The Online Right Is Almost Entirely Fake

Classic chivalric feudalism was based on an honour system of blood oaths. Over time, as bonds of honour came to be replaced by cash payment, the system degraded. Feudal lords became grubby, self-seeking, Machiavellian and treacherous. A similar degradation has taken place on ‘the online right’ over the past several years as independent voices have come gradually to be crowded out by paid shills, regime stooges and mouthpieces for moneyed interests. It has suffered a severe bout of what Thomas Carlyle once called ‘gigmanity’. Once righteous ideals have dwindled into tired ‘red cap’ versus ‘blue cap’ debates. This is one of many reasons that I now count myself as a former member. Now I only watch from a detached distance, from the sensible centre.

There are two chief distortive elements that have muddied the waters to the extent that, now, there is only mud: namely, the regime itself, and moneyed interests. Both take away from truth-telling. Jonathan Haidt once said of the woke epidemic at universities that the academy cannot serve two masters: it can either serve the Truth or it can serve political activism. The hijacking of online right spaces by the regime and by moneyed interests have had a similar effect: where righteous ideals and the pursuit of capital T Truth once stood, now there is only their distant memory, a landscape of ruins, and, in their wake, we have a cacophony of competing interests and voices serving some Higher Master. The establishment of institutions has generally had a detrimental effect on ‘the discourse’, since such institutions seldom if ever have Truth as their summum bonum, but rather a sectional interest and agenda, whether it be those of a foreign power, a political party, a corporate sector, or even the interests of wealthy individuals.

Some time back, I made a video outlining eight Schools of the Right. This video spoke to something like the Platonic forms of the eight schools, which is to say, how they exist in theory as opposed to in actu. John Arcto provided a somewhat different guide categorising the factions of the Rightosphere which speaks to the opposite, which is to say, how they exist in actu as opposed to in theory. One thing you will notice reading this guide is the various moneyed interests, parties, institutions and so on, involved in this broader milieu, all of which come with the distortive effects I describe above. John Sweeney and Evelyn Grant have provided exhaustive guides to who these moneyed interests are and how they astroturf and hijack political movements on their YouTube and Substack. The availability of this information, the knowledge that so many of the figures thrust in front of our noses to take up space in The Endless Conversation are essentially fake, has basically no impact on how they are received. People know, they just don’t care, because the pigs must feed.

It would be instructive to go through John Arcto’s incredibly well-researched list and try to answer in each case what or who is the ‘Higher Master’ being served, what ends, what political goals are being advanced? And furthermore, to ask, in the final analysis, whether these ends and goals serve to strike genuine blows against the power structure or rather to bolster, renew and strengthen it by containing and draining dissident energy. I would suggest that nearly 90% of those Arcto lists are working towards the latter and represent some form of containment and crowding out of genuinely independent voices. If anything, this is an understatement. Naturally, the plebian, the average internet user, the great unwashed anon, is staggeringly stupid – rightly called stupid hobbitses by Curtis Yarvin – and therefore cannot tell the difference. In any case, he (or, less likely, she) does not really care because this is all a strange form of postmodern entertainment to them anyway. It is a surrogate activity like watching a soap opera, so it does not really matter if their favourite e-celebrity is an astroturfed paid shill, because to them, it makes no real difference. As I said, they do not care if their ‘discourse’ is basically fake, what matters to them is that they are fed their daily dose of slop. The clowns can change, but the show must go on.

The upshot of all this is that the system has successfully neutered and tamed what was once something that alarmed them, in much the same way it neutered and tamed the left simply by bringing them in. The left, by which I mean, the true left, has long understood the way in which capitalism can do this. Liberalism’s great strength is its ability to ‘bring in’ its critics in order to smother them. Social media no longer needs to censor anyone because they are simply drowned out in a flood of noise and nonsense, a raw sewage pipe of slop. And one cannot really stand against the sewage pipe since the only outcome is that you too become covered in shit. The left was defanged and made to wear a ridiculous rainbow-coloured frilly skirt as the world laughed at them, and now a similar process is taking place on the right. The monkeys will be made to dance to a different tune, and wear a different skirt, but dance they will, and they do it so dutifully too. The handful of genuinely independent people left can all see this happening. We sometimes talk to each other too, but you can count those on two hands. As this process plays out, it will be grim viewing, the best you can do is keep yourself sane by staying as far away from it as possible.