A Modest Proposal In Response To a "Dangerous Faggot"

Milo Yiannopoulos is not the man you've been told he is. He favors regulating Twitter as a public utility (he's been banned for life), is not a leader of the alt-right, isn't racist (he's sympathetic to reparations), and is a Jewish rather than white nationalist. In short, if he's any kind of "fascist," it's of the Jewish supremacist variety that enjoys the longstanding and nearly unanimous support of political Washington. How did such a man become the scourge of the establishment?

Easy. He said that a grown man having sex with a 13-year-old wasn't pedophilia, adding that in his case it improved his fellatio skills immensely, for which he is eternally grateful. Naturally, such comments could not be received sensibly in the anally retentive USA, so the media predictably went nuts on the assumption that Yiannopoulos was justifying child molestation. He wasn't. He was merely trying to make points about terminology and the importance of not getting hysterical. The men Milo had sex with at 13 were hebephiles. Pedophilia is sex with children that have not gone through puberty yet. For the record, he’s against pedophilia and does not favor a change in the age of consent laws.

Ever eager to goose liberal sacred cows, free speech figures prominently in Yiannopoulos's political crusading, and he's particularly disgusted by the perpetually aggrieved proponents of identity politics, who seem intent on reducing university study to a four-year therapy session, and hardly a First Amendment friendly one at that. For these boundlessly fragile "snowflakes," trigger warnings must precede any presentation of controversial material, which these days can mean anything from rape to failure to use the proper gender pronouns in referring to an ever-lengthening list of sexual identities. Safe spaces are also mandatory, so students can feel confident they will not be exposed to anything fundamentally upsetting, especially ideas that "invalidate" the experience of "marginalized" groups. Such heresies must be condemned as "microaggressions" and rooted out.

That such ideas are flatly incompatible with the entire point of university gives Yiannopoulos his opportunity to be wildly popular for taking an easy position. 

“I’d prefer a world with no identity politics," he says, and that "we judged people according to reason, logic and evidence." Dreamy! Reason, of course, suggests that "if you are going to divide everyone up, you have to accept that straight white men are going to want their own special party too." Enter Donald Trump, whose election Yiannopoulos enthusiastically endorsed (he calls him "Daddy").

An improbable Mario Savio of the right, Yiannopoulos is firm in his determination that free speech must win out over every kind of political dogma.  “People like Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve) deserve to have their voices heard, and my divinely appointed job is to toughen up these (college) kids so they can properly engage in the big debates." Fair enough, and one can only hope there are no special exceptions, as Yiannopoulos insists there aren't: “My support of dangerous memes holds," he says, "even if your desire to explode polite taboos includes taking aim at the Holocaust." Unfortunately, he embraces open-mindedness more for its entertainment value than its educational effects: “I understand why so many young people find jokes about the Second World War attractive: they drive establishment types, especially conservatives, absolutely crackers. And I will defend to the death their right to tweet jokes about gas ovens, no matter how badly their words may burn.”

But why waste time on cheap jokes? Let's get Yiannapoulos in touch with the Committee For Open Debate on the Holocaust, which has long tried to simply raise questions about the canonical Holocaust (like why there is no forensic evidence of mass homicidal gas chambers), earning not a fair hearing but near universal condemnation and persecution. With a little backbone, Yiannapoulos's campus hecklers should be able to beat him at his own game. Why the taboo on questioning the existence of homicidal gas chambers?

Perhaps because the presumed existence of mass homicidal gas chambers makes Jews a special class of victims. For all his criticism of competitive victimhood, Yiannapoulos can't resist special pleading when the topic is Jews:  “I happen to disagree, strongly, that anti-Semitism is just like racism or sexism," he says.  Jews represent "a unique case" because of "a particularly virulent history of bigotry against Jews." For as long as there have been Jews, "it has always been dangerous to be one, somewhere in the world." Aside from the frankly prejudicial stance itself, Yiannopoulos neglects to note that the most dangerous place in the world to be a Jew these days is Israel, which was created as the place Jews go to be safe. In other words, the solution to the anti-Semitism problem has created more violent hostility towards Jews than at any time since the Nazi era, and this, not because increasing numbers of people hate Jews for who they are, but because they can't stand the Jewish state for what it does. Special case, indeed.

But rather than focus on this, Yiannopoulos prefers to bait Muslims and their defenders, denouncing Islam as a source of homophobia, patriarchy, street harassment, and intolerance. He accuses "leftists" of hypocrisy for opposing these practices in the abstract while defending members of a religion that condones them. Nowhere does he note, however, that promoting LGBT rights as a kind of political battering ram against Muslim dominant countries long subject to Western and imperial brutality (and regularly culminating in mass killing of Muslim civilians), is a far more serious kind of hypocrisy. If he doesn't want to see mass migration of Muslims to the West, and he insists this is an ongoing disaster, then why doesn't he publicly condemn USrael's endless outrages against the Arab and Muslim worlds? For campus activists, criticizing him on these grounds makes a lot more sense than impotently shouting, "racist, sexist, Islamophobic."

Source: 
Milo Yiannopoulos, "Dangerous," (Dangerous Books: 2017)

Homeless Americans Grateful For Government's Compassionate Financing Choice

Would you like NASA to fly a drone across Saturn’s largest moon, or to send a probe to collect samples from a duck-shaped comet?

From a dozen proposals to the agency’s New Frontiers competition — not unlike an interplanetary “Shark Tank” for a forthcoming robotic mission — NASA announced those two as finalists.

Each team will get $4 million and about a year to flesh out its idea. NASA will decide in mid-2019 which one to build, and the launch is expected by the end of 2025.

The Master Race of Self Chosen People of All Identity Groups Rules The World: Between Its Ears

Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. Breaking News Alert  December 21, 2017 NYTimes.com »

BREAKING NEWS In a stinging rebuke, the U.N. General Assembly condemned the U.S. decree on Jerusalem. The vote was 128 to 9, with 35 abstentions. Thursday, December 21, 2017 12:30 PM EST The overwhelming majority of the world’s nations voted to approve a nonbinding resolution demanding that the United States rescind the Dec. 6 decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, ignoring President Trump’s threats of revenge.Between Its Collective Ears

Items From The Garlic

In Alabama, pseudo-democracy’s outcome found the candidate charged with child sex abuse defeated by the candidate not yet charged with child sex abuse -  but -  subject to future charges of ageism if only being attracted to younger victims. Vegas, media pundits and Wall St. brokers anxiously await results of background checks and paid informants to see how long until new senator becomes victim of old charges.

Meanwhile, in answer to a great new market need, venture capitalists are forming support therapy group start-ups  offering help to all the women who had contact with the abusers but were never abused by them. The anonymous multi billionaire creator of the fart-belch-vomit app to make gluttony more relaxing said:

 “These women may be suffering great pain at not seeing themselves good enough to attract these pigs with hand problems. How would you feel if all your friends were  molested and you were not? There has to be some help for these rejected women, and we are filling that market need, with compassion, new psycho-neurotic breakthrough treatments and great investment opportunities for  capital too long tied up in old ideas like used food delivery and catered pet funerals.”

 Silicon Valley multi-trillionaire Jed Bozo has introduced a new app which allows buyers to shop while asleep. Investors are lining up to get in on this at holiday time.

 “No need for lulls while resting; this app saves your waking thoughts about commodity consumption and brings them into reality while you sleep, enabling shoppers to borrow more funds and consume more even when less conscious than usual.”

Wall St, the Pentagon, the Israeli lobby and the rest of organized crime in America are calling Trump’s presidency the  greatest political fund raising event in American history. Political, Psycho-Neurotic, Religious, Online and other Trivia Groups have raised  billions for the American democracy market and used nationalism to manipulate local and state minority voters.

While Trump and Netanyoohoo wore skull caps to cover their pointed heads, the two american parties owned by capital expressed joy at the news of biblical prophesy finally being acknowledged, but most of the foreign puppets, lap dogs and hustlers formerly obeying every american order have expressed opposition. Fears of losing weapons and taco-pizza-burger customers are causing some concern.

New law suits from the American majority charge abuses by the 1% causing shame, pain, homelessness, hunger, psychosocial disorders and worse.

 “They put their hands in our wallets and pocketbooks, against our wishes, and then sneered and laughed when we demanded a democracy to put a stop to their abuse”, said a union leader awakened from historic slumber by the demands of a newly formed majority of people without power. The majority has not been able to find a lawyer yet, most being busy with defending rich and powerful men from charges of sex abuse.

Anonymous Woman answering to the name Mother X charges her children with sexual abuse committed while she was giving birth. "They elbowed me, kicked me, touched all of my insides with reckless disregard for my physical and mental feelings ..it was awful". This historic case could finally end the human race. 

Identity groups cheer. “It’s about time; this stupid humanity concept has been holding us back for far too long” 

UK Refuses American Offer Of Nerve, Poison and Fart Gas

UK turns to sanctioned Russian project for its winter gas supply

UK homes are set to be heated over the new year with gas from a Russian project targeted by US sanctions, as the shutdown of a key North Sea pipeline slashes domestic output and sends utilities and traders scrambling for supplies. The first tanker of liquefied natural gas from the Yamal project in Russia’s Arctic, which was opened by president Vladimir Putin last week, is making its way to the Isle of Grain import terminal in Kent as UK gas prices soar.

How Liberals Breed The Reactionary Right: A Zionist Shock Jock Explains

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“If you tell lies to and about men, if you spread conspiracy theories about the ‘wage gap’ and ‘campus rape culture,’ if you tweet ‘Kill All White Men” and “I Bathe In Male Tears,’ if you close comment sections because you hate being ridiculed by readers who are smarter than you, if you prefer ideology and activism to facts, if you create a hateful atmosphere in which it’s OK to laugh at white people but no one else, if you are mean and vindictive and cruel and sociopathic yet try to cloak yourself in the language of tolerance and diversity, if you get people fired for bringing up studies or asking you to justify your claims, if you whip up outrage mobs over innocent jokes on social media, if you see racism and sexism and homophobia and every other imaginable kind of bigotry everywhere, and if you insist on warping reality to conform to your delusions, don’t be surprised if there’s a backlash. Don’t be surprised if that looks like President Trump.”

                                    -----Milo Yiannopoulos, Dangerous

The Market Forces of Sexual Abuse

The unbalanced relations and divisions of labor between the sexes dates back to long before patriarchy and had as much to do with nature, originally, as it has to do with power relations of money, at present. In the earliest societies men did not hunt and women gather due to any political dominance but to the physical realities that enabled men to run after and hunt animals for sustenance while women carried new life within them and had to stay closer to the nest gathering while developing what would become agricultural skills. It’s also likely that matriarchy existed due to the seeming powers of creating new life which were held by women, with possibly millennia passing before consciousness revealed that men had something to do with the creation of that life. But like so much else, the advance of what we call civilization has brought us both higher levels of material possibility and unfortunately lower levels of morality, both due to the commodity based relations forced on all humans, of all cultures and both sexes, by capitalist market forces in pursuit of private profit.

While living in a warfare state in which global destruction is threatened by nuclear powered adversaries, especially the USA which is both the inventor and only user of such murderous powers, much of american consciousness is occupied with this issue reduced to sometimes idiotic propaganda, while other issues become the stuff of surreality tv, fake news, and greater profits for the media, legal and psychology business community. Thus, we surround Russia and China with armadas and military bases while being told that Russia has destroyed our fictional democracy and China threatens our economic empire, and are given around the clock coverage of the renewed discovery that some men are pigs in relating to women, while some charges and countercharges of wrong doing have far more to do with the political and economic power of those making or resisting the charges.

Almost daily allegations, sometimes revelations, of things ranging from sexual indiscretions to abusive sexual practices lead to scandals causing powerful men to be reduced or quit their positions of power due to the public scorn which is both bad for men in business and good for women sometimes in the same business. The fact that women in some of these cases have waited many years before revealing such secrets is all due to what is seen as male power and rarely indentified as market power. The entertainment figures who have “come out” in the case of Weinstein all allowed his piggish behavior because they wanted-needed-aspired to the financial success his power might assure them but would possibly be denied if they had told him to buzz off or smacked his face when he dared disrespect them. It is pitiful for humans to be reduced to such groveling and submission before power, and all due to finance. It is also safe to imagine that if Weinstein looked like Brad Pitt, some might brag about attracting his attention at the time or be accused of wishful thinking if revealing it years later. The most important thing to consider is not just the male power exercised but also the economic power that serves as its foundation, obscuring any sense of self-respect on the part of victims, all at the upper end of the financial spectrum.

Tens of thousands of women suffer such disrespect, and much worse, while laboring in bars, restaurants, malls, coffee shops and other places of lesser financial reward collection, and usually do so in public silence, even if the outrages are common knowledge not only to those who suffer but often seen as the price that must be paid to get-do-succeed at the job. Playboy “Bunnies”, Hooters “Servers” and other women whose work totally depends on being subjectified as sexual merchandise, are part of the enormous and profitable sexual marketplace relatively invisible to those programmed to act in outrage at the treatment of those in service to a higher echelon at our collective sex mall. But the reduction of humanity in the pursuit of survival for the worker and profit for the owners is no different, in essence, at the bistro, the movie studio, the political palace, or the taco-pizza-burger joint. Those who need jobs are frequently reduced in humanity but have to go along in order to get or do the job, and socialized-to-be mistreated women reduced in stature by socialized-to-be mistreater men should remind us of the common state of humans reduced by market relations to perform in grudging acceptance of such disrespect in order to survive.

We should also consider the notion of justice alleged in believing an accuser simply because we agree with or have experience of what someone is being accused of. Our all but totally dependent on double standards culture makes it profitable for lynch mobs of thought or deed to form very quickly, emotionally and thoughtlessly, at the provocation of what some of us define as the Deep or Shallow State. Why is one person deemed a crook-liar-thug for doing what another person gets away with by being labeled a hero-heroine-savior? How does one president performing as a sexist slob become heroic when another who speaks like a sexist slob becomes a villain?

The social role of male and female is not a simple biological matter, and even that is being subject to all manner of stress and strain by market forces which enable some of us to buy sperm or rent wombs and become parents of new life which never knows one parent. That force of the market, dominant in all our lives but too often reduced to individual heroes and villains, needs to be considered in all these matters. If being able to afford profiting a law office is what amounts to justice, or being able to afford profiting an insurance company is what amounts to health care, then tolerating sexual abuse will remain a social reality. Far more than a person or a sex need to stand up against the systemic forces that keep us apart and at wars with each other, and worse, with nations, but if women need a model that is sex based, they should consider what happened 100 years ago when women took social action. They worked in a factory and while they may have suffered personal indignities their common cause was being overworked and underpaid. When they could no longer tolerate it they shouted, that’s enough – no more. Their walkout was one of the first actions in an experience that shook the world. It was called the Russian Revolution, and American knowledge of it is on a par with our ignorance of what market forces do to all of us, on both sides of the profit-loss ledger, with the losers growing in number and the profiteers growing wealth beyond reason. We need to become a collective people of reason who act as a democratic human race and not simply a sex or other identity group, to assure our survival as humanity before we are abused out of existence by being forced into continued action as racial, cultural and sexual commodities.

Stunningly Vicious Commentary From a Raving "Hate-Monger"

            .

            "Just how polarizing and negative are these fake news sites? Are they writing inflammatory stories about their political opponents with headlines like 'This Is How Fascism Comes To America?' Oh wait no, that was The Washington Post, in an article about Donald Trump. Are they suggesting their opponents will commit genocide if elected? No, that was an op-ed in The New York Times, also about Donald Trump. 
             “Just say it: Trump sounds more and more like Hitler” was, again, not published on any of the sites on the left-wing ‘fake news’ list, but on Slate, a once-respected magazine that published Christopher Hitchens.

            “And what about the unverified dossier claiming that the Russian government is blackmailing Donald Trump with evidence of him engaging in ‘perverted sexual acts’ that were monitored by Russian intelligence? It was published on Buzzfeed and reported on by CNN.

            “Obama is right, there is a problem with hysterics and misinformation in the press – but it’s a problem of the mainstream press, not the alternative media. It’s a bit fucking rich for journalists who got absolutely everything wrong about this election, and who published biased polls assuring the public of Hillary’s victory, to start complaining after the fact about ‘fake news’ because they lost the election.” 

                -------Milo Yiannapoulos, Dangerous

Class Dismissed: Identity Politics Without The Identity

"The goal of mainstream politicians of both parties should be to drive a wedge between the viciousness of white supremacy and people who are basically decent but tired of what they see as 'political correctness' that ignores the very considerable challenges faced by working-class whites while directing them to feel sorry for a whole range of other groups."

-----Joan C. Williams, White Working Class - Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

"We're voting with our middle finger."
-----South Carolina Trump supporter  

"There was no reason why the Left had to abandon its old blue collar base."
-----Milo Yiannopoulos

My apologies to Ta Nehisi Coates and the "it's all about race" school of politics, but by now it should be clear to just about everyone that attempting to achieve a democratic majority by multiplying victim minorities is doomed to failure. 

 For the four decades we have seen neo-liberal economics at work, white working class fortunes have gone steadily down the drain while diversity enthusiasts aggressively demanded universal sympathy for a growing list of victim groups: the poor, blacks, Latinos, "native" Americans, Asians, the disabled, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, the transgendered, queers, non-binary people, the asexual, along with every possible "intersection" of  these identities. Meanwhile, legitimate anger at the economic squeeze imposed on working people from outsourcing and mass immigration from the Third World has been written off as racism, sexism, nativism, and xenophobia. By 2016, the longstanding depression visible throughout rural America was a key factor in elevating Donald Trump to the presidency.

Something unprecedented was at the root of flipping battleground states that had previously gone to Obama to Trump this time: In working class America people are for the first time dying at a younger age than their parents. The death rate of white working class men and women increased sharply in the past generation, a reversal of the trend established over the three decades following the end of World War II. The opioid epidemic is a particularly grim feature of this tragic story.
   
But in the optic of identity politics, white people are "privileged" by definition, so downward mobility can only be the result of personal failure. In particular, if you are white and don't have a college degree, and two-thirds of American adults do not, then you are not part of the good life and have only yourself to blame.

As a result, the white working class is virtually invisible today. The movie "A Day Without A Mexican" attempted to show how indebted California is to immigrant labor, but there has been no parallel cinematic attempt to show how the white working class (largely) keeps our power lines working, our buses running, our sewers functioning, our trucks delivering goods to market. They also empty our bedpans, take our X-rays, watch our children, and respond to our 911 calls. Without them, the American Dream that they are increasingly excluded from could not exist. But there is virtually no public depiction of their plight.

Not that these workers want the pious solicitude offered to the poor. They don't. They simply want to earn a decent life for themselves by working, as they used to be able to do. They want respect for their work ethic and what it has earned them, and recognition that our entire physical infrastructure functions only thanks to their effort, skill, and dedication. A guaranteed income might cover their economic needs, but would leave them with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Similarly, guaranteed paid sick leave, pregnancy leave, or a higher minimum-wage cannot possibly substitute for a steady job that supports a traditionally middle-class lifestyle. That's what members of the working class used to have and what they still want. Unfortunately for us all, theirs is the identity that identity politics has no place for.

Donald Trump, however, did have a place for them, at least on the campaign trail. The strongest indication of Trump support was a concentration of high-school educated voters, and no one should have been surprised at that. Over the past several decades the Democratic Party has shed all concern for high-school educated workers in preference for professional and managerial elites it laughingly calls the "middle class," though households made up of such workers (one sixth of the total) had a 2015 income of $173,175. Obviously, this is well above working class, which used to be considered at the heart of the middle class, but today refers to those who are neither rich nor poor, and for that reason are consistently overlooked. 

In a capitalist society, work is at the core of identity, and here there are sharply divergent attitudes between professionals and the working class. For professional and managerial elites, work is not simply about the lifestyle it affords off the job; it's about "pursuing your passion," i.e., finding self-fulfillment in work itself. It also means risk taking for self-actualization; for example, founding an innovative start-up company to disrupt settled patterns that block the way of technical advance. Professionals value sophistication, "thinking outside the box," and creativity, all of which are primary values for getting and keeping a job if you're an order giver.

But matters are quite different for order takers. Their lot is to fill rigid, highly supervised jobs that are monotonously repetitive. Medical technicians, factory workers, bus drivers, construction workers, truck drivers, orderlies, nurses, and cashiers cannot "follow their bliss"; they have to develop the stability and dependability to support their families. Furthermore, to adopt an attitude of creative risk-taking would be evidence of "having an attitude," which just gets one fired. For the working class, the goal is developing the iron will to do a detested menial job for forty years without complaint. Self-fulfillment is simply irrelevant. 

 In a largely unionless economy dedicated to profit extraction and nothing else, working class family life goes something like this:

"Mike drives a cab and I work in a hospital, so we figure one of us could transfer to nights. We talked it over and decided it would be best if I was here during the day and he was here at night. He controls the kids, especially my son, better than I do. So now Mike works day and I work graveyard. I hate it, but it's the only answer: at least this way somebody's here all the time. I get home at 8:30 in the morning. The kids and Mike are gone. I clean up the house a little, do the shopping and the laundry and whatever, then I go to sleep for a couple of hours before the kids get home from school. Mike gets home at 5, we eat, then he takes over for the night, and I go back to sleep for a couple of hours. I try to get up at 9:00 so we can have a little time together, but I'm so tired that I don't make it a lot of times. And by 10:00, he's sleeping because he has to get up at 6:00 in the morning. It's hard, it's very hard. There's no time to live or anything (emphasis added)." 

There's no time to live, but it's the only way to survive. 

Theoretically, they could increase their income by moving where there are more and better jobs to be had, but working class Americans have good reasons to be wary of the paycheck nomad lifestyle professionals embrace as a matter of course. Moving around the country in order to ascend a career ladder that places money above every other consideration holds little allure. Maintaining one or even two full-time jobs in order to have a settled life in a familiar area is typically preferable. Close family and friends offer the only balm there is for the daily humiliation of being bossed around for low pay. Partly for this reason personal morality and dedication to family is what commands respect, not careerism and "merit." But after forty years of declining wages and disappearing benefits, working class people worry that opportunities for a settled lifestyle may soon vanish altogether. 

University education also might increase working class incomes, but ordinary workers tend to distrust higher education. For elites, extensive formal education is valued, but for the working class "being churched" is more important. Formal learning may be tolerated, but only as long as it's not put on display, in which case it's evidence of a "swelled head." More money is not worth it at the price of moral decline.

So for the working class college is decidedly optional, and may not even be desirable in many cases. What's indispensable is not a college degree, but a skill that will make people pay you for your work. So if go you go to college and end up without such a skill, you have wasted time and money both. [An increasing number of male college graduates end up in low or medium-skilled jobs.] But if you don't go to college but nevertheless do acquire such a skill, you can still make out. Working class kids worry that they might end up with a prestigious degree but be unable to secure work with it because they lack knowledge of the unwritten social codes of professional life, which are learned by osmosis in professional families. Is it really surprising that a child from the professional elite is three times more likely to be admitted to a selective private institution than a lower class white with similar qualifications?
 
Employers overwhelmingly favor people who mirror professional habits and values, people whose hobbies might be sailing and classical music, but not pick-up soccer and country and western concerts. Research shows that putting the latter set of interests on your resume will get you far fewer professional job interviews than the former.

Then there's the matter of ending up tens of thousands of dollars in debt in return for attending college, an increasingly common phenomenon throughout the USA. Average college debt among graduating seniors who had taken out student loans more than doubled between 1986 and 2008, and increased 56% in the decade before 2014. Accumulating a mountain of debt is extremely risky for anyone, but especially so for a working class kid. In 2009 student loans were draining off 35% of college dropouts' annual income. 

And aside from all this, the working class often just sees more value in its traditional jobs than in professional work. Many workers want to work with their hands and think that being a fire-fighter, for example, adds more value to a community than learning how to boost superfluous consumption with manipulative ads. So there are lots of good reasons to be skeptical of the college track, which is always going to be a minority option no matter how much we praise it. 

But this leaves working class families trapped in an insoluble dilemma: (1) higher education is either unattainable or undesirable; (2) middle-class jobs are increasingly unavailable; (3) accepting government help is outright shameful. And gaming the welfare system in order to receive extra benefits (like buying sodas with food stamps and then selling them for cash) is doubly shameful. So working class people are often unwilling to use government benefits even when they are available to them. In fact, they tend to resent poor people who eagerly snap up any government benefit they can get. (Working class blacks are an exception to this. They tend to have a non-judgmental attitude towards those in need, recognizing from bitter experience that being in need has nothing to do with lacking personal merit.)

Interestingly, working class people resent professionals but not the rich. Becoming rich is assumed to be the result of hard work, whereas professional wealth is regarded as the product of dubious entitlement, and professionals themselves are seen as phony and snobbish. So working class people tend to dream of self-employment as the only route to wealth that doesn't involve forfeiting one's character. For them, self-employment, not collective action, represents class consciousness. The dream is not to migrate out of their class milieu, but to stay with the people they like and resemble - while making more money. Trump epitomizes this: he made his original fortune in grand casinos flouting his "garish bad taste." Life on one's own terms!

While professionals move in an increasingly secular world, working class whites are proud of their Christian morality and deeply resent being depicted as ignorant homophobes. If liberal elites don't want them to embrace Rush Limbaugh, maybe they should stop insulting them with such caricatures. Not that liberals are the only guilty party here. On what passes for a political left in the U.S. many dismiss working class demands for jobs on the basis that it's just "white privilege"!

Working class accusations of "political correctness" are often a taking umbrage at such class cluelessness and its attendant snobbery. For example, in working class communities being a stay-at-home wife is a sign of elevated status and a much sought after luxury, not evidence of a backward attitude towards sex roles. (Trump won working class white women by 28%.) For many working class families, having mothers in the workplace represents not "liberation" but additional stress and disruption. By the Trump years a new generation of workers had lost any hope of fulfilling this aspiration, though their parents and grandparents had managed to do so. On the other hand, for professional and managerial women, being a stay-at-home mother represents a decline in status, i.e., "just a housewife."

While professional class husbands more often espouse egalitarian gender ideals, working class husbands do more child care. Who's more sexist?

 As for racism, many working class whites do harbor fears of blacks sporting "flashy cars, booze, and broads," and who "don't even want to get ahead for their families!" But many professional class whites are also racist, stereotyping blacks as lazy, violent, recklessly sexual, and less competent than whites. All forms of racism should be abandoned, of course, but in the meantime professional class whites have no call to indulge their class prejudices against working class whites on the grounds that only the latter are racist. It's just not so. 

As anthropology professor David Harvey reminds us, it is "all too easy to blame the victims for what happens when capital leaves town." But whatever workers' flaws are taken to be, "it is preposterous to claim that these can account for the total devastation of industrial regions that had for generations been the backbone of capital accumulation." For destruction on this scale we can only thank "the neo-liberal counter-revolution of the 1970s."  

There is a showdown with capital coming, says Harvey, that will make the upheavals of the 1960s "look like child's play." When that day dawns those of us who want to see corporate and national security elites displaced by popular democratic forces will need the bulk of the white working class on our side. If we continue to define it as inherently reactionary, it won't be.

Sources: 

Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Harvard, 2017)

Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, (Harper, 1991)

David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions And The End of Capitalism, (Oxford, 2014)

Sex In America, Part 2

by Ann Coulter

November 29, 2017

www.anncoulter.com

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At least liberals are finally telling the truth about Bill Clinton -- and just 20 years after it mattered! Of course, considering it took the Democratic Party a century to discover that slavery was wrong, two decades is lightning speed for these moral paragons.

While edging up to admitting that Bill Clinton maybe shouldn't have raped Juanita Broaddrick and flashed Paula Jones, liberals still can't own up to their utterly hypocritical defense of a president credibly accused of repeated sexual assaults and associated felonies.

Recently, The New York Times' Maureen Dowd tried to cover up the left's shameful response to Clinton's sleazy behavior with the "both sides" argument. According to Dowd, liberals "tried to kill off" Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas "over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics." And then conservatives "tried to kill off a Democratic president over sex when the real reason they wanted to get rid of him was politics."

Here are three important differences off the top of my head:

1) Anita Hill's accusations against Thomas involved words -- just words -- whereas Clinton was accused by multiple women of being a sexual predator on a scale to rival Harvey Weinstein.

2) The evidence against Thomas consisted of a single accuser, with no corroborating witnesses. The evidence against Clinton included, among other things, multiple witnesses; contemporaneous corroborating witnesses; secretly recorded confessions of the assaults and liaisons from Clinton himself (the Gennifer Flowers tape), Monica Lewinsky (Linda Tripp tapes) and Juanita Broaddrick (two separate tapes by people who wanted her to tell the truth about the rape); a DNA-stained dress; and, eventually, when he had absolutely no other choice, Clinton's own admission under oath.

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3) As Dowd says, the left was using Hill's made-up charges against Thomas to save Roe v. Wade. By contrast, it's absurd to imagine that Republicans were enraged by the policies of President Clinton -- a neoliberal, Third-Way, welfare-reform-signing, Ricky Ray Rector-executing Democrat. Clinton was the last of a vanishing breed, the moderate Democrat. That just wasn't a good enough reason to overlook his repeated sexual assaults, felonies and bald-faced lies.

It was liberals, and only liberals, who did an about-face on everything they supposedly believed about sexual harassment for political gain. The exact same people who had pretended to need smelling salts when told Thomas had joked about "Long Dong Silver" in the offices of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (never happened) were suddenly A-OK with a governor summoning a lowly state employee to his hotel room, dropping his pants and saying, "Kiss it."

The erstwhile lynch mob against Clarence Thomas was fine with a presidential candidate using his campaign staff (including ABC's George Stephanopoulos) to squelch "bimbo eruptions."

Liberals were totally copacetic with the president of the United States using the full power of his office to smear his victims as liars, bimbos, trailer park trash and -- in the case of Monica Lewinsky -- a "stalker."

In the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, feminist icon Gloria Steinem penned a New York Times op-ed launching the all-new "One Free Grope" rule. Steinem explained that Clinton's smooth "kiss it" line to Paula Jones merely showed that -- I quote -- "Clinton took 'no' for an answer."

No correction to Steinem's pronouncement was issued days later when news of Juanita Broaddrick's rape charge against Clinton began to circulate.

(If you doubt that the media are run by the totalitarian left, note that Steinem's op-ed has been wiped from the Times' archives. So I guess liberals do know how to wipe hard drives!)

Clinton was impeached for perjury and other felonies he committed to defeat Jones' sexual harassment claim against him. Not one Democrat in the Senate voted to remove him from office. Not one.

As a consequence, the rule on sexual assault at least since Teddy Kennedy drowned Mary Jo Kopechne was this: Liberals were free to grope, rape and drown women and to smear them and their defenders. But conservatives, lacrosse players, fraternity members, pompous Fox News hosts and other objects of liberal hate would be destroyed at the slightest hint of any sexual impropriety, whether true or comically false.

What didn't matter: The nature of the charge, credibility of the accuser, use of force, contemporaneous witnesses, photographic evidence, DNA evidence ...

What mattered: Who's the accused?

It would be as if pollution laws were enforced only against companies with Republican CEOs. Oh! It's Harvey Weinstein's firm? My mistake -- go ahead, dump toxic chemicals into this pristine river.

That's why the most shocking revelation to emerge from The New York Times' expose of Weinstein last month was that it was published at all. Least shocking was that, before Ronan Farrow took his detailed account of Weinstein's assaults to The New Yorker, NBC killed the story.

Also unsurprising: Soon after refusing to publish Farrow's report on Weinstein, NBC was frantically peddling a letter by "Saturday Night Live" staffers defending Franken from his own multiple groping incidents. (It's looking like the best way to defend Roy Moore would be to allege that Democratic Sen. Al Franken once fondled 14-year-olds.)

Still, with the Times' expose of Weinstein, for the first time in 20 years, liberals have finally begun to notice the prodigious abuse of women by liberal men -- other than Al Franken, of course.

Perhaps the day is not far off when we will have ONE standard for both liberals and the people liberals hate. A girl can dream!

COPYRIGHT 2017 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

Individualitis: A Crippling Social Disorder

Once again an anti-social blame game threatens to disguise material systemic madness under a blanket of personal identity psychosis. As almost any clear reading of evidence would lead one to believe, the illegal immigrant who killed a woman in San Francisco was found innocent of actually meaning to kill her. And as always, a tweet to America’s twit population is played as a major assault on humanity by expressing disagreement with the outcome, and as usual the tweet is as wrong as its opposition twits in this flathead vs. pinhead intellectual clash.

The system that deported a person, allowed him back into the country, deported him again and allowed him back in again, deported him again and allowed him back in again, and then deported him again and allowed him back in again..oops, one more deportation and allowance back in, goes totally unquestioned by both the “get the immigrants” brigades and the “protect the immigrants” legions. Whether this immigrant was the sweetest human being on the planet or a nasty individual hardly matters more than that an innocent human being would still be alive if he had not found, fumbled with and triggered a shot that killed her. Bulletin: he could not have done so if he had not been in America. Duh? His intent, alleged by some, or innocence, understood by some who considered evidence over opinion, was secondary to the actual systemic crime of allowing the person repeated illegal entry into the country not once, which would be bad enough, but five times. She would still be alive if he had been treated legally by a just and fair system that put people before profits, and that is the most important matter to be dealt with. Don’t hang by your lip waiting for the legions of “ immigrants r us and trump is a mass murderer” or “immigrants are a curse and trump is the son of god” population to come to that conclusion. Especially when the consciousness controllers and mind managers that run our “democracy” for our minority owners remain the only source of information (?) and opinion (based on the same?) that enters the minds, and souls, of all americans in the only expression - outside of a mall –in mass participation in what makes the country supposedly work: joining in the consumption of goods, services and assaults on morality that we call our special-to-the-world nation.

But the president and millions of others who argue against unlimited immigration, some of whom are bigots and most of whom are just decent people absorbing the social costs that immigration brings to benefit the private profit crowd are all labeled enemies of all that is good, wholesome and sweet, while an opposition that tolerates or helplessly allows mass slaughter of human beings in foreign countries and lowers to destitution hundreds of thousands at home clucks in superior contempt. Is this any way to run a country? It is, if you want to instill conscious support for private profit at all costs, or unconsciously speak against profit when you believe or are manipulated into seeing it as negative, and unconsciously enjoy it when it is beneficial and you are manipulated into believing it is so even as you wallow in debt, live in fear of terrorism but remember to stand with your hand over your heart, wallet, or crotch when a flag is waved or an anthem sung.

It takes a nation to create a people, to paraphrase a famous servant to capital’s best selling market hustle, and until we transform ourselves from a gang of i-me-mine and only us when like i-me-mine to a people exercising unity beyond the ends of our noses or identity groups, we will see our divisions become greater, the market become more dominated by the richest humans in the history of humanity, and our planetary homeland – whether we believe or disbelieve the brand name “climate change” – become unlivable.

One of the terrible contradictions of a system that only creates wealth for some by creating poverty for others, with the first group getting smaller and the second larger by the minute, is to import cheap labor for greater profits. The immigrants have little to no control over their status as such, but systemic powers, the kind that allow some into the country illegally and provide housing, jobs and education for them, however low on the economic scale, while crowding prisons with hundreds of thousands of native born denied and locked out of housing, jobs and education, are systemic powers that must be changed democratically. That takes unity among people identifying common problems, and that’s why we are kept in divisive sectors looking out for only “us”, in the selected minority of one or another identity group which may suffer for that identity but suffer even more for allowing ourselves to be kept in it.

Being put against one another over issues of individual immigrants while remaining unconscious to the political economic reality of immigration is what our minority rulers want. As long as we cooperate, as we are doing at the moment, we play into their hands, and endanger our majority’s future.