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The Opposite of What I Wanted: Reclaiming the Public Square

  The Dream That Wouldn’t Die Twenty years ago, I was trying to write the master’s thesis I wanted to write, not the one my advisor wanted. I was going to be a democracy theorist and study at Cornell with its eminent faculty. Fate intervened, and the thesis never got finished. But the ideas never left me. They’ve been bouncing around my head ever since. The outlines of a republic which could sustain honest speech without turning to coercion or chaos. Back then, I believed in something quaint: that there was such a thing as the public square . A shared civic space where people could speak, listen, and reason together. Even in the mid-aughts, that felt nostalgic. Now, it feels almost mythical. My goal wasn’t nostalgia. It was to imagine a model of the public square that wasn’t trapped between two dead ends: the absolutist “marketplace of ideas,” where speech is an unregulated free-for-all; and the authoritarian model, where the state decides what can be said. Both are failure...
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What is a Groyper?

To understand modernity, you must understand the subcultures that exist today. Groypers more defined by what they are not than by what they are. They identify with being against things rather than for them. To try to evaluate what the subculture is and its goals are is to mistake them for an ideology like fascism or anarchism. They believe nothing. What drives them is the feeling of alienation born of a loss of privilege. To Groypers, equality feels like oppression. Their culture is intentionally obscure and ridiculous to outsiders: a green frog and trolling furries, what? Those symbols and in-jokes, which allow them to hide being plausible deniability and promote insider status, are simply their methodology. To focus on memes is to miss the point: they do not explain who Groypers are or what they want (or, as it is, what they don’t want). In general, Groypers tend to be white, affluent, young, male. Those attributes, I think, are the key to understanding the group. Whiteness: Groypers...
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Location: Alabama, USA
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