Freddie de Boer has a brilliant article up on why certain people don’t like him:
For a long, long time the only important thing about getting a job in media, besides coming from money and the Ivy League, has been the opinions of your peers. That’s how careers have been made: you get professional security to the degree that other writers like you. Almost all professional writers engage with Twitter literally from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep, and they do because they know that the real work of their career is performed there, the performance of making other writers like them with flattery, tired humor, the right community-approved politics, and timely application of the retweet button. This is straightforwardly disastrous if you prize originality, self-criticism, and free thinking. But it’s how the NYC media sausage gets made.
The Bluechecks might not have originality, self-criticism or free thinking (indeed, free thinking counts as heresy in their religion), but they are all doubleplusgood duckspeakers able to endlessly parrot out the approved line on demand.
The consequence of this is their writing is dull and unoriginal. If you read their writing you will not get any new information, because you can tell what their goodthinkful Cathedral-approved view is on everything, before you read them. deBoer again:
There are so many writers in news media whose work has literally nothing to distinguish it - not prose, not insight, not inside knowledge, not useful reporting, not expert opinion, nothing. They offer only the same blend of worn-out Weird Twitter-era jokes and identical woke politics as every other writer.
Indeed so, which makes them vulnerable:
They have been protected by the Media Twitter game so far. But media is in very deep financial trouble. The question is, do you trust your ability to put your writing out on an open market and have that be your one ticket to financial security, as I and others have done?
Deep down, the bluechecks know they and their writing are mediocre (if they were confident their stuff was good, they’d be happy to give earning a living on Substack a go), but think they are entitled to status anyway.
If they lose their media jobs, maybe they could, I dunno, learn to code or something? That jibe hurt the feelings of the bluechecks so much that they got Twitter to ban the hashtag #learnToCode. Why did the jibe work? Because:
the bluechecks know that coding is something that requires intelligence and can be well paid
their self-image is of them being intelligent people
deep down, in the place they refuse to admit exists, even to themselves, they don’t think they’re intelligent. Their crony belief is that they’re clever but their secret-even-to-themselves merit belief is that they are not.