Article / Archive
Today, The Guardian published a rather long and rambling piece (Archive) doxing an internet personality named Lomez—a man with 60 thousand Twitter followers who runs a publishing house that prints works by “new right” authors such as Steve Sailer and Nick Land. The piece isn’t newsworthy. It’s the sort of thing that no respectable outlet would have considered printing in the early 2010s. It’s only purpose is to say “here is the name of a man who says things I don’t like; it sure would be a shame if he suffered professional consequences.”
I do not desire to defend the beliefs of Mr. Lomez or any of the authors who publish under his imprint. But I just wonder why it is that one of the U.K.’s largest newspapers felt the need to expose the identity of a mid-tier internet guy when much more consequentially malignant figures—left and right—are allowed to exist freely among the media elite. Do they want the right to be nothing but Alex Joneses and Sean Hannities? How are any of these writers more worrisomely fascist than, say, Nikki Haley, or even Barack Obama?
So many examples spring to mind I hesitate to even list them—it almost feels too easy. Just two off the top of my head, and I’m sticking to Democrats here because they get the gladhand treatment from every mainstream outlet other than Fox: Ezekiel Emanuel, brother to Rham and Ari, wrote a book about how people over 75 years of age should be euthanized because that’s the cut off point when they can no longer work and human life has no value if it’s not earning a wage. He is still a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress, a member of Biden’s COVID advisory board, and a vice provost at the U-Penn school of medicine. If you or I were pictured handing this man an award, we would suffer no real consequences.
Or—I’m sorry to do this, easy target, I know—consider Hillary Clinton. As Secretary of State, the erstwhile Most Qualified Candidate in American History personally intervened to insure that Haiti did not raise its minimum wage from 21 cents an hour to 64 cents an hour. She engineered the Honduran coup and is very directly responsible for turning Libya into one of the world’s largest slave markets. Hillary might not be popular among the hard left, but she’s still free to exist unmolested within our media ecosphere, and you are still free to support her. No one is getting fired for paying her to give a speech. She can pump out a shitty book or Netflix show every year or two, and the personnel involved in these projects do not need to fear being permanently blacklisted from white collar employment.
On his twitter feed, Lomez claims that the reporter had stalked him for months, texted his wife, and attempted to get friends of his fired for associating with him. This might sound extreme if you’ve never been through something similar, but I find it completely plausible: friends and former colleagues of mine faced similar threats after I pseudonymously published an essay that very gently criticized cancel culture in higher ed from an avowedly left-wing perspective. And that was pre-Trump. Things have gotten significantly more vicious since then.
Regardless of whether the subject of the attack is a “brocialist” who was insufficiently differential to the DNC or an “alt right” figure who dared published something that resembled right-wing populism, this is how the attacks always play out. There’s no attempt to engage with anything a Bad Guy has said or written. Today’s left has such little confidence in the strength of their own ideas they consider the act of persuasion a form of violence. Instead, they present a handful of incendiary quotes bereft of context, make some vague intonations about the nascent rise of neo-fascism, then provide a list of names and addresses to ensure that their readers will contact the proper HR departments. It’s scuzzy. It’s gross. It’s counterproductive and goes a very long way in legitimizing the comments that warranted the attack. And it’s now absolutely mainstream.
Today, The Guardian published a rather long and rambling piece (Archive) doxing an internet personality named Lomez—a man with 60 thousand Twitter followers who runs a publishing house that prints works by “new right” authors such as Steve Sailer and Nick Land. The piece isn’t newsworthy. It’s the sort of thing that no respectable outlet would have considered printing in the early 2010s. It’s only purpose is to say “here is the name of a man who says things I don’t like; it sure would be a shame if he suffered professional consequences.”
I do not desire to defend the beliefs of Mr. Lomez or any of the authors who publish under his imprint. But I just wonder why it is that one of the U.K.’s largest newspapers felt the need to expose the identity of a mid-tier internet guy when much more consequentially malignant figures—left and right—are allowed to exist freely among the media elite. Do they want the right to be nothing but Alex Joneses and Sean Hannities? How are any of these writers more worrisomely fascist than, say, Nikki Haley, or even Barack Obama?
So many examples spring to mind I hesitate to even list them—it almost feels too easy. Just two off the top of my head, and I’m sticking to Democrats here because they get the gladhand treatment from every mainstream outlet other than Fox: Ezekiel Emanuel, brother to Rham and Ari, wrote a book about how people over 75 years of age should be euthanized because that’s the cut off point when they can no longer work and human life has no value if it’s not earning a wage. He is still a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress, a member of Biden’s COVID advisory board, and a vice provost at the U-Penn school of medicine. If you or I were pictured handing this man an award, we would suffer no real consequences.
Or—I’m sorry to do this, easy target, I know—consider Hillary Clinton. As Secretary of State, the erstwhile Most Qualified Candidate in American History personally intervened to insure that Haiti did not raise its minimum wage from 21 cents an hour to 64 cents an hour. She engineered the Honduran coup and is very directly responsible for turning Libya into one of the world’s largest slave markets. Hillary might not be popular among the hard left, but she’s still free to exist unmolested within our media ecosphere, and you are still free to support her. No one is getting fired for paying her to give a speech. She can pump out a shitty book or Netflix show every year or two, and the personnel involved in these projects do not need to fear being permanently blacklisted from white collar employment.
On his twitter feed, Lomez claims that the reporter had stalked him for months, texted his wife, and attempted to get friends of his fired for associating with him. This might sound extreme if you’ve never been through something similar, but I find it completely plausible: friends and former colleagues of mine faced similar threats after I pseudonymously published an essay that very gently criticized cancel culture in higher ed from an avowedly left-wing perspective. And that was pre-Trump. Things have gotten significantly more vicious since then.
Regardless of whether the subject of the attack is a “brocialist” who was insufficiently differential to the DNC or an “alt right” figure who dared published something that resembled right-wing populism, this is how the attacks always play out. There’s no attempt to engage with anything a Bad Guy has said or written. Today’s left has such little confidence in the strength of their own ideas they consider the act of persuasion a form of violence. Instead, they present a handful of incendiary quotes bereft of context, make some vague intonations about the nascent rise of neo-fascism, then provide a list of names and addresses to ensure that their readers will contact the proper HR departments. It’s scuzzy. It’s gross. It’s counterproductive and goes a very long way in legitimizing the comments that warranted the attack. And it’s now absolutely mainstream.
