The identitarian monomania that started appearing in Salon.Com in 2011 was like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors at the start
2019 was the year "responsible" entities chose to start feeding it the large infusions of blood it craved wesleyyang.substack.com/p/personal-note
Now there is some concern among the hardcore partisans that the monster they've been feeding for a half-decade may consume things other they intended washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Including, of course, and above all, their own political power. Choosing to pivot toward more palatable messaging or to double down on lies and smears is tactical question; Sargent makes the case for the former.
But whichever way they go (and they are likely to do an unstable mixture of both, often in the same statement), it will all be in service of a in which a well-funded coalition of those who rent-seek off identitarian monomamia constitute an Iron Triangle
Change the message to increase voter appeal or stave off electoral defeat, sure. But unless they actually dismantle this apparatus within their ranks, it will be merely cosmetic.

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More from @wesyang

18 Nov
This is the point of the midwit meme. The midwit is smart enough to rationalize himself into the cultivated pseudo-smart idiocy that the natal idiot is too dumb to understand — and that the sage is smart enough to regard with properly informed contempt…
That converges at the tails with what turns out to be the healthy instinct of the idiot
When Dave Chappelle, scion of three generations of black intellectual elites who became a deca-millionaire playing crack addicts on TV and canceled himself for it, says "gender is real", he brings to completion this circuit...
Read 5 tweets
18 Nov
It might seem unsporting to single out a random master's thesis at a 2nd-tier public university.

But it's actually this degraded version of an already dumb and dogmatic credo that student life administrators and -- alas, elementary school teachers -- are spreading.
"Why are the kids using the word 'violence' to describe the ordinary vicissitudes of everyday life? " The word was directly assigned a new meaning by their teachers.

They accept it at face value.
Is this "CRT"? It is a direct lineal descendant of it.
Read 6 tweets
17 Nov
It’s a misreading of the intent of language change. It’s not just empty signaling, it’s a practice that from a theory of how domination is enacted through language, derived from Critical Race Theory and spread to other activist movements . buzzfeednews.com/article/emerso… Image
Derives from
Read 4 tweets
15 Nov
It's a purely pro-forma tribute to the gods that not only does not require evidence but does not actually permit its introduction.

Doing so would entail acceptance of the premise that such assertions require evidence when it is in fact meant to be accepted as a matter of dogma
Those habituated to the standards and practices of the old dispensation in which assertions required evidence find this kind of ritualized faith-based statement puzzling.

It's the new normal.
"Implicit racism and sexism has been constant" is a statement will never not be true because the definition of those terms can always be expanded to ensure that it is always already the case
Read 4 tweets
5 Nov
"I have a right to believe whatever I like without interference"

"Since my own belief necessarily entails others sharing in it, I have a right to compel others to share in it"
When radical subjectivism acquires the force of government compulsion
We have reached a key inflection point in the elaboration and extension of rights discourse, in which new imperial conceptions of rights cannibalize the ones out of which they grew. I call this process "ideological succession"
Read 5 tweets
4 Nov
This is why no election of a governor or president really matter with regard to these issues
Nuking the Tumblr server in 2008 might have availed us
There’s literally no way for SNL to parody that other than repeating the script word for word
Read 4 tweets

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