Add new comment

One of the paradoxes of call-out culture is that this kind of herd mentality is combined with a desire to look like a villain to people outside the clique. There's so many people nowadays who never lift a finger and whose politics are basically liberal-reformist, but want to be seen as radicals, extremists, super-militant in their causes, utterly intransigent enemies of America or Whiteness/white people or Modern Society, and who go out of their way to offend/trigger the mainstream, the right and the "centre", but they aren't doing this as a necessary side-effect of believing something "extreme", they're doing it as a supplement to moderate politics. For example: people who work in universities and spend most of their time arguing that "the modern university is irreducibly complicit in colonialism", attacking quantitative and qualitative research as epistemic violence, calling everyone who challenges them racist, but actually what they want is just some slight changes in course content and more people like themselves appointed in more senior positions. It seems very strange to me - like if some super-moderate Muslim cleric was posturing as bin Laden. My guess is they're faking supervillain because notoriety sells, they're playing the social media field where extreme/provocative statements generate field-carving flame wars with themselves at the centre, the same way Trump did/does. Though I also wonder if they're compensating for bad conscience about selling-out their earlier radicalism by LARPing as Fanon or Valerie Solanas.