oh yeah, the perception of legitimacy was a huge part of it. I don't think you could ever believe that guy was "optical" unless you already in the groyper echochamber, though. He has pretty much always had some kind of baggage, whether it was starting out as a neocon, being at charlottesville, or the statement he made pretty early on about racemixing being like bestiality. The funniest thing about him stealing TRS takes, apart from the obvious hypocrisy, is also that when he regurgitates them back up, he has to dumb them down and take any semblance of nuance away from them. I specifically remember when Striker started doing the whole "China" thing he tried to make it clear a number of times that he did not think China was unequivocally good or necessarily better than the US, but if you just weren't paying attention or weren't thinking about what he was saying the takeaway would just be "China is better than America, we should support China."