The Contrarian/Anti-Woke left continue trend of Anti-Democrat/Black & Dirtbag Leftist grift
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
something anti-black is going on over at the Worldwide socialist website...
"Identity politics is bad, but Jews who don't support Zionism are essentially race traitors" - Dave Rubin
washingtonbabylon.com
Which Side Are You On? The Answer is Clear for Today’s Useful Idiots for the Right
Tony Belletier
26-33 minutes
[Note: This is the second part of a weeklong series. Read Part I here.]
In 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic Socialist, was a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States. In a country where the left was systematically persecuted and whose intelligence services systematically persecute it abroad, such a development is significant and without precedent. Recent polls show half of millennials are well disposed toward socialism. Then, in 2020, a global pandemic took the lives of millions and wrought economic devastation in the United States with the unemployment rate reaching 14.7 percent by official figures. Neoliberalism has never been more discredited, so it stands to reason that within this context a new crop of media opportunists would sprout up to tell people that socialism is dead.
If you’re addicted to Twitter you may have noticed something awfully curious going on with a number of famous “progressive” journalists. Have you seen that people like, say, Matt Taibbi, are increasingly concerned with the goings on at college campuses? Have you seen him vomit Rush Limbaugh-style talking points about pointy-headed, elitist academics in their ivory towers or compare “cancel culture” to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?
How about Glenn Greenwald? Have you noticed the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and sworn enemy of the Brazilian right never misses an opportunity to defend Trump and the American right? You’ve given him the benefit of the doubt, but you can’t help but notice that he lies shamelessly and without remorse — like when he claimed that no Parler users invaded the US Capitol, a lie that was demonstrably false even at the time he made it.
Why would the husband of a gay, socialist politician in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil go out of his way to defend the crazed wannabe tyrant’s American counterpart? Surely there is no logical or moral consistency to these two positions? Why are so many others in the media employing the same knee-jerk contrarianism to attack the left and defend the right?
It’s no coincidence. There has been a concerted effort among think tanks and their right-wing publications to make inroads in left media and gussy up tired Reaganite claptrap with phony Marxist jargon and edgy shyt-posting to make “get off my lawn” conservatism seem counter cultural and hip. Capitalizing on the defeat of Sanders, these think tanks see an opportunity to exploit the ire and distrust of former Bernie supporters towards the Democratic Party and redirect this free-floating hostility to their ends.
Bring in the Clowns
Needless, to say a coterie of opportunistic and meretricious influencers are eagerly auditioning to be court jesters for National Conservatism. A few names immediately come to mind: Angela Nagle, Michael Tracey, and the podcast Red Scare are some of the big fish, but if we want to learn more, we must take a journey to the Island of Misfit Podcasters.
Michael Tracey: Dork. Dweeb. Loser. Fair Use.
A fringe but thriving new media ecosystem has emerged coalescing around this motley collection of writers, podcasters, trolls and failed artists who now call themselves “critics.” If anything unifies them, it is a morbid relationship and antagonism with an abstract “left.” That’s why so much of their content and branding is self-important posturing about leaving the left, haunting the left, criticizing the left, telling uncomfortable truths to the left, being left-heretics, left gadflies etc.
Rhetorically, their trick is to make use of American confusion regarding political terminology, conflating the left with liberals to discredit the former. For the most part they have no positions beyond knee-jerk contrarianism. They are reactionaries in the most literal sense of the term. They react. Whenever a Democrat does something, it is bad and whenever a leftist does something it is also bad because they are a Democrat or secretly a Democrat or a crypto-Democrat or working on behalf of the Democrats. You get the picture.
Whatever it is, it is a tendency of some kind. They all say the same things. They engage in constant backslapping and mutual PR. They constantly retweet and promote each other. They go on each other’s podcasts and they rush to one another’s defense whenever they are criticized. If that was it, one could dismiss it out of hand as a fringe political subculture. However, the overlap in subject matter between these influencers and publications affiliated with right wing think tanks leave no doubt about their ties, not to speak of their personal relationships.
A January 2017 Politico article describes Julius Krein as a conservative “whiz kid” who apparently was dreaming up ways to cut Social Security and Medicare when bullies were shoving him into lockers in high school. While working for a Boston hedge fund, the 2008 Harvard graduate began a blog called the Journal for American Greatness (JAG), writing articles anonymously under the pretentious pen name of Decius. He was joined by a group of conservative academics affiliated with the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank. On its website the Claremont Institute describes its mission to provide “the missing argument in the battle to win public sentiment by teaching and promoting the philosophical reasoning that is the foundation of limited government and the statesmanship required to bring that reasoning into practice.” And it sounds like they mean business.
The institute also runs the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. “Federal overreach in areas such as health care, environmental protection, and local spending has created an extraordinary number of litigation opportunities which the Center advances by pursing [sic] strategic litigation from initial complaint all the way through to Supreme Court review,” says its website.
Many of the bright minds at Claremont would stay behind to contribute to JAG’s successor, American Greatness while Krein went on to found American Affairs, a Claremont Review of Books-inspired conservative journal established with the quixotic, doomed mission of providing intellectual rigor to “Trumpism.” That project went about as well as one would expect, but the journal did go on to have some influence in online left discourse as we shall see.
Michael Lind is Porcine: It’s Funny Because It’s True
It might surprise you to know that Michael Lind, the porcine conservative academic, Heritage Foundation alumnus and author of radical screeds such as Vietnam: The Necessary War, has a lot to teach young socialist intellectuals about class warfare. In his book The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, Lind paints a picture of an “uneducated underclass” living in low-density areas and a “metropolitan elite” of university-credentialed professionals who he defines as a “managerial overclass.”
Porcine? Yeah, that was the best possible descriptor, though “dipshyt” or “gas bag” would have worked as well. Fair Use.
A synopsis of Lind’s thesis can be found online in the Summer 2017 edition of American Affairs. Conveniently for Lind, and the billionaires who fund the Claremont Institute, the amorphous, non-class of moderately better paid university-educated professionals like corporate managers, who seldom have any power on corporate boards, are the real enemy. Even more absurdly, teachers and nurses are grouped within the same class as the actual capitalists who patronize the think tanks who cut Lind a check for his services.
To Lind, it doesn’t matter if you are a waged-worker, and you receive a low wage at that. If you are, for instance, the child of a college educated schoolteacher and go on to take on student loan debt to get a degree before entering the work-force as a poorly paid wage laborer with no benefits, you are not working class after at all. No, you are the scion of a hereditary order of mandarins. Congratulations.
It should be realized from the jump that this is merely a cynical divide and conquer strategy, meant to draw a wedge between college educated and non-college educated workers. While depicting struggling debt peons as the new bourgeoisie is far-fetched, it also grossly distorts the data on the class composition of college attendees, 20 percent of whom come from low-income backgrounds. Some 47 percent come from non-white families according to a recent Pew survey. Nevertheless, this narrative gained a great deal of currency in left media.
Left media influencers picked up where Lind left off, propagating this anti-solidarity talking point and demonizing the “Professional Managerial Class.” In 2019, Chapo Trap House host Amber A’Lee Frost penned an essay on this theme in American Affairs, lifted largely though b*stardized from the great Barbara Ehrenreich. To her credit, she later distanced herself from the publication, but podcast co-host turned guru Matt Christman echoed these talking points in his interminable Vlog sermons.
Lind routinely pens essays in the pseudo-Marxist journal The Bellows. The Bellows describes itself as “an online magazine for class-centric Left-Populism.” Incidentally, its homepage lists Jeff Vandrew Jr. as a contributing founder of Vandrew LLC, a New Jersey-based wealth management firm, just in case you doubted its left-wing credentials. Not impressed? Little Jeff is the son of Republican dentist/congressman Jeff Vandrew Sr., who in 2020 supported Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Almost immediately following the launch of The Bellows it became clear that the website would take the most conservative positions possible to avoid alienating its Claremont-affiliated contributors. Hence, it churns out endless pieces suggesting that the populist left and populist right share common goals.
Malcolm Kyeyune a self-described “Marxist” who sees no contradiction, as it were, in working for the Swedish conservative think tank Oikos, reiterates Lind’s conceptions of class in a tedious Bellows essay entitled “Against the Managers.” In his characteristic style, which is at once maudlin and pedantic, Kyeyune argues that expansion of higher education created a new class of “would-be functionaries in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb.” So, even unemployed college graduates are dastardly managers in waiting. Kyeune continues:
What we have now on the left and right—on both sides of the Atlantic—is an open and bitter class war. It is a conflict between a growing cadre of imperial lords and the peasantry they hope to subjugate; between the managers and petty nobility of the much-prophesied “knowledge economy” and those they aim to manage.
So, the left are managers or managers-in-waiting while the Right are salt of the earth, scrappy peasants, which conveniently ignores the fact that high-income Americans voted for Trump in substantially higher numbers.
Kyeyune is a frequent guest along with Angela Nagle on What’s Left? a podcast hosted by prolific Twitter troll, paralegal and amphetamine connoisseur Aimee Laba, better known as Aimee Terese. She is perhaps the most enthusiastic disseminator of the PMC canard and other crypto-Claremont propaganda.
She’s also a head case. When she’s not reflexively defending Neo-Nazis engaged in anti-PC demonstrations in her native Australia (she deleted that tweet) she’s dunking on the libs, accusing everyone of being a secret Democrat and refashioning conservative talking points with ultraleft gibberish. She also uncritically platforms conservative think tank figures like Manhattan Institute fellow Oren Cass, who, friend to the working man that he is, wants to cut overtime rates and bar public sector unions from supporting and donating to political campaigns. Despite her professed advocacy on behalf of the real working class against the wily PMC, Laba, occasionally gives the game away:
Personnel wise, you need loyal footsoldiers to make populist campaign work, but you also need hungry/class traitors in upper echelons of movement [sic]. The difference between Sanders & Corbyn in 16/17 vs 19/20 is their upper echelons now too well entrenched professionally [sic]. On the ground the working class people doing the grunt work/canvassing etc they’re loyal in both cases. But if the pmc layer will be fine professionally regardless of electoral outcome, they’re worse than useless (unless you have a legit vanguard of hardcore class traitors).
This quote betrays her genuine contempt for the working class. In her imagination, she’s in charge and the hoi polloi are the boots on the ground doing the “grunt work.” It’s all very understandable when you stop to consider that Laba grew up in Sydney’s posh North Shore. She attended Loreto Kirribilli, one of Sydney’s most exclusive and expensive private schools, where students are inculcated with a “born to rule” mentality. She’s also the daughter of a wealthy Lebanese émigré, which makes her contempt for working people quite a bit easier to understand. (This image below appears to refer to her father. If that’s inaccurate, I will update this story.)
Which Side Are You On? The Answer is Clear for Today’s Useful Idiots for the Right
Tony Belletier
26-33 minutes
[Note: This is the second part of a weeklong series. Read Part I here.]
In 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic Socialist, was a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States. In a country where the left was systematically persecuted and whose intelligence services systematically persecute it abroad, such a development is significant and without precedent. Recent polls show half of millennials are well disposed toward socialism. Then, in 2020, a global pandemic took the lives of millions and wrought economic devastation in the United States with the unemployment rate reaching 14.7 percent by official figures. Neoliberalism has never been more discredited, so it stands to reason that within this context a new crop of media opportunists would sprout up to tell people that socialism is dead.
If you’re addicted to Twitter you may have noticed something awfully curious going on with a number of famous “progressive” journalists. Have you seen that people like, say, Matt Taibbi, are increasingly concerned with the goings on at college campuses? Have you seen him vomit Rush Limbaugh-style talking points about pointy-headed, elitist academics in their ivory towers or compare “cancel culture” to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?
How about Glenn Greenwald? Have you noticed the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and sworn enemy of the Brazilian right never misses an opportunity to defend Trump and the American right? You’ve given him the benefit of the doubt, but you can’t help but notice that he lies shamelessly and without remorse — like when he claimed that no Parler users invaded the US Capitol, a lie that was demonstrably false even at the time he made it.
Why would the husband of a gay, socialist politician in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil go out of his way to defend the crazed wannabe tyrant’s American counterpart? Surely there is no logical or moral consistency to these two positions? Why are so many others in the media employing the same knee-jerk contrarianism to attack the left and defend the right?
It’s no coincidence. There has been a concerted effort among think tanks and their right-wing publications to make inroads in left media and gussy up tired Reaganite claptrap with phony Marxist jargon and edgy shyt-posting to make “get off my lawn” conservatism seem counter cultural and hip. Capitalizing on the defeat of Sanders, these think tanks see an opportunity to exploit the ire and distrust of former Bernie supporters towards the Democratic Party and redirect this free-floating hostility to their ends.
Bring in the Clowns
Needless, to say a coterie of opportunistic and meretricious influencers are eagerly auditioning to be court jesters for National Conservatism. A few names immediately come to mind: Angela Nagle, Michael Tracey, and the podcast Red Scare are some of the big fish, but if we want to learn more, we must take a journey to the Island of Misfit Podcasters.
Michael Tracey: Dork. Dweeb. Loser. Fair Use.
A fringe but thriving new media ecosystem has emerged coalescing around this motley collection of writers, podcasters, trolls and failed artists who now call themselves “critics.” If anything unifies them, it is a morbid relationship and antagonism with an abstract “left.” That’s why so much of their content and branding is self-important posturing about leaving the left, haunting the left, criticizing the left, telling uncomfortable truths to the left, being left-heretics, left gadflies etc.
Rhetorically, their trick is to make use of American confusion regarding political terminology, conflating the left with liberals to discredit the former. For the most part they have no positions beyond knee-jerk contrarianism. They are reactionaries in the most literal sense of the term. They react. Whenever a Democrat does something, it is bad and whenever a leftist does something it is also bad because they are a Democrat or secretly a Democrat or a crypto-Democrat or working on behalf of the Democrats. You get the picture.
Whatever it is, it is a tendency of some kind. They all say the same things. They engage in constant backslapping and mutual PR. They constantly retweet and promote each other. They go on each other’s podcasts and they rush to one another’s defense whenever they are criticized. If that was it, one could dismiss it out of hand as a fringe political subculture. However, the overlap in subject matter between these influencers and publications affiliated with right wing think tanks leave no doubt about their ties, not to speak of their personal relationships.
A January 2017 Politico article describes Julius Krein as a conservative “whiz kid” who apparently was dreaming up ways to cut Social Security and Medicare when bullies were shoving him into lockers in high school. While working for a Boston hedge fund, the 2008 Harvard graduate began a blog called the Journal for American Greatness (JAG), writing articles anonymously under the pretentious pen name of Decius. He was joined by a group of conservative academics affiliated with the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank. On its website the Claremont Institute describes its mission to provide “the missing argument in the battle to win public sentiment by teaching and promoting the philosophical reasoning that is the foundation of limited government and the statesmanship required to bring that reasoning into practice.” And it sounds like they mean business.
The institute also runs the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. “Federal overreach in areas such as health care, environmental protection, and local spending has created an extraordinary number of litigation opportunities which the Center advances by pursing [sic] strategic litigation from initial complaint all the way through to Supreme Court review,” says its website.
Many of the bright minds at Claremont would stay behind to contribute to JAG’s successor, American Greatness while Krein went on to found American Affairs, a Claremont Review of Books-inspired conservative journal established with the quixotic, doomed mission of providing intellectual rigor to “Trumpism.” That project went about as well as one would expect, but the journal did go on to have some influence in online left discourse as we shall see.
Michael Lind is Porcine: It’s Funny Because It’s True
It might surprise you to know that Michael Lind, the porcine conservative academic, Heritage Foundation alumnus and author of radical screeds such as Vietnam: The Necessary War, has a lot to teach young socialist intellectuals about class warfare. In his book The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, Lind paints a picture of an “uneducated underclass” living in low-density areas and a “metropolitan elite” of university-credentialed professionals who he defines as a “managerial overclass.”
Porcine? Yeah, that was the best possible descriptor, though “dipshyt” or “gas bag” would have worked as well. Fair Use.
A synopsis of Lind’s thesis can be found online in the Summer 2017 edition of American Affairs. Conveniently for Lind, and the billionaires who fund the Claremont Institute, the amorphous, non-class of moderately better paid university-educated professionals like corporate managers, who seldom have any power on corporate boards, are the real enemy. Even more absurdly, teachers and nurses are grouped within the same class as the actual capitalists who patronize the think tanks who cut Lind a check for his services.
To Lind, it doesn’t matter if you are a waged-worker, and you receive a low wage at that. If you are, for instance, the child of a college educated schoolteacher and go on to take on student loan debt to get a degree before entering the work-force as a poorly paid wage laborer with no benefits, you are not working class after at all. No, you are the scion of a hereditary order of mandarins. Congratulations.
It should be realized from the jump that this is merely a cynical divide and conquer strategy, meant to draw a wedge between college educated and non-college educated workers. While depicting struggling debt peons as the new bourgeoisie is far-fetched, it also grossly distorts the data on the class composition of college attendees, 20 percent of whom come from low-income backgrounds. Some 47 percent come from non-white families according to a recent Pew survey. Nevertheless, this narrative gained a great deal of currency in left media.
Left media influencers picked up where Lind left off, propagating this anti-solidarity talking point and demonizing the “Professional Managerial Class.” In 2019, Chapo Trap House host Amber A’Lee Frost penned an essay on this theme in American Affairs, lifted largely though b*stardized from the great Barbara Ehrenreich. To her credit, she later distanced herself from the publication, but podcast co-host turned guru Matt Christman echoed these talking points in his interminable Vlog sermons.
Lind routinely pens essays in the pseudo-Marxist journal The Bellows. The Bellows describes itself as “an online magazine for class-centric Left-Populism.” Incidentally, its homepage lists Jeff Vandrew Jr. as a contributing founder of Vandrew LLC, a New Jersey-based wealth management firm, just in case you doubted its left-wing credentials. Not impressed? Little Jeff is the son of Republican dentist/congressman Jeff Vandrew Sr., who in 2020 supported Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Almost immediately following the launch of The Bellows it became clear that the website would take the most conservative positions possible to avoid alienating its Claremont-affiliated contributors. Hence, it churns out endless pieces suggesting that the populist left and populist right share common goals.
Malcolm Kyeyune a self-described “Marxist” who sees no contradiction, as it were, in working for the Swedish conservative think tank Oikos, reiterates Lind’s conceptions of class in a tedious Bellows essay entitled “Against the Managers.” In his characteristic style, which is at once maudlin and pedantic, Kyeyune argues that expansion of higher education created a new class of “would-be functionaries in numbers far in excess of what the labor market can or could absorb.” So, even unemployed college graduates are dastardly managers in waiting. Kyeune continues:
What we have now on the left and right—on both sides of the Atlantic—is an open and bitter class war. It is a conflict between a growing cadre of imperial lords and the peasantry they hope to subjugate; between the managers and petty nobility of the much-prophesied “knowledge economy” and those they aim to manage.
So, the left are managers or managers-in-waiting while the Right are salt of the earth, scrappy peasants, which conveniently ignores the fact that high-income Americans voted for Trump in substantially higher numbers.
Kyeyune is a frequent guest along with Angela Nagle on What’s Left? a podcast hosted by prolific Twitter troll, paralegal and amphetamine connoisseur Aimee Laba, better known as Aimee Terese. She is perhaps the most enthusiastic disseminator of the PMC canard and other crypto-Claremont propaganda.
She’s also a head case. When she’s not reflexively defending Neo-Nazis engaged in anti-PC demonstrations in her native Australia (she deleted that tweet) she’s dunking on the libs, accusing everyone of being a secret Democrat and refashioning conservative talking points with ultraleft gibberish. She also uncritically platforms conservative think tank figures like Manhattan Institute fellow Oren Cass, who, friend to the working man that he is, wants to cut overtime rates and bar public sector unions from supporting and donating to political campaigns. Despite her professed advocacy on behalf of the real working class against the wily PMC, Laba, occasionally gives the game away:
Personnel wise, you need loyal footsoldiers to make populist campaign work, but you also need hungry/class traitors in upper echelons of movement [sic]. The difference between Sanders & Corbyn in 16/17 vs 19/20 is their upper echelons now too well entrenched professionally [sic]. On the ground the working class people doing the grunt work/canvassing etc they’re loyal in both cases. But if the pmc layer will be fine professionally regardless of electoral outcome, they’re worse than useless (unless you have a legit vanguard of hardcore class traitors).
This quote betrays her genuine contempt for the working class. In her imagination, she’s in charge and the hoi polloi are the boots on the ground doing the “grunt work.” It’s all very understandable when you stop to consider that Laba grew up in Sydney’s posh North Shore. She attended Loreto Kirribilli, one of Sydney’s most exclusive and expensive private schools, where students are inculcated with a “born to rule” mentality. She’s also the daughter of a wealthy Lebanese émigré, which makes her contempt for working people quite a bit easier to understand. (This image below appears to refer to her father. If that’s inaccurate, I will update this story.)