I was all prepared to write about a sad National Review Incel’s piece, but Roy Edroso did it so well in his newsletter that I just had to share a piece of it.
Viewpoint neutrality should be legally mandated
The bizarre headline (and yes, I know that sometimes authors don’t write or approve their own headlines, though in the current journalistic environment a writer is unlikely to get even that level of editorial support) gives the impression that a few words were accidentally lopped off; surely Kauffman can’t mean that all viewpoints must be neutralized; am I not to be allowed a preference for coffee ice cream over chocolate, or the works of Carlton Mellick III over those of Chuck Tingle?
But then you read on:
When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him). So finds a survey of 20,000 university students that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducted in 2020. While people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating, this attitude bleeds into problematic spheres such as hiring and social toleration.
[Rips up a guy’s janitor position application] “Sorry, I just can’t see myself fucking him.”
This reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism…
I can’t break in for every nonsense phrase he uses but does “young elite American” mean college student? Because if so he should just say that. Now I’m really convinced Kauffman wrote the headline.
…a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in the name of the emotional “safety” of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexuality groups.
So wokeness is keeping MAGA guys from getting their wick dipped? Is refusing to date a Jo Jorgensen supporter also woke/snowflake/slur-of-the-moment? (I bet Kauffman could cook up an algorithm whereby refusal to date Trumpkins is 100% authoritarian but your score goes down by increments if you’ll consider supporters of other terrible Presidential candidates.)
In this left-modernist worldview, conservatives’ resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants.
What’s sexual progressivism? Cunnilingus? No wonder these people have trouble getting dates.
Then Kauffman yaps a while about how, in order to generally get social results they desire, conservatives have to use power and force rather than persuasion (“As J. D. Vance, Michael Lind, and Richard Hanania suggest, conservatives will have to overcome their squeamishness about government to have any chance of holding back the woke domination of American institutions”). And he keeps on going back to dating. Did you know that only 23% of “Ivy League men” will date Trump women? (Kauffman finds this “highly discriminatory.”) “Non-Trumpist Republicans” are prejudiced against Trump supporters too! Conversely, other poll results show “that Trump supporters are considerably more politically tolerant than Clinton voters when it comes to dating.” Maybe they heard Democrats were good in bed.
Kauffman eventually appears to feel a need to explain why the refusal to date Trump supporters is significant of anything besides the sad recognition that one’s fascism is unattractive:
The problem of “affective polarization” has been well documented, in which people react negatively to those of the opposing political tribe, and this animosity spills over from politics into everyday social relationships. But what if polarization has an asymmetric effect on power in society? What if the elite is becoming a politically endogamous tribe that dominates positions of power in society, reserving them for those with the correct political pedigree?
In other words, Trump voters are not unfuckable because they’re rude, chest-beating bullies who smell; they’re rude, chest-beating bullies who smell because “affective polarization” made them unfuckable. Morlocks are made, not born! Consider the lifetime of lovelessness and loneliness to which you elites have condemned them! Can’t you at least offer them the dignity of a hand job?
Lol.
It’s almost a cliche that so much of the misogyny out there stems from certain men’s belief that they are entitled to have sex with all the beautiful women they are attracted to. (Women, of course, are entitled to no such privilege — they must fuck any man who wants them, apparently.) This is the philosophy of the incel movement and it’s underlying belief system does animate a whole lot of the resentment that seems to motivate some men. And they do seem to gather in greater numbers on the right (although not exclusively.)
This piece illuminates yet another aspect of the American right’s burgeoning neo-fascism. While whining about “cancel culture” and complaining about their freedom being curtailed by the Deep State, they are demanding that they be loved in spite of their toxic beliefs and openly requiring Orwellian surveillance of American citizens:
Shameless to the end.
Roy Edroso’s newsletter is really great, by the way. Nobody can touch his acerbic wit.