Is that an accurate description of Red Scare's audience? I don't pay too much attention to it, but every time I hear Anna as a guest somewhere, she seems pretty in opposition to that kind of "woke" (or whatever you want to call it) language.
A wise person I know believes that she creates nothing — it’s a “transmission” from the source, and she writes it down. Imperfectly or not — sometimes there are what might be called transcription errors. But she transmits as faithfully as she can.
Most people out there are trying to will something specific into being, for a purpose — political, financial, self-aggrandizing. You probably do, too, sometimes. But yesterday’s thing felt more like a transmission.
I got what you were saying and I understood why Alex Jones was the photo. You are thinking ahead. One thing we know about history is that it repeats itself. It repeats itself so reliably that it's a reminder not to get too caught up in it (as you point out). Despite all of the times in the past we've seen the underclass rise up and topple the ruling class, somehow this country still thinks this is a good path forward. Alex Jones is about as insane as it gets. I spend a lot of time in Trump world and the truth is that Alex Jones is not a big part of it, or even an influential figure. He definitely dwells in a weird sub group but the populist revolution on the march is likely something different. Anyway who can make sense of any of it. I can't. But it is absolutely worth noting that the pendulum swings one way, then it swings the other. This much we know for sure. The one way it isn't going to swing, unless our government goes full Stalin, is towards the administrative state and away from the people. That is probably less likely than it swinging towards the populists.
As far as call outs on Twitter - you gotta feel badly for people who get off on public dunking. I guess everyone does. It is an easy trigger to pull and it probably feels really good to know you are hurting someone. But yuck, gross. It always makes me feel like I need to take a shower. You have readers here who value what you think, value your honesty and value how much time you put into this newsletter. History will remember you well.
This specific moment of eye-rolling, vaguely scandalized Twitter scolds and their attendant social justice politics will pass, and as you imply, it'll pass sooner than almost anyone expects. But there'll always be church ladies. There'll always be more "but" people than "if" people. And there'll always be, if not comfort, then predictably in deriding the risk-taker or pointing at the unclean. There's a really joyless pincer movement about it: if you're too cool to try anything new you can't fail at it, plus you've already succeeded because you've pointed out how fucking dumb some other guy is for even trying.
But, again, spaces are like this. Twitter might well be the worst of them, yes, but there was never a town square or a knitting circle or an intergalactic confederation that didn't have the beady-eyed curtain-twitcher, the vicious gossip, the nihilistic conformist with the thin smile and the raised pinkie. The only way out is to get out. Do as Freddie does - find a voice, find an audience, hang a shingle away from the madding crowd and say "I'm not doing this to be like everyone else. Stop by if you want something new." You'll cultivate a little garden of weirdos. And it'll be lovely.
I think what bothered people was less the fact that your post was poetically (as you seem to describe it) incomprehensible and more that it seemed to be intentionally vague, a sense that you were simultaneously trying to signal that you weren’t part of the woke contingent but also ambivalent/critical/unwilling to approve of any force that doesn’t straightforwardly identify as a well meaning leftist one. I think that ambivalence is a true one that transpires throughout your writing: you are a leftist through and through but there’s a sense (that some people reproach you, understandably) that you’re still avoiding grappling with the fact that maybe all leftism is at this point in history is this petit bourgeois managerial project that you often describe as the “bad” or “fake” left. Anyway as much as I understand the reproach, I don’t read your posture as cowardly but as a genuine moral ambivalence and questioning which is part of what makes your substack interesting (and you one of the only figures on the left I have any interest in at this point )
Writers would do well to take the advice shitty employees everywhere have been internalizing since the dawn of time: make yourself irreplaceable. Every asshole with an internet connection, some practice, and a free weekend can be a generic-brand Ezra Klein well enough to put the name brand out of business. How many people can ever be a non-union equivalent of Freddie deBoer though? Or Ethan Strauss? Very few. And that ALL comes down to voice. When you write as you nobody can replace you because nobody else IS you, and the simple act of being above duplication is in and of itself one of the most financially valuable assets any individual in any industry can have.
The importance of being weird cannot be overstated. Even among the "anti-woke". I stopped supporting a number of such writers, or declined to ever do so, because their takes -- though I agree with them -- can readily be found on Twitter or a subreddit's comments section for free.
Freddie, meanwhile, is offering a Substack like nothing else. I'm trying to train an AI to imitate the Woke Milieu. No fucking way I could do that with FdB; the poor thing wouldn't know how to patch this eclectic collection together.
You're flying high this week, deBoer. I'm filing away "performing confusion" to reference in future. I'm wondering if anyone on the left has ever performed confusion on Twitter about, say, Judith Butler (I really, honestly don't know because I quit Twitter after 5 minutes many years ago). Some of what you write may feel challenging, but it's never an obfuscation. For my money, it's gold.
"The Hinterland" is great at exploring whatever Justin Smith wants to explore. As I think Freddie is hinting at here, there's a lot more to talk about than whether being Woke is a terrible thing, an existential threat, or goofy nonsense for dum-dums. Smith pokes around into lots of other fun areas. I might have come to him through this blog, actually. Stack. Whatever. Here are some good ones (one or two are very slightly culture war-ish, but much of the rest of his stuff isn't): Click the Boats (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/click-the-boats), What are the Humanities? (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/what-are-the-humanities), On the Job (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/on-the-job).
The House of Strauss, which I'm almost positive I found through Freddie recommendation, is just really well written. It's a sports blog - don't hang up! - but I follow no sports at all and still find it great enough to pay for. The cat's just a really good writer: https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/archive?sort=new.
Anybody have other suggestions that at least sometimes veer away from "man the Wokesters just really smell bad, don't they?" Maybe even something funny?
There will always be people who hear you, see you, in the way you intend, and people who don’t.
When you say something even a little bit different from the currently accepted norms, no matter how carefully thought out it is, no matter how right it might be, the number of people who hear you and see you in the way you intend drops. Quite a bit.
In every era, there are the majority who play it safe, parrot the accepted views, and just get by (and a subset of those people have enormous wasted talents), and there are the small number who take risks.
That’s always been so, and it will probably always be so.
If you take risks, it helps to become more and more at peace with the predictable, even vicious reactions you get from all quarters and for all sorts of reasons. The reason so many talented people play it safe is because of those vicious reactions they get if they don’t. How sad and stifling it must feel to be them.
If you take risks, there’s a sense in which it’s important and health-promoting Not to Give a Fuck. That’s much easier said than done. It can take a lifetime to develop. With age, it comes more easily. It’s a worthy goal.
You’re enough. You need to feel that deeply, even when people are awful to you. Even when they are calculatedly so. There are people who will understand the rabbis remark. There are people who won’t. There are people who will willfully misunderstand, and that’s frustrating. Beyond frustrating. But fuck ‘em. You have your own goals.
Is that an accurate description of Red Scare's audience? I don't pay too much attention to it, but every time I hear Anna as a guest somewhere, she seems pretty in opposition to that kind of "woke" (or whatever you want to call it) language.
yes, and also "social tendency, typically mistaken for a political tendency" is good.
A wise person I know believes that she creates nothing — it’s a “transmission” from the source, and she writes it down. Imperfectly or not — sometimes there are what might be called transcription errors. But she transmits as faithfully as she can.
Most people out there are trying to will something specific into being, for a purpose — political, financial, self-aggrandizing. You probably do, too, sometimes. But yesterday’s thing felt more like a transmission.
Yesterday you made me think of Yeats. Was there a comment section? None came up for me. Yeats was involved with the Golden Dawn, too.
I got what you were saying and I understood why Alex Jones was the photo. You are thinking ahead. One thing we know about history is that it repeats itself. It repeats itself so reliably that it's a reminder not to get too caught up in it (as you point out). Despite all of the times in the past we've seen the underclass rise up and topple the ruling class, somehow this country still thinks this is a good path forward. Alex Jones is about as insane as it gets. I spend a lot of time in Trump world and the truth is that Alex Jones is not a big part of it, or even an influential figure. He definitely dwells in a weird sub group but the populist revolution on the march is likely something different. Anyway who can make sense of any of it. I can't. But it is absolutely worth noting that the pendulum swings one way, then it swings the other. This much we know for sure. The one way it isn't going to swing, unless our government goes full Stalin, is towards the administrative state and away from the people. That is probably less likely than it swinging towards the populists.
As far as call outs on Twitter - you gotta feel badly for people who get off on public dunking. I guess everyone does. It is an easy trigger to pull and it probably feels really good to know you are hurting someone. But yuck, gross. It always makes me feel like I need to take a shower. You have readers here who value what you think, value your honesty and value how much time you put into this newsletter. History will remember you well.
Thankful for you, Freddie! Now, let the Twitterites devour themselves and pass the turkey…
This specific moment of eye-rolling, vaguely scandalized Twitter scolds and their attendant social justice politics will pass, and as you imply, it'll pass sooner than almost anyone expects. But there'll always be church ladies. There'll always be more "but" people than "if" people. And there'll always be, if not comfort, then predictably in deriding the risk-taker or pointing at the unclean. There's a really joyless pincer movement about it: if you're too cool to try anything new you can't fail at it, plus you've already succeeded because you've pointed out how fucking dumb some other guy is for even trying.
But, again, spaces are like this. Twitter might well be the worst of them, yes, but there was never a town square or a knitting circle or an intergalactic confederation that didn't have the beady-eyed curtain-twitcher, the vicious gossip, the nihilistic conformist with the thin smile and the raised pinkie. The only way out is to get out. Do as Freddie does - find a voice, find an audience, hang a shingle away from the madding crowd and say "I'm not doing this to be like everyone else. Stop by if you want something new." You'll cultivate a little garden of weirdos. And it'll be lovely.
Excellent.
Read this while on my migraine meds. Perfect!
I think what bothered people was less the fact that your post was poetically (as you seem to describe it) incomprehensible and more that it seemed to be intentionally vague, a sense that you were simultaneously trying to signal that you weren’t part of the woke contingent but also ambivalent/critical/unwilling to approve of any force that doesn’t straightforwardly identify as a well meaning leftist one. I think that ambivalence is a true one that transpires throughout your writing: you are a leftist through and through but there’s a sense (that some people reproach you, understandably) that you’re still avoiding grappling with the fact that maybe all leftism is at this point in history is this petit bourgeois managerial project that you often describe as the “bad” or “fake” left. Anyway as much as I understand the reproach, I don’t read your posture as cowardly but as a genuine moral ambivalence and questioning which is part of what makes your substack interesting (and you one of the only figures on the left I have any interest in at this point )
Writers would do well to take the advice shitty employees everywhere have been internalizing since the dawn of time: make yourself irreplaceable. Every asshole with an internet connection, some practice, and a free weekend can be a generic-brand Ezra Klein well enough to put the name brand out of business. How many people can ever be a non-union equivalent of Freddie deBoer though? Or Ethan Strauss? Very few. And that ALL comes down to voice. When you write as you nobody can replace you because nobody else IS you, and the simple act of being above duplication is in and of itself one of the most financially valuable assets any individual in any industry can have.
The importance of being weird cannot be overstated. Even among the "anti-woke". I stopped supporting a number of such writers, or declined to ever do so, because their takes -- though I agree with them -- can readily be found on Twitter or a subreddit's comments section for free.
Freddie, meanwhile, is offering a Substack like nothing else. I'm trying to train an AI to imitate the Woke Milieu. No fucking way I could do that with FdB; the poor thing wouldn't know how to patch this eclectic collection together.
You're flying high this week, deBoer. I'm filing away "performing confusion" to reference in future. I'm wondering if anyone on the left has ever performed confusion on Twitter about, say, Judith Butler (I really, honestly don't know because I quit Twitter after 5 minutes many years ago). Some of what you write may feel challenging, but it's never an obfuscation. For my money, it's gold.
This might be a fun opportunity to share some substacks that are pushing the boundaries in the ways Freddie outlines here:
You might want to give "Fisted by Foucalt" a read (it's a terrible blog name, sorry buddy). Here's the interview that introduced me to it, coincidentally with Anna Khachiyan of Red Scare: https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-zrich-interviews-anna-khachiyan.
"The Hinterland" is great at exploring whatever Justin Smith wants to explore. As I think Freddie is hinting at here, there's a lot more to talk about than whether being Woke is a terrible thing, an existential threat, or goofy nonsense for dum-dums. Smith pokes around into lots of other fun areas. I might have come to him through this blog, actually. Stack. Whatever. Here are some good ones (one or two are very slightly culture war-ish, but much of the rest of his stuff isn't): Click the Boats (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/click-the-boats), What are the Humanities? (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/what-are-the-humanities), On the Job (https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/on-the-job).
The House of Strauss, which I'm almost positive I found through Freddie recommendation, is just really well written. It's a sports blog - don't hang up! - but I follow no sports at all and still find it great enough to pay for. The cat's just a really good writer: https://houseofstrauss.substack.com/archive?sort=new.
The Lindy Newsletter tries some fun stuff, though I'm not a paying subscriber yet: https://paulskallas.substack.com/
And of course, the granddaddy of them all, Astralcodexten (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/).
Anybody have other suggestions that at least sometimes veer away from "man the Wokesters just really smell bad, don't they?" Maybe even something funny?
There will always be people who hear you, see you, in the way you intend, and people who don’t.
When you say something even a little bit different from the currently accepted norms, no matter how carefully thought out it is, no matter how right it might be, the number of people who hear you and see you in the way you intend drops. Quite a bit.
In every era, there are the majority who play it safe, parrot the accepted views, and just get by (and a subset of those people have enormous wasted talents), and there are the small number who take risks.
That’s always been so, and it will probably always be so.
If you take risks, it helps to become more and more at peace with the predictable, even vicious reactions you get from all quarters and for all sorts of reasons. The reason so many talented people play it safe is because of those vicious reactions they get if they don’t. How sad and stifling it must feel to be them.
If you take risks, there’s a sense in which it’s important and health-promoting Not to Give a Fuck. That’s much easier said than done. It can take a lifetime to develop. With age, it comes more easily. It’s a worthy goal.
You’re enough. You need to feel that deeply, even when people are awful to you. Even when they are calculatedly so. There are people who will understand the rabbis remark. There are people who won’t. There are people who will willfully misunderstand, and that’s frustrating. Beyond frustrating. But fuck ‘em. You have your own goals.