Bari Weiss founded this journamalism website, The Free Press, back in 2022. I guess it is “free” — it’s bleeding money, and they’re desperately seeking investors, and you can predict that they’ll get money from some billionaires somewhere, so they’ll continue to be “free,” although they’ll also be “owned” at the same time by, probably, some pro-Trump fanatical Zionist, because that’s what Weiss is. What will be published won’t be what I would consider journalism — we need a new word. Journanalism? Jourge? Jourbarism?
Anyway, Weiss went on Twitter (heh, she still uses Twitter) to plug the latest article on her glorified blog, titled The People Who Rage Against the Machine, which I’m sure Tom Morello appreciates. It’s an account by Suzy Weiss (any relation? I don’t know, don’t care) of a hyper-weird, tiny meeting of 50 people, by invitation only, called “The Machine and (Human) Nature” retreat. The headline says An emergent coalition of Catholics, preppers, localists, Luddites, and farmers is determined to resist modernity. They call themselves Doomer Optimists.
It’s illustrated with this photograph:
Even if you’re not convinced that thermonuclear war, or widespread political violence, or an AI overlord is coming for us in the near future, you can probably recognize what the Doomer Optimists are seeing. The signs of decline are everywhere.
Are you confused yet? What is the point of this article? Does the author have a perspective on this strange cult-like ideology?
She does not. Except maybe that she thinks it’s cool.
Now try to actually read the thing.
If the American political scene is divided between the liberal establishment—the domain of Dick and Liz Cheney, and Kamala Harris—and the renegade rebel alliance—which includes Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard—this conference represents the intelligentsia, or the culturati, of the renegades. They code right—although it’s noted at the conference that the left-right political divide is a “foreign French import,” and doesn’t apply—but only because the left is the establishment now, and they are antiestablishment. They see themselves as the vanguard of whatever comes after the establishment finally collapses under its own weight, and they call themselves by a paradoxical name.
“We’re excited to have the Doomer Optimist scene here,” McNiel, 42, said, on the first day of the conference. “Whatever it is.”
That’s…that’s incoherent. Dick Cheney is the liberal establishment? Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are the rebel alliance? What kind of cartoon world is she living in?
This is a self-selected gang of raw milk drinking, goat-farming, conservatives patting themselves on the back over their iconoclasm, that is, their wildly backwards reactionary freakishness, and Weiss is calling them the intelligentsia
? Keep those insightful articles coming, The Free Press!
Worse, Bari Weiss has a rather inflated perception of her own cleverness. She also retweeted this cartoon.
That’s jerbalism for you.
I’m guessing this “article” was written by AI.
Oh really?
If that is true, Bari Weiss is one of those signs of decline.
She is part of the problem, not the solution.
What will collapse the USA isn’t nuclear war or AI overlords. It will be right wingnut attacks on our democracy by the GOP, Donald Trump, and Fox NoNews.
The other major driver of any sort of US crisis is rising economic inequality and the relentless rise in the cost of living, notably of housing.
This is also something the GOP has made worse by continually enabling the ultra-rich oligarchies.
It seems to me that as the cost of living keeps going up, that the US population is getting poorer in buying power per hour worked.
Strangely enough, the economic data says this isn’t the case. Supposedly, the data says US buying power is slowly increasing.
I’m not in any position to argue against the data.
What always shocks me though is how recently, house prices on the US West coast have gone way up.
Cthulhu, this is SF Bay area class house prices.
It’s that way all the way from Seattle to Los Angeles and San Diego.
That $820,000 doesn’t even buy you that much of a house.
I wouldn’t want to be young and looking at housing prices like that.
No wonder people decide not to have children any more. No place to raise them.
Oh, we are definitely in a decline that will lead to our inevitable extinction, just not for the reason that this fascist dipshit thinks. It’s not modernity that’s killing us, but the rejection of progress by liberals obsessed with maintaining the status quo and the right’s fanatical devotion to “tradition.” It’s the dismissal of science and reason, fueled by capitalism and theism (especially Christianity), that will lead us to ruin. Our doom will come because we spurn education and expertise in the name of populism and equality; the elevation of the common dumb-fuck off the street or celebrity bubblehead over properly-trained scientists, academics, and other people of the mind.
Sadly, I don’t think either party or any of the “acceptable” political movements that Americans tolerate (i.e. “centrist Democrats to Neo-Nazi) will stop this doom.
The only reasonable response to the chaos of Bari Weiss is: WTF?
These are the same people who think that centrist Dems are “communists” because they want to infinitesimally raise taxes on the rich. These are the clowns who believe that seat belt or vaccination requirements laws are some nefarious form of totalitarianism.
To them. Harris snd Cheney represent the old order, the traditional politics of compromise and backroom dealing that they’ve come to loathe. Trump and Junior seemingly oppose this with their promises of going around this system and “getting things done.”
Whilst I certainly dislike our current political system (and that’s putting it mildly), the horror lies in what these “rebels” want to get done.
What they want is a cross between Medieval feudalism with bucolic “The Andy Griffith Show” Maybury aesthetics. A society with no wicked, cities filled with sin and corruption. No universities that deny God and “common sense.” Just a green and pleasant land of church-going farmers and ranchers ruled by a wise king-like-figure who gets his wisdom directly from Gawd.
Oh, and no darkies or queers, either.