In short, do you not understand the mistake you are making?
Are you this disconnected from the people you purportedly serve?
Are you this clueless as to the nature of the threat you wield, brandishing it to the common people? This inconsiderate? This blind to the fact of your power?
New York Liberals
As a Portland native I have known a variety of leftists. I’m an Anarchist by philosophy. And let me tell you, New York Liberals are dangerously elitist. They live in an elaborate system in one of the most densely populated regions on the planet, and it never even occurs to them that it might not be possible to make the system they have work everywhere, so they go about their lives in New York avoiding flyover country and working assiduously to make flyover country more like New York without ever going there.
Portland lefties know they’re dirtbags. New York lefties think they’re at the top of Western Civilization (as they snidely tell you Western Civilization is a myth).
Now I’m at best a sometimes-fan of Scott Alexander. He’s a goddamn fool, and one of the worst of the fools, the moderate. He likes to take things apart from all angles, examine the basic pieces, and put it back together in the least controversial way. Boring.
Scott Alexander is the kind of person who can write, after a presidential election in which a populist demagogue stoked xenophobic impulses, threatened journalists with physical violence, and led chants talking about locking up his opponent, an article titled “You Are Still Crying Wolf” regarding the propensity of the sane-minded people in this country to notice the Fascism. He has not, to my knowledge, ever recanted this essay, even after, you know, the brutal crackdown on a protest on live TV involving a Bible as a sort of horrid endzone dance.
What I’m trying to say is he is a moron, but he’s also a talented writer and an independent thinker.
Let me define independent thought for you, as anyone working at the New York Times will not understand the concept. (Hint: you’re publishing someone’s real name against their will because of some rote adherence to procedure.)
Independent thinkers are dangerous because they might think things the Standard Neoliberal Toolset considers not just wrong, but taboo. Even if they later reevaluate their thought patterns, the fact that they dared to go off the beaten path makes them dangerous in the eyes of the puritanical left.
Now I’m not saying you, in your gleaming New York office, are of the puritanical left. You hold completely consistent viewpoints and you mostly just give people the rope to hang themselves!
And I’ve been watching Scott’s community for a few years now. Independent thought is mostly very bad. It turns out that you’re better off copying the Standard Neoliberal Toolset in, oh call it 80% of situations.
But it produces some striking work, and it’s more creative than what you can read in the papers, which is mostly rote as I’m sure you know!
Scott’s community is the kind of place where, 2016-2018, white supremacist arguments were heard because people there, though it is baffling, think that being able to construct arguments against white supremacists is a valuable and useful skill. Where a normal person would just be dependent on the Standard Neoliberal Toolset, in which you can recognize white supremacy and then ignore it like a rational human being, the independent thinker must trace through all of the lines of logic to see where the white supremacist is exactly wrong.
This process takes time. In the meanwhile, there was a strong white supremacist undercurrent in his community (especially the subreddit).
Reputation is a funny thing.
These people are used to being told by puritanical leftists that they are evil for giving white supremacists a platform even though they used that platform to thoroughly discredit the racists. That the scary independent thoughts in their head make them dangerous instead of pants-on-head dumb.
So this is where I get to the serious question:
Do you really not understand how unpopular you are, New York Leftists? (Yeah I use leftist and liberal interchangeably, what are you, a leftlib?)
These people, these poor befuddled internet denizens, they spend a lot of time watching the tides of the Internet. They see Twitter mob after Twitter mob chase down someone who said the wrong thing. They are afraid of you.
They don’t see the virtuous righteousness of the left. They only saw the last bully to cross their path, and outside of your shiny city bubble there are a lot of left-aligned bullies. They only see an accidental assemblage of ideology guiding an Orwellian crackdown on independent thought.
Are you really so mindless as to prove them correct?
Why do you think ripping off masks and throwing people to the mob is acceptable behavior? How do you think that isn’t what you are doing? What do you think this is going to accomplish except turn the entirety of Scott’s pseudo-intelligentsia against you?
Or… you can put down the doxxing gun and deescalate the situation. (Or do you not believe you have the gun? Or do you think that you’ve got a badge and permission to use it? Police aren’t just the ones with the badge, it’s a mindset y’all!)
I don’t even like the guy that much, I think he’s naive and paranoid and doesn’t know a fucking wolf when it’s howling right outside the window. But you never tell a person who has experienced death threats that it’s all in their head. You just don’t do that.
After all, how can he focus on the wolf when he’s got the Grey Lady threatening his livelihood?
Sincerely,
Impassionata