The Culture War is Not Fought on Fronts

Or: "Why it's nearly impossible to fight fair today"

Note: I wrote this in a hurry just to get it to press, and as I finished I started wondering if I’d stole some metaphors from places like Gray Mirror. I promise I wrote this without stopping from start to finish, so if this one of those “synchronicity plagiarisms,” I promise it was purely coincidental. The thoughts just swirl, hard to know where all the ingredients in the broth came from.

As much as I agree with Jesse Singal’s writing, I often avoid it. It’s hard to read an entry on his Substack without being left with a sense of helpless despair. But yesterday, as I shamefully ate a Chipotle burrito in the parking lot (I got one right before closing and had to eat it in my car, rice all over the lap, lettuce under foot, the whole deal), I decided to give a quick scroll of his latest post.

Not much different than any other, save for the clarity at which he articulated the desperation of our current predicament. To summarize things you already know, a dissection of a recent twitter feud between a well-meaning journalist and several bad actors served as an apt demonstration of just how perverse our current public discourse is, with one side being able to sift through every single article and prepositional phrase of their opponents words and nitpick every single tiny breadcrumb that may indicate some ulterior motive. That ulterior motive is usually, of course, that this person is a hateful little thing, disguising their evil motives with the language of fair-handedness. In the exchange the Singal highlights in this post, a reporter freelancing for the NTY sent out a set of extremely banal emails to relevant stakeholders in the science and medical community to guage their feelings toward gender transitioning healthcare services for teenager.

I don’t want to get into the meat of it too much, mostly because I promised myself I would resist the urge to get pulled down the gender track (lest this get bogged down in writing every single post about that), but suffice to say the reporter made the cardinal sin of saying he wanted to hear from people who were in favor of it, as well as those who had reservations. This latter part of the clause, that he was also looking for those who were resistant to the idea, was then taken for a spin in the crazy car by a host of activists including a Medill Journo professor who acted like a deranged teenager dragging “the girl we all hate at school” through the mud.

The amount of unfairness involved in the state of things is nothing new, but it draws our current conflict lines out with such clarity that I was left sunk to new lows of despondence. That freelance journalist (whose name is Ben Ryan) lost the article (and probably all future articles), while the unhinged Northwestern prof (named Steven Thrasher) would no doubt be spared of any consequences at all (and probably get high fives from colleagues). This pretty much says it all.

Might has always been right, but the “might” of today has decidely shifted polls. This is not surprising given that our world (at least in the West) has increasingly shied away from physical violence as a means of conflict resolution and has instead cozied up to the more traditionally feminine strategies of triangulation, reputation demolition, pile ons, and gossip. Such is the way of nature, I suppose. You stop building anything in a country, slowly turn the military bootcamps into daycamp outings, and generally turn all labor above lifting a few fingers over to automation, you’re going to get a new type of might, a new type of violence (probably why many of these people on the supposed left can you look you straight in the face whilst saying your words are a form of “actual violence” - to many of them, it’s the closest they’ll get).

I wanted to title this article “A New Kind of Violence,” but felt that pandered to the nascent ideologies of these ChatGPT babies. I consider “A New Kind of Might,” but too vague. Finally I decided I didn’t want to write that at all because I am just so tired from having to EDUCATE all of you.

The Battle of Princeton by James Peale, ca. 1782

Kidding…the reality is that the new manifestations of power in our world are only one part of the problem. It is the net result that troubles me. It is the fact that, because not a single punch is throw, and because those on the left got to the “words are violence” checkpoint first, we who struggle to maintain our sanity are bereft of the words needed to express what an utter chokehold the left has taken on public discourse. Namely, the fact that I am basically asked to bend the knee to this corrupted ideology multiple times a day as a college professor.

It’s death by a thousand paper cuts, but also there’s a few direct knife wounds thrown in for good measure. It’s hard to enumerate all of the little ways that I have to signal, each day, that I am a warrior of the light. I have to make small asides, present disclaimers and trigger warnings, offer opposite sides of arguments I think only. a moron would need to hear. Take trigger warnings: I know this is a thing overblown by the out of touch right, but the presence of providing content and trigger warnings prior to lectures and movies and even songs is so ubiquitous that its begun to disappear; so common in polite society that it doesn’t even feel like a thing anymore. I have to do this everyday, pander to an ideology I think is not only incorrect but that I actually find corrosive.

When I write anything in this ballpark, I have some people on here comment that they are unaffected by this. That I am exaggerating. Some recommend that I have to stand up and fight. Or that I should leave my profession. These people cannot possibly work in academia. If you color even a little bit outside of the lines and push even a tiny corner fold of the envelope, you are dealt with swiftly and brutally.

Furthermore, the students have the ability to - at any time - arbitrarily bring claims against you that will not be defended, that are not worth being defended, that are actually set up so as to make the college win the faster they bring consequences on you. Go ahead and say this is just colleges, and I will play a tape back of you saying the same thing in 2010.

In short, I lie all day long. I present a version of myself that is disingenuous, that pretends to think it’s important to say when I think a very basic concept is racially-motivated, when I have to give preference to the experience of one student over another, particularly when I am extremely aware of the student in question being a bad actor who is using the right words such as “safety” and “trauma” to get what they want at the cost of anyone else.

I literally count down the days until my student loans are paid off and I no longer need this job, but even then it will be a huge sacrifice and pay cut. Everything I learned to do, I learned it in a world that was much different than the one we are in today. I prepared for a culture that is very different than this, that had different landmarks of fairness and concern. They were not perfect, but they were at least pluralistic; they allowed room for adjutification of issues on the basis of liberal concern for freedom of thought and speech. If I try to fight the system, I will lose and be shamed. If I quit, I will be unemployed and barred from re-entry. Most of alternative meaningful employment seems to be in the few areas of manual labor for which my medical history does not allow me to engage in (let’s just say I’m missing crucial parts of my body). It’s not as easy as you think to just jump from a shitty academic job to a spot on Tucker…even harder since he left Fox. Most people who are “done dirty” by current society are never heard from again.

All the while, I am advancing the interest of the absolute worst people. I have to; I am compelled to. It does not directly seem as though anyone is forcing me, but that is only becuase very elaborate fences have been set up to filter this mandate through a series of channels that result in an authoritarian chokehold of ideas that is far enough away from the source so as to seem natural. There is always plausible deniability. There is always plausible ignorance.

The truth is that, in terms of culture, we are as defeated as any group of citizens under military occupation. We are free to leave our homes, buy our bread, play dominos in the park, yes. But we are occupied. The occupying forces do not use guns but administrative pathways. They do not use barricades but instead shunning and jeers. They limit our income and reputation, they humiliate us, present our ideas as if they are stupid beyond belief. They doxx us mercilessly, violating their own in-house prohibitions against it (exceptions are made when bad people are the target). They cut us off from their groups and institutions, limit our ability to share ideas, and eventually - if our crime is serious enough - they eventually levy a spurious claim of some sort of abuse against us so as to incur administrative or legal charges. They own every institution, and they are rabid in their defenses of them, rewriting rules as they go along and insisting they are all for free and open exchange of ideas within limits -limits that they of course set. Most of all, they will tell us that none of the things I have just written are actually happening, it is all in our heads, and that you have to be some sort of fascist or -phobe to believe these things.

We are free to do anything we want, as long as what we want to do is participate in any of the increasingly narrow childish activities that are now relegated to adult-infants. The society they wish for is not only post-scarcity and post-war, it is post-stakes. The idea of our country being invaded or running out of money or having our electric grid dropped or any variety of things happening that require a national coherence - these things are all boogeymen to them, lies forwarded by the “fringe elements” that surround them at all times while they drink white claws and have street fests.

This is perhaps the reason why it has been so hard to mount an adequate countervailing cultural response, because the behaviors and lifestyles of the people claiming to be beset on all sides by nefarious oppressive forces do not at all line up with the reality they depict. They claim to be embattled by fascists, but they are also having the time of their fucking lives. They claim to be relentlessly subjected to racism and sexism and transphobia and all the other -isms and -phobias and yet almost of every meaningful subject of national attention and adoration is on people supposedly subject to these forces.

It’s all mostly a lie, or at the very least profound exaggeration. And yet we seem powerless to stop it. Any reasonable person who encounters a lie intuitively seeks to confront it with the truth. But that never works, does it? As much as bad-fit-jeans-wearing, Bill Maher-watching sports dads across the nation think that the repetition of the “obvious truth” over and over again will break the spell, it never does. Why?

For the same reason that the people in a land occupied by foreign soldiers cannot get them to leave by reading them a book about imperialism. They are the winning force, they do not want to listen to you, and if you talk too much you will get a butt of a gun to your stomach or, worse, a bayonette to your brain. It does not feel this way because they have no uniform but herein lies the trick: that weird stilted way they all talk? The way they hedge everything and nod to DEI and excuse everything as trauma and talk in that over-pleasant NPR cadence is their uniform. That is how they identify each other. So for this reason, I must do the same lest they find out that I am not a part of their army!

Please understand - I am NOT arguing for some sort of actual armed or violent defense. I am saying that the response to this has to be the only reasonable response to a uniformed, occupying force when you are outmanned and out-gunned: guerilla tactics. We. need to stop arguing and start fucking up their parties. We need to start defacing their shit, stunting on their sayings and their hobbies and their cultural touchstones. We need to infiltrate and disrupt. It can’t just happen on 4chan. That’s like fighting an occupation in Prague from Iowa. We need to do it without putting a Pepe frog on it, or even directly addressing the content of what they say - too easy to call us bigots and fascists and wipe it from the table without a second thought.

It is impossible to be honest today, so don’t even try. At least not in conversation with them. Instead, our entire focus should be to expose their culture for what it is: extremely tedious, cringe, and insufferable. We need to make it cool to mock people who laboriously explain privilege to us, make fart sounds during land acknowledgements, and most importantly do it with the same degree of plausible deniability. If we do this right, when the people who are 12 years old now grow up, they will naturally laugh in the face of people who talk like the inclusivity and trauma people talk now. It will be such a natural and easy response that it will have no answer, the more they resist the more pathetic and stupid they appear.

Stop fighting on fronts. We’re already occupied.