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What I love most about your writing, Freddie, is how often your throwaway comments crystallize important truths that need to be reckoned with, but that hardly anyone is talking about. In this piece, it's "Silencing dissenting opinion without actually changing minds is dangerous because it lulls you into a false sense of strength." Movements have to persuade in order to accomplish anything of substance. Too many activists right now view persuasion with disdain, as if trying to see an issue from the perspective of someone who doesn't already agree with you- and then finding ways to appeal to that person from inside their experience,

rather than expecting them to "do the work" - is somehow contemptible. Most people aren't going to do the work. They just fucking aren't. And anyone who won't see this and adapt and take on the necessary hard work of persuasion isn't an activist or an ally.

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Other people have commented on this, but I think you attribute to crass cynicism ("money and pussy") what is more likely (or at least not less likely) due to a subtler, more genteel cynicism: basically, social pressure, the desire to get along with one's peer group, not make waves, not seem to be swimming against the current. Of course, as you point out, we've lined up lots of incentives in favor of wokeness and so it's hard to tease out when someone's hypocrisy is motivated by X rather than Y, and of course it can be both. But the tell for me is that I've seen this same sudden switch even among my peer group on social media, almost none of whom have any plans of monetizing this change in attitude. I myself, in 2017 or so, started coming up with all these rationalizations for why it was *now* okay to use political violence (or at least, wrong to criticize it), why Jesse Singal should probably just hush up about trans issues, etc., before the contradictions with my previous commitments became too glaring and I finally got some sense. I had been deploying my education and powers of reasoning to justify positions I knew deep down weren't justifiable. But I wasn't motivated by a desire to make it in media; I felt scared by the Trump presidency and so I wanted to get along well with people I saw as being on "my side," so I figured, go along to get along.

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What you’re describing sounds a lot like evangelical Christianity: asking questions or raising issues means you’re off the team. That happened to me in evangelical Christianity, and by then I was like, ok bye. Echoes your book title: this whole setup is cultish, and I’m not getting why so many people are either playing along or buying it whole cloth. (Well, I get the playing along part. Protecting the cashola, however meager it may be.)

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"it’s not enough for a solution to have good intentions. It has to actually be a solution" is the tee-shirt i want to signal my good intentions

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I think it is not a good sign that the head of Planned Parenthood apparently feels morally superior to Margaret Sanger and is comfortable using sexist stereotypes to get her point across. I was raised Catholic and while I am not a believer, the keen sense of being always a sinner striving to be better is deep in me. I am incredibly taken aback by how comfortable conscious self-righteousness is for so many on my side of the ideological aisle. Clearly Margaret Sanger had views that I would critique as being unsound and unkind, but I don't feel ashamed to say that she has done a lot more to advance liberation than I ever will. I don't know if it's all cynical, but it is clearly counter productive, and it is pretty infuriating that the people imposing the purity tests are not the ones who stand to lose if it results in a backlash and another resurgence of the right wing. If one side tells you that you that there is "white culture" and it is really terrible and you need to accept that and feel deeply ashamed about it and stop talking and the other side says that there is white culture and it should be the source of deep patriotic pride who is going to win the most white votes? Seems like an insane strategy to build a multiracial coalition to me, especially when lots of white people actual do support racial equity even as they behave in ways that are impacted by racist stereotypes that are deep in American culture.

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I honestly had no idea the Amazon union drive was going to fail. Were there any reports at all that attempted to assign a probability of success to it before the vote?

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founding

I generally agree with Freddie on the merits, but I do think there is a tension with this: "Here on planet Earth, the actual, obvious financial advantage (for writers or anyone else) lies in being the loudest Good White/Male/Straight/Cis Ally you possibly can be." He has written elsewhere, convincingly, that the finances and job prospects of the media/culture industry is bad and getting worse. It's not crazy for someone in that ecosystem to think there is a comparative advantage to develop an anti-cancel culture, anti-woke shtick. Is the audience smaller? Yes. Are there less people vying for that piece of pie? Also yes. Your Bari Weiss's and Jesse Singal's of the world seem to have found sustainable work. If you look at lots of popular comedians, they are ALL beating the anti-cancel culture drum, undoubtedly not solely out of virtuous commitment to free expression.

Look, when I read Bari Weiss write a story about some elite private school doing absolutely insane stuff, I go "yeah, that seems insane." The problem is that there is no rigorous attempt at trying to understand the scope of this. If you ask Bari, she says "this is all over pubic schools." To which I respond: LOL. Are most education non-profits doing diversity training and workshops on systemic racism, sure. Is the average poorly funded, crumbling urban school with teachers who have been there forever and are constantly annoyed the copier doesn't work enthusiastically teaching with Pedagogy of the Oppressed in mind? No, not at all.

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Your style continues to be my favorite style. Thank you. This is great. I'm going to use some quotable quotes for my Media Lit course, if that's cool. We are spending a day on "cancel culture" and just the mention of it to my h.s. seniors had them chatting at me via Zoom that there "is no such thing."

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For me the 'tell' was the suddenness of it all. Everyone from Roger Goodell to Nathan Robinson radically shifted their politics in the same direction over a couple of weeks or so? The only explanations for something like that are that they only had skin-deep beliefs to begin with (surely true for many people) or that the whole thing was propelled by fear and cynicism.

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founding

Re: Biased reporting on Amazon, something similar is happening with the Derek Chauvin trial. Reporters know they can't say things like "this one prosecution witness fell apart on cross" because Twitter would melt down and accuse them of siding with the defense.

So if you follow the coverage, it sounds like the prosecution has been perfect while the defense lawyer is an incompetent buffoon. MSNBC has been playing long, moving, effective clips of the prosecution while barely showing anything from the defense. If the verdict isn't murder, people are going to lose it.

I don't have time to watch the trial, so maybe the coverage reflects reality. But there's no way to know how it's really going besides watching every day -- because I know reporters will only say what their audience wants to hear.

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"Did it cross no one’s mind that establishing immense punishments for anyone who steps out of line with social justice orthodoxy ensures that we’ll have a lot of people who dishonestly embrace that orthodoxy in public to protect their selfish interests, in a way that obscures the actual political conditions of our country, leading to dynamics like Trump dramatically outperforming expectations in 2020? "

I wish I had the balls to post this on my Facebook page. I don't. I can't afford to lose my job. It's that simple. I'm still a progressive liberal, but you point out how poisoned the well is better than anyone. I thought this would change with Trump gone.

(SIDE NOTE: I got kicked off of Twitter for calling Trump a retard. Think about he irony of that for a second. Because I attacked the worst president ever with a word that the woke has decided is verboten now. It was a Q-Anon nut who reported me to the Moaists. The woke are literally handing weapons to their enemies. Retards on every fucking side.)

But no. Trump is gone and they're doubling down. Depressing. But you're a ray of light Freddie. Keep doing what you do. (All of it. The personal piece was great too.)

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I could sit here and write a comment about how wonderful this was to read, particularly the parts about solutions.

I could note how it has driven me crazy to spend the last few years seeing people who never gave a shit about the causes I devoted my life to now harang me for not doing enough because I don't support actions that have no hope of achieving the things I believe society needs.

I could even compliment the incredible level of wit in this article.

Instead, I am going to focus on how awesome it was to see what I presume is Freddie's bookmarks bar. I would certainly pay extra for more content about Freddie's fantasy football advice.

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"You think, what? That the army of white guys who are suddenly so deeply motivated against cancel culture critics aren’t doing it for clout and pussy?"

I cracked up at this. It reminded me of the South Park episode back in 2015 when they first introduced PC Principal. "PC= Pussy Crushing."

That show called this crap out early on, and of course Woke Twitter hates it. I think it's because the show strikes a nerve, and that's always uncomfortable.

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I'm so frustrated by this good/evil dynamic. Either you toe the line that the loudest people with the most followers are screaming or they try to drive you off the internet and ruin your life. I honestly feel like this phase of politics is going to be looked back on exactly like "hippy politics" were in the Sixites: good intentions but absolutely horrific and self-destructive tactics.

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Just wanted to agree that I fucking loath NJR; he is a completely spineless, convictionless weather vane that has never gone against a trend in his life.

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founding

I'm as cynical (practical?) as you and agree with most of this, but I wonder if you're underrating a dynamic in how basic moral convictions are formed, at least in my peer group - possibly a newish one we haven't widely grappled with yet.

In high school, most of us had the average privileged secular median opinion of gay rights ("not anti-gay but sometimes gay jokes are funny.") We didn't know that we knew any gay people. Through the internet (mostly pre-facebook), we came into contact with queer voices, and a plight that previously felt abstract to us became real. And so, not instantly, we came around on the political goals, and we lobbied our conservative parents, and it wasn't so much that we censored ourselves as that certain jokes stopped feeling as funny. Certainly, as social platforms ascended, there would eventually be social credit for this, but the process of getting to these beliefs was earnest.

I think the problem is that this process of moral revision has stopped being introspective and has become knee-jerk automatic, and is now expected so instantaneously and on such specific positions that it's impossible to know who to listen to, or to avoid treating communities as monolithic. It's performative because it's public, yes, but many friends who started advocating for stuff I consider dodgy (a slogan like "defund the police," say) didn't do it them because they were afraid of being shamed. They just thought there was a moral "authority" on a problem they haven't experienced that they should defer to, and tried their best to identify the right one on the internet. It's more in keeping with what you said about writing (or not writing) about trans issues - there are some basic humane convictions I believe really strongly and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm just not sure about.

Obviously "what beliefs are moral?" ≠ "what can I publicly say that will help/won't hurt my career?", and I can't speak to Robinson or anybody else, but I don't think this internal dilemma is usually mercenary. Maybe that thought is an optimistic luxury that comes from having a small audience, but many of us have the memory of phasing out bad beliefs, and so the attempt to revise or improve in the present tense becomes a kind of moral whiplash that's a fact of adult life. I'm not saying this is a wise way of living, but I think for a lot of people, even writers, it's sincere. It's Hanlon's razor or Scott Alexander's Moloch spiel - you don't need lots of individually mendacious grifters to wind up with a shitty orthodoxy that's reliant on unacknowledged "grift."

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