The Reactionary Mind and the Death of Proportional Thinking

How Anti-Woke Obsession Enabled Fascism

Photo by DJ Paine on Unsplash

Bari Weiss has openly identified herself as an anti-leftist reactionary. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald spent years constructing elaborate frameworks for why the liberal establishment posed greater threats to democracy than Donald Trump. Coleman Hughes admitted he saw DOGE and Trump as less threatening than the intellectual tyranny of the left. Konstantin Kisin of Triggernometry has declared repeatedly that “wokeism” is the primary threat to Western civilization and that Trump was necessary to stop it.

These aren’t analytical positions—they’re confessions of intellectual irresponsibility. When smart people with large platforms organize their entire worldview around opposition to one specific threat while remaining systematically blind to others, they become useful idiots for the very forces they should be warning against.

And now we live in the wreckage their sophisticated bias helped create.

The Self-Indictment

When Weiss embraces the reactionary label, when Taibbi builds a media empire around exposing liberal authoritarianism, when Greenwald makes his brand synonymous with attacking Democratic institutional overreach—they’re announcing that their thinking is captured by reaction rather than guided by proportional threat assessment. They’re confessing to the availability bias that makes their analysis systematically unreliable for anyone trying to understand political reality.

A responsible public intellectual would say “I analyze threats to democracy and free speech wherever they emerge.” A reactionary says “I’m specifically organized around opposing my chosen enemies, regardless of what else might be happening.” The difference is the difference between intellectual leadership and intellectual malpractice.

Weiss built The Free Press specifically to combat “wokeism” as a civilizational threat. Taibbi’s Racket became synonymous with exposing liberal institutional capture. Greenwald’s brand depends on Democratic establishment malfeasance being the primary threat to civil liberties. Their entire media empires depend on leftist excess being the existential danger, making them professionally invested in inflating threats from the left while minimizing threats from the right.

The Availability Trap

Thomas Jefferson understood that democratic freedom requires citizens to be informed about the full landscape of threats they face: “There is no safe deposit for liberty but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information.” But reactionaries don’t provide information—they provide systematically distorted information that serves their oppositional identity.

When you spend all your time documenting leftist excess, when your business model depends on finding new examples of progressive overreach, when your audience expects you to be the person who exposes liberal authoritarianism—you create what psychologists call availability cascades. The more you think about campus politics, the more dangerous it seems, which makes you think about it more, which makes it seem even more dangerous.

Eventually, your brain becomes convinced that diversity training represents a greater threat to freedom than FBI raids against political critics. That content moderation is more dangerous than military deployment against American cities. That campus speech codes are more authoritarian than systematic constitutional destruction.

This isn’t objective analysis—it’s cognitive capture disguised as intellectual sophistication.

The Professional Trap

The tragedy is that these figures started with legitimate concerns. Campus censorship was real. Intelligence agency overreach happened. Corporate-government coordination on content moderation raised genuine civil liberties questions. Progressive institutional capture was a real phenomenon that deserved serious criticism.

But when those legitimate concerns become your professional identity, when your audience expects you to find new examples of leftist authoritarianism, when your business success depends on leftist excess being the primary threat—you lose the capacity for proportional threat assessment. You become professionally invested in being wrong about the relative dangers facing democracy.

Greenwald’s obsession with intelligence agency overreach made him systematically blind to Trump’s authoritarian preparation. Taibbi’s focus on liberal institutional capture prevented him from recognizing systematic preparation for constitutional destruction. Hughes’s investment in critiquing progressive intellectual tyranny led him to recommend actual tyranny as a solution.

The Platform Responsibility

If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of people paying attention to your analysis, if you’re shaping how they understand political reality, if they’re making consequential decisions based on your framing—you have a moral obligation to cast your analytical gaze as widely as possible rather than optimizing for audience engagement or brand maintenance.

Jefferson understood this responsibility: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Those with platforms and influence bear special responsibility for providing information that serves democratic understanding rather than reactionary obsession.

But Weiss, Taibbi, Greenwald, Hughes, Kisin, and others made the irresponsible choice to become specialists in one type of threat while remaining systematically inattentive to others. They knew they had influence and chose to use it in ways that distorted rather than clarified public understanding.

The Strategic Catastrophe

The results of their cognitive distortion are now undeniable. While they obsessed over campus politics and liberal institutional capture, actual authoritarians systematically prepared to dismantle democratic governance. While they documented progressive speech policing and intelligence agency coordination with tech platforms, fascists built the infrastructure to weaponize federal law enforcement against political opponents. While they warned about woke tyranny and establishment overreach, real tyrants positioned themselves to eliminate constitutional constraints entirely.

Kisin’s declaration that wokeism represents the primary threat to Western civilization while China builds military AI and Trump hands them strategic advantages reveals cognitive capture so complete it borders on delusional. China is systematically challenging Western technological supremacy, creating alternative international institutions, and building the military capacity to dominate the next century—but diversity training is the existential threat?

This isn’t just wrong—it’s strategically insane. It’s like declaring grammar police a greater threat to English literature than book burners while helping the book burners eliminate libraries.

The Permission Structure

These people didn’t just get the analysis wrong—they helped create the conditions that made their wrong analysis politically consequential. Every essay about liberal authoritarianism, every podcast about campus excess, every sophisticated both-sides analysis served the same function: making Trump seem reasonable to educated voters who needed intellectual permission to choose fascism.

They provided that permission by treating constitutional preservation and constitutional destruction as equivalent alternatives, by framing the choice between imperfect democracy and obvious authoritarianism as a difficult judgment call between competing evils.

When confronted with their responsibility, these figures invariably deflect rather than acknowledge their role in enabling catastrophe. Taibbi recently defended himself by claiming he’s “repeatedly criticized Trump’s speech and surveillance policies” while dismissing other critics as “trolls.”

But the damage wasn’t done by their post-election criticisms—it was done by their pre-election both-sidesism that made voting for authoritarianism seem like sophisticated protest against Democratic excess. You don’t get credit for calling the fire department after helping start the fire.

They spent years training audiences to see progressive overreach as existential while treating Trump’s systematic preparation for authoritarian rule as manageable. The availability heuristic they created in their audiences—and apparently in themselves—made democracy’s destruction seem less important than diversity training’s annoyances.

The Useful Idiot Classification

History will remember them exactly as they deserve: as useful idiots who helped fascists gain power by making fascism seem reasonable to people too educated to admit they were choosing fascism. They thought they were providing sophisticated analysis of competing threats to democracy. They were actually providing intellectual cover for democracy’s destruction.

Greenwald’s obsession with intelligence agency overreach made him systematically minimize Trump’s authoritarian preparation. Taibbi’s focus on liberal institutional failures prevented him from recognizing systematic preparation for constitutional destruction. Their sophisticated understanding of progressive institutional capture became weaponized justification for supporting someone who would capture every institution while making their concerns look trivial by comparison.

They warned about the wrong authoritarians while enabling the real ones.

The Reactionary Mind Exposed

Reactionaries of all kinds suffer from the availability heuristic by definition, as Jefferson understood centuries before psychology gave us the terminology. When your thinking becomes organized around opposition to specific enemies rather than proportional assessment of all threats, you lose the capacity for the kind of broad observation that democratic vigilance requires.

The anti-woke reactionaries—Weiss, Taibbi, Greenwald, Hughes, Kisin, and others—failed Jefferson’s test completely. They had platforms, influence, and the obligation to provide information that would help citizens defend their liberty. Instead, they provided sophisticated justifications for choosing the greater threat while obsessing over the lesser one.

The Intellectual Verdict

These people forfeit any claim to serious consideration as public intellectuals. When you organize your thinking around systematic bias, when you build professional brands that require distorted threat assessment, when you use platforms to train audiences in the same cognitive distortions that captured your own thinking—you’re not contributing to democratic discourse.

You’re poisoning it.

Jefferson warned that democratic freedom requires eternal vigilance informed by accurate information about the threats we face. The anti-woke reactionaries provided the opposite: selective vigilance informed by systematically biased information about imaginary threats while real ones consolidated power.

They chose reaction over analysis. Brand maintenance over truth. Professional advantage over democratic responsibility. And now we live in the fascist state their sophisticated bias helped create.

The reactionary mind killed proportional thinking. And proportional thinking was all that could have saved us from the nightmare their bias helped create.

They were wrong about everything that mattered. We all pay the price for their sophisticated stupidity. And they want credit for warning about campus politics while fascism burned the country down.

Fuck the anti-woke reactionaries. History will remember them as the intellectual arsonists who obsessed over termites while helping burn down the house.

They were so terrified of the frying pan of liberal excess that they jumped straight into the fire of fascist consolidation—and trained their audiences to follow them. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. And now we all burn for their brilliant threat assessment.