The Spectre of Slopulism

Let me Kvetch and Gripe about the Online Right

Even though it happened some months ago, I've decided to write a response to the conversation that occurred between

Alex Kaschuta

and

Pedro L. Gonzalez

.

Their exchange went something like this: the online right is increasingly inhabited by low-IQ chuds who blame their personal shortcomings on political scapegoats (read: Jews, women, Klaus Schwab). What was once a creative intellectual space has devolved into an echo chamber of thought-terminating clichés.

Kaschuta followed this podcast up with an article on Substack, which sparked a flurry of responses. With the notable exception of the

Librarian of Celaeno

, the responses were mainly ad hominem attacks. She’s “having a woman moment”. She’s seething because some anon called her fat. Or, perhaps my favourite, she defected to receive Soros shekels. In short, she's either coping, or a sellout. Either way, you don’t need to engage with the substance of what she said, because it wasn’t said in good faith.

Unlike her critics, I don't know what motivates Alex. I don’t have access to her inner thoughts, or her bank statements. But I do know that she made several arguments that strike me as true. In this essay, I want to white-knight for her, by reiterating those arguments. In other words, I’m going to kvetch and gripe about the online right.

Fear not, fair Maiden Kaschuta. Thy most obsequious champion stands ready!

Throughout the conversation with Pedro, Kaschuta frequently used the word “slop”. Slop is a type of viscous liquid that is cheap to produce but can feed a large number of people. Likewise, slop content is easy to make but generates lots of engagement. It is the digital equivalent of chana masala cooked in an industrial food cauldron.

A spectre is haunting the online right—the spectre of slopulism. Musk now pays X users for impressions. This financially incentivizes people to produce slop (they're putting PRONOUNS in the drinking water!). He also promotes slop merchants, such as Libs of TikTok, End Wokeness, and Ian Miles Cheong. As a result, the site is now infested with prolefeed designed to outrage and entertain idiots. Admittedly, this describes most of the internet, not just X. But as someone who has lurked on Twitter for many years, I think the slop to substance ratio has gotten much worse.

Musk's free speech policies also appear to have degraded the quality of right-wing discourse. Censorship inadvertently functioned as an IQ test for the online right. Posters were forced to communicate forbidden truths subtextually, or with enough tact to avoid censorship. This style of posting tended to favor people with high verbal intelligence, such as disillusioned academics, who were disproportionately represented among the right-wing Twitterati.

By removing censorship, Musk inadvertently removed a form of quality control. The online right began pitching their ideas at the lowest level. Hence,

Gurwinder

writes, “The hard-right were strongest when they were being censored. By giving them free speech, Elon gave them the means to show the world their full retardation.”

The right-wing Twitterati wasn't just disproportionately academic; it was also disproportionately Jewish. This point has been made ad nauseum by Groypers, which naturally leads us to the online right's obsession with Jews.

It’s perfectly legitimate to discuss Jewish overrepresentation. Jews were, for example, overrepresented among the Soviet secret police. Leonard Schapiro (a not very gentile sounding last name) said “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself shot by a Jewish investigator.” But they would have been even more likely to be shot by a Latvian, as Latvians—not Jews—constituted the most overrepresented group in the Cheka. Jews were overrepresented among the Bolshevik elite, but equally overrepresented among dissidents and Samizdat writers. Vladimir Lenin was a quarter Jewish, but the lady who shot and nearly killed him was entirely Jewish.

I’m simply trying to point out that the truth is more nuanced than “the Bolsheviks were Jewish.” But nuance doesn't go viral. Sweeping generalisations about Jews do. And that’s why X is filled with low-IQ anti-semitism. This reflects poorly on the right, because X is now right-coded in the same way Tumblr was once left-coded. Rightly or wrongly—and I suspect more rightly than wrongly—people feel like they can gain insight into the collective unconscious of the right by logging onto X. When they peer into the rightwing dreamscape, they see a morass of slop, racial slurs, and feverish conspiracy theories.

An obvious retort to everything I have said is that I have chosen to focus on the worst aspects of the online right while ignoring the best. But unfortunately, the worst aspects are the most popular. To quote

Nathan Cofnas

:

Social status on the right is determined mainly by how much attention you can generate, regardless of the quality of that attention. People who appeal to the lowest common denominator rise to the top.

When most people think about the online right, they don’t think about

N.S. Lyons

,

John Carter

, or Johann Kurtz. They think about Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Laura Loomer. Jones believes in transdimensional dwarves. Candance Owens thinks that space is fake and gay. Laura Loomer claimed that the Deep State engineered a blizzard to sabotage Donald Trump.

Stupid conspiracy theories about dwarves, space, and HAARP technology might get you a lot of followers on X. But they ensure that high quality people (dare I say, elite human capital) remain firmly opposed to the right. Many readers will reflexively dismiss this point because it sounds like something

Richard Hanania

would say. But the truth is, the right won’t be successful unless it manages to convert the cognitive elite. After all, political change isn’t brought about by red-pilling normies; it’s brought about by elites. Why is this observation suddenly controversial? Didn't we all read Pareto, Mosca, and Jouvenel? (I'ma keep it real chief, I didn't read any of them.)

Trump’s victory in 2024 was not a “populist revolution”. Trump was backed by a counter-elite centered around Silizog Valley. They didn’t back him because they are populists, but because they see him as a useful battering ram against the Democratic party that has hamstrung and humiliated them.

I don’t pretend to know what motivates this counter-elite, but they genuinely seem concerned about inflation, immigration, lawlessness, demographic replacement, and left-wing authoritarianism. These are the defining issues of our time, and the reason Trump was elected. But so far, the Trump administration appears more concerned about “owning the libs” than addressing them. To quote

Endeavour

:

If I could summarize the governing style of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration with one word, it would be “slopulism”. What have been some of the new admin’s misadventures so far? Calling for Canada to become the 51st US state, threatening to annex Greenland from Denmark, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, proposing turning Gaza into a beachside resort, a farcically unsuccessful attempt at ending the Russia-Ukraine War, going back and forth on an incoherent tariff plan, and reintroducing single-use plastic straws.

These policies bear very little resemblance to those promised by Trump... The only resemblance they bear is that they make the liberal establishment angry… These antics will no doubt garner countless likes from 90-IQ MAGAtards on X, but in real world terms, they don’t even begin to address any of the societal issues which gave rise to the populism to begin with. The only real-world effect is that it makes these figures appear boorish and unprofessional to anyone outside the online slopulist echo chamber.

Trump spent years perfecting a persona for reality television. He is a master of kayfabe who knows how to manufacture attention through staged conflicts. He is also a master of the new media, who knows how to generate viral clips, tweets, and videos. This media savvy has enabled him to outflank both the mainstream media and his political opponents. But the instincts that make for compelling television and effective opposition campaigns don’t translate into competent governance. Trump's first 100 days in office have been a minstrel show. Kaschuta aptly describes them as “a case study in government by meme.”

Conundrum Cluster wrote a popular satirical essay critiquing Kaschuta. And yet, his own writings echo many of the arguments Kaschuta makes. He has previously criticized conservative politicians for performing hollow political stunts, and has called for "Coherence over Circuses." But what have Trump's first 100 days been, if not a circus? They have been a master class in the performative politics that Cluster warns against. The Trump admin named a government department after a meme. The White House posted a Ghibli-style image of a Dominican woman weeping after an ICE arrest. They named the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. This helps the right fill its leftist tears tumbler, but it doesn’t accomplish anything of substance.

I make these criticisms not because I'm a leftist, but because I'm extremely concerned about a left-wing backlash. Trump currently represents the only real alternative to leftism in the Western world. If he squanders this opportunity through performative politics, it will totally vindicate the left. Which is to say, it will vindicate their positions on censorship, populism, and mass migration.

Conclusion

Alan Schmidt

argues that right-wing Americans now have an unprecedented opportunity to engage in practical governance. Doors that were once firmly closed to them have suddenly swung open. They can walk through those doors and make their ideas reality, or they can remain perpetual outsiders. In other words, they can step up to the challenge of governance, or they can be contrarians.

I am the first to admit that I am a contrarian. In fact, it was my contrarian nature—rather than a conservative temperament—that first drew me to the right (I suspect the same can be said about Kaschuta). That said, the critiques that I have made of Trump do not stem from some sort of oppositional defiance disorder. Rather, I'm arguing that the Trump administration itself appears to be suffering from the shallow contrarianism that Schmidt warns against.

The spectacle of "owning the libs" may satisfy the slopulists, but it doesn’t address the substantive issues that fueled Trump's rise. If these issues are not addressed, the right will face a major backlash. In fact, this backlash may have already begun. In my country, the center-right party suffered a historic defeat two weeks ago. In Canada, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre not only failed to unseat the Liberals but also lost his own seat. Both of these parties had been predicted to win in a landslide only a few months earlier. These election results have quite convincingly been interpreted as a response to Trump’s first 100 days in office. People want solutions, not spectacles.

But I doth protest too much. This is a deeply unserious essay, written by a deeply unserious person, exhorting people to be more serious. It critiques the memeplex, but is laden with memes

Even as I lament the decline of serious discourse, I can't help but participate in the very patterns I criticize. This contradiction reveals something about our current predicament.

There are powerful incentives in place that drive people towards this style of communication. Memetic expression is intrinsically tied to virality. In an attention economy where reach equals relevance, the most successful ideas are those optimized for transmission rather than truth.

The internet is supplanting written culture with hieroglyphic culture. Shortened attention spans mean that complex ideas must be compressed into visual shorthand recognizable at a glance. Political relevance will increasingly hinge on fluency in this pictorial language.

Politicians won’t be selected for their policy expertise or governing capabilities, but for their ability to generate engagement. The statesman will give way to the showman. The clown is king of clown world.