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You are here: Home / Everybody’s misused him, ripped him up and abused him

Everybody’s misused him, ripped him up and abused him

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Let’s face it, with Balloon Juice frenemy Glenn Greenwald in the spotlight all week, this place is all about blogospheric navel-gazing for the time being. So I thought I’d bring up a trivial topic that I’ve given too much thought to. Why does (BJ alum) Freddie de Boer get so much attention? Chris Hayes answered him on teevee, Andrew Sullivan devotes half of his non-beard, non-video posts to answering something or another that Freddie said, Gawker named him one of the 50 least important writer of 2012. What gives, I don’t get it? Aren’t there lots of other similarly verbose lefter-than-thou types out there?

Reader S posits that he’s the Alan Colmes of the intertubes, a convenient lefty punching bag for cyberspace serious people.

Reader Interactions

109Comments

  2. 2.

    srv

    Doug, you see how rich and famous you could have been if you’d just taken the troll to the 11th dimension?

  3. 3.

    Rex Everything

    My theory: His stuff is pretty high quality. His questions are often worth answering. If you wanna be a junkie, wow.

  5. 5.

    longtime lurk

    Freddie is a great writer. Very smart, very earnest. He’s also fearless and doesn’t care whether he makes enemies. And personally, I identify with his politics more than I identify with the Democrat-partisan stuff I see here most of the time.

  6. 6.

    White Trash Liberal

    Plenty of writers are high quality with good questions. Why is Freddie being moved to the front of the line as a lefty worth rebutting?

    I’m going with punching bag. He’s Francesca Fiore’s husband who put off the pheromone that forces people to hit him.

  7. 7.

    Jamie

    There are plenty of lefter-then-thou types out there, but few combine the sheer obnoxiousness, profound self-seriousness and just flat-out, constant wrongness that Freddie Boners does. No wonder Sully likes him so much.

  8. 8.

    srv

    The key to success for a modern day liberal pundit is leaving room for Reagan being right about everything, clothed in a veneer of intellectual rationalism.

  9. 9.

    TR Donoghue

    I think he makes for a good Stereotypical Too-Earnest For His Own Good Hippie. These people are particularly useful when there is a popular Democratic president in the White House.

  11. 11.

    kwAwk

    His writing has that wonky/overly serious tone that resembles Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes.
    They like him because he reminds the of themselves and he writes like a journalist and nota blogger.

  12. 12.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Gawker named him one of the 50 least important writer of 2012.

    OK, isn’t this the sort of meta crap that drives people with working synapses nuts? If you’ve made it on to a list at Gawker, you’ve obviously made an impact, because you’ve been noticed.. Saying that I, or Soonergrunt, or Anne Laurie, or Ted and Helen, are among the 50 least important writers of the year would make some sense, because compared to Freddie, we’re all relative unknowns. Still, the fact that we’re mentioned on the list means that we’ve managed to annoy some git at Gawker enough to be made famous in one of their lists.

    Cripes, what people will do for clicks. It’s just embarrassing…

  14. 14.

    Lolis

    I didn’t know anyone else mentioned him. I don’t see his stuff anywhere but here.

  15. 15.

    ruemara

    He’s a vaguely liberal libertarian who is white, male and willing to write 600 words consistently. This is key to being considered a very important voice on the subject. Bonus points if you are contrary to perceived common wisdom.

  16. 16.

    max

    Chris Hayes answered him on teevee, Andrew Sullivan devotes half of his non-beard, non-video posts to answering something or another that Freddie said, Gawker named him one of the 50 least important writer of 2012. What gives, I don’t get it?

    Haven’t got a clue, never paid him any mind. Don’t watch cable TV news, only read Sullivan for links to interesting non-political things, basically never read Gawker (rather read Jezebel which I frequently forget as well), he doesn’t post here. Never notice the guy. I suspect TR Donoghue is correct that he’s the right kind of obnoxious college liberal to make a useful punching bag for the usual sorts. Kinda like NRO is for the right.

    max
    [‘Trolling for him, Doug?’]

  18. 18.

    Ted & Hellen

    Fuck you, Doug.

    He gets all the attention because he’s an incredibly gifted thinker and writer. Which explains exactly why he gets so much grief from the BJ Kool Kids.

    Jealous much?

  19. 19.

    Ted & Hellen

    Is BJ the only prominent blog where its dominant commentariat clique is diametrically opposed in thought and philosophy to that of its blog master?

  20. 20.

    longtime lurk

    @ruemara: Clearly you’ve never read any of his writing. He’s a “vaguely liberal libertarian”? Um, he’s an avowed Marxist. Is there such a thing as a vaguely liberal libertarian Marxist?

    The quality of the hippie punching around here has declined severely.

  21. 21.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Ted & Hellen:

    OK, it’s time to ease up on the acid dosage, dumbass. The lovely colors are groovy, but cripes, they turn your mind to mush.

  22. 22.

    vanmet

    yeah, you don’t get it. so please STFU and stick to what you “get,” whatever that is. i just wish it were elsewhere.

  23. 23.

    joes527

    Has this blog reached the point where most posts and comment can be summarized: “Everyone who isn’t me sucks!”

    (Yeah, I know. joes527 sucks! Don’t bother)

  31. 31.

    scav

    I found him a bit over-eager overly-sure-of-himself new-grad-student while here, never heard of him before. Too prone to using big words and big theory on the premise of that’s how the big boys do it than with a workmen’s understanding of the tools of his trade. That’s my best stab at how he felt somehow iffy. Available, willing, fits the stereotypical meme of over-educated liberal might go some way to explaing popularity.

    thunder rolling in from the east. ha!

  34. 34.

    Heliopause

    Really, Doug? In this big world of possibilities you’re this bored? Undisguised trolling of your own commentariat? Do you need some good recommendations for erotic material?

  36. 36.

    Corner Stone

    @Heliopause:

    Do you need some good recommendations for erotic material?

    Let’s, um, just suppose he does. I’ll bet you can’t make any.

  37. 37.

    SatanicPanic

    @muddy: I’m just laughing because all the brave commenters fighting the fights against the Balloon Juice SHEEPLE are getting all “Leave Freddie ALONE” like it’s the worst thing in the world to make jokes about some blogger.

  39. 39.

    Haydnseek

    @joes527: No, but it’s rapidly approaching a point where a nearly pathological obsession with pundits that a whopping one-millionth of one per cent of Americans are even aware of, let alone care about, takes up a lot of space. Who gives a fuck what Sullivan, Greenwald, Brooks etc. have to say about anything? This isn’t just navel-gazing. This is lint inspection with an electron microscope.

  41. 41.

    FlipYrWhig

    Always got him mixed up with E.D. Kain and Bernard Finel. “Oh, right, that infrequently appearing, condescending, humorless, verbose guy! Wait, no, the other one. No, wait, hold on, the other other one.”

  42. 42.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @FlipYrWhig: Sadly, I fell for some EDK’s conversion schtick. I doubt I will ever forgive m_c for being right about him and the gullibility of those who fell for his “head fake.” /spit

  43. 43.

    Calouste

    @SatanicPanic:

    I was first thinking that this was about E.D. Kain, but I remember now. Kain was the libertarian who was consistently wrong on everything. de Boer was that frontpager who wrote a lot about education issues yet consistently failed to properly capitalize his post titles, which means I hardly ever bothered to read any of it. Hard to pick which one of the was the worst frontpager on BJ, but they are without competition for the bottom two slots.

  47. 47.

    joes527

    @Haydnseek: I’m with you that Sully and Greenwald are blogfodder, so obsessing on them is naval gazing. But Brooks is that nice man that your grandparents watch regularly on the Tee Vee.

    That’s why I hate him with the heat of 10,000 suns. Because he unfailingly carries the blackest of the Republican’s water while totally passing as mainstream.

  48. 48.

    scott

    I guess they think he’s someone worth talking to. On the one hand, he can be very critical and even scathing, but no one questions his sincerity or that he’s into criticizing the arguments, not into fetishizing someone as his designated hate object.

  50. 50.

    muddy

    @joes527: I recently met a young woman, just graduating from college, considers herself very liberal and feminist, who was very positive about Brooks. “Oh, I like him! He’s so reasonable!” wtf

  51. 51.

    RSA

    Freddie can turn a good phrase, and he writes with some confidence, even if it’s sometimes on topics it’s not clear he knows very much about. He reminds me of Matt Yglesias in that way. To be honest, it’s a mystery to me why most famous bloggers are actually famous, in the sense that for a lot of them, I can think of someone who does it better. Maybe it’s consistency and productivity.

  53. 53.

    Lit3Bolt

    I vote for set-up guy. Freddie constantly engages anyone, no matter if they think they’re punching down, up, left, or right. People know they’re going to get a response, his political comments are everywhere (Buzzfeed, LG&M, Politico, Sullivan) so he always has a high output of “content” regardless of right, wrong, or merits.

    If you read Sullivan closely (shudder, why do I do this to myself), particularly his e-mail to the NYT about Glenn Greenwald you see a little bit of the inner working’s of the pundit mind:

    But I actually enjoy rhetorical trampolining, as long as no one gets hurt too much. I do not take anything he writes about my work personally.

    I think that’s a key statement. Sullivan reveals that the “professional” political bloggers don’t take anything personally and enjoy their little slap-fights as a way of manufacturing drama and personality clashes, which drive traffic much more than Genteel Something Something Burkean nuanced disagreement. Sullivan brings up racist IQ bullshit probably as a favor for Ta-Neishi Coates, who knocks down Sullivan’s strawmen with the greatest of ease and is probably, in a weird way, thankful for Sullivan being such a privileged Tory.

    In the same vein, Greenwald was initially infamous on the intertubes for his rampant sockpuppetry and has made shrillness and hysteria and outright lying for civil liberties his cash cow. Greenwald basically picked a fight with anyone and everyone, and it made him popular.

    Freddie is not as shrill or hysterical as Greenwald, but he’s learning that persistence pays off in the political blogging world, and that picking fights, quibbling over nuance, and setting up strawmen like so many GI Joes so that your fellow pundit can knock them down is actually fun.

    I’m not saying all internet slap fights are made up. But I am saying they do drive traffic and make dry, powerless political policy arguments more fun than they really are. So why not drive traffic with some posts about the author commenting about another author and mentioning this, this and this about how this author is wrong? Oh! Look, here’s a rebuttal, then there’s a back and forth and everyone has to follow that and then Corey Robin hates Erik Loomis hates Freddie DeBoer hates DougJ hates Andrew Sullivan hates Glenn Greenwald hates ABL hates John Cole.

    This is all what political blogging really is. It’s high school for grown-ups. Every political blogger worth is salt doesn’t just dryly examine policy, no, he sexes it up by making a photoshop artist make funny pictures of David Brooks looking like a Sugar Glider and then endlessly makes fun of his imaginary conversations with David Brooks. Or he writes 1,000 pages deconstructing Tom Friedman columns. Or he makes fun of Ross Douthat, which is like shooting fish in a fucking barrel.

    Political blogging is all about who’s out. Who’s in. Who’s up. Who’s down. This is all it is. Day after day. Forever.

    So Freddie has a nice niche going on. He’s a nobody right now, but his thinking is on Chris Hayes. Pretty soon he’ll be on TV. Just because he can be counted on to have a decently thought out opinion about something he’s never heard about in 5 minutes. Mention Karl Marx, sex it up with some philosopher quotes, and whinge about someone else impugning your worthless opinion, and deconstruct some strawmen, and BAM! Internet gold, baby.

    tl;dr You can become your own self-fulfilling prophecy on the internet, as long as you always engage, no matter what.

  55. 55.

    Quicksand

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    OK, isn’t this the sort of meta crap that drives people with working synapses nuts? If you’ve made it on to a list at Gawker, you’ve obviously made an impact, because you’ve been noticed.. Saying that I, or Soonergrunt, or Anne Laurie, or Ted and Helen, are among the 50 least important writers of the year would make some sense, because compared to Freddie, we’re all relative unknowns. Still, the fact that we’re mentioned on the list means that we’ve managed to annoy some git at Gawker enough to be made famous in one of their lists.

    Whoosh!

  56. 56.

    ChrisNYC

    Ruemara’s got it. His name helps too, for the demo you’re talking about. There’s never going to be a celebrated serious fiction writer named Kandi Kain. That person will change her name to Gertrude before she applies to a program.

  59. 59.

    different-church-lady

    600 words to say what he could in 200 + queasy willingness to signal self doubt = CATNIP!

  61. 61.

    TG Chicago

    @max:

    …only read Sullivan for links to interesting non-political things…

    I don’t suppose there’s a site that aggregates the non-political links Sullivan’s crew finds? That would be nice. Like a Dish Filter. Take out all of Sullivan’s wanking, the stuff about beards, beagles, and the Pet Shop Boys, and just link to the cool stuff that other people write.

    I swear it’d be easy money — just link everything he does and put a Google ad on it. Sully can’t sue for you “stealing” the stuff he’s stealing first, and a decent number of people would want to check it out.

    Get to it, internet!

  62. 62.

    different-church-lady

    34

    Heliopause says:
    June 12, 2013 at 7:12 pm
    Really, Doug? In this big world of possibilities you’re this bored? Undisguised trolling of your own commentariat? Do you need some good recommendations for erotic material?

    35

    Jim, Foolish Literalist says:
    June 12, 2013 at 7:14 pm
    @vanmet: Would you like a parakeet?

    I [heart] juxtaposition.

  73. 73.

    eemom

    I’d take a kindergarten full of toko-lokos, all day, every day, over thirty seconds of de Boob, or anyone answering, naming, posting about or otherwise acknowledging his petty adolescent existence.

    Sweet mother of Jesus, teh stoopid level is getting toxic in here.

  75. 75.

    Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)

    @RSA:

    To be honest, it’s a mystery to me why most famous bloggers are actually famous, in the sense that for a lot of them, I can think of someone who does it better. Maybe it’s consistency and productivity.

    It’s because a lot of the people who do it better don’t have the innate desire to be a pundit. They do it for other, internal reasons. It’s a lot like politicians. People don’t become politicians because they necessarily want to serve the public (although that’s buried in there somewhere), they become politicians because they think they are right and they like having their ego stroked.

  76. 76.

    A Humble Lurker

    @Heliopause:
    Well, look at how well it worked. He’s a recovering coke head where the crack is easy to get as it’s NOT easy to get an abortion in a blood red state.

  77. 77.

    Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)

    @TG Chicago:

    I don’t suppose there’s a site that aggregates the non-political links Sullivan’s crew finds? That would be nice. Like a Dish Filter. Take out all of Sullivan’s wanking, the stuff about beards, beagles, and the Pet Shop Boys, and just link to the cool stuff that other people write.

    It’s called “Every Other Interesting Site on the Internet.”

  78. 78.

    White Trash Liberal

    Tbh, what Freddie does a great job of is taking the work of other writers and critiquing it in a manner that allows Freddie to act like the kid who took the winning whack at the piñata. Since this kind of rhetorical flourish to emphasize that one’s core pundit philosophy (left, right, center) is the correct and noble one is the very basis of punditry since Broder, it makes sense that he is getting invited into the League of Extraordinary Bloviators.

  80. 80.

    gogol's wife

    @muddy:

    I was having lunch in a pizza joint in New Haven today, and a guy behind us was pontificating loudly about Weber. I thought, “Ooh, what if it’s David Brooks?” Even though the semester is long over, he must have turned in the grades for his Humility course, so it was highly unlikely, but what a good story it would have been for Balloon Juice. Of course it wasn’t him, although it looked vaguely like him.

  81. 81.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Corner Stone: I wouldn’t have figured that. I would have thought that endangered species were right up your alley. Live and learn, I guess.

  82. 82.

    gogol's wife

    @gogol’s wife:

    I had some hope because one morning in Princeton I said to my husband, “We’re having breakfast next to Paul Volcker,” thinking it was a guy who looked like him, but my husband looked at him and said, “That IS Paul Volcker.” It was cool. But unfortunately, it wasn’t Brooks. There was no salad bar.

  85. 85.

    gogol's wife

    @lojasmo:

    I was thinking he was the one M_C hated, but that was also ED Kain. They truly were indistinguishable, so don’t feel bad. Finel was slightly different somehow.

  87. 87.

    eemom

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    This is a distraction from the surveillance stuff.

    hmm, I guess ya got me there….though I’m not sure one self-important 29 year old twat is much of an improvement over another.

  92. 92.

    gerry

    I’m sure glad there are no holier-than-thou types on the front page here.

    Keep it real guys.

  97. 97.

    Rex Everything

    @coyote: Cheers.

    If anyone’s interested, here’s a good piece from Freddie; nothing political don’t worry. (A sample — you gotta admit this is funny — “The royal ‘we’ is to be used only in the sentence ‘we are a fucking poseur.'”)

  98. 98.

    SteveM

    All I know is that Freddie de B. mocked me for speculating that there might be Chinese involvement in all this (an idea I picked up from Marcy Wheeler, who’s not exactly a Greenwald-bashing O-bot). Then Snowden turned up in Hong Kong. Emoprog fail.

  99. 99.

    eco2geek

    Going back to Glenn Greenwald for a moment, why, you might ask yourself, did former NSA contractor Edward Snowden go to him? Why did he show Greenwald a secret FISA court order telling Verizon to hand over 3 months’ worth of metadata about its customers? And why did he follow this up with information about NSA’s PRISM program? Then follow that up with information about “Boundless Informant”? And cap it all off by outing himself, and giving Greenwald an interview?

    Why, it was simply to screw with this blog’s commentariat, of course. It was to cause all those howls of outrage from commentors who hate Glenn Greenwald.

    Really, it was just all about you.

  100. 100.

    Tractarian

    Doug, you wouldn’t make a very good liberal punching bag yourself. If that makes you feel any better.

  104. 104.

    Jewish Steel

    Thinks he’s Eric Hobsbawm. Is really Rick from the Young Ones. That’s Freddie.

  105. 105.

    brad

    He reminds me too much of myself when I end up mansplaining. Pompous, unaware of who he’s generally hectoring when he wades outside the obvious big name political targets, chauvinistic in that he thinks having lived a few years and read a great deal gives him true insight into experiences any genuinely educated cis straight white male scum (like myself) could never fathom.
    He’s Hitchens waiting to happen again, and if anything that’s a backhanded compliment.

  108. 108.

    Ted & Hellen

    @brad:

    You’re an idiot.

    But you’ve also got all the PC Gender Studies words down pat, so you’ll go far in the PC Gender Studies world.

  109. 109.

    IM

    Freddie is the Holy Joe of the liberal blogosphere.

    Talented, serious, a lot of opinions I share and others I at last understand.

    But very self righteous. And he tends to depict the world as the compromised, hypocritical, obama-worshipping, corrupt liberal blogosphere on one side and Freddie de Boer, the last honest leftie on the other. And to achieve that he tends to build gigantic strawmen. And if his interlocutors then point out to him that e. g. Dershowitz and TNR don’t represent all liberals, he isn’t really ready to back down and admit errors. Any errors.

    So even he as a point or somewhat of a point, his “only honest man” act annoys.

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