Chait’s not dumb, I assume he can understand how false equivalencies can advance terrible ideas. But he’s also, you might say, triggered by certain kinds of talk about race, and it blinds him to the obvious way that false equivalences have recruited him for a reactionary effort.
https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1486143993775890433
That fundamentally emotional response to certain racial interactions - the little shock of annoyance and anger at a perceived offense, combined with the dopamine hit of hitting back at the typically young-and-nonwhite groups who committed it - is the root of the wokeness panic.
It’s rationalized as fighting a threat to liberalism, but that’s how pretexts WORK. You can still see something is off because there’s an inability to keep things in proportion. You can tell people WANT to talk about this regardless of the scale of the actual threat.
Anyway, I think ultimately, it comes down to status threat. These groups are supposed to be deferential, but they’re not. They’re supposed to listen to logic, but they won’t. They’re clearly irrational, illiberal, out-of-control.
By the way the reason I feel confident about this is because I’m hardly immune to it either. I’ve rolled my eyes at my fair share of activists. But then you have to think “Do I really want to build an ideology out of this eye-rolling?” And the answer really ought to be “no.”
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