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
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Dems can demand a rollback of the Supreme Court ICE racial profiling case. It’s a trivial legislative fix. It poses little political risk to them. It protects 68 million people from state persecution. It protects basic constitutional values. No government funding without this.
This is a bare-minimum demand, something any decent person concerned about ICE’s campaign of terror against Latinos should support. There is no reason - none - to leave in place a dangerous rule that allows masked men to brutalize innocent workers for the crime of being brown.
We probably can’t make Democrats fight for our entire wishlist of protections against Trump, to their discredit. But this is narrow. This is simple. We can insist that they make this one clear demand.
Been reading Hitler's rise. So many entities - business, right-wing parties, unions - struck deals with the Nazis after he became chancellor, where he promised to preserve elements of the old system. Then months later he invariably broke them and jailed or killed those people.
Hitler never won sweeping majorities - he secured total power by convincing everyone else that they were better off accommodating his regime rather than resisting the Nazis' nonstop defiance of the law. But once they acquiesced on the law not mattering, he could just kill them.
It never seemed to occur to the many opponents of a Hitler dictatorship - which included everyone from the huge Social Democratic left to many far-right Nationalists - that he was playing by different rules, and that his words and deals meant nothing and would protect nothing.
There were two fundamental problems with the Minneapolis city convention yesterday. First, you had a lot of technical and procedural issues that led to the convention doing essentially no business for the first eleven hours and fifteen minutes, except one confusing ballot.
That ballot was a mess because many people could not tell whether or not their vote counted and received no confirmation of having voted, and despite being an electronic ballot, took hours to resolve and announce.
The results of that ballot suggested that an endorsement was possible but by no means inevitable, and certainly didn’t suggest a huge 2/3s majority for any candidate, which is what would be necessary to throw the rules out and race forward.
I am increasingly convinced that the thing that has driven politics insane is the growing ability of people to find ways to validate their beliefs, no matter how incorrect and irrational. It started in right-wing media but has become central to all political discussion.
Anyone can believe whatever they like and for the most part will never be confronted or challenged. Instead they’re likely to be funneled into or self-select into a social environment where those views are supported, treated as obvious, new facts are invented to support them.
You are encouraged to lie to yourself and endless resources will be provided to ensure that you can. Challenging other people’s false beliefs is deemed elitist. As a result everyone’s politics ends up mirroring whatever assumptions or resentments are lurking in their heart.
It’s clear that if the Holocaust happened today in America huge swaths of MAGA would describe it as “based,” say “this is what we voted for,” and do the “oh are you gonna cry, lib?” routine.
There’s zero reason their gleeful celebration of brutal deportations wouldn’t extend to actual extermination. The psychological mechanism is identical: they tell themselves morals are for suckers and empathy is for losers, so immortality and cruelty become a proactive good.
It’s the politics of sadism - hurting people for pleasure. Do we truly believe that they’d draw the line at killing? Frankly they’ve ALREADY killed and didn’t care at all.
The craziest thing that is actually true is that a relatively small group of very literal Nazis has completely seized control of the US government
They have accomplished by building a tight-knit community in the dark corners of the internet, then establishing a lot of influence over the inner circle of MAGA, especially Musk and Vance
Musk empowered them massively by taking over Twitter and then removing almost all restrictions on them, while promoting many of their most notable figures. Musk seems extremely taken with them personally and spends a lot of time trying to impress them