Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “How Can We Live Together?”
Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.
This arrangement certainly risks some measure of injustice, inaccuracy, and overreach: a careless joke or comment here or there need not a bigot, much less a dyed-in-the-wool fascist, make. But admitting such possibilities, seeing this kind of basic social norm enforcement as fundamentally at odds with living in a free country is deeply delusional. Not everyone you go to school with is invited to your birthday party, not every coworker and neighbor to the cookout. Deciding the level of intimacy with which you will live with the people around you is an utterly mundane part of living in the world—yes, even a free world—and doing so on the basis of other people’s character and conduct informs those decisions for anyone with values that stretch beyond those of cynical self-protection and into the territory of things like “basic self-respect,” “respect for others,” and “basic integrity.” Russell was not infringing on Mosley’s freedom by deeming him unworthy of polite conversation—even if he had done so for questionable rather than principled reasons. He was simply exercising his own freedom, alongside a better set of values than Mosley had. A free world would expect as much: indeed, it would require it.
Mike Masnick, “The ‘Debate Me Bro’ Grift: How Trolls Weaponized the Marketplace of Ideas”
The “debate me bro” playbook is simple and effective: demand that serious people engage with your conspiracy theories or extremist talking points. If they decline, cry “censorship!” and claim they’re “afraid of the truth.” If they accept, turn the interaction into a performance designed to generate viral clips and false legitimacy. It’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition that has nothing to do with genuine intellectual discourse.
The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture isn’t just that it’s obnoxious, it’s that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling. When you agree to debate someone pushing long-debunked conspiracy theories or openly hateful ideologies, you’re implicitly suggesting that their position deserves equal consideration alongside established facts and expert analysis.
This is exactly backwards from how the actual “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to work. Ideas don’t deserve platforms simply because someone is willing to argue for them loudly. They earn legitimacy through evidence, peer review, and sustained engagement with reality. Many of the ideas promoted in these viral “debates” have already been thoroughly debunked and rejected by that marketplace—but the “debate me bro” format resurrects them as if they’re still worth serious consideration.
James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis”
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own children, we, the blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at their hands: which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
Sarah Taber, “Why Farmers Voted for Trump”
Jeff Sharlet, “Rubber Glue Fascism”
Have you ever donated to a left organization with a credit card? Get ready. This doesn’t mean they’re coming for you. It means that if for some reason they want to come for you, you’re already cooked. That little rectangle of plastic in your wallet’s been turned into a weapon to be used against you. …
The plan isn’t so much to kick down doors as to bleed nonprofits dry, a double whammy effect: as the big organizations dwindle, everyday people doubt the potential of organization. Wonks will realize how it works; others will conclude that maybe such efforts to build democracy just aren’t popular. Some will retreat into alienation; others will persuade themselves to get with the new program.
Diana Butler Bass, “30 Years Ex-Evangelical”
The evangelicals who ran the institution wanted me to “fit,” but I didn’t want to fit. I wanted them to change. I guess I wanted to be their savior. I wanted them to be more like Jesus. To love with greater compassion. To embrace the radical implications of grace.
I persisted. I didn’t leave easily. I fought them. Indeed, I had to be thrown out. Up until the very last, I didn’t want to go.
Becoming an ex-evangelical was not something I chose. Evangelical powers-that-be chose it for me.
Same for being a college professor. Thus, in late summer thirty years ago, I found myself outside of my faith community and without vocation.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In