Identitarianism

X MARKS THE HAKANKREUZ:

The Making of an Anti-Woke Zealot: How Elon Musk Was Infected with the MAGA Mind-Virus (Eoin Higgins, February 5, 2025, Lit Hub)

Musk began combining all his complaints into one overarching idea: the threat of wokeness, which he saw as censorious and against the meritocracy he believed existed in Silicon Valley. As Musk became more and more obsessed with woke, his right-wing friends cheered him on. Always desperately in need of approval, the world’s richest man lapped up the praise and decided it was time to get more involved in Twitter, the social media site where he was fast becoming a major celebrity.

He began the process by getting on the company’s board but soon found the position too restrictive. Musk convinced himself that he could quintuple the site’s revenue by 2028 if he had control. He secured funding from Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital, Binance, and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as funds from Dubai and Qatar.

By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.

Despite his bluster about buying Twitter, Musk went back and forth on the deal. In more rational moments, he realized it was a mistake and tried to back out. Musk’s approach to strategy and tactics can be seen in the way he played cards, as Max Levchin recounted.

“There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” he told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said, ‘Right, fine, I’m done.’”

Eventually, Musk was sued by Twitter’s management to agree to the sale. Musk was unable to force the company to a lower price than the gag cost of $54.20 a share, a price he had posted as a joke for his followers as a play on the association “420” has with cannabis. He faced certain doom in court and begrudgingly bought the company in October 2022.

A few days before the deal closed, he visited the headquarters and was disgusted with the company’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion. To Musk, these were signs of weakness. Once in charge, he slashed staff and installed loyalists.

Isaacson argues Musk was irrationally passionate about Twitter in large part because he had paid too much for it and was incapable of thinking logically about the business. It’s true that $44 billion was an overvaluation, but the implication that Musk wasn’t thinking rationally once he was trapped only works if he had been capable of making a sound business decision about Twitter in the first place. Making a meme share price offer doesn’t indicate that this was ever the case.

His passions overrode basic logic particularly when it came to the site’s content moderation. Unfortunately for Musk, moderation was important for running the company. As he tried to make Twitter into an anti-woke, far-right message board, Musk began tilting into extremism and conspiracy theories. The venue he claimed was for unfettered free speech was simply becoming a venue for right-wing speech.

That was no good for advertisers; predictably, revenue collapsed. Twitter had long struggled to avoid placing ads next to extremist content, and Musk’s cuts didn’t help.

Initially, Twitter’s trust and safety department head Yoel Roth was the only one with access to content moderation tools. Roth tried to hold a line on some content but soon found himself at odds with Musk and his allies.

Their requests were fundamentally unworkable on a technical level. Del Harvey, a former Twitter staffer who was the company’s first head of trust and safety, told Wired in November 2023 that part of the problem was that advertising “was built on an entirely separate tech stack than all of the rest of Twitter.”

“Imagine two buildings next to each other with no communication between them,” Harvey said.

The possibility of identifying problematic content on the organic side couldn’t easily be integrated into the promoted content side. It was this ouroboros of a situation, two sides locked in this internal struggle of not getting the information because they didn’t connect the two.

Unwilling to admit error, Musk blamed activists. The platform of open discourse that had been promised was in no way universal—Musk demanded Roth ban boycotts, reasoning that this would stop people from pressuring advertisers to step away from an increasingly toxic platform. Predictably, it acted as a kind of “Streisand effect,” so named for the pop star whose attempts to stop people from talking about her mega mansion in the early 2000s only made it more of a story, and backfired.

Musk continued to make decisions based on his anger over wokeness and his pathological need for praise rather than sound business practices.

LOST, NOT LAST:

Last Boys at the Beginning of History (Mana Afsari, Jan. 22nd, 2025, The pPoint)

There is no dress code at NatCon, but somehow everyone, young and old, is dressed to the nines. Many attendees look like extras in American Psycho; it’s a hot summer, but I see tailored wool and linen suits, tastefully patterned burgundy, ultramarine and violet silk ties, and pocket squares on twenty-year-old men. There are hundreds of young men here, and plenty more are turned away at the registration table; they try to sneak in anyway. Several ask me to help get them in: among these are foreign interns visiting over the summer for internships, young private-sector professionals, college students.

The first morning, I’m approached by a young man dressed in a nice gray suit, who has been hanging at my periphery as I talk to an editor for First Things. The newcomer offers a handshake, mentions he’s a student at an Ivy League school, and clumsily adds that it’ll be his first semester this fall. I realize that he must have graduated high school only weeks before. I had been surprised already to notice many men are easily younger than 25—I hadn’t anticipated meeting a teenager. He’s chosen to spend part of his last summer before college here, at this political conference at the Hilton.

He asks for my LinkedIn and I reach out to him in the fall, after the election. “I was ten when he first announced he was running for president, and he just captured my attention,” he says. “I’d always been fascinated by politics and history, obsessed with world leaders… I think that there’s a certain element of greatness in Trump’s personality.” And then: “I’ve always seen myself in him. That’s the first thing that drew me to him when I was ten. I’d always been admonished in school by my teachers…”

He pauses. “Well,” he laughs, “this is a little silly. But when I was little, I always wanted to do something great, and I would talk about that when I was a kid. And I’d have teachers and other people telling me: you can’t say that, you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. And then this guy comes on to the stage, eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”

Lucas,*11. Like all other asterisked names, Lucas’s name was changed for this article. born in 2005, was raised in a “typical” and “apolitical” family outside of Philadelphia. “I’ve never in my life remembered a time when the Democratic Party supported ambitious people,” he says. “I think their whole ideology is based off of oppressing those with ambition, who actually have the gumption to go out and do something and build something on their own. … The people who make humanity great, the innovators, the builders, the winners in society, they look at the winners and tell them, ‘You’re evil, and the only reason you’re at the position that you’re at is because you exploited other people.’ It’s antithetical to the way that a lot of young men work.”

But, I ask him, what do young men who aren’t aspiring to be “innovators, builders and winners” think of Trump?

“I went to public high school in a middle-class area,” he says. “A lot of the guys who I went to high school with weren’t particularly ambitious career-wise, but they do admire people who are. They all admire Trump for what he’s done.” He pauses. “Going to the gym, for example: it’s a way to improve yourself.” I immediately think of all the right-wing intellectual influencers on Twitter that post bodybuilding photos alongside their recommended reading lists. “All young men, even if they’re not actively trying to be great, still admire greatness,” he continues. “It’s really rare that you meet one that doesn’t have some respect for somebody who’s gone out and done something great.”

Trump, he explains, is a role model: “He wins against all odds. He gets impeached, he gets criminal trials thrown at him, shakes all that off. He gets shot. The fact alone that he got up and pumped his fist—that takes a lot of physical courage in itself. … He understands deep down that the U.S. has been rudderless since the Cold War. We haven’t had the best people.”

I ask Lucas if anyone else at NatCon, including Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D. Vance, the former of whom he got to meet, inspires him. “I really like them. They’re sharp guys; I like their policy. But I don’t really think there’s anybody else like Trump.” Trump proved to him that his dreams were possible, no matter the opposition. “Hopefully I can strike it big in the private sector,” he says, “and then if everything were to go right, I would like to be president someday.”

TRUE BELIEVERS:

Trump’s Secret Weapon Has Always Been Status Anxiety: In a phone-powered age of diminishing social capital and growing identitarianism, the president knew just which fears to activate to get him back into the White House. (Alan Elrod, Jan 30, 2025, The bulwark)

The economic anxiety thesis is too easily contradicted by economic reality, which we have fairly reliable and objective ways of mapping and assessing. More useful for understanding what motivates Trump’s base would be a relative measure—one that could conceivably affect people in a variety of economic circumstances. The best starting point, as some observers have been arguing for years, is status anxiety.

That’s because while “status” comprises a number of signs of economic success—homes, jobs, bank accounts—it goes beyond them to include important intangibles. As Alain de Botton put it in a 2008 book on the subject, status also has to do with “a sense of being cared for and thought valuable.” And that kind of judgment is one we can only arrive at through comparison with others. He continues: “We see ourselves as fortunate only when we have as much as or more than those we have grown up with, work alongside, have as friends, or identify with in the public realm.”

This is the perfect pathology for citizens of a democracy: If merit, not rank, determines social value and achievement, as is meant to be the case in our country, then your average person will be confronted every day with the question of why they haven’t experienced greater success—a toxic recipe for self-righteousness, shame, anxiety, and self-consciousness. Especially when, thanks to our deranged media environment, the apparent success of others—including those we consider undeserving—is constantly in view. Why should they be so lucky, we might ask ourselves. Why isn’t my life like theirs? Why should I have to change my behavior to accommodate them? Why don’t people respect or value me?

As Anne Applebaum puts it in Twilight of Democracy, “When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule—who is the elite—is never over.”

The central role that status anxiety played in Trump’s most recent electoral success is attested in data gathered during the run-up to last fall’s election. For instance, a July 2024 survey from the Young Men Research Initiative and YouGov showed that men aged 18 to 29 who agreed with the statement “I do not feel financially stable”—that is, men experiencing acute economic anxiety—favored Harris by 10 points. Meanwhile, those who agreed with the statement “society looks down on men who are masculine” leaned +32 for Trump. A September 2024 CNN poll found 56 percent of respondents who voted for Trump feel that “growing diversity is threatening American culture.”

Status anxiety was also a key driver of Trump’s support in his first election. In 2016, survey analysis from the Public Religion Research Institute showed that “white working-class voters who say they often feel like a stranger in their own land and who believe the U.S. needs protecting against foreign influence were 3.5 times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not share these concerns.”

The inflection status anxiety gives to political issues like civil rights, wealth inequality, and cultural acceptance allows them to be separated from material needs that could be clearly quantified; they become instead a matter of competition between groups over position in society.

Shorter version, Eric Hoffer: “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

THE CONSPIRACY-MINDED ARE ALL ALIKE:

I Have No Idea What Peter Thiel Is Trying to Say and It’s Making Me Really Uncomfortable (Matthew Gault, January 10, 2025, Gizmodo)

Peter Thiel, longtime Trump supporter and billionaire master of the universe, published an op-ed in Financial Times that perfectly replicates the experience of being cornered by a sweaty cokehead at an Austin, Texas house party.

“A time for truth and reconciliation,” is the piece’s ominous title. The reference to South Africa’s post-Apartheid era policies is the most coherent line in the article. The subhed immediately takes us into drug-rant territory: “Trump’s return to the White House augurs the ‘apokálypsis’ of the ancien regime’s secrets.”

To hear Thiel tell it, the incoming Trump presidency is the dawn of a new age. Thiel uses ancient, I’m sorry “ancien,” spellings of many words. Words like “apokálypsis” which he says will lead to the grand unveiling of multiple truths. Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? What’s the real story behind the JFK assassination? Was COVID-19 a U.S. bioweapon? Did Brazil ban X at the behest of the Biden administration?

According to Thiel, Trump has an opportunity to unveil all these truths and more. It’s an essay that rails against a word coined by Thiel’s “friend and colleague” Eric Weinstein, what they call the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation.” In short, elites.

There’s a lot of problems here. The biggest being that Thiel is, by any measure, an elite. He is a member of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex he seems to oppose.

If the world refuses to conform to your ideology it is easiest to assume that conspiracies prevent it. Don’t be anm ideologue.

JUST YOUR AVERAGE TRUMPIST:

How Crazy Was The Las Vegas Cybertruck Bomber? (Tom Scocca, January 6, 2025, Defector)

The striking feature of Livelsberger’s writing was how ordinary it sounded. One of the two messages released by officials opened with a note-for-note cover of Trump’s central campaign message: “We are the United States of America, the best country people to ever exist! But right now we are terminally ill and headed toward collapse.” What followed was a litany of standard doomer and/or influencer populism, the sort of grievances that the Trump movement runs on and which Elon Musk retooled X to concentrate and amplify.

“The top one percent decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them,” Livelsberger wrote. “You are cattle to them.” And: “A lot of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children are addicted to screens by the age of two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.” And: “Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He complained about homelessness, called DEI a “cancer,” and declared (while endorsing Donald Trump) “We are done with the blatant corruption.”

His other message was just as familiar, in a slightly different key—the apocalyptic operator key of Steve Bannon and the most militant participants in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol:

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.

Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.

Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.

Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

Was this the tone of a mentally ill person? Yes. Was it the tone of the controlling faction of the Republican Party? Also, unquestionably, yes.

iDENTITARIANISM IS TEXAN:

The New Orleans killer was an all-American loser Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s story is all-too familiar (Alexander Nazaryan, January 4, 2025, UnHerd)

He was Texan-born and -raised, an Army veteran who spoke with an East Texas drawl, forced to shack up at a trailer park after his career and love life went sideways. In short, he was as American as gas-station apple pie, loaded with carcinogens and carbohydrates, wrapped in a plastic sleeve that will be floating shortly in a waterway near you.

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

IT’S ALWAYS CUTE…:

The Great MAGA Immigration Meltdown (John Ganz, Dec 29, 2024, Unpopular Front)

While Elon Musk and his tech oligarch cohort have revealed themselves to be pro-immigration—at least,t for the type of skilled workers that they need for their businesses—the national populists of MAGA are up in arms about what they feel is a betrayal of the fundamental anti-immigration principle of the movement. These objections have been articulated in terms that range from putatively colorblind civic nationalism to raging racism and antisemitism, with the predictable specter of Jewish capitalists importing pliant ethnic hordes—a Great Replacement—being raised. It’s descended into name-calling with the pro-immigration business lords calling MAGA types “retards” and the MAGA types responding with other slurs that I will not repeat. For those of us who wish ill on all these characters, the battle has been amusing to watch. If only Bannon, Musk, Loomer, and Vivek could somehow all lose. It’s also pretty funny to see the racism machine that Musk built blow up in his face, although we all now have to live with the fallout.

As might be expected, Trump, himself an employer, has deferred to the power of money—the only force he respects—and come out in favor of the H-1B program.

This is not a debate about policy as such—in fact, many of the people doing the argument seem to have a very vague idea about how the program works—but, as the antagonists realize, about the ideological content of MAGA.

..when MAGA pretends it’s the illegality they object to

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The poison of white identitarianism (Inaya Folarin Iman, Dec. 22nd, 2024, spiked)

A mishmash of primarily online political subcultures have emerged over the past few years, vociferously defending white identity. It shares striking similarities with woke identitarianism. These advocates share so-called progressives’ racial essentialism, their obsession with identity and their conspiratorial mindset. Some have called this emerging movement the ‘woke right’, others the Very Online right. Either way, anyone who values liberal principles should be concerned.

These new rightists’ nihilistic resentment, indeed their racial identitarianism, is in danger of being passed off as a ‘legitimate grievance’ by the broader right – as an understandable response to successive governments’ failures on immigration; as of a piece with more general public concerns. At the very least, there is a hesitance among some conservatives to call out these toxic views. […]

But identitarian rightists are not expressing legitimate concerns about immigration, governance, the economy, fairness and social cohesion. They are criticising immigration on the dubious grounds that it is a means to dilute white British culture, through the sheer weight of non-white numbers. This is the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory – a crackpot fixation once found only in the darker corners of the internet that is now being increasingly mainstreamed. Indeed, one proponent of right identity politics delivered a public lecture earlier this year, presenting migration as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white Brits and warning that they are due to become ‘a minority in their own homeland’. […]

[T]o dismiss the emergent identitarian right as an insignificant minority would be to make the same mistake as many liberals and leftists once did. They dismissed wokeness as being limited to pesky, pink-haired university students, and subsequently proved unable to resist its mainstreaming.

The obvious difference between woke and MAGA is, obviously, that we actually subject black to systemic discrimination.