Weekly Grounding #46
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“Texas Tramples First Amendment Rights with Police Crackdown of Pro-Palestinian Protests”
discusses the recent police crackdown on protestors at the University of Texas at Austin for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) blog: Governor Greg “Abbott and UT Austin’s egregious response to peaceful protest and protected speech on campus doesn’t just violate the very state law Gov. Abbott signed — and to which, as a public university, UT Austin is beholden. It also violates the fundamental First Amendment rights of all citizens, including college students and faculty at a public university, to speak freely and loudly on issues of interest and concern. Such a disproportionate show of force meted out based on the content of protected speech is flagrantly unconstitutional, not to mention excessive and unfair, no matter how offensive, hateful, or wrong those in power may consider the speech.”While I subjected several FIRE-adjacent public intellectuals to criticism in my recent article, “In Defense of Woke Zoomers,” I am heartened to see that FIRE itself continues to stand up for free speech, despite many of its members’ personal sympathies with the State of Israel.
“Postcard from the Hispanic Working Class”
summarizes recent polling data on the ideological and political gap between non-college educated and college-educated Latino voters for : “These data strongly suggest that not only are working-class Hispanics driving the Hispanic trend toward Trump and the GOP but also that working-class and college-educated Hispanics have very different political outlooks and concerns that are obscured by thinking of them as an undifferentiated mass or, worse, ‘people of color.’ The beginning of wisdom is recognizing these class differences and adapting political appeals to take those differences into account.”Teixeira reports: “In terms of voting intentions, Biden leads by just one point among working-class Hispanics but by 39 points among their college-educated counterparts. Interestingly, this 38-point reverse class gap is actually larger than the class gap in this poll among whites (30 points).” He also notes that working-class Hispanics favor the policy proposal, “‘Build a full wall on the U.S.-Mexico border,’ by 18 points while college Hispanics oppose the idea by 19 points. And working-class Hispanics favor ‘Restrict the ability of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum,’ by a whopping 39 points while college Hispanics are roughly split down the middle.”
“Woke-Speak of Bosses at NPR and Academia Irks the Masses”
declares that “woke is over now” at Sublation Magazine: “[T]his way of talking is a style. It’s a style that has grown incredibly irritating. It’s a style that attributes to itself the supernatural ability to change reality by changing vocabulary. So, by its own standards it must be condemned as a miserable failure, insofar as it does not help people achieve justice, but primarily alienates and divides them. It functioned fairly effectively as long as it was restricted to the academic hothouse, but as it’s emerged, the futile absurdity of its layers of euphemisms has been exposed.”Sartwell perceptively observes that “There will be vestiges for decades, and many young people, having been thoroughly trained in woke academic style, will be confused and disabled politically for a bit as the echoes fade. They’ll need to adjust and maybe find a new way to be progressives. But the people who are really going to struggle are the college professors and administrators who came of age during this period, the squads of DEI officers and humanities professors who have already written hundreds of memos, or whole tenure books, in the approved vocabulary.”
“Internet Archetypes and the ‘Ideological Aesthetic’”
offers a fascinating analysis of male political livestreamers and their audiences at : Of various livestreamers, he writes: “Though putatively belonging to two different ideological persuasions, I was struck by the many similarities in their affect - their lexicon, their mannerisms, speech, and, dare I say physiognomy. As their origins should suggest, they’re united by a certain spiritual adolescence, and they are by no means alone in this. I’ve stumbled across many of these ‘Internet Guy’ archetypes over the past few years, and have been struck by a certain consistency. By and large, they are not people whom large numbers of their audience only aspire to be, rather than people who they already are.”Dematagoda continues: “They speak not to a state of being which one would like to attain, of self-improvement, but rather an admission of defeat, of consolation and solace at who one is. Yet they do live lives of material comfort that their audiences covet, nonetheless - despite being exactly the same as them….It’s clear that the followers of these ‘Internet Guys’ love them and hate them in equal measure, as they love and hate themselves…Aspiration is a hope for the future, consolation is something else entirely, and something which speaks to the uniquely dystopian character of present-day technological anomie.”
“The Women Of The E-Right”
Sticking with the topic of the internet and politics, but switching from the ‘Internet Guy’ to the ‘Internet Gal,’
provides a “spotters’ guide to the female tribes on the internet Right” at the . This “tongue-in-cheek” guide profiles “Dogwhistling Scene Girls,” “Redpill Pickmes,” “Viral Pinups,” “Pious Tradwives,” “Race Realist Radfems,” “Crunchy Fashmoms,” “Antifeminists,” “Anglofuturist E-Girls,” and “Reactionary Feminists.”Here’s an excerpt: “Redpill Pickmes: Not generally religious, and often ironically single, professional, and public-facing advocates for piety, marriage, and women withdrawing from public and political life. Lurked on manosphere forums long enough to learn the talking points, built a massive following very fast by repeating them while female. Now audience capture and the need to make rent means they can’t stop. A target of mockery by several of the other tribes.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
I eyewitnessed 21 peaceful protesters arrested at the University of Texas at Dallas on Wednesday as the encampment was razed by riot police. No one was committing civil disobedience, let alone rioting. They languished for 24 hours in the Collin County jail for exercising their 1st amendment rights. Other protesters pulled an all nighter in front of the jail and 300 were on hand when they were finally released.