This is the Gin and Tacos guy, I’d started to write him off over too many years of sad essays about working at the University of Buttfuck, Sattelite Campus, but like Jacob “IOZ” Bacharach he’s one of my old regular reads who started getting commissioned this election cycle and seems to be freshening up a bit, tho I do expect a relatively low ceiling.

A thing here is that even in pushing-back, he accepts the “racialist” frame. That’s not “race realist”, but it’s something.

In the “commanding heights” of society, which is to say mostly on social media, the left is on the defensive right now, fighting over how much ground they’re gonna lose. They maybe won on Williamson at The Atlantic but that was a holding action, they maintained the status quo ante, for now, and at expense - Williamson’s cachet is up, those of his enemies are down, institutions are coming to bear to impose costs on surrender.

None of the social media fights are about establishing new left positions, which is the opposite of what I remember 2010-2016, getting ridiculously accellerated towards the end - like when I first showed up on tumblr the local avant-garde trans narrative was “we need more sensitive gatekeepers”, year by year working through “maybe SRS” (then ooga-boogaed as “sterilization”) “isn’t necessary”, “maybe the concept of dysphoria isn’t itself necessary”, and then they just dumped it all the normies in a bundle.

I didn’t expect “the return of race science” this week, even as a regular Sailer reader, that came outta nowhere. I remember him talking about the ‘90s as an “interglacial” when this stuff last got entertained, or rather a high point of right-culture, and did not expect it until after another 4 years of consolidation at least.