Contra Parvini
What Academic Agent Gets Wrong
I’ve been hit with several notices from a number of people I respect regarding an article published recently by Neema Parvini, who writes under the handle Academic Agent on X. Generally, they seem to approve of it, or at least have no objection to its core thesis, which is that the right has been taken over by “slop”- pervasive, low quality propaganda that inculcates ignorance, cruelty, and delusion upon those subject to it.
As you’ve probably already guessed from my title: I believe something like this has happened to people who thought they had become “red-pilled” and stepped out of The Matrix a few years ago. All that has really happened is that they’ve left the old neo-liberal goldfish bowl and plonked themselves in a new one that can be broadly called “Slop Right”, a strange make-believe world in which tweets substitute for politics, and performative outrage and cruelty for clicks substitutes for any sort of real-world result.
With respect to κρῠπτός, Dave Greene, and others, I don’t share the sentiment. I think this piece is exactly what the right doesn’t need, and following the advice given in “Escaping The Slop Right Matrix,” such as it is, will result in the utter failure of any rightist program, anywhere.
To begin with, it would have been useful if Parvini had included specific names and examples of the sort of thing he’s talking about, but the piece is short on both- short generally, really- and despite the purported importance and pervasiveness of the phenomenon he describes the only Agent Smith he names is Matt Walsh, with no notion of what Walsh said or did to earn that categorization. He laments the lack of “liberal overlords” on X- unironically- before explaining the threat as he sees it:
Serious policy is replaced by this “based Olympics”. Some people, addicted to this environment, have sadly become “slop brained” and taken leave of reality. Actual politics is replaced by a fantasy world – “Nationalist Narnia” as I heard one commentator say – in which the power of tweets will, as if by magic, deport tens of millions of people.
What policy? What people? Who used the phrases, “based Olympics” and “Nationalist Narnia” and what do they even mean or signify as elements of discourse? And most importantly, who, exactly, thinks tweets will “deport tens of millions of people?” The whole thing is like this, just vague insinuations about rightists-in what numbers and to what degree unclear- having had their brains melted by… something.
The pretext for this seems to be the recent aggressive immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis and several geopolitical moves on the part of the Trump administration:
Over the past decade, there was an acute sense that “we” held the moral high-ground – the enemy cheated, the enemy called us names, the enemy got us fired from jobs, the enemy tried to put Donald Trump in jail, the enemy killed Charlie Kirk – but this accumulated capital has been squandered rapidly over the past month or so. I have watched “the right” degenerate into a near-mindless and emotional cheerleading squad for, among other things, kidnapping a world leader on the thinnest of pretexts for reasons that still are not abundantly clear, the shooting of a mother of three by scarcely-trained government officials (among several such incidents involving ICE), and increasingly erratic threats from President Trump against long-standing allies, such as Canada and Denmark.
The right were the good guys, but then, a month ago, they (again, who exactly?) did a heel turn and are now evil, because the right are now cheerleaders for shooting mothers and kidnapping people. For a piece ostensibly about the dangers of propaganda, written out of purported concern for the state of the right, it’s especially shameful to see this ridiculously tendentious framing. Untrained ICE agents shot a mother of three? That’s the whole story? They just saw this random mom and shot her because they didn’t have the manual with them that day?
This is that training manual. All three reasons are “because f*** immigrants,” but only the third solution is to start blasting. They should have followed the steps in order.
I find it similarly interesting that the things that he feels gave the right its moral high ground all come back to their being victims of liberals and the left. The right are good people when they’re defrauded and mocked and cancelled and jailed and assassinated. They become evil at the exact moment when they have the power to do anything to redress the systemic injustices that motivated them to support Trump’s wholly unprecedented comeback. Their villain arc culminated with them displacing their tormentors, at least in part.
“Athena” is the brave pen name chosen by Adam Kinzinger for his roman-a-clef autobiography.
No one thinks that tweets will deport people. ICE agents deport people. Tweets aren’t a substitute for policy; they’re the means through which advocates track and urge its further implementation, or else its replacement by something better. The people of the United States came together in a free and fair election and put Donald Trump in power for a second time with the express mandate to enforce immigration laws. In most places this proceeds smoothly. In some places, deluded and evil people have refused to accept the results of the election and the right of the government to enforce laws passed by elected representatives. Donald Trump’s actions in Minneapolis are not cruelty; they are, if anything, a restrained response to an organized rebellion against lawful authority, orchestrated by an alliance of local and state officials and subversive political actors. Everyone has the right to protest. No one has the right to grind law enforcement to a halt.
The left has been reposting this shocking and not-at-all-slop fake photo all over, and even got a former general in charge of SOCOM to retweet it, but to my mind it shows, not an act of oppression, but a hero cop still on the job despite being decapitated.
But by implication, that’s what Parvini seems to argue for. It looks cruel, and will discredit right wing ideas, and therefore, we should stop, because the right will lose the midterms:
I have no doubt the midterms will take place (it’s a liberal talking point that they won’t), and I have no doubt the Democrats will win them. My fear, rather, is that all this is going to kill the viability of rightist ideas for a generation: “We gave you the shot and you blew it by acting like excitable monkeys; furthermore, you confirmed our predictions and proved that the right is driven by nothing but unthinking hate”. What makes things worse is that, as things stand, the liberal assessment is correct.
The theory seems to be that right wing ideas (which ones, exactly?) are good and true, and that it’s important that the masses have a positive opinion of them (even though elites are all that matter) but it’s also necessary that those ideas never actually be implemented, because if they are, they will be seen as evil. Rightist thought is for debate, discussion, academic conferences, and risqué parties where you talk HBD with the likes of Nathan Cofnas. It’s not for governing. It’s part of a big game where you show liberals how daring you can be, and how threatening you aren’t.
Say what you will about Rousseau, but he actually wanted to overthrow the decadent pseudo-elites he grifted from his whole life.
The oddest part for me in this is Parvini’s take on the state of the European right, the fortunes of which are apparently bound up with the status of Greenland. Yes, like others, Parvini seems to think that the various European powers involved will break up NATO over the issue, and that this puts Nigel Farage in a tough spot:
On the global stage, there is serious concern that NATO cannot survive. Last week, on a very mainstream liberal radio station (yes, it’s LBC!), I heard a British general say that if American soldiers fire on European troops in Greenland, it would spell the end of American bases in Europe and signal the end of the postwar order. Again, this is nothing I am worried about (I prefer a sovereign Europe and an end to postmodern fictions!), but the political impact of all of this is that it is discredits the right in Europe. In fact, so unpopular are these moves by Trump, that the net effect has been to split the European right from the American right along lines that ultimately strengthen the neoliberal establishment. On this, Farage and Le Pen have had to fall in behind Starmer and Macron, and the balance of opinion from dissident voices on the right has also been to fall in behind them – an extremely rare moment of moral unity among the establishment, insurgent populist leaders and the so-called online right. The trouble is, those populists and many online right figures have spent the past decade cheerleading Trump too, so they have been made to look ridiculous. Again, I fear, once the excitement is over, all this might serve to put “the right” to bed for a decade as it will be argued – correctly perhaps – that it is unfit to govern.
America is NATO, and the fungible Eurocrats who’ve spent the last three years screeching to the heavens about the existential threat posed by Vladimir Putin are hardly going to be willing (or able) to remove American forces from their midst over Greenland. But assuming they were, what would this have to do with the ascent of the right in Europe in the big picture? The right exists as a political force in Europe for the same main reason it does in the US, the destructive and destabilizing effects of mass immigration, which is the main issue on which Trump has demonstrated effective and inspiring leadership. The European right wishes they could point to a head of state who actually used the term “remigration” to describe his policy (le Pen and Farage sure won’t).
“Which is to say, they’ll now all be allowed to come legally.”
I hope I’m wrong.
While Parvini will describe the right as cruel and unfit to govern, he is carefully nuanced and anodyne in his description of the censorious EU tyrants who actually embody performative outrage and cruelty. For the people who will jail you for describing immigrant crime uncharitably, he can only call them “draconian” and describes the proposed banning of X in Britain as “the best thing to ever happen to the right.” It’s difficult to see how, unless you believe that rightist ideas are like dangerous viruses meant to be kept locked up in universities for study and experiments, but never released. While rightist propaganda is slop, liberal propaganda, whatever critique one might make of it as a thought exercise, is never to be challenged in a way that might injure its legitimacy. There’s no level of stupid they could reach on Bluesky that would motivate Parvini to urge Starmer to undertake a similar crackdown there.
I really hope they don’t call my bluff and actually ban it. I and the world would miss out on a ton of gold-theater Will Stancil urban guerrilla arc content.
Is Parvini correct that the right is under the control of a new Matrix? I don’t know, because he’s not really making an argument. The whole brief piece is a pose, a string of cant with the point of demonstrating how above it all he is. But to be fair, let’s examine the one example he does give of someone who is a purveyor of slop, Matt Walsh.
I used to dislike Matt Walsh. He was NeverTrump back in 2016- annoyingly so- and I had written him off as yet another cuckservative. But in the time since, I occasionally had one of his videos pop up in my YouTube feed, and I found them- despite myself- compelling and entertaining. But what cemented my reappraisal of Walsh was his bold stance against transgenderism. At a time when the whole world seemed ready to descend another rung on the ladder of degeneracy, Walsh stood firm, and didn’t just talk, but went out to confront this evil in person. He never surrendered the framing; he never called men ‘women’ and refused to accept any part of the conceptual framework. At a time when the creepy Republican governor of Utah was proclaiming his pronouns on a Zoom call to teenagers, and fellow former NeverTrumper David French was welcoming Brian Reidl to the New York Times as a newly-minted lady named Jessica, Walsh was visiting colleges, going on television, lobbying the legislature, and making a hit film- all with the goal of not just legislating against transgenderism, but rendering it nonviable as a publicly held sentiment. While there’s still a long way to go, we’re a long way from Target having a prominent tr00n youth swimsuit section like they once did, and that’s certainly in large part due to Walsh’s (and many others’) advocacy.
If you’re Pastor JD Greear, you just turn to the Good Book- the New York Times Style Guide.
Matt Walsh lives under constant threat of death from pro-trans leftists, people Parvini couldn’t be bothered to describe as cruel and demonic. One of them killed Charlie Kirk, to the widespread approval of the same sorts of people now forming mobs to attack ICE agents. They would kill Walsh if they could. They may yet. And if that happens, the Parvinis of the world say nothing too harsh about it. Walsh was a slop merchant, no big loss.
Matt Walsh is not an intellectual. He doesn’t read Louis Althusser, a communist who defended Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution, driven so insane by the evil he advocated that he strangled his own wife to death, because Walsh has sense enough to know that a man like that isn’t guiding you out of any Plato’s Cave. Walsh isn’t a theorist; he’s not a politician, and he’s not a brilliant artist (though he is very hardworking and prolific). What he does have, however, is courage. It’s his courage that has gained him the following and the influence that he has, and it’s that same courage that inspires others to adopt rightist ideas. A display of bravery has infinitely more impact than a display of wit. Walsh may not be sophisticated but he’s not slop and he’s not propaganda.
He even bucks the system’s line on UFOs.
The mistake Parvini makes is to confuse the emotional appeal Walsh’s messaging makes with some attempt to deceive, because he has to live in fear of a worm like Keir Starmer and his cronies working to “collect all the evidence they need to follow the lead of Australia and crackdown as hard as they can on dissidents.” He lives under a regime where being honest gets you jailed, and he hates that others are freer that he, and rather than condemn the injustice, he hopes that others suffer under the same yoke, that those who actually live out the ideas he plays with might have to do without X, because they, not the degenerate managerial elites he cowers before, are cruel.
If I sound harsh it’s because I’ve seen this a lot, and it always bothers me greatly. The right needs intellectuals and academics; I count a number of them among my friends and supporters. But the right needs a full spectrum of support if rightist ideas are ever going to be actualized. We need artists and writers and musicians. We need filmmakers. We need memesmiths. We need shitposters. We need research autists. We need rabble-rousers on the ground. We need cops and soldiers and politicians. We need Matt Walsh. And we need everyday people like the ones I live among, for whom Tradition isn’t something you study, but something you live, tradition in the proper sense of a thing handed down from your ancestors, a way of life that reaches into the past and into the transcendent above. Those who know who Schmitt and Pareto are might be an elite, but that only obligates them to defend and work with those not so equipped.
We on the right are engaged in a war against an enemy that wants us broke, imprisoned, hurt, or dead. They are the enemies of our faith and civilization. They aren’t attacking ICE because they love illegals; they’re doing it because they hate Americans. They don’t celebrate Trump almost dying because of who he is as a man, but because he represents the instantiation of power of the part of people they’ve been taught to despise as beneath them, history’s losers destined to be steamrolled by progress. The left is the force motivated by hate- hatred for everything noble, excellent, beautiful, true, and good. Theatrical denunciations of “the right” as being cruel, evil, demonic, etc. are nothing more than self-serving concern trolling. The right is screwing up in Minneapolis? How are they doing in London? Perhaps you could go down to the local jail and tell them how demonic they are for objecting to foreigners killing little girls in their streets.
If you don’t like Walsh, don’t watch his stuff. But don’t slight him and those like him as shady grifters when they’ve demonstrated to the world their willingness to put their lives on the line for ideas you claim to love. If you think there’s too much slop on the right, make something better. I had something to say, so I sat down at the end of a long day, with my family asleep, typing in the dark for three hours straight to say it. If you have a response, do likewise.
To be clear, I am not arguing that there are no problems on the right, that there are no grifters or conmen or idiots or nuts. I’ve dealt personally with many of them, whether the JOOOOOOOOOOZ crowd or the sorts who want a scene instead of a movement. But if you’re going to criticize, do so by name and by stating clearly the parameters of your objections. Simply saying “the right” is a cesspool or that X is a propaganda mill avoids the hard and real distinctions that are necessary in favor of scoring head pats from people who hate you anyway. I have some of the best people I’ve ever met here and on X, and every day I see posts that are uplifting, inspiring, thoughtful, funny, and above all true.
Matt Walsh has called for unity on the right in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder.
I agree. In the spirit of unity, I hope that everyone on the right will take this in the spirit of constructive criticism, and that we can work together toward common political and philosophical goals. Let us come together and fight the good fight, with positivity and clarity. That’s the real redpill on offer- the truth that we can win.
Parvini strikes me as a liberal who thinks being on the right is cool and is utterly shocked by right wing ideas, and can’t seem to understand why right wingers aren’t just cool right wing liberals instead.
I can just picture AA sitting in a Seattle bar wearing a leather jacket saying something like "Nirvana ruined grunge by making it too popular". We are starving dogs, we should be able to eat our cheesy puffs.