@Daniel - Curious to hear more about what you think is crankery in Kirn. I haven't seen anything, either from The Racket or from briefly scrolling his Twitter feed, that I'd consider beyond the pale. The main point I come across is identifying a new iteration of the security state in the "disinformation industr…
@Daniel - Curious to hear more about what you think is crankery in Kirn. I haven't seen anything, either from The Racket or from briefly scrolling his Twitter feed, that I'd consider beyond the pale. The main point I come across is identifying a new iteration of the security state in the "disinformation industry," and I take seriously the reporting that The Racket, Tablet, and others have done on this. They may not be right on all the particulars - I don't know if Renee DiResta is really acting in bad faith, for instance - but I'm fairly convinced by that basic thesis tbh.
@Evets - I didn't want to get bogged down on this in the post itself, but Williams is an interestingly equivocal figure. He's often broadly included in the ranks of the heterodox, but in this post - https://www.racket.news/p/the-atlantic-compares-walter-kirn - Kirn and Taibbi clearly feel deeply betrayed by Williams' Atlantic piece. Reading between the lines, I kind of think Williams had trouble selling the piece to The Atlantic and was able to do so only on condition that he really held Kirn's feet to the fire over downplaying the danger of Trump. The piece seems a bit unsure of itself and is an odd fit for The Atlantic. The Atlantic recently has emerged as a real skeptic of the 'heterodox' and I think very much wanted a hit piece.
@judith - Maybe I wasn't as clear as I meant to be in the article. I believe that the point of journalism is to report on stuff and above all to hold to account those who are currently in power. It's been a problem that the 'liberal media' has been very soft on all Democratic presidents from Clinton to Obama to Biden (and probably long before then) - and it has not gone unnoticed by the right, which manages to run successful campaigns by attacking 'the media' in toto.
@Josh - I included Rufo, who I think has a gone through a considerable evolution. In the 2010s, Rufo was an early critic of Critical Race Theory - it's interesting to read this New Yorker piece (https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory) and to see at that point just how unknown the intellectual tree of Critical Race Theory was in mainstream discourse. Early on, Rufo was mostly a commentator and critic. His association with DeSantis and then his plagiarism campaign came later He is a textbook instance of somebody who was seen to be in a 'heterodox' space and then became pretty much a Republican Party operative.
I really like Packer's piece, but I guess the framing here would be a bit different. It comes ultimately from Bari Weiss' 2018 piece on the Intellectual Dark Web (when she was still with The New York Times) - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html. The premise is that there is a group-think that can often be unconscious on the liberal left and in mainstream discourse, that discreetly avoids a wide variety of controversial topics and sort of pre-organizes the conversation. At the time of Weiss' piece it seemed like the IDW didn't have that much to complain about - a certain fixation on Trump and Russia-Gate and some ideological conformity within identity politics. But that group-think really became much more obvious in 2020/2021 with, in no particular order, a) the reluctance to discuss the lab-leak theory; b) the vilification of anyone questioning vaccine efficacy; c) the free pass given to rioters during the Floyd protests; d) the free pass given to Antifa and the autonomous zones in western cities; e) the cancelation of dissenting voices from social media platforms and the widespread social media practice of 'deamplification' f) the prevalence of fairly extreme 'woke' narratives in centers of learning. It's very possible to argue that none of these are the most important issues in the world - that, taken together they are all less important than the threat posed by Trump - but these all seemed to be fair questions for intellectuals to tackle. The idea with 'heterodoxy' is that anyone who is willing to step on any of these third rails in liberal course becomes 'heterodox' and tends to receive a certain amount of opprobrium. I do continue to find it a useful term even if, by definition, it is somewhat slippery.
Thank you all for comments.
@Daniel - Curious to hear more about what you think is crankery in Kirn. I haven't seen anything, either from The Racket or from briefly scrolling his Twitter feed, that I'd consider beyond the pale. The main point I come across is identifying a new iteration of the security state in the "disinformation industry," and I take seriously the reporting that The Racket, Tablet, and others have done on this. They may not be right on all the particulars - I don't know if Renee DiResta is really acting in bad faith, for instance - but I'm fairly convinced by that basic thesis tbh.
@Evets - I didn't want to get bogged down on this in the post itself, but Williams is an interestingly equivocal figure. He's often broadly included in the ranks of the heterodox, but in this post - https://www.racket.news/p/the-atlantic-compares-walter-kirn - Kirn and Taibbi clearly feel deeply betrayed by Williams' Atlantic piece. Reading between the lines, I kind of think Williams had trouble selling the piece to The Atlantic and was able to do so only on condition that he really held Kirn's feet to the fire over downplaying the danger of Trump. The piece seems a bit unsure of itself and is an odd fit for The Atlantic. The Atlantic recently has emerged as a real skeptic of the 'heterodox' and I think very much wanted a hit piece.
@judith - Maybe I wasn't as clear as I meant to be in the article. I believe that the point of journalism is to report on stuff and above all to hold to account those who are currently in power. It's been a problem that the 'liberal media' has been very soft on all Democratic presidents from Clinton to Obama to Biden (and probably long before then) - and it has not gone unnoticed by the right, which manages to run successful campaigns by attacking 'the media' in toto.
@Josh - I included Rufo, who I think has a gone through a considerable evolution. In the 2010s, Rufo was an early critic of Critical Race Theory - it's interesting to read this New Yorker piece (https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory) and to see at that point just how unknown the intellectual tree of Critical Race Theory was in mainstream discourse. Early on, Rufo was mostly a commentator and critic. His association with DeSantis and then his plagiarism campaign came later He is a textbook instance of somebody who was seen to be in a 'heterodox' space and then became pretty much a Republican Party operative.
I really like Packer's piece, but I guess the framing here would be a bit different. It comes ultimately from Bari Weiss' 2018 piece on the Intellectual Dark Web (when she was still with The New York Times) - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html. The premise is that there is a group-think that can often be unconscious on the liberal left and in mainstream discourse, that discreetly avoids a wide variety of controversial topics and sort of pre-organizes the conversation. At the time of Weiss' piece it seemed like the IDW didn't have that much to complain about - a certain fixation on Trump and Russia-Gate and some ideological conformity within identity politics. But that group-think really became much more obvious in 2020/2021 with, in no particular order, a) the reluctance to discuss the lab-leak theory; b) the vilification of anyone questioning vaccine efficacy; c) the free pass given to rioters during the Floyd protests; d) the free pass given to Antifa and the autonomous zones in western cities; e) the cancelation of dissenting voices from social media platforms and the widespread social media practice of 'deamplification' f) the prevalence of fairly extreme 'woke' narratives in centers of learning. It's very possible to argue that none of these are the most important issues in the world - that, taken together they are all less important than the threat posed by Trump - but these all seemed to be fair questions for intellectuals to tackle. The idea with 'heterodoxy' is that anyone who is willing to step on any of these third rails in liberal course becomes 'heterodox' and tends to receive a certain amount of opprobrium. I do continue to find it a useful term even if, by definition, it is somewhat slippery.
Wow now that is a thorough response! Well done - and on the column too.