Bennett's Phylactery
Jul 18, 2024 ∙ Paid
Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok) and other online conservatives are on the warpath against people who have advocated for the murder of President Trump on social media.
Jack Black cancelled his tour (and maybe his band). Raichik has collected the scalps of politicians, bureaucrats, school teachers, counselors, prosecutors, police officers — all of whom are obviously in positions of public trust and are not free to advocate murder in public without consequences.
But she has also gone after a handful of honest, working-class small-folk who were simply exercising their constitutional right to normie bloodlust.
Normie bloodlust is the tendency of people with conventional political opinions to publicly fantasize about ludicrous and deranged violence in furtherance of those opinions. They like to post about “fucking around and finding out”.
In 2021, they crowed for a teenager to be raped in prison. Also Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Andrew Tate — really, any time a Certified Bad Person goes to jail, they like to loudly savor the idea that he will be raped in there.
The more conventional the opinion, the more cartoonishly sadistic its enforcement. They love to talk about what ought to be done to pedophiles — not because they have unusually strong opinions about the well-being of children, but because pedophiles provide the broadest possible canvas on which to fantasize about social cruelty.
Normies are like this because they are allowed to be like this.
If you think that Love is Love and No Human Is Illegal, you can improve your relative social status simply by being louder and more aggressive about it than the next guy. If you think we ought to repeal the Civil Rights Act, you’d better be careful and clever and charming about it.
The Gaza War was a powerful normie-scrambler, because they got mixed signals from the top about which side was the Bad Guys. So they dutifully expressed their desire for either IDF or Hamas to be disemboweled and starved and raped in prison, only to discover too late that, actually, all this time they had been advocating violence against a marginalized community. (Yikes, bad look, etc.)
In the aftermath of last week’s assassination attempt, the organs of narrative control have been paralyzed.
If you check the news, you will notice that the only consensus they’ve even attempted to generate is that it would “irresponsible to speculate”. Even calling for an investigation is a bridge too far.
Accordingly, you may have noticed that the shooting is not generating much conversation at work or church, because people have not been told how to feel or what to think about it.
Most ordinary people are wisely keeping their mouths shut and waiting for a software update; but a handful of unfortunates have kept rolling with the old social instructions from a week ago, in which Donald Trump was a 100% acceptable target for normie bloodlust.
This is the window that people like Chaya Raichik are exploiting. Home Depot’s HR department hasn’t changed their fundamental ideological orientation — but they’re no longer sure where the line is. And since firing a cashier is cheap, they erred on the side of caution.
The debate about this phenomenon among conservatives has been framed largely in moral terms: is it fair to do this to some poor old lady? Is it proportionate? Is it hypocritical to institute “right wing cancel culture” when we’ve spent the last decade resisting it from the Left? Are we “no better than them” if we do “the same thing” when we are “in power”?
The problem is, we aren’t in power — not even close.
“Cancellation”, as characterized by its leftist proponents, is simply the result of doing and saying things that a lot of people don’t like. If you do something that enough people don’t like, you will find yourself proscribed in your professional and social opportunities.
They are right that there’s nothing unfair, and certainly nothing unconstitutional, about facing social opprobrium for unpopular speech and behavior. People have no moral obligation to listen to speech they find repulsive, or patronize businesses whose agendas they reject.
That is what happened to Dylan Mulvaney, and it’s what is currently happening to Jack Black.
But it’s not what has been happening to us for the last decade.
The reason you can get fired for liking a Steve Sailer tweet, or donating $25 to a legal defense fund, isn’t because of a Groundswell of Popular Outrage — it’s because your employer can face 9-figure fines if they refuse to enforce a particular set of social strictures.
When my doxx was released, the “expose” got 400 likes on Twitter. For perspective, I’ve had 10 tweets with more than that in the last 72 hours. 400 likes is not “viral”, even with a dozen antifa doxxing rings (at the height of their energy) and a reporter from the Guardian helping it along.
It turns out, nobody actually cares if an entry-level finance drone thinks that feminism sucks.
But it wasn’t about a “social media outrage mob”. My employer was a glowie intelligence contractor — they didn’t “cave to popular pressure”. They don’t even sell to the public.
It was about avoiding the threat of being sued for creating a Hostile Work Environment by allowing my words to go unpunished. They fired me to comply with federal law.
So it is, in fact, different when we do it.
There will always be social rules. There will always be things you can say that will embarrass your friends and that make you a reputational liability to associate with. If “free speech absolutism” extends to the social sphere, it becomes very difficult to coordinate around any other principles. (This is why the Libertarian National Convention is always such a humiliating clown show.)
The question is not whether there should be social rules, but who will make them, and who will enforce them.
There is a strain of conservatism that enjoys moralizing about tolerance as a simulacrum of power. They imagine that they permit all these transgressions against decency out of their boundless magnanimity and dignity, rather than their powerlessness.
If we can’t overcome our embarrassment at enforcing the most basic standards of behavior, we will never have power and don’t deserve it.
But there is another strain of cope, which suggests that this singular event has somehow flipped America’s human resources bureaucracy, and that right-wingers are the ones who do the cancelling now.
A good friend who works in HR issues the following warning:
But there are gains to be won in this moment.
Republican politicians have successfully struck fear into the hearts of some teachers and bureaucrats. It is possible to imagine a path forward in which right-wing activists consolidate wins like these, and clearly establish public-sector political purges as winning issues for red-state politicians.
These moves make more sense both optically and logistically than trying to tattle to private-sector HR departments.
Ordinary people understand intuitively that a woman responsible for socializing third-graders should not be slavering for blood in places where those children might see it.
It is also a much lighter lift to tell public sector workers in rural Oklahoma “there’s a new sheriff in town” than to unwind the decades-old infrastructure of law and custom that have established a communist secret police bureaucracy at The Home Depot.
Ultimately, though, the assassination attempt and its aftermath has revealed that the rot in our system will not be corrected through its own internal mechanisms of reform. None of these moves matter unless they assist in returning our system of government to direct human control.
The people who thrive in the coming years of crisis will be those who are realistic about the limitations on their power, without resigning themselves to powerlessness.
