Will Stancil Profile picture
Apr 23, 2021 13 tweets 3 min read Read on X
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 Image
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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More from @whstancil

Sep 14
Honestly kind of furious at Democrats too right now - people like me have spent years trying to get them to take the far-right pressure cooker on social media, and especially Twitter, more seriously - and have been mostly scoffed at and treated as overly-online hysterics
Now we have a VP candidate who has melted his brain with pro-Nazi gutter racism memes, and is actively trying to cause an anti-immigrant pogrom in his home state. ONLINE IS REAL LIFE. TAKE IT SERIOUSLY
The weird affectation that no one pays attention to this stuff - MILLIONS of people pay attention to this stuff. Political types ESPECIALLY pay attention to this stuff.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 18
Not to state the obvious but the GOP’s obsession with mass deportation doesn’t come from any interest in improving policy outcomes but because it’s a rationale for large-scale state terror against a population the GOP dislikes. It’s a pretext to hurt people for fun
Anti-trans laws? Impossibly vast deportation programs? Attacks on college campuses and protesters? What it all has in common is that it’s a pretext to target a perceived set of enemies and derive pleasure from their pain
That’s why the programmatic details and aims are always so sketchy, why no compromise can be arrived at. They don’t really exist except to give the most meager facial justification.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 10
The religious zeal that surrounds the anti-Biden obsessives is really frightening. Not even the slightest hint of doubt about the remarkably reckless course of action they're demanding.
Being a few points behind in the polls after two weeks of saturation-level media panic isn't great, but Trump was much further behind in 2016 and still won. There have been last-minute candidate switches before and they ended in disaster.
The fact of the matter remains that Biden had a really bad, weird debate, and then has continued to campaign and serve normally. But the foaming panic has infected every corner of the media and now the Democratic Party and is causing dramatically more damage than the debate did.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 3
Let’s explain this in very simple terms:

-the media right now is publishing many stories about how Biden should drop out

-those stories are pushing his polls down among swing voters, endangering his campaign

-why shouldn’t/couldn’t they publish the same stories about Trump
The main difference here is not that Biden and Trump have different swing voters - that doesn’t make sense.

The difference is that when Biden does something bad, media says “he should drop out” over and over, but when Trump does, media says “his voters won’t care” and moves on.
The response of the media/political class becomes self-fulfilling. There is no mounting pressure against Trump after horrifying statements and crimes, because everyone agrees it won’t matter. But Biden botches a debate and the narrative mounts for weeks. This is the difference!
Read 4 tweets
Jul 1
This is an open threat from a far-right account with 2.5 million followers. This is where we are: these fascist goons are so emboldened by our rogue Supreme Court and Donald Trump that they're openly threatening to kill liberal politicians. Image
This guy appears on stage with top Trump luminaries. He is indistinguishable from the worst kind of homicidal Trump troll. These people have just given themselves the power to prosecute, jail, and assassinate their enemies - the point of my tweet - and now are planning to do it.
They are not being remotely ambivalent about what this "You have less than 5 months" refrain means. They are saying they are going to kill us after Trump is elected. They are counting down. They are explicit about it. They are excited by it. Image
Read 5 tweets
Jun 28
We’ve spent eight years waiting for the political elite in this country to wake up to the fact that Trump is a true authoritarian threat who must be confronted directly before he destroys the foundations of constitutional government and here we are, still waiting
He’s a liar, a thug, a demagogue, and he wants to be a tyrant. You have to fight people like that DIRECTLY: you say what they are, you put them in jail, you keep them out of politics, you resist them with whatever it takes. You don’t rely on them losing a policy debate
The bizarre bankshot approach favored by the American political class has always failed: “Instead of saying what Trump is - instead of saying he’s anathema to American republican government - we’ll tiptoe around it, and say his economic policies are bad”
Read 4 tweets

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