I feel like if you wanted to improve The Discourse, you would try to improve the discourse, and if you wanted to pump up today's Twitter fight by embracing a notorious dickhead's bogus excuse for his being a dickhead, you'd do that
I encourage everyone sharing my annoyance with Matt Yglesias to retire that thing where people call him "Matty"; it doesn't rise to his excessively high standard of what counts as "harassment" but it's pointlessly rude and there are so many real things to pick on him for
One super valuable way to set up a structural complaint about something is by being as inaccurate and pejorative as you can be about people’s motives as they operate within the structure
I usually don't get defensive about my own Substack because it's fine to object to whatever nascent brand-building revolves around phrenologists and Cancel Culture grifters claiming it as their safe space, but this is just old-fashioned pious fake-professional gatekeeping
Maybe Michael Powell could have avoided the confusion by describing his beat as "exposing left-wing excess" rather than "Free Speech & Intellectual Debate"
Anyway right-wingers interested in decoding what Michael Powell was or wasn't trying to do with the story should look at who among the central characters get to have their class status considered throughout the piece and who gets their class set aside in favor of their race