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Mar 22, 2022Liked by Aaron M. Renn

Have you read the stuff French is posting at The Atlantic? He started off by saying the worst mistake of his life was " Despite growing up in the South, I deeply underestimated the continued prevalence and malignant legacy of American racism." In his most recent post there, he smears people who express insufficient enthusiasm for Ukraine as being likely to be QAnon type conspiracy theorists based on a polling overlap. He pivots into only people like him who question both sides are critical thinkers. Never mind he pulls his punches against the left and doesn't question the narrative until the issue has passed. It appears he is trying to become a David Brooks 2.0 type pundit. He no doubt wants to be the token "conservative" in a newspaper or on a Sunday show who gets trotted out to mostly bash white conservatives.

I don't understand why there is a market for this, but it exists. Reports were French, Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes started The Dispatch they got around 20 investors to give them $6 million. As you saw, French has a small group of loyal followers on Twitter, including one who compared him to an Old Testament prophet. I consider people who came from rural America and bash those still there as rubes and hicks to the elite particularly loathsome. French is electing to make a career of this.

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I fear I won't be much help keeping you on course because I am so far from the modal consumer of content that appealing to people like me won't win popularity contests. I don't have a Twitter account, don't really know much about David French other than that he seems like a meme-level grifter, never heard of Sohrab Ahmari, and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything for not having heard of this feud.

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