Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
Millennials aren't doing that, and are if anything sticking firmer with the left side parties with age.
I would be interested to see if this holds when you control for "stage of life" rather than age. I would be very surprised if Millennial homeowners, married Millennials, and Millennials with children weren't significantly more conservative than their generation, more broadly. This is because I would bet heavily that the Churchillian "young liberal -> old conservative" spectrum has at least as much to do with the changing levels of responsibility that people go through as they age into adulthood as it does with the actual passage of time.
Millennials, overeducated and under-worked due to some combo of secular western parental trends, the 08' recession, and the unfortunate conjunction of economic opportunity and extremely high cost-of-living in the major U.S. metropolises, are way behind previous generations in taking on the full responsibilities and social roles of adulthood (self very much included). Less married, fewer kids, less money, fewer assets - it all plays a role.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo. Kinda increases the incentives for doing political crimes now.
The BLM lawyers who firebombed a cop car got 12-15 months.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals
The problem is that "classical liberalism" has very little positive substance to it in most formulations; it's usually articulated as something of a meta-philosophy about open competition between ideological groups (free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equality before the law, etc.). It has very little to say about what the actual positive vision society should be working towards is. Hence its fundamental discomfort with the actual exercise of power necessary to rip out the institutional kudzu the woke has implanted into the liberal's precious "impartial institutions."
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term.
The problem is that there is no institutional check on the left when it gets into power (eg all the nonsense the Biden Administration got up to, as documented ably by Rufo and many others) so the only actual check there can be is the one originally contemplated by the Founders - the full exercise of political power by a successive administration elected to reverse the initiatives of the last.
In fact, the checking of one aggressive force (wokism) by an equally and oppositely-aggressive one (Trumpism) is precisely the balancing of powers and passions contemplated by Madison and the federalists. It's just been so long since we had anything even resembling an equal fight between progressive and conservative forces in the country's institutions that actual open conflict looks like a radical coup.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
So the Pride flag is officially on the same level as the National Anthem now? I thought that was just a dissident right twitter meme about "globohomo" and the "GAE." But good to know, good to know.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
People renaming stuff for ideological reasons is bad actually.
Right. This community knows this progression. neutral rules are best, but once someone defects then trying to uphold the neutral rule is basically the same thing as unilateral disarmament.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
I believe that speech is powerful. Words are a means we use to convince other minds of beliefs about the world. Minds act upon those beliefs.
Especially nowadays, words are in massive superabundance. Unless you are someone with a public following - and even then - the idea that any one statement, out of millions, is dispositive of an individual's actions, strains credulity.
At present, there is a powerful right wing-meme that many people, some LGBT and some not, mostly democrats, are attempting to sexually confuse children for nefarious purposes. This is often described as "grooming" in order to equivocate with sexual abuse children.
It is also described as "grooming" because it is seen, in its own terms, as a dangerous hijacking and corruption of children's development towards au courant notions and sexed identities. There is evidence for this claim.
Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable.
No, you have not drawn a nexus between this particular bar and efforts aimed at children; or between the shooter and the "groomer" meme.
All you have on that point is that the shooter is the grandson of a Republican politician. This, in itself, tells us very little, because it is not uncommon for the descendants of major GOP figures to vocally repudiate, or distance themselves from their politically-active kin. In fact, it's a meme that every brooklyn hipster has to deal with "conservative family" on Thanksgiving.
Nor does there appear any evidence (at this time) that the shooter himself was politically radicalized (though that could change). What information we do have suggests the shooter was, in fact, generally violent (e.g. the threats against parents with home-made bombs and guns, with sufficient severity that the parents had the dude arrested). Of course this could change, and if and when new information comes out I will update my assessment accordingly. But right now, there is no link other than supposition and weak inference-drawing.
You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?
This proves too much. No speech could survive a standard requiring that not even a mentally-deranged individual threatening their own parents with bombings could interpret any particular statement so as to encourage violence.
Even if this standard were workable, which it is not, I would reject it because it is only ever applied unidirectionally. Only traditionalist or conservative speech is ever to be muzzled; the entire industries built on the left about pathologizing and demonizing conservatives, whites, and men are to be left alone. For example: no-one suppresses the speech of Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nahesi Coates, or thinks about reining in the legion of diversocrats who make a profession out of demonizing "whiteness," when radicalized black racialists kill white people, or torture white people, or assault random white people because they are white.
I would gladly stand with you if you said "we should all condemn these unprovoked murders." I would even be on your side if you had referenced the Idaho pastor cited in OP's link who apparently called for drag queens to be put to death. I would still be with you if you were proselytizing this sub's decorum rules, which would foreclose most use of the 3-edgy-5-me "day of the rope," "free helicopter ride," and other memes which do play around with and cheapen actual lethal political violence. But that's not where you're standing, which seems a bit telling to me.
You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas. I know of no society that believes they should be having free and open debates and votes about whether teachers should be permitted to sexually abuse children.
The French did, and within living memory. And it may not be specifically teachers doing it, but, well, uh, the sexual use of children does happen in some cultures today. The question of when "childhood" ends, and what special privileges are to be accorded children is not inviolate throughout time and space, and has been answered many different ways, changing over time in response to material circumstances and cultural shifts. It evokes especially high emotions for many contemporary Americans, but that's not a cross-cultural universal.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
In Accessibility law, this is the realm of ADA testers and their lawyers: a very small group of people who promise that they're at least theoretically interested in going to a far larger space of public or semi-public accommodations and making sure that anyone with similar disabilities can access them (and not coincidentally make a lot of money), who individually have hundreds or low thousands of complaints or even lawsuits.
There is a SCOTUS case coming on this. Last month the Supreme Court elected to take up an appeal from a 1st Circuit case questioning whether a self-appointed ADA "tester" has standing to sue for damages in federal court if they never intend to actually visit the place they're "testing":
The plaintiff, Deborah Laufer, has brought 600 lawsuits against hotels around the United States. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, hotels are required to make information about their accessibility to people with disabilities available on reservation portals. In this case, Laufer – who has physical disabilities and vision impairments – went to federal court in Maine, where she alleged that a website for an inn that Acheson Hotels operates in that state did not contain enough information about the inn’s accommodations for people with disabilities.
The district court threw out her lawsuit. It agreed with Acheson Hotels that Laufer did not have standing because she had no plans to visit the hotel and therefore was not injured by the lack of information on the website. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit reinstated Laufer’s lawsuit.
That prompted Acheson Hotels to come to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in. The company pointed to a division among the courts of appeals on whether cases like Laufer’s can move forward; indeed, Acheson Hotels noted, courts have reached different conclusions about whether Laufer can bring these kinds of cases. And the issue has “immense practical importance,” the company stressed, describing a “cottage industry” “in which uninjured plaintiffs lob ADA lawsuits of questionable merit, while using the threat of attorney’s fees to extract settlement payments.”
Laufer agreed that review was warranted, although she urged the justices to uphold the lower court’s ruling. The justices will likely hear argument in the case in the fall, with a decision to follow sometime in 2024.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Or, perhaps, this is attractive to voters as a concrete example of a policy which they have consistently demanded for decades, frequently gotten lip-service toward from multiple politicians in both major parties, but have never actually seen consistently and seriously enacted. It's not packaged and commodified desperation; it's visual evidence that they are finally, for once, getting what they have been promised.
vastly poorer, shittier, more corrupt, more violent countries don't have the problems that the above article notes exist in the Los Angeles metro.
Because they're not rich enough to (1) afford ubiquitous personal car transportation, (2) isolate themselves from the effects of luxury beliefs like "we should prioritize the feelings and welfare of criminals over having orderly public places"
Los Angeles is the second city of the richest country on earth. The median income in Los Angeles is $70,000 a year.
Right, rich enough to afford personal cars for most people, and luxury beliefs allying the guilty-feeling, effeminized elites and the underclasses.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Because this leads to photos of children being separated from their parents by law enforcement, which makes a majority of voters sufficiently sad/uncomfortable to vote against it.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
This is extremely inaccurate. Lebanon is famously split between feuding Sunni, Shia, and Maronite christian groups to the degree that their constitution sets ethnic quotas for power-sharing. Afghan is also split between many warring tribal-ethnic groups as well, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
What the hell are you talking about?
Our idiot mayor (promoted far above her competence because of her race and gender) decided to be in Ghana even after she was warned that conditions were going to be particularly dangerous for fires.
The deputy mayor - also a part of the same ethnic political machine - was out of the picture because he is being raided by the FBI for allegedly calling bomb threats in to City Hall.
The third in line - the City Council President who only got the gig after the previous President went down for allegedly racist comments about the same ethnic mafia - was too busy cutting off public comment and oversight over City Council meetings and didn't do anything either.
In previous fire seasons, fire-engines were forward-positioned in the hilly areas to respond quickly to reports of small brushfires before they could spread and get out of control. Efforts were made to clear fire access roads up into the hills and cut away excess brush. DBS inspections were made of properties with notably overgrown brush and fines assessed if the landlords did not engage in required clearance. Etc. Etc. None of this was done, and the fire department itself dedicated to issues of gender and sexual diversity rather than actual fire-fighting effectiveness.
To say nothing of how decades of one-party liberal rule have led to a situation where our municipal water infrastructure is ancient and creaky - unable to deliver the volume of water needed in a true crisis - the DWP has become a byword for corruption instead of competence, and we still have the same number of fire stations as we did when the city had half the residents.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
I disagree with you. This editorial is very bad, and Chuck Todd should feel bad for writing it.
The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are.
This isn't new. Herbert Hoover's magisterially-dyspeptic magnum opus goes into microscopic detail about all the ways various FDR-administration officials and allied journalists lied and slanted the truth to manage and manipulate public opinion during the depression, New Deal period, and WWII, and the number of people who remember or care today round to zero. Heck, even the "really famous" examples like the NYT lying about the Holodomor in Ukraine, or rabidly defending the Lindsay administration in NYC at the time, then excoriating it in Lindsay's obituary, are just cocktail-party trivia and not seriously internalized lessons.
Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.
How do you get "incrementalism" from "the country is politically-divided"? It really smacks of "we just need to make sure we boil the frog slowly so it doesn't jump out." No instinct towards actual compromise or even honest open conflict; just dishonest slow-rolling and gaslighting about ultimate endgames until it's too late and the fait accompli can be imposed on a prostrate foe. Of course, this strategy also has the side-effect of not being at all concerned with actual quality of governance in the mean-time...if you're suffering from a gushing stab wound, incremental care, one bandaid at a time, won't stop you from bleeding out even if stitches or cauterization would really hurt in the short-term.
Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.
Our political information ecosystem is primarily geared towards rationalizing already-extant beliefs. That's how you get in people's customized algorithms - feeding them plausible-sounding affirmation of things they already believe. It's not a question of "nuance" or "incrementalism" - what do those even mean in the context of journalism? That you shouldn't report facts if it looks like they lead to an "unnuanced" conclusion or one that is a radical departure from current consensus? And why do we think that our information delivery system should be characterized by the same qualities as policymaking in the first place? To even ask the question betrays the degree to which unbiased investigation has been subordinated to ideological preference.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It's not a terribly deep or positive thought, but I kinda yawned my way through this.
It's not that it's badly written, but more that it's formulaic. Ah yep - conservative religious upbringing that fails to actually describe recognizable relations between the sexes and settles for formulaic denunciations. Escapist fantasies of liberation that inevitably shatter on the weird, cold, and uncomfortable reefs of confusing interpersonal relations? Check. And next we'll have...yup, there it is...sublimation of the disappointment from those broken dreams into uncharitable takes on the opposite sex, complete with meme-tier statistics. Finally, we wrap up with white-knuckled clinging to any available validation for the hole the author's dug herself, a wistful call-back to liberatory fantasies, and a circle back to those conservative parents, who still remain fuddy-duddies.
And as a parthian shot, I have a hard time taking the author's complaints about the sexual marketplace seriously when she's literally an OnlyFans model. Bemoaning the lack of human connection in romantic matters and the reduction of women to "defective cumrags" rings mighty hollow from that position.
On the other hand, make that bag I guess.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The black population of the Union states was negligible in the late 1800s, but it was there that the U.S.'s great agricultural and industrial innovations were born and took root. The "Great Migration" of southern agricultural black laborers north to the booming industrial cities occurred after the great gilded age of American lassiez-faire capitalism, and well into the urban progressive movement (which itself smoothly transitioned, after flirtations with fascism and communism, into the FDR welfarist coalition that dominated the mid-20th century, and whose institutional bones we're still building).
Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK
This is a very doubtful proposition. The U.S. is several times larger than the other major industrial powers in the world (Germany, UK, France, Japan), significantly more diversified in resources, and - these are the big doozy - didn't get bombed flat or invaded during WWII, and didn't lose an entire generation of elite young men in WWI. Instead, WWI put America in the position of having the allies mortgage their empires to us in exchange for food, war materiel, and ultimately intervention (WWI debts to the US weren't fully cleared in the UK until I think 2003?), and then the physical destruction of Eurasia in WWII put us in a massive comparative industrial advantage.
One perfectly valid question to ask is why did the USA not follow in the same footsteps as Europe when it came to implementing a very high tax and spend redistributive economy...
We tried to. It led to the stagnation of the 70's and early 80's. We then elected Reagan (as the Brits elected Thatcher) to try and shake the system loose, to varying degrees of success.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
This is literally the plot of Shakespeare's Coriolanus - "discriminated-against military leader defects to erstwhile-enemies" is so common as to be a trope throughout history.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
You've misjudged the politics. Trump was already the leftward turn on policy for the Republican party. He's against cutting Medicare/Medicaid, wanted to tax the rich heavily to pay for infrastructure projects, was by far the most pro-gay GOP candidate ever, and made a big deal of signing major reductions in criminal justice efforts. He also was exceptionally dovish by GOP standards.
There is no outflanking that on the left, and Trump wasn't getting criticism because he was too far right on policy - he got attacked as the boorish tribune of declasse plebs; all those rural white men ... YUCK! Can't be any less cool than that. Didn't anyone tell them the Future is Female? And takes a train in a big city to an email job? Deviating significantly from a Trump-ish attitude signifies that the candidate isn't with the base, and that's no way to win a primary.
No, the way DeSantis attacks Trump is on details. DeSantis can sell himself as the type of executive who actually can do things. This means culture war stuff about defunding woke educational bureaucracies, sure. But it also means basic good-governance stuff like public order, disaster recovery, COVID management, firing rogue prosecutors, etc. (Whether or not DeSantis can make good on this is another question - he's benefitted mightily from having good connections with the friendly legislature in FL while governor; he's significantly less well-connected or -liked in Congress, and there's no guarantee that a Pres. DeSantis would have majorities in both houses).
The RCID thing is not as big as you make it out to be. I'm not even sure people remember why they were mad at Disney in the first place over this.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
AA is gone.
The Harvard admission statistics for 2024-5 strongly suggest otherwise.
DEI is declining.
- The Democratic nominee for president brags about tripling federal government loans specifically to non-whites.
- Her Vice Presidential nominee, as Governor of Minnesota, signed into law mandatory racial quotas for bodies disbursing state health and community welfare grants. (e.g. MN Statutes secs. 145.9285, Subd. 3; 145.987, Subd. 1). Of course, this already builds on existing "Ethnic Councils" established in 2017, explicitly charged to "work for the implementation of economic, social, legal, and political equality for its constituency" by lobbying the governor and legislature for set-asides, exercising oversight over proposed legislative and administrative changes, promoting racially-affiliated interest groups, and disbursing contracts. (MN Statutes sec. 15.0145)
- Approximately one in five academic jobs requires an ideological litmus test of allegiance to DEI.
- The Department of Education (pdf warning) spends a significant amount of effort on collecting detailed statistics on the racial and gendered breakdown of suspensions, expulsions, and law-enforcement referrals in schools, heavily-hinting that this is racial discrimination...but then tucks the tables with student offenses at the very end, and doesn't provide any details on who's actually doing the offending. In that report, by the way, the Department cites a 2014 "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened loss of federal funding if schools didn't punish black and brown kids less, regardless of their actual behavior, which is apparently still active.
- The Department of Agriculture just doled out over a billion dollars in reparations-style payments to black farmers specifically.
Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.
Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign
As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?
Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions.
Ah yes, Matt "I think fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing to do" Yglesias. Clearly he is being fully open and honest about his views, which have changed based on evidence which has convinced him to foreswear his most recent book, "One Billion Americans." (I am being sarcastic; I do not believe for a second that Matt is being honest).
Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".
Ahhh, but remember - "her values have not changed."
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
that there is no evidence of democrats having tried anything like changing the actual vote totals or storming the capitol building
(1) Lying to create "Russia-gate," including lying to FISA courts in order to ensure that Trump campaign officials' phones were being tapped.
(2) Impeaching Trump over his attempt to investigate what we now know was actual quid-pro-quo corruption in which Ukranian oligarchs paid Joe Biden's son to have Joe Biden leverage U.S. foreign policy to prevent their prosecution.
(3) Rioting outside the White House including setting the next-door church on fire.
(4) Organizing 51 intelligence officials to falsely claim that the Hunter Biden laptop - which the FBI had possessed for over a year previously and knew to be genuine - "bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation" in a successful attempt to interfere in the 2020 election.
(5) Organizing social media censorship of stories connected to the Hunter Biden laptop.
and, actually most importantly for the 2020 election:
(6) funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars in ostensible "COVID-relief funds" through private donors to election officials in Democratic-controlled swing-counties, who then proceeded to use almost none of the funds for COVID-relief purposes, and instead used it to hire Democratic activists to run partisan get-out-the-vote operations, and in some cases effectively privatize the actual conduct of the elections themselves:
"Trump won Georgia by more than five points in 2016. He lost it by three-tenths of a point in 2020. On average, as a share of the two-party vote, most counties moved Democratic by less than one percentage point in that time. Counties that didn’t receive Zuckerbucks showed hardly any movement, but counties that did moved an average of 2.3 percentage points Democratic. In counties that did not receive Zuckerbucks, “roughly half saw an increase in Democrat votes that offset the increase in Republican votes, while roughly half saw the opposite trend.” In counties that did receive Zuckerbucks, by contrast, three quarters “saw a significant uptick in Democrat votes that offset any upward change in Republican votes,” including highly populated Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and DeKalb counties."
Hemingway, "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections," Ch. 7
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
The problem appears to be wider than that - from the same article:
Race, color, or national origin discrimination claims made up 3,329 of all complaints received in FY 2022, according to the civil rights office’s annual report, which was released last week. That’s up from 2,399 the year prior. Disability-related complaints comprised 6,467 of the total compared to 4,870 in FY 2021.
At the same time, age discrimination claims, which made up 666 complaints in the most recent report, were down from 1,149 the prior year. The office notes the majority of these claims were also filed by a single person in both years.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
The political will for AA exists in the universities and bureaucracies, and will be abetted by ideological fellow-travelers in law, politics, and journalism. If this iteration of AA is struck down in these particular places, colleges and universities will simply change their methodology and bury the decisional factors even further under layers of committees, unrecorded exercises of discretion by low-level admissions staff, and student advocacy. They will stop collecting, and attack as racist, the metrics which would reveal their actions to be discriminatory (e.g. standardized testing). They will bog down litigation in years of lawyering, backed up either by billion-dollar endowments, or blue state's public fisc. One or two red tribe suits might win, but on the whole, the system will remain.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Both republican and democratic defense secretaries are speaking out about Trump firing senior military leaders in an unprecedented fashion.
Even if we grant everything else in your comment, what does this have to do with "democracy?" Is it undemocratic for a civilian head of state to exercise control over the leadership of the professional military?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I hate the discourse around inflation - when people say "inflation is down" they are talking about a decrease in the rate of change, not a decrease of an absolute number. This is unlike many other things we talk about in economic life; when the unemployment rate goes down, more people have jobs; when there is a decrease in the mortgage rate, houses cost less, etc. This condition people to think that an economic indicator "going down" means that things are getting better.
This is not the case with inflation. When inflation "goes down," it does not mean that prices are actually decreasing back to the levels that existed prior to the inflation. Deflation is a separate phenomenon that almost never actually happens (and maybe shouldn't be allowed to happen - I'm not smart enough to parse the monetary theory of it all). When inflation "goes down," it means "you're still paying way more for stuff than you were a year ago, but at least the prices aren't skyrocketing up quite as fast anymore; you have some time to rebudget and get used to these new, permanently higher prices."
That statement isn't actually a "good sign" for the economy; at best it means "things aren't actively getting worse." Unless there is some significant increase in productivity to drive prices back down, people are still having to pay more for goods and services than they did previously; their money is worth less and they are poorer now than they were previously. The damage has already been done.
Supah_Schmendrick
2yr ago
Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.
"Dismantling the gender binary" is not a personal voyage of discovery, but a broad social program including significant changes to governmental policy at all levels, fairly substantial changes in pedagogy, dissolution of parental authority over their children's upbringing, development and deployment of unproven hormonal interventions, the redefinition and hijacking of ordinary language, willful deception regarding scientific research and suppression of contradictory findings, and coordinated harassment campaigns against dissenters in anything from dating (the "cotton ceiling") to workplaces and academia. It is not as simple as "live and let live."
I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them, instead blaming a cabal of autogynephilic billionaires.
Insofar as the "cabal of. . .billionaires" is either responsible for the intellectual development of a concept, coverage of that is basic bog-standard pop-intellectual history. Insofar as the cabal is providing a network of organizational and monetary support for activists, then that's worthwhile reportage just like pieces on the Koch or Soros networks, or "Big Tobacco's" involvement in quashing cancer research.
Politics has replaced religion as a foundational cornerstone of personal morality and identity, and people really don't like having those questioned. Seriously; just look at the polling about whether you'd be comfortable dating someone with different politics/religion and the two concepts have flipped over the last half century.
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