Antisocial
Metadata
Highlights
- Some on the left still found it comforting to assume that every Trump supporter was a shiftless rube under a demagogueâs spell. The reality Iâd seen so far was more unnerving in its complexity. The leaders of the Deplorable movement were deeply wrong on many fundamental questions, both empirical and ethical, but they werenât guileless or stupid. They were deft propagandists who, having recognized that social media was creating an unprecedented power vacuum, had set out to exploit it. As Hillary Clinton often said of the rancor that fueled Trumpâs campaign, âThis is not who we are.â The sentiment was nice to hear, but it was wishful thinking. We are not Good. We are not Bad. Our behavior is a product of many contingent factors, not least our cultural vocabulary, and our cultural vocabulary can change. (Location 1291)
- Our country was undergoing a painful and sudden shift. The old national vocabulary was being dismantled, and it was too early to tell what would take its place. I sometimes imagined the process as a barbaric form of surgery, an unauthorized organ transplant. The ribcage of the body politic had been pried open; the alt-light demicelebrities were trying to sneak into the operating theater, insert their thinly disguised demagoguery, and then sew up the wound before anyone noticed. They werenât actual doctors, but you couldnât necessarily see that at first glance; they wore convincing-looking uniforms and spoke with authority, and for some people that was enough. Nobody, not even the alt-light themselves, knew whether the transplanted organ would be assimilated or rejected. We would all have to wait to find out. (Location 3393)
- the Big Swinging Brains agreed on a set of commonsense assumptions. The best stuff spreads. The cream rises to the top. New technologies will disrupt old hierarchies, and this disruption will ultimately redound to the good. (Location 3716)
- He was willing to be proved wrong, of course. But when he went looking for counterarguments he never seemed to find anything direct and thoroughâjust the Democrat narrative that every problem could be solved by spending, and the Republican narrative that everything could be solved by tax cuts, and the History Channel narrative that Hitler was Lucifer and Martin Luther King was the Messiah, and the social-justice-Twitter narrative that white men were the root of all evil. Those were all forms of emotional badgering, not rational debate. When he googled race and crime, he found Jared Taylor. When he googled race and IQ, he found Steve Sailer. He also found the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the SPLC warning the normies not to look at the crimethinkersâ sites, but those warnings never seemed to include point-by-point refutations of the actual arguments. There were red pills everywhere if you knew where to look. (Location 5091)
- Some types of people seem to be particularly susceptible to extremist online propaganda: people with weak real-world social ties; people with unstable senses of self; people with too much verbal intelligence and not enough emotional intelligence; people who prize idiosyncrasy over logical consistency, or flashy contrarianism over humble moral dignity. (Location 6017)
- Where everybody lies about everything of importance, the truthteller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act; he, too, has engaged himself in political business, for, in the unlikely event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world. (Location 6027)
- Now, instead of imagining that we occupy a postgatekeeper utopia, it might make more senseâin the short term, at leastâto demand better, more thoughtful gatekeepers. (Location 6217)