Dear Friends,
Last Friday I wrote about the big conversation sparked by Kevin DeYoung’s critique of Doug Wilson and the “Moscow Mood.” Part of my evaluation was this:
Moreover, generally speaking, when challenged, there is nobody on the planet as adept as Doug Wilson at misdirection, muddying the waters, nuancing logic into pretzels, and miraculously coming out the other side perfectly justified and everyone else being the problem. I have witnessed this public dynamic repeatedly for three decades (maybe in his personal life he is a ‘quick to repent’ guy, but otherwise it’s nowhere to be seen). So even while gladly acknowledging and even appreciating that Doug writes plenty of true and witty essays—the man has an otherworldly way with words—it frankly amazes me the number of people who don’t recognize this (what else do I call it?) career of gaslighting any time he is seriously challenged.
Then the other day Doug published his lengthy rejoinder. I will leave it to you to judge, but from my point of view he couldn’t have more clearly illustrated and vindicated my assessment. And just yesterday I was randomly talking to a friend who told me he’d been a follower of Doug since 1998, and who hadn’t even read my essay, who told me: “In all that time until now I’ve never seen Doug ever apologize for anything!” See, I am not the only one, and Doug seems completely oblivious to how he appears to those outside his bubble.
For about a moment or two I was tempted to go through and highlight his misdirections and fallacies in detail, but I don’t think it would be very fruitful (except to note with utmost surprise that he, too, pretends to not know the difference between recommending or watching a film in which characters use foul language and using foul language). From the widest vantage point, Doug and his crowd do this thing where they rhetorically poke people in the eye and throw hand grenades—that’s what “No Quarter November” is about, and he even does it in this very rejoinder—and then they act like they are getting unfairly singled out and picked on the moment somebody criticizes them. It is passive-aggression at scale. It is performative, and from his final segment talking about how there is now some kind of “moral obligation” to continue this discussion (there isn’t), I surmise that continued public attention is the point.
They’re unlikely to get any more from me.
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