Wow, the New York Times opinion pages keep reminding me of what a craphole they’ve become. The latest entry is by Gerard Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, who appears to wag a finger at those dang liberals who keep pointing out that the electorate that voted Trump into office were mostly conservative white folks who were driven by racial bias.

Racist is pretty much the most damning label that can be slapped on anyone in America today, which means it should be applied firmly and carefully. Yet some people have cavalierly leveled the charge against huge numbers of Americans — specifically, the more than 60 million people who voted for Mr. Trump.

In their ranks are people who sincerely consider themselves not bigoted, who might be open to reconsidering ways they have done things for years, but who are likely to be put off if they feel smeared before that conversation even takes place.

“Consider themselves not bigoted”…well, now I’m convinced. They don’t believe the things they do and say, or that Trump does and says, are bigoted, therefore they aren’t. You know, that’s not how the universe works.

And worse, he’s arguing that if we point out the racist/sexist awfulness of the Trump administration, they’ll then become even more racist/sexist out of spite. Please stop. This isn’t how people operate. You don’t become something you despise because people call you a mean name — you might exaggerate what you really are, but you don’t become the antithesis of your beliefs.

All Alexander’s complaints are is a litany of abuser’s cliches: “You made me do hit you!” “It’s all your fault — if you did the things I told you to do, I wouldn’t be angry!” “I don’t like smacking you around, but how else will you learn?” “I’m not the bully, you are!”

Look at the horrible things liberals do.

Pressing a political view from the Oscar stage, declaring a conservative campus speaker unacceptable, flatly categorizing huge segments of the country as misguided — these reveal a tremendous intellectual and moral self-confidence that smacks of superiority. It’s one thing to police your own language and a very different one to police other people’s. The former can set an example. The latter is domineering.

Yes, we can disagree with conservatives, and we can say so. Don’t you believe in free speech?

It’s true, some speakers are unacceptable. If they want to come to campus and declare that lesbians, or Republicans, need to be murdered, we ought to shut that poison right down.

Obviously huge segments of the country are misguided — they elected a corrupt, incompetent charlatan to run the country. QED.

It is a very different thing when someone uses their speech to incite violence and hatred, but it’s not that much different from when you use your own speech to provoke violence and hatred. Alexander is basically arguing that it’s not liberals’ business if right-wingers spout racism and misogyny — that they get a free pass on doing that because they’re not liberals.

Sorry, guy, you’re an American, supposedly. There exists a commonality that requires some agreement on civil behavior.

The whole piece is an exercise in hypocrisy and false equivalency. You tell me one thing that liberals have done that is worse than bombing foreign countries, throwing away environmental regulations, poisoning the water in Flint with lead, fomenting a tragic rise in racism & hate crimes, separating immigrant mothers from their children, enabling the NRA to turn our country into a war zone, or wrecking the economy? If you do, I’ll probably suggest that yeah, we should stop that. It doesn’t mean you’ve got an excuse to continue destroying the United States and all the people within it.

The only good thing about that essay that once again my decision to never, ever give a penny to the New York Times was affirmed. Where do they dredge up these awful people?

Are you interested in a good, balanced article on free speech? Here’s one: How Free Speech Warriors Mainstreamed White Supremacists. Our current problem isn’t a lack of free speech, it’s that the most vocal advocates for free speech, the ones who claim that it is curtailed and that they are victims, aren’t actually interested in free speech. They want an excuse to silence criticism of the most odious opinions. It’s the opposite of free speech — they want selective support for expression of bad ideas, while shutting down opposition in the name of protecting their views.

Capitalizing on the fuzziness of their coded speech, the new right has spun this plausible deniability off on hosts who either aren’t attuned to the underlying message or simply don’t care. Take, for example, the Rubin Report, a YouTube show purportedly devoted to “free speech” and “big ideas” with more than 700,000 subscribers. Host Dave Rubin positions himself as a “free agent” in the “marketplace of ideas,” seeking to establish a “new center rooted in free speech, logic, and reason.” To that end, he has invited on an eclectic, albeit right leaning, mix of guests, including mainstream public intellectuals like David Frum and Steven Pinker. But Rubin has made his antipathy for what he calls the “regressive left” and PC culture a common theme and so on the more extreme ends of the spectrum, he rarely, if ever, brings on a radical leftist. While Rubin frequently rails on identity politics, which he has called “evil,” he often invites on some of the most toxic practitioners of pro-Trump, white-identity politics, like InfoWars’ Paul Joseph Watson, who recycle black and immigrant crime stories, decry globalism and multiculturalism, and portray white identity as under attack. There they are offered the same deference and audience as some of the country’s leading public intellectuals.

Rubin is what used to be called a useful idiot — an undiscriminating tool who would uncritically promote terrible, destructive opinions while presenting himself as the noble supporter of open unbiased commentary. He’s not very bright, despite claiming to be a fan of logic and reason. The worst skinheads are smarter than he is.

“Thirty years ago, we used the same tactic and would refer to our movement as ‘White Pride’ or ‘White Separatist,’ said Picciolini, who was once a leader in the skinhead group Hammerskin Nation, recounting that less palatable labels caused problems and turned off potential recruits. “We [would say] we didn’t hate anyone, we were just interested in white civil rights. That was our public face. Behind closed doors, we were virulently racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic. The whole notion of ‘white nationalist’ or ‘race realist’ or ‘identitarian’ or ‘alt-right’ are based in the same racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic ideas we held. It is a marketing tactic and people should not be fooled.”

Yeah, they shouldn’t be, but it seems that being a fool is a path to wealth and popularity, as the Intellectual Dork Web has discovered. People with bad ideas are desperate for some kind of affirmation, and there’s always someone willing to provide it, for a fee. That’s been the lesson of religion for thousands of years, and now some atheists have rediscovered the principle, and have found that there are misogynists and racists happy to cough up cash if only you will tell them that their beliefs are virtuous and good. Telling people what they want to hear is always profitable.

Another darling of the Right, Bari Weiss, has also mastered this style. Like others of her duplicitous alt-right kind, she doesn’t even seem to be aware of how bad her arguments are. I’ll bet you’ve heard this one from the media a few times before.

I'm talking here about an emotional response. What happens to you when you are called deplorable? Is the response to say to the accuser: Actually, hey, you're right! I hadn't realized that about myself. Or is it to maybe consider voting for Trump?

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 11, 2018

I’m talking here about an emotional response. What happens to you when you are called deplorable? Is the response to say to the accuser: Actually, hey, you’re right! I hadn’t realized that about myself. Or is it to maybe consider voting for Trump?

Second: When conservatives, classical liberals or libertarians are told by the progressive chattering class that they–or those they read–are alt-right, the very common response is to say: Screw it. They think everyone is alt-right. And then those people move further right.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 11, 2018

When conservatives, classical liberals or libertarians are told by the progressive chattering class that they–or those they read–are alt-right, the very common response is to say: Screw it. They think everyone is alt-right. And then those people move further right.

Trump voters aren’t racist! But you are making them racist by calling them racist!

You know, that’s not how it works. I don’t want to be racist, either, but if you called me a racist, if you were even precise and specific and quoted something at me that I said that was racist, my reaction wouldn’t be to embrace that idea and go whole hog for Trump and join the KKK. It would be to say to myself that I don’t want to be a racist, I don’t want to be that person I was, what can I do to be better?

The Bari Weiss response is apparently to say, “What can I do to be a better racist?”, and that’s only the kind of thing somebody who is already pretty damned racist would say.

But here’s the bottom line, my emphasis:

In their blinkered fight for the alt-right’s “free speech”—a battle rarely, if ever, waged by the same actors on behalf of liberals—Rubin, Shepherd, and a number of college groups around the country seem to be both unable to make the vital distinction between protecting and promoting hateful ideology and unwilling to learn about it. They seem to view white-supremacist ideas pushed by social-media trolls to be on the same plane of harmless offensiveness as a Coed Naked T-shirt, inured to their real-world implications. Of course, they all have the right, at least in America, to give a platform without a heckler’s veto or credible counterpoint to ethno-state propagandists and noxious conspiracy theorists, who can smile and speak politely while peddling black crime stories and racist pseudoscience. But why, in the name of civil discourse and individual rights, would they want to?

That’s the real problem. I like free speech; I benefit from free speech. But I believe in the responsible exchange of ideas, I think in part because I’ve been conditioned by years of engagement in creationist arguments. That’s a situation where the other side is clearly intellectually bankrupt, where even someone like Dave Rubin or Sam Harris would agree that those people are so terribly wrong that it’s appalling to even consider giving them a free pass to indoctrinate our children. Yet I can disagree with creationists in the strongest possible terms and so detest them that I’ve been refusing to dignify their representatives with debate, while not suggesting that churches ought to be burned or fundamentalists jailed. That’s free speech.

They don’t seem to recognize that the pseudoscientific racism that they platform, or the institutionalized misogyny they promote, is just as disreputable and scientifically nonsensical as creationism, and even more damaging to society. So they talk about the “marketplace of ideas” and the “free exchange of views”, and offer a bullhorn to the biggest assholes they can find, while quietly whispering mild demurrals.

We on the Left are not fooled. We can see what you’re doing.

What’s wrong with you conservatives, classical liberals or libertarians that you don’t realize we can see right through you? The Communists had a term for enablers like you, “korisne budale”, or “useful innocents”, but I don’t think these right-wingers are innocent at all — they can’t be that stupid. They are well aware of what they are doing, and their disingenuousness is duplicitous.

Late last night, I mentioned that terrible little man who defended torture by claiming it worked on McCain. Again, I think McCain was a posturing, hypocritical Republican, but it turns out that one thing he was not is a “songbird”: when asked to name the members of his squadron under torture, he gave up the names of the Green Bay Packers football team. The cheeseheads of Wisconsin might resent that bitter treachery, but he didn’t betray his military colleagues.

The guy who made the accusation, Thomas McInerney, is a kook of the first order who was formerly on a birther crusade, claiming that Obama was a secret Muslim who was not born in this country, and he also filed an affidavit to support a military officer who refused to obey orders, since the Commander-in-Chief, he claimed, had no authority. I think that makes him more of a traitor than McCain.

McInerny still got booked for his valuable opinions on Fox Business, despite being a gullible conspiracy theorist and racist (face it, if you gave credibility to the claim that a black president was not eligible for the office, you’re a goddamned racist.)

Gina Haspel was the commandant of a secret prison in Thailand, where prisoners were tortured. She was responsible for destroying all recordings of the torture. She got nominated for head of the CIA.

Scott Pruitt was bragging about blocking environmental regulations before he was made head of the EPA. Now it’s revealed that he was also having expensive dinners with a certain Catholic defender of kiddie diddling. Isn’t associating with Cardinal Pell a moral failing?

I could name the entire cabal of crooks in the Trump administration, including the chief con artist himself. None of these people belong in any position of power and influence, yet there they are. I could name the rotating cast of regulars appearing on talk shows and “news” programs every day, milking every scrap of notoriety for more notoriety. They’ve tunneled through rich loamy filth to suddenly pop up with an eruption of dirt and sludge at the top of our country.

I guess I’m not the only one who noticed the blatant ironies of The Intellectual Dark Web. So did Nathan Robinson.

Weiss says that “offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe,” such as the O2 Arena, where they dare to say “That Which Cannot Be Said,” offering “taboo” thoughts like “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” (Gosh, perhaps it’s just the fringe conservative circles I move in, but I seem to hear that stuff constantly!)

Well, are they right? Are they being “purged” as part of a “siege” on free speech by the illiberal left? It’s interesting that Weiss chooses to use the formulation “feeling locked out of legacy outlets,” since I seem to remember a great philosopher once saying that Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings. These people may feel as if they are persecuted renegades, suppressed at every turn by Postmodern Neo-Marxists. But there are a lot of facts to say otherwise.

First, even from the evidence in Weiss’ article, we can see that freely speaking about the “siege on free speech” is impressively lucrative. Dave Rubin’s show “makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon” while Jordan Peterson “pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month” and recently released a bestseller. Ben Shapiro gets 15 million downloads a month and has published five books, Sam Harris gets a million listeners per episode and has published seven books. Though Joe Rogan insists “he’s not an interviewer or a journalist” (I wouldn’t disagree) his three-hour podcast conversations are among the most downloaded in the world. These dissident “intellectuals” each seem to make about as much money in a month, with far larger audiences, than is made annually by the critical race theorists and gender studies professors they think are keeping them from being heard.

I guess we can put all of them soundly in the conservative camp, since they meet the two main diagnostic criteria: they make money off their persecution complex, and they’re all flailingly hypocritical.