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"Cringe" is a super useful word, IMO. So is "creep". These words occupy the space that "gay" and "lame" used to occupy before they were cancelled.
The best way to defeat a label, of course, is to own it. You want to call me a Yankee Doodle Dandy? That's cool. I'm the gayest, lamest, Yankee Doodle Dandy you ever saw.
Still, in 2023, no one wants to be cringe or creepy. These words still have power.
You know what was cringe? Alt-right people dressing up in Hawaiian shirts and carrying Tiki torches. You know what's not cringe? Bill Ackman waging a crusade against Harvard wokists.
Wait a second, you say. Who gets to decide what is cringe, and what isn't?
Answer: The Elite. The elite gets to decide who is
lame and gaycringe and creepy and who is not. Control of the narrative is what defines the elite.Do you see where I'm going with this? Richard Hanania does. In one of his less annoying pieces he makes a great point about the possibility of a Jewish realignment.
When you correct for IQ, when you correct for tribalism, Jews are something like 30-50% of the elite population in the US. Look at university presidents, look at cabinet members, look at Nobel Prize winners. You're bound to notice something.
Jews are under attack in the Western World right now. We are seeing the largest outbreak of anti-semitism since WWII. And it's the far left that is responsible. If, and it's a big if, this results in American Jews abandoning the left, it could end with the biggest political realignment since the 1970s. Already we see the the strands of a nascent movement among the cognescenti. Is an intellectual, philo-Semitic conservative movement possible? I think, surprisingly, the answer is yes.
Populists are cringe and creepy. Elite realignments are cool and edgy. The fashion barber pole has made another rotation and the mustaches are slightly less ironic.
Pretty convenient that elite realignments are cool and edgy (edgy though really?...VC and non-profit realignments as edgy?) given that's the easiest thing to get behind. Relatedly, inequality soars... inequality is actually cool!
And how about simply being not anti-semitic, not philo-semitic? In fact philo-semitism seems a good way of generating more anti-semitism.
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