I didn't really start paying attention to Jacobin's role in the left until they published the TERRIBLE piece about why addressing racism is bad, actually, by the Philly DSA chair who refused to let members form a reading group about the book she was reviewing. https://twitter.com/HRHTish/status/1252331717001609217

My sense from what I've seen of their and their editors' presence on Twitter is that they're pretty much a group of privileged class reductionists who are just really really invested in being seen as the brains of the left and the official "is this leftist?" verdict-deliverers.

Their content is all over the place.

Some is by writers I respect (even if I don't agree with them) and by writers I respect, some is just self-important word salad.

More than anything they remind me of what DSA's membership like before Bernie: white dudes sitting around having Very Important Ideas and grumbling that the little people weren't flocking to them like moths to the lamp of their genius.

Now, thanks to Bernie, democratic socialism is increasingly mainstream, they think they were the ones who made it that way with their Very Big Socialist Ideas, which.

No.

Organizers did this shit.

But, they think they own socialism and everyone has to listen to them.

As class reductionist snobs convinced that their Very Big Socialist Ideas were the only smart takes in the room, they've mostly focused on trying to poison newly-minted socialists to the idea of intersectionality and convince them it was fundamentally liberal and Not Left.

They also decided relatively early in the primary that they couldn't afford to admit that Trump was a fascist or even a white supremacist, really.

They couldn't, or they wouldn't have been able to justify their contempt for popular front unity against him.

(Plus, it would have meant admitting that white supremacy is an actual real problem, not just some minor facet of working class oppression)

They gave the dirtbaggers pseudo-intellectual cover for class reductionist politics, which gave podcasters a way to excuse their fanbase's oppressive brigading of marginalized people.

In return, Chapo et all told their listeners that Jacobin people were The Smartest Socialists.

So, the dirtbaggers and Jacobin have spent five years exploiting and taking credit for and profiting from the democratic socialist boom that Bernie inspired and organizers built, and all the newbie Chapo Socialists think Jacobin is the great ivory tower of socialism.

In reality, it's a circle jerk of a small group of mostly white dudes who read the same small bit of political theory & think they know all the theory that matters & accuse the rest of us of being anti-intellectual when we're like, there are other books that matter besides yours.

They're VERY invested in explaining why only their books matter, and VERY invested in the project of telling the rest of us we're just anti-intellectuals when we're like, I don't come from that theory tradition so I don't know what that means but this isn't a jargon contest.

Which sounds less like intellectualism and more like being part of an extremely insecure cult, if you ask me, but that is neither here nor there.

Anyway, Jacobin and the dirtbags are in this devil's pact symbiosis based on making money by giving their overlapping fanbases excuses to be misogynist and racist on the internet.

So like, Jacobin editors as far as I can tell are a bunch of theory nerds who've only read one kind of theory ever, and who think they hit the Bernie home run and made socialism A Thing.

Their grift is a lot more of a grift of delusional entitlement than the podcasters.

Whereas the podcast dirtbags all seem pretty self-aware about the fact that they're socialism-themed, bargain basement Howard Sterns selling white dudes permission to be dicks to marginalized people.

Jacobin, meanwhile, has appointed itself the what-is-or-isn't-left police, and relies on Chapo's audience to maintain that clout and Chapo's troll base to beat the crap out of people when they disobey Jacobins what's-allowed-to-be-left laws.

So.

Assholes who cause a ton of unnecessary drama and pain and division and showdowns, yes.

Complicit in misogynist brigade-trolling, yes.

But they're doing it all less for the love of drama and more to try and keep that King Of Socialism crown on their collective head.

That's my read, anyway.