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be careful how you win your victories. It is one thing to win by persuasion and another thing to win by elite cultural intimidation. Illiberalism breeds illiberalism. Using elite power, whether economic or cultural, to silence less educated foes usually produces a backlash.

If you exile 40 percent of the country from respectable society they will mount a political backlash that will make Donald Trump look like Adlai Stevenson.

A simplistic answer would be that such pressure does not conflict with free speech because the First Amendment applies only to government censorship, not to restrictions imposed by individuals.

Many of the reasons why Americans object to official censorship also apply to the suppression of speech by private means. If we conceive of free speech as promoting the search for truth—as the metaphor of “the marketplace of ideas” suggests—we should be troubled whether that search is hindered by public officials or private citizens.

If the point of free speech is to facilitate the open debate that is essential for self-rule, any measure that impairs that debate should give us pause, regardless of its source.

But although social restraints on speech raise many of the same concerns as government censorship, they differ in important ways.

First, much of the social pressure that critics complain about is itself speech.

When activists denounce Yiannopoulos as a racist or Murray as a white nationalist, they are exercising their own right to free expression. Likewise when students hold protests or marches, launch social media campaigns, circulate petitions, boycott lectures, demand the resignation of professors and administrators, or object to the invitation of controversial speakers. Even heckling

one of the central tenets of modern First Amendment law is that the government cannot suppress speech if those harms can be thwarted by alternative means. And the alternative that judges and scholars invoke most frequently is the mechanism of counter-speech.

Put bluntly, the implicit goal of all argument is, ultimately, to quash the opposing view.

Counter-speech can take many forms. It can be an assertion of fact designed to rebut a speaker’s claim. It can be an expression of opinion that the speaker’s view is misguided, ignorant, offensive, or insulting. It can even be an accusation that the speaker is racist or sexist, or that the speaker’s expression constitutes an act of harassment, discrimination, or aggression.

In other words, much of the social pushback that critics complain about on campus and in public life—indeed, the entire phenomenon of political correctness—can plausibly be described as counter-speech.

It’s worth asking, though, why expression that shames or demonizes a speaker is not a legitimate form of counter-speech.

To argue that a speaker’s position is racist or sexist is to say something about the merits of her position, given that most people think racism and sexism are bad. Even arguing that the speaker herself is racist goes to the merits, since it gives the public context for judging her motives and the consequences of her position.  

Besides, what principle of free speech limits discussion to the merits? Political discourse often strays from the merits of issues to personal or tangential matters. But the courts have never suggested that such discourse is outside the realm of free speech.

Cohen v. California, “We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.”

Are these forms of social pressure inconsistent with the values of free speech?  That is a more complicated question than many observers seem willing to acknowledge.

The problem with this argument is that all counter-speech has a potential chilling effect. Any time people refute an assertion of fact by pointing to evidence that contradicts it, speakers may be hesitant to repeat that assertion.

Fine, the critics might say. But much of the social pressure on campus does not just demonize; it is designed to, and often does, chill unpopular speech.

This highlights a paradox of free speech, and of our relationship to it. On the one hand, Americans are encouraged to be tolerant of opposing ideas in the belief that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market

On the other hand, unlike the government, Americans are not expected to remain neutral observers of that market. Instead, we are participants in it; the market works only if we take that participation seriously, if we exercise our own right of expression to combat ideas we disagree with, to refute false claims, to discredit dangerous beliefs

This does not mean we are required to be vicious or uncivil. But viciousness and incivility are legitimate features of America’s free speech tradition

This, one suspects, is what bothers many critics of political correctness: the fact that so much of the social pressure and pushback takes on a nasty, vindictive tone that is painful to observe. But free speech often is painful.

Many critics, particularly on the left, seem to forget this. Although they claim to be promoting an expansive view of free speech, they are doing something quite different. They are promoting a vision of liberalism, of respect, courtesy, and broadmindedness

That is a worthy vision to promote, but it should not be confused with the dictates of free speech, which allows for a messier, more ill-mannered form of public discourse. Free speech is not the same as liberalism. Equating the two reflects a narrow, rather than expansive, view of the former.

Does this mean any form of social pressure targeted at speakers is acceptable? Not at all. One of the reasons government censorship is prohibited is that the coercive power of the state is nearly impossible to resist

Social pressure that crosses the line from persuasion to coercion is also inconsistent with the values of free speech.

This explains why violence and threats of violence are not legitimate mechanisms for countering ideas one disagrees with. Physical assault—in addition to not traditionally being regarded as a form of expression —too closely resembles the use of force by the government.

What about other forms of social pressure? If Americans are concerned about the risk of coercion, the question is whether the pressures are such that it is reasonable to expect speakers to endure them. Framed this way, we should accept the legitimacy of insults, shaming, demonizing, and even social ostracism, since it is not unreasonable for speakers to bear these consequences.

a system that relies on counter-speech as the primary alternative to government censorship should not unduly restrict the forms counter-speech can take.

Heckling raises trickier questions. Occasional boos or interruptions are acceptable since they don’t prevent speakers from communicating their ideas. But heckling that is so loud and continuous a speaker literally cannot be heard is little different from putting a hand over a speaker’s mouth and should be viewed as antithetical to the values free speech.  

Because social restraints on speech do not violate the Constitution, Americans cannot rely on courts to develop a comprehensive framework for deciding which types of pressure are too coercive. Instead, Americans must determine what degree of pressure we think is acceptable.

In that respect, the critics are well within their right to push for a more elevated, civil form of public discourse. They are perfectly justified in arguing that a college campus, of all places, should be a model of rational debate

But they are not justified in claiming the free speech high ground. For under our free speech tradition, the crudest and least reasonable forms of expression are just as legitimate as the most eloquent and thoughtful

most people primarily seek the approval of people in their own reference groups.

Acceptance within some circles is contingent on refusal to cooperate with the Biden administration’s public-health campaign. Getting vaccinated is a betrayal of that group norm, and those who get the shot can legitimately fear losing their job or incurring the wrath of their families and other reference groups.

Sociology solves mysteries like these by zeroing in on problematic relationships, not the decisions that individuals make in isolation

Having expressed doubts about COVID-19 vaccination or other pandemic mitigation likely makes Ivey and DeSantis more effective in persuading other conservatives: Their previous positions signify authenticity and in-group loyalty, making them more trustworthy, not less. High-status leaders such as Scalise, Ivey, Blunt, and DeSantis can expand the range of acceptable behavior for other group members through the example of their own actions.

The seminal text in the field—Erving Goffman’s 1952 essay “On Cooling the Mark Out”

all targets of con artists eventually come to understand that they have been defrauded, yet they almost never complain or report the crime to authorities. Why? Because, Goffman argues, admitting that one has been conned is so deeply shameful that marks experience it as a kind of social death.

people targeted by con jobs can save their pride by denying the con as long as possible—or claiming they were in on it the whole time. This saves face and cheats social death, but allows the con to continue unchecked, entrapping others.

con artists employ specialists to “cool” marks down when the deception is finally revealed. A cooler, he writes, “has the job of handling persons caught out on a limb—persons whose expectations and self-conceptions have been built up and then shattered.” Coolers prevent blowback from angry marks

a very distinctive type of relationship that sociologists have been studying for more than 70 years: the con job. Con artists gain social or financial advantage by convincing their marks to believe highly dubious claims—and to block out all information to the contrary.

The conservative coolers are finally on the case, and only they have a chance of transforming partisan vaccine refusers into vaccine adopters.

Armed groups of men have always been a major force in world history, whether sanctioned by the state or not. The idea that the moral power of grieving parents could overcome the identity gifts -- the sense of security -- that arms give to the men who cherish them is not just ahistoric; it misunderstands the fundamental dynamics of how power works in human society, and the politics of masculine identity in America. Even in a democracy, the only thing that can overcome force is force.

There are other ways of creating change. Public shaming also has a power.

The gun conversation can be changed by the one type of force more powerful than an organized group of people with arms -- the power to make people feel ashamed of themselves and ostracized by the group they care most about.

America has undertaken more vigorous shaming campaigns for far less harmful social behaviors than keeping a sloppy hold on guns, such as getting pregnant as a teen, or smoking, or letting babies ride in cars outside of car-seats. And it would mean asking gun owners to rethink how they store, share, and sell their legally purchased weapons.

legal gun owners are the second-largest source of guns flowing to criminals, with 37 percent of them coming from family or friends of the individuals locked up in state prisons.

I don't believe that a small group of grieving mothers -- even with strong political backing -- has the power to transform a conversation that's at core about how millions of men define themselves. Only the men of the relevant communities can do that

. The family of the Christian man had notified the police of threats against them by Muslim villagers the day before the attack, he said.

Extramarital affairs or sex between unmarried couples are taboo among both Muslims and Christians in conservative Egypt. They often attract violent reactions in rural areas, where questions of honor can lead to deadly family feuds that endure for years or result in ostracizing of the perpetrators.

Criminal gangs have often targeted wealthy Christian families south of Cairo in recent years, kidnapping their children for ransom. There have also been scores of cases in recent years of underage Christian girls lured away from their families by Muslim men who force them to convert and keep them in hiding until they reach adulthood

At least 35 percent of Minya’s population is Christian, the largest in any of Egypt’s 27 provinces.

If the case were different, and a Muslim man was having an affair with a Christian woman, the reaction would have hardly been so violent, he added.

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.” Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

To help readers understand the drive for identity in Western Civilization, Fukuyama coins two new terms, both based on the Greek word thymos, which he explains as “the part of the soul that craves recognition or dignity.” His first term isothymia, he defines as “the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people.”His second new word, megalothymia, is “the desire to be recognized as superior.”

What actions can liberal democracies take to protect minorities while strengthening their traditional freedoms? Fukuyama proposes the development of “creedal national identities.” In this scenario, individuals would strongly identify with the “core values” in their country rather than on “shared personal characteristics.” 

Fukuyama argues that the left has made a serious mistake in abandoning its traditional concerns with demanding economic equality and worker protections in favor of promoting “a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized…blacks, immigrants, women, the LGBT community.” In response, the right in many countries redefined itself as “patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity.”

Megalothymia becomes a major problem when an aggressive majority group takes power and seeks to socially ostracize or even exterminate a minority group. Nazi Germany is the ultimate expression of this trend in the 20th century. 

In the United States, progressives should “adopt an assimilationist agenda.” This would include “strengthening external borders” while providing a clear path to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented men and women now in the country. He also wants public education to phase-out bilingual education and focus on teaching all students English language skills. He cites the “thirteen different languages taught in the New York City schools” as a divisive factor, weakening a national identity and fostering segregated communities.Fukuyama also proposes universal national service for all young people, as a “powerful way of integrating newcomers into the national culture.”He chastises the Democratic Party and progressives in general for “undermining the legitimacy of the American national story” by suggesting that racism and gender discrimination are “intrinsic to the country’s DNA.”

This has allowed the Republican Party and other conservative ideologues to redefine themselves as “patriots who seek to protect national identify.”He advises progressives to return to the traditional working-class issues of economic redistribution and improved government services (e.g. education, child care). 

They would feel that 'their careers are more fragile, their reputations are more fragile and they don't want to take risks'.

'I very much fear for the younger generation of writers. Novelists should feel free to write from whichever viewpoint they wish or represent all kinds of views. Right from an early age I've written from the point of view of people very different from myself. My first novel was written from the point of view of a woman.'

Sir Kazuo, whose new novel Klara and the Sun is published today, said he does not fear being cancelled.

Last year more than 100 high-profile cultural figures including JK Rowling, Noam Chomsky and Gloria Steinem signed an open letter which claimed the spread of 'censoriousness' was leading to 'a vogue for public shaming and ostracism'.

Booker Prize-winning author Sir Salman Rushdie, 73, also voiced his fears for literature and rejected the idea that writers can only write about their own experiences.

Prue Leith, 81, revealed last year she had 'abandoned' her novel after falling out with the publisher 'because they kept wanting to tell me what was politically correct'.

She was put in an impossible predicament, something Birx has been vocal about since she left the White House, most recently in a much-hyped CNN interview with Sanjay Gupta that aired this past weekend.

unlike Fauci, who stumbled more than once but managed to stay truthful enough to get himself ostracized by Team Trump, Birx practiced some impressive moral yoga in her defense of the president’s response.

Birx operated on the same premise that many others in senior roles, including career soldiers such as former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly and onetime national security adviser H.R. McMaster, accepted as well.

She apparently woke up every morning believing it was nobler to try to manage an ignorant, mercurial president than it was to speak out publicly and risk losing all influence.

She no doubt told herself she had an obligation, as a policy expert, to do whatever she could to protect Americans from the administration’s abject incompetence. And if that meant she had to echo untruths and offer up a bunch of silly praise, so be it.

This was Birx’s dilemma: to work within the system and maybe mitigate the tragedy, or to say what she knew and resign herself to powerlessness.

What we do know is that, by tempering her remarks, Birx enabled and amplified Trump’s lies — that the virus was a media creation, that reopening the economy wasn’t dangerous, that the government had things under control.

the larger lesson here — as though we should have to learn it again — is that appeasement never works.

It doesn’t work for nations facing down aggressors. It doesn’t work for a political party that’s been taken over by a nativist bully. And it doesn’t work when you’re serving a president who demands unyielding loyalty and a willful disregard for the truth.

In large-scale contemporary studies, the authors continue,liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals.

A UMass April 21-23 national survey asked voters to identify the person or group “you hold most responsible for the violence that occurred at the Capitol building.” 45 percent identified Trump, 6 percent the Republican Party and 11 percent white nationalists.

The surprising finding was the percentage that blamed the left, broadly construed: 16 percent for the Democratic Party, 4 percent for Joe Biden and 11 percent for “antifa,” for a total of 31 percent.

“Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?,” agreed in an email that both liberals and conservatives “engage in biased reasoning on the basis of partisanship,” but, he argued, there is still a fundamental difference between left and right:

What we are seeing in the Republican Party is that mass partisan opinion is making it politically devastating for Republican elites to try to uphold democracy. I think that an underappreciated factor in this is that the Republican Party is the home of cultural conservatives, and cultural conservatives are disproportionately open to authoritarian governance.

“What type of Western citizens would be most inclined to support democracy-degrading actions?”

For what is likely a variety of reasons, a worldview encompassing traditional sexual morality, religiosity, traditional gender roles, and resistance to multicultural diversity is associated with low or flexible commitment to democracy and amenability to authoritarian alternatives.

Democrats, Wronski continued, appear to have takena pass on the identity-driven zero-sum debate regarding the 2020 election since there is no compromise on this issue — you either believe the truth or you believe the big lie. Once you enter the world of pitting people against each other who believe in different realities of win/lose outcomes, it’s going to be nearly impossible to create bipartisan consensus on sweeping legislative initiatives (like HR1 and infrastructure bills).

those who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents that lean closer to the Republican Party demonstrate less favorable opinions of their party, reduced perceptions that the Democratic Party poses a threat, and even become more favorable toward the Democratic Party, as a result of exposure to information about conflict within their party.

The challenge facing Democrats goes beyond winning office. They confront an adversary willing to lie about past election outcomes, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to overturn future election returns; an opponent willing to nurture an insurrection if the wrong people win; a political party moving steadily from democracy to authoritarianism; a party that despite its liabilities is more likely than not to regain control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

Greene compiled a long list of unhinged comments and social media posts, including endorsement of violence against and assassinations of top Democrats, 9/11 trutherism and denials of school shootings.

Paradoxically, by seeking to punish Trump and Greene, Democrats may actually be helping to perpetuate the cycle of victimhood and complaints about "cancel culture" that each uses to crank up the anger of their radical base.

Greene has seized Trump's mantle by remaining defiant and insisting that she will not apologize for her mistakes in interviews and social media posts

"The entire Marjorie Taylor Greene disaster has been a meteor headed directly at the GOP conference since she won her primary. She should have been put on the bench then," said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman. "But the President liked her -- and liked the Q crazies because they liked him. GOP leadership needs to get onto cutting this craziness out of the party or it will proliferate."

Trump has long used the idea of victimhood as an anchor of his appeal to grassroots supporters who feel ostracized from the Washington establishment. In fact, one of the pillars of his defense in his Senate impeachment trial next week will be an argument that Democrats are trying to cancel his right of free speech -- which he used to discredit a fair election and to send a mob to sack the Capitol. That's a message Greene echoed with her mask on Thursday, which read, "Free Speech."

Greene's loss of her committee assignments may actually give her an opportunity to portray her rebuke as the result of standing up to liberals and even "establishment" members of her own party. She has told her supporters she has raised at least $1.6 million during the uproar over the past week.

While just 11 House Republicans voted to remove Greene from her committee assignments Thursday night, 61 voted the night before to remove Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking member of the conference, from her leadership position over her vote to impeach Trump.

Rather than taking full responsibility for her actions in her Thursday speech, Greene said the media that exposed her lies and lunacy is as bad as the QAnon conspiracy theory she espoused. She called Democrats -- rather than Trump's rioters who invaded the Capitol on January 6 -- a "mob."

Greene told The Washington Examiner that in removing her from her assignments Democrats "don't even realize they're helping me. I'm pretty amazed at how dumb they are."

"Think of Greene as a virus. Forceful and decisive action has to be taken to prevent the spread,"

Republicans could have taken more forceful action to drive Greene and her radical sentiments from their party at any time in the last few months -- or over the past year when she was running for Congress. Instead, Greene got a standing ovation from many in the House Republican Conference meeting Wednesday night.

The former President on Thursday declined to answer for his seditious behavior, turning down a request by House impeachment managers to testify for his trial.

The furor over Trump and Greene shows that even with the ex-President out of office, most of the Washington GOP is not willing to take issue with the radical fringe that festers among its most loyal voters.

"In the House, I tell you what I think's going on. I think they're trying to play both sides," former Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich said on CNN's "The Situation Room" on Thursday. "They don't want to aggravate the people who sort of sign up to QAnon and these conspiracy theories. They don't want to aggravate them but they also want to win the majority. It's all a fight for power."

For many in the party, Trump's unrepentant departure after trying to tear democracy down with false claims of vote fraud and Greene's rocket to fame as a "Make America Great Again" heroine are a nightmare scenario.

"I do think as a party we have to figure out what we stand for, and I think we've got to be a party of ideas and policies and principles and get away from members dabbling in conspiracy theories," South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune told CNN's Manu Raju on Thursday. "I don't think that's a productive course of action or one that's going to lead to much prosperity politically in the future."

"The House Republican Conference has been taken over by QAnon caucus, the crackpot caucus and the conspiracy caucus at the same time," Democratic House Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries told CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday night.

"The party of Lincoln is gone. The party of Reagan is gone. The party of John McCain is gone. This is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene."

Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless

in this era of fallen gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, banishment has been ostensibly democratized

It would be nice to live in a more forgiving world, one where dissenting from groupthink does not invite exile and people’s occasional lapses are not held up as evidence of who they are

if we are to construct such a world, we would do well to leave the slight acts of cancellation effected in the quad and cafe, and proceed to more illustrious offices.

The N.F.L. is revered in this country as a paragon of patriotism and chivalry, a sacred trust controlled by some of the wealthiest men and women in America. For the past three years, this sacred trust has executed, with brutal efficiency, the cancellation of Colin Kaepernick.

the N.F.L. has a different power at its fingertips: the power of monopoly

Mr. Kaepernick’s cancellation bars him from making a living at a skill he has been honing since childhood.

the wrongdoing of elite institutions was once hidden from public view, in the era of Donald Trump it is all there to be seen.

A sobering process that began with the broadcast beatings of civil rights marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, then accelerated with the recorded police brutality against Rodney King, has achieved its zenith with the social media sharing of the executions of Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald and Daniel Shaver.

The new cancel culture is the product of a generation born into a world without obscuring myth, where the great abuses, once only hinted at, suspected or uttered on street corners, are now tweeted out in full color

Nothing is sacred anymore, and, more important, nothing is legitimate — least of all those institutions charged with dispensing justice. And so, justice is seized by the crowd.

Mr. Kaepernick is not fighting for a job. He is fighting against cancellation. And his struggle is not merely his own — it is the struggle of Major Taylor, Jack Johnson, Craig Hodges and Muhammad Ali

This isn’t a fight for employment at any cost. It is a fight for a world where we are not shot, or shunned, because the masters of capital, or their agents, do not like our comportment, our attire or what we have to say.

they are men like my late father and his friends, who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned.

courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard

As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can't control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”

To reduce all of this to sexual inadequacy, however, is too facile. It cannot explain why millions of men look the other way when Trump acts in ways they would typically find shameful. Nor is arguing that Trump is a bad person and therefore that the people who support him are either brainwashed or also bad people helpful. He is, and some of them are. But that doesn’t explain why men who would normally ostracize someone like Trump continue to embrace him.

one must first grasp how deeply they are betraying their own definition of masculinity by looking more closely at the flaws they should, in principle, find revolting.

Is Trump honorable? This is a man who routinely refused to pay working people their due wages, and then lawyered them into the ground when they objected to being exploited. Trump is a rich downtown bully, the sort most working men usually hate.

the fact of the matter is that Trump is an obvious coward. He has two particular phobias: powerful men and intelligent women.

Whenever he is in the company of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take the most cringe-inducing example, he visibly cowers.

he is eager to criticize China, until he is asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping.

This is related to one of Trump’s most noticeable problems, which is that he can never stop talking.

Is Trump a man who respects women?

Women clearly scare Trump. You don’t have to take my word for it. “Donald doesn’t like strong women,” Senator Ted Cruz said back in 2016

Trump never seems more fearful and insecure than when women question him

Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team? Not in the least. In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s a blamer.

Stern’s observation opens the door to a better explanation of why—despite all of his whiny complaints, his pouty demeanor, and his mean-girl tweets—Trump’s working-class voters forgive him.

Trump’s lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy.

Trump is a hero to a culture in which so many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence.

especially for men who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.

so many of the men who support Trump have morphed into childish caricatures of themselves. They, too, are little boys, playing at being tough but crying about their victimization at the hands of liberal elites if they are subjected to criticism of any kind.

Trump’s base of support among working-class white women. (Those numbers are now declining.) But perhaps these women, too, regard Trump as just one more difficult and mischievous man-child in their lives to be accommodated and forgiven.

The best example of women giving him a pass was after the Access Hollywood tape came to light in the fall of 2016.

Female Trump supporters were interviewed on national television and—in a tragic admission about the state of American families—seemed confused about why Trump would be considered any worse than the men around them.

In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him. When a grown man brags about being brave, it is unmanly and distasteful; when a little boy pulls out a cardboard sword and ties a towel around his neck like a cape, it’s endearing. When a rich and powerful old man whines about how unfairly he is being treated, we scowl and judge; when a little boy snuffles in his tears and says that he was bullied—treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, even—we comfort.

Donald Trump is unmanly because he has never chosen to become a man. He has weathered few trials that create an adult of any kind. He is, instead, working-class America’s dysfunctional son, and his supporters, male and female alike, have become the worried parent explaining what a good boy he is to terrorized teachers even while he continues to set fires in the hallway right outside.

Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.

it appears that Abbot was barred from a more august podium out of an assumption that his views on racial preferences are beyond debate. Even though he was to speak on an unrelated topic. This “deplatforming” — if we must — was, in a word, simplistic.

the existence of racism does not, as DiAngelo suggests, make it valid to propose that there is a kind of undifferentiated body of white people with indistinguishable interests.

Writers like DiAngelo, who wield enormous influence in our current discourse, encourage the assumption that white people act as a self-preservationist amalgam. This notion of a pale-faced single organism stomping around the world is a cartoon, yet smart people hold this cartoon up as an enlightened way of thinking, and it has caught on.

I also suspect I am hardly alone, when hearing the term “systemic racism,” in quietly wondering how useful it is to use the same word, racism, for both explicit bigotry and inequality, even if the latter is according to race.

His simplistic definitions declare a dichotomy between racism and antiracism with naught in between — quite a blunt instrument to apply to something as complex as the sociology and history of race in our nation

In his similarly best-selling “How to Be an Antiracist,” the Boston University professor Ibram Kendi begins by defining a “racist” as “one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” He then defines an “antiracist” as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.”

religion tends to anthropomorphize. He sees a major difference between religious belief and science as the tendency for the former to attribute agency and intentionality to things we may not be able to explain.

In the new woke religion, society is described as “racist,” a term originally applied to people.

Note also the eerie parallel between the conceptions of original sin and white privilege as unremovable stains about which one is to maintain a lifelong concern and guilt.

Religions don’t always have gods, but they usually need sins, which in the new religion is the whiteness that supposedly bestrides everything in our lives.

With an unreachable pitilessness, a catechism couched in an elaborate jargon is being imposed almost as if sacred: privilege, decentering, hegemony, antiracism.

The only thing that will turn back this tide is a critical mass willing to insist on complexity, abstraction and forgiveness. As a Black man, I am especially appalled by the implication that to insist on these three things in thinking about race issues is somehow anti-Black.

precious few people want to be part of a movement that’s merely “less evil.” They don’t want to be or do anything evil at all. They want to be proud of their president. They want to be proud of their movement.

while it might be easy to reconcile a one-time action (like a vote) as less evil, it becomes far more difficult when your political affiliation is part of your identity. 

Many millions of Republicans aren’t just Republicans on Election Day, they’re Republicans every day. And Donald Trump placed every-day Republicans in a constant dilemma. Did you point it out when he did evil things? Or did you mainly remain silent, trusting in the notion that no matter how bad Trump was, his opponents were worse?

even worse, did the tension between Trump’s actions and your own morality grow so great that you started to redefine morality itself?

How many people made the migration from supporting Trump in spite of his character to supporting him because of who he was? I can think of countless folks, in both public and private life. 

That’s what discipling looks like.

Ted Cruz says his pronouns are “kiss my ass’ not just because he corrupted himself for Trump but because the crowd is corrupt as well. The same analysis goes for Josh Hawley’s refusal to apologize for his fist salute or his election challenge. He is morally corrupt. That cheering crowd is morally corrupt. 

Why? Because they’ve absorbed the lessons Trump taught. Fight the left with profane anger. Never apologize.

In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention passed one of the most prescient and important resolutions in the denomination’s history. Its Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials

First, he’s the undeniable front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination, and there are reports he might even announce his candidacy before the 2022 midterms.

Second, the January 6 Committee is doing an extraordinary job using the words of Trump’s own officials to fully expose to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear that Trump corruptly and likely criminally engineered an American coup.

Third, Axios reported this week on potential Trump plans for a second term, including a radical civil service reform that could lead to the government being stocked not with thousands of Trumpist officials, but with tens of thousands—discipled by Trump, imitating Trump, devoted to Trump. 

We should expect Trump to fill the government with his most loyal servants, and the January 6 hearings have taught us that loyalty to Trump sometimes requires lawlessness.

hy write about Trump and Christianity again? Three reasons.

“Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”

Over the weeks, the months, and the years, when the price of calling out actual evil—even an alleged lesser evil—is ostracization and alienation, then it’s often only a matter of time before your mind turns “lesser evil” into “not evil at all.” 

There is no binary choice. Republican Christians can say to Trump, right now, that there is no case for him over other Republicans—men or women who can choose better judges than Democrats, pursue better policies than Democrats, and defeat Joe Biden without resorting to lies and conspiracy theories and without corrupting the conscience of the church.

American Christian political leaders behave in public more like Trump than like Christ. American Christian families are torn apart by MAGA members who behave—the instant the topic turns to politics—more like Trump than like Christ.

They’d been discipled by Trump.

Russia’s status in the world has abruptly and obviously changed. Russians cannot escape their isolation as long as they cannot watch Netflix, access TikTok, or see their footballers play in international competitions. Pro-regime oligarchs, who once spent holidays in Europe, bought mansions in Mayfair, and visited their children at English private schools, now face visa restrictions and asset seizures. They have been denied the ability to use the rest of the continent as their gilded playground.

When a Russian spymaster complains about his country’s cancellation, our response should not be to laugh at an idiot confusing a culture war and a real one. Instead, we should recognize that economic and social isolation is a powerful weapon, and resolve to use it with the same restraint as any other weapon.

The deal will lead to the removal of tariffs on 96 percent of goods traded between the two countries within five years, both ministries said.

Mohamed Al Khaja, the Emirati ambassador to Israel, called it “an unprecedented achievement.”

Jews living in the Emirates are also observing their religious traditions increasingly openly.

But is the gender phantasm as crucial to the global far right as Butler claims?

Butler has little to say about the appeal of nationalism and community, insistence on ethnic purity, opposition to immigration, anxiety over economic and social stresses, fear of middle-class-status loss, hatred of “elites.”

why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is so popular, it would be less his invocation of the gender phantasm and more his ruthless determination to keep immigrants out, especially Muslim ones, along with his delivery of massive social services to families in an attempt to raise the birth rate

The chapter of Who’s Afraid of Gender? that is most relevant for American and British readers is probably the one about the women, many of them British, whom opponents call “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), but who call themselves “gender-critical feminists.”

But is obsession with “gender” really the primary motive behind current right-wing movements? And why is it so hard to trust that the noise around “gender” might actually be indicative of people’s real feelings, and not just the demagogue-fomented distraction Butler asser

Instead of proving that “gender” is a crucial part of what motivates popular support for right-wing authoritarianism, Butler simply asserts that it is, and then ties it all up with a bow called “fascism.”

ascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet.

As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own

Instead of facing up to the problems of, for example, war, declining living standards, environmental damage, and climate change, right-wing leaders whip up hysteria about threats to patriarchy, traditional families, and heterosexuality.

They discuss only two authors at any length, the philosopher Kathleen Stock and J. K. Rowling. Butler does not engage with their writing in any detail—they do not quote even one sentence from Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, a serious book that has been much discussed, or indeed from any other gender-crit work, except for some writing from Rowling, including her essay in which she describes domestic violence at the hands of her first husband, an accusation he admits to in part.

They dismiss, with that invocation of a “phantasm,” apprehension about the presence of trans women in women’s single-sex spaces, (as well as, gender-crits would add, biological men falsely claiming to be trans in order to gain access to same), concerns for biologically female athletes who feel cheated out of scholarships and trophies, and the slight a biological woman might experience by being referred to as a “menstruator.”

Butler wants to dismiss gender-crits as fascist-adjacent: Indeed, in an interview, they compare Stock and Rowling to Putin and the pope.

It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want.

what is authenticity

In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.

I can't tell you how many left and liberal people I know who keep quiet about their doubts because they fear being ostracized professionally or socially. Nobody wants to be accused of putting trans people's lives in danger, and, after all, don't we all want, as the slogan goes, to “Be Kind”?

The trouble is that, in the long run, the demand for self-suppression fuels reaction. Polls show declining support for various trans demands for acceptance . People don’t like being forced by social pressure to deny what they think of as the reality of sex and gender.

They cite the civil-rights activist and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon’s call for “difficult coalitions” but forget that coalitions necessarily involve compromise and choosing your battles, not just accusing people of sharing the views of fascists

What if instead of trying to suppress the questioning of skeptics, we admit we don’t have many answers? What if, instead, we had a conversation? After all, isn’t that what philosophy is all about?

The Village tends toward risk aversion, as evident in its Covid caution and its increasing wariness about free speech (which very much can have sticks-and-stones consequences). It tends to make decisions by consensus, with dissenters punished by ostracization

The River has been on a winning streak in terms of its impact on society and our economy: Its core industries, tech and finance, continually grow as fractions of the economy, and Las Vegas is bringing in record revenues

So far in the 2024 election, the Village has been making better risk-management decisions — out-Rivering the River. The presidential race remains close, but at least for now it looks like the Village is winning.

At least the Village got the most important decision right: kicking President Biden to the curb. In so doing, they roughly doubled their chances of winning

To understand why, it helps to know that the River can be prone to contrarianism. As the Village has become bluer and bluer, some communities within the River have rebelled by becoming, to varying degrees, red-pilled in response.

But the River is by no means a bloc, whereas the Village’s penchant for consensus helped it, when Mr. Biden stepped aside, to consolidate quickly around Ms. Harris

The poker player in me would have played the percentages and taken the calculated risk in Mr. Shapiro. The choice of Mr. Walz has grown on me as Ms. Harris has sustained her momentum in the polls — but Pennsylvania still looms large.

It’s much harder to see the upside for Mr. Trump’s choice of Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

Mr. Trump himself straddles the River-Village boundary awkwardly as a former casino magnate (though not a successful one), but he’s more intuitive than analytical and obsessed with his news coverage in the Village.

The Trump campaign made two classic mistakes with his V.P. choice, though Silicon Valley’s conservatives cheered. One was counting their chickens before they hatched.

The second error was a failure to practice strategic empathy, meaning a willingness to put yourself in your opponent’s shoes.

This is generally something that people in the River are good at; it’s essential in poker.

There’s another term from the poker world that describes Mr. Trump’s recent decision-making:

He may be on tilt, the condition of making suboptimal choices because your emotions get in the way. Every poker player has seen it: An opponent builds up a huge stack, looks forward to treating himself to a steak dinner and bragging to his buddies. But then he loses a big pot — and before he knows it, the rest of his chips are gone as he tries to chase his losses.