PS Who? I tore the rearview off and won't be needing it.
I go to Unz for the Achmed E. Newman contents in the comments or to laugh at the latest 30,000 word salad regurgitation from Yung Fraud.
The hive is doom and thinking outside the pine box is not.

PS: It may not be a great place to live (anymore), but if you visit Seattle, you should check out the troll that lives under the north approach of the Hwy 99 Aurora suspension bridge. (It goes over the ship canal from Queen Anne to Fremont/Ballard.) He's got a real VW bug in his grasp. That's what I picture when I picture a troll.

That, and commenter Corvinus. He is not mean or directly insulting, but he is just a tremendous time suck, and arguments go nowhere, not fast, but slowly.

PS

RE: Robert

The classic definition of "troll" that comes from old Germanic mythology (?), I have no idea how by the 2000s it was being used to mean the kind of anonymous (or non-anonymous) Internet trouble-maker, sarcasm-drone, morally unserious bad-faith actor. That is quite a leap, but there must be some missing steps along the way I am overlooking.

PS: Mr. Hail: Sometime around Second or Third Grade, I started walking to School. There was a somewhat busy street on the way, and my Parents told me to "Obey the Troll Boys." (At least, that is how I heard it.) I was quite worried, and a little scared.

PS

- On trolls -

I don't know when I first encountered this man Anglin, some time in the 2010s. I do remember identifying him as a "troll" and resolving to not engage with him, and have kept that up ever since.

I notice "troll" as a term I see has faded considerably from Internet-culture lingo. It meant someone acting maybe in bad-faith, maybe for his own entertainment, or for some other reason, usually ironic or a lowest-form-of-wit practitioner, out to rile someone up. You could never tell how serious such a person was. It all morphed into performance-art.

Some of the longtime commenters on Steve Sailer fit this old "troll" definition: Corvinus, Art Deco, Jack D about half the time, Truth most of the time, and many others. Reg Caesar also qualifies as a species of troll (albeit not a malicious one) as most of his comment-output is meant ironically. Then there is that prolific commenter Achmed E. Newman, who only very occasionally dons the troll suit. In those few cases it is always as counter-trolling various idiots or trolls, or maybe very occasionally when "@'ing" Ron Unz (who himself is basically a troll in much of his commenting, but not article writing). (NOTE: The many commenters who are contrarians are not necessarily trolls. The excellent commenter Intelligent Dasein I would not classify as a troll, even he is usually found disagreeing it is always done intelligently and unironically. The best of the commenters are not trolls.)

The term "troll," common in the 2000s and into the early 2010s, may have faded for this reason: the type became almost the norm for "social media personalities." Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk were classic "internet-trolls." Most politicians seems now to embrace being a troll on social-media. This is a social contagion of our time. To embrace "troll-dom," as Mr Anglin does, is to willfully do damage to the informational commons, a highfalutin way of rephrasing some of what was said in the original post here.

PS

Well said, Mr Blanc.

PS

The Alarmist wrote: "What is 'our side'?"

Good question.

PS Anglin is way over the top. Being over the top is one way to attract attention in the media biz, and Mr Angln has attracted a lot of attention. Not all of it good. If you go after the Chosen Ones as Anglin does, that will certainly bring the heat on you. And asserting that everything bad that happens is due to Their malign influence will quickly turn your following into a mere cult. Yes, They have a lot to answer for, but so do some other folks.

PS

What is “our side” ?

Conservatism is dead. There is nothing of value left to conserve on a national scale, and very little at the state and local levels in most of the Western World. In fact, Western Civilisations seems hell-bent to self-terminate.

I’m not sitting around waiting for the rapture, but that doesn’t mean I have ruled out these being the “end times.” Satan is running the Western World, laughing and mocking us as too many of us bend the knee to all sorts of idiocy.

Anyway, as we are facing a world going back to the dark ages, the time for conservatives is past. It is now time for revolutionaries and other secular heretics to challenge the Woke Orthodoxy.

Germany is screwed, but my German friends and colleagues are accepting their fate a bit too well. They’d probably jump onto the fires if they were told it was for the greater good. This is what happens when a nation has its soul beaten out of it.

PS: Mr. Hail, I agree with your friend and your viewpoint that Andrew Anglin is more of a showman than anything. "Cartoon Nazi" is a good way to put it. Maybe that's his way of getting back at the HATE industry organizations that have tried to keep him from being read.

By "our side" I surely didn't mean the GOP or something. There can be more than 2 sides, but Tucker seems to be on my side in his views anyway. You may be right. Perhaps he realizes he can be top dog - most viewed and talked about - in all of big media by saying out loud much of what the alt-right and real Conservatives are thinking ... well, KNOW. I don't know. Would he have kept doing this if it was all just for his career even after he had those ctrl-left bastards hanging around his front yard/house a few years back?

I may be just too optimistic here.

PS: Mr. Hail, firstly, regarding the Unz Review site: I'd always been disgusted with about half the writers on that site, and I suppose there are others who'd say the same about the writers that I like to read from. Steve Sailer is on the right side as a "blogger" rather than column-writer (not a big distinction, but I suppose it's longer articles vs. shorter posts and weekly or so vs. more frequently.

Anglin's writing is closer to a blog, and I'd have thought that Mr. Unz, as organized as he is (no sarcasm at all there) would have put him under iSteve's stuff, where Audacious Epigone's writing used to be. (He had that "Raches" guy there for while, and that didn't work out at all!)

Maybe this was a formatting thing, and maybe it's that Anglin is officially a "columnist" and does get lots of comments, from what I see.

BTW, very, very, occasionally, a Steve Sailer post will appear on the top too. Then too, some VDare columns will be up there. Occasionally a Jared Taylor photoessay type deal will be up there, getting 10 the number of comments as compared to when it's just down below. I think Mr. Unz like to experiment with this and maybe reward the writers or something.

I think Ron Unz wants to be known as a guy who will let any point of view be seen - maybe that's not good for his "magazine", but it's something he's proud of. I respect that, anyway. It's hilarious though, when Mr. Unz writes insulting comments to argue against his OWN WRITERS, haha.

I agree it can be depressing to look at the home page (called the "main page" nowadays). Then, I just look for what I want to read.

PS

"Tucker Carlson...is most assuredly on our side"

I would say there are not two sides. There more than two sides.

In a two-party duopolistic system, the (two) political parties and their respective cheerleading squads and onlooker-galleries are always coalitions of multiple "sides" who view it expedient to unite under one banner.

But on a personal level, there are also people who insert themselves into politics or commentary for reasons OTHER than ideas (which in a purist world is the basis of the "sides"). What those other reasons ARE, well that may be hard to categorize as all people are a little different and not assembly-line robots (another point you make in this post). Broad themes could be enumerated. In the previous comments I allude to what I believe the motivations of people like A. Anglin are, and they are not good.

PS

I recall now some in-person conversations with an old friend about this man. The friend was more sympathetic to the man than I. The friend had begun to follow the man's work, at some point, when it was more easily available.

I had never taken the man seriously, had concluded that the man was a clown, someone out for his own amusement: life-, culture-, and politics-as-video game. The friend basically agreed.

The friend said words to the effect that while A. Anglin had a lot right about political ideas or instincts, the package he delivered was meant to drip with irony or was meant as an circa-2010s equivalent of the old shock-jock radio material.

As to his willingness to embrace a sub-culture-ghettoized political-identity (cartoon nazi), we concluded it was apparently largely for laughs, self-entertainment, and not meant as a serious political program (not that that's a hard call to make, but in our ironic age some had started to feel meme-as-policy was real).

Although A. Anglin started as a blogger and still is one, in that sense he is quite the "social media personality." He continues his act in the early 2020s. This is NOT the things from which greatness is made. It is rather the personification of degeneracy.

This same friend, a White American of largely colonial-stock German origin, was then (mid-2010s) quite active trying to make a political influence and had ties to the early Trump world. The friend had gotten into contact with A. Anglin some time before Trump and even received a reply or two. Then the friend wrote some criticisms or suggestions. It could well have been something like: do not try to make a point of praising Hitler and calling for gassings of Jews. This is not useful and it is not the satire he thinks it is. The friend never heard back after that. In other words, A. Angling made his choice: politics or self-amusement, and chose the latter. Your analysis of the man as a hardcore social-media addict today fits with my friend's analysis, current as of about 2017.

PS

I definitely agree with the spirit of what you write here. I have always avoided reading this man and view him as disreputable and unappealing. I have never thought to try to put into words why. I have preferred to just ignore him.

Regular Unz browsers and readers are not so easily able to ignore him, which is why you felt inspired to write this.

I notice that whenever I'm back at Unz.com I feel worse for the experience (than I did when I visited near daily in much of the late 2010s), a big reason being that this man is now apparently the leading feature. On the full homepage he is among the top things you see (Steve Sailer is way down nearer the bottom).

Why is Ron Unz doing that, hosting him so prominently on the main page and in featured articles? Not just giving him server space (or something), but having him as in some ways the "face" of the site in the name of clicks by fans or in the name of something called free-speech: why not give front-page space to the street-corner homeless ranter who believes UFOs are controlling the world and the government, that homeless UFO-ideologue also otherwise "excluded" from the "mainstream media"? Ron Unz is, in a sense, a coward for hiding behind free speech in a way, motivations unknown.