It's not my intention to embroil myself in drama with another writer, but to those who’ve asked about this jab at me on Freddie de Boer's blog…
She’s perfectly typical of the whole Joe Rogan spectrum of politics. I don’t particularly hate Rogan, and I don’t think it’s true (or helpful) when liberals simply call him a right winger. But what is true, even more so than when I wrote about him a couple of years ago, is that Rogan will take any argument seriously but is exposed only to right-wing arguments like 80% of the time and so becomes a right-wing figure in effect if not in intent. Joe Rogan the podcast host is welcoming to left guests but Joe Rogan the booker is not, and the upshot is that his show is functionally a right-wing program. And a lot of his fans are fine with that because they are in fact wingers.
Which gets to a question that I want to ask more and more often to these anti-progressives lately: are you sure you aren’t just a Republican?
You get that the accusation of hypocrisy works exactly as well in the opposite direction, right? You get that, right? Tell me you get that. Please.
Yes, I’ve seen it, no, I don't love it.I mean, obviously. Finding out that somebody who you thought you were on friendly terms with actually views you with profound contempt: not great, 0 stars, would not recommend.
Anyway, if you want to know how I feel about this issue on the merits, feel free to read my essay about the limitations of this dumb fandom-based politics whereby even the mildest critique of Side A immediately prompts angry accusations that you must be a secret, evil loyalist to Side B — and then, if you want, you could read my other essay defending the right of Palestinian liberation activists to post all the paraglider memes they want without being cancelled, which should just about cover it. Whatever my faults as a writer and thinker, I continue to not be the self-deluded Republican droid anyone is looking for.
But I also think it says something that this accusation continues to be such an effective rhetorical strategy, and remains in widespread use— not in this case, just in general.
Many people think we're in the midst of a long-awaited "vibe shift," which supposedly marks the end of the great awokening or cancel culture or whatever you want to call it. As I've recently written elsewhere, I have had my doubts about this, and now I have more: within the past week, I have read three separate book reviews in which a critic just fully derailed, mid-critique, to accuse the author of the book under consideration of being somehow bigot-adjacent. Jon Haidt, per the New Yorker, is "beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism", while the work of Lisa Selin Davis, per the Washington Post, "[has] not earned her a lot of friends in the transgender community."
The guilt-by-association thing is a nice little rhetorical sleight-of-hand, in that it gives its adherents a free pass to not even engage with the substance of a person's ideas, just as long as they can find some way to vaguely and unfalsifiably insinuate that they’re some way affiliated with the Bad Team. At the height of the Red Scare, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” was only nominally a question, and your answer didn’t really matter; if someone was asking, you were already screwed, and you knew it.
But what's more important than the "why" of this is the "who" — as in, who uses this rhetorical strategy, and who its targets are. Because "just so you know, Person X is disliked by Group Y" only works if the members of Group Y are understood as the arbiters of who it is and isn't okay to associate with; similarly, the effectiveness of the "stealth Republican" accusation depends on an existing, enforced ingroup consensus that Republicans are icky and evil and shouldn't be listened to on principle, about anything, ever.
What I'm saying is, these are not the tactics of a struggling resistance — and you'll notice that nobody who employs them ever takes aim at someone bigger than they are, someone who it might actually be a risk to criticize. The absolutely insane reviews of Lisa Selin Davis's Housewife by reviewers at the Washington Post and Book Forum are a peak example of the utter lopsidedness of these scenarios: here you have two legacy publications pulling out all the stops to character-assassinate a freelance writer with no institutional backing and a few thousand Substack subscribers.
Basically, you don't smear people like this because you're speaking truth to power; you do it because you have power.
Hence my skepticism of the idea that the tide has turned on the woke culture war; this seems more like the part where the war has long since been won and the new regime is strategically (figuratively) drone-striking random intellectuals it perceives as a threat to its dominance. Personally, I will believe that wokeness-or-whatever is in decline when this particular tactic stops working.
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+1 for the sentiment that Freddie is often insightful (I subscribe to him) but sometimes he kicks random people in the shins in a pointless and uncalled-for way.
The accusation of hypocrisy doesn't even work in reverse in a general sense, either. A 23 year old adult at the head of a public protest calling for violence against a specific person isn't the same as an underage person saying something bad in a time when it wasn't seen as that bad in that context. The point of your tweet is very specific to the kind of people who believe in holding even children accountable for diverging from their standards of decorum while being okay with an adult breaching it in a much more profound sense as long as it's in service of their activism, simply saying "This is the reverse of that" doesn't apply at all.
+1 for the sentiment that Freddie is often insightful (I subscribe to him) but sometimes he kicks random people in the shins in a pointless and uncalled-for way.
The accusation of hypocrisy doesn't even work in reverse in a general sense, either. A 23 year old adult at the head of a public protest calling for violence against a specific person isn't the same as an underage person saying something bad in a time when it wasn't seen as that bad in that context. The point of your tweet is very specific to the kind of people who believe in holding even children accountable for diverging from their standards of decorum while being okay with an adult breaching it in a much more profound sense as long as it's in service of their activism, simply saying "This is the reverse of that" doesn't apply at all.