I hate seeing writers like Jesse and Matt grouped with Graham Linehan, who seems to genuinely hate trans people.
I thought Graham's post mocking the dating profile photos of trans women was repugnant. These individuals had no power and had done NOTHING wrong. The dating app explicitly welcomes trans women to participate. And putting up a dating profile is such a scary and vulnerable thing in the first place. It was so unnecessary and cruel.
If this is really about transphobia, the focus should be on Graham -- not Jesse who wrote on Substack, for example, "Why The Hard Age Caps On Youth Gender Transition Being Proposed By Conservatives Are A Very Bad Idea." Or Matt who doesn't even write about these issues.
The only thing I can even think of is that Matt signed the Harper's letter, which didn't mention trans issues -- but was construed as transphobic after it got published.
I hate woke and Identity politics, but I have a question for its critics. I think it is an important one for them to answer. When have we ever been better than this? Jesse Singhal, Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss seem to believe there was a time when our politics was ruled by reasonable, well informed citizens and I do not believe that a time like that has ever existed. It is a myth. I don’t think it ever will exist either. Call me a Misanthrope (I’ll come to dinner) but Man isn’t good enough to create a just society. He can only dream them up.
Throughout our history people have used false narratives and outright lies to gain and keep power. Slave owners, robber-barons, and anti-communists have demonized and ostracized people to maintain their power, and innocents were hurt. The only thing different today is who is wielding the power and the technology they wield it with. The technology makes the manipulation of the mob more suffocating but since Jackson our politics has been about manipulating mobs. The people who are wielding the power sincerely want a society free of racism and misogyny and I think that is a better ideal to strive for than the maintenance of corporate power and sustaining the wealthy. There are excesses, stupid ideas abound and innocents are cancelled, but that is nothing new either.
As for journalism it has always been biased and the willing servant of one power structure or another. And well journalists are opinions. The era of objective journalism, if there ever was one, was a short one. Mr. Singhal’s obsession with who is saying what about whom on twitter is really just coverage of an insular war among journalists that really isn’t all that important.
Of course, a cynic like myself finds wokism sickeningly sweet and insincere but the world is never a happy place for cynics. I don’t think there is revolution happening, or our democracy, such as it is, is in peril. It is just a new era is upon us. And this too shall pass.
Thanks for this, Jesse. Well, carefully, and clearly said. I feel for you guys in the trenches, and I’m also really (selfishly) glad you’re there. Keep fighting.
Lots of people on the left are saying "cancellations" of journalists isn't a problem b/c they go on to do fine on Substack or equivalents.
But here are a few of things to consider.
True, not everyone who is "cancelled" has their careers ruined, and some established folks do better financially. OK. But for most journalists, losing a gig right now is a really big deal. Many thousands of journalists have lost their jobs over the past year. So if a journo is considering publishing something controversial, I don't see how they don't hesitate and probably just give it a pass. There's a demonstration effect when people are ousted from jobs and if you don't think this is harmful, I don't know what to say to you.
Second, let's focus on readers rather than writers for a change. The Substack-ing of media is putting good writers behind expensive paywalls, paywalls that many cannot afford. This makes it harder for new readers to find them and more importantly their ideas, and limits circulation to motivated readers who have the financial ability to support a host of writers they want to read. If you are interested in democratizing the flow of ideas and information, this is pretty clearly a bad thing. This complaint is being aired more widely now, and it seems quite justified.
Finally, frankly, the "some writers end up doing better" seems like a rationalization to avoid addressing the problem. In almost any situation where something bad happen, you can find people who end up doing better after it happens.
I think certain people see evidence-based journalism as a threat to their abilities to push social change forward by inundating everyone with a specific narrative (like getting people to accept a "disease analogy" for how some form of bigotry or crime operates). If there is evidence-based journalism, they want extremely minute control over how the issues are framed and interpreted to aggressively prioritize what they see as harm reduction.
“Stories about Donald Trump’s endless lies, for example, were increasingly peppered with phrases like “he said without evidence, “a claim he could not provide any evidence for,” and so on.”
Donald Trump certainly has a loose relationship with the truth, but these phrases always set off my bullshit detector.
First, it’s an isolated demand for rigor - political stump speeches are not exactly academic journal articles and essentially any time a politician opens their mouth it would probably be fair to append “citation needed”. Yet the “claimed without evidence” phrase was only applied to Trump and his allies.
Second, the people using the phrase rarely provided any evidence of their own that the statement was actually false.
So in practice “claimed without evidence” quite often meant “said something we didn’t like but can’t actually refute without making it clear that the issue is actually a complicated one that we can’t claim pure Moral Clarity on, so we’re just going to hope you treat it as unambiguously false and move on”
It’s not like they were shy about saying “repeated the false claim that...” if they actually could prove the statement false (even then, “false” often meant “controversial” or “disputed”. The press has a bad habit of treating “disputed” “refuted” and “debunked” as synonyms when it comes to statements they disagree with).
I have yet to figure out what the end game is. The media has gone to hell. Narratives are pushed on all fronts. Everything and everyone must fall in line or else. But to what end? What does the glorious utopia look like? I don’t mean what is the horror we envision at the end of this slippery slope. What do the narrative-pushers envision is the better world they’re breaking all the rules to achieve?
Honestly, I fear those who are a little *too* clear on their morality. Life is complicated, and that makes figuring out the right and wrong of most situations complicated too--at least, it should. Save us from moral clarity.
If "moral clarity" were the norm for all political flavors, it would be great. But it's used as another sectarian weapon. Like people who are "pro-science", meaning they believe in evolution and climate change, but then tell you that there are many sexes.
So, moral clarity itself becomes just another political tool. I am fairly sure that little, probably none, of the reporting on the Atlanta shootings presented via an intersectional/CRT lens has been put through the moral clarity strainer.
Thanks for another interesting article, Jesse, but I cannot read most of the comments for some time now and Substack does not seem to have a subscriber feedback system.
I hate seeing writers like Jesse and Matt grouped with Graham Linehan, who seems to genuinely hate trans people.
I thought Graham's post mocking the dating profile photos of trans women was repugnant. These individuals had no power and had done NOTHING wrong. The dating app explicitly welcomes trans women to participate. And putting up a dating profile is such a scary and vulnerable thing in the first place. It was so unnecessary and cruel.
If this is really about transphobia, the focus should be on Graham -- not Jesse who wrote on Substack, for example, "Why The Hard Age Caps On Youth Gender Transition Being Proposed By Conservatives Are A Very Bad Idea." Or Matt who doesn't even write about these issues.
The only thing I can even think of is that Matt signed the Harper's letter, which didn't mention trans issues -- but was construed as transphobic after it got published.
I hate woke and Identity politics, but I have a question for its critics. I think it is an important one for them to answer. When have we ever been better than this? Jesse Singhal, Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss seem to believe there was a time when our politics was ruled by reasonable, well informed citizens and I do not believe that a time like that has ever existed. It is a myth. I don’t think it ever will exist either. Call me a Misanthrope (I’ll come to dinner) but Man isn’t good enough to create a just society. He can only dream them up.
Throughout our history people have used false narratives and outright lies to gain and keep power. Slave owners, robber-barons, and anti-communists have demonized and ostracized people to maintain their power, and innocents were hurt. The only thing different today is who is wielding the power and the technology they wield it with. The technology makes the manipulation of the mob more suffocating but since Jackson our politics has been about manipulating mobs. The people who are wielding the power sincerely want a society free of racism and misogyny and I think that is a better ideal to strive for than the maintenance of corporate power and sustaining the wealthy. There are excesses, stupid ideas abound and innocents are cancelled, but that is nothing new either.
As for journalism it has always been biased and the willing servant of one power structure or another. And well journalists are opinions. The era of objective journalism, if there ever was one, was a short one. Mr. Singhal’s obsession with who is saying what about whom on twitter is really just coverage of an insular war among journalists that really isn’t all that important.
Of course, a cynic like myself finds wokism sickeningly sweet and insincere but the world is never a happy place for cynics. I don’t think there is revolution happening, or our democracy, such as it is, is in peril. It is just a new era is upon us. And this too shall pass.
And *again*, the Left is mimicking the Right after 9/11. "Moral clarity" was a favorite term of people like Hannity and Bill Bennett.
(P.S. went to my library this morning and asked them to order The Quick Fix.)
Thanks for this, Jesse. Well, carefully, and clearly said. I feel for you guys in the trenches, and I’m also really (selfishly) glad you’re there. Keep fighting.
Lots of people on the left are saying "cancellations" of journalists isn't a problem b/c they go on to do fine on Substack or equivalents.
But here are a few of things to consider.
True, not everyone who is "cancelled" has their careers ruined, and some established folks do better financially. OK. But for most journalists, losing a gig right now is a really big deal. Many thousands of journalists have lost their jobs over the past year. So if a journo is considering publishing something controversial, I don't see how they don't hesitate and probably just give it a pass. There's a demonstration effect when people are ousted from jobs and if you don't think this is harmful, I don't know what to say to you.
Second, let's focus on readers rather than writers for a change. The Substack-ing of media is putting good writers behind expensive paywalls, paywalls that many cannot afford. This makes it harder for new readers to find them and more importantly their ideas, and limits circulation to motivated readers who have the financial ability to support a host of writers they want to read. If you are interested in democratizing the flow of ideas and information, this is pretty clearly a bad thing. This complaint is being aired more widely now, and it seems quite justified.
Finally, frankly, the "some writers end up doing better" seems like a rationalization to avoid addressing the problem. In almost any situation where something bad happen, you can find people who end up doing better after it happens.
I think certain people see evidence-based journalism as a threat to their abilities to push social change forward by inundating everyone with a specific narrative (like getting people to accept a "disease analogy" for how some form of bigotry or crime operates). If there is evidence-based journalism, they want extremely minute control over how the issues are framed and interpreted to aggressively prioritize what they see as harm reduction.
“Stories about Donald Trump’s endless lies, for example, were increasingly peppered with phrases like “he said without evidence, “a claim he could not provide any evidence for,” and so on.”
Donald Trump certainly has a loose relationship with the truth, but these phrases always set off my bullshit detector.
First, it’s an isolated demand for rigor - political stump speeches are not exactly academic journal articles and essentially any time a politician opens their mouth it would probably be fair to append “citation needed”. Yet the “claimed without evidence” phrase was only applied to Trump and his allies.
Second, the people using the phrase rarely provided any evidence of their own that the statement was actually false.
So in practice “claimed without evidence” quite often meant “said something we didn’t like but can’t actually refute without making it clear that the issue is actually a complicated one that we can’t claim pure Moral Clarity on, so we’re just going to hope you treat it as unambiguously false and move on”
It’s not like they were shy about saying “repeated the false claim that...” if they actually could prove the statement false (even then, “false” often meant “controversial” or “disputed”. The press has a bad habit of treating “disputed” “refuted” and “debunked” as synonyms when it comes to statements they disagree with).
I have yet to figure out what the end game is. The media has gone to hell. Narratives are pushed on all fronts. Everything and everyone must fall in line or else. But to what end? What does the glorious utopia look like? I don’t mean what is the horror we envision at the end of this slippery slope. What do the narrative-pushers envision is the better world they’re breaking all the rules to achieve?
Honestly, I fear those who are a little *too* clear on their morality. Life is complicated, and that makes figuring out the right and wrong of most situations complicated too--at least, it should. Save us from moral clarity.
If "moral clarity" were the norm for all political flavors, it would be great. But it's used as another sectarian weapon. Like people who are "pro-science", meaning they believe in evolution and climate change, but then tell you that there are many sexes.
So, moral clarity itself becomes just another political tool. I am fairly sure that little, probably none, of the reporting on the Atlanta shootings presented via an intersectional/CRT lens has been put through the moral clarity strainer.
Is it just me or is a Jesse's defense of Matt y an open post in substack but Matt y defense of himself a locked one ... If so that's odd
Thanks for another interesting article, Jesse, but I cannot read most of the comments for some time now and Substack does not seem to have a subscriber feedback system.
I wonder what the next episode of *Weeds* is gonna be like.