I think with reactionary nerds the dichotomy also comes the fact that in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s nerds saw themselves as “apolitical.” They didn’t want to hear or care about any politics, man, they were just simple dudes who wanted to play video games, watch anime and read comic books. They used to hate conservatives back when conservative groups and politicians were coming after video games, heavy metal, DnD and so on
Eventually in the 2010s the enemy shifted from Jack Thompson types to feminists as nerd media stopped being exclusively catered to horny 14-35 year old dudes, and during Gamergate conservatives managed to leverage that resentment to begin fully folding them into the conservative movement. They’re adopting more and more conservative viewpoints which is replacing the vaguely ambivalently liberal. sorta libertarian ethos they used to have
So they want big titty waifus to jerk off to but they also wanna ban abortion and bring God back to schools
It’s basically that American counter-culture has always had a strong chauvinist libertine current to it, for whom the ultimate sin is someone getting between them and their treats. And this doesn’t just apply to libertarians, but was also a strong current in the broader American “left” (which was mostly center-right sucdems).
This leads to incoherent things like, say, Heavy Metal magazine being at once openly cynically exploitative and publishing a lot of extremely problematic trash, but also still being better than its contemporary mainstream on social issues. Or 4chan 20 years ago generally being left of the mainstream (like when I was in highschool, all the queer theater kids and general outcasts were avid 4chan users), even though it was chauvinist libertine trash then too. And you can take this back further to things like the hippy movement that was incoherent and mostly focused on young men not wanting to suffer and die for a stupid, evil reason and also those same young men wanting special good boy treats like drugs and music and free access to women’s bodies, and while it may have intersected in places with the left and the civil rights movement that was entirely incidental and you had a lot of racism and sexism because it was still an American movement. Like the American mainstream social mores have been so extremely chauvinist and awful that even contrarian libertines just demanding treats ended up better politically than the geriatric demons running the show.
Then the lines were redrawn: the theocrats faded into the background momentarily and their fascist oligarch backers switched to trying to capture a new generation of libertines by telling them women and minorities were coming for their treats, leading all that self-serving latent bigotry to crystalize into their entire worldview and creating an army of frothing fascist treat lads. Conversely, the backlash against them also allowed an actual left to form because suddenly a big chunk of the chauvinist libertines who were sucking the life out of everything weren’t just gone, they were a militant enemy that had to be opposed.
It’s a cyclical thing. Back in the 90’s it was the Howard Stern conservatives who thought the libs were coming for their cigarettes, high flow toilets and in-ground pools and ruin their vibe. The rugged individualism facade that American conservatism puts on is really good at convincing those types that conservatism is the party time ideology that wants to deregulate their treats. It continues until the cultural conservatives gain the upper hand and then they realize again, oh these people want to control others.
Like a perpetual game of peekaboo with a toddler that hasn’t developed object permanence, every other decade or so centrists and liberals forget that conservatives are really just fascists in everything but name.
![[CW: Misogyny, gross AI image] Even when they do get a game with a big butt in it, these guys can't just be happy about it](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/b2d2a6bb-6716-4e66-82d4-1ad5fbfcf494.jpeg){kind=link}
I think with reactionary nerds the dichotomy also comes the fact that in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s nerds saw themselves as “apolitical.” They didn’t want to hear or care about any politics, man, they were just simple dudes who wanted to play video games, watch anime and read comic books. They used to hate conservatives back when conservative groups and politicians were coming after video games, heavy metal, DnD and so on
Eventually in the 2010s the enemy shifted from Jack Thompson types to feminists as nerd media stopped being exclusively catered to horny 14-35 year old dudes, and during Gamergate conservatives managed to leverage that resentment to begin fully folding them into the conservative movement. They’re adopting more and more conservative viewpoints which is replacing the vaguely ambivalently liberal. sorta libertarian ethos they used to have
So they want big titty waifus to jerk off to but they also wanna ban abortion and bring God back to schools
It’s basically that American counter-culture has always had a strong chauvinist libertine current to it, for whom the ultimate sin is someone getting between them and their treats. And this doesn’t just apply to libertarians, but was also a strong current in the broader American “left” (which was mostly center-right sucdems).
This leads to incoherent things like, say, Heavy Metal magazine being at once openly cynically exploitative and publishing a lot of extremely problematic trash, but also still being better than its contemporary mainstream on social issues. Or 4chan 20 years ago generally being left of the mainstream (like when I was in highschool, all the queer theater kids and general outcasts were avid 4chan users), even though it was chauvinist libertine trash then too. And you can take this back further to things like the hippy movement that was incoherent and mostly focused on young men not wanting to suffer and die for a stupid, evil reason and also those same young men wanting special good boy treats like drugs and music and free access to women’s bodies, and while it may have intersected in places with the left and the civil rights movement that was entirely incidental and you had a lot of racism and sexism because it was still an American movement. Like the American mainstream social mores have been so extremely chauvinist and awful that even contrarian libertines just demanding treats ended up better politically than the geriatric demons running the show.
Then the lines were redrawn: the theocrats faded into the background momentarily and their fascist oligarch backers switched to trying to capture a new generation of libertines by telling them women and minorities were coming for their treats, leading all that self-serving latent bigotry to crystalize into their entire worldview and creating an army of frothing fascist treat lads. Conversely, the backlash against them also allowed an actual left to form because suddenly a big chunk of the chauvinist libertines who were sucking the life out of everything weren’t just gone, they were a militant enemy that had to be opposed.
It’s a cyclical thing. Back in the 90’s it was the Howard Stern conservatives who thought the libs were coming for their cigarettes, high flow toilets and in-ground pools and ruin their vibe. The rugged individualism facade that American conservatism puts on is really good at convincing those types that conservatism is the party time ideology that wants to deregulate their treats. It continues until the cultural conservatives gain the upper hand and then they realize again, oh these people want to control others.
Like a perpetual game of peekaboo with a toddler that hasn’t developed object permanence, every other decade or so centrists and liberals forget that conservatives are really just fascists in everything but name.