Ross Douthat: The Faults Beyond Our Algorithms

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 due to automation? Oh … they’re going to be retrained for the jobs of the future! They’re going to learn to code! The free-market will figure it all out!

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

6 Comments

  1. Quite a quotable gem on the main page as the lead-in to this article:

    “As the Titanic heads for the iceberg, the American political establishment has convinced itself that it can hang on to power through censorship”
    – Hunter Wallace

    Nice sharp wordsmithing there, exactly capturing the great issue of the moment

    It was on ZeroHedge that 1/4 of all jobs in America are already ‘gig’ work – temp agency jobs, driving for Uber, etc – low-paid and precarious, for an America where half don’t have any savings

    Tho there is clearly another major reason US people don’t save – Any savings are easily stolen by America’s mafias, via divorce lawyers, police confiscation, liens for emergency medical bills. Might as well spend the cash before the goons steal it.

    The Jewish in-your-face leading of the censorship campaigns is something notable, but it’s also important to recognise, that the Jewish elites doing this, can only do so, because they are the mafia of a corrupt oligarchy which is more than half gentile goy, media & tech Jews just the 2nd tier enablers.

    It seems that people in the USA are quickly becoming aware that they are being deprived of access to voices they would like to hear, and this may be one of the big factors in Trump’s sudden drop in polling numbers, along with the record-high millions of illegal migrants arriving, and the failure to improve the dismal quality of job offerings under ‘record low unemployment’.

    • Not to mention that anyone who actually saves is really losing money. With the Fed and (((Bankers))) keeping rates low, combined with inflation, a saver is losing. They must encourage spending and debt to keep their Ponzi scheme going.

  2. Boomers be like:
    “You lazy millennial snowflakes just don’t want to work!”

    Within the lifetimes of the children alive today -assuming there is no catastrophic end of time war or plague or whatever – there won’t be work (menial labor and really any kind of occupation for average intellect people) for anybody to do, and isnt that the end goal of all this technological “progress” anyway? There is a disconnect in the minds of many people that seemingly makes them unable to see that, if the goal of all technology is to make work easier to do, and if the goal of capitalism is to maximize profits and minimize overhead costs, it will be desirable to replace human labor with machines as soon as possible. Or, in other words, “antique farm equipment” is about to be made obsolete by machine-nogs and that is OK. Because everyone is either a slave or a master.

  3. We haven’t called enough attention to the Jewishness of the new push for censorship. MAGApedes and boomers need to be made aware of the fact that the ADL and other Jewish groups are the main advocates for censorship.

  4. My political views have been pretty much the same since 1990. Therefore, social media nor YouTube played any role in my ideological development.

    Just living in this cultural and racial cesspool is enough to red pill most White folks. I can only imagine the hell it is for White students where they’re in the minority.

    Social media or not; Whitey is coming out of hibernation.

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