𝓝𝓪𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓲𝓮 𝓦𝔂𝓷𝓷  💎

Many of the leading Alt-Right/Lite figures don't actually care very much about politics. And they assume that no one else does either—that is, they assume that leftists are just playing the same game they're playing, only on a different team.

Over the last several months many Alt-Right/Lite A-listers have slid into my DMs. Often they have effusive praise for me and my videos. They're big ContraPoints fans.

It's often very startling how different these people are in private compared with their public personas. They're affable, friendly, light-hearted, they just want to chat and joke. Effectively they're breaking kayfabe to chat with who they think of as a heel.

You CANNOT understand the Alt-Right/Lite if you only rely on what they say in public. The only way to grasp what's really going on is to go behind the curtain and figure out, as @PennyRed put it, who the "true believers" are and who are the performers.

If you're someone who obsesses over the Alt-Right, or whose literal job it is to make sense of contemporary politics, there is an immense epistemological temptation to take these people up on their offers to hang out. Because you want to find out what they're really like.

But if you're someone people look up to as a leftist commentator, activist, or politician, taking them on that offer carries an immense risk. Because for the most part *we actually do care.* And our followers and colleagues care.

So we have a lot to lose when the photos surface of us smiling with the enemy. It's pretty much always taken as evidence of betrayal. Yet no right-wing figure ever seems to suffer from being photographed with a leftist.

It often feels like the only options are to 1 seclude yourself, never mingle with the bad guys (and another problem is the category "bad guys" is sometimes inflated way beyond Alt-Right to include even centrists & liberals), and hence have no knowledge of or influence on them—