At left: Our most recent Shout-out Saturday demonstration in front of Lindsey Graham's office, February 15, 2020. (I'm in front wearing the pink hat, holding the "SHUT DOWN TRUMP" sign.)
~~~
I thought about renaming my blog "thoughts on populism" or something, but that's so pretentious.
Because I hate academia and want them to stay away, and that would certainly work.
But no, sticking to my values. This is it.
I will not 'rewrite' myself; I will not engage in Stalinist rewrites of history to make it look like I've always been right. I haven't been, as this blog shows. At some point, I will also be 'wrong' again, since to err is human. But I have never deleted a post from this blog, not once, not ever. (On
my tumblr, I think I deleted maybe 3 posts, all by request.) Overall, the dangerous and Orwellian idea that
we have always been at war with Eastasia, has entered our discourse and twisted things in fascist, cruel, sick ways. People who 5 yrs ago hated the queers are now the champions of the downtrodden. When you go back and try to find the insults, the jokes (from leftists and liberals!) about Lindsey Graham being "light in the loafers"--well, those have been dropped down the infamous memory hole. We're all gay now.
Rather than try to explain themselves to us:
well, when I was a homophobe/Christian/supporter of segregation, I believed such-and-so and I learned otherwise because...? Let's discuss, share histories, explain the process we want to share with others. BUT NO, this discussion is now thoroughly impossible, since everybody has always been on "the right side of history" and always thought exactly the way they do right now.
Nobody on the Left will currently fess up to ever having any other view than the 'correct' one.
So only bad people, the unenlightened and unwoke, have EVER had the 'wrong' opinion.
And as we see, these are college kids speaking that strange, bizarre, elitist, limited postmodernese, and if you don't speak it, they will even tell you that you have never been a real leftist. Kids from private schools who learned about Social Justice a week ago, will inform old ladies who got hit in the head by right-wing lunatics and STILL protest every single week (none of them do), that if you aren't fluent in Judith-Butlerese, you can not possibly be a leftist, so of course, they do not even have to listen to you.
Thus, unlike boomers and Gen X, they are not learning from actual veterans in the movement.
This might be why there are so few (if any) ongoing protests, NO coherent position statements, NO journalistic-coverage of economic terrorism in the heartland, NO attempts at mass-organizing in unorganized neighborhoods, NO radical cells ... and why Donald Trump will handily be re-elected.
~~~
As many of you know, I was a
Yippie. I am old. Look us up. We were batshit crazy and proud of it.
I regret a lot of it now, and yet, who would I be without that experience? I could not analyze and understand the current political situation at all, and I would be as frustrated as so many others are.
As it is, I was raised to
closely examine anyone making lots of noise and why they were making it.
I was taught by
my mentors to not only examine what they claimed they believed, but who they ARE.
And interestingly, this is integral to postmodernism. So I get it.
The postmodern Left claims
words change meanings, literally shape-shifting and turning into something different, depending on
who says them.
The best recent (rather shocking) example is a fawning, positive interview of
Andrea Long Chu in
The New Republic, a trans women declaring
"We're all female now" (this came as a bit of a shock to the men I know) and what "woman" means:
I recently met with her in Washington Square Park to chat about her first book Females, which springs from an unsurprisingly audacious conceit: “Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism, but rather a universal existential condition.” For Chu, “femaleness” is the urge to be a vessel for another’s desire. Gender in this conception is defined not only by the self, but also by the other—it is the expression of what someone else wants.
Chu is a trans woman of color, which in Leftist Postmodville, puts her way up on top of the oppression-food chain, so she can say this extremely-sexist, porn-derived drivel with total impunity.
But I ask you:
If the dreaded basement-dwelling, white 'incel' young hetero male, OR a right-wing Christian, dared to propagate this nonsense, defining women in that fashion????
What would be the reaction?
Convulsions from the #metoo crowd, calling for their execution.
So, we learn from this episode:
all words are not equal.
Some people are permitted to say (apparently with a straight face) the meaning of womanhood is to be a porn-character. (In fact, the Chu interview seemed like a direct-rewrite of some parts of
The Story of O.)
They aren't only ALLOWED, they are REWARDED for their misogyny with book deals and interviews and excellent health insurance and Ph.Ds.
Other unfortunate people, who don't live in Brooklyn and hang out with important editors, who may be foolish enough to think
they have the right to say that same exact shit, would lose their jobs and be run out of town on the proverbial rail.
Yes, that's where we're at now.
Orwell, call your office: Some people are indeed more equal than others.
~~~
In 2018,
The New York Times even hired a person (and then proudly refused to fire them) named Sarah Jeong, who had a sordid social-media history of hundreds of hateful tweets. Many of these authoritatively asserted there is
no such thing as "white culture".
Talk about hating hillbillies, this snooty Harvard grad raised it to
a whole nother level.
If you've ever wondered why the NYT
deliberately refuses to cover bluegrass or country music (etc), we
finally got an answer.
We don't even exist, and they are perfectly fine with hiring people who proudly tweet this.
After all, she accurately speaks for and represents the bourgeois-class consensus on this. This has ALWAYS been the view of the NYT, so why not hire someone who comes right out and says so?
But do they realize, in proudly keeping Jeong on staff, they
confirmed the anti-worker/anti-hillbilly bias of the Times, that we have been accusing them of
for decades and decades???
(I guess there is not
a single hillbilly or country-music fan on the staff of the NYT who might have ventured a daring,
um, what did you say? They would have been fired outright if they had.)
Jeong was instead rewarded with an encouraging, loving, supportive statement from the Times. Roughly, you could translate it as:
GOOD WORK INSULTING THE RIGHT PEOPLE, SARAH! YOU'RE IN!
However it IS notable that the Trumpsters talked up Sarah Jeong as 'typical' of the Times,
for 2 solid months.
And the NYT
didn't mind a bit; they seemed to revel in it. My whole point.
These people went to Harvard and Yale and they will be
just fine. They can withstand Trump; they live in liberal states that took the Medicaid Expansion. They ain't worried. They don't have any militias nearby. They don't protest, so nobody will ever throw rocks at them.
To them, Trump is a remote academic theoretical exercise. Or some exotic animal in a zoo? Whatever he is, rest assured, they have never spoken to an actual Trump supporter and wouldn't know how.
~~~
The Yippies taught me to look at the
class and actual history of the people who show up on the Left, not just their words.
Who are their parents? How were they raised? What neighborhood did they grow up in and who did they largely associate with, growing up?
Is there
any indication they are who they claim they are?
Did they go to private schools, thus getting into the best colleges, writing dissertations and getting book deals, while living in the most expensive city in the USA? Chu does, unabashedly admits it too... and in my day, it meant OF COURSE this person could
not be a leftist. There is absolutely nothing in their life to suggest that they are.
Just like those very-capable infiltrators during the
COINTELPRO era, they said they were radicals but they were there to take us down.
THESE PEOPLE ARE TOO.
LOOK AT THE CLASS OF PEOPLE THEY REPRESENT.
These people are members of the class that keep the rest of us down, perhaps not the 1%, but definitely
the 9.9% that calls the shots in this country. (linked article is notably titled "The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy")
These people's parents get tax breaks under Trump, which is why they taught their kids to hate working class people when we try to question them.
They do not answer to US (the masses or the workers), as Karl Marx (as well as Trotsky, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Marcuse, Du Bois, Fanon, et. al.) instructed them. They are answerable to
no one directly. They answer to "
critical theory" and Judith Butler instead. They pointedly do
not care about the working class and even enjoy directly insulting us, Jeong-style. Their health insurance is great. In fact,
Chu wrote an entire article in the New York Times (!!) about how her new vagina would not make her happy, but she needed it anyway. (!!)
I am dead serious: bragging about wasting six-figure-health-insurance-costs on an apparently-empty surgical gesture. Lots more surgery to come as well, also mentioned in the article.
I wonder what the
poor trans women of color who aren't writing dissertations and can't afford endless surgeries and Brooklyn co-ops, think of all this?
Well, true to form, Chu didn't ask any and obviously doesn't care.
~~~
And now we come to the re-election of Trump, which seems imminent. The working class has been exiled from the Left and not permitted to participate, since we don't know the highfalutin theory-language. So, the working classes go to wherever they/we are welcome.
If the Left is too good (or stupid, or pure, or whatever) to explain their incoherent, incomprehensible
horse-shit, then the Right will be happy to step in... and they have. Nature abhors a vacuum.
The Left will then respond with "If they talk to the Right, it proves they were right-wing all along!"--and since (unlike me) they have conveniently flushed their old blogs and embarrassing tumblr accounts down the toilet, there is
no proof they haven't
always thought the right thoughts. They are ideologically pure as the driven snow. They don't associate with the other side, they might get infected.
So the tribalist-polarization continues, which of course (as
Gramsci explained about cultural-hegemony, which the kids haven't read, since they are busy with Judith Butler and similar meaningless gender horse-shit)
always helps the party currently in power.
And that's YOU kids isn't it?
Andrea Long Chu's academic paper (!) titled
"Did sissy porn made me trans?"(pdf) is
much more important (and lets not forget prurient and sexy) than going to the heartland to research boring wonky health insurance and farm subsidies.
These opinions are obviously
directed to the people getting the tax breaks, the people who can already afford all kinds of exotic surgeries.
We can imagine what its like when some poor guy whose company is closing, losing his 401K and health insurance and insulin, has kids (and maybe even grandkids) to support... reads about the exotic New Yorkers in cafes, writing dissertations and books about porn fantasies and
getting paid for it (
jackpot job of the world, he's thinking), reading for the first time about facial-feminization surgery, something
so elite he has never even heard of it.
Then he is told that he is in fact
oppressing poor Andrea (the one who actually gets
paid to write about porn!) since he is a poor hetero white guy in West Virginia who can't even afford new boots or dentures.
Yes, this is where we are.
~~~
And so... our poor uneducated white guy
finally figures out that Andrea, Sarah and all their friends will go insane if Trump is re-elected and he decides, hmm... I definitely need to vote for this guy, since they hate him so much. I mean, that means he must be RIGHT, isn't he?
Because these
spoiled brats suck the big one.
I mean, certainly you DO understand the temptation?
I sure do, and
I have been a Red since 1972.
~~~
But Trump is as Ivy-League as the rest of them. He has no intention of actually shutting them up (which is what our poor West Virginian is hoping for), since they are handily winning elections for him. He AMPLIFIES the rich-kid voices, just to antagonize the West Virginians. He has assigned loyal sonny-boy Don Jr the ongoing task of making fun of them, thus Junior Don produced a book (or rather, somebody did) and called it
"Triggered"--a whole book making fun of the ridiculous excesses of the suburban hothouse-orchids of the Left.
Trump loves them.
They are like an enormous FREE pro-Trump campaign; the Left now a huge din of class-hatred and snobbery based on despising the people who don't use the right words/pronouns/etc, who do not subscribe to the Creed, who dare to question orthodoxy.
As they are alienating the vast working class, one by one, Trump and minions are there to say,
See? Is the Left your friend? They hate you.
Since 2017, I have been protesting against Trump once a week (and for the past few months, twice a week) in the reddest, most conservative county in the USA.... and
this is what the people actually say to me.
Dear Modern Left, and what do
you say to them in return?
Since they ask
you these things as regularly as they ask me, what is YOUR reply, since they often leave ME (48-yr veteran of the Left) speechless. I mean, you talk to them as often as I do, right? Since you claim to CARE so much? Please share your experiences organizing these folks.
(Hahaha, am I funny or what?)
~~~
TL; DR --
Modern rich-kid "Wokestasi" Left is actually a tool of the Right.
The actual working class, whom the Left was
invented to defend and protect, is now totally marginalized and unprotected, as arrogant kids with Ph.Ds take over and decide everything. (In that sense, same as it ever was.)
Whenever they say "
critical theory"--scream and scream again.
The modern "Left" represents the rich, which is why we no longer recognize it. And the rich want Trump, so the modern Left works hard to re-elect Trump.
Once you see it this way, you can't unsee it.
