The Rise of Right Wing SJWs

"I'm not Leaving Until I've Castrated Every Last One
of You White Male Shitlords!"

The women-only screenings of the recent Wonder Woman film have prompted both praise and criticism on social media.  In other news, water is wet.  Much of the praise has been about its feminist and girl power themes, with little mention of the directing, acting, writing and production - which I've been told were all quite good. But there's been criticism too.  Most of that being of the fact that the feminism of Wonder Woman was not sufficiently queer or intersectional.  In other news, the sun is hot.

When it comes to issues of representation in media and the whole dynamic of identity politics (bleh!) behind it, It's the obstinacy in both camps, and the anxieties underlying said obstinacy that I find notable.  If a film comes out that is entirely directed and produced by women, that features exclusively female leads, if not an exclusively female cast, and is intended to be enjoyed exclusively by women, I could honestly care less.  Am I going to go see the recent Wonder Woman movie?  No.  But I didn't go and see Super Man either.  No interest.  So there's no need to involve my country's Orwellian human rights boards in my movie going tastes, because at least I'm consistent.  

But I am suspicious of the "Geek Feminists" of this world who strike me as being excessively preoccupied with identity to the point of obsession, and would need a constant deluge of such films to quench their need for constant acknowledgement of the greatness of their gender.  It seems oddly reminiscent of pre WW2 Germanic Volkisch.  Very similar dynamic.  The ongoing implication that "girl power" and women's equality in general somehow necessarily implies a rejection of men or the creation of women-only spaces should be disquieting for people with a genuine interest in gender equality.  Women and men do need to be equal, but they also need to coexist, get along together and generally accept one another.  To a fair extent, I do think some criticism of the girl-power obsession in our culture is warranted, and it will be a while yet before mainstream media steps up to the plate to deliver.

But just as ridiculous do I find the anxieties displayed by certain kinds of men towards releases like Wonder Woman, or to Rey's character in the new Star Wars films, or their outrage on social media over an all female Ghostbusters reboot that amounted to little more than gendered accusations of cultural appropriation.  A lot of this just reeks of castration anxiety to me.  A mirror image of the kind of fears of male virility that underlie a lot of pop cultural feminism.  And we're seeing a very toxic interplay between these two camps repeat itself over and over and over again on social media.  Donglegate, Elevatorgate, Shirtstorm, Gamergate.  On and on and on.   

One of the main reasons I've abandoned the mainstream political spectrum is that neither side is really exemplary when it comes to stuff like this.  It became fashionable on social media from about 2014 onwards to rail against "SJWs" and their endless Orwellian crusades against free speech, especially on college campuses.  Their obsessions with safe spaces, trigger warnings, hate speech, harassment and so on.  It should be apparent by now that I'm no fan of any of that.

But let's take a bit of a step back here.  I find it astounding just how prevalent the view is that censorship, moral panic, the propensity to read absurd agendas into otherwise innocuous pop-culture products and other forms of projecting personal anxieties onto the broader society is something exclusive to the left.

Anyone remember the Moral Majority?  The PMRC?  The Satanic panic of the 1980s?  I sure do.  Conservatives like Jack Thompson were going after video games for their violent content well before Anita Sarkeesian did.  What of the Comic Codes of the 1950s?  What of McCarthyism and Hollywood blacklisting?  A big, BIG part of the reason why people like me who had concerns with political correctness and speech codes were brushed off for as long as we were is because the center left in much of the western world was so accustomed to censorious moral panics coming from the right that they couldn't believe or accept that it could possibly come from the left (despite the obvious examples behind the Iron Curtain), even as their embrace of hate speech laws, date rape kangaroo courts on college campuses and so on laid the foundations for their own kinds of McCarthyism. 

Plus, I don't think we can say that censoriousness and prudishness on the right have been confined to the ash heap of history, and it is now a libertarian right defending free speech against a regressive left hell bent on creating the world of 1984, as the dominant culture wars.  What I would call a right wing kind of SJW - apparently called culture warriors, is definitely becoming a thing now.

For instance: the aforementioned outrage over women-only screenings of the new Wonder Woman film causing massive backlashes on social media and even lawsuits.  Howls for Kathy Griffin to be fired from CNN (despite not technically being an employee there) or even prosecuted after her admittedly tasteless image of herself holding up Donald Trump's severed head went viral on Twitter.  Conservative pundit Tomi Lahren being sacked from the Blaze for being pro-choice.  Milo Yiannopoulos being dropped from Breitbart and losing a book deal with Simon and Schuster over controversial comments regarding sex with minors.  

Donald Trump himself has indicated that he would like to tighten defamation laws.  In the UK, Conservative leader Theresa May made cracking down on unbridled expression on the internet in the wake of recent terrorist attacks there part of her campaign, and this may well have contributed to her disappointing performance in the election.  Those brave defenders of free speech: the religious right are up in arms over video game Far Cry 5, which apparently features a Christian Cult as antagonists.  I could go on.  Breitbart keeps 'em coming just as fast and just as stupid as Buzzfeed does.

I tried warning regressive leftists over the last several years.  They were fooling themselves if they thought they were going to be able to keep the tactics of the angry twitter mob to themselves forever.  If they could get a CEO fired for having once opposed gay marriage, how long would it take before Christian conservatives - who are still numerous and powerful in some places - would be able to get a CEO fired for transgressing some boundary and, more importantly, having a political affiliation they didn't like?  As if there was no historical precedent for it, or anything.  And once that did happen, the social justice mob would have zero credible ground from which to cry foul, since they had so recently used all the same tactics themselves.  

You can guess their responses:

• You're a racist.
• The progressives were never, ever going to lose power because the growing hispanic vote.
• You're xenophobic.
• Stop sympathizing with young Earth creationists.

Yada yada yada.

Truth is, though, I don't think it's the case that one side is valiantly libertarian while the other advocates for the world of 1984.  It's more the case that one side advocates for the world of 1984 while the other advocates for the world of The Handmaid's Tale.  And the other is just as predictable in their dismissals of valid objections and warnings about their own pet causes:

• Communism doesn't work so STFU.
• <Post a Moon Man or Pepe the Frog meme>
• Degenerate!
• Cuck!

Again, yada yada yada.

Can't say I'm enthusiastic about either one.

If you ask me, it would be kind of nice if the redpills and manosphere types, and the 3rd wave feminists, could take their sexual hangups and their parental issues to the psychologist's office, where they belong.  If nothing else, our geek culture would be far better for it.

Class vs Race Privilege

A question was recently put: Class privilege is real, white privilege isn't. Agree or disagree?

I think there's something to the idea of white privilege. But it's become this sweeping and reductionist idea that's been used to license shitty behavior.  Hate the white working class all you want, they have all the power because they’re white.  That makes it okay.  Upper middle class academic progressives can thereby scapegoat those stupid, unwashed rednecks for the collective historical sins of the white race. Beneath the very thin progressive veneer of this sentiment is downward punching snobbish regressivism at its ugliest.

Not that this makes racism among the white underclass okay.  It certainly doesn’t, for it erodes their capacity for solidarity with the black underclass that is so needed for both to get a better deal in the long run.  It also lends the legitimacy of “popular support” to regressive policy enacted against the black underclass by the elite.  So called "brocialists" should keep in mind that the black underclass does not have it easy, and that affirmative action and knapsacks of privilege have a funny and ironic way of being colorblind where the lower classes are concerned.  The black underclass has it worse, if anything.  So the white working class should take nothing that I say as a license to be racist towards blacks, so don’t be.  The white working class has a long history of class blindness, motivated in part by racial prejudice and in part by a US left that long ago traded in class for racial concerns and embraced neo-liberalism. This has repeatedly driven the white working class to support regressive right wing politics, as has been recently demonstrated in the US 2016 elections, and they've always ended up suffering for it. 

But for the varied segments of the underclasses to fight among each other over who has it worse is quite stupid, for reasons that should be obvious by now.  It is likewise misguided for the black underclass to despise whitey. This has been good for the black upper middle class that has arisen in the wake of the civil rights movement and the rise of neo-liberalism - the twin engines of the Democratic Party.  Better for them that the black underclass blame white rather than class privilege for their woes.  But this just puts them in a position oddly comparable to that of the Republican supporting white working class.  The real color of privilege is green, and this can only be challenged by white and black together.

Between class on the one hand and identity - race and gender - on the other, I do think class is the more fundamental of the two, though I don't think identity is completely irrelevant.  This is because it has been made relevant by an elite that has used race and identity as a means of dividing the underclass.  So the reality is that identity and class cannot be so easily extricated from one another.  The postmodern left likes to claim that racism/sexism is "prejudice plus power" and that powerless identities cannot oppress. But where does the power - that makes the prejudice of some groups more pernicious than others - come from?

Ownership of capital and the access to political power this inevitably entails. In short, class.

The problem with the postmodern academic left is not identity politics per-se, but how those politics have been co-opted and made to serve powerful interests. The academic postmodernist "left" refuses to see class for one simple reason: they're much higher up on the class totem pole than they'd like to admit. They're not Fortune 500 or Military Industrial Complex by any stretch of the imagination, but they do possess significant advantages over the working and middle classes. Namely that of supremely privileged access to media.

Their position can be compared to that of the clergy in a more religious era, such as that wherein Marx declared religion the opiate of the masses. They use institutions empowered by capital and backed by the state to spin the dominant cultural and social narratives. As we know from the theorists of the early Frankfurt school, Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony and even from Marx himself, the ruling narrative of any era is the narrative of its ruling class. Or in this case, how its ruling class was NOT responsible for the historical atrocities brought to light by earlier generations of radicals.

Plus, you'll notice that the solutions to racial and gender inequality favored by these "leftists" always either empower capital - "fire him from his job!" - or the state - "sue for hate speech!"

As such, the SJWs - the new clergy of our secular era - are not radicals, but rather ego driven enforcers of a decidedly statist and capitalist status quo.

Leftists! Leftists everywhere!

These are bad days for the Rush Limbaughs of the world.  The internet is awash in left wingers!  Lucky for Rush and his kind, there are many kinds of left-wing people and they tend not to like one another.  Though this is increasingly true on the right as well.  But that's another story.  One way of categorizing the leftists is as follows:

Regressive New Left:  The kind of regressives we all know and don't like. "SJWs" and Islamic apologists.  Cultural authoritarianism based on feminist and critical race theory.  Tend towards anti-capitalism, but lack economic theory and are generally not concerned with economic issues.  While Hillary Clinton is probably not one of these, many of her followers are.

New Left: It's not really that new now.  The 1960s were a long time ago now.  Their main concerns were cultural and social, with environmentalism, anti-war, civil liberties and equality for women and minorities being the main issues.  Anti capitalist, but less concerned with economic issues overall.

Regressive Old Left: All things old are new again, and these guys are called "Tankies" now, I understand. Political authoritarianism based on Leninist or Maoist theory. Economically far left to a fault.  Culture is not a central concern, but they are repressive towards cultures that are seen as "reactionary" or inhibiting "class consciousness." Which can be just about any kind of culture they can get their hands on.

Old Left: Concerns around organized labor and Marxist, Keynesian or some other kind of center to left wing economic theory.  To the extent that they care about social and cultural issues at all, these guys are generally opposed to racial and gender equality, but reject identity politics and tend to see inequality mostly, if not entirely in economic terms.  

Regressive Alt-Left: These folks have only just begun to rear their ugly heads.  Cultural authoritarianism based on nationalism, racism or anti-feminism.  Their anti-feminism and/or anti-Islamism is less motivated by liberal concerns than they'd have you believe, and descend - not always consciously - into the fever swamps of extreme nationalism, racism and sexism.  Their economics are autarkic, nationalist and statist.  While Donald Trump is probably not one of these, many of his followers are.

Alt-Left: Oppose the influence of white male guilt in postmodern leftism, and are thus not opposed to advocacy on behalf of European culture, people of European descent and/or men's rights. They're weary of political correctness due to concerns surrounding civil liberties, freedom of speech and anti-white/male bias.  They worry about mass immigration and the Islamization of European and English speaking countries on liberal grounds: Islam being repressive towards gay and women's rights, mass immigration driving wages down, and so on.  Where feminism is criticized, it is for being censorious and misandrist.  Most alt-leftists advocate some kind of center left economics, a minority are farther left and more thoroughly socialist.

Notes

Regressive vs. Non Regressive: Regressive belief systems tend to be closed, tribalistic and irrational.  Non regressive belief systems tend to be open, universalist and rational.  Keep in mind that this is a continuum, not a strict either/or thing.

Overlap: Not uncommon, but one almost always dominates, and one of the two overlapping systems is almost always old left, regressive or not.  The trajectory of the post WWII world has been from old to new, and in the future, possibly to alt.