The Pundit Class Played Devil’s Advocate. Now the Devil’s at the Door.

Pop intellectuals spent decades luxuriating in smug, performative detachment—flirting with reactionary ideas, indulging in conceited contrarianism—because they believed history had a progressive safety net. They thought their equivocations were harmless and progress was inevitable. They sold their Airport Book devil's advocacy from a place of perfect safety. Now, the devil's at the door, and they want to pretend they weren't complicit.

A revolving door of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post columnists made a career of platforming people who—either blatantly or through implication—argued that transgender people shouldn't exist. That democracy had "gone too far." They raged against "wokeism" because they couldn’t conceive of a world where it wouldn’t prevail. They bemoaned "cancel culture" not because they cared about free speech, but because they mistakenly believed the right-wing ideologues they dined with had been cast out for good.

In their intellectual stupor, they decided that the forces of social change were so overpowering and unstoppable that the world needed a voice to speak up against them in an infernal balancing act. And it felt daring, didn't it? To be the literary equivalent of the Cool Girl—not like those Other Girls who care about freedom, equity, history, and common sense.

They dressed themselves up as the beatniks of cultural commentary. They convinced themselves of their "underground" status. They basked in institutional protection, indulging in a self-congratulatory circle-jerk of mock dissent where the stakes were always someone else's problem. They positioned themselves as lone voices against an imagined tide of unthinking dogma, pretending that they were fighting against orthodoxy when, in reality, they were just reinforcing the status quo with a hipster filter. They weren't holding truth to power. They were selling a brand: rebellion without responsibility, provocation without principle, and the posture of dissent with none of the burden of consequence.

They dined on the aesthetic of courage without ever taking a risk. And why not? The market for disaffected liberals playing footsie with fascists was lucrative and full of opportunities for highbrow grift.

They could afford to dabble in these games because in their minds, the battle was already won and the arc of history would keep bending toward justice, no matter how much they nudged it for sport. They believed that the worst couldn't happen, that democracy had training wheels, civilization an auto-correct function.

But the horrors of the past have not stayed in the past. The right-wing authoritarian comeback is here, it is accelerating, and it is ruthless. Across the U.S. and Europe, the far right have seized power, stacked courts, rigged elections, and gutted democratic institutions with surgical precision. Trump and his allies have weaponized the government against dissent, stripping civil rights from the marginalized while openly laying the groundwork for permanent minority rule. Their assault on transgender people is an active state-sponsored persecution, backed by bans on healthcare, forced detransition, and legal erasure.

Hate crimes are surging, right-wing vigilantes operate with impunity, and book burnings and academic purges are no longer relics of history. This is not an intellectual exercise or a thought experiment—it is a full-scale fascist takeover, fueled by corruption, violence, and the complicity of those who once dismissed the alarms.

It was nothing less than Neoliberal excess and an echo chamber of insulated dialogue and protected, coddled abstraction that allowed the Pop Thinkers their fantasy. The truth—that even the smallest degree of critical thinking could have shown them—is that the world cannot be marked safe from totalitarianism. It is always there, lurking in the shadows, waiting for its moment to strike, seize control, and rise again.

As the ground shifts, as the people they once dismissed as "alarmist" turn out to be prophets, as the movement they teased shows no intention of stopping at first base, the "Independent Thinkers" want distance. They want plausible deniability. They want to pretend they were always just asking questions, just keeping an open mind, just exploring the marketplace of ideas.

This was never a game. It was never a thought experiment. It was never an abstract concept for clever people to debate in cozy cafes. This was always about real lives, real people, real harm. The pundit class who spent years smirking from their ivory towers, who laundered reactionary ideology as debate, who made their names dancing on the edge of the fire—they don't get to feign innocence now that the flames are closing in. And their absolution won't come cheap.