. Undoubtedly that is the preferred and less painful alternative, but talking can’t transform a deadbeat into a workaholic. Habits are formed early in life and rarely change thereafter. And if you think the Left is going to be content to stick with yakking when the going gets tough, then you haven’t been paying attention to history.
My main problem with Moldbug goes back to a post you had awhile back about how “Based Stick Man/The Alt-Knight” was doing more for conservatism by swinging his stick at antifa in the streets than all the think tanks and publications combined. Humans need to be balanced/well-rounded to win a fight with their enemies in the culture war in case the battles become literal (always a possibility). Yarvin was incredibly smart (if too solipsistic and impressed with himself) but I can’t imagine him watching my back in a literal fight. He looks like the type who would cut and run. We don’t need soccer hooligans with Union Jacks tattooed on their necks getting drunk and beating Pakistanis with chains either, but there has to be a golden mean between all brain and no balls, and all balls and no brain.
Someone like Steve Bannon or Nigel Farage scares the hell out of our masters because their form of populist-conservatism represents a friendly handshake between conservatives across class and intellectual boundaries that the elite would prefer remain hard. Moldbug is a programmer and a spergie Jew, and is thus not the type of officer to build rapport with his Joes in the trenches. I’ll take a Buchananite Semite like Paul Gottfried any day of the week over Yarvin.
I’m finding it ever easier to grasp why it was that Bolsheviks hated intellectuals so much…
Buckley was concerned with creating a image of himself as intellectual. To that end he never used a three syllable word if he could remember one with four syllables, and never a four, if he knew one with five or six.Mr. Yarvin’s problem is similar, he seeks to impress via opacity.His is the sin of gnosticism, making his thoughts so obscure his readers will assume his brilliance because they cannot understand him. True brilliance is found in clarity.
I agree. I tried to read him. Every now and then I took something of value out of his posts, but most of the time I didn’t know what he was saying. I was never sure if that was because of his writing style or if the IQ was sufficient that I just couldn’t understand, but from my perspective the difference doesn’t matter too much I guess.
I can’t look up the meaning of a word fast enough when the writing is fabulous. I never once went to the trouble in a Buckley column. His use of vocabulary was the product of narcissism, not understanding or elegance. It seems that flaw ran deeper than I realized.
I’m too young to know firsthand, but I’m told National Review used to publish untranslated French articles. Maybe they had French readers, but it could have been another affectation of Buckley’s.
I suspect that was urban legend as I never heard that, nor saw any such article. Some of NR’s articles, from time to time may have included quotations in untranslated French, or Latin, which is not quite so bad. But then, I also was too young to have seen the early issues.
I read NR regularly from the mid 1970s to the late 1990s but never saw any articles in French, just, as you say, some untranslated French quotations.
It used to be an academic convention. Pick up history books written before 1965 or so — they have passages of untranslated French, Latin, Greek…. they assumed that only the college-educated (a small minority back then) would read these, and everyone with a degree could. It’s not necessarily being pretentious — if you’re the kind of specialist who would read an academic study on medieval history, say, it’s handy to have the original word-for-word. If you see it NOW, though, it’s just pomposity. With Buckley too, I imagine — only the *right sort* read National Review, you know.
This ripple in the pool went unnoticed by me, and by the time it was addressed by the “conservative” homo I had stopped reading National Hebrew. My only quibble with this post is the bit about recycled old ideas fading into the woodwork. I don’t think there are really any new ideas, just old ones that find new supports.
One other thing is that some of the recycled old ideas that we sometimes assume were defeated by progressivism are actually old discarded progressive ideas. The early progressives were mostly race realists and promoted eugenics. Sure, it could have been a ploy to appeal to southern Democrats, but yeah, they furtively sterilized Aunt Jemima.
The eternal questions return in various guises generation after generation not because we can never resolve them, but because we resolve ourselves in them–Richard Fernandez
The fortunate thing is that the prevailing orthodoxy is so identifiable and so toxic, that continually asking questions and maintaining challenges should not be difficult to do. People are motivated by self-interest, and there just isn’t much of the Left that is attractive to self-interested normal people in the real world.
Outlawed ideas have a way of becoming attractive to many, especially younger people, specifically because they are outlawed. Not the best reason for our ideas to earn support, but we need to collect all the support we can get.
Old messages in new packages are the way of things. The Left has been repackaging totalitarianism for a long time now.
Moldberg’s ideas lack the staying power for younger people. They will see a shiny object, look at it, and ultimately move on. Way too technical and complicated, and anti-freedom to boot.
There was another blogger called “Radish” that I referred to as “Moldbug Lite” who was less prolix. The web site is still up, here: https://radishmag.wordpress.com/ Derbyshire highly recommended it. He had an earlier blog called http://unamusementpark.com/ which is also still up. Both haven’t been touched in years.
Unamusement Park was good, but he was Jewish and so only got limited traction with a lot of the nascent alt-right types. He started as some other blog (I forget which) whose pieces used to get picked up by Paul Kersey’s “Stuff Black People Don’t Like” and “Second City Cop.” “Jew Among You” is a good race-realist guy who works in a similar vein (and advocates for non-marriage of Jews and gentiles, which means probably even Spencer would get along with him alright. I remember he used to be at all the American Renaissance conferences). I loved Whisky’s blog, but he doesn’t post anymore.
Are you sure that the Radish fellow is also the guy who wrote unamusementpark.com? I did read them occasionally a few years ago but they seem to have been written by very different people.
Same guy.