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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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It took decades for Left Inc to finally 'police its own' and issue denunciations when some of them unapologetically stated they had no issue with the externination of Jews - despite this strain of antisemitism being loud and obvious to anybody paying attention and who wasn't wrapped up in the coalition. And this just so happens to coincide with wealthy donors shutting their purses. Sure.

Ditto for the insistence that elite higher education was essentually unassailable, had no duty to accountability or obligation to explain itself to the plebs, and only caved when the extent of Ms Gay's fraudulence became too much to ignore - after bravely standing to her defense with a super-serious official Harvard letter and several weeks of articles accusing her critics of being anti-black.

Compared to the reflexive denunciation ritual every Republican or conservative has to partake in when somebody points to a Nazi and accusingly asks "DO YOU HAVE A COMMENT ON THIS?". Nope. You don't get to casually claim superiority on that front. Perhaps you are saddened that you see less of those denunciations 'over the last 8 years' than before, but it's obvious to me that this fruit doesn't have much juice left to squeeze, and that is entirely your fault.

EDIT: I don't know how I could have written that bit on Claudine Gay and completely whiff on the most odious part of her case: that her fraudulence went uninvestigated, unpunished, and was generally rewarded due to political interests in an institution that is supposed to value academic excellence (ha ha, I know, at least 'on paper'). Gay isnt a bad actor operating all on her own. She gets to her position with the aid of a corrupt system that will crow about their prestige and integrity every day of the year, right before they pivot to "actually, this is pretty normal, and uhh... we don't really need that kind of pedigree for something as boring and unserious as college president". And you consider her an 'extremist'? She's very normal to me, and my only surprise (which isn't, really) is that some Dems are belatedly unhappy with or embarrassed by a creature that is their own making.

Do you have a right-wing closet Nazi analogue you'd like me to condemn? Somebody who isn't a Substack writer, or a third-rate grifter on a platform thats probably throttled to hell and back if it hasn't been outright banned from the Play/Apple store?

It took decades for Left Inc to finally 'police its own' and issue denunciations when some of them unapologetically stated they had no issue with the externination of Jews - despite this strain of antisemitism being loud and obvious to anybody paying attention and who wasn't wrapped up in the coalition.

It has never been loud and obvious to me in all my years of paying attention to politics. I have seen many far-left calls to destroy Israel, sure. But not to destroy Jews as an ethnic group. I mean, I often spend time in far-right online spaces where people call to destroy Jews as an ethnic group and I do not recall having ever seen anything similar in far-left spaces. Maybe there were coded calls that I missed, but in any case nothing loud and obvious.

Please avoid personal antagonism. If you’re going to call people liars, you need to be very careful about bringing the receipts.

Fair, and I should have known better.

I never know what the etiquette is for editing out sections of prior posts. Obviously, I said what I said and I meant it. And even though I shouldn't have, deleting it afterwards feels like a cover-up.

I'll take it out since it's not like it was entwined with any brilliant insights.

I would be content with you using strikethroughs, and then acknowledging your error.