On Millennial Snot

is the author of the , a newsletter diligently cataloguing and curating the latest and best – and most hilarious and/or cringeworthy – content, personalities, and internet drama bubbling up out of the so-called “New Right.” It’s fun, irreverent, refreshingly light-hearted, and actually quite useful for those like me who’re not on social media but still somehow a part of this political and cultural space or otherwise interested in keeping track of it.

Dudley himself is also consistently well-written and thoughtful, and I’ve encouraged him to try branching out into writing his own essays. So when he sent me a draft of this piece on the distinctively juvenile style of language adopted by the professional managerial class in recent decades I was happy to publish it here as a guest post. It gets at what I think is really a very deep question: why has all our political and cultural discourse, and especially that of our alleged governing elite, become so utterly unserious? I hope you enjoy Dudley’s humorous take on answering this. And if you do then I encourage you to subscribe to the New Right Poast for more.

Mandatory disclaimer that Dudley’s views, language, and tone are all his own and not mine, so if you have any snotty complaints you’ll need to subscribe to him to deliver them directly. – N.S. Lyons

Back in May, a black studies professor – an academic of the type who writes dissertations about the semiotics of Beyonce – “clapped back” at one of her peers, a white man who had dared complain that all the jobs in his corner of academia had been given to minorities. Their grating exchange went viral, and the poor schmuck certainly won’t be finding work now.

Setting aside the content of the argument, I was struck by how these people spoke to one another:

"I mean, I'm sorry --"

"Let's be *very* clear here"

"So true 🙄"

"You're so right 🙄"

"This is an *extremely* bad look for you"

"Umm, frankly..."

These are middle-aged PhDs with prestigious careers, talking like snotty teenagers or sassy black drag queens. Note the overuse of sarcasm, emphasizing asterisks, exclamation points, and pregnant pause ellipses to denote how “over it” they are. They all speak in the dramatic tone of the mean girl.

"History PhD here, and uh, this thread is...a lot!"

You see this language, and these people, everywhere today.