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Musk representing himself as a powerful man is a break with the conventional institutional 'representatives'
The strength of the 'institutional representation' system is how intangible it is. Lies get woven into 'official' reports that get represented as fact based on 'scientific consensus' by completely replaceable 'spokespeople'. And when someone seeks to fact check these representatives and what they say they are met with the rhetorical equivalent of cold hard brutalist concrete: "Are you saying science is wrong? Do you not believe our intelligence communities? Are you anti-intellectual? Do you not believe in physics?!"
To this extent academia and media are just PR firms that wash dirt off of policy positions for the people in power. Like immigration being fantastic and without any flaws. Or that we can't share one last moment with grandma on the hospital bed due to risk of spreading COVID, but that we can protest against racial inequality by joining a giant street protest, rubbing shoulders with hundreds if not thousands of random people.
So, in fairness to Musk being incorrect sometimes: So to was the prior system sometimes incorrect! And just how incorrect it got and how impossible it was to fact check is practically why we have Musk where he is now.
I'm not sure what Hanania is after here, other than whining about the fact that X doesn't boost his posts when he links to his substack and that he wasn't picked up to be involved with any of Musks projects. Or that mass media has allowed people Hanania considers lesser than himself to reach heights of clout and upvotes he can only dream of... All things directly or indirectly mentioned in the article. To that extent the entire thing is just an embarrassing pout from the author. I mean:
Yeah... At risk of breaking the rules: lol. lmao even.
Hanania is basically a Gen Z David French. His ecological niche is writing things that flatter progressive sensibilities while ostensibly writing from the outside. In this case "look at how stupid and out-of-touch the Tea-Party/MAGA right is. Elon Musk does not trust 'the experts' do not be like Elon."
I think the cancellation attempt right as his book was coming out damaged him more than it appeared at the time.
He can't become a "serious" right wing intellectual, either by gaining a patron in the Trump admin or being welcomed unto the Ezra Klein show and other such places when they need a steelman of what the Republicans are doing (by his own account the GOP is now too dumb to support them on its own - I suppose his behavior is congruent with his claims there).
So he's trapped in the Twitter/Substack attention economy and so has to find a niche. The current one works for him since he just seems to be of a disagreeable and trollish nature in general, and there is a lot in Trumpism to disagree with.
Who are the serious right wing intellectuals at the moment, in your view? Hanania talks a lot about the right lacking human capital, and in this very post argues that it's less and less tenable to be an intelligent person on the right. Who would some counter-examples be?
There are few, but they exist. But there are also few on the left (none really that I can recall). You have Douglas Murray, Charles Murray (coincidence?), Victor Davis Hanson, and Niall Ferguson who all talk about modern issues from mostly right of center perspectives.
Then there are also some of the more pragmatic (some will be controversial and/or considered evil by many here I think) ones like John Yoo who is a very good SCOTUS prognosticator and pontificates on legal issues from a right of center perspective, in that vein we also have Steven Miller on immigration, Molly Hemingway on media corruption, Bjorn Lomborg on climate change, and some others.
Who on the left could get invited plausibly to a DNC event that talks about any major issue of the day honestly and frankly? It is hard to say. Which, again, is why it is hard for me to take Hanania and others talking about this sort of topic seriously. If "intellectual" is just code for "politely repeats left wing propaganda" then it has no real persuasive power to me.
I suppose we should define 'serious', in a sense.
I think it's pretty clear that academics or intellectuals occupy a different place in the ecosystem of the right to that of the left. There is no right wing equivalent of, say, Judith Butler or Ibram Kendi. However pseudointellectual those people might be, they are seriously involved in shaping left-wing discourse and setting left-wing priorities. Intellectuals don't get to occupy the driver's seat on the right. My theory would be that left-wing domination of academia has made the right in general sufficiently paranoid about academia that they on principle refuse to follow academic theories if they can't see where they're going.
But if by 'serious' we mean something like 'of genuine original intellectual output', then there are no doubt some on the right, though I don't think I buy all of your examples. Mollie Hemingway, for instance, is not an academic. She may be a fantastic journalist, pundit, and media commentator, but I wouldn't describe her as a member of the intellectual class. Bjorn Lomborg is an intellectual, but wouldn't consider him a conservative or right-wing thinker - he's just a global warming skeptic.
If you are certifying Ibrim Kendi there is no bar to clear. He's literally just a random guy who wrote a bunch of unsupported nonsense that supports left wing politics.
I'm certainly not asserting any quality or intellectual rigour to his works - I just called him a pseudointellectual! I'm asserting, rather, that he is a professional academic whose ideas have had a significant impact on the course of left-wing politics.
Mediocre as he may be, he is a university professor whose thought has been influential in shaping politics. I don't think that's the case for right-wing academics. If you want to look for right-wing thinkers with similar impacts, you shouldn't go to university, but rather to think tanks. The people working at Claremont or wherever are less central examples of academics than professors, and I think they have less influence over the political tribe as a whole.
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