Hacker News Reader

Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

I read the comment as a tongue-in-cheek jab, not an insult. The author made no value judgements about French, and it’s hard to deny that part of French’s audience turned on him.

The reasons for that are not examined, and in the context of the reviewer’s opening, it serves as nothing more than a way to say “usually, trust can be built over time, David French’s situation notwithstanding”.

To conclude that the author hates French is a pretty enormous leap.

It strikes me that this comment is guilty of the same thing it complains about.

View on HN

For what it's worth, I found in the comments to this article a discussion by the author of why he doesn't like David French: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/nobody-will-admit-the-b...

So I don't know about "hates", but he really does dislike the man.

I got the sense the author wanted to construct an example that would be so obvious as to be laughable. But I immediately thought of Christina Hoff Sommers' claim that feminism has changed to the point that she believes she now looks like an outsider because of it.

Is it the truth, or PR? I agree it's annoying that this narrative is so common, but if I spent all my time getting angry about that kind of PR I wouldn't have time to do anything else. I think we just have to bear it and trust people to dig to find out the truth.

Alternatively, we can also just not care too deeply about the answer and blithely ask on HN-- can someone in the know tell me if David French complains about a specific denomination of Christians, or Christians as a whole? If it is a specific denomination, where do I go to find out a) what a critical mass of that specific denomination thinks about the world, and b) what a critical mass of that specific denomination does about the members of their church that seem to be trolling the rest of us?

In brief, he mainly complains about Christians blindly following Donald Trump and the current Republican Party.

And has written a lot about cases of sexual abuse by Christian pastors and leaders.

I greatly admire French and agree that his views have stayed consistent, while the beliefs and actions of most of those who shared the label "Conservative Christian" have greatly changed, or at least been exposed.

Interesting. That appears to explain why the review has a strong, "quirky, 'hip' campus Christian newsletter" vibe.

Interesting, thanks for sharing that. He does follow this up to clarify:

> Something like that. Mostly I don't hate him, he just bothers me. I really wish he wasn't the banner-carrier for mainstream Christianity/Conservatism, but I don't wish he'd fall off a cliff or whatever.

I'm not sure if the reviewer's issue with French is rooted in French's willingness to explore nuance in a way that makes christians/conservatives uncomfortable, or if it's because French embraces positions that are really not compatible with the 2022 version of conservatism while still aligning himself with that movement.

In either case, it seems like a position that isn't particularly relevant to the primary content of the review. I will say it was probably an unnecessary distraction to mention him at all, but I don't think that distraction warrants ignoring everything else the reviewer writes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com