Straight Pride and the Gatekeepers of Oppression

A group calling themselves Super Happy Fun America has announced plans to hold a straight pride parade sometime this August in Boston, Massachusetts, and the woke internet isn't happy about it.

The totally sincere and legitimate group describe themselves as follows on their website: "Super Happy Fun America advocates on behalf of the straight community in order to build respect, inclusivity, equality, diversity, unity, solidarity, dignity, social mobility, empowerment, sustainability, justice, awareness, intersectionality, human rights, education, access, participation, dialogue, visibility, tolerance, and alliances with people from all walks of life.  We encourage everyone to embrace our community’s diverse history, culture, and identity regardless of sexual orientation."

Playing it straight for 0.4 years. 
Or something

Strength is our diversity!

Yeah. Totally no trolling or spoofing going on here. This totally doesn't have 4chan, or a very similar source, written all over it. They've even adopted Milo Yiannopoulos as mascot and grand marshal for the parade. Just think about that. Really think about it. Take your time, and let it sink in.

It should be obvious by now that SHFA isn't playing this straight.

Plus I'm sure you'll be shocked to discover that the masterminds behind this stroke of genius also have a history of involvement in far right bootlickery more generally. One Mark Sahady, parade organizer, has a history with a group called Resist Marxism, founded by "based stick man" Kyle Chapman, according to this Daily Beast article. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of antifa and found them hard to sympathize with even when one of them did get whapped upside the head, but here we have the exact reason that the far right is a lame dud that will never come to anything, and is no vehicle for dissent and protest against globalism.

Resist Marxism.

Yeah. You go, boys.

Should this farce of a parade actually take place, expect to see far less of their corny heterosexual pride banners and far more defacing of the hammer and sickle. Because even more than queer tyranny over straights, Marxism is clearly a looming power in America today. One look at the current US administration and one can only wonder how long it will be before industry is placed under worker's control, finance is nationalized and agricultural collectivization is to begin? On a more serious note, what being anti-Marxist has to do with heterosexual pride is anyone's guess. I don't think the Soviets were that keen on LGBT issues, to put things mildly. Marx himself was a heterosexually married man. The phrase "bourgeois decadence" comes to mind here.

So yes, far right cringe. Behind an all but acknowledged as farcical facade of straight white male pride, you'll get just the kind of anti-social welfare, anti-public sector, anti-union, anti-socialist and anti-social democracy cringe fest we've all come to love and expect from the yellow and black crowd. I can hardly wait!

Yet this is not what the progressives criticizing this are up in arms about. This is about identity politics, and as you can imagine, the internet is responding with what it does best. OUTRAGE!

Some examples you might have expected:

"This is why straight people don't get to have a fucking pride parade." Followed by a link to a news story about a violent homophobic incident, wherein a lesbian couple was allegedly assaulted on a double decker bus in London, UK.

"A straight pride parade is kinda like throwing a fundraiser for healthy people because people with Cancer had one."

"Straight men already have a pride parade - it’s called the Senate."

Et cetera. Straights get to have a pride parade when straights have a history of being oppressed like LGBTQ folks have.  To be clear, this straight pride parade sounds like the stupidest thing I've heard of in quite some time. I wouldn't be caught dead at this parade, assuming it even goes ahead, except maybe to make fun of it. And even then, probably not, since even if I did live in Boston, I have better things to do.

But as little use as I have for any of this, I also have concerns with this whole "straights/whites/males don't get to have a pride day" mindset. Not because I think straight (or white or male) pride is needed. As I indicated above, I don't think that even the far right organizers of this charade really believe that. What concerns me is the social justice crowd appointing themselves the gatekeepers of who is and isn't oppressed, deciding exclusively among themselves that one must first be deemed oppressed in order to be able to put on a pride parade, and therefore who gets to have a pride parade and who doesn't.

While I'm not necessarily against the idea that pride is more appropriate for a group that has had to struggle for its rights as opposed to groups who have always defined what the norm is, I still wonder who died and decided that professional progressive ideologues were the ones who get to decide all of this?  Perhaps, by that rationale, a pride parade is in order for everyone who isn't a professional queer, feminist or critical race theorist. And the Fortune 500, Washington beltway lobbyists and the military industrial complex can probably sit that one out as well.

This mindset is already coming around to bite Pride in the tail, as is evidenced by recent incidents wherein Black Lives Matter has taken it upon themselves to decide that Pride parades should not include uniformed police officers. BLM gets to decide this on behalf of Pride because of intersectionality. Or to make Pride more "inclusive." Or something. Such are the issues that arise when the self appointed vanguard of groups that assign marginalized status to themselves can then take it upon themselves to police the public expression of other groups, and be seen as legitimate in the media in doing so, because marginalization. It doesn't sound like an environment where anyone gets to decide for themselves whether they can have a pride parade or not. Is this really what progressives want?

As much as I do agree in principle with race and sex based equality, this "power plus prejudice' mentality is profoundly anti-liberal and undemocratic, especially when the gatekeepers themselves actually become powerful enough to impose their will on the governmental authorities who actually issue the permits. Last time I checked, the right to free speech, to assembly and to protest belonged to all equally. To decide that only some and not others should have it is the very definition of privilege, exactly the thing the woke crowd professes to be against. Well, only when "privilege" is narrowly defined as an essential feature of whiteness, masculinity and heterosexuality, it would seem.

I don't recall being consulted about how oppression was defined and what privileges get granted to those who fall under its umbrella. No one I knew was either. I don't recall "we the people" being able to vote on the definition of who is and is not oppressed, and therefore who is and is not allowed to have a pride parade in honor of their identity. I don't recall any of this being seriously debated in any sort of public forum. As usual, mainstream media didn't present the arguments in a for and against format. Somewhere along the line, we just started being told who was and wasn't marginalized and oppressed, and therefore who was and wasn't entitled to a pride parade. Told by professional academics and activists in the media and in the education system, and whose dictates have since been parroted ceaselessly on social media, in comments sections and by any "progressive" eager to evangelize. Progressive, in the same sense that Lenin's idea of a "democratic" centralist, vanguard party was progressive. Which is to say, not at all.

No recourse, no debate, no looking under the hood of the institutions which have formulated and propagated these dictates, no thinking for oneself or seeking a second opinion about the issues of race, gender or sexual orientation. This is not good for an open, liberal democratic polity. To question any of this is to be a far right bigot, we are told. That sounds like a dangerous recipe for a self fulfilling prophecy, if you ask me.

As a curious aside, the white male working class wasn't included in the charmed circle of marginalized groups. Rich or poor, if you are a straight white dude, you are "privileged" and therefore an acceptable target for progressive scorn by default. And we wonder why they voted for Trump.

Indeed, I suspect that the real outrage over this straight pride parade among the woke twittersphere has a lot less to do with the demonstrable threat to LGBTQ rights posed by this parade (which is virtually negligible, since the vast majority of the people taking this parade at all seriously will be the counter-protesters) but because some straight white dudes somewhere are daring to challenge the authority of the self appointed holy trinity of feminist, critical race and queer theorists. Despite the fact that challenging authority was, until recently it seems, supposedly a left wing value. As long as it isn't the progressive establishment's authority, of course.

And while the challenge may in this case be stupid and juvenile, the authority itself also lacks democratic legitimacy and has zero transparency and accountability. And I find that a lot more worrying than the antics of some 4chan themed group trolling social media with plans for something so cringy and stupid as a straight pride parade.

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Keep it Regressive - Upping the Ante Post Inauguration

Sargon of Akkad hates having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

Jonathan Pie hates having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

Something tells me that Snopes.com isn't happy about having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

And I'm not happy about it either.  Not that it's "defending" Donald Trump per-se, It's about trying to keep political discourse open and reasonable.  Scrutiny and criticism of Trump will be more effective in the long run if it's not so marked by sensationalism and hysteria.  People are going to start rolling their eyes whenever the Huffington Post, CNN or any of them pound their "Trump is evil Hitler" drum, and the ironic result of that is that eventually Trump will gain greater leeway to act.  I suggest to the chattering classes that they go back and read that old Aesop story about the boy who cried wolf.    

As recently as a few months ago, I was rather proud of the fact that hysterical paranoia surrounding the sitting President was a right wing specialty.  Sure, "Bush derangement syndrome" did have its excesses, but nothing that could compare to Tea Party or Info Wars type nonsense asserting that Obama was a Muslim, a communist, a non-citizen or even the Antichrist.  And for those of us with a few more years under our belts, Bill Clinton was an evil commie coming to take everybody's gun's away.  

And it goes back much further than that.  Further than Reagan and the paranoid Moral Majority of the 1980s accusing my favorite heavy metal records and role playing games of the time of being Satanic.  Richard Hofstadter was writing about the Paranoid Style in American Politics as far back as 1964.   To say nothing of McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, the American Mercury Magazine (which returned in 2010, by the way, with the only thing missing being Pepe the Frog) - the craziness of which drove William F. Buckley to leave it and go start the National Review in the early 1950s.  It's even older than that.  The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the sundry anti-immigration leagues of the late 19th century and anti-Illuminati conspiracism going back further than that.

The progressives, with all of their flaws, are simply smarter than that.  Sure there had been dumb leftists too: the degeneration of the Communist Party USA into a mere mouthpiece for the Kremlin, the carrying around of pictures of Chairman Mao and fetishizing of 3rd world dictators among the New Left, Herbert Marcuse's doctrine of "repressive tolerance" and the related concept of "power plus prejudice" to emerge out of the radical serge of the late 60s, the personal becoming political among the anti-heterosex feminists of the 1970s and 80s, the emergence of political correctness in the 1990s, the apologetics for and palling up with regressive Islamism in the Bush years (and carrying on to the present day) and the emergence of the social justice warriors in the last decade or so.  All of it stupid and counterproductive.  But widespread mass hysteria and moral panic akin to the red scare or the Satanic panic was simply not within the purview of left wing politics. 

Oh no.  Not us.

Then 2017 happened.  

Antifa riots in DC following Trump's inauguration destroy, among other things, a limousine belonging to a Muslim immigrant, whose livelihood may be lost as a result.  231 people all told were arrested.  

And then, of course, there was UC Berkeley meltdown in response to Milo Yiannopoulos's speaking tour, causing an early estimate of $100,000 damage and sporadic reports of injuries.

Though the worst of what we've seen thusfar, these are not isolated incidents either. 

Suddenly, the special snowflakes on tumblr don't seem like such a big deal now, don't they?

I've had personal experience with these antifa characters.  I moderate several alt-left Facebook groups, and quite suddenly - almost as if on cue - they're spamming every leftist social media space with bland calling outs of "liberals" who refuse to endorse black block tactics, with some even going as far as to call liberals "fascist sympathizers."  I don't brook a whole lot of this - they get banned right quick if they descend to such foolishness as to believe that smashing store windows, lighting garbage cans on fire or pepper spraying unarmed civilian protesters is some kind of valiant resistance to fascism, on par with the British R.A.F in the summer of 1940 or the Red Army in Stalingrad circa December 1942.  Seizing the means of production, they are not.

Don't major in political science.  That would be my counsel to these antifa apologists.  If antifa and actual Nazis ever end up in a real clash, can I guess it will be over who hates "liberals" more?

Do I need to actually say why it is these black block tactics are stupid?  Do I have to explain why no platforming is stupid?  Do I have to explain why attacking peaceful civilians - not actual nazi skinhead gangs that are really causing trouble, like antifa was established to do, but nothing beyond normies wearing "Make America Great Again" caps - is stupid?  Do I have to explain why smashing store windows and burning your own campus and urban core to the ground is stupid?  Do I have to explain why behaving this way in front of the whole world due to the reach of social media is stupid?

Let the recent spike in Milo's international profile and book sales answer that question.  

There's now a petition circulating to have antifa declared a terrorist organization.  And I don't blame the circulators of this petition one bit.  

What's suspicious about this is that, like every other regressive left-wing fad, from privilege theory to "Islamophobia" to just about any manufactured social justice grievance you can think of - cultural appropriation, safe spaces, trigger warnings, men complimenting women as harassment, attacks on due process for men accused of sex crimes, on and on and on, its emergence seems strangely choreographed. 

Amidst all the hubub, I keep reading - mainly in right wing sources, about paid protesters and conspiracy theories surrounding the Clinton Foundation, George Soros and the like.  I used to just scoff at such tinfoil hat talk.  Now I'm not so sure.  Regressive left stupidity emerges in all kinds of places almost spontaneously, and spreads like wildfire before reasonable people have even begun to respond - by which time media coverage has long since moved on.  

The silver lining, if there is any, is that liberals are now getting bashed from the left for a change.  This might just be the wake up call they need.  But then again, the emergence of political correctness was supposed to be a wake up call.  The excesses of online social justice warriors was supposed to be a wake up call.  Trump's victory was supposed to be a wake up call.  As I've recently said elsewhere, the center left has been hitting snooze on the alarm for a very long time now.  

Instead, the regressive left just keeps doubling down on the regressive.  Which isn't what we need, because enough bad crap is going to come down the pike from the Trump administration and GOP dominance at both the congressional, state and soon enough the Supreme Court level that we need to be on our game. We're heading in exactly the opposite direction.  We're getting conspiracy theories from people who should know better, that these riots were provoked by Breitbart, Yiannopolous and the Trump administration to bring about increased federal control over higher education.  Because it's easier to blame a conspiracy than it is to admit your side screwed up and really has no good ideas.

Perhaps I should consider becoming a professional protester.  George Soros and the Clinton Foundation on the one side; Trump, Bannon, Yiannopoulos and Breitbart on the other can bid against each other for my loyalty.  Kind of like Clint Eastwood's nameless protagonist in those old spaghetti westerns, playing one side against the other, a guy could make a fistful of dollars doing that.

I have no love of censorship and certainly balk at the prospect of government control over curriculum in higher education, but look at what a disaster the colleges have become in the last quarter century.  The censorship going on inside the Ivory Tower is beyond ridiculous.  Something needs to be done.  It's been left to fester for far, far too long now.

More seriously, trying to talk to left leaning people about the idiocies present on their own end of the spectrum reminds one of the words of Charles McKay in his 1841 opus Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds.  It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Is it too much to ask my fellows on the left that we think and scrutinize a little more, and goose step along with the party line and follow baseless and stupid fads a little less?