Racism is the mot du jour for Authoritarian Leftists. Do you want to tar someone you don’t like? Just call them a “racist,” even if there’s no evidence they are bigots. No matter if they’re just conservatives or even moderates—”racist” will do in place of “Republican”, “libertarian,” or even “moderate Democrat.”
Read and weep as the HuffPo Control-Left demonizes those who, by and large, are on our side. Yes, Rubin is a libertarian, but Weiss is a classical liberal who has been deemed ideologically impure by idiots like those who run HuffPost. Click the screenshot to read:
Excerpts:
The world would not be quite so riven with death and destruction if America’s political elite had better taste in music. Classic rock, for instance, is a fraud. It never existed. Jimmy Page never turned to Robert Plant and said, “Hey, let’s start a classic rock band.” Led Zeppelin did not imagine itself to be part of a sonic movement that included Billy Joel ― that idea came from corporate radio gurus in the 1980s, and they called their marketing concoction “classic rock.”
The same is true for “classical liberalism,” a moniker currently en vogue among a particular right-wing set that would very much like to be described as intellectuals, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and YouTuber Dave Rubin.
“Classical liberalism is the idea that individual freedom and limited government are the best way for humans to form a free society,” Rubin said in a recent video, citing “great thinkers” such as Adam Smith, John Locke and John Stuart Mill.
. . . Just as you should avert your ears from any band in the 21st century calling itself “classic rock,” so too should you be alarmed by today’s purveyors of “classical liberalism.” Whatever classical liberals say about their ideas, in practice they have always functioned as a respectable intellectual veneer for authoritarian politics.
I won’t speak for Ryan, but I haven’t seen either Weiss or Rubin evince racism in their writings or podcasts. Rubin has interviewed some that others call white supremacists (I can’t think of any offhand), but that’s an interview, not an endorsement. Weiss’s crime? Being too pro-Israel, which apparently makes her a racist:
“It kills me that Trump and the Republican Party are turning Israel, which should be a progressive issue, into a right-wing one,” Weiss told HBO’s Bill Maher in May. Weiss doesn’t support the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem because she is a conservative. Don’t confuse her with a common Trumper when she dismisses the deaths of more than 50 Palestinian protesters from Israeli sniper bullets. And certainly don’t suggest, as Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie recently did, that the “Intellectual Dark Web” that Weiss has been lionizing is really just a team of people who “totally agree … that Islam is a religion of hate.”
On the contrary, Weiss is a classical liberal. She doesn’t listen to classic rock, you see. She only listens to vinyl.
What a snarky pack of name-callers HuffPo has become! And yet, of course, many on the Left read it avidly (look at its traffic). I will say it again: if the Left doesn’t reclaim classical liberalism rather than veering off to these censorious and hate-filled Pecksniffian extremes, we’re in danger of having Trump as President for six more years. We cannot win by eating our own—or our friends.
I have to say that I don’t like Rubin’s definition of classical liberalism.
+1
+Another
Yes, it looked more like a definition of economic liberalism [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism ].
FWIW most of the world seems to be, successfully, social liberal.
The Control Left, or regressive left, or New Racists, as I call them, seem to save a lot of their vitriol for Jewish people.
Something I’ve noticed.
Not sure what crimes Weiss has supposed to have done, except to occasionally criticise the regressive dogma. So I am suspicious of a lot of the obsession about her. I note the “anti-war” Red-Brown Alliance (i.e. the pro-war apologists for Assad and Putin) are often upset with her. Tells you a lot.
There is a lot to criticise and mock Rubin for, although a lot of the criticism I see of him is obsessively OTT and often antisemitic.
I abhore the authoritarian left, but I fear any kind of liberalism is in trouble. I listened to Sean Carrolls podcast with the author of “The People versus Democracy”. It was kind of depressing. The rise of the authoritarian right is not uniquely American. The upcoiming election may tell the tale (or not).
Re the first sentence: Can one even use the word “tar” as in “to tar someone” without being called out? I ain’t callin’ ya out, just making an observation. As things stand now, “the pot calling the kettle black” now seems verbotten, and “niggardly” went that way long ago.
Absurd! Now I’ll read the article, but I’m sure it’ll spoil my breadfast.
I haven’t heard anyone knock “tar” — though “tar baby” might be a different matter (since it comes from the “Br’er Rabbit” stories of Uncle Remus, though it was used there in a non-racial sense, and still provides a useful idiomatic metaphor).
I still use “niggardly” on occasion, but only with an audience I’m confident will know what the word means. (Hell, look what happened to Coleman Silk, the fictional professor in Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain when he used the term “spook,” in the sense of “ghost,” in a college classroom.)
I recently heard criticism of pot and kettle in relation to someone who used the expression when characterizing the dissing duo, Omarosa and Trump; can’t recall if she took umbrage and said it was racist, or someone else.
I also recall that a number of years ago, some people went nuts when a public personage used the word “niggardly.” They didn’t know what it meant; it was the superficial resemblance, but that didn’t matter to them. I find this related commentary by Steven Pinker https://web.archive.org/web/20150603012325/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1999_02_02_newyorktimes.html.
I’m standing by for someone (if s/he hasn’t already) to have a problem with the country names “Niger” and “Nigeria.”
I’ve been buying bird seed for years. Somewhere along the way, “niger seed” became “nyjer seed”.
Pinker asks, “Does this mean a perfectly innocent word is doomed?”. I think that if such a large proportion of native English speakers no longer know what this word means, this means it is alreadu defunct, and there is no need to waste efforts to resuscitate it.
Yes, one can use the expression “to tar” without being called out. I assume it’s a shortening of “tarring & feathering” [correct me if I’m wrong though] – a painful humiliation visited on criminals of all races down the ages. I believe the IRA punished/shamed women this way for being ‘over-familiar’ with the occupying forces.
There have been incidents of tarring & feathering being used on Negroes by racists [KKK?], but only a tiny number compared with the whole.
I’d certainly rather be tired and fettered than tarred and feathered.
Is that like Tom Waits’s line “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”?
I need to correct myself:
SOURCE
Interesting etymology. I was thinking both literally and figuratively, figuratively of tar as blackening, besmirching, etc., and also literally. Then we have the Tar Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar-Baby, which I read does not derive from anything to do with skin color or race, but which has certainly become associated with race (not directly, though) in the Uncle Remus stories.
And, unfortunately, blacks were tarred and feathered, so though it wasn’t a punishment used exclusively on blacks, it carries an association that helps freight the word “tar” in a racial sense. But when I think of tar, I think of the La Brea Tar Pits.
I think of ciggies & jolly Jack tars* – “aargh Jim lad!”
John Adams on the Boston Massacre: “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negros and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs”
aargh!
* From Brit sailors tarring their plaited hair. Possibly.
“Tar Baby” is also the title Toni Morrison gave her 1981 novel, playing off both the original Uncle Remus meaning and the secondary racial connotation that had accreted to it since.
The CTRL-Left’s major problem politically is that it is immature. It thinks that ideological rigidity is the key to success. It has no practical experience. Even Hitler and Lenin saw that there were occassions when political alliances, however brief, were necessary. When something like racism is defined so rigidily that white = racist, they wind up having more enemies than friends.
+1! Excellent series of points made quite succinctly!
Having just finished the book “Anatomy of Fascism”, I’d say that alliances of convenience were the norm for Fascism, not the exception. They didn’t have core beliefs other than knowing who the enemy was (socialists and Jews).
I suspect Zach Carter knows as precious little about Rock’n’Roll as he does about the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.
Zach Carter seems not to understand how the word “classic” is applied after the fact. Anyone who applies the “classic” label to their own new work would be deservedly laughed at. On the other hand, perhaps his Led Zeppelin anecdote was tongue in cheek. If so, it wasn’t at all funny.
Robert Plant is 70 tomorrow & still playing amateur pub football in Kidderminster. He made a very good deal with the devil at those Xroads.
When the Devil comes to collect, perhaps Plant can have Keith Richards represent him — the way Daniel Webster did the NH farmer in Steven Vincent Benét’s short story — since Keith and the Devil seem to remain on the best of terms. 🙂
When the label or party you are attempting to attack is getting hard to define you are not going to make your point by turning to music and pretending you know what you are talking about. Anyone can find faults with liberal or conservative, it is the degree of faults that must be added and compared, not specific individuals.
Madison, along with Jefferson’s assistance created the first opposition party during his early years in the new congress. Time was spent via their secret newspaper getting the word out to their followers criticizing the enemy (Hamilton) and telling their followers what they should believe politically. They failed pretty much in the beginning because the attack was always pointed at the individual and not so much explaining what they should stand for. Attacking Hamilton because an attack on Washington and that was never going to be a winner.
became an attack, not because…
Classical liberalism, or Libertarianism, can be a fig leaf for racism, although it’s not necessarily so. If someone argues that we shouldn’t interfere in the wolf/sheep relationship, this may sound wonderfully principled, but it implicitly supports the position of the wolf.
Note that the identification of Locke and Mill as great thinkers is put in scare quotes—thus denigrating Liberalism per se.
The rhetoric of our contemporary ctrl Left has rather a familiar ring for us older campers. In the golden age of Stalinism, it was conventional to denounce any departures from the Party line as fascist or racist. And as for an “anti-war” Red-Brown alliance, that very coupling, complete with the propaganda of faux-pacifism, was on display during the 22 month period of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact of mutual friendship.
I believe “counter-revolutionary” was The Party’s preferred ideological put-down — or mot du Jour back in the jour … er, day, to use Jerry’s “coynage.”
“I will say it again: if the Left doesn’t reclaim classical liberalism rather than veering off to these censorious and hate-filled Pecksniffian extremes, we’re in danger of having Trump as President for six more years.”
I do not know if Weiss is a “classical liberal.” But, if she is, then contemporary liberals should repudiate her. Classical liberalism is nothing more than a synonym for libertarianism, a political philosophy that emerged in the latter part of the 19th century, championed by such people as Herbert Spencer, that espoused the view that the role of government should be kept at a minimum. This view overlapped with Social Darwinism, a perversion of Darwin’s theory, that argued that if government was kept to a minimum, the “fittest” would survive and a better society would emerge. Here we see a rationale for eugenics.
What we now call modern day liberalism in the United States had its practical origins with William Jennings Bryan (yes, that WJB!)and the Populist Revolt in 1896, gained steam with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century (although the views of these two men did differ in some key respects) and developed into what we know it today with FDR and the New Deal. The commonality between these movements was the belief that government could and should play an active role in regulating economy, thereby repudiating the “invisible hand” ideology of the classical liberals and today’s libertarians while retaining a belief in regulated capitalism.
Of course, modern day liberals believe in free speech as much as conservatives, even more so then the latter, which is curiously are silent when Trump attacks the free speech. As always, it must be pointed out that liberals are not the same with the tiny and powerless far left. As of now, at least, polls do not display any indication that the rantings of the far left have had any noticeable affect on electoral politics.
In summary, the use of the term classical liberalism is nothing more than a way for right wingers that embrace libertarianism to avoid using the term. It’s like how for many years liberals called themselves progressives to avoid being demonized by the right wing for calling themselves liberals. Unfortunately, confusing terminology plays into the hands of the right wing.
+1
I can’t agree. Classical liberalism has a long tradition of also accepting things like a welfare state, making it rather different from today’s libertarianism.
That’s contradictory. The eugenics movement argued that the state should intervene in how people bred. That’s incompatible with “government kept to a minimum”. Indeed the whole point of the eugenicists was the claim that laissez faire w.r.t. breeding would not lead to good outcomes.
I disagree with your view of classical liberalism. As Wikipedia puts it:
“Drawing on ideas of Adam Smith, classical liberals believed that it is in the common interest that all individuals be able to secure their own economic self-interest. They were critical of what would come to be the idea of the welfare state as interfering in a free market. Despite Smith’s resolute recognition of the importance and value of labor and of laborers, they selectively criticized labour’s group rights being pursued at the expense of individual rights. while accepting corporations’ rights, which led to inequality of bargaining power.”
I think you are confusing classical liberalism with other varieties of conservatism that were not opposed to some versions of state welfare.
Regarding eugenics, yes, there seems to be a contradiction between supporting the idea while accepting Social Darwinism. But, where in life, do you not find contradictions? Again, as Wikipedia puts it:
“The idea of a modern project of improving the human population through a statistical understanding of heredity used to encourage good breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton and, initially, was closely linked to Darwinism and his theory of natural selection.”
So, it is true that groups and individuals not in sympathy with classical liberal philosophy supported eugenics, but Social Darwinists would not necessarily reject it. Also, keep in mind that support for eugenics does not necessary mean that the state should be castrating the unfit. The encouragement of voluntary action was part of the eugenics program. Among the many criticisms of eugenics, an important one is that carried to extremes, it served as a rationale for the mass murders carried out by the Nazis.
I stand by my basic point: in economics, classical liberalism as practiced and preached at the end of the 19th century is the same as modern day libertarianism and provides the intellectual basis for conservatives who believe in minimum regulation of the economy by government. In the economic sphere, Trump seems to be implementing libertarian policies, although he may have no idea what the word means.
Geez, we can’t even agree on what we are talking about…
Are we just seeing the result of “liberal” having different meanings in the US, Europe, and in history?
“Classical liberalism” presupposes support for free enterprise; it does not demand fealty to unbridled laissez-faire economics. The latter is a fudge frequently fostered by a particular brand of libertarianism.
People who today use the expression “classical liberalism” are trying to distinguish themselves from the modern day liberals (who came into full bloom during the New Deal) at the same time trying to downplay what they traditionally called themselves – libertarians. Whether they know it or not their golden age is the late 19th century, referred to in the U.S. as the Gilded Age. It was during this period that laissez-faire capitalism reigned and government did not interfere with business except on those occasions when it called in federal troops to suppress the “collectivist” strikers, who happened to belong to unions. This was classical liberalism at its best according to those people who refer to themselves by this term. For these folks, then and now, it was quite permissible for corporations to merge and form monopolies or trusts (they tended to ignore the contradiction that laissez-faire capitalism tended to destroy free competition), but it was a violation of classical liberalism for workers to join together in unions. More traditional conservatives were disturbed by this trend, resulting in the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, legislation of debated effectiveness. You can call this viewpoint libertarianism or classical liberalism, intellectually propped up Social Darwinism, but one thing is clear: it is a tool of business to suppress workers. Classical liberalism as a philosophy to promote freedom and liberty is a giant con game. While evangelicals and social conservatives pine away for the 1950s, classical liberals yearn for the “freedom” of the Gilded Age.
Sure. I’m not disagreeing with you. All I’m saying is that this misinterpretation of “classical liberalism” is a construct of the reactionary right (whether by apologists for fin de siècle robber barons or of more recent vintage) rather than anything inherent to be found in the words of John Locke or David Hume, or even Adam Smith or Edmund Burke.
Just a brief comment in concurrence, Historian. That Chicago School economics has for quite some time been called ‘neoliberal’ indicates its genealogical roots in classical liberalism and, as you say, libertarianism.
The Darwinism in “Social Darwinism” is a metaphor (used to compare social constructs to species). Blaming its mistakes (such as eugenics) on Charles Darwin makes as much sense as cursing the hillside after a rainstorm because someone’s made a fallacious slippery-slope argument.
+ 1
I would dispute the assertion that Rubin is ‘on our side’. Maybe at one point he was, but like much of the ‘classically liberal'(whatever that actually means anymore) crowd he seems to have become consumed by his dislike for SJWs and the illiberal left and in the process minimises, or engages in apologetics on behalf of, the bigger threat coming from the right.
The last few years really have helped distinguish true liberals from people who just get a buzz from complaining about the illiberal-left and SJWs. That kind of anti-SJW stuff is fun, it’s easy, there’s a huge online market for it, and it means you can ignore serious stuff like the president’s daily attacks on the democracy, the free press, law and order, or the shambolic state of British politics. Or the rise in far-right governments across the western world. And you can spend your time demonstrating how much more _sensible_ and _rational_ you are than a bunch of eighteen year olds who haven’t got an idea between them, or a cherry-picked idiot on Twitter with inane PC beliefs. Well that’s an achievement. Colour me impressed.
When I see someone who chooses to almost exclusively concentrate their attacks on SJWs, to the exclusion of everything else, I just turn off. It’s a kind of solipsistic distraction tactic from people who can’t bare to face up to the far more important political convulsions that are occurring in America and the rest of the west.
I’ve heard very little genuine criticism from Rubin about the alt-right or Trump or any of these people that wasn’t sweetened with a little ‘but not really’ disclaimer, or some facile whataboutery. I was quite impressed at the start, especially since he’d departed that fetid swamp, The Young Turks. Now I’d be hard pressed to tell which I find most depressing. They’re both hives of confirmation bias.
The Red Scare of 1919, the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, and the attack on the social justice warriors have something in common. They all served the purpose of sowing fear in the general public that redounded to the benefit of the conservatives in society. The tactic is simple, easy to implement, and often effective. All you need to do is find a group that holds views contrary to those of most people, that is small in numbers and powerless, and demonize them as an imminent threat to the state. Conservatives are masters of this art, which puts liberals on the defensive. Although McCarthyism was eventually put down and even finds few defenders among conservatives today, during its heyday it destroyed many lives and had a chilling effect on free speech. Today, right wingers, under the guise of calling themselves classical liberals and defenders of free speech hope that attacking the miniscule far left will gain support for the right wing in general. In the U.S., such efforts so far seem not to have worked. I hope it stays that way.
It is no accident that virtually all libertarians who get into the political arena support Republicans and conservative candidates. While all conservatives are not libertarians virtually all libertarians are conservative. They may believe in free speech (except when they are mute about Trump), but their real concern is the economic. If this were not the case, they could easily support mainstream Democrats, who believe in free speech as much as any libertarian.
By the way, Politico has a recent article that discusses how the term “classical liberal” has gained vogue for many on the right who feel that the terms “conservative” or “libertarian” could be harmful to their libertarian views.
Here is a relevant quote from the article:
“Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University, suggested that the ‘libertarian moment’ may have exerted its toll on the movement’s brand. “[The term libertarian] has the baggage of being slightly dogmatic, whereas the ‘liberal’ expression does not,” Klein said in an interview. ‘I’m not for discarding the word libertarian, but classical liberalism is like a nuanced libertarianism.’”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/16/why-the-classical-liberal-is-making-a-comeback-218667
That’s exactly my view on it. That a whole clutch of people who are politically quite right-wing but don’t want to deal with the consequences of allying themselves with places like Fox News, or people like Trump, describe themselves as ‘classical liberals’ to sweeten the pill, both for themselves and for others. They also like referencing liberal forefathers like Thomas Paine, Karl Popper, John Stuart Mill, while also being able to go on about Ayn Rand and Nietzsche.
Most of the time it’s just an intellectual smokescreen.
‘The Red Scare of 1919.’
I immediately thought of Dos Passos’ ‘1919,’ the middle volume of the U.S.A. trilogy–and of the author’s late-life slide into a reactionary conservatism. . . .
I’m guessing by “classic liberal” here, they aren’t using “classic” in a strictly historical sense. My guess is they are referring to liberals that are not rabid SJWs. They support liberal causes but not the divisive identity politics of the warriors. Most Dems, in other words.
I think “fancy racism” is a good alternative name for “identity politics.”
I’ve never used the term “fancy racism” (and can’t imagine ever doing so), but if I had to pin it on someone, I’d reserve is for the “human biodiversity” crowd and the soi-disant “racial realists” — the gang that’s endeavored to give their bigotry a patina of scientific respectability.
Maybe but “fancy racism” makes me think of KKK members in designer costumes.
Well, there you have it. One of the most prominent advocates of the “racial realism” I mentioned above is Republican former Louisiana state legislator (and former candidate for governor and US senator) David Duke, who traded in his Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan robes for a three-piece suit.
David Duke was the former Klansman Donald Trump balked at disavowing the support of during the 2016 campaign — the guy Trump claimed he didn’t know after having first acknowledged he knew him.
Good one. Yes, David Duke is definitely a fancy racist. Trump might also be considered one too if he wasn’t so lowbrow. This is yet another elite clique that he struggles to belong to. He’s rich and racist but no fancy racist!
I contemplate “unfancy” racism.
I agree.
I would say if you are in a room full of registered Republicans and say you are a liberal no matter what the definition or stripe, you will be in front of a hostile audience. In certain areas of the country, it is a bad word. Heck, in family affairs, it is a bad word. Ok to say you are a conservative, not ok to say you are a liberal.
The obverse side of this coin is that the alt-right has weaponized the use of the slur “pedophile” against its enemies on the left and center, almost always based on not a stitch of evidence whatsoever.
Then, they must be fans of Elon Musk :-).
The quality of journalism oozing from the cesspits of HuffPo and NYT ensures that Trump will be a shoe-in for a second term.
Time will tell if Trump wins in 2020 and the causes for that, but the current polls do not support your view that Trump will be a shoo-in.
“Ensures” he’ll “be a shoe-in”? O RLY?
Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for for the presidency in 2015, he has never even once had an approval rating among the American people above 50%, something that’s never been true for any other incumbent president since we began keeping track of such things. Trump is also the only incumbent ever to lose the popular vote by 3 million ballots. With those kinds of numbers, it is all but impossible for an incumbent to win reelection absent of a significant third-party candidate who would siphon votes from the Democratic nominee.
Moreover, the numbers for Trump are even worse than they appear. He’s lost significant support (as evidenced both by poll numbers and by congressional special election results) in the so-called “Brexit belt” in which he eked out his 2016 electoral college win — which runs from Pennsylvania through Ohio up into Michigan and around the horn into Wisconsin — mainly because more-mainstream Republican college-educated suburban voters (especially women) have begun to abandon him owning to his grotesquely incompetent performance in office.
In the absence of some catastrophic global event, and especially if this nation’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies can curb the Russians from once again throwing massive support Trump’s way in 2020, Donald Trump is hardly a “shoe-in” for reelection (even assuming he is still in office when the next election rolls around, which is by no means a given).
I agree. I look at it this way. Trump barely won in 2016. I can’t imagine he’s gained many converts since he was elected. Instead, those that thought they were voting for a brilliant businessman who, once elected, would act more presidential have been shown their error. Couple that with Dems being very, very motivated, it seems really unlikely he’ll win in 2020. Of course, major events might occur between now and then but, even if they do, it is doubtful Trump will react to them well.
Is Trump not MORE popular with Republicans than before the election? My guess is that there are alot of closeted Trump supporters. I have said before that the longer the economy hums along and the worse predictions have not come about (war with North Korea), the more the closeted Trump supporters will vote him back in. A recent poll showing his poularity has increased with African Americans blew me away. The midterms and the Mueller report will most likely show the way IMO. It is scary to me.
Only die-hard Trump supporters credit Trump with the current state of the economy. GOP candidates campaigning for office are not focusing on the tax cuts, for example, because they generate little traction with the general electorate. Instead, the tax cuts are perceived as going mostly to the rich and, instead, they are a good Dem talking point. Trump also campaigned on improving wages and that hasn’t happened. The perception is that the economy is only “good” for the rich that own stocks and for corporations.
Not the ones I have talked to. Brother-in-law has small busineess and his business associates attribute the economy to Trump.
Right but that’s a business owner.
True enough. I hope you are right. I wish he would leave office tomorrow…but it confounds me he has ANY suppport. It seems mind boggling.
+1
That’s the Rasmussen Poll which is fairly consistently an outlier among polls apparently [I don’t know for sure from over here in 3600-miles-from the-crazy-stan]. There could be a
rich, unhinged, self-regardingKanye West effect that’s ‘upticked’ all the polls, but most polls seem to put the African-American demographic at 10% to 15% approval. See THE WASHINGTON POSTHope you are right!
I saw that report about African Americans, but considering the base level of support he used to have I wasn’t impressed that it went up. It’d have been hard for it to have gone any further down, and that fuckwit Kanye West has undoubtedly helped.
A year and a half or so ago an allegedly objective NYT news article described Trump’s (now former) chief of White House security as “bullet-headed,” figuratively shooting a bullet in the collective NYT foot.
But we can safely predict that he will be in shoes.
I do not think it is dismissal when people note, from Palestinian own media, that initially 85 %, later 90+ %, of killed were professional terrorists attacking the border rather than peaceful protesters.
It is an amazing show of precision from the Israeli military, and an amazing show of sleight-of-hand from HuffPo.
Unfortunately real protesters were killed, but I notice that Israeli non-protesting civilians were also subject to the violence which is routinely “dismissed”.
More precisely, the professionals were army men from various places. But they lent themselves to the terrorist instigated attack.
Click on the screenshot doesn’t go to the article. Luckily for me, I know how to google. Unluckily for me, I found the article and read it… ugh.
Early Led Zep was based around the blues, classic rock my arse!
What in hell is their problem with Bari Weiss??
I don’t get it either. She seems fine to me. Having said that, I thought the same about Rubin at one point.
That doesn’t align with observable reality.
1) Far Right personalities of the Truther, Trump, Identitarian and Conspiracy scene are notably common on his show: Lauren Southern, Mark Cernovich, Carl of Swindon or Stefan Molyneux to name a few. Dave Rubin himself endorses Trump, therefore he cannot be a “Classic Liberal” in the established sense (most people who now use the label don’t qualify, making the label itself suspect).
2) He does endorse his guests. That’s the format of his show, where he presents personalities to his audience to talk about what they are up to. Anything more specific comes down to the exact moment. For example, he does agree with Molyneux and his particular “Race and IQ” views also at that moment. Endorsement is also the default position, which is the obvious format of the show itself.
I don’t know where people get the idea it was somehow different. It never was a show about interrogating guests, or showing different and colourful personalities. Dave presents his soldiers for what he imagines to be a “Culture War”. This is very clear.
3) The people Dave invites are also, completely consistent, listed as part of the “Intellectual Dark Web”, the names I gave above included. Dave himself was instrumental to form this cluster the way it turned out, because he also introduced himself to the audiences of the guests. In that way, he helped build a shared audience that likely subsribs and follows personalities of the IDW cluster, and each other. Bari Weiss helped form that cluster, too, because she wrote the article for the NYT, and made it a point to recommend the website that also included the names I listed above.
No surprise that someone in their twenties completely botches a classic rock metaphor.
But then again, in that piece, Zach Carter pretty much botched rational thought.