Natalie Wynn and the Democratic Party
"She's called contrapoints because she's contra having a point." - Eyup Lovely
They don’t want victory, they don’t want power. They just want to endlessly critique power. - Natalie Wynn, Envy, August 7, 2021
This has been a long time coming. In many ways, it was inevitable. My publication’s name was literally inspired from this one video, which became memetic as soon as it dropped. If I am going to critique power, of course I will also critique Natalie Wynn,
Critiquing Power, for I thought that in my personal absence of power, what else could I, a humble nobody do but critique the powerful? I’ll admit it: I was never really a fan of Ms Wynn or Contrapoints (her youtube project). I blame this solely on my age. 33 (as of today) is too old to have known or enjoyed Contrapoints. To put this in perspective, I was taking my first philosophy courses at community college when she was herself 21 (and pre-transition, pre-even the existence of a thing called ‘Contrapoints’). When Breadtube truly picked up circa 2018, I barely noticed it. She only really landed on my radar, my ire, in 2021.
That’s when Envy dropped. My distaste towards her caricature curdled as I heard her speak those infamous words. On that date, August 7, it had been nearly eight months to the day that Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government. It had been 21 years and eight months since the 2000 election was stolen, 18 years since the United States illegally invaded Iraq, and in less than three years, we were about to help start the next genocidal atrocity in Gaza and occupied Palestine. My retort to Natalie then is the same I have now: “Who had all the power, all the victory?”
It wasn’t the Left, it wasn’t even the centrist Bidenettes, despite their ostensible 2020 victory. It was Trump, it was the Republicans. They have held history by the balls for decades because they alone critique power. When Nixon had to resign in disgrace they pumped up a populist Reagan. When Bush Junior flopped they pivoted to Trump. The Republicans possess in them a natural digestive regurgitative system. The winners rise to the top and the losers are discarded as yesterday’s trash. There is no similar process amongst the Democrats.
In many ways, the Democrats have been running on the Obama-Clinton coalition of 2008. Speaking very broadly in terms of demographics, Obama brought the youth and racial minorities to the table while Clinton brought the seniors and white people, especially women into the tent. It was a broad enough coalition to win a landslide in 2008 and eke out a smaller victory in 2012. Ever since then though, the party has effectively been on autopilot, unchanging in both message and messenger. If you were speaking at the DNC in 2008, and are still alive and not in jail, chances are you also spoke at the DNC in 2024. Biden didn’t even attempt to have a policy page in 2024, cribbing entirely from his 2020 platform. The party from the very top abandoned new ideas and even the very basic concepts of politics like persuasion (aka having a message).
The only time the Democrats have ever won since 2012 was in 2020, during a generational, disastrous, apocalyptic pandemic that produced voters and trends totally alien to normal electoral politics. In other words, unless there’s going to be lockdowns and mass deaths every four years, the material conditions of the 2020 victory cannot be replicated.
I say this all because what Ms Wynn suffers from is the same sin the rest of her Democratic partisans suffer from: hubris. A haughty vision of the world where they and she know better than all. And this isn’t some imagined critique. This is how many Democrats view the world, from Obama on down.
Let’s talk about BlueAnon. I’m not referring to the current iteration, which thinks the 2024 election was stolen, or the Biden Regime BlueAnon which believed that all instances of Biden appearing to be old was Russian AI-CGI disinformation. I’m talking about an older version, which commanded loyalty to the Democratic Party-line no matter what, based on an incorrect view of the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice. The scion of the establishment, James Carville, produced in 2009 their Bible:
In it, Carville observes that lots of young people and hispanic people support Democrats, and observes that the number of both are going up, and that the number of non-hispanic older people are going down. Thus comes the cardinal sin of any science: he formulates causation where there is none. “Line must always go up” is not a scientific thesis, and moreover, Carville reduces entire populations of real human beings into stats on a chart. Of course people can change their mind. They can vote, or choose not to, or vote for the other guy. That’s exactly what the youth and hispanic voters did in 2024, after all.
How important is this Bible, is this message? It dominates the elite establishment brain to this day. Ms Wynn is the perfect representation of this mode of thinking. Why do Democrats never bother campaigning on a message anymore? Why have they totally given up on the art of persuasion? It’s very simple. Yes, Biden was old and decrepit but this Bible, coupled with his victory in 2020, deceived him into complacency. It deceives all Democrats into compliance, including Ms Wynn. I say Ms Wynn is the Democratic Party because she has bought in to the mythos, hook, line, and sinker.
Ms Wynn doesn’t want to critique power because to her, power is just right around the corner. Demographics is destiny after all, and just wait! In 2, 4, 6, 8 years we will win the House, the Senate, the Presidency. The Supreme Court may take 30 years to take back but by sheer weight of demographics alone, we will win every single election from here until the end of time. Then we can have the free healthcare, we can end the bombings, end the killings, bring abortion back, and every single person who wants a pony, can have a pony. Thus, any Republican victory can be blamed on the Left, on the Bernie Bros, or on the Arabs and the Muslims, or on men, especially Black men, or on institutions like the electoral college. After all, every election begins with a Democratic victory assured, confirmed, inevitable. It is only wreckers who steal victory from the jaws of defeat.
This is a very convenient myth for people currently in office, of course. There is no policy they can support, no vote they can’t take that is too egregious. After all, any critique is wreckerism; being critical of a Democrat is proof of your disloyalty. This has real consequences: if you dare critique the establishment, you may very well find yourself unemployed and unemployable. And the circular firing squad within the many echelons of the Democratic Party ensure uniform loyalty to one another, an omerta system if ever there were one.
And we must ask: what has victory and power delivered to people like Ms Wynn who backed the Biden regime tooth and nail? A temporary reprieve of four years from personal genocide, and little else. 22 states now have some form of abortion ban with 12 states possessing total bans. Both House and Senate are now ruled by Republicans. Donald Trump is President, again, Elon Musk tore up Congress’s power of the purse, and JD Vance stands ready to take up the mantle as Groyper-in-Chief. If there is a 2028 election, it is entirely possible the Republicans win it outright once again.
We can’t even celebrate Biden’s limited victories. All of his biggest accomplishments, his CHIPS and his IRA bills are in the process of being shredded by a captured legislature, executive, and judicial branch. The past Biden administration will remain as nothing but an amnesiatic blip in our heads, four years zipped by in a flash, and Trump’s second administration began as soon as the first ended. Yes, trans people were safe for a moment, but now that moment is gone and soon-forgotten.
I haven’t turned yet to what makes this article topical, her “Statement on I/P”. I could do a line by line reaction and vitriolic takedown of the statement, but why bother? The message in that is effectively the same message she had in Envy in 2021, the same message I’ve heard from every single Democratic partisan since 2009: “stop pissing in the tent, for the tent is glorious and magnificent and beyond reproach” despite that obviously being untrue. Democrats can and do lose elections all the time. There does exist such a thing as an Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter. They are real. People change their minds, constantly, over very little things and sometimes very things. But pretending it doesn’t happen helps no one.
What Ms Wynn does in her statement, does in her video, does in the broad corpus of her work is yet more impotent rage. It’s the same impotent rage I hear all the time from Democratic elected officials. I think she and they are smart enough to know that deep down, the Democrats do suck. They do make mistakes. I do think she is genuine when she says she opposes the genocide. But her loyalty to the myth of the demographic destiny, to the inevitable goodness and moral victory of the Democrats make her totally blind to the obvious truth: if we are unable to criticize the Democrats, we enable them to make more mistakes, to be even more entrenched in incorrect thinking.
To take the most obvious elephant in the room, if you don’t speak up and critique the genocide, you are signaling to the party and the rest of society that there are no red-lines. Genocide thus becomes okay because our demographic destiny will ensure our electoral victory and then we can stop the genocide, or so the logic goes. The truth is, a party of yesmen always delivers predictable results: an endless line of lemmings jumping off a bridge.
So, unable to critique the Democrats yet also pained to support them, Ms Wynn does what any other Democrat does: she whines, she cries. AOC is quite infamous for her long tirades on Instagram Live, becrying “woe is me” as she supports funding Israel. This is victimhood ideology, whereby Wynn and AOC and all the rest of them transform from defenders of the antagonists to the victims of new antagonists, often the Left or inconvenient minorities.
Let’s be clear about one thing: the Left does not have the power to decide elections. The Left has never had that power. They may in the future, but not once in American history have they held any sway on the national stage. Not even in 2000, which people attribute to Nader’s profundity but in actuality they should blame Gore’s cowardice for not stopping Bush’s steal. Same goes for 2016 and 2024. It was the Democratic candidate’s failure to convince a majority of people in the electoral college, no one else’s. You could whine about uncommitted or the Bernie Bros but then you’re just whining. Where does the buck stop? Who has the most agency? At the end of the day, who alone is responsible for electoral victory (or defeat)? The candidate. If the candidate fails to convince people who ought to be in her coalition, that’s her fault.
So, what are we left with when it comes to Contrapoints? Ultimately, to me, this proves Ms Wynn is not that intellectually minded, for she has become a brain-dead loyal partisan to a debunked political theory. This in turn throws every other single one of her ‘philosophical’ video essays into question. Why should anyone pay attention (or pay her money in particular) if the lens through which she views the universe is so fundamentally flawed and incorrect? The obvious answer is that they shouldn’t.
And, after the extremely offensive “I/P Statement” they would be right to. There’s nothing there at the end of the day. Just vapid, angsty commentary from a half-deluded woman in her mid-30s, rage-crying into the bitterness of the night, dressed up with pretty lights, fancy costumes, and good camera angles. You’re better off watching something, anything else. The same goes for the rest of the Democratic Party. If you cannot bring yourself to critique your fellow partisan, we are changing the channel to something else.
