Unclear and Present Danger
the junk shop of history johnganz.substack.com
- Indexed pieces, last 90 days
- 15
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 17, 2026
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Latest pieces
From Shitpost to Bullshit (opens the original)
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In a post last week, I discussed Erick Erickson’s j’accuse about the Nazis lurking on the American right. I sketched a theory about the function of conservative intellectuals: they are not leaders of their movement; they do not set the agenda or advance ideas; their role is rather to mediate and to justify, rationalize, and euphemize. They sometimes understand themselves as guiding the debate, but in fact they have a subaltern position. Whatever authority they have comes not from setting the par
A Grin Without a Stat (opens the original)
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I began this review for a magazine, but it took me so long to finish it that they didn’t want it anymore. I’ve finally finished it, and I hope it still provides some insight without the assistance of an editor. “A week is a long time in politics,” Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson is reputed to have said, supplying us with one of the great political clichés. If a week was a long time in the middle of the 1960s, it’s a positive eternity today. Politics, mediated through the internet, appears as
Better Late Than Never? (opens the original)
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Last week, conservative broadcaster Erick Erickson published a piece on his Substack entitled “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off the Cliff.” He tells the story that a radical current has moved from the margins of the American right into a real institutional ecosystem linking multi-millionaire ideological warlord Charles Haywood, the Claremont Institute, the Society for American Civic Renewal, American Reformer, and adjacent Christian-nationalist networks, while a separate but con
Hyperpolitics Reconsidered; “The Crisis in Culture;” Workout (opens the original)
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Reason v. Rule (opens the original)
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I am torn, as many are, I believe, between AI skepticism and fear. On the one hand, I’m unimpressed, and on the other, I think there’s a real existential risk in the development of these technologies. I suppose one way to resolve this tension is to articulate it like this: I don’t think the literal destruction of humanity—our biological species—is likely to occur, but I do think a kind of mass dehumanization is possible and even desired by its creators, although they may not fully realize it or
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