George Gooding responds

Let's make this quick

George Gooding got around to commenting on my post about his article in the Norwegian outlet Nettavisen, where he paints Elon Musk’s sieg heils as media hallucinations. His response is almost twice as long as my post and just doesn’t merit a point-by-point rebuttal, but I’ll give it some discussion.

Gooding says it’s incorrect to say he’s moved rightwards politically, which is fine–I needed a quick way into the beginning of my post and wrote a couple sentences about how he and I are maybe reflections of each other in some way. I didn’t suggest I really knew Gooding or his politics. I just wanted to get to talking about his piece where he tries to say Musk didn’t throw up a Nazi salute; the intro is just a device. But in his response Gooding clarifies that he is an anti-woke classical liberal and launches immediately into a rant against the dishonest media in relation to which he has formed his political views. It just seems evident to me that Gooding is very much inside of his own head and doesn’t recognize it. Regardless, voting history aside, I think it’s completely fair and accurate to place a self-styled classical liberal who is bought in to anti-wokeism on the Right. Things change, ideologies and coalitions shift, but today anti-wokeism is one of the key strands of the Sorelian myth of the Right. Gooding or anyone else is free to disagree or challenge, but that strikes me as silly overcomplication and obfuscation.

Gooding gets to talking about Musk’s salute and immediately confirms what I was pointing out in my post: for Gooding, it’s not about Musk at all, but about the media’s “supreme power to define” reality for its consumers. Here and elsewhere in his response, Gooding acts a little as if he thinks I’ve never considered the power and authority of the institutional media on its own terms, which is pretty tedious. But once again his framework raises questions, some of which he’s anticipated. For example, I am pretty plugged in to daily news and events and make a reasonable effort to get ahead, around, and behind the media’s gloss on things, and I simply watched the clip of Musk performing two very clear, incontrovertible Nazi salutes; I didn’t need media people to interpret to me what I was seeing. To Gooding, though, my perception isn’t real or serious–people like me have been “primed” by the media, brainwashed so thoroughly that we produce the response and adopt the attitudes expected of us even when those are not spelled out explicitly. In other words, I saw Musk deliver a Nazi salute because the media has wormed its way into my cranium and controls my perception. (For what it’s worth, Gooding also thinks this wave from Tim Walz is “the exact same gesture.”)

Gooding is, by contrast, very confident in his own powers of perception. If you’ve ever encountered commenters who like to pose as prophetic Cassandras who are far wiser than the ordinary, deluded citizens around them and who always see the media’s secret, manipulative agenda, then Gooding will not surprise you. Gooding doesn’t acknowledge anything the media produces as reflecting reality to any degree. If media sources have been discussing Musk’s turn towards the far-right for years, it’s because the media has a long-term goal of slandering and destroying Musk. The possibility that Musk’s lean into extremism is actually real is something Gooding quickly raises and dismisses. On the other hand, Gooding accepts Musk’s claims and explanations uncritically and at face value, presenting him again as a defender of free speech who took over Twitter and reestablished the holy separation of government influence from private civil society. Just to put a pin in things here: Gooding is writing this in March of 2025. At this point I don’t think there is anything Musk could possibly do to get Gooding to reconsider what Musk tells him about Musk.

To the extent Gooding acknowledges that Musk really does interact with and signal boost a lot of fascists, Nazis, and anti-Semites, it goes like this:

So where you see "interactions with racists, fascists, Nazis, and antisemites", the reality is that there will be a racist that say [sic] something mundane, and Musk will agree with it. He doesn't care who this person is, he doesn't do a full background check on them before interacting with them; he's liberal when it comes to who he talks to, and interacts with. Seltzer and others, are of course, the opposite. They will ensure that they never positively engage with anyone who has a single thoughtcrime on their record - to avoid this guilt-by-association game that they themselves play.

So Musk runs one of the biggest, most powerful communications platforms in the world and takes no responsibility for what he does, with whom he engages, and which narratives he amplifies? I think Musk is more aware of what he’s doing than that, but regardless, it says something that this is Gooding’s defense of Musk. Regardless, it turns out I’m more like Seltzer in this respect: I don’t take kindly to people whose ultimate program is the repression of democratic society and free speech, so I tend not to give them time or energy.

Has Musk opened up X to many unsavory characters? Yes, he has - because their speech is protected by the First Amendment, and Musk has stated plainly that he does not believe in creating an arbitrary system of censorship outside of the laws of the country when it comes to the matter of speech.

I am once again begging everyone to understand the meaning of free speech. Saying that Musk has opened X to extremists because extreme speech is protected by the First Amendment is a complete non sequitur. People who talk like this don’t understand what “free speech” actually signifies, and at Gooding’s age the choice not to understand has to be interpreted as a deliberate one. I don’t really want to hear anything such people have to say about free speech, or anything.

Gooding says I was also unfair to Jack Posobiec, Marc Andreesen, and Curtis Yarvin in my post. Posobiec wasn’t really dehumanizing opposition to the Right in his Unhumans book; Andreesen dedicated his manifesto to Filippo Marinetti because of Marinetti’s ties to futurism, not because of Marinetti’s ties to fascism; and Yarvin really really hates Anders Behring Breivik! Gooding makes it sound as if Yarvin loathes Breivik even more than the families of the victims of the Utøya attacks. I think that the dumb games of rhetorical footsie that these guys are playing are obvious.

Gooding concludes with a few paragraphs on the Hunter Biden laptop issue, but by now my interest and energy are spent. It won’t be good enough for Gooding, but I’ll just say that I don’t think the “liberal establishment” is without corruption, malign influences, media manipulation campaigns, and so on. Gooding thinks he is on solid footing because he has identified examples of this corruption and discusses it in terms of facts, evidence, and interpretations that are at least arguably true. He doesn’t see himself as operating within a mythology which tells him that only these things are real and nothing else counts. Getting into the weeds with him and debating the Hunter Biden laptop story in its details is a futile exercise because the details aren’t the point, even with him. The point, rather, is “the immense weight of what [the story] actually entails,” i.e., a mythic reality that overrides everything else and that only disingenuous hacks resist or deny. For a guy who claims to be very sensitive to what he alleges is my smearing of political enemies as belonging to “The Other,” Gooding sure does a lot of Otherizing.

I dunno, man. I think Musk did Nazi salutes. I don’t think it’s an optical illusion generated by the media. I’m not convinced denialists like Gooding are free from extra-rational influences just because they call their critics “brainwashed” and insist again and again that they are enlightened figures who see through narrative biases. I think maybe the media’s power isn’t as supreme as Gooding assumes, and I think maybe he should consider setting aside the Hunter Biden laptop story for just a moment and perhaps inquire into, say, what Musk the principled free-speech hero is actually up to at the moment. But these are just thoughts–take them or leave them, but please don’t subject me to another 3,000 words about them. And please stop posturing like you’re the philosopher king of media theory while the rest of us are dragging our knuckles inside Plato’s allegorical cave–it’s fucking obnoxious and boring as hell.