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Freddie, I found you through the podcast Blocked and Reported (by Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog), and man oh man your writing has done so much for my mental health.

I'm a long time left-of-center person and have no desire to ever look in the GOP's direction. But goddamn it do I hate social media-fueled woke culture and cancel culture. I hate all the mobbing and shaming. And I REALLY HATE how most arts criticism (especially movies and TV) has devolved into this fucking circus where the only point of art is to express the "correct" message and how anything else is "problematic" at best or harmful at worst.

I've been driven insane by how seemingly the only mainstream people speaking out against this crap are right wing. We badly, desperately need actual left wing people to do the same. Thank you thank you THANK YOU for doing what you do.

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I am always a bit puzzled by the claim that the police were invented to catch runaway slaves in America because there are of course countries other than America that also have police but never runaway slaves.

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I don't know if you want to hear this, Freddie, since you say you support trans rights, but "trans women are women" is the ultimate, perfect example of Kayfabe. Everyone who says it knows what a woman is. Obviously! But they're devoted to the sense of sacred commitment, to maintaining the consensual fantasy as you put it.

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I'm not sure it's all kayfabe, although I imagine much of it is, especially as you creep up the power ladder. I have encountered more than a few people who appear to be "true believers". Perhaps they are just exceptional actors, but it seems more likely to me that they are simply very passionate people who lack critical thinking skills and see no dissonance between their position six months ago and their position now because they don't have the mental skills to recognize the shift. They'll say they haven't given up on Defund, they're just shifting tactics because the "optics" have changed, or what-have-you, and then spin up reasons it's all the Republicans' fault. In my experience, it's like talking to a brick wall.

"In the long run we do have to think about more radical alternatives because there’s inherent violence in the cop-community relationship"

I know you have a million requests, but I'm curious if you'd be willing to expound upon this. I've seen a lot of people declaring we need 'radical' change in policing, yet none of them seem to know what that radical change is. I live in Minneapolis, and I've heard a lot of ballyhooing about "re-imagining what police are!", including from elected officials, and all of it is pseudo-academic feel-good nonsense without a single concrete policy proposal in sight. It seems to me a lot of people earnestly want policing to change but have no idea how to do this, and this would be fine except they're tearing down policing with nothing to replace it, and the fallout is devastating and falling almost entirely on the poorest communities.

It seems to me that violence is the point of police: modern states rely on being the sole source of legitimate force for their power, and this is true regardless of their government or economic system. If you're not willing to eventually resort to violence to enforce laws, you can't have laws. Many modern people are understandably disgusted by violence, but I don't see how violence can be wholly eliminated: for violence to be eliminated, we'd have to have a populace that is completely obedient. Looking at the history of mankind, achieving that seems like a stretch. We can do a lot with poverty alleviation, etc, but humans are and always have been emotional, violent creatures, and no social program is going to change human nature. (and that's before we get into the thorny problem of mental illness, or even of drug use. you cannot reason or bargain with people who have become wholly divorced from reality)

So I guess basically I'm wondering what's in your 'radical change' step, because what others have said boils down to "miraculously all humans become perfect model citizens and then we don't need police".

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I am a person who is happiest when I start my day with 75 minutes or so of running outdoors, but I am not sufficiently self actualized to just listen to my own thoughts, and music messes up my cadence, so I listen to podcasts, mostly about politics. And this paragraph exactly captured how I now feel and why I pay for this newsletter:

"Living under kayfabe makes you yearn for plainspoken communication, for letting the mask fall. The professed inability of progressives to understand why woke-skeptical publications like this one keep succeeding financially is itself a slice of kayfabe. They know people are paying for Substacks and podcasts and subscribing to YouTubes and Patreons because it’s exhausting to constantly spend all of your time pretending things that don’t make sense make sense, pretending that you believe things you don’t to avoid the social consequences of telling the truth." I feel such mystification when I hear Ezra Klein or Emily Bazelon wonder if there really is a climate of new censoriousness. My 18 and 21 year olds can tell you that of course there is and that the experience of being young today includes worrying that it is coming for you.

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Freddie,

I totally understand the frustration that prompted you to write this, but I've gotto say a few things.

1) You underestimate the earnestness of people advocating for defunding the police and similar policies, and you're conflating enthusiasm for the idea with a belief that it's imminently going to happen. A lot of the support for these ideas is genuine, despite the enormous difficulties in implementation! I do think there is some kayfabe in the professional activist class, but don't project that onto ordinary people. This leads me to my next point...

2) I think you get a way worse dose of this stuff than most people because of your job. I can't think of a single person in my social circle who would support the professor in the video you posted. (For context - I am a 32 year old software engineer in Chicago and my friends run the gamut from long-time DSA members to Hillary Clinton Democrats.) Honestly in that particular case - have you tried just saying what you think? A lot of abstract support for these call outs collapses in the face of direct interpersonal cruelty. (Although apparently this happened during a class on public speaking and debate? I think there might be a bit more to the video than meets the eye.)

I do find the belief that reading Ibram Kendi and mandating corporate diversity training actually helps fight racism and improve the country to be pretty frustrating. When talking with my friends, I've found the thing that helps get people to admit this is to contrast these activities with concrete, material steps, for example: all the corporate diversity training in the world does less for minorities than Medicare for All would; same for a $15 minimum wage. To your point, perhaps I wouldn't say that to my head of HR. But still - I think if you can focus on what real change actually looks like, you might find that people are less invested in the superficial stuff than they appear.

Keep your head up man.

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It's Wednesday, so today we get the Freddie who believes that political actions should be effective, and who rightly laments the staggering ineffectiveness of the left to get anything meaningful done.

But tomorrow we are just as likely to get the Freddie who wants to throw AOC under the bus for being insufficiently rigorous on Palestine, and who loudly declares that Hilary Clinton is "garbage" (which he did in 2016, when it mattered).

Freddie: you rightly lament the fact that the George Floyd Act is unlikely to pass the Senate, but did you happen to notice the vote in the House? Democrats: 217 for, 2 against. Republicans: 0 for, 211 against. (One Republican accidentally voted yes, but has now corrected the record.) Gee, how can we possibly tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans???

Yes, tomorrow we will get the Freddie who thinks there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, no reason to try to get Democrats elected (especially to high office like Senator and President) and to work with them.

That's Freddie's kayfabe, one that he keeps quite rigorously.

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Nice piece Freddie, thank you. nicely parsed and well stated. The main difference i see between the activism of the 60s (i.e., late 50s, 60s, early 70s) and now, which you captured very well, is that then there were clear goals: stop the war, stop Jim Crow, break segregation, enfranchise voters. Attaining each of those goals could be measured, progress toward them measured. I have been troubled by the unclarity of most of the stated goals of the current activism. Black Lives Matter has a good ring to it but I thought from the beginning if they had said Black Lives Matter, Too, it would have short circuited counter arguments (ALL lives matter, for instance, or Blue lives matter). Many people have said the "too" was obviously implied but the opponents' responses indicate otherwise. Defund the Police, as you clearly point out, was intellectually vapid from the beginning despite it having a nice ring to it as a slogan. Since Reagan, and more so since 9/11, policing has become more violent as well as applied to many situations where it does not belong (mental health responses, for instance). Despite the long slog, I believe that the only proper response to the sophomoric and simplistic sloganeering (and intellectual poverty) of my liberal tribe is to continually create a coherent response which unmasks their lack of clothing while developing an strong intellectual foundation to that response. Something that you and a number of others are doing. (thank you) What you are discussing here necessitates a continual and forceful response in order to set limits on what is happening. As someone whose books are being burned these days (I have said improper things out loud) I can see all too clearly where all this is going if we do not oppose it strongly and relentlessly. The sad thing is that far too many people (many that I once respected) are unwilling to take a stand.

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Thanks for writing this. Your writing makes me feel a bit less insane and a bit more optimistic about reality becoming reality again.

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I wish it were this simple, but it isn't. One substantial group with a significant percentage not in on the kayfabe is activist youth. They aren't sufficiently disillusioned yet. Experience with many, as well as my own past, suggests it. And they bring a lot of energy to these fights. There are also those incrementalists who understand but accept that a pound of rhetoric will get you a penny of change. And some of the changes passed by local governments are penny enough to them (however well or poorly thought out). As usual, there are multiple social forces at work, which is why the kayfabe that there is can't simply be dropped by mutual agreement.

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founding

The folks in my social and professional circles are completely caught up in this, with varying degrees of sincerity (from what I can tell).

I struggle because while "defund the police" doesn't accomplish anything, it has become a symbol of supporting people with marginalized identities. If BLM is saying "defund the police," arguing feels like saying to black people, "I'm not on your side. I don't support you." Especially because people are so quick to claim that disagreement = harm.

I feel the same way about some of the extreme demands and talking points in the queer community (which I am part of). Someone says "I'm not sure that's reasonable to demand," and people will just start crying because they hear "I hate you."

In politics, strategy should be more important than emotion. But a lot of this plays out in social groups among people who don't have any power or influence. When I stay quiet, I'm not trying to hold on to my New York magazine column -- I just don't want my friends to think I'm an asshole.

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I'm not sure you were aware, and I bet many people have made similar analogies over the years, but Eric Weinstein used kayfabe similarly:

"Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants. As such Kayfabrication is a dependable feature of many of our most important systems which share the above two characteristics such as war, finance, love, politics and science."

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783

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I read FDB to recalibrate my sanity.

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This may be my new favorite Freddie deBoer article, and yes, it’s mainly for the wrestling content.

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I found myself agreeing with vast majority of what's written here. And it seems equally applicable to all of the loudest parts of the progressive policy agenda right now (HR1, "what you hate voting?" PRO Act, "what you hate workers?") Still, after sitting with it for a bit, it strikes that the right is dealing with the same sickness, if perhaps a more insidious variant. On the left, you have to pretend bad policy is good policy, hide your discomfort with identity politics, and pretend patently obvious simplistic views are self-evident truths. But there's implicit room to wiggle because of course leftists agree the world is complicated. If pushed, the professor would say "of course I literally don't believe all of policing was born out of the slaveholding south." On the right, thought, you literally have to pretend deniable facts are other than as they are. The left will watch the video of the debate kid in the classroom and say, "this isn't indicative of a larger problem," (when it obviously is). The right will watch its version of the video and have to say say, "that didn't happen; the video was forged, fake, staged, etc." There's no room for backtrack or nuance, or else you get Liz Cheney'd.

I see this as a subtle but important distinction. But maybe not, maybe it's the exact same problem. Either way, I don't know that articles like this that talk to one half of the problem move the needle. I'm not sure I see a way out of a national death spiral unless we can find a broad-based way to inoculate the population as a whole.

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Hey, are you aware that video you cited of the teacher "berating" a student was taken out of context and was part of an exercise where the whole point was to have a debate like this? https://hornet.fullcoll.edu/viral-video-of-cypress-college-instructor-and-student-was-actually-part-of-the-assignment/

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