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Bouvard on Right-Wing Defensive Hardening and Its Costs

X / Twitter · Jan 08, 2026 · 1 min read

It may be that the rewiring of the right has gone haywire. What we see in, e.g., Megyn Kelly's defiance of attempts to morally pressure her derives from a kind of necessary "hardening of the heart" or developing of a kind if immunity to leftist blackmail. You have to be able to

say "I don't care if I'm racist/sexist/homophobic...; I don't care if someone got killed I'm going to examine the conditions under which he was killed, etc." But once that rewiring has been done, it becomes a kind of automated reaction to any questions and you become

resistant to questions you do need to take up: is a particular claim true? Plausible? Genuinely worth pursuing? By which criteria do we tell? Instead, you lock out precisely those people asking those questions because it messes with your rewiring. This just turns you into a

permanent troll, intrinsically hostile to constructing the kind of model of the world needed to contribute to governance. Anyone insisting you develop or rely on such a model of the world is just trying to force you into some propaganda model. The closest thing to an idea you can

have is something like "War is bad for children and other living things." It will be a serious problem if the administration doesn't completely repudiate this entire cesspool. Again, it can just put out the same kinds of posts it does in response to some MSM BS. Since it does

that already it can now look like it's favoring these other media outlets. For Trump himself, it may not matter; for Trump succession it matters a lot.

I might as well also point out that the "all deaths are equally bad and we can pin the culpability for them on anyone we dislike" is identical to the kind of concern trolling that the right wing "rewiring" was supposed to create resistance to in the first place.

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