TikTok Democrats and 4Chan Republicans

Civilization and its discontents.

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189
(via Getty Images)

“Twitter isn’t real life,” it’s said. (Twitter isn’t even Twitter anymore, technically.) Social media is a funhouse mirror of reality where conscientious political activists get to pretend that the average voter feels more passionately about their pet cause than he or she does about, say, the budding romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.

But social media can be useful for detecting political riptides before they’ve risen to the surface. The Trumpmania of late 2015 is an example: If you were on Twitter at the time, you knew better than to doubt the staying power—and unsavoriness—of his base of support. The influence of progressive identity politics over Democratic policy is another. Any American alarmed by the seemingly sudden mainstreaming of “woke” beliefs must not have spent much time tweeting over the past decade.

So no, Twitter isn’t real life, but it can give you a hint of where real life might be going. It’s a clearinghouse for expressions of people’s political id. And today’s id may become tomorrow’s dogma, which is how we ended up with the leader of one of the two major parties ranting about rooting out communist “vermin.”

Do you want to see what the political id of the left and right fringes looks like at this moment?

Maybe you don’t. I spent most of Wednesday gazing into the abyss and regret it in hindsight.

But it’s my solemn duty with this newsletter to leave you despairing for the future of Western civilization. And it’s my moral duty to warn American Jews, their friends and allies, and supporters of Israel that the two tips of the proverbial ideological horseshoe are starting to look like a pincer.

To quote investor Balaji Srinivasan, “The future is TikTok Democrats vs. 4Chan Republicans.”

The first thing to know about TikTok Democrats is that there are a lot of them. And as you’d guess, they skew young.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Rdpulfer

    While I agree with Nick's conclusions, I would point out there are TikTok Republicans...probably more so than 4Chan Republicans, which seems rather niche at this point (also, are there MySpace Libertarians?).

    Like Marshal McLuhan said, "the medium is the message". In this case, the short three-minutes-or-less soundbites affects both the perspectives of progressives and conservatives alike. In the case of Israel, many Democrats are bombarded by the horrors of Gaza, and identity politics or not, it's fair to want to prevent civilian causalities in Palestine. However, you'll likely also find a similar ignorance - or straight-up denial - of the horrors of October 6th, owing to the distortions of the TikTok information ecosystem. Similarly, misinformation spreads like wildfire over TikTok, and many younger conservatives often find themselves carrying water for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, sometimes without knowing it. And since all of this is nuance-free, it's tough to penetrate that bubble on either side of the political spectrum.

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  2. Betsybowditch

    "The first thing to know about TikTok Democrats is that there are a lot of them. And as you’d guess, they skew young."

    And their ranks include the children of prominent Republicans, Ted Cruz' older daughter has a TikTok account as does Nikki Haley's daughter. It is the way a certain cohort communicates.

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    Ben Connelly

    ““Twitter isn’t real life,” it’s said. (Twitter isn’t even Twitter anymore, technically.)”

    Ha!

    “It smacks of denial to believe that interest on TikTok in jihadists’ anti-American views must be a matter of Chinese manipulation rather than a product of sincere curiosity among leftists too young to have been personally stung by 9/11.”

    That rings true

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  4. Yikes

    Hi RHINO's, Blue collar guy here. Instead of constantly taking shots at populists and nationalists, why not take a shot at trying to get their support? The crazies will always be there, but most of the people I know who want Trump back like what he said he would do for them. Bring back jobs from China. Stop sending American troops to bring Jeffersonian democracy to people who don't want it. Bring more jobs back from China. Make the thieves and liars who only don't speak Russian right now because of the U.S. military, pay their fair share of NATO's bills. Stop illegal immigration (If they voted for Republicans the wall would be 60 feet high). These are just a start but most of you get excited about guys like Jeb! and Mitt Romney so it is moot.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Kmregan7

      And yet Republicans, thanks to Trump, ended up NOT supporting a bipartisan immigration bill designed to address illegal immigration that they knew Biden would sign.
      Perhaps, instead of repeating talking points like that, you should be paying attention to what people actually DO once they gain the office.

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    2. Avatar photo
      Rochejaquelein

      RINO is an acronym. It stands for Republican in Name Only.

      RHINO is a large endangered mammal.

      RINO is a stupid term used in bad faith by populist grifters, but you could at least use it properly.

      We look down on people like you because you give us cause to (and yes, I read the rest of your lazy hyperbolic nonsense as well).

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    3. Goatprairie

      "Bring more jobs back from China."

      yeah, you can always spot a Trumper. All those high-paying jobs will be coming back from China if Trump gets back in. Sure thing. ha, ha, ha.
      If you believe that, you also believe in fairy tales. Orange ones.

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  5. Goatprairie

    I read Bin Laden's dopey letter and found nothing new but the old lies the mass murderer repeated in the letter that other mass killers like him have prated.
    The West is totally responsible for all the bad things that have occurred in the Mideast. The Muslims of the area are totally innocent of any wrongdoing and are, naturally, victims of the West's rapacious demand for oil.
    I've heard that plenty of times before.
    Maybe instead of mass murderer Bin-Laden's lying explanation, the Muslims of the Mideast can't seem to get their act together and spend far more time attempting to kill unbelievers and other Muslims. Tiny Israel has contributed far more to the world in the areas of science, medicine, and technology than the combined Muslim world put together.
    In short, people like Bin-Laden are losers chained to a violent, intolerant religion.
    Of course, the young people in the video who were stunned by Bin-Laden's lies appear to be the typical young skulls full of leftist mush who believe lying mass killers like Bin Laden....BECAUSE THEY WANT TO!!!

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    1. Avatar photo
      Theirnscott

      Muslim Nobel Laureates, 16. There are about 1.7 billion Muslims.
      Jewish Nobel Laureates, 214. There are about 18 million Jews.

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    Dina

    This is an excellent observation of how extremes on both sides find common ground on antisemitism.

    The kind of antisemitism that I and my family have personally experienced, however, is Black antisemitism, which doesn’t neatly fall into right/left categories (although most Blacks are Democrats).

    It’s mostly Farrakhan-influenced and based on a massive amount of ignorance about actual Jews.

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  7. Michael.Aaron.Love

    As a 23-year-old man, the rise of Ben Shapiro when I was a teenager was very formative in my transition from a Bernie progressive to a conservative. It is sad to see what he has let the Daily Wire become. Shapiro has admirably refused to bend on many other memetic fads of the right(anti-vax, election theories etc.), but his dream of making Daily Wire an influential generator of right-wing cultural content caused him to make fateful compromises in his host selection in order to broaden the influence of the company. As a 2016 "never-Trumper" he should have known the MAGA base would not abide his "disloyalty" forever. I hope this makes him reexamine what kind of website and company he has created, but I won't hold my breath.

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    Normb1442

    I want to compliment Nick for his analysis of why antisemitism from the right was always going to come eventually. Antisemitism has always had two sources -- one coming from the ruling classes (whichever they were -- royalist, capitalist, Communist, etc.) in an effort to distract their populations from various failures; the other coming from portions of the working classes driven by the perception that Jews are responsible for problems that they experience.

    Populist politics are actually the perfect medium for the growth of both versions. In the present instance in America, however, it has somewhat been defused by the fact that an ample supply of alternative "others" has always been available -- blacks, Latinos, etc. -- and also, of course, by the fact that the Holocaust showed what antisemitism unleashed could lead to, and nobody left of David Duke and his buddies wants that. Thus Trump goes after illegal aliens and leaves it to the lunatic fringe to take on the Jews. The lunatic fringe understands that Trump is still their best ticket to power, and supports him even though they think he doesn't go far enough. Steve Bannon, just last week, noted that "we" (meaning those of his belief) will use power so savagely that the country will long for a return to what he calls the "moderate" Trump. We ignore him at our peril.

    The antisemitism of the left in the context of the Israel-Hamas war is different than usual, because it's not really coming from the working classes. There has always been a current of antisemitism among urban blacks, for example, stemming from the fact that Jews were frequently the landlords or storeowners who they felt victimized them. This ain't that. In spite of Jonah's herculean efforts to prove otherwise, it is not antisemitism that drives most of academia and upper middle class students to protest the conduct of the war, and to the extent that a double standard exists it is centered around the belief that Israel isn't supposed to choose for its government a coalition of racists and religious fanatics, while academia and upper middle class students don't expect Hamas to do any better. As for the REAL working class in this country, I don't think it processes the war at all in terms any different from that of the Ukraine War, which is to say it mostly gives it the support which the populist right denies it, and Ukraine's leader is Jewish and everyone knows it.

    Most Jews of my generation experienced antisemitism from the working class kids they attended school with, and tended to think of it as something that the ignorant or uneducated take part in. That it was most often something which the UPPER classes fomented -- directly or indirectly -- wasn't on our radar. It was only when we studied the history of antisemitism that its use of the "other" (us) to deflect deserved hostility became obvious, and I want to thank Nick for identifying it for what it is.

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  9. Holifield.A17

    “But it’s my solemn duty with this newsletter to leave you despairing for the future of Western civilization.” The modus operandi of every pundit since the advent of media, and particularly so since about the eighties. The first driver of “where ‘real’ life might be going”. TikTok democrats and 4Chan republicans. Chickens or eggs?

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  10. Nordic_man

    Honestly as a leftist it's hard to make sense of things sometimes. When it comes to the Israel Palestine broader conflict (not just the 10/7 attack) we have some real issues
    1) The modern collection of Jews who made up the initial jewish state were never the dominant culture in the area (to the point the british had to violently remove thousands of palestinians) which makes the standard self determinism claims kinda fall flat.
    2) There is a influential (kingmaker) minority in Israel that wants Israel to exist as a Jewish state from the river to the sea. They may not use as stark and obvious violence, but they don't have to when they have time. This of course dovetails tightly with the issue of west bank settlements which seem to come and go out of favor depending on the political winds.
    3) Despite all of that it's obvious why Jews want a state of their own somewhere, if for no other reason than to have somewhere to run if shit hits the fan.
    4) Is there a place on earth where you could carve out land that is inherently dominated by Jews enough to solve the self determinism problem? I'm not super up to date on it but I don't think so.

    That being all said, clearly Hamas has to go, you can't expect a people to go quietly after an attack like that.

    So it's a tug of war between a people who understandably want a state where there really never was a good place to give them one, and whoever you would have to step on to give them one.

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    1. Goatprairie

      The land called Israel has been the traditional Jewish homeland for thousands of years. They didn't want to leave....the Romans forcibly evicted them. But many Jews still managed to remain somehow or return in the centuries before the state of Israel was created.
      Given that, the Arab Muslims were still offered their own state. THEY TURNED IT DOWN!!! THEY WANTED COMPLETE CONTROL OF THE LAND. NO JEWS WERE TO BE ALLOWED!!
      And now they're mad because they're losers and the Israelis are the winners....in more ways than one.
      The solution is to find another homeland for the residents of Gaza....but not near Israel.

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      1. Nordic_man

        By that logic I should have the right of return to denmark. But my ancestors moved a long ass time ago, so the whole ancient right of return falls flat unless you want to just have open borders and a great global reshuffle. And once again you seem to be confusing Palestinians and Hamas. Palestinians actually wanted the state. Hamas engaged in a mass terror campaign to ruin it. Not to mention you are just ignoring Israeli expansion into the West Bank, and mark my word Israeli settlements will pop up in whatever parts of Gaza have been evacuated post war.

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        1. Goatprairie

          Faulty logic. Danes weren't kicked out of Denmark.
          BTW, many European countries allow people with proven ancestry from a certain country to become citizens or at least compete on their Olympic teams. So, there's that.

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          1. Nordic_man

            Go back far enough and most “reasonable “ looking self determination was made rewsonable at sword point. Cultural homogeneity didn’t just happen. It was mostly enforced with violence and exile. If the Jews get to go back to Roman times to complain about exile thousands of other cultures do too.

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