basically what's happening is that you have a bunch of ideas that have always appealed to comfortable people at the top of society - mostly white dudes - about how you should be allowed to be a little racist and homophobic and political correctness is out of control and whatnot
but over the last few years the people who became most associated with those ideas became intrinsically rather toxic among the educated set. like you can't admit to listening to ben shapiro and jordan peterson and expect to be taken seriously
so what's happening is that a bunch of moderates and liberals - who just so happen to be white dudes themselves - have started advancing suspiciously similar arguments with a liberal gloss. "this is just an argument about politics, it's not like I don't believe in racism"
and what do you know! turns out there's a big audience for this stuff. which totally probably reflects the quality of the underlying thinking, and definitely not that there's a lot of reactionary sentiment out there looking for a socially acceptable way to express itself
like let's just be blunt: what yglesias et al are doing is using their reputations as liberals to launder right-wing thinking about race and gender to a primarily white, primarily male audience who both subscribes to that thinking but wants to continue seeing itself as liberal
and, this is important: THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING SURPRISING ABOUT THE FACT THAT IT WORKS. it is not surprising that many people like this stuff and will gobble it up! but spoon-feeding it to them doesn't make you a brilliant contrarian thinker, it makes you Fancy Rush Limbaugh
this is america, you're allowed to be rush limbaugh or bill o'reilly or bill maher if you want. but it's gross, it's bad for the rest of the country, you're hurting people and making the world worse to get rich
possibly some of these guys don't even quite recognize what they're doing. after all, being white guys, the ideas probably have some intrinsic appeal to them, and they get a lot of reinforcement from similarly-situated guys they respect, so why interrogate their own success?
but in terms of scenarios in which you should feel wary of your own success, "I am a prominent proponent of ideas that are disproportionately represented among society's most powerful segments" pretty much tops the list
people will rarely be penalized, and often rewarded, for thinking up clever arguments that indulge the prejudices of the power caste.
it's still awful to do it, though
I'm sure people will say this is ironic or he's not endorsing the daily caller, but when the premise of your joke is "look at me chortle along with white nationalists," you can hardly be surprised when white guys like yourself are the only people laughing
again the connective tissue between all these takes is that it's white people giving other white people permission to believe things that white people have wanted to believe since time immemorial
you can try to understand anti-PC stuff as an extension of some kind of ideology but you're really going to have to contort yourself to explain why it comes from left, right, and center
or you can just look at the race of the writers and audience and it makes perfect sense
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Read this thread. Takeaways:
-economic sentiment is decoupling from national conditions, just like sentiment on other issues
-correlates with news coverage becoming much more negative
-there’s an asymmetric ratchet effect, where bad news gets much more coverage than good news
As @jburnmurdoch and others point out, the culprit here - both in traditional and social media - is likely audience capture. Digital media gives speakers a very fine-tuned sense of what gets lots of engagement, and doomerism does huge numbers while nuance or optimism doesn’t
@jburnmurdoch Over time outlets and social media posters select for the ideas that give them the most engagement, getting continuously better at it. So the vise of endless pessimism gets tighter and tighter
Rounding up 11 to 15 million means somewhere between 1 of every 25 or 30 people are snatched off the street. That's someone from every neighborhood, every block, every classroom, every workplace. It's a dystopian nightmare worthy of the German Gestapo or Russian NKVD.
That's a world where a van of armed agents pulling up and grabbing someone - often a young woman, or elderly couple, or a child - is quite literally an everyday experience in America.
Even if it were logistically possible to round up more people than live in the entire state of Pennsylvania, the process would continue for years and years.
This kind of right-wing legalistic gaslighting is such a menace. The reason I know January 6 was an insurrection or coup is because I WATCHED IT LIVE. I watched Trump lie for months, give an incendiary speech, instruct Mike Pence to change the result, and send support to the mob.
This is Orwellian in the truest sense: authoritarians showing you something and then, gradually over time, chiseling away at your ability to see it clearly, with word games and logical tricks, until the thing that was as clear as day seems like nothing at all. DO NOT fall for it.
Trump tried to overthrow the government. He tried to have state and federal officials change the result. He tried to make his own Justice Department do it. And when that didn’t work, he incited an armed mob to attack and invade the US Capitol. None of that is exaggeration.
I think one of the worst pathologies of our time is the conviction among so many powerful people that "being reasonable" and "acting powerless" are the same thing - that reacting to events in any way, or attempt to effect change on the world, is inherently unserious.
It's a huge part of what has left our politics so paralyzed in response to things like Trump. "Wow, Trump's bad," some of the most powerful people on earth say. "It's crazy that he's running for reelection after attempting to overthrow the government. Hope he doesn't win!"
Something about the endless bubble of screens and news we live in has trained our society's leaders to believe they're not really part of the world, just observers of it. They've absorbed the passivity of the cable TV watcher or Twitter commenter.
Reorienting the legal system to protect white people, regardless of whether it’s done under the guise of anti-anti-racism or whatever, is effectively the restoration of formal white supremacy. It was always inevitable that Trump’s far right would end up here.
This is the beating heart of Trump’s politics: taking the inchoate resentment of reactionary white people terrified that they are losing their racial privileges and using it to create a regime where those people can endlessly exact revenge on groups they believe subordinate.
“White reactionaries incorrectly believe they have been discriminated against and simply want to compete on level ground” - given that they ALREADY are competing with an advantage, what would a legal regime privileging this group look like?
Biden has been the most progressive policy president in 50 years or more. He's enacted massive stimulus and climate bills, he's governed with a full-employment mindset that has created a booming economy for workers, he's appointed progressives across the federal government.
He's made great court appointments, stood up for labor unions like no president in history, and stood by an anti-monopoly FTC chair that has big business howling in anger. He's cancelled tons of student and tried to cancel more. He's done SO MUCH.
It is ALSO true that his opponent is undisguised fascist and rapist who previously tried to overthrow the government, campaigning on a platform of, quite literally, dictatorship, bloody revenge, and concentration camps for immigrants and other perceived undesirables.