Gethelred
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Mostly agree. Have thought this for a while now; the worst thing possible for his health/mental wellbeing was the level of validation he got after 14C. They harnessed his rhetoric and argument style in order to oppose trans rights on freedom of speech grounds, and swept him up in it.
Course, there's an element of grifting involved here as well. You don't like and retweet a post from Crowder criticising the Daily Wire then delete the evidence that you did either once you found out without being a bit interested in the financials.
Rogan I see as akin to Adam Sandler.
The bloke gets a blank check; certain people will watch his movies no matter what, and those people cross cultural borders. You don't need to understand english to be able to 'get' his humour, so there's money to be made in just throwing money at him to get him to write, produce and act in his films; as a consequence, Sandler just grabs his mates and goes on a holiday every time he makes a movie.
Rogan has found a way to do what he enjoys doing anyway and makes money doing it. He's living his best life, and he really doesn't give a **** what other people think about it; if they enjoy it great; if they don't, I'd be doing it in my basement with Gareth from marketing instead of the founder of the Proud Boys.
Yep.
I don't think Shapiro believes anymore. He used to, but the argument ceased to be about who is correct and became about who won. He likes winning too much to care about the facts.
And money is an excellent method of keeping score.
Nah, grifter supreme.
Think he started out where Rogan is, then decided he wanted to be rich more than he liked doing what he does.
Tate is a supremely damaged individual. If you ever get an opportunity, check out his history; it's ****ing awful.
His father abused him physically and mentally, deliberately, to produce an ideal man. Tate internalised all the bullshit; if you look at what he teaches other men to be, he replicates the precise abuse his father embedded into him.
Again, as with Peterson there's absolutely an aspect of grifting going on, but I think Tate is victim and abuser both. He is evidence of the relevance of feminism in the modern world; his history is precisely how patriarchy gatekeeps itself, resisting alternate views of masculinity pathologically.
There's also a strange effect at play for a number of these figures.
I don't think for a minute Tucker Carlson or Jordan Peterson set out to become figureheads or ideologues of the new right. There's something psychological going on here; if you repeat something often enough despite knowing it's not true or fact as truth or factual, you start to believe your own bullshit. I think Tucker genuinely sits at 50/50; he knows - intellectually - that what he's saying is bullshit, but emotionally he gets a lot of catharsis out of saying the things he says. I think the same is true of Alex Jones, and was true of Rush Limbaugh and Stan Zemanek over here; they donned the mask out of a desire to make money, and came to believe their own bullshit through sheer familiarity and inundation.
Ben Shapiro is another of these people, but he also grew up in a staunchly conservative household and was socially ostracized due to being 'special'. One of the things people often don't realise is that being a prodigy isolates you from other people; you're either years younger than them as you shoot through education quickly, or you're constantly bored in class whilst overachieving and the teachers either hate you for making you do the extra work or fawn over you because you always get the answers right. The other side of it is that it's exceedingly rare a prodigy isn't simply just an early developer; others catch up to you as they hit 20-25. You get all this education then you hit a wall due to a primary school understanding of social relationships. I think Ben treats all of his relationships in that way; I'd be interested to see how he and his partner interact away from public view, because if he doesn't model his behaviour towards her on his fathers towards his mother I'll be shocked. He behaves as though developmentally stunted, because there's every chance he is.
If you're looking for a pure grifter, Sean Hannity is who I'd be pointing the finger at. Bloke would sell out his mother, father, children, grandchildren and every pet he's ever owned for a few pennies.
