RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Anxious Generation was published one year ago today. Our plan was to promote the book in the spring, take the summer off to recharge, then get to work in September on Jon’s next book, a deeply depressing investigation of technology’s effects on democracy.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the book catalyzed a movement around the world. Most spectacularly, schools, states, and entire countries implemented phone-free school policies, and Australia raised the age for opening social media accounts to 16.

This went well beyond our wildest expectations of what could happen.

The question is why this change is unfolding so quickly—and what this mass movement says about the state of our culture and its prospects for renewal.

Wherever children have smartphones in their pockets and social media on those smartphones, family life turns into an eternal struggle over screen time. That’s been our reality for a while. Then came Covid-19.

For several years, children—deprived of school and every other normal social activity—were confined to their screens. As Covid restrictions faded away, the device addictions they had amplified did not. And that struggle between parents and their kids only intensified.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/burn-vandalize-teslas-domestic-terrorism

Over the past month, anti-Trump agitators have found a new favorite target: Teslas. In response to Elon Musk’s war on bureaucracy, vandals in cities across the country have broken windows, punctured tires, and keyed doors of the popular electric vehicle. Some have even lit the cars on fire.

Various administration officials have labeled the acts “domestic terror.” Musk critics have brushed off these actions as the price of political participation or implied that they are a predictable backlash to his alleged extremism. Indeed, the most ardent defenders see the burning of cars as a proportional response—as one protester’s sign put it, “Burn a Tesla: Save Democracy.”

These efforts to blur the line between protest and terrorism, however, are profoundly undemocratic. The idea that property destruction and violence are legitimate forms of protest has deep roots on the left, but it is inimical to the freedom of expression that makes democratic life possible.

The Tesla bombers are reading from an old playbook. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American and European anarchists conducted bombing campaigns and other acts of political violence. They were inspired by theorist Peter Kropotkin’s “propaganda of the deed”—the idea that the expressive character of violence could help instigate revolution.

The revolutionary Soviets not only engaged in brutal violence but also actively justified it as a necessary precondition of their revolution. In Terrorism and Communism, for example, Leon Trotsky responds to a liberal critic by insisting that the revolutionary class has an obligation to use violent means to attain its ends.

https://dianawest.substack.com/p/whats-it-all-about-carlson-and-rogan

One of the more interesting things Darryl Cooper revealed while ensconced on the massive Joe Rogan platform last week concerned his appearance on the even more massive Tucker Carlson platform last summer. It was the night before the Carlson interview, Cooper recalled, and he and Carlson were having dinner, talking about the upcoming show. Carlson informed Cooper that he was going to introduce him as America’s greatest living historian. Cooper says that he demurred, having explained to Carlson that he was no historian, did no original research, published nothing; rather, that he was someone who recorded stories about what he had read.

Carlson was having none of that. He was dead set on tagging Cooper with this nonsensically extravagant accolade and told him just to roll with it during the taping the next day. If you go back and watch Tucker’s opening of the Cooper show, you will notice that no blush, no gulp, and barely a muscle move across Cooper’s face as Tucker coats him with this syrupy wash of words — “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” But even that wasn’t enough for Tucker: “I want people to know who you are, and I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States today because —”

Yes, yes … why? Tell us why!

“— because I think that you are.”

If Carlson’s motives remain opaque, we are now at least privvy to the calculation, the Barnum-esque decision, to dress up the podcaster as this “greatest,” this “most important” historical expert in the whole of these United States.