The part of the right wing that evolved out of the alt-right and infested the Republican Party has one fundamental principle: snitches get stitches. Gangsterism worked for the left, so why not for us?
@TheSloppyFatBoy I think it tracks back--maybe not in every individual case, but the posturing, the rhetoric, and much of the substance, yes. Where else could the dissident sphere around COVID have come from?
@TheSloppyFatBoy So it's mutated due to adaptation to its environment. The conspiratorial antisemitism was always there, though.
@TheSloppyFatBoy At this point we'd have to start arguing like historians and poring through sources
@TheSloppyFatBoy Yes, there was a moment there when it seemed like antisemitism wouldn't gain the ascendancy but looking back that couldn't have really happened. We'd have to discuss specific people at some point.
@TheSloppyFatBoy But do you think I'm wrong about Vance's political identity being shaped in those spaces?
@TheSloppyFatBoy And the postliberals.
@TheSloppyFatBoy Maybe he just gets it all through Carlson, who himself picked up on the more popular elements of the alt and dissident right.
@TheSloppyFatBoy It strikes me that someone should do an in-depth study of Vance, which might clarify all these influences and how they work through him. David Samuels, who sometimes writes for Tablet, could do it.