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By David Futrelle
In 1941, writer Dorothy Thompson invented what she described as “an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game” called “Who Goes Nazi?” The idea was simple: the next time you’re at a party, or some other social gathering, take a look at those around you and try to guess which ones would, “in a showdown … go Nazi.”
You don’t do this out loud, of course, unless you really want to be punched.
The game feels as relevant at this point in history as it was when Thompson wrote her classic Harper’s essay explaining the rules of the game and offering a series of descriptions of the assorted social types she thought would (or most definitely would not) turn into literal Nazis when the chips were down — from the bank vice president who “has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer” (definitely a Nazi in embryo) to the downwardly mobile editor who manages to be intellectual without being a snob about it, about whom Thompson remarks that she “will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi.”
Thompson’s portraits of these assorted social types, and her theories about who would and wouldn’t go Nazi, are a little too pat for my tastes; she basically thinks that nice people are immune to Nazism while mean and bitter types are drawn to it like moths to a lamp.
“Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote.
They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Not far from the truth, I think, just a little oversimplified.
Still, the game itself is genius.
Over the last couple of years, for obvious reasons, Thompson’s article has been resurrected and passed around on social media, and several writers have proposed modern updates of her famous game, from the “office edition” to one focused on media figures. The only trouble with playing the game now is that so many of those who would have gone gone Nazi in Thompson’s day already have, in ours.
While the original game is still worth playing, let me propose an alternate version that might be even more entertaining for readers of this blog: Who Goes Red Pill?
Think of the various people you’ve recently met — in real life or online — and try to figure out who among them is most likely to embrace the toxic misogynistic ideology that unites the otherwise disparate groups that make up the manosphere, from MRAs to MGTOWS to incels to PUAs. What personality traits do they exhibit? What behaviors are obvious (or not-so-obvious) tells?
Are they NiceGuys (TM) stewing in aggrieved entitlement? Do they like South Park maybe a little bit too much? Do they get suspiciously angry about female superheroes? Are they fans of Pewdiepie, or Joe Rogan, or Jordan Peterson? Do they complain that women are sexually harassing them by wearing yoga pants? Do they know more than Chris Hansen does about age-of-consent laws? Do they describe themselves as “equity feminists” or “egalitarians?”
The game is a little trickier than it might at first appear. Some of these Jordan-Peterson-loving NiceGuys have already swallowed the Red Pill (and sometimes have even embraced the even more nilhilistic Black Pill), thus disqualifying them as candidates for the game.
Others may exhibit several seemingly obvious tells — but their flirtation with the Red Pill may end up being little more than a passing phase. I’m not sure I quite understand just what makes one person a Red-Pill-swallower and another a Red-Pill-spitter-outer. But maybe you do.
Share your own thoughts below as to what personality types you think are most drawn to the Red Pill (or to Nazism, if you’d prefer to play the original version). Let the games begin!
Gabbard has also been hanging out with Mike Huckabee.
https://www.wonkette.com/tulsi-gabbard-just-hangin-with-mike-huckabee-like-regular-democratic-candidates-do
She can fuck off.
IronCthulhu
You can also piss off, but fucking off is better. Much better.
Fuck off.
@Alan Robertshaw & others
At the risk of outing my real identity, I’m a well-known kinky leatherworker who apprenticed to David Morgan. Please don’t use whip thongs for suspension. For starters, good whips can take years to obtain and cost over $1000 US. Surely people have more edifying ways of destroying fine craftsmanship than doing breaking strength tests.
The kangaroo and calfskin high-end whips might hold bodyweight once or twice, but won’t crack or throw accurately afterwards. The cheap cowhide ones often have waste rope fibers and paper padding inside, while the poorly-tanned hide covers shred from cracking them, much less hanging from them. Expensive cowhide cover with rawhide center bullwhips *might* support bodyweight a few times, but also at the expense of destroying accuracy from the degradation of the interlocking helix braiding geometry. Bodyweight stress would also damage any leather attachment to the swivel mechanism connecting the thong to the rigid handle.
If you must use a braided thong-like item to hang from, try a rawhide lariat. Whether twisted or braided, they’re designed for pulling stress. And – they can be thrown at a target or cracked. Not as easily as a whip, but even the fanciest whip is just tapered, multi-layered rope.
@Alan
There are multiple artificial-fibre quality bullwhip makers (even David Morgan used to sell them). Some base their whips on marine rope, others use paracord. Both would stretch a lot under bodyweight, but should stay usable afterward for other whip activities. The manufacturers may be able to answer any questions.
Stay safe, everyone!
@Dreidl
Thank you so much for being here and sharing your expertise with us. It really amazes me how many brilliant and accomplished people there are here on WHTM.
Well if those assholes use “equity feminist” I guess I might stop. But I’m not comfortable identifying as a regular feminist just because I know it closes people’s minds, and I think there are a few non-horrible people who’ve been misled by carefully skewed media and cringe compilations on YouTube. Probably not most, but some; there are ex red pillers, after all.
I’ll just say I’m not not a feminist.
@Dalaila
Destroying your ability to communicate with feminists in order to approach members of groups that want to kill you seems like a bad tradeoff to me, since anyone who’s scared off by the word feminism isn’t going to listen to you to begin with.
I think this is a reasonable take, though IMO her ability to damage the party is extremely limited. Her support is very niche – for now, anyway. Again, I’m not sure where she goes after 2020. I could see her defecting to a post-Trump GOP still influenced by a more sophisticated “Trumpism.” I could also see her sliding more toward the Sanders left, though with a kind of reactionary “anti-woke” cultural politics.
Or, (and I think this is different from the previous two scenarios) maybe she becomes a full-on, self-styled “social conservative, fiscal liberal” whether as a Democrat or Republican. This is a hugely underserved constituency, and if Gabbard is ever to become a major political figure, I think this is how she’d do it.
@IronCthulhu
Mate. Sit down for a second. Take a breath. Don’t type anything for a full several minutes.
You said something that a lot of people who read it thought was a problem. Do you think this line-by-line refutation of their responses is a good strategic use of your time?
It might make you feel momentarily better, but you’d just be stirring the pot some more and it’s not changing anyone’s mind about what you said.
You can do better than that. Your brain is capable of writing better words and taking a smarter course of action.
I won’t tell you what course of action to take – you have lots of options and you get the opportunity to figure out which one is actually good for you and the people you are interacting with. All I can ask is that you take a good second to think before you type.
Because if the choice you make is only going to annoy people and make them think you’re an idiot, then you have chosen poorly.
@IronCthulhu
If it means to royally fuck someone over, then say that instead. The only people who use rape to mean that are misogynistic assholes like you who don’t care about actual rape victims.
I am a man and I was a virgin, dateless and despairing for a very long period of time, and resented it. I don’t recall whether I was being exposed to any “red pill propaganda” at the time, mainly because I have an extremely poor long term memory for this sort of personal historical recollection. I can’t see how, though, I could have sensibly ended up swallowing it if I was.
The point is, I liked (and like) women. I liked women a lot, which was why I wanted to sleep with them and why it distressed me that none of them seemed to like me enough to want to sleep with me.
What I am getting at is that, while I may have been exposed to plenty of misogynist and sexist attitudes, the whole MRA, incel, red pill thing was never going to appeal to me because it would rely on me simultaneously wanting to sleep with women (or at least being upset about not getting to) without at the same time either liking them or caring whether they like me in return. And whatever else was (and is) wrong about me I was (and am not) that kind of arsehole (whatever other kind I may be) and I can’t get my head around the thought process that would mean somebody would be.
Whether there is or us not that fundamental attitude present is to my mind how you can work out whether someone is a potential MRA / Incel / red piller etc, as far as I can see, and it’s not (which may reassure some) going to be affected by whether they started visiting dodgy websites, or listening to dodgy internet “thinkers”, or however resentful or frustrated they may be at not getting laid.
@weirwoodtreehugger
Irrelevant. I was answering the question of who goes redpill, not making a pitch for it. That would only get me banned anyway & defeat the purpose.
@TacticalProgressive
Please don’t trivialize the word “prolapse” then, since we’re all so big on literalism.
@StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved
Oh I see, but it does depend on whether or not I meet YOUR “beauty” standard does it?
Hypocrisy much? What’s good for you is good for me. Here take this song to heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIlFlkRZMSE
Redpillers don’t believe their ideas are harmful or else they wouldn’t be redpillers.
@Definitely not Steve
Dude I’m unwinding after work. Strategic use of my time is not high on my priority list.
Thanks dad. Can I go outside and play in the snow with Billy now?
Oh, I see. Since men tend to do better than women financially after m/f divorce, I’m assuming this is like five dudes? Five dudes who the Court apparently thinks are a huge risk to their children, since they don’t even have supervised visitation? Okay. Rape is a bad analogy for that. Maybe you should call it “divorce fever dream cooked up by men who hate women and believe that all marital assets belong ultimately to them and they’re just generously allowing their wives and children to use them as long as they remain married.”
My cocktail guest most likely to take the red pill is someone who expresses the belief that paying spousal support is kinda equivalent to rape if you think about it, although I’ll confess I’ve never actually heard that at a party. Second place goes to men who say, “She’s got me over a barrel, since if we get divorced she gets all my money,” something two different men have said to me at two different parties.
Just because you keep saying “irrelevant” doesn’t mean your words are actually irrelevant. And the hinting around that you have some great truth bombs that would get you banned is not really helping your case here.
@ Jenora Feuer:
I first heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma from a friend who told me how, when it came up in one of his university classes, a fellow-student who’d grown up in the old Soviet Union or one of its satellites responded with “but doesn’t everybody know that if the police say they’ve already got evidence against you, they’re lying to trick you into a confession? Of course you don’t talk!” and that has always framed my view of the scenario.
It’s silly for people above ITT to slam Tulsi for appearing at far-right talk-shows. She is doing precisely what a good orator and politician is supposed to do – facing her oponents and trying to reach them, to make them change their views. Was it wrong for the Civil Rights leaders to debate racists? She is fighting for working class, not for “woke” hipsters, who are more concerned with the POTUS being rude than with America’s foreign policy killing hundreds of thousands people in the Middle East and North Africa each year.
True.
I guess you could say she is “present.”
If you are unable to distinguish the difference between “granting consent to have something done to you” and “deciding to do something to someone else regardless of their consent”, then frankly I’m not surprised that you’re equating divorce to rape.
And honestly I hope that women stay the hell away from you, for their own safety.
Dengler,
Stealing the children of refugees and putting them in concentration camps, sexually assaulting dozens of women (including at least one 13 year old Jeffrey Epstein victim), appointing another rapist to the supreme court, budding up to dictators, legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people by health care providers, the Muslim ban, and spreading Kremlin talking points while attacking our presidential election for the second time is not what I’d call rude. It’s monstrous. And it’s not like this list of horrible things Trump has done is comprehensive.
Also, Tulsi is pro Assad, pro Modi, and quite possibly pro Putin, so don’t even try to sell her as the peace candidate.
Anyway, if objecting to rape and genocidal racism makes me a woke hipster, than call me a woke hipster I guess. I thought it was just being halfway decent though.
I completely agree, Trump is horrible, but so is the entire US establishment. America had had Third-World levels of income inequality, social immobility and incarceration rate before Orange Man’s election. Mainstream Democrats haven’t addressed these problems.
She is simply anti-interventionist, that doesn’t make her anything but pro-American. Refusing to antagonize nuclear powers is a simple common sense.
She is against starting new wars, so, yes, she is literally THE peace candidate.
@IronCthulhu
Like the ever brilliant Catalpa says
Yes.
Whether or not it’s ok for a man or anyone of any gender to stare at me depends on these things:
Am I at work? If I am at work part of my job is to look a certain way so that my boss’s clients have a nice time. That certain way happens to be with aligned cishet ideas of conventional attractiveness for women but that doesn’t even matter because the issue is consent. If a client of any gender is normal and nice not only can they look all they want but I will do my best to make them feel welcome and enjoy themselves. They are supposed to look at me and I like it and it’s actually an art form but I doubt you’d get that.
If I’m not at work:
Do I like it that the person doing the looking is looking? If he’s a man then NO I don’t like it and it’s NOT ok to stare at me *unless* he’s tall, has a handsome face with chiseled features and dark hair and eyes and an athletic muscular ripped body that I can see, is smart, kind and compliant and does what I tell him but without being a wimp about it and still being masculine… in which case he can stare all day and I’ll pose. 🙂 Other than that the answer is no and staring at my body becomes a creepy leer which is in no way OK regardless of what he or anyone else wants.
See this is an example of how *consent* works. Can you really not see that?
Is the idea of another person’s own desires making a difference really so strange to you that you need to get a new world view which is what red pill is supposed to be.
Has anyone here praised the political establishment? I haven’t seen it.
And Bernie Sanders with his explicit anti-war stance and Elizabeth Warren with her explicitly anti-corruption/dark money stance are both far more deserving of the peace candidate mantle.
No, I don’t have time to explain to you how corruption and war are connected.
Well, I like Bernie a lot, too, he says the right things and has done plenty of these, too. If I were American, I would rather vote for him than for Tulsi, but I still respect her very much.
She has made a lot of good points, but for me she is too ready to compromise and bend for pragmatic reasons.
@Dengler
So, what you’re saying is that she is “America First.” Hmm…I wonder who else said that?
@WWTH
Not to mention that Warren and Sanders didn’t get to their positions of power by explicitly running on an anti-LGBTQIPA+ platform.
Yeah, how horrible of Warren to actually understand how our political system works and knows you can’t wave a magic wand and get everything you want passed with no court challenge. God, brogressives are exhausting.
So? If Hitler, Stalin and Chikatilo drank water, then whe shouldn’t do it, right?
It was a nasty thing of her, sure. I admit, she is not a saint, but she definitely stands for good in most aspects.
@Dengler
So far we’ve found quite a number of unsavory aspects of Tulsi. I can’t think of many where she stands for anything uniquely good that other candidates aren’t better at.
Oh, and that’s the first time I’ve heard the “drink water” defense from a brogressive. I’d previously only heard it from conservatives and libertarians.