The heterodox commentariat has flooded the zone with too much shit

(Not that it helps to blame.) Some thoughts on the eve of the US election...

I’ve been lying on the couch reflecting and crying tears of overwhelm that are running into my ears….

This is big

There is a sense that the outcome of today’s US election will be reflective of a far bigger and frightening reality that we haven’t begun to comprehend yet, but that we know has been hovering “out there” for some time.

It makes me think of the “invisible ships” phenomenon¹. A whopping great ship sits just off the coast of an uncolonised territory for weeks but remains undetected by the Indigenous people going about their lives on land. The “natives” have never encountered a ship, it doesn’t exist in their imagination, so they literally can’t see it, not until strange-looking, armed white men approach in row boats. Suddenly the ship comes into view as a new (and inevitably life-altering) reality.

No matter the outcome of this election, it will bring forth a whopping great new reality that we haven’t been able - or haven’t wanted - to see yet. A fascist Trump Presidency or a Harris Presidency will slam the ship right up in front of our noses. That ship, of course, is a disintegration of democracy and stability (for violence and further separation are sure to follow no matter the “winner”) and of decency and truth (there’s no unseeing Elon Musk’s vested support of the Trump campaign, or Jeff Bezos’ silencing of The Washington Post editorial board). It’s the diminution of human rights (witness: The Israeli lobby’s influence and the momentum the abortion rights roll-back gained among men) and of trust in institutions, and of a sense of commonality. That ship is collapse.

I think some of us here find it helpful to see things through this lens. It makes sense. It even enables some compassion. (The Blame chapter in my Book Serialisation explains how this pans out, if you want to catch up). As much as I don’t want to engage in the almost-hysterical hyperbole, I find myself saying to others in this space - this will play out as it must; it has a momentum of its own now. A Harris win perhaps delays and slows the process. A Trump win lets things rip.

At the same time, I’m not quite ready for the reveal. Will we ever be?

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Learning from the heterodox hypocrisy

There is a lot of noise surrounding this election.

The heterodox commentariat, in particular, has been in overdrive, commenting on each others’ comments and furiously examining the origins of liberalism and free speech and who is to blame for woke-ism, cancelling cancellers and competing to be the most right.

I’m audibly groaning when I open my inbox or flick through my phone alerts. Oh Gawd, does that have to be said? Does that have to be owned?

We could get to the meaty heart of this noise issue by asking, What Happened to Russell Brand? Which is to say, what happened to the powerful heterodox commentariat more broadly?

Someone dug up this promotional video for a podcast I did with Brand in 2019. This was back when he’d just hit strides as a contrarian voice speaking out on injustice and elite power issues. In our conversation, we discussed spiritual authenticity. Brand, back then, spoke truth to power and was quite the gift.

Covid hit shortly after, which saw many systems-cynical commentators like Brand follow their vaccine scepticism to problematic extremes. But the pandemic was not the only, nor the original, trigger.

The main thing that happened was that the world had suddenly got precarious and unpredictable in all kinds of directions - we got a dread-full sense of that ship lurking out there somewhere - and people with big minds and voices felt compelled to try to pin it all down with their important hot takes. They began to do what scared modernists have done for yonks - to name things, own things, create theories about things, to blame outwards when they come up against fear and uncertainty, and to invent scapegoats when they hit deadlocks in their linear, materialist logic that they impose atop the chaos of an increasingly complexifying world.

Erstwhile balanced, centre-Left voices turned their attention to criticising the more extreme Left (mostly about woke stuff 🙄.) More precariousness and wobbliness in the world, coupled with the algorithmic momentum that accompanies outrage, saw their views dial up to “rabidly anti-woke”. The algorithms then rewarded them further (Elon et al assisted here, of course) and this growing crew of recalcitrant pundits took interviewing each other on each other’s podcasts and commenting on each other’s comments on their Substacks. The noise now entered an echo chamber, which eventually herded much of the heterodox movement to the far Right and to the pro-Trump camp.

RB and Donald Trump Jnr sharing a stogie.

Brand possibly leads the pack with this bizarre about-face. (

Daniel Pinchbeck

details the full journey here and I covered it here.) He’s recently become a Christian evangelist and Trump supporter, platforming JD Vance, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson. You could argue he has swapped out his old addiction(s) for a new one - the juicy dopamine hit that you get when you’re the noisy guru assuaging (predominately men’s) fear by blaming, naming, theorising, creating scapegoats and engaging in three-hour psychological bullshit-y Youtube pontifications with grifters.

There’s also the Weinstein brothers, Charles Eisenstein, James Lindsey, Jordan Peterson and podcaster Dave Rubin, a self-styled classical liberal and free speech champion who embraced the “stop the steal” message more recently (and became a lackey for Russian bot factories). Elon Musk went from supporting Biden and railing against political interference to being Trump’s biggest backer and spreading fake news about the election. This column over at

Persuasion

explains how OG heterodox site

The Free Press

has also swung².

This hypocritical heterodox about-face has played out prominently here on Substack where many of the heterodox voices flocked after - in many cases - having been “cancelled” by MSM for their contrarian views. I’ve observed this transformation over the past three years (I’ve interviewed many of the hypocritical about-facers, too).

"Woke" v "anti-woke" is boring and redundant... and dangerous

And I have been incredibly disappointed. Smart, discerning minds should be capable of more. Adults with that much power should be more responsible.

I don’t want to add to the noise, nor get trapped in that godawful theorise ‘n’ blame trap. And this is precisely the point I wish to make. We need to learn from what has happened to this community. When humans are scared and are dealing with horribly wobbly circumstances, we bifurcate and brazenly put certainty stakes in the ground. We try to own the thing, to conquer it with words and categories, to create an “us” and a “them”. We try to win. Unchecked this addiction to noise leads to extremism, fascism and the rest.

There is a lot more noise ahead. The election dissection will be intolerable, the theories, the hot takes and the one-up-manning on “right-ness” will be soul-incinerating. We need to smile at it and remember why it’s happening (everyone is scared) and commit to not adding to the noise with our own need to anchor things and to be right. (If you want to practice this skill, scroll through any of my Instagram posts about the election, like this one, and …breathe deeply…and let go.)

A very pragmatic case for voting for Harris

We can all go back and forth on the Democrats’ handling of the Middle East issue and whether a protest vote for Jill Stein is the morally right way to go. I’ve been challenged on this point several times. Me, I long ago quit expecting politics to be anything but political. We can’t hold it to the same moral account as we hold each other, for example. It’s a system and our best route is to play the game and vote pragmatically. For me, ensuring Trump’s model of fascism does not take hold is the pragmatic goal and only Harris can stand in its way.

But I came across this even more pragmatic perspective this week. Rachel Donald at

Planet: Critical

made a point in a much longer column about communicating calmly in dark times:

“Women will only be able to mobilise for Palestinians under Harris. Under Trump, American women will be too busy fighting for their own rights.”

And, let’s not forget that it’s mostly women who mobilise - for Palestinians, the climate and otherwise.

Let’s keep the farm calm in the days and weeks ahead. I’ve been unsubscribing from quite a few newsletters and feeds. I’m hiking and doing yoga. If I had kids I’d be taking them to a park and having a wrestle. If I had a garden, I’d plant something. I’m taking on board the advice of my boyfriend (yeah, I recently acquired one) who sends me memes of dogs doing cute things and suggests not trying to understand things. I’m reminded of my dear friend Tim’s invitation, “Do you want to be right or do you want love?”.

Feel free to share what you’re feeling.

Sarah xx

PS Also take time to enjoy the ironies that abound. We’re a hapless species sometimes.

1. We might have to leave aside that this is probably a deeply colonialist myth, based loosely on the diary entries of Joesph Banks who wrote of the arrival of the Endeavour in Botany Bay; the parallel is the point. The concept was popularised in the film What the Bleep Do We Know, which is where I think I first came across it.

2. I had to unsubscribe from the site after initially supporting it. Its too-vested pro-Israel editorial line is problematic. Founder Bari Weiss set up the site committed to, yes, a free press but was not able to maintain this post-October 7.