Levitz, like most people in the media who are not explicitly conservative, must play a delicate game. The game is to engage in enough nuance and care in your writing to still be able to look yourself in the mirror, to preserve some integrity, without getting right-coded in the culture war. Once a person finds himself on the wrong side of culture war debates enough times, they will be regarded as a reactionary no matter what their actual beliefs. They fall into the Maw. I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility. The Maw shreds nuance and destroys complexity and, more than anything, forces everyone to constantly arrange their self-presentation in a way that ensures they don’t fall on the wrong side of the culture war faultline. I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about the Twitter files and how they are being reported. The Maw insists that there’s nothing there at all.