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NancyB's avatar

"But it’s worthwhile to remember that what’s animating these efforts are not just ideas or an aggrieved sense of fairness, but burning, passionate contempt for women and minorities."

Thank you. Thank you for your willingness to state this so plainly. I think many liberals and progressives only fleetingly notice this hugely important fact. But for many women and minorities, it is blindingly obvious that this is the affective fuel driving rightwing politics right now.

Yes, much of the DEI language and formal initiatives are bloodless. Some are pernicious (imo no one should have to submit or sign a "diversity statement" when they apply for a job). But formal DEI measures are an epiphenomenon of a slow but real shift, and shift that has permitted women and minorities to stop conceding to hoary ideas about their place in natural law and in the rise of "civilization." That shift has set off not just political opposition of various kinds. It has ignited gut level feelings of disgust, contempt, hatred. As the emails show, all kinds of people are susceptible to those feelings, including women like McDonald and gay men like Thiel.

Say you will about the excesses and sometimes silliness of identity politics and Twitter activism, a lot of people are in the fight because they know at a visceral level that the rightwing doesn't just want to preserve a social "order," they want to crush and humiliate and strip the dignity from the people they view as upstarts who don't know their place.

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sjellic2's avatar

As I am eager to read more about in your book, there have long been some of these notes played on the right, but the two that strike me as especially prominent now

1. Really, genuinely believing there is nothing to save and preserve in actually existing America. The Flight 93 Election is jarringly blackpilled and that perspective hasn't changed. These guys were always disgusted with emergent cultures and trends, but they look at Main Street with disgust now.

2. The total absence of Christianity.

Both of them lend the movement to a more fascistic character.

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