The goal isn’t to anesthetize disagreement; it is to inoculate public life against dehumanizing hierarchies smuggled in as common sense.
Wait, so you’re telling me speaking breathily in hushed but very deliberate tones like an NPR interview doesn’t automatically make you a great person deserving of respect and accolade and substack subscriptions?? 🤯
Challenging a line or two inside a chummy format is little more than fact-check pantomime, the performance of scrutiny with none of the rigor. It signals seriousness while leaving the audience with the impression that the differences are ideological rather than moral, that the right answer to dehumanization is to speak more softly to it. Worse, lowering the heat in the studio often raises it outside the room. Viewers are told to prize civility while watching politicians and pundits lie, mislead, and dissemble without consequence; the gap between polite banter and public harm curdles into resentment.
The trolling and half-truths must be met in the moment lest they metastasize in the feeds, producing an economy that packages its wares for audiences curated by shared hatreds. If we invite those whose programs obstruct a common life of equal dignity—deepening inequalities, narrowing rights, and multiplying suffering—we owe the public more than cordiality. A conversation that ends without fists is the minimum, not the model. Keeping the peace is necessary; calling it “exactly the right way” is an abdication.
Adding fresh water to a cesspool does not purify it. The work here is not governmental censorship but private stewardship—editorial design and curatorial responsibility. Don’t grant free and unfettered access to long-standing garbage-dumpers without meaningful challenge and correction. The problem compounds when the young, with little ability to distinguish vetted knowledge from confident fabulism, meet “the other side” for the first time because a host has imported that viewpoint simply to gain more reach. If you’re going to expose your audience to that guest, the framing, the record, and the counters must travel with them. Otherwise you’re not informing; you’re onboarding.
Fuck, I am so glad somebody wrote this because it needs to be said so loudly and on repeat. Throw back to the last time this happened (and it’s hard to believe in hindsight that seems mild by comparison to what we’re facing in the present). This is not normal, so stop normalizing it!
This is not pedantry. It is the substance of liberal responsibility. Politics is more than the absence of bullets; it is the quality of speech that fills the space bullets might otherwise occupy. Ideas may not pull a trigger, but they draw the lines of what type of violence becomes thinkable. The twentieth century’s worst episodes did not begin with gunfire. They began with named categories—“parasites,” “vermin,” “degenerates,” “enemies of the people”—ways of talking that prepared the ground for ways of acting.
The best moments in liberal modernity, by contrast, have tried to reset the moral grammar: The Reconstruction Amendments, Brown v. Board, and the Civil Rights Act recast public life around equal protection, dignity before hierarchy. To say “we argue here, we do not shoot” is a minimum. The question is what is being argued for, and what a platform helps along. Politics at its best turns enemies into adversaries under rules and accepts that conflicts over fundamental values endure, which is why the guardrails matter. The goal isn’t to anesthetize disagreement; it is to inoculate public life against dehumanizing hierarchies smuggled in as common sense.
It’s kinda the paradox of tolerance come to think of it. Civility and tolerance go hand in hand.
This whole article is fucking awesome, but I think maybe this line says it best:
The goal isn’t to anesthetize disagreement; it is to inoculate public life against dehumanizing hierarchies smuggled in as common sense.
Psychological inoculation is the key to battling disinformation, and calling out half truths or fact checking claims is not intolerance. It’s just bare minimum moral responsibility for anyone claiming to represent a liberal viewpoint.
Neutrality has a side. Camus put the duty starkly: “The writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.” The same charge falls now on the podcaster, the news anchor, the radio host—every keeper of a microphone. Let liberal platforms prove their willingness to meet the demands of this moment—by whom they book, how they frame, and what ideas they center in the weeks ahead. The task now is not to lower the temperature, but to raise the standard.
All my homies hate Ezera
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice - MLK Jr
Ezra in a nutshell
Oh, what a better place the world might have been if people like Charlie Kirk and Ezra Klein had stayed in those figurative nuts.
Fuck them all, and fuck Charlie Kirk he died from what he believed don’t see any problem with that. His words school shootings are just a fact of life. Maybe if their kids start or better yet them start getting shot at instead of “the poors” they would start caring.
Charlie fucking sucked. He abused educational institutions to make himself appear as legitimate and the victim of persecution for his shitty and shallow beliefs. The people that defended and followed him are incredibly stupid. Stupid in the sense that they don’t care about complex thinking and want simple answers that appear correct only on the surface.
