It was never about optics, not really. At least not after Charlottesville. Pre-Unite the Right, Nick was a small fish in a big pond. His show on youtube got around 7,000 views on average. At the same time, people like Red Ice, Iconoclast, James Allsup and others were getting views in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions. Post-Unite the Right all that changed. Youtube altered it's algorithm to suppress right wing content, plenty of people were deplatformed, etc. This was when Nick launched his Optics Wars. Not because it was something he cared deeply about, but to use it as a weapon to get rid of any remaining competition. His followers would mass-flag and report people Nick targeted, and that was that. The unoptical wignats were gone and Nick was the last man standing.
That's the thing all of Nick's self-branded "wars" have in common. Optics Wars, Thot Wars, Groyper Wars, all of them were about attacking other people on the right and trying to drive them away. Not because of some deep ideological differences, but because Nick is a grifting piece of shit and wanted all the potential dono money for himself. He has worse optics than the wignats ever did, he's happy to work with women who support AF, and he's happy to go on more moderate shows if he thinks it'll grow his audience. He and AF stand for nothing. The whole "movement" only exists to feed his bank account and his ego.
