Democrats are behaving badly (as usual), peace is breaking out in the Middle East (not as usual), how Soros and company are funding violent unrest, some Wuhan coronavirus shenanigans, and some unexpected stealth fighter news. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
The Elite has stiffed Bernie (twice), alienating his supporters.
The Elite has sent their (white) radical street muscle into Black neighborhoods, burning and looting black businesses.
The Elite hasn’t really done anything at all for the hispanic community. Their support for communists has hurt them in Florida where Donald Trump is outpolling Joe Biden among hispanics (!).
The Elite has pushed outsourcing (most recently the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty which Trump killed). Private sector unions have noticed.
The Elite has pushed the virus lockdown which has thrown millions of restaurant employees out of work. Many of these folks belong to SEIU. Now that emergency unemployment benefits have run out – and restaurants are going out of business because of the continuing lockdown – you have to wonder if these people will start to wonder why they support the Democrats.
Public Sector employees have done well, but the areas that locked down hardest are the areas where the government budgets are most in trouble. New York City is going to lay off 40,000 employees. The Elite has hoped that Biden will win and bail out the states and cities. Good luck with that.
Lastly, suburban women are hit with a Democratic Party double whammy: schools remain closed in many (especially Blue) areas. Women see their family lifestyles massively disrupted, and potentially are forced to consider giving up their own job to home school their kids. At the same time they see radical rioters entering suburban towns. Rioters are filmed telling people to get out of their homes which will be taken as “reparations”.
From The Department of Duh: “Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter.” Further: “The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The point person for the Fight Back Table, a coalition of liberal organizations planning for a “post-Election Day political apocalypse scenario,” leads a progressive coalition that is part of a massive liberal dark money network.
Deirdre Schifeling, who leads the Fight Back Table’s efforts to prepare for “mass public unrest” following the Nov. 3 election, founded and is campaign director for Democracy for All 2021 Action, a project of Arabella Advisors’ Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a dark money network that provides wealthy donors anonymity as they push large sums into the left’s organizational efforts.
The connections suggest that post-election mobilization isn’t just the project of a liberal fringe, but that powerful Democratic Party interest groups are also involved.
Created in 2019, Democracy for All 2021 Action includes more than 20 labor union, think tank, racial justice, and environmental groups that push for automatic and same-day voter registration, prohibiting voter ID laws, and removing “barriers” to naturalization, among other initiatives. While the Sixteen Thirty Fund does not report Democracy for All 2021 Action in its D.C. business records, the group acknowledges that it is a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund at the bottom of its website. The Sixteen Thirty Fund has been used as an avenue for donors to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to state-based and national groups in recent years. In 2018 alone, $141 million was passed through the fund to liberal endeavors.
A complete list of groups that make up the Fight Back Table is not publicly available, but Schifeling’s group appears to be an integral part of its efforts. Beyond being the point person for the Fight Back Table’s election war games, Schifeling has ties to two of the Fight Back Table’s founding groups, Demos and Color of Change, which are part of Democracy for All 2021 Action. Schifeling’s group is also a part of Protect the Results, a separate coalition that is collaborating with the Fight Back Table on mass mobilization to “protect the results of the 2020 elections” in more than 1,000 locations across the United States.
The post-Election Day prep follows other doomsday planning scenarios by liberal activists. The Transition Integrity Project released a 22-page document that mentioned “violence” 15 times, “chaos” 9 times, “unrest” 3 times, and “crisis” 12 times. The Fight Back Table, likewise, is preparing for extreme outcomes, including violence and mass mobilization efforts following the elections.
Snip.
Schifeling’s group is just one of dozens that fall under funds affiliated with Arabella Advisors. The funds have facilitated more than $1 billion in anonymous funding since President Donald Trump took office.
Funds affiliated with Arabella Advisors act as a “fiscal sponsor” to liberal nonprofits by providing tax and legal status to the groups. This setup means that the nonprofits do not have to file individual tax forms to the IRS, which include information such as board members and overall financials.
Some of the most prominent groups on the left fall under these funds, including Demand Justice, which fights Trump’s judicial nominations, and numerous prominent state-based groups. Funds at Arabella are also used to push grants to outside groups not contained within their network, including David Brock’s American Bridge, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy, and America Votes.
Three new George Soros campaigns to further advance the left’s radical agenda have been uncovered in separate news reports published this week. Keep in mind that the U.S. government subsidizes the Hungarian billionaire’s deeply politicized Open Society Foundations (OSF) that work to destabilize legitimate governments, erase national borders, target conservative politicians, finance civil unrest, subvert institutions of higher education and orchestrate refugee crises for political gain. Details of the financial and staffing nexus between OSF and the U.S. government are available in a Judicial Watch investigative report.
With the help of American taxpayer dollars, Soros bolsters a radical leftwing agenda that in the United States has included: promoting an open border with Mexico and fighting immigration enforcement efforts; fomenting racial disharmony by funding anti-capitalist racialist organizations; financing the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations involved in the riots in Ferguson, Missouri; weakening the integrity of our electoral systems; promoting taxpayer funded abortion-on-demand; advocating a government-run health care system; opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts; promoting dubious transnational climate change agreements that threaten American sovereignty and working to advance gun control and erode Second Amendment protections.
The list extends even further, with Soros tentacles—money—reaching previously unknown domestic and foreign causes that promote a broad leftwing agenda at various levels. It turns out Soros donated $408,000 to a Political Action Committee (PAC) that supported Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, whose office just dropped felony charges against the actor who fabricated a hate crime earlier this year. The actor, Jussie Smollett, claimed he was attacked in Chicago on his way home from a sandwich shop at 2 a.m. He said two masked men shouted racial and homophobic slurs, beat him, poured bleach on him and tied a rope around his neck. Smollett blamed the crime on white Trump supporters. When the hoax was uncovered, prosecutors charged him with 16 felonies but Foxx dropped all the charges this week. Illinois campaign records provided in the news report show that Soros personally contributed $333,000 to Foxx’s super PAC before the March 15, 2016 primary was over and an additional $75,000 after she became Cook County’s top prosecutor. “Soros has been intervening in local races for prosecutor, state’s attorney, and district attorney — often backing left-wing Democrats against other Democrats in doing so,” according to the article.
Another report published this week reveals that a Soros foundation gave $1 million to a nonprofit that favors choosing the president by popular vote. The group, National Popular Vote Inc., gets millions from leftist groups to push its purported agenda of ensuring that “every vote in every state” matters. Another group, Tides Foundation, that raises money for leftwing causes, also contributed to the popular vote nonprofit. Soros’ OSF’s have given millions of dollars to the Tides Foundation, according to records provided in the story. Based in San Francisco, the group envisions a world of shared prosperity and social justice founded on equality, human rights, healthy communities and a sustainable environment. The nonprofit strives to accelerate the pace of social change by, among other things, working with “marginalized communities.”
The last article documents what Judicial Watch has reported for years—Soros’ huge influence in the U.S. government, specifically the State Department. The agency pressured Ukraine officials to drop an investigation of a Soros group during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Barack Obama’s U.S. ambassador actually gave Ukraine’s prosecutor general a list of people who should not be prosecuted. “The U.S.-Soros collaboration was visible in Kiev,” the article states. “Several senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials and FBI agents appeared in pictures as participants or attendees at Soros-sponsored events and conferences.” The piece further reveals that internal memos from Soros’ foundations describe a concerted strategy of creating friendships inside key U.S. government agencies such as the departments of Justice and State.
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber: “Woe is to us! We’re a racist institution! We repent of our white privilege!” Department of Education: “Well, if you’re a racist institution, I guess we’re going to have to investigate you for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and possibly pull your federal funding.”
If you want to know why the vast majority of initially Trump-skeptical conservatives have embraced the president, one reason is that he’s actually willing to name the enemy and take the fight to them:
The president is denouncing critical race theory on national television—and elevating this intellectual fight into a major campaign theme.
The battle-lines are drawn: we can embrace the principles of 1776 or the principles of 1619.https://t.co/rAfKQXX9ma
You may not have noticed, since the media tried desperately to bury the story, but the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, formally recognizing Israel. If Obama had done this, it would be the leading MSM story for weeks, with our ruling class insisting he deserved another Nobel Prize.
Speaking of the Obama Administration’s incompetence:
So many Obama-era "heard realities" turned out to be so much wishcasting, or else covering up for the multitudinous failures engendered by their own manifest incompetence. https://t.co/Fyzo1YZfHW
Other Arab nations are in talks to follow suit. “Those in advanced talks with the US over Israeli relations are though to include Oman, Sudan and Morocco.” And possibly Saudi Arabia.
A recent sermon from one of Saudi Arabia’s leading clerics called for Muslims to avoid, quote “passionate emotions and fiery enthusiasm” towards Jews.
It’s a marked change in tone from Imam Abdulrahman al-Sudais, compared to previous emotional statements he’s made about the plight of the Palestinian people.
In the past the cleric had prayed for Palestinians to have victory over what he called “invader and aggressor” Jews — a nod to Israel.
However, Sudais’ new remarks referenced a relationship between them and the Prophet Mohammad.
“He treated the Jews of Khaybar equally and treated his Jewish neighbor well.”
All by itself, the softening of the hard-line stance against Israel among leading Wahhbist clerics in “The Land of the Two Holy Cities” is huge, arguably a bigger shift in Muslim thought than all the Arab-Israeli peace treaties combined.
The late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir summed up the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East decades ago when she said: “Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us. We can forgive them for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with them when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Prime Minister Meir’s sentiments 50 years ago were the result of numerous occasions where Arab leaders rejected very favorable territorial agreements and other peace settlements and opted for war instead. The very clear message was, and has always been, that the Arabs would rather die fighting the Jews than thrive while living alongside them. Just think about the seething hatred an entire group needs to have to sustain such a disastrous outlook. It truly boggles the mind.
Are today’s Democrats much different? Their single-minded hatred of President Trump and his supporters knows no bounds. They oppose every policy he puts forth, contradict his every statement, and try to undermine his very humanity just like Islamic radicals regularly attempt to dehumanize Jews in Israel and all over the world,
They don’t even like to refer to him as “President Trump,” as they immaturely prance around on TV and social media calling him “45” as if referring to him solely as the 45th president is some kind of serious insult. Palestinians and other Israel-haters pull a similar move when they refuse to call the land “Israel.” They instead opt for nasty Orwellian terms like “Zionist entity.”
And now they are running a presidential campaign with the sole message of “get Trump.” There’s not one person really planning to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden; they’re all just Trump-haters. None of those voters can truly articulate the slightest argument for Biden without talking mostly or all about Trump. It’s the most hateful campaign against an incumbent since the pro-slavery Democrats tried to unseat Abe Lincoln in 1864, and that’s saying something.
All of this hate has been in place of what could have been four years of deal making with Trump, who came into office with no real orthodoxies to maintain and without a long political career filled with masters to oblige.
Like the wasted 72 years of Palestinian stubbornness in the face of so much Israeli success since 1948, Democrats have chosen a scorched earth policy rather than acknowledge their defeat in the last election or take advantage of any policies they could have pursued with this president on infrastructure, health coverage, and ending U.S. involvement in unending wars.
It has been called to our attention that this article is not satire. We regret the error. Those responsible have been sent to our state-of-the-art re-education camp. pic.twitter.com/02RtE6tO1f
Rosie and Ellen shows featured toxic work environments where staffers were required to work 80-90 weeks.
Alan Dershowitz sues CNN For $300,000,000 in defamation lawsuit. “The Harvard Law professor emeritus is demanding $300,000,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from CNN for misrepresenting his legal arguments in the Trump impeachment trial.”
“New Netflix Movie Actually Murders Puppies To Teach That Murdering Puppies Is Bad.”
“Following California’s Plagues Of Darkness And Fire, Pacific Ocean Turns To Blood.” “I figured it was just a murdered hobo, but there was way too much blood. You’d have to have killed at least a thousand hobos, and that hasn’t happened out here since the ’90s.”
At the direction of President Trump, the White House Office of Management and Budget will move to identify and eliminate any trace of “critical race theory” in the federal government.
Critical race theory is the leftist, racist doctrine that forms the intellectual underpinnings of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other radical organizations currently engaged in unrest on America’s streets.
It alleges, among other things, that the United States is a white supremacist country, and that all white people are guilty of racism, whether they intend it or not.
President Trump has brought the issue of far-left indoctrination to the forefront of the national conversation in recent months. It was a major theme of the President’s Independence Day speech at Mt. Rushmore, in which he condemned far-left theories that “defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”
Employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” or where they are required to say that they “benefit from racism.” According to press reports, in some cases these training have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.
These types of “trainings” not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce. We can be proud that as an employer, the Federal government has employees of all races, ethnicities, and religions. We can be proud that Americans from all over the country seek to join our workforce and dedicate themselves to public service. We can be proud of our continued efforts to welcome all individuals who seek to serve their fellow Americans as Federal employees. However, we cannot accept our employees receiving training that seeks to undercut our core values as Americans and drive division within our workforce.
The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions. Accordingly, to that end, the Office of Management and Budget will shortly issue more detailed guidance on implementing the President’s directive. In the meantime, all agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. In addition, all agencies should begin to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these un-American propaganda training sessions.
This move is long overdue, but it’s only a start. To really counter the threat of Critical Race Theory, it need to be purged from all of America’s educational institutions be denying federal dollars to to any institutions that teach such poison.
But just naming the enemy is a huge first step. Just forcing all those “moderate” Democrats to take a stand on the issue will be hugely clarifying…
A three hour interview. Yeah, I know I’m not making things any easier on you.
Still, I suggest watching it, even though I think Rogan and Weinstein are wrong on some fundamentals (see my notes below) because Weinstein, having lived through the Evergreen State College nightmare, has a far better (and scarier) understanding of what outlandish ideas animate the unholy Social Justice Warrior alliance that has set America’s cities aflame.
Some of the money quotes:
“We were in a faculty meeting [at Evergreen], and I said that the proposals that were moving through were a threat to the Enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution. And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the Enlightenment but on the idea of enlightenment. I was just so stunned. I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that Enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything.”
“If you end up in Critical Theory, any one of these fields, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, whatever, it is you have already foregone this option [of studying STEM]. You don’t end up in Critical Theory if you have the chops to do science. So in effect you have people who don’t stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider, because they wouldn’t go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors.”
“An excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette. Odette is half black her mom is Afro-Caribbean, she was known to be my student and Heather [Haying, Weinstein’s wife and also a teacher at Evergreen]’s student during the riots. And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science. This actually happened.”
“If #BlackLivesMatter just simply meant what those words imply, I’d be on board with it. It doesn’t. It means a great deal more than that, and we’re beginning to see that in the last couple of weeks.”
“There’s something in us that thinks that the Great Leap Forward in China cannot happen here. That what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here. That Nazi Germany cannot happen, and that the Soviet Union couldn’t happen here. I don’t know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible. I don’t think it’s impossible. I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure it is the Constitution.” (I would contend that widespread gun-ownership and ingrained American individualism make it very unlikely. I also wonder if he means the Cultural Revolution rather than the Great Leap Forward.)
“The proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish. The strategy is incredibly smart.”
“If there’s one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen fiasco, it’s that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we are also seeing in Seattle.”
“The idea that you could withdraw the police first is absolutely insane.”
“Joe Biden is an influence peddler. He is not an idea guy. He’s the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology. Who cares? This is not an answer to any known question. This is stay the course at a moment when we could not afford to stay the course less right. How dare the Democratic Party do this to us again at this moment?”
“Hillary Clinton advanced Trump’s candidacy because she wanted to run against him. So if you if you have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you still have to be angry at the Democratic Party for putting us in this predicament.”
The biggest thing Weinstein and Rogan get wrong: The lack of opportunity in inner cities isn’t an effect of mass incarceration, but of the breakdown in the black nuclear family brought about by the perverse incentive structures of Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs, which preceded rising black crime rates and increased incarceration. Widespread black economic progress was proceeding and converging toward white norms before the Great Society. Once again, read Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, which goes into great statistical detail to prove the case.
Also, Occupy Wall Street was in no way, shape or form an “organic” movement, it started out battlespace preparation by the Obama team to face Mitt Romney in 2012, but quickly became the prototype for the organizational insurrection we saw first in Ferguson and which has now been rolled out nationwide.
His argument for a “radical centrist duo” to run for President and Vice President outside the two-party system just isn’t going to work, for political, cultural and (most important) Constitutional issues. And it can’t work this year for calendar/ballot access issues. (And the idea that former Admiral William McRaven is even remotely possible as a center-right white horse savior is laughable. Weirdly, Andrew Yang strikes me as much more plausible candidate, even if Universal Basic Income is wrong, but he’s neither rich nor famous enough to pull it off.) When he starts talking about that, feel free to skip to 1 hour and 44 minutes in for Rogan to start talking about Biden’s cognitive decline.
To be honest, I made it about an hour and fifty minutes in, only because I need to post this do other stuff. I fully intend to watch the rest this weekend.
Gee, what could have possibly sent hospital prices skyrocketing? It’s an unsolvable mystery! (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Old and Busted: ObamaCare will save the government money. The New Hotness: “In its latest report on the law, the Congressional Budget Office said it is no longer possible to assess the overall fiscal impact of the law.”
“For Obama and his defenders to blame Bush — or anyone but Obama — 64 months into his administration deserves nothing short of lip-curling scorn.”
“It is not sufficient that transsexuals should be free to act on their delusions — the rest of us are expected to participate in them with unreserved enthusiasm, and the Left is willing to use the state to compel us to do so…The belief that members of minority political tendencies should be jailed for their views is very much in vogue for the Left at the moment.”
Once again, liberal Democrats oppose a project that might give burly blue collar men high-paying jobs.
Christopher Hitchens on Hillary Clinton. Yes, it’s old. (The fact Hitchens exited this vale of tears over two years ago may have been the first tipoff.) But I suspect this will not be the last time I repost it between now and 2016…
The Texas Republican Convention occurred in Ft. Worth over the weekend, and delegates killed a down-payment on illegal alien amnesty, the so-called “Texas Solution.” How many time does the GOP establishment need to be told that actual voters reject amnesty, and demand that the border be secured before any changes are made to immigration law before they start listening?
Speaking of amnesty, all this “Dream Act” talk has sent children pouring over the border, where there are no housed in overcrowded and unhygienic holding facilities. Thanks, Obama!
Even Obama’s own immigration adviser says says his amnesty plan is endangering children. Plus “roughly 70 percent of swing-voters want tougher immigration rules.” Obama seems unwilling to stop the flood of illegal aliens because he views them all as potential Democratic voters…
Here’s one of those stories that buries the real news under bright, shiny affirmations of political correctness:
Texas State Board of Education member Ruben Cortez says he’ll propose a vote to decide whether to create a statewide Mexican-American studies course at the agency’s meeting next month.
If passed, the measure would mark a major victory for Latino education activists who have pressed for a public school curriculum more reflective of their state’s majority-Hispanic student body.
“This is it — we’ve been inching our way to a vote,” Cortez told The Huffington Post. “Just the mere fact that we’re going to have a vote is historic.”
The group Librotraficante, formed in 2012 to protest the banning of the Tucson Mexican-American studies program, started calling last year for the Texas SBOE to include a dual-credit Mexican-American studies course when the state agency took up the question of new course design.
The idea appealed to Cortez, a Democrat from the Rio Grande Valley who says too many Mexican-Americans go through their public school educations without learning about the achievements of Hispanic heroes.
Even before we start digging into the issue, there are a few problems here. First of course is the unspoken assumption that students should only identify with great Americans if they have similar skin-tones or ethnic makeups. Americans should look up to and admire George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King for their towering achievements, not because of ethnic solidarity; they’re heroes for the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
Second, if any Texas students “go through their public school educations without learning about the achievements of Hispanic heroes,” then it’s only because Texas teachers aren’t doing their jobs. Are students no longer taught that many defenders of the Alamo (Juan Abamillo, Juan Antonio Badillo, Carlos Espalier, José María (Gregorio) Esparza, Antonio Fuentes, Andrés Nava) were ethically Hispanic, or about the career of Juan Seguín? Are they not taught that Texans were initially fighting for restoration of the more liberal Mexican Constitution of 1824?
If so, these are indeed problems, but not ones a “statewide Mexican-American studies course” would be designed to address.
No, the real reason Democrats want such a course can be deduced from mention of that Tucson Mexican-American studies program whose cancellation has them so upset. Just what did that course consist of?
What is left out of traditional syllabi, of course, is the grievance and distortion. When Horne finally acquired the program materials he requested, they included texts with titles such as Occupied America and The Pedagogy of Oppression. And according to John Ward, a Tucson teacher who saw his U.S. history course coopted by the Raza Studies department, the Raza curriculum’s focus is “that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites.”
When Ward raised concerns about Raza Studies (which is part of TUSD’s larger Ethnic Studies department) he was, despite being Hispanic himself, called a racist and eventually reassigned to another course. Ward told a reporter from the Arizona Republic that by the time he left the Raza Studies class, he had observed a definite change in the students: “An angry tone. They taught them not to trust their teachers, not to trust the system. They taught them the system wasn’t worth trusting.”
“’It’s propagandizing and brainwashing that’s going on there,’ Tom Horne, Arizona’s newly elected attorney general, said this week as he officially declared the program in violation of a state law that went into effect on Jan. 1.”
And here we see the real reason for the course: Another chance for the far-left ethnic grievance lobby to get their hooks into students and indoctrinate them in Critical Race Theory’s victimhood identity politics.
Nigerian Muslim defends daughter’s conversion to Christianity, pleads for multiculturalism and tolerance. Ha, just kidding! He hacked her to death with a machete.
“What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic.”
“The exchanges are based on layers upon layers of bad software, run by shady characters,” he writes. “The Bitcoin masses, judging by their behavior on forums, have no actual interest in science, technology or even objective reality when it interferes with their market position. They believe that holding a Bitcoin somehow makes them an active participant in a bold new future, even as they passively get fleeced in the bolder current present.”
More on Critical Race Theorist/Social Justice Warrior types: “These people don’t listen to things like “logic” and “reason” when they are in one of their social justice tizzies. It’s not even worth trying to be kind or polite to them.”
Once there was a physicist named Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt who used her scientific background to create a radially improved putter. The only problem with the story is that pretty much every word but “putter” in the previous sentence is a complete lie.
Including “her.”
And inevitably, the very fact that Caleb Hannan would dare report that “Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt” used to be Stephen Krol ignited a firestorm of controversy among the victimhood identity politics crowd, as exemplified by the #JusticeForDrV tag.
I first saw the link for Caleb Hannan’s story on the magical putter and the serial liar behind it from Dwight, but The Other McCain has been doing the heavy lifting on the reactions. (I thought I had added McCain to the blogroll back when the story of convicted felon Brett Kimberlin first blew up, but I guess I didn’t; that oversight has now been corrected.) )(It was already there, my eyes just missed it. D’oh!) His summary nicely gets to the heart of the matter:
The #JusticeForDrV crusaders grabbed hold of the idea that “Dr. Vanderbilt” was driven to suicide by Caleb Hannan’s “transmisogynistic journalism” — a claim for which they offer no real evidence — while ignoring all evidence that (a) “Dr. Vanderbilt” was not a victim, but rather a person who victimized others, and (b) it was the failure of the pseudo-scientific putter scam, not fear of being “outed” as transgender, which motivated “Dr. Vanderbilt” to commit suicide. Of course, “Dr. Vanderbilt” had attempted suicide in 2008, before Hannan ever heard of her, but why let facts get in your way when you’re ghoulishly exploiting a corpse as “LGBT Victim of the Week”?
The #JusticeForDrV tag, of course is ironic, since, as McCain put it:
McCain dealt admirably with the substance of the issue, but I wanted to deal with the mindset behind those using the #JusticeForDrV tag, since I’ve run into it more than once.
This is another case of the intolerant acolytes of victimhood identity politics mobbing someone for daring to tell the truth. The animating idea behind it seems to be that no one has a right to say anything that might make a tranny (or any other member of a Designated Victim Group) feel bad, even if it’s the truth. They have abrogated for themselves the right to dictate to others what the acceptable limits to free speech are as regards members of said victim groups. It’s an attempt to silence critics (both actively and preemptively) who do not toe the political correct, neo-Marxist, Critical Race Theory line that the “privileged” (straight white heterosexual conservative males in particular) should not be allowed to speak on any issue that touches on the “marginalized” (i.e., the members of any left-wing victimhood identity politics group). Their terminology is Orwellian in the very specific way that it seeks to shape language and limit discourse in ways that make it impossible to object to the agenda being pushed.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. “Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
Or, put another way by the same author “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Or, to put it still another way, “Freedom is the freedom to say that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.” Those pushing the #JusticeForDrV tag are largely the same as those who assert Bradley Manning magically became a woman by changing his name. The idea that “gender is a social construct” is a great lie that they must furiously defend, no matter how obviously absurd. Hannan’s article is unclear on whether Krol was merely a cross-dresser or had gender reassignment surgery; in neither instance would the chromosomes in the trillions of cells in his body have been switched from xy to xx.
And as for Hannan having “outed” someone who used to work at “an LGBT bar,” as McCain also notes: “When a 6-foot-3 middle-aged man gets a sex change, the result is unlikely to be particularly . . . persuasive.”
Caleb Hannan’s great crime was to commit an act of investigative journalism against a member of a designated victim group. (The whole “without fear or favor” slogan must go over social justice warrior heads, since favor is one of the defining principles of identity politics.) I’ve not seen a single credible accusation that the facts Hannan uncovered were untrue. Had Krol not been a serial liar, Hannan would never have been investigating him. His crime is he cared more about journalistic truth than politically correct guidelines on “acceptable discourse.” I would hope all journalists value truth over political correctness (though surveying the dominance of left-wing thought in the mainstream media, this is probably a vain hope).
I’ll end with the same conclusion McCain ended with:
“Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said. And the simple fact is that Essay Anne Vanderbilt’s entire life was a huge lie.”
Last night the #solidarityisforwhitewomen tag raced to the top of the Twitter trending chart, treating people not only to an amusing left-on-left slap fight, but also providing a glimpse into the fever swamps of far-left victimhood identity politics.
It’s an unholy marriage of Marxism and racial identity politics, brewed and decanted among far-left community organizers and tenured faculty members. The basic idea is that victimhood equals saintliness, in that the more of a victim you are, the less of a white capitalist hetronormative patriarchal oppressor you are. (Feel free to add another dozen or so far-left buzzwords to the preceding sentence.) This is done both in order to assert who has the greater moral claim on the spoils of big government, and to cow others and guilt-trip them into giving in to your demands, because black victimhood automatically trumps white privilege, etc. It’s also to keep people firmly ensconced in the left’s group-think herd mentality rather than thinking critically. It’s the language of thought-terminating cliches, designed to end debate by placing those employing it higher on the hierarchy of victimhood than those it is deployed against.
As for what brought on this hashtag, well, it’s a rich, zesty, resentful stew of left-wing grievance-mongering.
Part of it seems to be backlash over all the attention lavished on Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s “how to have it all by climbing the corporate ladder to CEO and still having children while promoting the sisterhood” book, which seems particularly near and dear to the hearts of white female business writers everywhere.
When Lean In takes up all the feminist oxygen for weeks and WF don't get why WOC aren't excited and celebrating. #solidarityisforwhitewomen
Part of it seems to stem from some white feminists actually daring to be critical of radical Islam, which (for complex and mysterious reasons) seems to trump white feminism on the hierarchy of victimhood.
It’s also amazing how often some variant “You shut up” is deployed for any white women who happen to have some objection to this mass race-based mobbing.
The lesson: On the far left, you are not allowed to speak when your superiors on the victim hierarchy chart are speaking. As usual on the far-left, “let’s have a dialog on race” turns out to mean “you’ll shut up and listen while I condemn you, bigot.”
Of course, underlying all of this is a real truth that none dare speak out loud: The Democratic Party as currently constructed spreads the benefits of its patronage disproportionately to old white politicians and their favored cronies. Just look at the paleness of hue of all those green energy subsidy recipients. Why, think of all the community organizing and diversity consulting sinecures that money could have underwritten! The Pigford scandal is a drop in the bucket by comparison. The Hillary Clintons, Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosis are always going to have first call at the trough of big government largess, because that’s the way the Democratic Party’s spoil system works.
But above all, this blue internecine warfare is designed to do one thing: to keep those on the identity politics left as part of the herd. Those fixated on victimhood and inter-feminist doctrinal differences are far less likely to question why their policies have failed so badly when allowed to run their course in Detroit, or why 72% of blacks are born out of wedlock, thanks in large measure to to the welfare state.
