Your Favorite Writers Aren't "Brave"

Courage is even rarer than you think

Recently, I was scrolling Twitter and saw someone post something like “I’m attracted to [some hot button culture war issue] because you can lose your livelihood for speaking out on it.” This was a writer who had done well for himself taking the anti-woke position on everything. I found this amusing, as I couldn’t remember a single instance of this individual ever challenging his fans by telling them something they didn’t want to hear. Yet here he was, implying that he was doing something tough and brave. I almost responded along these lines but then said forget it.

I’ve come to realize that many people define “brave” to mean “says things that I agree with.” I’ve previously argued that Liz Cheney clearly showed political courage over the last few years. Here was a woman who, probably for reasons of affirmative action and nepotism, became the third highest ranking Republican in Congress shortly after getting elected. For the rest of her life, she would’ve been at least a congressional leader, and probably at some point a plausible VP pick or cabinet secretary.

People are simply unable to distinguish between whether they like someone’s politics and whether they have any positive traits.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been tweeting a lot about black crime, as it’s become a hot topic on Twitter, and I’m no longer afraid of it getting me banned since Elon gave us permission to go nuts. The numbers of people following me on Twitter or subscribing to my Substack have shot up. For most people, saying blacks commit a lot of crime and we should talk about it more is not a smart career move. For someone in my position, it’s apparently the path to success.

What’s brave for me? Defending a woman’s right to choose, being pro-vaccine, or saying Liz Cheney is brave. I can see the follower count go down when I start talking like a normie, and people are so stupid that they accuse me of doing it to gain power and respect. To be fair, it is true that I would rather have the respect of smart people than dumb people, and so maximizing my follower count and income isn’t my only goal. But that’s not because the smart or high-status people are going to pay me or give me a job or anything; it’s based on a genuine belief that some human beings are better than others and more worth engaging with.

Me when I say democracy is good and you should listen to medical experts and get vaccinated.

The left surely isn’t immune to this. You sometimes hear them talk about the “bravery” of some female or minority activist, who isn’t in any physical danger and doing little more than cashing in on their identity.

On the right, you see a persecution complex as part of a broader oppositional culture. It’s not enough for conservatives to say that liberal ideas are generally advantaged in most areas of life. Rather, they have to believe that to be liberal is always to your advantage, while being conservative always brings oppression. So even if Liz Cheney is a Republican leader, taking a course of action that leads to her getting censured by her own party and eventually voted out of office must be to her advantage somehow, because CNN will say nice things as her career goes down in flames. It’s almost as if conservatives assume that of course anyone would rather have the approval of liberals because they’re naturally superior people, even if rightists can’t find a material incentive that would explain why someone would kiss up to the left in any particular case.

You probably already know that most people who follow politics like living in an echo chamber. I don’t think, however, most people understand how extreme this tendency is. I see that the numbers go up or down based on the extent to which I either reinforce or challenge right-wing dogma. Although some say they appreciate someone telling it like they see it, the data shows that most people clearly don’t.

When I try to rack my brain for examples of writers that I think have behaved bravely recently, not many examples come to mind. According to Unz, Steve Sailer stopped saying nice things about the covid vaccine after getting flak from his readers. There’s Yarvin’s hobbits and elves piece, though I’ve more recently seen him kissing up to pro-lifers. I remember admiring Claire Lehmann for pushing back against her audience on covid issues. So it happens, but writers are so rarely willing to make their audiences mad that it’s genuinely difficult to think of many clear cases. I like to give them credit and a status boost when they do.

The other day, Aaron Sibarium criticized the DeSantis campaign’s stance on vaccines, which they seem to be making a central part of their pitch to voters.

Talk like this is particularly harmful because what politicians say on the issue during a campaign actually matters. Someone could take one position on entitlements or foreign policy and then simply do something else when in office. But running on vaccine hesitancy contributes to the issue being politically polarized, and can directly end up affecting the decisions people make. I don’t think it matters much for covid anymore, but the next time we have a pandemic, there are likely to be serious consequences of Republicans taking this path, both in terms of policy and what their voters decide to do. Another Operation Warp Speed from a Republican president, unless maybe it’s Trump, has become much less likely, and if a Democrat does it there’s a good chance he’ll be opposed by the other side every step of the way.

Watching the DeSantis campaign, I keep asking myself, is this guy ever going to take a stance that goes against his immediate political interests? Will he ever say one thing that will make the online right mad? I can’t think of a single time he has. I’ve written before that I don’t think this is a good strategy. But I also have an aesthetic revulsion to behaving like this.

If you’re a smart conservative like Sibarium, you’re naturally not going to be a part of MAGAworld, so every incentive is towards maintaining a good relationship with the DeSantis crowd, which is the other major force in conservatism right now. Most DeSantis fans who are not themselves anti-skeptics have averted their eyes from this part of his campaign. Tweets like Sibarium’s one above are therefore clearly against his self-interest. I guess maybe one could make up a story saying that he just did it to get praise from the Richard Hanania Newsletter, just like Liz Cheney did everything to please CNN. Sibarium is one of the smarter young conservatives, and his work has been featured across mainstream publications and boosted by Elon Musk. But he’s only got 44K followers, which I suspect might be getting close to the maximum you can expect as a conservative who isn’t brain damaged or some sort of lunatic. Meanwhile, a guy sharing maps showing Trump winning California has almost three times as many.

A lot of people see the former president’s flaws and come down with Trump Derangement Syndrome. I think that what his critics say about him and what he did to the Republican Party are correct, but I can’t help but enjoy the show and respect the extent to which the man has bent conservatism to his will. Trump not being the leader of the Republican Party at this point in its history just feels wrong, like it would be inconsistent with the natural order of the universe. I have a sense that the gods are going to send a plague if he doesn’t win the primary. And because all other Republicans hate vaccines now, we won’t have the best tools possible to deal with it.

While I like Trump, it’s the wimps who have followed him when they should have known better that I really can’t stomach. They’ve spent years going along with the narrative that American politics is a Homeric struggle between Trump and the forces of darkness. They hid for their lives on January 6, voted against conviction in the Senate and then shrugged the events of that day off as they continually broke a longstanding and fundamental norm that one should acknowledge the results of elections. Every Trump legal issue was treated as a Deep State conspiracy targeting the only honest man in politics. They’ve done this for the better part of a decade now. And suddenly, in summer 2023, they finally want to turn around and start criticizing Trump. I was interested to recently read an article that provided evidence for what I’ve long suspected, which is that, in the minds of Republican voters, “conservatism” has come to be defined as “loyalty to Trump.” Weaning voters off of Trump now is like if you taught people to accept Christian dogma for years and then decided to run against Jesus in the primaries. Good luck.

And when they finally do criticize Trump, it’s not for encouraging a mob that came within moments of hanging his vice president, but for cutting through a failed bureaucracy and more quickly delivering a vaccine that saved millions of lives! It would be genuinely bad for our politics if such cowardice was rewarded with electoral success.