I have wasted altogether too many years of my life learning to get used to how right-wing gasbags and their fans talk about...everything. I really hope that this is a skill that might have practical uses—and maybe it has at least taught me how to be more even-tempered overall, because the purpose of right-wing gasbags is to inflame the emotions. The best of them achieve an almost perfect separation of form from function: while talking the most arrant sentimental drivel they mimic the dry professional mannerisms of Oxford dons lecturing on art history, and this excites adulation in their fans and outrage from honest academics. 95% of right-wing bloviation, at least, consists merely in schooling oneself to be snobbish and aloof and oblique to the point of being impossible to understand except by the initiate. They love to cite each others' work as if they were quoting Isaac Newton or Thucydides.

And they all feel, so very very strongly. It's honestly all they have to offer, despite their pantomime of intellectual activity and rational discourse: what matters most in right-wing bloviation is feelings. They wish at all times to convey the impression of a mild-mannered scholar being suddenly and abruptly jolted into awareness of tremendous injustices, and therefore to be excused for any indelicacy or sloppiness of rhetoric. The fact that these people have spent their entire lives being abruptly jolted into outrages, declaiming repetitively in one column after another, seems to escape everyone's notice. They've done it so often they probably don't know they're doing it any more, no matter how trivial the pretext for their latest version of O tempora! O mores!

I would guess that all of them have some sort of grand origin story, too. I only know this in any detail for a couple of the right-wing pundits. James Lindsay, the infamous "ConceptualJames" on Twitter, was supposedly "radicalized" into fascist noisemaking because as a Ph.D. mathematician (supposedly) he was so outraged by the nonsensical blithering of academic theorists that he planted obvious fakes into a variety of low-rent academic publications who'll take just about anything without scrutiny, and that "proved" of course that feminism &c. are nonsense. (His career now consists of asserting that Marxism is gnosticism, or something.) Bret Weinstein, the lesser sibling to better-known fascist ideologue Eric R. Weinstein and currently leading a charge to "Rescue the Republic", was a teacher at Evergreen State College here in my home state of Washington, a school with a rather poor reputation for its loosey-goosey experimental methods. Bret was too bigoted to keep the job, got sacked, and then constructed a whole Ignatius V. Reilly narrative about how Evergreen was the evil nexus of Woke Education or something. Charles Murray's story is pretty well known because popular biology writer Stephen Jay Gould (who knew Jeffrey Epstein, by the way...worrisome, that) and other biologists tore his "Bell Curve" work to shreds, whereupon Murray slunk into semi-hiding behind a number of think-tank jobs.

All of these people, to the last person I would guess, are professional failures in some way. That's where academic cranks usually come from. There might be a few who are truly self-invented, rising up from nowhere, but most have credentials of some sort, and have gotten themselves busted out of legitimate jobs and professions, so now they subsist on "wingnut welfare", i.e. the massive streams and smaller rivulets of cash always trickling down from unseen corporate benefactors and flowing into a variety of propaganda institutions and powerful "influencers" and friendly corporations. They lean doublethinkfully on their credentials too: while lampooning and mocking mainstream academia as hopelessly corrupted by "cultural Marxism" and whatnot, gleefully claiming that college education is now worthless, they nevertheless pretend that somehow their degrees are proof of excellence. Christians are especially good at this game, for they always regard themselves as sui generis within organizations that (in their view) ought to be grateful for their presence.

We have not mastered the art of approaching these people. Mono can knock them to the ground easily enough (horses, you know, they're pretty BIG) but they get back up again. One of our headmates is offering their services! His name is Peter—you may have heard of him—and in another life he once ruled the known world.

~Chara of Pnictogen