Alt-Right Pipeline
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Including people like Joe Rogan in the supposed AIN makes this article even less convincing. Joe Rogan has interviewed guests of very varied political leanings, and he himself seems to have a complex not strictly partisan world view. Should one never interview right-leaning people on their shows to avoid being dragged into these “influence networks”?
I’m also very skeptical of the “guilt by association” type ideas that seem foundational to such pipelines or networks. I could be wrong, but they seem like a shaky foundation for this radicalization theory to me. Simply talking with someone should not mean you subscribe to their politics or endorse those views.
In fact, I think that this kind of “guilt by association” rhetoric is further segregating people into echo chambers, and it’s unhelpful.
To many on the left, this alone is "proof" that Rogan is The Other, which must be censored.
To put another way, this is exactly why Spotify hosting him was so controversial among the bien-pensant. Like the more recent attempted boycott of Hogwarts Legacy, the attempt to relegate Rogan to wrongthink was a miserable failure. Once the HL boycott failed those backing it did their best to rewrite history and claim that they never expected to succeed; did this happen with the Spotify attack?
Who decides whether the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab is a scientific hypothesis to be tested, or "misinformation" to be suppressed? Who decides that Jordan Peterson is an "extremist figure" but RuPaul is not?
Why are (generally left-leaning) people trying so hard to keep certain concepts out of the marketplace of ideas?
If those ideas are so obviously wrong and bad, why should they be censored and suppressed, rather than discussed and refuted?
The article should be re-written from a more neutral point of view. As it is, it implicitly endorses a certain framing of the issues it discusses. Usually Wikipedia has better standards.
[0] https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...
What bothers me most about this delegitimization is how it's only ever applied to the right. Left has literal communists pushing an ideology that caused famine, misery and oppresion worldwide, radical feminists tweeting KILL ALL MEN all day... Nobody bats an eye. It's like the right is perpetually scrutinized ever since Hitler but people couldn't care less about the oppression and destruction brought about by Soviet Union style subversion.
I don't even consider "radicalization" and "extremism" to be bad things. "Radicals" are simply those who refuse to compromise on their ideals. There must be a truth out there, we're all seeking that truth and it sure as hell won't be found by compromising on some middle term that neither side is happy about. There must be some kind of resolution.
The lab origin theory itself is not harmful, but the way it was presented by the right absolutely was. The base is FAR more prone to knee-jerk violence than the left. To many of them, china lab leak = Chinese people should be physically attacked. The knee-jerk suppression of discussion was caused by the knee-jerk violence.
Jon Stewart could talk about it because he argued in good faith. Tucker Carlson was very obviously looking to rile up the base knowing damn well the logical leaps they would make.
It takes many logical leaps. First, one has to believe the lab leak happened, which we can’t say with certainty — there is a lot of circumstantial and weak evidence on both sides, it is very speculative. Secondly, one would need to believe there is culpability (it was not an accident). Thirdly, one would have to believe that all Chinese are collectively culpable, which alone is pretty ridiculous. And one more logical leap is necessary to agree that random violence would constitute appropriate justice (people generally feel that even when criminals are unduly murdered, this does not make things equitable for the harmed party).
These leaps already require a very radicalized audience. I don’t believe this will work to radicalize a substantial number of people.
And even putting all of that aside, calls for violence are outside social norms and considered hate speech. The problem is not discussing the lab leak theory, it’s doing so outside the social norms. If we say that lab leak discussion is hate speech, that is simply incorrect.
Who said all lab leak discussion should be classified as hate speech? I'm positive people said it was being presented by certain people with the intent to invoke hate and violence, but I doubt anyone with any credibility said all discussion of a lab leak should be classified as hate speech.
Edit: To be clear, by "anyone with any credibility" I did not mean to imply including anyone in the government, on either side. There's not much credibility to be found there.
I agree and argue that we should not go as far as to label the topic as such and dismiss it. Not because the lab leak theory is particularly credible, but because dismissing ideas is harmful to society in my opinion.
As for your experience with people dismissing violence towards the Chinese due to these ideas, I can understand how that would happen. But I still don’t believe significant violence was caused.
There just happens to be a particular party line, wherein some types of harm are bad, and some types of harm are in service to, well, the party agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:History/Alt-right_pipe...
Initial version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alt-right_pipelin...
source reference: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10108
…wait, what?
I think people are underestimating the bias of their own tribe and that many people are “de-programming” from radical leftwing ideas (eg, systemic racism against Asians or systemic misandry in education) by finding content which exposes inconsistencies in those narratives and points out their underlying bigoted nature.
When you’re part of a cult, you start accusing everyone of being “alt right” when they leave.
Of course, one could argue that the collectivist authoritarians who believe in a racist ideology and are systematically enacting that at places like Harvard and Yale are the actual Nazis — who are merely trying to deflect by calling everyone else a “Nazi”.
Funny you mention that.
In my country, government used to allow anyone to report their own gender and race. Then they added quotas for minorities in federal schools. Obviously this resulted in a lot of people self-identifying as minorities.
To fix that "abuse" they created something I can only describe as a racial tribunal. People literally assemble and judge if you're black enough to fill that quota. Not just based on your skin color, place of origin and your culture but also anthropometry such as skull shape and size. I've seen actual published documents detailing criteria for this.
Not even Nazi Germany was like this. In Nazi Germany, they just judged if you were german enough based on your ancestry.
Basically nothing in this wiki page is accurate.
What makes you likely alt-right ?
In the propaganda war, substance is irrelevant and repetition is key.
At some point, society is going to heave a collective sigh and thumb its nose at all of these online scandal-peddlers.
It's all a colossal farce, and cannot implode quickly enough, on the Left of Right.