Off-duty from TikTok and their Fox News guest-panelist gigs, the young conservatives did exhibit a certain level of willingness to really get into it in a mostly productive way, which, I’ll admit, is more than I can say about a lot of people back in Brooklyn. Still, it was disconcerting how often a normal conversation with one of these so-called normal people could cannonball from politics and policy into, at the very least, a not-so-PC joke and, at worst, something hateful.
When I first reached out to Wexler, for example, asking to talk about her weekend plans for the inauguration, she wrote back, “Let’s do it. Full transparency, I think ‘pronouns’ are ‘ret-----.’” She asked me to tell my readers that. “Tomorrow, we’re going to have images of them rounding up illegals and deporting them. That’s exciting,” she said another time, cackling. She also called me a “man in lipstick,” though I wasn’t wearing any. Later, when introducing me to Sinclair, she said, “He’s a queer. But a friendly
one.” I laughed.
“The hold the left has is coming to an end because you guys were making bad decisions,” a droll, self-confident IDF soldier tells me at Butterworth’s. “When you go too far, you isolate people, you polarize people. The pendulum effect is real.” Here, she says, “is where you can say whatever you want!”
I think one big takeaway from this (aside from how fucking insufferable these people are, of course) is that this coalition is extraordinarily fragile. A lot of people in this article are expressing support for extremely "thin" reasons--wanting to be on the winning side, wanting to be able to say slurs, aesthetics, and so on. There are former Biden and Bernie voters who are "on the Trump train" because it's the path of least resistance, and because the casual cruelty is both trendy and easier than giving a shit. It's really important to remember that a lot of these people are opportunists and/or grifters: the true believers of fascism are actually relatively rare. They had their opportunity for cultural ascendency here, and immediately squandered it by allowing those true believers to do whatever the fuck they want, which the vast majority of people find disgusting. I strongly suspect a lot of the people interviewed here will just sit out the next election. This isn't supposed to absolve them--they have blood on their hands as much as Stephen Miller does--but I think it's important to remember that this "cultural ascendency" is really a mirage. These people are fucking losers.
as you'd expect. Hopefully this is the end of his career in academia.
