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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Intersectionality is Itself a System of Power

Intersectionality is itself a system of power. It upholds the status quo and protects the powerful and privileged.

Recognizing this is the key difference between the alternative left and other current forms of political thought.

A fan of the Alternative Left Facebook page recently posed this question to me:

Have you considered that you might be postmodernist? The actual meaning of the term, not Peterson's ridiculous conflation and confusion of it. It seems as if a lot of your philosophy relies on the rejections of meta-narratives.

At a glance, this seems an absurd question. Isn't rejection of postmodernism integral to the alt-left? Doesn't all that deconstruction and bafflegab distract from the hard and real work of class struggle? Isn't a return to some semblance of economic realism, if not historical materialism, what we're all about at the end of the day?

Not so fast. While I don't think postmodernism is a tenable philosophy long term, it does make some good points. It's like nihilism and other forms of radical skepticism. They're nice places to visit, and doing so is a sign of intellectual growth, but you wouldn't want to live there.

My quarrel with postmodernism is how it tends to be cherry picked by the intersectional left, the feminist theorists in particular. They're quite good at using deconstruction to pick apart the texts of their opponents, and will exploit other postmodernist concepts such as "the death of the author" - the idea that textual interpretation by authorial intent is flawed - to license their tendency to simply read their own narrative into ideas that threaten them. They use such notions as science being a western, patriarchal "way of knowing" as a legitimizing excuse to handwave otherwise proven claims of some biological basis in gender differences, for example.

Deconstruction, cognitive framing and other advanced linguistic concepts are devastating ideological weapons against those who are not aware of them. Intersectional theorists get a unique education in these concepts in the academic institutions wherein their views dominate. Institutions that are not cheap to attend and require significant baseline intelligence to be successful in. They're therefore able to win debates against their less privileged opponents simply through framing and linguistic and cognitive gimmicks of this nature.

Ultimately, however, feminist theory's apparent embrace of postmodernism is self serving pretense. Notice how their own theories are presented as if they were eternal truths, universally binding on all people under all circumstances. Cultural relativism is fine when it's used to impose multiculturalism and diversity upon western cultural spaces, but has a funny way of disappearing when similar demands of tolerance are made of feminist theorists in turn. Fixed and objective meaning of text based on authorial intent is not authoritative, since the author no doubt lives in a network of socially constructed systems of which he is barely aware. But not so the feminist critic. Her views, and her views alone apparently, somehow transcend the context of the society that gave rise to them, and so are above questions of this nature and constitute an ultimate authority on par with divine revelation.  No one is faster to declare epistemic superiority for their own points of view - standpoint theories so called - than college feminists who've studied the poststructuralists closer than anyone. If feminist theory is not a metanarrative, you tell me what is.

Who deconstructs feminist theory, one must ask?

Yeah, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

Herein lies a very central tenet of alternative leftism: that the brands of postmodern critical theory so prevalent on college campuses and that are the underlying ideologies of the SJWs are actually conservative, not radical. They are in fact themselves systems of power, like the very notions of patriarchy and colonialism they so love to deconstruct.

This is quite naturally a counter intuitive concept when first exposed to it. Feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory and so on - Intersectionality serving as a kind of one ring to rule them all and thus a useful term for referring to them collectively -  is interpreted either as official party line and not to be questioned, in the case of the mainstream left. Or else condemned as "cultural Marxism" and taken at face value as advocacy for an artificial egalitarianism, in the case of the right.  Neoreaction comes quite strangely closest to the truth in its denouncing of progressive ideology as "the Cathedral" - a vast Matrix like social construct comparable to the Christian church in the middle ages - the state religion to which everyone must pay homage, hence the term.

The Cathedral: It doesn't challenge the aristocracy.
It is the aristocracy.

Neoreaction's flaw, however, lies in the irony of its denunciation of progressivism in those terms. Isn't a medieval form of social organization exactly what they want? The Church of the middle ages, far from being an institution for egalitarian social levelling, had a long history of supporting the aristocracy and running interference on behalf of the status quo, despite a good portion of what Christ actually taught, which may be where the confusion arises.

So it is with intersectionality. Despite its pretenses, and despite what were likely genuinely radical critiques at one time, current year intersectionality does not challenge privilege. It upholds privilege.

Do not misunderstand me, dear reader. I do not condone racism towards minorities, misogyny and homophobia. The left spearheaded the fight against those things for all the right reasons. And not merely because prejudice undermines working class solidarity, thought that is reason enough. To be left is to value equality, to some degree or another, and fair treatment regardless of what one is by accident of birth. Intersectionality itself was intended to be a manner of looking at how various different forms of oppression reinforce one another. This is not in itself a bad idea.

The problem is that intersectionality has evolved into something does not actually promote real social justice. Its lack of tolerance for dissent made it vulnerable to abuse on part of the unscrupulous, who were thereby attracted to intersectional feminist spaces. They've co-opted social justice movements, and used them as tools to oppress people. It's like Marxist Leninism 2.0 - a popular movement is appropriated and exploited by an elite vanguard professing to represent the interests of marginalized people, and using that to consolidate their own power. Cultural rather than political power this time, but the underlying mechanisms are quite a bit alike.

It's also quite different from Marxism in one key aspect, and this is often overlooked by those on the right who equate intersectional ideas with Marxian leftism: intersectionality's lack of emphasis on political economy. It is not merely that they simply don't care about or are ignorant of the internal workings of the international economy or the political machines of the G7 nations. Intersectionalists are rewarded by capital for framing privilege in terms of racial and sexual identity rather than in terms of wealth and political power. These rewards include expansion in academia, access to agenda setting mass media and favorable policy service. Ideological systems that truly threaten the status quo do not enjoy universally favorable media bias, moderator bias on major corporate social media platforms and an exalted status in academic institutions.

The state religion does not advocate for the truly marginalized within the polity.

It's important that you divest yourself of the notion that intersectionalists truly represent the underclasses, including most women and people of color. They occupy a very different world than that of working single mothers or unemployed minority youths in the ghetto, or on their way to prison. They occasionally will use real oppressions suffered by women and minorities while making the case for an increase in their own influence, but that is the only reason for which they ever seem to do so. If one takes their standpoint theories at all seriously, the plush halls of the academy and major media outlets are not the places we should be seeing credible voices of the oppressed and marginalized. Those voices are kept quite intentionally silent, because their demands will be for redressment of their economic hardships and lack of political representation.

Women who are turned off of men and family as a result of feminism, and men who are turned off of religion, community and nationalism as a result of anti western critical theory find themselves completely atomized and without an identity. This is central to the alt-right's critique of modern liberalism and the abolition of borders.

But the real question is: who is the real beneficiary of all this? The far right will tell you that this is "cultural Marxism" and is necessary in order to groom the populace for the embrace of socialism.

That's not what happened. If you do not believe that, observe how neoliberalism increased apace just as this so called cultural Marxism did. The emergence of political correctness coincided with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. If the idea was for feminism and multiculturalism to precede socialism, they could not have failed more miserably.

Atomized individuals turn to careerism and consumerism to fill the void, and they're more easily replaced when cheaper cogs for the machine are found. So they're more obedient and easily used in the workforce and more responsive to consumer trends. When other vectors of identity are removed, do the brands we work for and consume become the way we identify ourselves? This seems to me to be the triumph of capitalism, and quite in line with the manner in which Marx believed capitalism would progress, abolishing relations based on kinship and reducing all human interaction to commodity exchange, rather than the triumph of Marxism itself that it's so often described as by reactionaries.

Hard Fact: Social liberalism is the handmaiden of capital, not of revolution. And so capital became socially liberal when national economies became fully saturated and capital had to go global in order to keep up its expansion. The alt-right is hated in the capitalist press because capital must always seek new markets, and it was therefore in capital's interest to globalize and promote diversity.

Observe one of the methods whereby Intersectionality preserves its hegemony: by seeking to get people who disagree with them fired from their jobs. Often with no recourse or due process whatsoever. In what world does leveraging the power of capital over labor so flagrantly and directly constitute anything that could be at all called left wing? This is what was done to socialists and trade unionists back in the bad old days of blacklisting. This isn't to say that removal of an offensive or hateful person from a workplace isn't sometimes appropriate or necessary, but to use the threat of employment loss as a means of enforcing ideological conformity more broadly is something the left should not be supporting. We can question the rationality of workers supporting conservatism all we want. It won't seem quite so irrational now that this ugly tactic has been normalized.

Another hard fact: Intersectionality relies on the absolute power that capital has over labor and consumers in order to successfully impose its will on the population, as it's doing in geek culture, for instance. The capacity for populations to resist cultural and moral relativism imposed from above would be greatly increased if cultural and economic as well as political institutions were democratized and under some or another kind of social ownership.

Intersectionalists are a safe and nerfed form of "leftism." One that attacks white male "neckbeards" and "dudebros" in places like 4chan while leaving the State Department, the military industrial complex and Wall Street lobbyists unscrutinized. Activists and even radicals who truly want to challenge the status quo find their anger and vigor channeled into safe outlets that do not truly threaten the powers that be. Offensive statements by white male celebrities are made front page news by an intersectionalist movement that's presented in the headlines as being radical and subversive - the resistance, so called. Offensives launched by the US military on the other side of the world in defense of petrodollar interests are kept more safely out of the public eye.

Intersectionality is a tool used by an educated elite to police the culture of the underclass, and to undermine the solidarity of that underclass by dividing it along racial and gender lines. We've seen this done time and again now: with Occupy Wall Street, with Bernie Sander's campaign for the White House, now with the Democratic Socialists of America. Most leftist spaces on social media are completely overrun by intersectional dominance, even ones that profess to be Marxist or anarchist.

Intersectional activists have a curious way of coming to dominate leftist spaces, and maintain their power through dividing the left against itself and redirecting popular anger towards other segments of the left. Sometimes the target is white male leftists - brocialists, so called. Sometimes it's white feminism, or TERFs or straight feminism. Sometimes straight black males are called the white people of black people. Sometimes cisgender gay males are driven out of LGBT spaces. Some or another activist has run afoul of the intersectionalist overlords and is publicly shamed, like in a Maoist struggle session or the young kids being banished from polygamous fundamentalist communities for the most trivial reasons.

But the real reasons aren't so trivial: to maintain the power of the leadership over the flock. Ceaseless purity spiraling destroys the cohesiveness of the left. J. Edgar Hoover and his COINTELPRO could not have done a better job if they tried. Perhaps the FBI still is, and that's what all this really is.

Like a puritanical religion, intersectionality promotes a guilt based morality that ceaselessly berates its followers for their ideological and lifestyle shortcomings. Theories of inherited privilege based on what people are by accident of birth become a moral burden comparable to original sin. People with a lot of internalized guilt do not take action to challenge their leaders. They punch down, not up. Nearly any action a person may commit or even a thought they might think can be construed as oppressive in some way or anther. That combined with intersectionality's taboo on questioning claims of oppression made by its activist leadership - who are above any kind of ethical or moral standards due to their supposed "marginalization" - results in a near cult like atmosphere in intersectional spaces. Not surprisingly, most people want nothing to do with this and thus nothing to do with the left overall. Who does that benefit, in the long run?

As mentioned previously, considerable education is needed to really understand their theories, and the intersectionalists themselves conveniently have a near hegemony within the academy itself. Hence, the relative absence of working class people in these self styled radical movements. Which in turn makes the whole of the left easy for the right to denounce as "limousine liberals", "champagne socialists" or the like. No more effective means of turning the working class off of the political left could be contrived. This makes McCarthyism look clumsy and amateurish. People who are rightly put off by intersectionality then defect quite willingly to conservatism as a protest against it. One almost wonders if this wasn't the intent all along.

The problem is not with education itself, which is perfectly fine and good. But rather with the co-optation of education to serve elite interests. Something that the left was much more willing and able to call out prior to the capture of the humanities and social sciences by intersectionalists.

The ideology of intersectionality itself is constructed to be a closed system of thought, wherein disagreement with it is likened to actual oppressive behavior against a marginalized person. Allegations of racism or sexism - made with the backing of powerful media outlets - against lone individuals without recourse and no due process are effective and currently socially legitimate ways of marginalizing people. It's a good way of removing someone who's bringing up facts and ideas that the truly powerful don't want publicly legitimized.

Far from emboldening the resistance, intersectionality keeps protest culture in line and ensures its continuity as a controlled opposition. One that allows the powers that be to claim that they allow and legitimize dissent - so long as it doesn't really threaten them. One oligarch or another might get thrown under the bus due to his alleged racism or sexism here and there. The oligarchy itself is thus made safer, for it submits itself to the appearance that it really is held to scrutiny and made accountable for its abuses. Surely the absurdity of a racist or sexist comment ruining a CEO while his abuse of his workers, defrauding of his shareholders and pollution of the environment as a matter of course going completely unnoticed highlights the absurd nature of intersectionality as a form of radicalism.

With leftism like intersectionality, who needs conservatism? It's the ultimate metanarrative, and if the postmodernist techniques of deconstruction can be turned against it, that can only be a good thing. An essential thing, as a matter of fact.

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