The fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time
January 15, 2025 12:07 AM   Subscribe

Now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. from The New Rasputins by Anne Applebaum [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet (45 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
There is nothing new about this movement. It's just the kind of conservatism identified by the prophet Wilhoit seven years ago: the ingroup is beyond reproach and therefore worthy of protection, while outgroups are responsible for all the world's ills and must therefore be kept in their place.

Wilhoit says "There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time" and although that's essentially correct, it downplays the extent to which people who subscribe to this brand of conservatism are unmoored from reality.

The simple fact is that there is no discernible moral difference between anybody's ingroup and their assorted outgroups. We're all just people. We all suck to about the same extent, statistically speaking; the differences between groups of us are differences of circumstance, not of character. So the idea that some arbitrarily selected group is more deserving of the protection of the law is just plain incorrect on its face.

I find it completely unsurprising when people willing to ignore that blatantly obvious fact also prove willing to ignore pretty much any other blatantly obvious fact that might likewise challenge their tiny, self-centred worldviews. Facts such as In A Pandemic, Vaccines And Masking And Avoiding Crowds Are Good Actually, or Acquiring Territory By Force Is Immoral And Illegal Even If It's Us Or Our Allies Doing It, or De-Sequestering Fossil Carbon Has Become Too Expensive To Justify, or OMG Elon Musk Is Such A Shithead.

The other point that Wilhoit downplays is the extent to which a tendency toward conservatism correlates with a lack of self-awareness. Conservatives almost always behave as if whatever tendency they're complaining about in others is not something they also do themselves, usually to a much worse extent, and often put ludicrously on show by the ways in which they choose to frame and present those very complaints.

The attitudes of and policies supported by the US Christian Right are illustrative here. What would Christ have to say, I wonder, about the moneylenders now owning the temple, or cruelty having become the point?
posted by flabdablet at 2:31 AM on January 15 [34 favorites]


I don't think this is a "bottom up" phenomenon, but a carefully engineered "top down" one. The synchronicity of all the progressive Western heads of states going down, like a political "And then there were none", is very suspicious.

Especially when you link it up with previous efforts: Bannon trying to create some headquarters in Italy, his envoys persuading Zemmour (a French columnist) to run for the presidency, ...

Strangely, Zemmour is the only French pol invited at Trump's coronation.

I didn't saw it before, but since 2014 at least it feels like there has been some concerted effort to revive nazism in Europe. If you look back, the pick up artist and dark enlightenment trends of the early 2010s were carrying a lot of the reactionary ideas that are now in full bloom everywhere. Gamer gate. I don't think any of these skirmishes were organic anymore, I think some group of nasty people (Peter Thiel ?) understood traditional media influence was waning and made a huge bet on influencers and guerilla propaganda, and they are now reaping huge profits.

They began by targeting niche but aggressive communities (gamers, incels, ...) and incrementally built up on these successes to reach an increasingly wider audience.

Think about it, all of the dark figures emerging now, from Milei to Trump, increased or acquired their popularity through social networks.

The frightening thing is social pressure works. Once they capture a critical mass of the opinion, everyone will turn on a dime and support them. Many people don't have strong beliefs and just go along to get along with whatever they feel is the zeitgeist. If the zeitgeist is remigration, they'll be happy to call the police on their foreign-looking neighbours, and feel like they are good citizens. They'll even film themselves doing it, and people will like their videos.

I can see the change happening real time here in France and I'm terrified for the next few years.
posted by dragondollar at 3:20 AM on January 15 [16 favorites]


Have I said this here before? I don't think so, but I say it to my husband all the time (poor husband!), the moment I heard Trump offhandedly refer to himself as "Mr. Brexit" in a 2016 primary speech, I knew what was up. The chill! Yet I didn't notice anyone remarking on it then (or now). I felt crazy! Still do. Maybe it was just obvious to everyone else ... and it kind of was to me, but not in such a concrete way.
posted by taz at 3:29 AM on January 15 [8 favorites]


Maybe it's just too early in the day for me to parse all of this, but I don't think the problem she's describing really has much to do with "New Age" spirituality or GOOPiness. It has to do with support of extreme right wing ideologies. Admittedly, seeing that go hand in hand with crystal healing and all seems weird, but I feel like the way the article is framed is...oh, wait, this is The Atlantic, I see.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:37 AM on January 15 [11 favorites]


I don't remember old-school conservatives, even the viciously racist ones, being so obsessed with conspiracy theories, UFOs and quack medicine. Peter Thiel's insane op-ed is an example.

I think the combination of living in online bubbles, and the rich ones only talking to sycophantic yes-men in real life, has led to them drifting further from reality. In previous generations, newspapers and broadcast network news gave them some touch with reality. Now they have Twitter or Fox News and just get self-reinforcing insanity.

I'm not sure about the Rasputin analogy, I think a lot of modern historians think that he had little to no political influence.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:17 AM on January 15 [11 favorites]


The average person in a normal cultural setting cannot easily reform an inherited cosmic order of things (heaven>earth>pharaoh>man>woman>etc.). Our medieval outlook is always there to take advantage of instability, even causing it when cracks appear. What is noticeable is that our voluntary subordination is directly reliant on woo-woo being in the picture. I suppose it works on the part of the brain that once made all decisions before we had any rationality, a default mode for confusion. Nobody predicted flat-earth making a major comeback, but the bible says so.
posted by Brian B. at 6:27 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


since 2014 at least it feels like there has been some concerted effort to revive nazism in Europe

I don't remember old-school conservatives, even the viciously racist ones, being so obsessed with conspiracy theories, UFOs and quack medicine


Seems to me that "I don't remember" plays a pretty big part in the way this whole thing works.

The world's previous fascist meltdown was approximately one human lifetime ago. The number of people still alive now who were there in person as all of that built up is very small and doesn't find much of an audience. So it seems likely to me that the main driver behind today's general turn toward authoritarianism and/or straight-up fascism is that most people simply no longer have a visceral personal sense of just how shitty that will inevitably make everything for everybody.

Also can't hurt to reflect on the facts that Hitler was both barking mad and utterly consumed by spurious grievances, Mussolini was about as ego-driven as TFG, and that then as now there was a lot of old money pushing fascism along both in Europe and in the US; keeping the poors at each other's throats is a very effective way to limit the number of them storming the gated communities with pitchforks and torches.

History doesn't repeat, but its rhyme scheme is not all that complicated.
posted by flabdablet at 7:24 AM on January 15 [18 favorites]


Seems to me that "I don't remember" plays a pretty big part in the way this whole thing works... The world's previous fascist meltdown was approximately one human lifetime ago.

If you haven't noticed any viciously racist politicians between WW2 and today, George Wallace and Enoch Powell for example, that's your lack of attention, not a lack of vicious racists.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:38 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]


Agreed. Vicious racists are never in short supply; what varies is how much actual power the general public is willing to allow them to wield.
posted by flabdablet at 7:47 AM on January 15 [8 favorites]


I don't think any of these skirmishes were organic anymore

I remember noticing when Breitbart started reporting on Gamergate.

> > I don't remember old-school conservatives, even the viciously racist ones, being so obsessed with conspiracy theories, UFOs and quack medicine

> Seems to me that "I don't remember" plays a pretty big part in the way this whole thing works.


Exactly: The John Birch Society. The Red Scare. Holocaust denier "scholars". The Reagans consulting an astrologer. Televangelists. Rush Limbaugh and AM talk radio hocking boner pills and gold bars.

These are all at the far end of living memory, but I keep trying to reassure people saying "at least so-and-so wasn't..." that yes they were. Selfish rich bastards pushing lies and hierarchy has always been this bad and this bonkers. Trump is a monster. George W Bush is a monster. Reagan and Goldwater and Nixon and Andrew Jackson and Caligula were all monsters following their religions and ideologies that conveniently made themselves richer at the expense of others.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:05 AM on January 15 [9 favorites]


I think this story is reporting a symptom, not a cause, and the illness is a growing dissatisfaction with the failures of the status quo, and the apparent inability of most democratic governments and international alliances to respond adequately to these problems.

Just a few examples of failures
- failure to restrain post USSR Russia
- the economic hollowing out of the working and middle classes in western countries from zealous free trade
- big economic crises (eg 2008) and increasing pressures (inflation, housing, food, healthcare, education)
- decades of Middle-East tension and conflict that's getting worse
- Brexit- grievances (real and imagined) that could be blamed on EU membership
- anxieties over climate, pollution, pandemics, overpopulation, disasters, famines... the future.
- growing income inequality
- Will your kids do as well as you did?

I'm not denying the power of social media to amplify or manufacture discontent, and that the rich and powerful have learned to leverage them. Rather, I'm pointing out that our democratic systems and processes have not evolved fast enough in response to effectively address and respond to our new problems and the growing anxiety and discontent.

This makes today's anxious voters more willing to roll the dice, to vote for the outsider, the shit-disturber, the wild card.

I believe the most prominent example of a troubled democratic system is the US, where the rigid 2-party system (and where disenfranchising/discouraging voters is acceptable) and some antiquated structure means that you can grab and hold power by influencing just a relatively small number of voters. Oversimplified for sure, but is this not what just happened?

tl;dr: if your foundation is rotting, rats will get in and wreck stuff. Our democratic systems must grow and adapt.

Note that political and economic crises also provided the conditions for Hitler to win support and take control.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:12 AM on January 15 [8 favorites]


Rather, I'm pointing out that our democratic systems and processes have not evolved fast enough in response to effectively address and respond to our new problems and the growing anxiety and discontent.

This is sort of on purpose though. Many aspects of the present day global order were specifically designed to curtail democratic influence. Free trade treaties increase trade by harmonizing regulations, but also limit law-making (and in many cases, jurisdiction) on a national or regional level. Central bank directed monetary policy delivers price stability, but without democratic control. Liberalization and privatization regimes mean cheaper products and services on a global scale, but render it difficult to enact legislation or controls to protect local workers and knowledge.

In much of the economic calculation that runs the world, democratic systems and processes are a liability, not an asset.
posted by dmh at 8:42 AM on January 15 [9 favorites]


Thanks dmh. All I can say is that if the "global order" was perceived to be working, voters and others would not be as interested in shaking it up?
posted by Artful Codger at 8:55 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


I'm pointing out that our democratic systems and processes have not evolved fast enough in response to effectively address and respond to our new problems and the growing anxiety and discontent.

They were evolving pretty damn quick in the mid to late eighties as the neoliberal economic foundations for the present slough of despond were being laid down.

I distinctly remember being appalled by the headlong rush to privatize and deregulate everything in sight, doubly appalled by the consequent impoverishment of public discourse as terms like patron, patient, member, passenger, client and citizen all got crushed by "customer" as the tapeworm larvae of robotic MBA bizspeak encysted themselves within the brain of the body politic, and triply appalled as union busting became the top priority for all of public policy.

At the time I was unaware of the Federalist Society, as most people would have been. These days I rate its project as the most competently executed subversion of democracy that any of us are ever likely to see.

And then in 1996, right-wing talkback radio metastasized into Fox News and democracy found itself on life support, where it remained until late last year when the US collectively decided to switch off its ventilator. 2025 marks the start of the ugliest historical era I've ever personally experienced, as the world commits itself to yet another round of finding out how many people fascists can kill and/or immiserate, this time with added overpopulation, climate change and an ongoing mass extinction to give the whole exercise a bit more spice and zing. I hope I live to see the back of that, but honestly don't expect to.

It's a pity. For a while there, a Green New Deal looked like it might have had some legs.
posted by flabdablet at 9:05 AM on January 15 [11 favorites]


> TheophileEscargot: "I don't remember old-school conservatives, even the viciously racist ones, being so obsessed with conspiracy theories, UFOs and quack medicine."

One tidbit of American history that I wish I knew more about is the Know Nothings. They're usually glossed over as a transient 3rd party that emerged out of the collapse of the Whig party before the Civil War and only lasted a short time. The part that I feel like is under-emphasized is that the Know Nothings were wildly anti-Catholic and obsessed with Catholic conspiracies, at one point actually sabotaging the construction of the Washington monument by stealing a stone that was donated by Pope Pius IX and chucking it in the river. Also, they did violence at polling places because they were worried about non-citizens voting. So yeah, there's that too.
posted by mhum at 10:35 AM on January 15 [6 favorites]


And the Know Nothings reached peak success in the mid 1850s, roughly one human lifetime before Hitler.

Memories
Light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolor memories
Of the way we were
posted by flabdablet at 10:55 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


OK I read TFA before saying anything, and let me come out in agreement with people who aren't sure what this is for. "Wholesale repudiation of the Enlightenment at the dawn of an as-yet-unseen New Order" seems to be overstating things. To say the least.

Most of our fellow humans are not terribly good at knowing things, as opposed to just having beliefs or opinions about them. Being good at knowing things involves both practicing admitting that you were wrong (because you can't learn anything, after a certain point, without falsifying something you thought you knew, and giving that something up) and encountering new "knowledge" with an attitude of "why would you believe that?" These are not things that are systematically taught, so far as I can tell.

In particular, most Americans have always been both shockingly ignorant and also not too friendly to the Bill of Rights. I have seen Sunday newspaper features from 100 years ago, bemoaning the abject ignorance of the nations high-school graduates, citing their inability to name the dates of the Civil War or to even mention major events of the then-pretty-recent war with Spain. I seem to recall reading back in the 1970s, about a pollster asking a random sample of Americans if certain freedoms would be Good Ideas, followed by a list of the Bill of Rights, with the reaction that no, most of those ought not to be allowed.

Our information environment right now is dominated by the fact that there are no effective, undiluted, out-and-proud pro-D voices among news media outlets. All of the legacy media are objectively pro-R, or they would have spent the last 25 years documenting how the R Party has transitioned from "political Party" to "subversive criminal organization dedicated to minority rule." The place of objective, balanced news media as it existed during the latter half of the 20th century has ceased to exist. Journalism now can choose between being pro-R or pro-D, and trying to split the difference makes them firmly pro-R.

I don't know how Ds get pro-D media orgs, but I do know that if they try to build such they have to refrain from censoring them over sacred cows. Any legit pro-D journalism outfit would have been holding D officeholders' feet to the fire over arms supplies to Israel during the last year, for example. And I have a hard time imagining the current institutional leadership of the D Party being OK with that.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:17 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]


I think Applebaum is genuinely appalled at authoritarianism, Trump, and Putin; but she comes out of conservatism and it seems she can't quite get past that. Thus the notion that these people aren't really conservatives, the invocation of Burke and Buckley, the attempt to point to some left-wing examples.

No, all this is nothing new in US politics, and there's a through-line between Buckley's support for segregation and the open racism of the right today.

As just one example of the weak-sauce both-sides-ism: she mentions Sahra Wagenknecht, once leader of The Left in Germany, a party which held 38 seats in the Bundestag out of 736 until she split off to form her own party. This is simply not the same as actual fascists taking power in Hungary, Italy, Russia, and the US, or the 41% of the French who voted for Le Pen.
posted by zompist at 12:34 PM on January 15 [7 favorites]


> zompist: "she comes out of conservatism and it seems she can't quite get past that."

This seems emblematic of the terrible irony at the center of conservatism. One the one hand, conservatism rests heavily on the idea of learning from and revering history because of the unchanging wisdom of the ancients or whatever. And yet conservatism is also unable to actually grapple with history since, well, conservatives have been on the wrong side of history for over 200 years: pro-monarchism, anti-abolitionism, anti-women's suffrage (and anti-women's rights in general), pro-segregation, pro-South African apartheid , etc... It's like a congenital intellectual dishonesty in the conservative movement where they refuse to see and understand what conservatism was and, consequently, what it currently is.
posted by mhum at 1:52 PM on January 15 [2 favorites]


[Know-Nothings]They're usually glossed over as a transient 3rd party...

You had different professors than I did, and it wasn't my area but as a late-1900s undergrad the Know-Nothings were always presented to me as the purest and most essential distillation of American politics imaginable. It seemed so self-evidently true that I filed it away with such facts as "fire hot" in the things that are obvious section of my brain.
posted by stet at 2:10 PM on January 15 [2 favorites]


This Anne Appelbaum? She's 100% fine with authoritarianism when it suits her, and her analysis is shallow and stupid here.
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:28 PM on January 15 [4 favorites]


It's a real phenomenon, but Applebaum's analysis here is just a derivative, watered-down version of the analysis that the Conspirituality podcast has been doing for several years now.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 6:32 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]


I'm surprised at the pushback on this article, given that its message seems pretty straightforward: she's describing the dismantling of scientific authority and the scientific method, and how with those tools, with calling on determined facts, you can more or less establish reality. By record keeping. By holding proof in your hands of what, for example, the percentage of an average income in mid-18th century France was spent on bread, and then track the beginnings of the Revolution in relation to those historical records. Social research and long-term studies and gathering of evidence used to contribute to government policy making and these are all the things that the right wing, in their canny, clever, horrific way have targeted.

Gathering statistics can show people a clear picture of their impoverishment, not just the Feelings that Things Are Worse. With no solid evidential ground to stand on, it's all guesswork and intuition. It's why Texas is no longer gathering data on the results of their abortion ban, which includes as we all know the "collateral damage" of women dying from incomplete miscarriages. Scientific records show that the climate is warming, so hide those records away, or simply break the trust of the people in science entirely. Replace that with superstition and lies. It's the Anti-Science scheming that the right is pouring money into, from Hungary to Brazil. It's one of their most frightening weapons.
posted by jokeefe at 6:44 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]


If you tell me that the earth is a sphere revolving around the sun, for a billion years, I know something about your education, and nothing about your loyalties and allegiances.

If you tell me the earth was burped into being by an uneasy cosmic frog, I have a clue about your tribal affiliation.

That's part of what is driving the new obscurantism.
posted by ocschwar at 6:57 PM on January 15 [2 favorites]


By holding proof in your hands of what, for example, the percentage of an average income in mid-18th century France was spent on bread, and then track the beginnings of the Revolution in relation to those historical records.

One of the more shocking stats I ran into along this line, in an early 80s article in the New Yorker, was from a historian who concerned himself with the history of physical stature in Europe, and claimed that the Frenchmen who stormed the Bastille averaged less than 5 ft. in height.
posted by jamjam at 12:51 AM on January 16 [3 favorites]


Social research and long-term studies and gathering of evidence used to contribute to government policy making and these are all the things that the right wing, in their canny, clever, horrific way have targeted.

The pushback is not so much against that, which I expect most contributors here would file under "no shit, Sherlock". It's against the idea that this is any kind of new behaviour for authoritarians, who have a long and ugly record of suppressing and/or killing off anybody who seeks to draw public attention to flaws in their ideology on the basis of actual facts.

It's also against this:
When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them.
She's talking about the nativist horseshit responsible for Brexit and the rise of TFG and the backlash against immigration into Europe and this is absolutely a right-wing project.

The technologies upon which modernity is built have long been sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, corroding a public immunity to woo that was never particularly strong to begin with. Obscurantism in the form of simple wrong answers to complex questions has been on a steady rise for my whole lifetime. But only the Right has been weaponizing it politically for all that time.

Applebaum writes:
The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
If Applebaum honestly believes that the defining character of the Right only began to change a decade ago, she's fooling herself (as conservatives are wont to do). The Right has never been about preserving the status quo per se; it has always been about preserving privilege.

In the words of the Prophet:
As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny.
posted by flabdablet at 3:21 AM on January 16 [4 favorites]


I think Appelbaum is conflating two different tendencies here.

One tendency is a simple-minded rebellion against authority, which can turn into a rebellion against reality. Ideas spring up in the laziest manner, based on feels and vibes, and get handed around by social pressure. Supporting the wacky idea is only a way to signify membership in the in group, nobody cares if it's true or not.

The other tendency is the turn a small number of right wingers have done towards esoteric, occult, or unusual religious or "philosophical" orientations. There are some dark enlightenment types in this group, some Yarvins, Bannons, Thiels, but they're not numerous.

I can see where the first tendency might create a pipeline to the second for a small number of people, but the majority of the current right wing don't have the patience or the brainpower to take on a genuine occult path or religious conversion. Example: Hegseth's religious tattoos have no foundation beyond cheering for a team. He has the intellectual heft of a drunk football hooligan.

Or, consider Thiel, who seems to be backsliding into word salad rather than doing the hard work to be consistent or coherent. (Coherent in this context doesn't mean correct...it's just the bare minimum of having a belief system and using that to construct an argument. )
posted by gimonca at 6:15 AM on January 16 [2 favorites]


The promise of multiple Rasputins lured me into reading the article. But instead of getting much in the way of Ra-ra Rasputin, most of the article’s main points had me thinking “didn’t the Nazis do that, or something like it?”
posted by house-goblin at 10:00 AM on January 16 [2 favorites]


Appelbaum seems to be describing history well enough, noting that left and right have lost their meanings with anti-democratic ambition. The middle ground is heresy because loyalty is the new accountability, which is why demagogues exist. But finding a new frame for political engagement would need to leave out the left/center/right descriptors, because they are no longer a shared reality but live in their own bubbles. Nowadays one typically uses the terms left and right as a way of not revealing or examining their ideological fantasies.
posted by Brian B. at 12:53 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]


left and right have lost their meanings

Show me a leftist who classes this as anything other than yet more post-truth right-wing obscurantism. I bet you'll struggle to find one.

No surprise at all to me to find a conservative writer making this claim, especially in the context of a complaint about obscurantism. See my remarks upthread about the conservative tendency to lack self-awareness.
posted by flabdablet at 8:18 PM on January 16 [2 favorites]


Show me a leftist who classes this as anything other than yet more post-truth right-wing obscurantism. I bet you'll struggle to find one.

That's an oblique question to me. I can't speak for them, or read minds, but sticking to the subject, obscurantism is a thing the analytical left must negotiate, noting that all of the theorists in the last link left their convictions long ago, see down page or the last post on this subject. Chomsky calls out post-modernism as obscurant, which is where many, perhaps most on the left find a lot of theoretical gusto to disagree with others about. I agree with him, but he calls himself an anarcho-syndicalist and is at arms length to any non-obscure description, maybe because he once got dinged for supporting Pol Pot.
posted by Brian B. at 9:17 PM on January 16


flabdablet:"There is nothing new about this movement. It's just the kind of conservatism identified by the prophet Wilhoit seven years ago: the ingroup is beyond reproach and therefore worthy of protection, while outgroups are responsible for all the world's ills and must therefore be kept in their place."

Phenomenal comment and I'm returning to this thread to share an article I found.
I knew I'd read "Wilhoit's Law" or something like it five years ago, thank you for the original source. I googled Wilhoit and immediately noticed that he'd apparently died eight years before the comment was posted.
The story of two Wilhoits is captivating and I really like this new Wilhoit.

I don't like the interviewer's editorializing in this piece and his oh-so-obvious patronizing tone... (speaking of verbal talismans - I think "pithy" is perhaps my least favorite word in the mouths of Slate-type liberals like Grabar, oh, you clever, erudite professional thinker, you. Au contraire, I say! You, sir, are pithy.).

Wilhoit the Latter is hilarious, his compositions are good, and I like the way he talks and writes and thinks.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 6:49 AM on January 17 [3 favorites]


This is a derail over an offhand quip, but, BrianB, I respectfully suggest you look deeper into the allegations Chomsky supported Pol Pot. Far as I can tell, the accusation arose from Chomsky’s criticism of the methodology used by an early researcher/reporter on the Cambodian Genocide as well as his doubts about the total deaths being as large as much of the media of the time reported. That said, if you’re aware of any direct quotes from him that unequivocally express support for Pol Pot, I’d appreciate it.
posted by house-goblin at 10:03 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]


Back to the main topic, I gotta ask why Gwyneth Paltrow is the face of woo health for Anne Applebaum? She’s ignoring a crapload of far right shit flingers flogging all kinds of snake oil vitamin supplements, powders and who knows what else.
posted by house-goblin at 10:11 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]


She’s ignoring a crapload of far right shit flingers flogging all kinds of snake oil vitamin supplements, powders and who knows what else.

It's because Appelbaum has ideological commitments of her own that she's carefully concealing, and in the service of those commitments she very much needs for "the left" to be at least equal to "the right", if not worse, in terms of overall badness.
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:54 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]


House-Goblin, I'll link it for you. I see parallels in denial here, and Chomsky kept at it for years. I would add that the author of Manufactured Consent was manipulated by tin pot propaganda as a true believer (and see the death of Gladwell section for the way they treated friendly journalists they invited to visit).

Examining materials in the Documentation Center of Cambodia archives, American commentator Peter Maguire found that Chomsky wrote to publishers such as Robert Silver [sic] of The New York Review of Books to urge discounting atrocity stories. Maguire reports that some of these letters were as long as twenty pages, and that they were even sharper in tone than Chomsky’s published words.[1]: 223 
posted by Brian B. at 11:18 AM on January 17


oh, you clever, erudite professional thinker, you

Are you taking the pith?
posted by flabdablet at 12:18 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]


[Engage Derail]Hey again, BrianB. Yeah, I've seen that (even checked that very page before posting), but rather than a direct quote it's somebody saying Chomsky said terrible things. Peter Maguire needs to reveal the letters. Additionally, this is terribly fraught territory. Even if the letters were published, will there be a general consensus Chomsky (a somewhat pacifistic anarchist) was supporting Pol Pot (a genocidal communist) or will there be credible voices stating it's his usual critiques about methodology and the way the media emphasizes some horrors and downplays others?[Disengage Derail]
posted by house-goblin at 1:26 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]


Now, to continue my tradition of re-engaging with the main article. I agree with most of the critiques posted, but I suppose I can cautiously applaud Applebaum's opposition to some of her fellow travellers on the right side of things. Even if she's determined to "no true conservative" them, while also ignoring the fact you can't throw a stick into a pile of Hitler quotes and not hit something that rhymes with stuff coming out of the mouths of people marching under the banner of conservativism.
posted by house-goblin at 1:45 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]



Back to the main topic, I gotta ask why Gwyneth Paltrow is the face of woo health for Anne Applebaum? She’s ignoring a crapload of far right shit flingers flogging all kinds of snake oil vitamin supplements, powders and who knows what else.


Because she's not a gym rat devotee of the manosphere, and she's not following any tradwife influencers on Instagram. So when it comes to snake oil pushers she actually has heard of or from, Paltrow's going to be the first that come to mind.
posted by ocschwar at 7:34 PM on January 17


I didn’t know Steve Bannon, hawker of anti-covid vitamin defence packs and all around “wellness warrior”, is also a gym rat and trad wife influencer.
posted by house-goblin at 12:25 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]


Also, Bannon makes for a good Rasputin. Guy gives off very strong “I feel fine after drinking poisoned wine” energy. Applebaum is asleep at the monitor.
posted by house-goblin at 1:11 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]


I don;t know. At least the real life Rasputin looked like he bathed regularly.
posted by ocschwar at 2:04 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]




plan for a future of downward social mobility

because taxing the assets of ultra wealthy families is just unthinkable, so we'd rather keep on letting them jack up the prices of everything until the middle class sells it them?

Zombie Thatcher is grinning like a fucking shark.
posted by flabdablet at 7:23 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]


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