If you would like to read a thread that is almost impossibly pretentious, a thread that pushes the boundaries of what you thought unearned self-importance could look like, Eric Weinstein has you covered.
Just imagine offering Ben Shapiro as a tonic for culture war excess. Mate, he's its apogee.
Just imagine suggesting Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Crenshaw as examples of politicians who exist outside the reality of partisanship.
I really need to expound on this because it's about as surreal as it gets.
Eric Weinstein advises us to "draft" those who "stood outside THE DUOPOLY." Cool, cool. Let's do it.
Okay, nice, he's given us a list. Who is on it?
Why, it's Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro is on the list.
Ben Shapiro is on the list of people who have exempted themselves from the left/right binary.
This, my friends, is galaxy.
I'm not trying to be mean-spirited here. But, speaking as the pluralist/centrist/moderate that Eric relentlessly projects himself to be, Eric's shtick is deeply offensive to me.
Eric styles himself as someone who stands outside THE SYSTEM, observing its decay as a concerned, reasonable onlooker. But to follow him is to find yourself knee-deep in culture war ephemera. In one-sided analysis. In reactionary politics masquerading as above-it-all centrism.
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1: Trump has just run one of the most hysterically alarmist presidential campaigns in history.
The whole thing was an attempt to use a baseless crime panic to build a red wave, propel his anti-immigrant crackdown, and reintroduce cartoonishly regressive law and order policies.
2: The crime panic's main function, of course, has been to get him reelected.
It’s why he killed an immigration bill earlier in the year that accommodated nearly every Republican demand and was negotiated by conservative stalwart James Lankford.
3: Passing the bill would’ve disarmed Trump of a narrative critical to his attempts to retake the White House. So he torpedoed the implementation of everything Republicans had been asking for in order to prioritize getting reelected.
1. During the VP debate earlier this month, JD Vance spent the entire evening audaciously attempting to recast himself, and the MAGA philosophy he champions, as the embodiment of common-sense normalcy.
It was preposterous.
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2. Vance’s aim was to project a cogency and coherence onto Trump that is fundamentally alien to him, and a governing seriousness onto MAGAism that would be wholly absent in a second Trump term.
As @JVLast said, Vance sought to come off as “an entirely normal political persona.”
1: It is difficult to overstate how utterly unhinged the right’s reaction to Tuesday night’s presidential debate has been.
I have never seen a collective freakout about the media this embarrassingly frivolous.
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2: Let’s use a sitting U.S. senator as our starting point.
30 minutes in, Mike Lee asked who else was annoyed by ABC. Hours later, he ran a poll getting 10K votes at 93% disapproval for ABC. Then, last night, he suggested that we “reexamine the laws” regarding TV broadcasting.
3: Obviously, social media polls run by ideologically self-segregated hardliners will always be plagued by insuperable selection bias.
But that’s exactly what makes it valuable here: it’s a window into the right’s widespread—and entirely ridiculous—contempt for the moderators.
1: Since replacing Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, @VP Kamala Harris has attracted ungodly levels of racist disparagement posing as solemn concerns about her qualifications and merit.
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2: It’s all just a recycled outrage campaign from before—a rehash of the same treatment she got when Biden picked her to be VP.
Only, instead of “She’s a DEI candidate!” … it was “She’s being picked due to identity politics!” then.
3: Of course, this rhetorical strategy isn’t Kamala-specific.
It’s a time-honored template right-wing race-baiters routinely deploy to cast doubt on the governing, legislative, or presidential readiness of minority candidates, especially black ones, on the basis of their race.
1: On Sunday, Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from the 2024 race.
Following that announcement, there was an immediate consolidation behind Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee.
Republicans criticized both developments as undemocratic. They’re wrong.
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2: The following is just a sampler. There’s a million other examples of Republicans—along with some brain-addled Democrats—claiming this was all undemocratic, or that it was tantamount to a coup against Biden, or that Harris lacks democratic legitimacy.