Being Twitter famous has given me the opportunity to have private conservations with some of the smartest people in the world about this problem, and not one of them has a single coherent idea of what to do.
Most seem to agree the current public vulnerability to misinformation stems from a series of material and psychological deprivations combined with the sudden democratization of information. Too many want to hinder the latter rather than solving the former.
There will be no top-down solution to this problem. You will not legislate your way out. You will not litigate your way out. You will not censor you way out. And any attempt to arbitrate the truth will fail unless you remove those material and psychological deprivations.
You could not be more wrong (which is fine) but your lazy attempt to smear people like me as anti-gay misogynists is just sad at this point. "Libs going to brunch" is quite obviously code for affluent detachment from the life and death politics of the marginalized.
"Back to bunch" describes for how certain segments of the Democratic party are ready to ignore politics completely once Trump is gone, as he is primarily a personal irritant. If they can just reset the clock to 2013, they will be happy.
People who had problems in 2013 and will continue to have problems after 2020 rightly ridicule this attitude. And brunch is a convenient cultural shorthand because it has always been connected to wealth and gentrification. So when these signs became common, it was a natural link.
Tim Pool saw Shell Oil post a black square on Instagram and now he thinks they actually give a fuck about racial justice because he is waaaaaay dumber than you.
Being punk is about respecting the cops and absolutely never throwing a brick through a window under any circumstances.
Being punk is about getting on a bus with a bunch of militia freaks in Call of Duty costumes, driving to a city you don't live in, attacking someone with mace, and getting shot in the face.
THREAD: If you are one of these hand-wringing intellectuals who believe Gavin McInnes' attempts to distance the Proud Boys from Unite the Right, Richard Spencer, VDARE, etc., was based on ideology rather than aesthetics and strategy, then you are a sucker.
Gavin McInnes, a smart man, understood that a successful American white supremacist organization cannot have an all-white membership and cannot be overt about being a white supremacist organization. It sure as hell can't march around chanting blood and soil.
So like a lot of white nationalists in the wake of Heather Heyer's death, McInnes dressed up his bigotry in the fancy clothes of "Western Chauvinism." For example, McInnes said:
Hey @RexChapman, can you do us a favor and not use your million-follower account to promote one of the most vile, bigoted, and abusive trolls on this website? If you don’t know the story of Bianca Delarosa, aka Bravenak, I’ve got a few tweets to share with you in this thread...
Nazi-level anti-Semitism is a theme with Delarosa. This is the person you are promoting: “I did not know jews hated us blacks so much. Good to know. I will return it in kind. There are so few of them it’s a wonder they have the gall to think about being racist against blacks.”