I agree except the part about the new oligarchs doing the manipulating. I think they are manipulating themselves, sucked into these brain rot machines as much as anyone.
I heard a Thiel interview recently where he ranted about Greta Thunberg and the antichrist and used a bunch of very online Xhitter bubble terms like referring to low efficacy as “low-T” and I was like this guy needs to touch grass. It didn’t even make a lot of sense.
It's never made sense for me (as a gay man) how a gay man could get sucked into the fringe alt right manosphere. That whole ecosystem is antithetical to you
It makes perfect sense if you think about it from Thiel's perspective. Other than legal technicalities like marriage, the consequences of being gay are mainly determined by societal attitudes and not electoral politics. No legal changes that the Republicans would make do anything to stop a powerful billionaire from being openly gay. So it makes perfect sense that he would favor his business interests when he takes sides in politics.
I mean, these people aren't well my guy. It's not a huge stretch to imagine a bunch of repressed self-loathing around one's identity being at or near the core of it.
Thiel grew up in the 90s. Whatever one deems the tolerance situation today, it was worse then.
More like the 80s but true. Also maybe worth remembering that Thiel was outed by Gawker. He didn't come out as gay of his own volition and perhaps never would have.
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That's funny in a dark way, especially it being Thiel given that this entire movement/era traces a clear intellectual and emotional lineage to his activism all the way back at least as far as his writing in the student libertarian rag at Stanford in like 94 (and apparently a childhood fixation with Quenta Silmarillien exceeding even my own).
Trapped in his own Intellectual Dark Web one might say.
Yeah, Greta Thurnburg is making the frogs "low-T". What a bunch of fucking losers.