No the first time I ever wrote in response to him complaining about me I accidentally misspelled it, then he clipped sections of my response out of context and refused to link on Twitter AND complained about the misspelling, so I now occasionally intentionally misspell it that way as a form of poetic justice. A very, very childish form.
Yes, but “Get the F Out” was one of the single greatest marketing campaigns ever. They lost a lawsuit over their name, their brand - it could have been devastating to the company, which was already getting shaky. What did they do with it? Lemonade, my friend. They made an ocean full of delicious lemonade.
I generally agree with this, and have two additional thoughts:
1) The one which jumped out to me was...did like a whole generation of writers watch older comedians do the 'women act like this, men act like this'/'white people act like this, black people act like this,' model and not get that the joke was supposed to be on...everyone? And that it was a joke.
2) Also, to be fair, there is a stronger version of this argument which I don't think I've seen generally made on twitter (though I simply observe a few folks who don't reliably annoy me on twitter). That is, there is an interesting question on why republican voters skew white and male (happy to provide citations if needed). But that argument needs to deal with the fact that a majority of democratic voters are also...white. A smaller majority, but still a majority (as you'd expect given the voting population).
On a totally random aside, I do wonder given current census results and what really looks like a shift in folks from identifying as white how long term data analysis on this is going to play out and if we're going to end up with a democratic party that is majority 'minority' without actually changing its makeup in any way...
This is true if you're comparing 2020 to 2016--in other words, by thinking of the populace as a trend rather than a group--but when you look at the votes themselves Biden won because he had a massive majority among voters of color.
I get what you're trying to do here, but I'm not entirely sure that this is how we should be understanding the electorate.
I was thinking that a couple of those white men Freddie quotes, *could have* been making that kind of joke, only just pulling the knot a little tighter. I believe there's a kind of sly absurdity joke (I can't be sure because I do this and I could be fooling myself) where you bald-facedly criticize people for doing or being exactly what you obviously are, and also, act as if it's funny because you're getting away with it. Also, being on the internet and consistently saying things that will enrage people is a thing, called trolling. They say it's hard to read people who are only represented to you by text, but I may be a little overcautious because I'm not great at reading people even in good lighting.
As dedicated intellectual materialists, I am sure David Roberts and other good white men are equally dedicated to the proposition that the ideas and opinions of all Black people are also just a confluence of historic power differentials and impersonal cultural forces that act through them and give, at best, only the mirage of personal agency. This would be a totally fine and unobjectionable thing to say to racial minorities whenever they express their ideas, right?
Perversely, yes. They'd never say it out loud, but given how readily the woke bristle at the possibility that non-white peoples have real agency, and can thus be judged for their actions, it does seem implicit.
I found this piece unusually snarky, shallow and unthoughtful. Are there common problems with White men? Yes. Am I a White man? Yes. Are you going to make nasty comments about my appearance next?
Really? Universally? Without exception? If yes, then you have no right to speak; if no, then your categorical is meaningless.
"Are you going to make nasty comments about my appearance next?"
I'm sorry - are you under the impression that this men have a great deal of emotional charity towards their targets? Hmm? You think they're speaking with respect and comity to the white male abstraction they regularly pillory? You think they're interested in anything else than the politics of ridicule? What's good for the goose....
Good god, is this the level of rigor you apply to your thinking and treatment of others sometimes? I can't speak for others, but this feels scary to me. Do you not care who you hurt, so long as you have some thin rhetorical justification? I love your writing, Freddie, and think of myself as a kindred spirit. But this just seems abusive.
You haven't responded to the substance of my comment at all. I don't care what you find scary, and I am not concerned about the feelings of these men who are going out of their way to hurt the feelings of others, a fact that you have not even contested. And that will be the end of that.
To respond to the substance (I assume you don't mean the substance of your rhetorical questions at the end), there can be common problems with a category of people without those being universal or without exception. E.g., a common problem with jerks is that they turn on their friends and look for excuses to ridicule and exclude them.
"Jerk" is a category derived from behavior, which means that jerks can cease to be jerks. A white man can't cease to be a white man; all he can do is see to his behavior. Therefore there is no moral valence to critiquing a white man as a white man. It is ethically inert. If the problem is white men's tendency to shitty behavior, then the last thing you want to do is indict them all; instead, you want to denounce the shitty behavior and praise the good behavior. This is the only way to elicit more of the good.
Why do you say these critics are critiquing white men "as white men"? E.g., the first example started by saying that "It's hard to overstate how much white dudes hate idea X". Certainly that is a behavior, and someone who hates idea X can cease to hate idea X? If many white dudes do hate idea X, how is it inaccurate to say the quoted sentence above?
I suspect that you wish these critics were making much more explicitly permanent statements than they are. Can I really not say "Democrats sure do excuse a lot of corruption" because NO BEN, not ALL Democrats do that?
This is interesting. What Freddie has done is specify exactly a few “white dudes”and what their offenses against reason are, whereas those dudes he mentioned abusively apply negative characteristics to an entire swath of people (less themselves).
I get that his writing in this one is snarky, but if a social commentator decrying the terrible qualities of White Men, indiscriminately yet with extreme prejudice, can’t shake off “nice hair Legolas,” then what are they doing in social commentary?
I get that it can feel justified to give someone their commeuppance. The problem I see with that is that it triggers defensiveness not only in the targets (who you might believe will never change their minds anyway) but in the minds of readers. There's a natural tendency to want to defend someone who's being maligned and so, by being snarky, you might be inadvertently arousing sympathy for them.
Being cutting also contributes to the horrendous online culture of cruelty that I believe you and most of your readers absolutely hate, but that we wind up getting sucked back into despite ourselves -- our demons always wrestling our better angels and sometimes winning. What would you say to Dave Roberts in person versus what you've written here?
I've probably posted this before but it's my go-to for political discourse: "Speak the truth but not to punish." (Thich Nhat Hanh).
First mention on that Will Stancil tweet: "Just a minor correction, this was written by a white woman." Of course white women belong to their own special totalizing category.
Woke people kinda destroyed feminism. Women's issues have either been pushed back behind race and LGBT ones, or women just get dismissed entirely as Karens etc
You can really see it in the response to the Texas abortion ban. All pro-choice people agree the law is bad. But instead of organizing, everyone is just bickering and scolding each other. I wish Texas abortion funds got a nickel for every Tweet blaming “white women” or scolding others for even using the word “women” (trans exclusionary, not explicitly centering BIPOC people with uteruses, etc…)
We can’t focus for five seconds, and it makes me feel like the pro-choice movement is doomed.
"But instead of organizing, everyone is just bickering and scolding each other. I wish Texas abortion funds got a nickel for every Tweet blaming “white women” or scolding others for even using the word “women” (trans exclusionary, not explicitly centering BIPOC people with uteruses, etc…)"
I actually haven't seen this. I thought the abortion ban was the one thing where discussion around women's issues would be kinda normal. oh well
Okay, I just "educated" myself by Googling texas abortion ban. Two of the top results were 1) A new station on how "the abortion ban attacks Native American women's reproductive justice" and 2) An ACLU article on the "racist history of abortion bans"
I wonder if in a couple years there will be a new issue (ableism, maybe?) that trumps race and we'll see articles like "The ableist history of Arkansas' 'No black people allowed in schools' law.
God, can't something just be bad without fitting into a race or gender issue?
Noticed the same thing about Texas. So much of the energy is dedicated to stuff like “#TexasTaliban is a racist hashtag because it’s actually white men who are responsible for this” and “comparisons to the handmaids tale are racist because they erase BIPOC who will bear the brunt of this law” etc etc. What a rhetorical whirlpool.
On the other hand, I did think Zaid Jilani made some excellent points here about how the #TexasTaliban memes "otherize" Muslims. It's interesting b/c Zaid is a strong critic of woke identitarianism but he also sees here the folly of lumping anti-abortion Christians in with the Taliban. If anything, the liberal labeling of TX anti-abortion laws as tantamount to a Taliban takeover shows their hypocrisy--woke when they want to be, Islamaphobic when that serves them. https://www.inquiremore.com/p/why-are-liberals-comparing-their
It's a lot worse than that. The definition of woman has been obliterated, since men can self-identify as one, and many do. The entire category of being female no longer exists.
...and male prisoners self-identifying as women so they can be he housed in women's prisons, men competing as women in the Olympics, men winning women's scholarships and literary prizes.....
"Women's issues have either been pushed back behind race and LGBT ones"
-If by LGBT you mean Trans, yeah. I don't see the rights of lesbians or bisexuals or gays subsuming women's issues, but I do see the Trans activist movement aggressively doing so.
I have a hypothesis on this for some contexts. In the corporate world, identity is the one way to legitimately express grievance. I certainly couldn't go on LinkedIn and offer a Marxist critique of work. But I can express issues with inclusivity, whiteness, patriarchy, etc. People diagnose themselves with mental disorders for the same reason. Critiques are only respected by the upper middle class if they filter through an identity lens.
This might come down to the simple fact that companies can get sued over identity stuff, and not just generally being bad.
This is an excellent point. It's been noted before by many people that talk of diversity, inclusion, patriarchy etc. mainly manifests itself in the boardroom, not the factory floor. There's surely a connection there. Ensuring the directorship is x% whatever is relatively cosmetic; real, concrete changes to working conditions are not.
Yup, it's cosmetic. It also helps certain managerial elites advance their careers. Having more POC in boardrooms doesn't help the vast majority of POCs, but it does help an upwardly mobile white-collar workers. I think a lot of this stuff is just used by the upper middle class to advance their careers.
Once again, if I refer to a general social phenomenon, people say "you've provided no examples." If I provide examples, people say "this is too personal." You have to decide which is more important to you: specificity and citation, or a fetish for false civility.
"And so in lieu of justice, we’ve arrived at this place where it’s just… a little embarrassing to be a white man? Sort of? In certain very narrow social contexts?" Such as sitcoms, where it's now de rigueur to swipe at the white maleness of the white male cast members. Observed most recently in the otherwise charming Only Murders in the Building, which show's creators (including Steve Martin!) are obliged to apologize for having cast older white men in two of the show's three lead positions.
Not to harp on The Berenstain Bears, but my husband has a really hard time with those books because Papa Bear is invariably portrayed as a bumbling, childish buffoon. It’s like, come on you guys. Show some nuance. #notallpapabears
I'm SO disappointed. I rather liked "liberaltarian" Will and found his insights worthwhile. I even subscribed to his substack because I found his insights in that phase worthwhile.
Apparently I should have checked his Twitter feed first. I finally de-subscribed last month.
With one exception: I don't think the quote you've used by Will Wilkinson implicates all white men.
It seems pretty clear to me that he's saying that hostile emailers are usually white men, which says nothing about the white men who aren't hostile emailers. Presumably Will thinks he fits in that category.
Great essay. I now generally read these guys as: desperate midwits in a dying industry debasing themselves for engagement.
The ‘ooh I’m edgy for social justice’ identitarianism did in fact generate some heat 5 years ago when it went against progressive norms that had been pushed since the ‘60s. But now it’s a mature, saturated industry that has been subsumed by everything from the security state, to Disney, to Lockheed Martin, to American Express.
It is a little sad. And unfun. Which is how I feel about Park Slope too. I get that the neighborhood is affluent and the brownstones are nice. But it’s sanctimonious, people dress poorly, a lot of the men have gynecomastia, it’s more parochial than cosmopolitan, and in general filled with the type of upper middle class Leftist wine moms who a generation ago would have been moderate Republicans in Fairfield County.
I don’t think it’s fair to believe all these guys and the other guys and gals like them are 100% cynically saying these things. It’s useful to remember that religious converts are usually the most vocal and evangelical for the cause. It’s nice to feel like an insider with special knowledge. I struggle with not feeling condescending toward people in that stage, particularly since I’ve been in it before. The things I loathe in other people are typically things I’ve seen I myself.
There is great comfort to be found in being an insider. Which I learned from The Berenstain Bears and the In-Crowd.
Great piece, white dude! Messy human peculiarity is a swell phrase
“Be kind. Be honest. Be gentle. Protect those weaker than you. Tell the truth. And don’t spend a day of your life apologizing for who you are.“.
If only some of us could direct that inward. But yes.
In Conair-- Swamp Thing (M.C. Gainey), probably not reflective but useful.
Typo in the link under untoward ways. It has a period in front of it, so it doesn't actually link to: https://twitter.com/freeblckthought/status/1382461124168151045
thanks
Additional typo: "The problem is that the it renders the substance of your critique totally incoherent." think that just wants to be "that it"
Great piece. What's with the misspelling of Noah's name? Is that to thwart attempted name-searching?
BTW, I assume you know, but his Twitter is private due to being outed for paedophilia apologia.
No the first time I ever wrote in response to him complaining about me I accidentally misspelled it, then he clipped sections of my response out of context and refused to link on Twitter AND complained about the misspelling, so I now occasionally intentionally misspell it that way as a form of poetic justice. A very, very childish form.
I thought it was some kind of roundabout Animal House reference.
Lol! This whole time I thought it was too. Damn it, I wish it was.
"Fat, drunk, and being the worst account on Twitter is no way to go through life, Noah."
Completely irrevelant to the substance of your post but I, too, will ever get used to the WWF being called the WWE
there are some hills a man must be willing to die on
(Damn, can’t post images here)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wwf+panda+chair+shirt
I know what that is just by reading the URL.
Yes, but “Get the F Out” was one of the single greatest marketing campaigns ever. They lost a lawsuit over their name, their brand - it could have been devastating to the company, which was already getting shaky. What did they do with it? Lemonade, my friend. They made an ocean full of delicious lemonade.
I generally agree with this, and have two additional thoughts:
1) The one which jumped out to me was...did like a whole generation of writers watch older comedians do the 'women act like this, men act like this'/'white people act like this, black people act like this,' model and not get that the joke was supposed to be on...everyone? And that it was a joke.
2) Also, to be fair, there is a stronger version of this argument which I don't think I've seen generally made on twitter (though I simply observe a few folks who don't reliably annoy me on twitter). That is, there is an interesting question on why republican voters skew white and male (happy to provide citations if needed). But that argument needs to deal with the fact that a majority of democratic voters are also...white. A smaller majority, but still a majority (as you'd expect given the voting population).
On a totally random aside, I do wonder given current census results and what really looks like a shift in folks from identifying as white how long term data analysis on this is going to play out and if we're going to end up with a democratic party that is majority 'minority' without actually changing its makeup in any way...
Indeed, what won the 2020 election for Biden was not voters of color but the continuing swing of college-educated whites towards the Democrats.
This is true if you're comparing 2020 to 2016--in other words, by thinking of the populace as a trend rather than a group--but when you look at the votes themselves Biden won because he had a massive majority among voters of color.
I get what you're trying to do here, but I'm not entirely sure that this is how we should be understanding the electorate.
I think the point is, do Democrats need voters of color to win? Absolutely yes. Do Democrats need white voters to win? Absolutely yes.
I was thinking that a couple of those white men Freddie quotes, *could have* been making that kind of joke, only just pulling the knot a little tighter. I believe there's a kind of sly absurdity joke (I can't be sure because I do this and I could be fooling myself) where you bald-facedly criticize people for doing or being exactly what you obviously are, and also, act as if it's funny because you're getting away with it. Also, being on the internet and consistently saying things that will enrage people is a thing, called trolling. They say it's hard to read people who are only represented to you by text, but I may be a little overcautious because I'm not great at reading people even in good lighting.
As dedicated intellectual materialists, I am sure David Roberts and other good white men are equally dedicated to the proposition that the ideas and opinions of all Black people are also just a confluence of historic power differentials and impersonal cultural forces that act through them and give, at best, only the mirage of personal agency. This would be a totally fine and unobjectionable thing to say to racial minorities whenever they express their ideas, right?
No, because....blah blah,.....power, privilege, etc. (It's a merry go-round. You can't win with them.)
Perversely, yes. They'd never say it out loud, but given how readily the woke bristle at the possibility that non-white peoples have real agency, and can thus be judged for their actions, it does seem implicit.
I found this piece unusually snarky, shallow and unthoughtful. Are there common problems with White men? Yes. Am I a White man? Yes. Are you going to make nasty comments about my appearance next?
"Are there common problems with White men? Yes."
Really? Universally? Without exception? If yes, then you have no right to speak; if no, then your categorical is meaningless.
"Are you going to make nasty comments about my appearance next?"
I'm sorry - are you under the impression that this men have a great deal of emotional charity towards their targets? Hmm? You think they're speaking with respect and comity to the white male abstraction they regularly pillory? You think they're interested in anything else than the politics of ridicule? What's good for the goose....
Good god, is this the level of rigor you apply to your thinking and treatment of others sometimes? I can't speak for others, but this feels scary to me. Do you not care who you hurt, so long as you have some thin rhetorical justification? I love your writing, Freddie, and think of myself as a kindred spirit. But this just seems abusive.
If you can call this "scary" and "abusive" I don't think you're as much of a "kindred spirit" as you like to think.
Expressing an opinion is violence. Silence is also violence. Basically everything is violence.
'Everything is violence' sounds like the title of a novel short listed for the Man Booker award.
I wrote about people doing what you're attempting to do, and why I don't tolerate it: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/red-handles
You haven't responded to the substance of my comment at all. I don't care what you find scary, and I am not concerned about the feelings of these men who are going out of their way to hurt the feelings of others, a fact that you have not even contested. And that will be the end of that.
To respond to the substance (I assume you don't mean the substance of your rhetorical questions at the end), there can be common problems with a category of people without those being universal or without exception. E.g., a common problem with jerks is that they turn on their friends and look for excuses to ridicule and exclude them.
"Jerk" is a category derived from behavior, which means that jerks can cease to be jerks. A white man can't cease to be a white man; all he can do is see to his behavior. Therefore there is no moral valence to critiquing a white man as a white man. It is ethically inert. If the problem is white men's tendency to shitty behavior, then the last thing you want to do is indict them all; instead, you want to denounce the shitty behavior and praise the good behavior. This is the only way to elicit more of the good.
Why do you say these critics are critiquing white men "as white men"? E.g., the first example started by saying that "It's hard to overstate how much white dudes hate idea X". Certainly that is a behavior, and someone who hates idea X can cease to hate idea X? If many white dudes do hate idea X, how is it inaccurate to say the quoted sentence above?
I suspect that you wish these critics were making much more explicitly permanent statements than they are. Can I really not say "Democrats sure do excuse a lot of corruption" because NO BEN, not ALL Democrats do that?
This is interesting. What Freddie has done is specify exactly a few “white dudes”and what their offenses against reason are, whereas those dudes he mentioned abusively apply negative characteristics to an entire swath of people (less themselves).
I get that his writing in this one is snarky, but if a social commentator decrying the terrible qualities of White Men, indiscriminately yet with extreme prejudice, can’t shake off “nice hair Legolas,” then what are they doing in social commentary?
I get that it can feel justified to give someone their commeuppance. The problem I see with that is that it triggers defensiveness not only in the targets (who you might believe will never change their minds anyway) but in the minds of readers. There's a natural tendency to want to defend someone who's being maligned and so, by being snarky, you might be inadvertently arousing sympathy for them.
Being cutting also contributes to the horrendous online culture of cruelty that I believe you and most of your readers absolutely hate, but that we wind up getting sucked back into despite ourselves -- our demons always wrestling our better angels and sometimes winning. What would you say to Dave Roberts in person versus what you've written here?
I've probably posted this before but it's my go-to for political discourse: "Speak the truth but not to punish." (Thich Nhat Hanh).
This comment puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.
First mention on that Will Stancil tweet: "Just a minor correction, this was written by a white woman." Of course white women belong to their own special totalizing category.
Woke people kinda destroyed feminism. Women's issues have either been pushed back behind race and LGBT ones, or women just get dismissed entirely as Karens etc
No longer waves but a hundred different rivulets.
You can really see it in the response to the Texas abortion ban. All pro-choice people agree the law is bad. But instead of organizing, everyone is just bickering and scolding each other. I wish Texas abortion funds got a nickel for every Tweet blaming “white women” or scolding others for even using the word “women” (trans exclusionary, not explicitly centering BIPOC people with uteruses, etc…)
We can’t focus for five seconds, and it makes me feel like the pro-choice movement is doomed.
"But instead of organizing, everyone is just bickering and scolding each other. I wish Texas abortion funds got a nickel for every Tweet blaming “white women” or scolding others for even using the word “women” (trans exclusionary, not explicitly centering BIPOC people with uteruses, etc…)"
I actually haven't seen this. I thought the abortion ban was the one thing where discussion around women's issues would be kinda normal. oh well
Okay, I just "educated" myself by Googling texas abortion ban. Two of the top results were 1) A new station on how "the abortion ban attacks Native American women's reproductive justice" and 2) An ACLU article on the "racist history of abortion bans"
I wonder if in a couple years there will be a new issue (ableism, maybe?) that trumps race and we'll see articles like "The ableist history of Arkansas' 'No black people allowed in schools' law.
God, can't something just be bad without fitting into a race or gender issue?
White women are blamed for voting Republican. The other hot take is that white women will still have access to abortion because of their privilege.
Noticed the same thing about Texas. So much of the energy is dedicated to stuff like “#TexasTaliban is a racist hashtag because it’s actually white men who are responsible for this” and “comparisons to the handmaids tale are racist because they erase BIPOC who will bear the brunt of this law” etc etc. What a rhetorical whirlpool.
If it's easy, could you post a link to a tweet that critiques the handmaids tale comparisons as erasing BIPOC women/people with uteruses? Thanks!
Turns out it wasn’t exactly easy, as this person tweets about 200 times every day and that means a lot of scrolling for me, but here you go:
https://twitter.com/wagatwe/status/1433084170549428232?s=21
The link's not working for me but no worries, thanks for trying Isaac, no need to spend more time on it:-)
On the other hand, I did think Zaid Jilani made some excellent points here about how the #TexasTaliban memes "otherize" Muslims. It's interesting b/c Zaid is a strong critic of woke identitarianism but he also sees here the folly of lumping anti-abortion Christians in with the Taliban. If anything, the liberal labeling of TX anti-abortion laws as tantamount to a Taliban takeover shows their hypocrisy--woke when they want to be, Islamaphobic when that serves them. https://www.inquiremore.com/p/why-are-liberals-comparing-their
It's a lot worse than that. The definition of woman has been obliterated, since men can self-identify as one, and many do. The entire category of being female no longer exists.
...and male prisoners self-identifying as women so they can be he housed in women's prisons, men competing as women in the Olympics, men winning women's scholarships and literary prizes.....
This. I truly hate the Karen thing. How anyone claims it's not 95% naked misogyny I can't fathom.
It comes down to women not being a protected group in minds of wokeness
"Women's issues have either been pushed back behind race and LGBT ones"
-If by LGBT you mean Trans, yeah. I don't see the rights of lesbians or bisexuals or gays subsuming women's issues, but I do see the Trans activist movement aggressively doing so.
I have a hypothesis on this for some contexts. In the corporate world, identity is the one way to legitimately express grievance. I certainly couldn't go on LinkedIn and offer a Marxist critique of work. But I can express issues with inclusivity, whiteness, patriarchy, etc. People diagnose themselves with mental disorders for the same reason. Critiques are only respected by the upper middle class if they filter through an identity lens.
This might come down to the simple fact that companies can get sued over identity stuff, and not just generally being bad.
This is an excellent point. It's been noted before by many people that talk of diversity, inclusion, patriarchy etc. mainly manifests itself in the boardroom, not the factory floor. There's surely a connection there. Ensuring the directorship is x% whatever is relatively cosmetic; real, concrete changes to working conditions are not.
Yup, it's cosmetic. It also helps certain managerial elites advance their careers. Having more POC in boardrooms doesn't help the vast majority of POCs, but it does help an upwardly mobile white-collar workers. I think a lot of this stuff is just used by the upper middle class to advance their careers.
Cosmetic, just like skin tone.
Once again, if I refer to a general social phenomenon, people say "you've provided no examples." If I provide examples, people say "this is too personal." You have to decide which is more important to you: specificity and citation, or a fetish for false civility.
Yeah, but... maybe could of done with out "freshman understanding of x" or "weepy woke x"
Perhaps you're right.
fwiw, I subscribe for the authentic you.
Its too personal to look at a person's public twitter feed?
so they tell me
"And so in lieu of justice, we’ve arrived at this place where it’s just… a little embarrassing to be a white man? Sort of? In certain very narrow social contexts?" Such as sitcoms, where it's now de rigueur to swipe at the white maleness of the white male cast members. Observed most recently in the otherwise charming Only Murders in the Building, which show's creators (including Steve Martin!) are obliged to apologize for having cast older white men in two of the show's three lead positions.
Not to harp on The Berenstain Bears, but my husband has a really hard time with those books because Papa Bear is invariably portrayed as a bumbling, childish buffoon. It’s like, come on you guys. Show some nuance. #notallpapabears
"...from snide Cato Institute libertarian to weepy woke white man ...." This sums Will's trajectory up so well.
I'm SO disappointed. I rather liked "liberaltarian" Will and found his insights worthwhile. I even subscribed to his substack because I found his insights in that phase worthwhile.
Apparently I should have checked his Twitter feed first. I finally de-subscribed last month.
I did the same thing! I thought he might have some interesting things to say after he got cancelled for that Mike Pence tweet, but no, didn't happen.
This is spot on.
With one exception: I don't think the quote you've used by Will Wilkinson implicates all white men.
It seems pretty clear to me that he's saying that hostile emailers are usually white men, which says nothing about the white men who aren't hostile emailers. Presumably Will thinks he fits in that category.
Great essay. I now generally read these guys as: desperate midwits in a dying industry debasing themselves for engagement.
The ‘ooh I’m edgy for social justice’ identitarianism did in fact generate some heat 5 years ago when it went against progressive norms that had been pushed since the ‘60s. But now it’s a mature, saturated industry that has been subsumed by everything from the security state, to Disney, to Lockheed Martin, to American Express.
It is a little sad. And unfun. Which is how I feel about Park Slope too. I get that the neighborhood is affluent and the brownstones are nice. But it’s sanctimonious, people dress poorly, a lot of the men have gynecomastia, it’s more parochial than cosmopolitan, and in general filled with the type of upper middle class Leftist wine moms who a generation ago would have been moderate Republicans in Fairfield County.
I don’t think it’s fair to believe all these guys and the other guys and gals like them are 100% cynically saying these things. It’s useful to remember that religious converts are usually the most vocal and evangelical for the cause. It’s nice to feel like an insider with special knowledge. I struggle with not feeling condescending toward people in that stage, particularly since I’ve been in it before. The things I loathe in other people are typically things I’ve seen I myself.
There is great comfort to be found in being an insider. Which I learned from The Berenstain Bears and the In-Crowd.