iroi_one

Was this reply meant for someone else? I never once used the phrase “meeting the audience where they’re at”, I expressed confusion at your assertion that Hasan was “bending the knee to secure the bag”.

My point in addressing the "meat" of the article is to disqualify it on its lack of merit in regard to its intended audience, not to put words in your mouth.

I agree that his essay doesn’t prove anything, but if debate doesn’t prove anything or change people’s minds then an essay in the NYT sure as hell doesn’t do that either, so why are we mad.

What's left when you disqualify the violence argument is Hasan advertising himself through virtues that resonate with the readership of the NYT (e.g. securing the bag). The issue here is that Hasan is not writing this horse shit in good faith and this is exactly where he is bending the knee. He, up until now, did not practically believe in "debate" as anything more than a way to gain exposure and generate content.

The challenge here is that for this to mean anything beyond media careerism we need to square the Hasan that wrote the OP NYT Op-Ed with the Hasan interviewed for this Verge article.

Edit:

Yasha Levine in his latest column explains incredibly concisely what is happening here.

Throughout their short existence, they [influencers] have been insulated from the psychic madness they’ve pumped into the Spectacle. They’ve been secure in their nice neighborhoods and big houses and elite institutions, certain that the people they’ve trapped with the Spectacle are too distracted, too enchanted, too zombified… But this Charlie Kirk assassination changed something for them. It’s dawning on them that the Spectacle is not just an abstract entity. They are realizing deep down inside that the Spectacle can be made flesh. And that flesh can be killed. And that this flesh can be theirs.

Still, though, there is little they can do. They are at the top of the Spectacle, yet they are still slaves to it, bound to it more tightly than any of us. They can’t exit. They’re trapped. And so…the Spectacle became real for them, but only for a moment. Charlie Kirk’s death has now too been Spectacularized — taken out of the real, uploaded to the feed, abstracted and refracted and reflected through millions of prisms and mirrors. But make no doubt, the Spectacle will make landfall again. The Spectacle will again become flesh. And then the cycle will begin again and again and again.

Hasan does not do a good job of actually proving out his statements. He simply vaguely gestures to the consequences of capitalist nationalistic imperialism and says "do you see?". That is not "meeting the audience where they're at" regardless of what anyone here says. It's simply that we agree with these statements. This is not going to get liberals to question the fact that their axiomatic understanding of violence is essentially deferring to what the state considers violence to be. It does not even directly argue that "what is Violence?" is a political question -- it merely dances around that in gesturing to problems. For NYT reading liberals starving the homeless is not a breakdown of the social order, it is the social order. This column fails to prove otherwise.

What is "meeting the audience where they're at" in this column is the "I love free speech, debate, and I was going to engage with Charlie Kirk "the right way"^TM (which is what people like you NYT reader like). However I am sad I no longer have the ability to do that (which coincidentally is how I make my money). So look me up and maybe like and subscribe?"

Lol after this Hasan has no business critiquing Zohran Mamdani's capitulation when this column is literally debate bro bending the knee to secure the bag.