New post by Spandell Find the Symmetry:
Funny thing is, the dark side of the Internet is a small, tiny little thing. Really. Neoreaction is, what, 1,000 people? Spread around the whole world. 75% in the US, maybe. And the alt-right, which has inherited much of good ol’ national-socialism, is what, 20,000 people? I love those guys, I really do. Frog Twitter is hilarious. /pol/ is very funny. But come on. Even Steve Sailer, who has been writing for decades, who is a middle-class, 50+ old, utterly middlebrow guy who writes in very accessible language, who writes about sports! Steve Sailer has 13,000 followers on Twitter. Ezra Klein has 1.6 million. Ezra Klein, that doofus-looking doofus. Even Matthew Yglesias, whose picture is in English phrasebooks to explain the phrase “his face looks like a joke”, has 270k followers. The alt-right is beyond small. Trump didn’t win because of the alt-right. He won because he got 60 million Fox News watchers to vote for him.
But media isn’t talking about the at-right much anymore. Now they are focused on healthcare. The media overgeneralizes the alt-right to mean anything to the right of National Review and newer than Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. Twitter follower counts don’t mean much anyway, unless your following is organic. Most of these corporate media accounts have a lot of useless/bot followers and little engagement relative to the number of followers. 1.6 million followers and 99% of them inactive or robots. Steve has only 13k followers, but 1/2 the number of ‘retweets’ and ‘favorites’ as Ezra, who has 1.6 million. Steve’s Unz columns generate massive page views and comments…more than a typical New York Times columnist. He usually writes three posts a day, and each one gets dozens or even hundreds of comments, making him one of the most influential columnists alive.
The Alt Right punches way above its weight. The MSM media, outside of finance, isn’t that influential and punches way below its perceived weight. The MSM is a paper tiger…fake/useless Twitter followers, headlines that are forgotten hours after being published, faux SJW outrage, etc. Yeah, the WSJ and New York Times finance sections pack a serious punch (because they are followed by billionaires and other important people who can move markets), but the other parts of the paper not so much. Most people don’t know or care about politics…they just care about what’s on TV and supporting their ‘team’, whether it be the ‘red’ team or the ‘blue’ team. Most of those who voted for Trump would have done so anyway, with or without Fox News. Even if the GOP ran a ham sandwich and did no campaigning, it would have still gotten at least 45% of the national vote; ditto for the Democratic party if it ran a tuna melt. Due to the electoral college, election victories are decided on the margin–the 5% who are undecided in key swing states, and the alt-right may have played a pivotal role in tipping the election in Trump’s favor in these states. Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and other battleground states, in an otherwise very close election.
And this is why the left is scared..because they know that their media cannot deliver election victories and has dwindling power. The people who read New York Times columns are zoned-out and unengaged. Alt-right people are engaged, and each alt-righter is like 10,000 NYTs-reading zombies. Milo, who is in his 30’s, has Instagram account, and each post has thousands of likes…does any New York Times columnist have anything comparable to that? No. Liberals, especially, baby boomer ones of the New York Times demographic, are out of touch, out of times, clinging to their 60’s-era socialist/communist dreams.