Episode 13 : Persuasion mechanisms and WWII with Ryan Faulk (AKA Alternative Hypothesis AKA FringeElements)

Very special guest today. Ryan Faulk or The Alternative Hypothesis is the fella who brought me into the edgy online right as a teenager back in 2010.

More than any other individual, Ryan is responsible for defining the arguments and talking points of the 2015-2016 AR. All the podcasters and memelords you may have enjoyed in 2015 were probably influenced by Ryan in 2010-2014.

Topics:

• Ryan’s intellectual origins as a neocon and his original forays into HBD

• His early advocacy of Anti-Statism and Polycentric Law

• The Libertarian to Alt Right Pipeline

• The death of right libertarianism

• Ryan’s involvement with the 2015-2018 Alt Right

• Ryan’s longstanding opposition to IRL “retard rallies”

• Privacy is a necessary condition for ideological conversion

• Live debates are ineffectual

• Can comedy truly be subversive given the necessity of shared assumptions?

• Ryan’s opposition to big positive projects and preference for pure critique

• Efficiency of attacking the right vs. the left

• Substack vs. Twitter vs. YouTube

• The Oppression Narrative is a single thing

• Conspiracy theories aren’t independent

• Alt Right are psychologically liberal

• Walt’s idea for ending America’s racial problem with reparations

• Ryan’s idea of The Hegemonic Cult

• Decline of written doctrine religion

• Flexibility of liberalism ideologically disperses it and makes it hard to attack

• How Ryan got interested in WW2 during the Russia Ukraine War

• Is supporting Ukraine in the interest of America?

• Why isn’t America more aggressive in promoting the Petrodollar?

• Ryan’s theory that Putin is holding back in Ukraine

• Extreme waste of NATO military spending

• Could the Confederates have won the Civil War?

• Paradox Interactive games as a force shaping people’s mental model of the world

• Japanese grand strategy in WW2

• Hitler wanted an alliance with Poland

• Dunkirk

• Could the Germans have won in Barbarossa?

• Hitler could have strong-armed Turkey and Spain into the war

• Hitler’s failure in creating foreign-facing propaganda

• Growth of belief in HBD as consequence of New Atheists growing up

• Bill Gates probably believes in HBD

• HBD implications for paternalistic liberalism