Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières Written by Kathryn Joyce & Jeff Sharlet

What do we make of former friends who fell down the rabbit hole of the Right?

How to name the rude currents eroding the Left, those which have claimed the hearts, minds and Substacks of so many former friends and fellow travelers? 

There are the journalist-provocateurs and the readers who have followed them rightward, the Trumpers-come-lately marching on to Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble or vanishing into Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone. 

There are those not quite yet there, such as Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks, currently mourning the leftism she now believes “gaslit” her about a “crime wave” it refuses to admit. “I’m going through something very real and very sincere,” she told a “disaffected Democrats” podcast in July, “and it’s uncomfortable.” It is, indeed.

Consider the dislocation that flickers across the face of journalist Matt Taibbi in a TV interview this summer for the conspiracist, right-wing Epoch Times. Acclaimed by the Left during Occupy Wall Street as a scourge of corporate power, Taibbi is best known for his years at Rolling Stone. When the day eventually comes, the “vampire squid relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” . . . 

Continue reading @ ESSF.

Losing The Plot 🔨 The “Leftists” Who Turn Right

Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières Written by Kathryn Joyce & Jeff Sharlet

What do we make of former friends who fell down the rabbit hole of the Right?

How to name the rude currents eroding the Left, those which have claimed the hearts, minds and Substacks of so many former friends and fellow travelers? 

There are the journalist-provocateurs and the readers who have followed them rightward, the Trumpers-come-lately marching on to Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble or vanishing into Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone. 

There are those not quite yet there, such as Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks, currently mourning the leftism she now believes “gaslit” her about a “crime wave” it refuses to admit. “I’m going through something very real and very sincere,” she told a “disaffected Democrats” podcast in July, “and it’s uncomfortable.” It is, indeed.

Consider the dislocation that flickers across the face of journalist Matt Taibbi in a TV interview this summer for the conspiracist, right-wing Epoch Times. Acclaimed by the Left during Occupy Wall Street as a scourge of corporate power, Taibbi is best known for his years at Rolling Stone. When the day eventually comes, the “vampire squid relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” . . . 

Continue reading @ ESSF.

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