People were losing their jobs for repeating things Charlie Kirk said word for word. But there was no pearl clutching when he said that “some patriot” should bail out the man who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. Not uproar over trump saying he was glad that Robert Mueller had died. They know that they’re hypocrites, but they’ve realized that decency and the social contract in general can be wielded as a cudgel if your side collectively agrees to give themselves a pass.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
I’m a lot more worried about what domestic companies are doing with my data than Chinese ones.