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The day before my interview with the poet, essayist, memoirist and novelist Patricia Lockwood, the attempted coup took place in Washington DC. She, like myself and millions of others, followed it online, scrolling for hours, watching as President Trump continued to incite his fans by posting untruths about the election. Whatever divide ever existed between the real and virtual worlds was as decisively shattered as the Capitols windows.

WHAT A DAY TO BE SITTING ON YOUR BUTT IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER, EH, Lockwood emailed me from her home in Savannah, Georgia, using the all-caps and no-punctuation style that all of us who spend too much time online recognise as meta sarcasm: sarcasm but also sarcastically mocking the obviousness of the sarcasm.

I tell her that Ive spent 127 hours on Twitter. Lockwood is often described as the poet laureate of Twitter and the 38-year-old originally made a name for herself with her joyfully weird tweets, such as her parodies of sexts (I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. Wow, I yell in ecstasy, This makes no sense at all. And asking the Paris Review: So is Paris any good or not (no punctuation, of course.) So I feel no shame in admitting my social media addiction to her.

It was like every hour became somehow cubic and we were chained up in it like a murder basement, she writes back, combining the punchy hyperbole of Twitter (murder basement) with the lyrical originality (every hour became somehow cubic) that has made her a literary star. As well as two poetry collections (Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals), she has published a bestselling memoir, 2017s Priestdaddy, about when she and her husband were forced to move back in with her mother and her raucously eccentric father, who became a Catholic priest after watching The Exorcist 72 times. She is also a contributing editor for the London Review of Books where she wrote about her recent experience with long-term Covid, which she caught when travelling to Harvard last year to give a lecture. She had a bad bout of it: Everyone I know who had Covid says that at some point in the night they felt like, OK, body, you had a good run, were over now. But so many people died who didnt have to, she says. Whereas she used to travel often, she has been largely housebound for the past year, partly due to the lockdown, but mainly becasue of her health. She still cant type due to the arthritis she developed: See how the joints are crazy prominent? she says, holding up her palms, joints pressing through the flesh. So she largely dictates her notes: But I have to consider myself lucky, even though I cant use my hands.

When Lockwood was a young unknown, her poems occasionally getting plucked from the slush piles of literary magazines, posting online taught her how to let her personality shine through in her writing. She has always had an almost synaesthetic reaction to words: When I read the words moonlit swim I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word sunshine had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it, she writes in Priestdaddy, something she puts down to being, she says, not a neurotypical person. Whether shes writing a poem about Shirley Temple (Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do / you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand / in a circle and whisper to her, Shirley Temple / there will be war. Shirley Temple youll get no / lunch) or describing the decor of a restaurant in Priestdaddy (a fake cactus threw up its helpless arms, as if my father were holding it at gunpoint), there is the impression that Lockwood is getting as much of a kick out of her gleefully unique prose as the reader.

Absolutely Im the Barbra Streisand of tasting my own voice. I dont have any problems with procrastination where writing is concerned, she says. Writing on the internet helped her to find that pleasure in her originality. But in around 2012, she noticed there was increasingly a conformity in online writing: the hyperbole, the all-caps, the meta sarcasm, the coining of a universal internet-speak. Her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, published in the UK next month, has already garnered praise from Sally Rooney and was extracted in the New Yorker last year (Now everyone is talking about this, an American writer emailed me, deliberately invoking the excitement around the extract, and also, less deliberately, his jealousy of the size of the literary spotlight accorded to Lockwood.) The novel began as a diary in which she wrote about being on the internet and the feeling my thoughts were being dictated.

You have to look for where the language goes crunchy, where everybody starts saying the same things and formulating their reactions in the same way and step out of it, Lockwood says. The result of this stepping out is an extraordinarily original novel about interplay between the online and real worlds, one which would have felt bitingly relevant anyway, but now feels almost painfully so. On the day of our interview which we, inevitably, conduct online the newspaper headlines are that Trump will be banned from Twitter. In Lockwoods book he is referred to ironically-but-also-not-ironically as the dictator.

We could all see [how Trump used Twitter] and that lets people take a book about Twitter more seriously. But good luck describing the book! she laughs.

Here goes. The first half is about the unnamed and extremely online (Extremely Online, as extremely online people put it) protagonists life on social media, where she communicates in memes (SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS), talks in the new shared sense of humour (ironic, doomy, deliberately exclusive) and makes herself care about the things that they care about (Every fiber in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police). She watches how peoples behaviour changes online, individually and collectively (A man who three years ago only ever posted things like Im a retard with butt aids was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way). She also explains the reason for those changes in passages that evoke proper laughter as opposed to merely an emoji laughing face:

White people, who had the political educations of potatoes, were suddenly feeling compelled to speak about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.

The book is formatted into bite-sized paragraphs, so it feels as if you are scrolling down a social media timeline. It is also largely autobiographical and in the second half a devastating family tragedy occurs, and the protagonist mentally returns to the offline world. Whereas in the first half of the book the narrators biological sex is irrelevant, in the second half the offline part it is inescapable as she is forced to confront issues such as abortion rights, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. On the internet people send her memes, in the real world they ask her why she hasnt had a baby yet.

Ive always felt like a grey alien whos forced to wear a bikini in summer, and I dont know if Im capable of having children, which disqualifies me from traditional womanhood to a lot of people. I think that is what is so attractive about the internet to me and people like me: you can exist there as a spirit in the void, Lockwood says.

Lockwood is all too aware that books about the internet have a bad reputation: [They] had the strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement, she writes in Nobody Is Talking About This. There is no boner pressure here. The novel captures better than anything Ive ever read what its like to be online, which is not a surprise, given how enmeshed Lockwoods life is with the internet: as well as originally coming to prominence on Twitter, she met her husband Jason Kendall online (in a poetry chatroom so innocent). Lockwood had no doubt that she could pull off this high-wire act of a book: I have never experienced a lack of confidence, because Im an extreme megalomaniac, she says, ironically-but-not-ironically. I think this is something I inherited from my dad. This is a guy who believes he has the vocation to be a Catholic priest, so maybe if you grow up seeing something like that you get weird ideas about what youre set on Earth to do.

As deeply enjoyable as Nobody Is Talking About This is, as I read it I wondered if this ephemeral thing Twitter was a worthy subject for Lockwoods enduring talent. So many people are spending all their time on it, and its a worthwhile topic just for that reason, she says. Even politicians communicate in internet-speak now: Hillary Clinton tweeted the meme Delete your account at Trump and Barack Obama teases Joe Biden with visual memes. It is wallpapering the brains of those of us who use it too much, as much as its warping our politics, so Lockwood is right: it is absurd to treat Twitter as irrelevant. But was she worried that those who arent Extremely Online would be put off by the books Extreme Online-ness?

I never thought about the non-Extremely Online reactions, she says. But yes, you want [the book] to stand up to the test of time, but also to preserve the vernacular, so thats the line youre walking.

The internet can be a place where you hide yourself behind memes, or post your most intimate thoughts. Lockwood has generally taken the former approach, revealing little of her life online. But in her publishing career, she has gone the other way. In 2012 the website, the Awl, published her poem, Rape Joke, which was far sparser than her previous poems. It was also, unusually, autobiographical, describing when she was raped when she was 19.

My work up to that point was so non-autobiographical, I was like a little Wallace Stevens: Look at this jar, its on a hill! Im barely here! So maybe if you keep the autobiographical dammed up for so long, it emerges in something like Rape Joke, she says.

After years of just scraping by, Rape Joke propelled her to literary celebrity, aided by Lockwoods original support system, the internet, where the poem went viral, as poems rarely do. After that she published Priestdaddy, in which she described her peripatetic childhood in the midwest with her charismatic but also batshit crazy a lot conservative parents, her attempted suicide as a teenager and her adult writing career. She writes about her parents very fondly, but says if she was still living with them Id be back on the mental ward, because of [their] politics. Her father was, she says, an early inhabitant of the rightwing alternate reality and is a fan of conservative figureheads such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter (but not Fox News: Too liberal.)

One of the first experiences I had of someone whose language was going crunchy was when Id hear him say something and think: Thats not something he came up with himself, hes repeating something that someone else told him. That struck me as strange, she says.

On the one hand, Lockwoods rise to fame looks like an eminently 21stcentury story: she made her name on Twitter and she has now written two books that at least touch on the online world. But she also took a more traditional path, achieving literary acclaim by writing about her most personal experiences, something women writers from Nora Ephron to Elizabeth Wurtzel have done for decades.

Priestdaddy came out at the height of the cult of the personal essay, when [publishers] were encouraging young women to write these books of hyper-revealing essay and not protecting them . With Priestdaddy, I recognised all that to be true and also I knew I could write a good book and thats what I had to concentrate on, she says.

Did she feel protected after Rape Joke came out? I dont think you can be protected, and I did feel vulnerable. Still now Ill be caught off guard if Im being introduced somewhere for a reading and the very first thing they say about me is that I wrote Rape Joke, and Im supposed to get up there and make a funny joke. Ill sometimes go completely quiet and you can see Im experiencing something traumatic in real time. But its still a poem that I wrote, she says.

Lockwood is currently working on a collection of short stories. I ask if she had always wanted to write stories and she says she doesnt plan her books that way: When Im working on something, I like to use extremely wet clay rather than chipping from a block of marble. So I start a book by nudging my way into dark corners, she says, taking palpable pleasure from each of the words, possibly picturing a woodland animal, or herself, burrowing through the mud. Eventually, a path reveals itself, she smiles.

What had the beautiful thought been, the bright profundity she had roused herself to write down? She opened her notebook with the sense of anticipation she always felt on such occasions perhaps this would finally be it, the one they would chisel on her gravestone. It read:

chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what

***

After you died, she thought as she carefully washed her legs under the fine needles of water, for she had recently learned that some people didnt, you would see a little pie chart that told you how much of your life had been spent in the shower arguing with people you had never met. Oh but like that was somehow less worthy than spending your time carefully monitoring the thickness of beaver houses for signs of the severity of the coming winter?

***

Was she stimming? She feared very much that she was.

***

Things that were always there:

The sun.

Her body, and the barest riffling at the roots of her hair.An almost music in the air, unarranged and primary and swirling, like yarns laid out in their colors waiting.The theme song of a childhood show where mannequins came to life at night in a department store.Anonymous History Channel footage of gray millions on the march, shark-snouted airplanes, silk deployments of missiles, mushroom clouds.An episode of True Life about a girl who liked to oil herself up, get into a pot with assorted vegetables, and pretend that cannibals were going to eat her. Sexually.The almost-formed unthought, Is there a bug on me???

A great shame about all of it, all of it.

No One Is Talking About This is published by Bloomsbury Circus.

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Patricia Lockwood: 'That's what's so attractive about the internet: you can exist there as a spirit in the void - The Guardian

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Carole Sargent, Georgetown University

(THE CONVERSATION) Years ago I discovered a shocking early English political satirist when a professor urged me not study her. Dismissing what I assumed was his liberal bias, I claimed bipartisan curiosity and dove in anyway. You could say I fell for the clickbait.

What I found went beyond politics. To explain why I later stopped studying her, I said she sounded like the Ann Coulter of 1709, after the modern right-wing commentator. The satirist, London playwright Delarivier Manley, wrote and flourished between 1690 and 1720. In 1709 she anonymously published The New Atalantis, two bestselling books packed with behind-the-scenes political scandals. This gossipy, libelous attack included sex and humor.

Political conservatives like her were called Tories, then an emerging party. Also known as royalists, they stood for a powerful throne, an archbishop-controlled Church of England and nobility ruling the working class. The opposing faction, Whigs, were rough equivalents of todays British Labour party, leaning toward what became representative government with a prime minister. Literary scholar Rachel Carnells new book Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne, with images from my collection of Manleys books, offers context for that complex time.

The American colonies werent yet a country, and their leaders followed London news. As an early Americanist studying English women writers influence on our shores, I noted William Byrd II, founder of Richmond, Virginia, staying up nights decoding Manleys books.

Manleys opinions seemed like standard Tory politics, so at first I didnt see a problem. As I decoded more stories, however, a disturbing subtext emerged.

Brilliant disguises

I missed her more extreme points because she wrote in a kind of storybook code. Strict libel laws might land a writer in prison, so she couldnt attack directly. Instead, Manley used popular songs and fables as strategic cover. When she was arrested, she claimed ignorance and avoided prison.

In one scene I decoded, a poet wife smacks her priest husband in the face with a hot apple pie, followed by butter to cool him again. The scene was vague enough for her to plausibly deny any connection to real people, even under oath in court. Within a generation few understood it.

Three centuries later, I used 21st-century technology to decipher it. Working with a database of 18th-century texts, which computers have only recently been able to scan, and using clues in a footnote from literary scholar Ros Ballaster of Oxford, I searched pye (their spelling), butter and stories of wives beating husbands.

Manley borrowed both characters from famous ballads to disguise a well-known, divorcing couple. She accused the wife, poet Sarah Fyge Egerton, and her rich Whig patrons of being what we now call feminists. Modern far-right provocateur Ann Coulter dubs them angry, man-hating lesbians, and Manley later used the charge of lesbianism as a similar political cudgel. Womens sexual empowerment became a weapon pie upending both the poets marriage and the order of the Church of England.

Humor can normalize bigotry

Manley was an entertaining writer, memorably commenting on controversial issues while escaping serious punishment. But as my digging revealed coded racism, antifeminism, homophobia and fear of immigration, I reconsidered my priorities.

She admitted that she was a perfect bigot, citing untainted lineage. In another story I decoded, she portrayed the new Bank of England in dangerous debt to foreign lenders. She warned they would foreclose, steal jobs, marry into the aristocracy and rule Britannia. Her warnings also influenced American colonial leaders.

Gradually I understood why Winston Churchill had railed against her. Though he was no champion for immigrants, he deplored her tactics. Manley insulted his ancestor the duke of Marlborough, saying he prostituted himself to a kings mistress to buy his military commission. She also claimed Marlborough prolonged a war for personal gain, and bet on the outcome of battles he commanded. Churchill wanted to sweep her back to the cesspool from which she should never have crawled.

The charm offensive

I met Ann Coulter at the National Press Club. She was friendly, but why not? Manley also had personality. Jonathan Swift, famed author of Gullivers Travels and A Modest Proposal, dined with her and hired her to edit his Tory newspaper one summer. But Swift eventually distanced himself, complaining Manley ranted too much. Similarly, the conservative magazine National Review dropped Coulters column after her post-9/11 call to invade (Muslim) countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.

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Manleys will requested her papers be burned, that none ghost like may walk after my decease, but her spirit still rattles around. In 2016 her wraith must have howled in glee over Brexit. In early 2017 I thought I heard her cheering when the immigrant-loathing United States president initiated a Muslim ban.

Instead of Manley, I now study a Whig poet who was influential in early America, Elizabeth Singer Rowe. If my identification of her in The New Atalantis is correct, then Manley attacked her for being a closeted lesbian. I anticipate bringing her, Sarah Fyge Egerton and others to vivid political life for a new generation of readers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/my-research-helped-uncover-a-long-lost-right-wing-provocateur-but-then-i-turned-away-from-her-work-150118.

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My research helped uncover a long-lost right-wing provocateur but then I turned away from her work - Houston Chronicle

In the days leading up to Trumps departure from office, his online followers watched with horror as his pardons that were supposed to go to allies and supporters instead went to people who were inherently swampy: white-collar criminals convicted of tax fraud, family friends, Steve Bannon, even Democrat Kwame Kirkpatrick.

So just to recap: Trump will pardon Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, high profile Jewish fraudsters No pardons for middle class whites who risked their livelihoods by going to war for Trump, fumed a user in a white supremacist channel on Telegram, the encrypted messaging service that has gained thousands of new subscribers since the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Conspiracies flew out of the mouth of Fox News host Tucker Carlson that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had blackmailed Trump out of pardoning Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, further infuriating MAGA hardliners. Trumps anti-immigrant base, whod been with him since his initial run for the presidency in 2015, flipped out when he granted amnesty to tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants.

Please vote to convict, Ann Coulter tweeted to GOP senators.

And the QAnon community, a group that had desperately hoped Trump had one final ploy to stay in power and fight against the nebulous forces of darkness in Washington, erupted in despair as Joe Biden became president of the United States. It got so bad that one prominent QAnon online forum threatened to ban any users who posted negative content.

There's a lot of grief and confusion in Q world over the plan seeming to fizzle out, and feeling as if Q abandoned them, Mike Rothschild, a disinformation researcher working on a book about QAnon, told POLITICO. But I think that will very quickly turn into determination to continue down the path they've committed to.

Taken together, the reactions across MAGA internet reveal a mosaic of anger, denial and disappointment that the former president let them down in his final days.

Without their leader to direct next steps, the MAGA coalition the extremist militants, the hate groups, the conspiracy theorists, and the stans is starting to turn on itself.

The movement is self-driving now, said Shane Creevy, a disinformation researcher at Kinzen, a data analytics firm that tracks online falsehoods and works with social media companies to counter potential threats. With Trump gone, the head has been decapitated, but that doesnt mean this is going away. The big question is what happens next?

Since the Jan. 6 riots, which resulted in five deaths and scores of arrests nationwide, more mainstream right-wing influencers like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino scaled back their support for potential challenges to the results of the November election. But rather than calming their millions of online followers, the efforts have produced a backlash, with posters calling these high-profile personalities traitors for not fully supporting insurrection.

Conspicuously missing was any direction from Trump.

Without his Twitter account, the ability to communicate with his base was muted. The polished videos posted on the White Houses official Twitter account were greeted with suspicion. But in the build up to Inauguration Day, Trump supporters, QAnon acolytes and extremist militias still, at a minimum, held out hope that the outgoing president would stick it to the establishment on the way out the door.

On encrypted message boards and digital apps, followers labeled Jan. 19 as national popcorn day in the hopes that they would have a front-row seat to the mass arrests of Antifa campaigners and, possibly, Trump imposing martial law in an effort to turn the election.

As the hours ticked closer to Bidens swearing in, the online chatter became more tense, with different online users questioning the loyalty of others, while increasingly getting desperate that The Storm, or the violent overthrow of deepstate agents, would never materialize.

POLITICO NEWSLETTERS

Tracking the people, policies, and emerging power centers of the Biden Administration.

In white supremacist Telegram channelssome of which have tens of thousands of followersthe anger soon spilled over into outright hatred toward Trump, as well as a call-to-arms to the outgoing presidents more mainstream followers that they had been misled.

Let this be a wake-up call for QAnon followers and normies, one post read just ahead of the inauguration. No one is coming to save you. No one man can defeat this evil marxist machine.

Amid accusations and counter-accusations, different parts of Trumps base began to turn on each other. QAnon supporters lashed out at militia groups, claiming they were part of the deep-state plot to undermine Trump and that the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill were part of an elaborate coup attempt, either by parts of the federal government, Black Lives Matter campaigners or, bizarrely, China. They even turned against certain QAnon celebrities Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn for hyping them up.

Elsewhere, mainstream MAGA voters ridiculed QAnon groups unbending belief that Trump was the savior even as he boarded Air Force One for the last time on his departure from the White House.

It's all been a con from the start. Promises made and not kept, one user posted on TheDonald.win, a website that has been flooded with conspiracy theories and calls for violence in recent weeks, in reference to the QAnon movement. You sat on your butt waiting for someone else to do what everyone should have taken care of themselves.

Several members of the QAnon community scrambled to suggest that Biden was now going to execute the conspiracy theorys underlying beliefs, or even that the incoming president had switched faces with Donald Trump. But in a sign that Trumps reign was truly over, former 8kun administrator Ron Watkins, one of the only people who allegedly knew the identity of the mysterious Q, published a post on Telegram surrendering to the inevitable.

We have a new president sworn in and its our responsibility as citizens to respect the Constitution regardless of whether or not we agree with the specific details regarding officials who are sworn in, Watkins wrote.

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Trump leaves QAnon and the online MAGA world crushed and confused - POLITICO

The world has gotten used to watching news broadcasters, commentators, and all sorts of entertainers shoot footage from their homes. Seeing what somebody chooses for their backdrop says a lot about that person and their unintentional / intentional home self.

Some go with the feng shui-minimalist-uncluttered life look. This space might include one of those tri-fold Japanese byobu dressing screens (delicate images of smiling dragons and swirling lotus flowers are optional, along with character writing that could say anything because, who would know?). Add a lived-in feel by including a table with only a bonsai tree and an earthenware noodle bowl, perhaps drape the string of a Darjeeling tea bag fashionably over the edge. Accessorize this look with a copy of The Analects by Confucious laying at a breezy angle. Having an obese cat, preferably a marmalade-colored tabby make an unplanned, disinterested stroll through the shot adds a whimsical note.

The bookcase is a classic look. Cant go wrong with this choice, and its a shame more people dont use it. Its not as simple as it seems. It takes a lot of thought to make something look thoughtless. I say bookcase but the case itself is really another matter. Books are the main element. Serious questions abound. How many books should I include? Should they be neatly arranged, because that might imply they havent been touched in years? Should I stack them here and there in teetering piles, maybe lay a few open and attach brightly colored sticky notes? Then, there are titles. This is a profound deliberation. I could go the professorial route and leave Moby Dick or Don Quixote casually in view. That might look pretentious. Perhaps the earnestly cynical-Gore Vidal-cultural critic look would suit me better. Dress-down this look by letting treatises from rabble-rousing demagogues appear in the shot, like Ann Coulter or Michael Moore. One goes virtually mad with choices.

Sports folk are prone to hanging framed antique promotional flyers from obscure sporting events conveniently in the shot. The level of insider cool is off the charts. Sports nerds frame flyers from events like when the Ringling Brothers Circus roared through the CoreStates Spectrum the night before facility staff herded everything out to start shooting the first Rocky movie; or the x-ray of the dental work of some poor schmuck Mickey Mantle punched on a bender through Gotham with Billy Martin. A golf putter leaning casually in a corner, and a Nerf basketball goal, the kind with sucker cups, stuck to something incongruous, such as a picture of Winston Churchill holding a cricket bat, add nice touches.

I suppose the accidental / contrived backgrounds for home broadcasts arent any more inauthentic than the nighttime New York skyline that I loved behind David Letterman, or the dungeon of Svengoolie, which I still enjoy (It was particularly good on Saturday, with The Creature From the Black Lagoon.). Its all smoke and mirrors anyway, right?

The rest is here:
Oh, was that in the shot? | Pontotoc Progress | djournal.com - Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

What a time to be alive.

The last year has brought with it a global health pandemic, racial strife and national reflection, a fraught election and finally a violent assault on the nations Capitol.

This country is divided with various factions of our countrymen ascribing the worst possible motives to others. Many dont just think their neighbors are malevolent, they know it.

Increasingly, the attempt to understand those with thoughts divergent from those we find acceptable is supplanted with an effort to stifle those thoughts and deem them too menacing to be aired in polite society.

Inevitably, activist classes mobilize and the purveyors of unfavorable speech and their enablers are set upon and made to apologize, relinquish their appointments or suffer any sort of cancellation.

This week, the Washington, D.C., site Politico came under fire from both staffers within and pundits on the outside when conservative star Ben Shapiro was allowed to guest-author the newsletter.

Upset staffers vented on a Zoom call, others used the messaging app Slack to lament Shapiros presence in the magazine, one citing Shapiros long history of bigoted and incendiary commentary.

Another commented, This is especially confusing given the newsrooms welcome efforts over the last year to cover issues related to race in a more intentional, elevated, thoughtful way,

In recent weeks, liberal journalists have also authored the newsletter, including MSNBCs Chris Hayes, CBSs Weijia Jiang and PBSs White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor.

Those writers enjoyed little or no controversy as their belief systems and politics fit more favorably with Politicos staffers.

When New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi responded to the controversy by tweeting a message meant to convey the importance of listening to those who we disagree with, CNN Fact checker Daniel Dale responded by posting screenshots of Nuzzi praising columnist Ann Coulter more than six years ago.

Im curious if youve ever explained this stuff, Dale posted, in an obvious attempt to redirect the social media mob onto Nuzzi who had merely posted, many years ago at barely the age of 20, positive words about a conservative columnist.

This week, it was Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey who was under fire from progressive media outlets. The Daily Beast ran a story titled, Matthew McConaughey Keeps Flirting With Alt-Right Darlings, which lamented McConaugheys association with comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan as well as Canadian author and professor Jordan Peterson.

Whatever can be said about Joe Rogan, neither he nor Jordan Peterson could be described as Alt-Right. Joe Rogan, who endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in 2020, in fact shares many political views with those on the left.

But the unfortunate fact is that simply holding a position or two that departs from perfect woke orthodoxy is enough to be branded a bigot, a fascist or a Nazi in todays society. It appears that now any publication or public figure who engages with those pariahs in any way must be similarly tarnished by association.

This is an ever-expanding circle of cancellation that will not stop at Matthew McConaughey or Olivia Nuzzi. We must nip this toxic cycle of progressive purity culture in the bud now before it completely destroys our ability to speak openly to one another.

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Conservative views can expect to be canceled - Boston Herald