The Profoundly Ignorant Shouldn't be Snarky

Snark has to be earned

One of the more irritating things one sees constantly on the internet is the noxious admixture of overconfidence, ignorance, and snark.

For example, among American conservatives, January 6th has become something of a meme—when it comes up, everyone laughs at those dumb MSNBC-watching liberals who are so concerned about it. Michael Knowles, whenever it is mentioned, will always say in some faux dramatic voice “Jaaaaanuary siiiiiiixth, the most serious event in our nation’s history,” and then ignore the fake electors plot, Trump sitting around for hours doing nothing while the mob stormed, and other malfeasance. Some conservatives recently held a panel “to talk about why the left can’t let Jan 6 go.”

Now, as it happens, one of the fellows on the panel was someone I recently debated about whether Trump was a good president. When January 6th—and the surrounding fake elector plot to subvert the election—came up, his response was to claim ludicrously that Biden, Harris, and even Obama attempted a coup. It was pure whataboutism. He had no defense of Trump’s attempt to get the vice president to throw out the results of a fair election that he knew he lost. His unrelated attempt to shift the conversation to unrelated Democratic malfeasance didn’t even get the facts right, but instead consisted of profound and systematic distortion of, for instance, the behavior of Obama (see Renee DiResta’s excellent piece for an explanation of why the allegations in Gabbard files are bogus).

And yet his profound ignorance on the subject apparently was not enough to stop him from psychoanalyzing us crazies who find it concerning that the sitting president attempted a coup. Despite being unaware of the facts concerning January 6th, and not wishing to discuss said facts, he apparently had great energy to puzzle over how people could be so silly as to be concerned that Trump tried to get his vice president to unilaterally declare him the winner and throw out millions of votes. I am reminded of a passage from C.S. Lewis:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism".

It’s fine to not know anything about January 6th, and the events leading up to it. But what you should not do is act sanctimonious and snarky about it if you have about as much knowledge of it as squirrels have of quantum physics. If you’re not familiar with the basic facts, if you don’t know what the fake electors plot was or why various of Trump’s cronies were disbarred for it, then you don’t get to mock people for being concerned. You have to earn the right to be snarky.

When I did high school debate, lots of the other debaters were communists who constantly mocked all sorts of conservative ideas. When discussing the objection to communism that it hasn’t seemed to work very well ever in world history, they’d put on a dumb voice and say “WuHt AbOut VeNeZuElA and IPhones.” When I asked some of them what they made of the calculation or incentives problems, I was met with dead silence—they were completely unaware of the most common objections to communist governance, but they had the chutzpah not to let that temper their moral certainty in communism’s success.

At one point, a real conservative showed up and started arguing with them in some discord server. While they attempted the same sneering, dismissive tone, they got totally annihilated on the substance of their claims. It’s a lot easier to be arrogant and dismissive and snarky about a person when you’re not talking to them face to face.

This has become the dominant way of speaking among leftists today. Rather than the solemn seriousness of Chomsky, they speak almost exclusively in a sneering, condescending, dismissive drawl, as if no political issue is at all difficult, as if anyone remotely aware of the facts that they know (through memes on Twitter) would inevitably come to agree with them. Dudley Newright calls this speaking style millennial snot, and it’s pretty well encapsulated by the way that Adam Conover and Lance from the Serfs talk.

Conservatives have their own irritating and condescending way of speaking—a sort of dark mirror of millennial snot. It’s filled with edgy references and sneering, as if the aim is to communicate that anyone aware of the Hidden Knowledge They Possess (probably that black people commit more crimes than white people on average) would automatically agree with their political prescriptions. It also frequently leans into a strangely subjectivist way of speaking, treating the fact that some idea disgusts them as sufficient proof of its error.

This kind of overconfident snark is especially common among the people who get their information from podcasts, Facebook, and Twitter. They kvetch about the pervasive falsehoods spread by the mainstream media, while they chug Ivermectin because a lying propagandist told them it worked. They refuse the COVID vaccine, and act like those who read reputable mainstream sources are the brainwashed ones, even though they haven’t read a single study on its efficacy, and are going by the recommendations of podcasters with no medical expertise or ability to read studies—who flee before randomized control trials like vampires before the sunlight.

They talk about how brainwashed people are to believe the Zoonosis theory, but they haven’t looked into the evidence at all. They don’t know that the earliest cases were at the wet market. They are only attracted to the theory because it’s what their friends and political allies endorse. They fashion themselves freethinkers, but only go based on ideology without ever looking into the evidence.

Recently, my friend Ethan Muse started a substack which I’d encourage you to all read. Ethan is a Catholic and also happens to be the smartest person I’ve ever met, someone whom I never win arguments with, even on topics that I know about and he doesn’t. His first post is dedicated to arguing for the veracity of the Fatima miracle—that a genuinely supernatural event did occur.

Sound crazy? Ethan comprehensively addresses all the leading objections, presenting multiple lines of evidence against each of them. I’m not a Catholic, to be clear, but I think his post is surprisingly compelling, and I want to hear what skeptics think about it.

But a lot of the comments left by skeptics are dripping with snark, often while merely repeating objections that he rebutted at length, as if they didn’t even read the post. Even though I’m not a Catholic and don’t ultimately buy the conclusion of the post, this annoys me. When someone does dozens of hours of serious research and compiles a compelling case for their findings, you shouldn’t brush it off glibly just because you disagree with the conclusion. If you couldn’t last five minutes in a debate with the article author, then you shouldn’t be snarky and glib about how much of an ignorant rube he is.

I choose the Ethan example deliberately because I assume few of my readers are Catholic. A lot of people get annoyed when people they disagree with are overconfident and snarky, but tolerate snot coming from their own side. Liberals get annoyed by overconfident and low information conservatives, but tolerate liberal ignorance and condescension—and vice versa.

(As an aside, it should go without saying that most of those who complain about shrimp welfare have not earned snark privileges, and are generally literally incapable of rendering the arguments that convinced people that the painful annual torment and then slaughter of a number of creatures equal to four times the number of people that have ever lived is a big deal!)

This arrogant conduct is hypocritical and self-defeating. If we fashion ourselves serious people, we have to call out our own side. The other side takes you more seriously if you are willing to criticize your own. We should admit when the other side has a good point, or when there’s some argument that we don’t know what to say about but assume is wrong based on higher-order evidence.

We shouldn’t tolerate glib lowbrow sideswipes, even when they’re coming from our own side. Nonsense is nonsense even if said by people on your team. Our politics is being flooded with a deluge of flak from those suffering from the twin vices of overconfidence and ignorance. Overconfidence and stupidity must be called out, lest the world be overrun with snot!