Angela Nagle interview on the anti-woke left (further discussion)

Angela Nagle just did a long and wide-ranging interview with Justin Murphy, mainly on topics relating to the anti-woke left.

They ponder why there are so many women at the forefront of the anti-woke left, including attractive women. Another question, though: why aren't there any hot guys? From my exposure to the online left, the women don't seem to have anyone who they're ga-ga over within the left. No one who amasses an army of "reply girls".

I've heard them refer to Hasan Piker from The Young Turks, but that's understandable for someone who's on camera. I think the Red Scare ladies once said Nick Mullen from Cumtown is conventionally attractive, and he's certainly anti-woke and on the left. But generally, hot guys seem to avoid the left like the plague, while cute girls are if anything drawn more into it.

My hunch is they're more Independent and non-partisan, or somewhat to the right. I wouldn't be caught dead identifying as a "leftist" -- though not as a right-winger either -- and babes call me "hot," "cute," "gorgeous," etc. in their low-effort pick-up lines in dance clubs. (I don't see it or feel so, but then guys can't really tell what hot guys look like.)

Seems like the goal of spreading the message of anti-woke leftism should be for the women on the left to reach out to men and women who are Independent, socially moderate or conservative, and economically populist. The leftist women can't preach to the converted men, and male leftists are far less able to interact with men or women outside of their leftist bubble. Those few who are, like Michael Tracey or Kyle Kulinski, tend to balk at labels like "leftist" anyway.

They discuss my post on the ethnic composition of the anti-woke left, to which I'll add a couple more examples that I was reminded of yesterday. Nathan J. Robinson, evangelical woke-ist, is so WASPy he even fakes a British accent. And "shoe0nhead" from Twitter, anti-SJW Bernie/Tulsi supporter with a large following, who's Irish and Italian (though identifying more with the Italian side).

Murphy is still unaware that "the list" is only an appendix to a fleshed-out argument. He does favorably cite Anna Khachiyan's summary of my argument, but evidently the full post was too taboo for the social media commissars to present or link to, so he'd only seen screencaps of "the list" itself.

Nagle read the full post, though, and was more or less open to the argument. As far as I can tell, then, the only ones who at least skimmed the body, rather than rely on the commissars' screencaps, were Anna, Angela, and Aimee Terese -- not surprising why they're thought leaders on their side. They're not hidebound by silly taboos and parental advisory stickers.

It also makes me wonder if having immigrant parents, or being immigrants themselves, inclines people even harder against wokeness, since all three have at least one parent who migrated at some point. Obviously I mean within the ethnic groups already composing the anti-woke left -- excluding WASPs, Ashkenazi Jews, and upper-caste South Asians, mainly, but including the other Ellis Island groups and white Southerners.

Nagle is more defiantly anti-woke than Irish-Americans whose families have been living here awhile. Khachiyan is more anti-woke than Armenians who've been living here for several generations. And Terese is more anti-woke than Levantine Christians whose families migrated to the Anglo West 100 years ago.

Perhaps they have a keener sense of the uprooting and destabilizing effect of the expansion of the American empire, and are more ambivalent about its woke solution -- just reserve some seats at the elite table for the groups you bring under your sphere of influence, and who cares if those people have to abandon their homelands for the imperial core? (Terese's father moved to Australia rather than America, but it's still part of the broader Anglo empire.)

An earlier post predicted that over time monotheistic socialism will replace polytheistic identity politics / wokeness and the American imperial cult. This is on analogy with the rise of Christianity that ended the pluralistic polytheism and imperial cult of the Roman empire. Notice where Christianity came from -- the periphery, not the core. Its founder, Jesus, was an imperial subject but not an immigrant or coming from immigrant parents; he remained in and around Judea, where he was born. But Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, who spread the teachings and practices far outside of its home region, was not only an imperial subject but a member of a diaspora, his Jewish family living in southern Anatolia (Tarsus) rather than the Levant, let alone Judea. Still hailing from the periphery, though, like Jesus.

Nagle mentions that she's escaped woketard capital Brooklyn for Pittsburgh, probably the most anti-woke large city in America. It's in Appalachia. According to a recent survey, it's the least gay city, along with its southern Appalachian sister steel city Birmingham, Alabama. It's one of the least WASPy or Jewish cities, is full of the other Ellis Island ethnics, and is totally surrounded by Scotch-Irish hillbillies (including my mother's side of the family, a few counties to the west in Ohio). Disillusioned academics probably associate the look and feel of the city with Wonder Boys, while for romantics it will bring to mind Flashdance (as detailed in this post, one of the most darkly lit mainstream movies ever filmed, whatever you think about the plot and acting).

Nagle brings up Tulsi as an anti-woke role model for women, emphasizing how rare it is for someone on the left to be putting so much on the line for anti-imperialism (regardless of whatever label she would put on it). That ties back into my argument about wokeness serving the role of imperial integration -- it's the pluralistic ideological glue holding together a multi-ethnic sphere of influence.

If the left's ideological commitment is to wokeness, then they are materially committed to imperial integration (as long as our subjects receive fair and equitable treatment). Anything that would help to disintegrate the empire is contrary to wokeness, and thus anathema to most leftoids in America. That's why the woke-ists hate Tulsi so much. It's also why they aren't talking about removing American forces from Germany, Italy, and NATO generally, as well as from South Korea and Japan, where they've been stationed forever.

At most, the US left might object to a particular war or bombing campaign -- but not to the continued presence of our military around the entire world. It's not as though our occupation of the NATO countries is resulting in massive death and destruction, and the elites of all nations concerned are getting along perfectly well with each other. No one is calling each other ethnic slurs within NATO. American soldiers and generals don't make slant-eye faces at their Japanese subjects anymore, and aren't dropping more atomic bombs on them. So what is there for a woke-ist to object to? They are not anti-imperialist, but merely against the poor and inhumane treatment of our imperial subjects -- woke-ists are not against their subjection under us in the first place.

On the future of wokeness, Murphy thinks there's a backlash coming soon, while Nagle is less optimistic. I agree with a backlash coming around next year, as the 15-year cultural excitement cycle leaves the vulnerable refractory phase, where everyone feels victimized, and enters the restless warm-up phase, where they want to come out of their shells and mix things up again.

In this post I detailed how feminism changes across the three phases of the cycle, looking over multiple cycles. (Here is a quick recap of the excitement cycle model.) The next 5-year phase from 2020 to '24 will feel more like the late 2000s or the early '90s, with an explosion against political correctness, proper manners, and sensitive behavior. It may or may not have a populist / socialist cast to it, but it will be anti-woke for sure. Of course, during the next refractory phase (around 2030-34), we'll be in panic mode all over again.

Over the medium-to-long term, however, I see a rising persecution by the woke-ists against the socialists and anti-imperialists, as detailed at length in the post on monotheistic socialism. That historical analysis looked at many other examples, not just the breakdown of the Roman empire during the Crisis of the Third Century, but also of the Ottoman empire, and of the Fatimid Caliphate. As the American empire begins to seriously come apart, there will be a ruthless crackdown by the woke-ists, who believe that such an imposition will put the empire back together again.

But over the much-longer term, wokeness will die out in America just as polytheism and the imperial cult did in the Italian peninsula after Rome was over, and just as the millet system vanished from Anatolia after the Ottomans were over. A more single-minded moral system will replace it, and it seems clear that as of the Industrial Revolution, that will be some form of socialism (not the SJW-ism heresy of today).

Finally, Nagle says she's thinking of doing a podcast in lieu of getting back on social media platforms, because they're so toxic. I think she should start a blog instead, and write medium-to-long posts on her own schedule, without aiming the output at the online talk radio call-in show that we call social media. I've never understood the appeal of social media, and have never used them to "generate content". Such a pointless waste, unless you're terminally bored and your "content" is shitposting and food-fighting.

Even better, she should start a group blog with the three other women-of-A. Or two blogs between the four of them. Or something. More intimate, more productive, more collaborative (including when they comment on each other's posts), in a way that you can't do in 240-character tweets, or on a podcast where four hosts might talk over each other. Moderate the comments if they don't want retards piling in constantly. The last time blogs surged in popularity was the late 2000s, so it's only fitting for the same phase of the excitement cycle to see them come back into social-emotional style.