I don't of course merit inclusion of the list. I am not an activist engaged in any effort to litigate or legislate against CRT. I am merely an independent commentator who has some views critical of it.
This is enough to get me tagged an enemy.
They will hurt whomever they perceive standing in the way of their cause without regard for proportionality or accuracy: this act is in turn revealing of the character and nature of their cause itself
These methods have of course been very successful in chilling dissent such that only a very ragtag band of "frontline" opponents remains. But the way one obtains victory also says something about whether the victory was deserved -- and whether it deserves to last.
When your account of the enemy's "infrastructure" reveals that they have no infrastructure
I am listed here as working for the Manhattan Institute. I've done a couple Zoom talks for otherwise have no other affiliation.
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One by one, people and institutions realize that in order to remain tethered to the reality that is the basis of their enterprise, they must pass through the simulation
It was always going to be tricky to both be the primary organization defending and advancing LGBTQ rights and the primary organization defending the right to call people faggots.
There was a unique power to that configuration so long as the principle was held in high esteem.
The premise of the organization is that the ability to do the former is dependent on the ability to do the latter
But what if we made a turn where the powerful all smiled on LGBTQ rights and so there is no need to protect advocacy of LGBTQ as a form of "unpopular speech" and we can simply ban the bad unpopular speech while continuing to support the good, popular speech?
A lot of reporting that goes viral these days is just exposing to the wider world the truth about intra-female social dynamics
I don't mean that all female social dynamics inexorably lead to the fatal terminus of the Kidney story or the TimesUp meltdown. I mean that there is a distinctively gendered character to the *way* in which things go awry that is more salient as more women lead organizations
We already know a lot about the dynamics of male organizational and social dysfunction, often terminating in overt violence...
Douthat is spot on here. There is a real danger and one should not deny its existence, but it is "not a singular danger that should organize all other political choices and suspend all other disagreements. nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opi…
Douthat grants Kagan that was merely mistaken in good faith about the existential threat requiring war posed by Iraq. But plenty of evidence that the war was meant to introduce a new form of militarized foreign policy and claims of existential danger were a pretext.
The sudden coalescence of various arms of partisan media around an ostensibly existential danger suggests that we are seeing the manufacture of a pretext menat to "organize all other political choices and suspend all other disagreements."
There's a dream sequence in Cobra Kai set to Whitesnake's Here I Go Again that despite/because of its horrible obviousness is painfully evocative to a certain generational experience
Also captures the post-Houellebecquian horror of people in their 40's on dating apps