Jeet Heer Profile picture
Aug 4, 2018 17 tweets 7 min read Read on X
1. Who wants to watch @sullydish egregiously & completely misrepresent another writer? It's an edifying experience.
2. In New York, @sullydish quotes a tweet from @sarahjeong and characterizes it thus: "Or you could describe an entire race as subhuman."
3. But as @studentactivism points out, @sarahjeong's tweet original belonged to a sequence, which sheds light on what the quoted tweet means.
4. In sequence, the tweets read:
GOTTA HEAR BOTH Sides -- Andrew Sullivan
Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.
let's hear both sides.
5. In other words, if we read the tweets in context, its clear that Jeong was not (absurdly) arguing that white people are "genetically disposed to burn faster, etc." Rather, she was parodying the scientific racism of ... Andrew Sullivan.
6. This is one example but it stands as a synecdoche for the larger controversy. Jeong made statements which are clearly jokes/satires/jibes & bad faith readers like Sullivan insist on reading them as racism.
7. Now, here is a very clear-cut case of @sullydish misrepresenting someone. Will he apologize? Will @NYMag issue a retraction & apology? LOL.
8. It's easy enough to criticize Andrew Sullivan. Let's take it step further and ask about New York magazine editor Adam Moss (is he on twitter?)
9. Adam Moss made the decision that @sullydish, someone who finds Asian names & accents to be inherently funny, was a good person to write about the Jeong controversy.
10. Addendum. This lays out in an even clearer manner the fact that the tweet Sullivan objected to was one parodying Sullivan himself:
11. Addendum II: This by my colleague @onesarahjones is good: newrepublic.com/article/150404…
12. Addendum: @sullydish is avidly promoting a charming fellow who a) is offended at a joke making "rice cooking app for white people" b) repeatedly uses the phrase "white genocide" without irony. c) reads a joke about alt-right paranoia about "white genocide" literally
13. The concept "white genocide" has a particular provenance. It's a signature concept of the alt-right. @sullydish is helping mainstream this idea and Adam Moss is totally okay with that.
14. Here's the thing. If you are offended by "rice cooking app for white people" how do you deal with "White Men Can't Jump," Eddie Murphy's "White Like Me" or, in fact, 99% of hack stand up comedy?
15. Hypothesis: leftists tend to slightly over-rate Evelyn Waugh & Anthony Powell out of a nostalgia for conservatives who understood irony & satire.
16. Oh look, the Jeong critic that @sullydish avidly promoted & repeatedly re-tweeted thinks we should keep an open mind about Pizzagate. Cool, cool.
17. So, to recap: in his eagerness to discredit Sarah Jeong, @sullydish promoted a guy who believes alt-right theory that "white genocide" is a real threat & is Pizzagate curious. And Adam Moss is okay with this & doesn't think it reflects poorly on New York magazine. Cool!!!!

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More from @HeerJeet

Dec 15, 2023
1. "What a minute," yo might ask, "Isn't Milei a self-proclaimed libertarian, even an anarcho-capitalist who who wants to abolish the state? How can he be using police power to repress free speech & protests?" Well, the history of anarcho-capitalism has the answers.
2. The term anarcho-capitalism was coined by Murray Rothbard, this elfin looking guy, tweaking an earlier formulation by his friend Karl Hess (a Goldwater speechwriter turned anti-war activist). Rothbard was a pioneer in coopting language of anarchy for authoritarianism Image
3. Rothbard was politically all over the map, at various points allying himself with Robert Taft, Joseph McCarthy, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, New Left historical revisionists like William Appleman Williams, the Maoist Peace & Freedom Party, the Koch bros, Pat Buchanan
Read 8 tweets
Nov 2, 2023
1. Fun fact: New Criticism was an outgrowth of a group called The Fugitives or Southern Agrarians. Their governing ideology was a celebration of hierarchical & traditional societies like the pre-Civil War south & pre-industrial Europe. Guess what they thought of Blacks & Jews?
2. This is a complicated story but the New Critics were Southern white reactionaries who idealized pre-industrial life & Christian hegemony, whitewashed slavery, and embraced formalism in criticism as a way of exalting an idealized order untouched by historical change.
3. It's kind of hard to place the New Critics in terms of contemporary politics because they were both anti-socialist and anti-capitalist, seeing industrialization as a falling off. And their critiques of capitalism & industrialization have real force & value.
Read 11 tweets
Aug 6, 2023
I've literally been reading racists right-wingers (notably Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan) since Yglesias was in kindergarten. It's a big part of the work I do. Yet I somehow manage to avoid praising them as interesting parts of the discourse even as analyze their work. Image
The key thing here is that Yglesias thinks of the revanchist & racist right as part of his universe of discourse, people who are wrong on some stuff but worth engaging with. By contrast, for him left & left-liberals beyond the pale.


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"He's clearly quite racist! But...." There's always a but. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jul 27, 2023
1. Oppenheimer, Barbie and the contradictions of German-Jewish whiteness: Notes for an essay. (Jack Kirby will make a cameo here).
2. What's the real thread unifying the Barbenheimer phenomenon besides the coincidence of an opening date. I'd say both films are about the fraught experience of the children of immigrants in putatively melting pot society.
3. J. Robert Oppenheimer: of German-Jewish descent, huge success in his field, brought low by national security establishment. Ruth Handler, creator of Barbie, of Polish-Jewish descent, huge success in her field, brought low by IRS.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 18, 2023
1. While researching Young Americans for Freedom I came across what is, I think I can say this confidently, the worst music every sung by humans: the ersatz folk songs belted out by young rightwingers in 1960s in a desperate attempt to copy the folk revival.
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2. This music is evidence of the strong anxiety created by the rise of the counterculture & New Left, which the right felt had to matched by an counter-attack. Janet Greene, for example, was often touted as the right's answer to Joan Baez.
3. This story has it all: White Christian Nationalism, neo-Nazis, domestic terrorism, the GOP, and a ventriloquist dummy. Hard to imagine any terrorism worse than the music though.
Read 8 tweets
Jul 15, 2023
1. The obvious reason why this strategy of "progressive policy" denuded of class solidarity wont work is that the rich have intense class solidarity, which is why liberal rich are always outgunned in numbers & intensity by right-wing rich. For every Soros there are 100 Kochs.
2. You often hear this in liberal & even left-liberal circles: "why can't liberal billionaires fund X" (X being a left counterpart to Fox News or The Federalist Society or ALEC. The answer is there are very few liberal billionaires & they are generally committed to status quo.
3. There's also this. The rich who involved with center-left politics tend to have agendas that are the opposite of pursuing "progressive politics" (unless you have the most anemic possible progressive agenda).
Read 5 tweets

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