Freddie de Boer, who I’m happy to see is still around, has a recognition of a behavior in leftists that’s the same for the right:
One of the things I discovered early, in my little political niche, was the obsession with magic words. Leftists were forever throwing emotionally loaded terms around, like when the coffeehouse didn’t have raw sugar and they called it fascism. It’s not really hard to understand why: when you have no power, you resort to mysticism. You instill words with powers they can’t really have because you’re desperate to feel in control of something, anything. That’s what “eugenics” has become online; it’s not much different from your average depressed wine mom talking about Mercury being in retrograde. They all just want to feel a little bit of power.
And I’ve seen right-wingers waving around phrases like objective evidence and scientific arguments (or maybe it was scientific evidence) to uphold views on Jesus and abortion, as if they invoked the magical phrases of the era, maybe they’d gain more prestige.
And I don’t doubt they’re right. Not that they’re right about Jesus and abortion, but they probably did gain more prestige.
So now I see the left is doing that, too. It’s not just weaponization, like using BIGOT! on people like J. K. Rowling and Richard Dawkins for attempting to start debates on transgenderism, but by claiming to recognize eugenics in anything, they can make claims of intellectual insight, and thus climb their ladder of power and prestige.
It’s worth noting that there’s more than one ladder of power and prestige in the nation, it’s just a matter of which one people respect, and which ones are not respected, by the people you want to be respected by. Got that?
Good. Tell me what I’m trying to tell you.
