• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I was cogitating earlier about a pattern that you see in right-wing media circles frequently. Most of the propagandists enjoy an individual sort of celebrity, even if they're operating out of some organization.

cw: lengthy discourse on patterns of organization among right-wing propaganda figures, with Charles Murray as a particular example


They're largely solitary figures, monologuists who've attracted permanent audiences. Charles Murray for example: he's got relatively heavy-weight credentials for a right-wing propagandist, as a "fellow" or whatever of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the many organizations subsidized by lavish corporate donations to function as right-wing imitation universities and research institutions, purportedly devoted to studying "free enterprise" and Ayn Rand and Mises and all that. This gives Murray elevated status; it's like he can pretend to be a professor. But the AEI label itself barely matters. Murray could do the same shtick at some other think-tank and probably he does—I wouldn't be surprised if he's collecting dozens of paychecks from being a "fellow" of some place or other. Charles Murray is famous for being Charles Murray, expert on everything, because he's supposedly mastered the secrets of human intelligence.

But Murray does (or did) have an erstwhile partner. There was no formal relationship I don't think, just...mutual interests. That partner was former New Republic columnist Andrew Sullivan, who is now one of the many "independent" and "heterodox" right-wing propagandists who are loosely organized at Substack, with Bari Weiss and that crowd. (Weiss and Sullivan had similar problems: nobody wanted to work with them after a while, so they had to become "heterodox".) For a while, at least, Sullivan acted as a sort of unofficial press agent for Charles Murray, writing laundered accounts of Murray's work and hinting that this was Very Important and being suppressed and all that. (Right-wing folks are superb at behaving like they're always about to be dragged away for crimes against orthodoxy. They must read Darkness at Noon once a week.) I don't know if Sullivan still does this, now that he mostly shelters behind a paywall.

It was a curiously unequal pairing. According to the topsy-turvy intellectual standards of the right-wing world, Murray is way above Sullivan. Murray is the pseudo-professor, a man who might very well believe that he deserves multiple Nobel Prizes, and Sullivan is just some popular magazine columnist. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan's mass appeal was superior to Murray's, whose professorial airs make him extremely aloof, as if he's just barely able to bring himself to address the unenlightened masses in the first place. Murray needs someone like Sullivan to humanize him and soften his image; Sullivan needs Murray because Murray's got friends in high places. He's chummy with Harlan Crow, that rich guy who bribes Supreme Court justices.

There's other unequal pairings of this sort. J. K. Rowling has come to serve as a press agent for a gang of mostly British pseudoscientists devoted to elaborate metaphysical and philosophical theories about masculinity and femininity, disguised as a biological inquiry into human genitalia and sex chromosomes and so forth. All of these persons are individual cranks and if Rowling weren't around to impose some cohesion on them, they'd probably all be squabbling with each other over tedious minor differences. Pseudoscience is like that; pseudoscientists split hairs and get into massive fights over trivia, because each of them privately thinks they're the only true expert and everyone else is a blunderer. But they can rally around J. K. Rowling, with whom they enjoy the same sort of unequal relationship that Charles Murray cultivated with Andrew Sullivan. Rowling can make all these academic charlatans seem palatable to a wide audience (and even so, Rowling's sales pitch is quietly centered round the fact that she doesn't give a curse about whom she hurts.)

It occurs to me that this pattern—unequal pairings between sources of right-wing authority and a group of people who serve to humanize and publicize them—probably has a nested quality. That is to say, while Charles Murray may be august and elevated from the perspective of Andrew Sullivan, he's still lowly in comparison to unseen superiors. Even though Murray presents himself as a revered intellectual titan, he's still soiled himself with commerce and mass appeal. And academic credentials do still mean something in his right-wing world; indeed they're of supreme importance even as right-wing propagandists bellow about the evils of education. "AEI" may pass as good credentials in the popular press, but Murray is nobody compared to a comparable figure with a Harvard professorship. However, these hypothetical better-credentialed right-wing academics are likely to be far more shy of the public...because their ideas are likely to be far more poisonous even than The Bell Curve.

It's a formidable landscape and I've only seen the outermost edges of it so far.

~Chara of Pnictogen (EDIT: changed a word because I forgot that Murray does have fancy degrees even if he's now in think-tank pseudo-academia)


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in reply to @pnictogen-wing's post:

A comparable figure with a Harvard professorship? You mean like Herrnstein?

I think you’ve got this backwards: Murray and his ilk don’t have clout because they work at AEI. AEI has clout because it employs them. Murray could easily have tenure at a top university, he made a choice decades ago not to do that.

oh, thanks for the name drop by the way, I'll need to make a note of that. do you think I'm way off base here? I maintain that there must surely be a kind of trade-off between leaning a bit more openly into the eugenics than most, and retaining the best professional credentials ~Chara