Feminism: the New Religion?

As International Women's Day rolls around again, I wonder if feminism has become the new religion of the western world? At first glance, the answer would be no. Even up here in Trudeau's Canada. The relationship between feminism and religion has been complicated at times, but usually icy and ambivalent at best.

Feminists have criticized, generally accurately, the propensity for religions to relegate women to 2nd class roles. Male dominance in religion is claimed to be either implied or directly mandated by the following:

• God reveals himself as masculine, not feminine. Ditto for the angels, for most the history of their representation leastwise.
• God mandates strict gender roles as part of the divine order. 
• The husband/father as head and absolute ruler of the household.
• This patriarchal rule carrying over into the church: positions of authority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy (and it is, of course, a hierarchy) being occupied exclusively by men. 
• The woman Eve being the first sinner in the Garden of Eden, and subsequently tempting Adam, the first man, to sin.
• Women being expected to adhere to strict rules of chastity and modesty, lest they "tempt" men into sexual sin. 
• Sexual strictness, going as far as to claim that a man who looks at women with "lust in his heart" is already guilty of adultery. Women's vulnerability to the same sin is never mentioned.

This list is not exhaustive, and the list of sexist practices in the church throughout its history is long. 

To be fair, there is an opposed point of view. This view claims that Jesus was as free and open (and quite naturally sinless) in his relationships with women as with men, that he frowned upon any sort of dominance of one gender over the other and his stance of relative leniency towards a woman accused of adultery (let he who is without sin cast the first stone), among other things. And St. Paul carries on this tradition, claiming that, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ".[Galatians 3:28] As such, some denominations have liberalized, allowing for the ordination of women and so on. 

Moreover, even those who adopt a religiously patriarchal stance maintain that it's not about men lording power over women, but of having responsibility for both the physical and spiritual well being of his family.

I have here confined my analysis to Christianity. Is the plight of women better in other faiths? Based on what we've seen in Iran since 1979, what we're seeing in Saudi Arabia and what we saw in Afghanistan under the Taliban, I'd say that Islam would be an "out of the frying pan and into the fire" kind of deal for women. The occasional Linda Sarsour claiming otherwise notwithstanding. I can't speak for Hinduism, Buddhism and others.

On the surface, the rationale for this is quite simple: most religions mandate a subordinate place for women vis-a-vis men, and feminism is quite naturally and rationally opposed to this. Fine so far. But is there a deeper reason? Could it also be that claims to absolute truth are naturally mutually exclusive? Strict ideological systems tend to view other belief systems as competitors. They may ally with one another out of convenience or against a common foe, but never as a matter of principle. 

Why do I suggest this? Because it seems to me as though feminism has grown to be quite alike a religion in more recent times. At least in some regards. Feminism makes no claims about the supernatural or truly transcendent, except occasionally suggesting that God be a woman, or something such. Funny that the devil is never likewise possibly a woman. In any event, religion isn't just about supernatural entities. It's also about philosophical concepts that are bigger than the lives of individual people. Gods obviously fit the bill. So too can philosophies or social systems.

Despite very obvious doctrinal differences, these kinds of belief systems inevitably end up sharing a lot of meta-political characteristics. Let's look then at the similarities between current year intersectional feminism and historical Christianity in the west:

Man exists in a fallen state: Original sin in Christianity vs white male privilege and complicity in historical atrocities such as colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade for feminists.

Manichean World View: This means that history is seen in terms of a sweeping and epic conflict of good against evil. In Christianity, it is the Church's ongoing struggle against Satanic infiltration and rule over worldly affairs. In feminism, it is the movement's ongoing struggle against patriarchy, racism and other forms of oppression. 

Claims of Ideational Exceptionalism: This means that each either implies or states directly that its own world view is the one and only truth, and must be accepted on faith. Claims of papal infallibility, scriptural inerrancy and church magisterium in Christianity vs feminist standpoint theory: the belief in the philosophical superiority of the world views of marginalized people, or their self appointed representatives.

Belief in pervasive evil outside the faith: There is no salvation outside the church, and some variations of Christianity take this to the extent of total depravity, meaning that man cannot consciously choose good and therefore requires divine grace for salvation. Feminists tend to view everything outside feminist theory as being creations of a patriarchal society, and therefore rooted to some extent or another in the oppression of marginalized peoples, if only subconsciously.

On the plus side, both have a tendency to champion the oppressed, the poor and the marginalized. At least in theory. The last shall be first in both feminism and Christianity. This can be a two edged sword, though. Both can also define who is and isn't poor and oppressed in self serving ways, placing themselves squarely in the oppressed camp even when that's clearly not the case. When victimhood becomes a virtue and a badge of entitlement, it also becomes a sought after commodity.

A darker side to the above is a proneness to antinomianism. This means that the elect are not bound by moral law. The elect are saved by grace no matter what sinful or evil acts they do. Likewise, the oppressed and marginalized are incapable of being racist, sexist, oppressive, etc.

Both have an antagonistic relationship with science and the enlightenment. At least on occasion. The Christian church's standoff with the theory of evolution is well known and perhaps the best example. Less well known is feminist academia's contention with biological sex differences, sometimes going as far to claim that science and reason are "masculine" and therefore oppressive ways of knowing. Some on both sides have bemoaned the enlightenment, worrying that loss of religion will lead to widespread social chaos, devaluation of human life and the loss of European indigenous culture (in Christianity) vs propensity to oppress and impose white western values and cultural norms on non-European indigenous cultures (in feminism).

What initially tipped me off to feminism and Christianity's common philosophical roots is a mutual tendency to sexual puritanism. The alliances formed between the religious right and feminists to combat pornography are the most obvious examples. One can't help but see the influence of Christ's claim, "But I tell you anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28) in current feminist obsessions with sexualization and objectification.

In more extreme cases, a tendency to live in community and shun outsiders. This can be physical, in the case of Christian cults or the feminist Womyn's lands. Both seemed to have strong counter-cultural movements emerging from the socially turbulent times of the 1960s and 70s. Both can be very stifling environments for free thinkers. Questioning the leadership and straying from strict codes of personal conduct can result in shunning and excommunication from the stricter and more doctrinaire groups of feminists and Christians alike.

Widespread institutional study and a large body of apocryphal work: Feminism and Christianity alike present themselves as complex doctrines and both have produced large volumes of self-referencing devotional literature. Christianity has its numerous seminary schools and monasteries, feminism has institutionalized itself in the women's studies departments of colleges the world over.

Ritual observances: One thing that atheist critiques of religion do not often account for is the need for ritual and mythology in the lives of many people. Christianity has its liturgical calendar, feasts in honor of the Saints, lent and advent. Feminists celebrate international women's day, black history month and gay pride week, among others. Likewise common to both is a faith based vocabulary - words commonly used by the faithful to signal belief. To outsiders, this means a lot of buzzwords, slogans and jargon. Both feminists and Christians understand, at least subconsciously, that belief is very much a social thing and reinforced through regular communion with other believers.

Emphasis on victimhood and oppression: Christ tells his followers that they will be hated for his namesake (Matthew 10:22) and the bible is replete with warnings that Christians will face persecution, especially in the end times. This carries over into the present day, when conservative Christians claim that they are being persecuted by a liberal political and cultural establishment.  Likewise, feminists have become notorious for their claims of widespread rape, violence against women, objectification in the media, opposition from right wing political and media figures, among other things. In some cases, activists on both sides conduct themselves in so obnoxious a way that you can't help but wonder if they're not intentionally visiting criticism on themselves, to legitimize claims of oppression.

Propensity to censorship and drives to control media content: Both have activists concerned with media content. Concerns that video games drive youth to violent tendencies appear on both sides, notably Jack Thompson (conservative Christian) and Anita Sarkeesian (feminist). Both have criticized heavy rock music, rap music and have sought, with varying degrees of success, to influence film, television and comic book content. Both have an antagonistic relationship with "geek culture." Both Christians and feminists are adept at organizing to achieve these goals, but they occasionally backfire and galvanize backlashes against them - think GamerGate or punk, metal and rap musicians pushing back against the Parent's Music Resource Center. 

Whence come these similarities between belief systems otherwise so different in their emphasis and goals? Some possibilities:

• Feminism and social justice's roots in Christianity. This seems strange at first, given Christianity's above listed patriarchal characteristics. But issues of concern among early feminists tended to involve reining in immoral and unchristian conduct among their men: curbing alcohol use, gambling and so on, as well as the aforementioned sexual purity issues. The social purity movement exemplifies this. Social justice was originally a Christian concept. 
• Feminism stepping in to fill the void left by declining religion. Kind of like how communism and fascism played a similar role in the early 20th centuries, replacing a declining Church. This seems plausible. Some people, at least, seem to need what religion provides, and if religion has been discredited, a surrogate ideology can fill the same role.
• A certain type of person, be it the authoritarian personality or the true believer, craves systems of thought that profess absolute truth, and gravitate towards such systems.
• People naturally gravitate towards that which is successful and capable. Organized belief systems give otherwise disparate people a common identity and a common purpose. This in turn leads to group cohesion and a propensity to organize and strategize to achieve specific goals. Even neutral bystanders conclude that they're doing something right, and decide to be a part of it.
• Both profess to champion the marginalized and downtrodden. How effectively or sincerely is another matter.
• There are only so many tools at the disposal of individuals or movements seeking to create a morally homogeneous society, thus explaining why ideologically divergent religious and political movements end up creating doctrines and societies with similar characteristics. 
• Success copies success. If the Moral Majority can achieve political success by adopting certain methods, why can't the Feminist Majority?

Of course, they are frequently enemies in the political and cultural sphere. Religion, when it becomes political in the western world today is usually conservative and allied with the Republican party. Likewise feminism skews liberal and towards the Democrats. There have been exceptions, of course. The issue of abortion will forever bitterly divide the two.

But this division reminds me of the division between fascism and Bolshevism in early 20th century Europe. So different in some ways, so similar in others.

For more relevant content, view The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, on Samizdat Broadcasts!
Read Intersectionality is Itself a System of Power at the Alternative Left.
Read The False Promise of a Return to Religion and Tradition at the Alternative Left.

Follow Ernest Everhard on these formats:

Ernest Everhard on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Twitter.

Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube.
Ernest Everhard on Minds

Toxic Masculinity

Toxic masculinity is a controversial idea, and it's all over the media these days. It's a common catch phrase in feminist parlance, and thus the mere appearance of the term tends to provoke defensive responses in the more reactionary parts of the internet. The American Psychological Association has even gotten in on the act, addressing the concept in its recently released Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.

The document defines "masculinity ideology" as the following:

... is a set of descriptive, prescriptive, and proscriptive of cognitions about boys and men (Levant & Richmond, 2007; Pleck, Sonenstein, & Ku, 1994). Although there are differences in masculinity ideologies, there is a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence. These have been collectively referred to as traditional masculinity ideology (Levant & Richmond, 2007). Additionally, acknowledging the plurality of and social constructionist perspective of masculinity, the term masculinities is being used with increasing frequency (Wong & Wester, 2016).

Such language does, not surprisingly, trigger defensiveness among nonfeminist readers. And if they liked that, they'll love this:

GUIDELINE 3
Psychologists understand the impact of power, privilege, and sexism on the development of boys and men and on their relationships with others.
Rationale:
Although privilege has not applied to all boys and men in equal measure, in the aggregate, males experience a greater degree of social and economic power than girls and women in a patriarchal society (Flood & Pease, 2005). However, men who benefit from their social power are also confined by system-level policies and practices as well as individual-level psychological resources necessary to maintain male privilege (Mankowski & Maton, 2010). Thus, male privilege often comes with a cost in the form of adherence to sexist ideologies designed to maintain male power that also restrict men’s ability to function adaptively (Liu, 2005).

The response to this from reactionaries, including many on the alt-left, is to see it as part of the ongoing attack on men and masculinity coming from a staunchly ideological academy. And this is not entirely inaccurate. But perhaps the idea does merit at least some consideration. Men's rights godfather Warren Farrell regarded many characteristics of traditional masculinity as the conditioning of men and boys for disposability. This observation largely underwrote his great deconstruction of patriarchy theory in his 1993 opus, The Myth of Male Power. Anti-feminists should stop and think here.

On the one hand, anti feminists like to defend men and masculinity against feminist criticism, making claims that echo those of Farrell: men are overwhelmingly the cannon fodder in every major war ever waged, they die in the most industrial accidents, they commit suicide far and away more often than women, and so on. On the other hand, though, anti-feminists also tend towards an economic and social conservatism that contributes to the evils highlighted in precisely those same claims - neoconservative warmongering contributing to male disposability in battle, neoliberal industrial policies such as deregulation and deunionization contributing to male disposability in the workplace, and so on.

He got away with being a macho man.
The rest of us might want to reconsider.

What's crucial to understand is that while the case could be made that there is such a thing as toxic masculinity, consisting of characteristics that have been historically defined as machismo, pointing this out and deconstructing it is not the same as claiming that masculinity or being male is itself intrinsically toxic. If we are to take men's psychological health and well being seriously, perhaps some kind of happy medium is the best thing to strive for here.

While machismo does underlie a lot of antisocial behaviors, there's something to be said for so called traditionally masculine virtues. Think resilience, stoicism (to a point), and qualities such as competitiveness and drive to succeed provided they do not get too extreme. We owe much that we have in our world to men who had these qualities. Additionally, we have good reason to fear the consequences of overprotecting and coddling men and women alike. The measures that tend to be advocated by feminists and progressives to curb excessive masculinity: speech codes, trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias response teams, political correctness, sensitivity and anti-bias training and so on are resulting in people being less rather than more tolerant, not to mention lacking in resiliency.

While the feminists are not wrong to attack macho masculinity, we'd do well to ask what they'd replace it with? The answer would appear to be no small amount of unearned guilt. White male privilege becomes the new original sin for those saddled with it. It becomes acceptable, if only tacitly, at least in activist circles, to ridicule if not outrightly abuse those with more privileged identities. Power plus privilege, punching up and all of that. And don't even get started on the sexual shaming, the constant equivocation between attraction and objectification, flirting and harassment, so long as it's a man or non-feminist woman that's doing it. If you liked religion's ceaseless diet of guilt based puritanical morality, just you wait until you see what woke social activists have in store. I can't see how life in any kind of association with avid feminists, at least as feminist ideology is currently structured and practiced, would be good for a male's mental health.

Plus I think we have grounds to be skeptical how sincere feminists really are in their anti machismo. Try actually arguing with one and you'll fast see what I mean. Their go-to responses sound more like school yard taunts than cohesive defenses of a world view that has whole academic departments devoted to its study and propagation. It's almost a law of the internet that pro vs anti feminist arguments will eventually default to accusations of not being able to get laid. One wonders if this is a sound rhetorical strategy for a movement claiming to be so concerned about the sexual objectification of women?

As a bit of an aside, hasn't current year feminism also enabled the rise of a kind of female equivalent to machismo? Scratch the woke, social justice veneer and how much of what so often passes for "independence" and "liberation" these days really just boils down to an oversized pickup truck with a "Silly boys, pickup trucks are for girls" bumper sticker in place of a set of brass balls hanging from the trailer hitch. While expressed somewhat differently: female sexual power is expressed by rejecting men whereas male sexual power is expressed by conquering women, do both feminism and machismo not thrive via the cultivation of a dismissive attitude towards love, honor and respect for the opposite sex? Do both not foster hyper competitiveness, a he or she who dies with the most toys wins kind of mindset and perhaps above all, very large and very fragile egos? Looks that way to me.

Then again, maybe feminists have since figured out that men being awash in machismo might be a good thing for them. Irony of ironies, yes, but it does stand to reason. What they like to call toxic masculinity prevents many men from admitting when women have pulled one over on them. I can't count the number of times I've seen women appeal to macho masculinity to shut down even sound intellectual critiques of feminist theory, "you just can't get laid" being the stereotypical example. Machismo's go-it-alone individualism mitigates against men organizing for their mutual protection and benefit in the face of an increasingly feminized legal and education system. If personal confrontation, preferably a punch-up is the best way to solve problems, and as a corollary to this if book-learning is sneered at as wimpy and unmanly, then men will be a lot less likely to study the institutional structures - think education and mass media primarily - that feminism has relied on for its successes.

And organized feminism isn't the only institution that benefits from what can be called toxic masculinity. They're hardly the tip of the iceberg:

• If I were a statesman, and I wanted an endless supply of cannon fodder eager to go overseas to fight and kill for the business interests of my campaign financers,
• If I were a conservative politician, and I wanted an electorate who was actually willing to vote into power someone who would give away the store to big business and sell away consumer's and worker's rights and abolish the social safety net,
• If I were an authoritarian politician, and wanted a military and a police force that had no qualms about busting skulls in order to keep me in power and keep my financial backers rich, 
• If I were a contractor for a private corrections firm, and wanted a steady supply of convict labor,
• If I were an industrialist and I wanted a work force willing to work their hands to the bone in exchange for minimal compensation,
• If I were a marketing executive and I wanted to an eager market to sell wasteful status symbols to on high interest credit,
• If I was a woman and I wanted to rinse men, either in the dating game or in family court, 

then how would I want a substantial portion of the male population to think? Seems like machismo, toxic masculinity so called, fits the bill quite adequately. Don't whine or complain even if you are getting screwed over. Just be willing to work, work, work and pay, pay, pay and maybe drink excessive amounts of alcohol, drive a car stupidly fast or punch someone or something when the pain gets to be too much. Just don't think too long about what you're doing and why. Don't peer under the hood of the political, economic and sexual systems and ideologies that have been structured so as to structure your life, and not in your benefit. Doing that is wimpy, egg-headed and worst of all, potentially feminine. And above all, don't find common cause with other men like yourselves whose lives and whose blood keeps the whole facade going. Organizing is for pansies. Be tough, go-it-alone and maybe you'll be rich and powerful one day yourself. 

One wonders how many epitaphs that last sentence would make?

Follow Ernest Everhard on these formats:

Ernest Everhard on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Twitter.

Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube.
Ernest Everhard on Minds

Who's Really to Blame for Male Decline?

A recent Huffington Post article blasts conservative pundit Tucker Carlson for blaming male decline on women earning higher wages. Read the article and view Carlson's video clip here.

In a recent video segment on Fox News, pundit Tucker Carlson discusses the declining marriage prospects for an underclass of blue collar men who've been dislocated by the evaporation of blue collar jobs in America over the last generation or so. Women have less interest in marrying men without financial prospects, and this in turn exacerbates single motherhood which conservatives, according to Carlson, claim is a significant factor in pathologies such as alcoholism, drug abuse and crime that plague young men in affected communities. Behind this ominous rise in single parenthood and its associated pathologies is big government and the high taxes it levies to enact the social programs that incentivize fatherlessness and create reliable voting blocs for liberal democratic politicians. Or so we are told.

It would well behoove conservative Republicans to take the plight of displaced young white men in rust belt and heartland communities seriously, Carlson urges, since this is the G.O.P voter base.

While Carlson's take on all of this isn't entirely false, it's far from the whole story and while he does allude to the nature of the core problem, he's reluctant to come right out and say it. This is because conservatives Republicans are just as guilty, and benefited from this just as much as liberal democrats did, if not moreso. It's a little late now for conservatives to lament the decline in male wages and the impact this has had on their marriage prospects, when lower wages, not just for male workers but for everyone who isn't a majority shareholder or c-suite executive, are exactly what the conservatives want and have been pushing for for decades now. Don't expect Fox News to host a pundit who will admit this.

One would think, therefore, that progressive newsblogs would be shouting this fact from the rooftops. One would think. But not quite. The mainstream leftist Huffington Post lambasted Carlson for "blaming higher earning women for men in decline."

The narrative that the Huffpost and Media Matters seem to be pushing is that of Carlson being an old, sexually insecure curmudgeon incapable of reconciling himself with rising female empowerment.

The Huffpost then goes on to quote numerous tweets from empowered women and their new age sensitive male supporters who are simply outraged that Carlson would dare suggest such a thing!

@jbinnie7 tweets:

@JennyCraig Please cease advertising on the Tucker Carlson show. He continues to advocate for outmoded ideas that are used to repress women. Throughout history, women have fought and struggled for the right to vote, to be paid equal wages and not be victimized.

Sigh. This is always the go-to response among feminists, isn't it? Somebody said something they don't like. Therefore deplatform them. Women are apparently so empowered and strong that they're leaving men in the dust in the job market, but still need mountains of ideological protectionism and moral dependency when faced with even the slightest lack of support and encouragement from those same men. Doesn't sound too empowered and independent to me.

@kelownascott tweets:

Tucker Carlson is a misogynist afraid of economically secure women who can't be dominated by cash

The comments section in the Huffpost article is loaded with similar sentiments:

So.... my high achieving daughters are to blame because BillyBob can't find a date?  I think Darwin had an explanation for the 'problem' and the likely outcome.  Meanwhile, I don't think I am going to worry about it.

So progressives are social Darwinists now? When the losers are lower class white males - "Billy Bob" - I guess they are. It all just depends on who your untermensch are, I suppose.

If higher earning women have led to the decline of men then Carlson recognizes and acknowledges the power and superiority of women over the weakness, decline and subordination of men. Hear them roar down there Carlson!

Men are losing! Women are winning! Hooray! This can only be for everyone's greater good. Right?

This is the whole problem with the Huffington Post's take on this. Feminists, not surprisingly, are making this all about themselves and the only thing that really matters to them at the end of the day: their egos. Some whiny conservative MRA is snivelling because women are succeeding financially and socially without men, and he needs to get with the times or get the hell off the media.

I wouldn't disagree with this take if that's all there was to it. But while Carlson's off the mark in his interpretation of what's going on here, due mainly to his own ideological limitations, he is highlighting a legitimate problem. Men and women really are in this boat together. If either gender loses, neither gender wins. An injury to one is an injury to all, after all.

And finally:

Carlson has become a bad parody of a political commentator.   

Women have greater pay equity in places like Finland Sweden Denmark and Norway, where incarceration rates  (along with suicide, infant mortality, medical bankruptcy) are much, much lower than in the US.

Now that's interesting. Gender equity in pay alongside much lower rates of incarceration among men in the Scandinavian countries. Why might that be, I wonder?  Something to do with stronger unions and a social democratic political tradition perhaps?

This conversation, if it can be called that, highlights everything wrong with American political discourse. So let me make this very easy for people.

• American conservatives, of whom I trust we can consider Tucker Carlson, Fox News and much of its viewership as being examples of, caused this. Men weren't brought low by feminism. Feminists celebrate the defeat of the white male, quite naturally, but they didn't cause it. Neoliberalism caused it.  Let me repeat that. Neoliberalism caused it. Outsourcing and free trade caused it. Blue collar male wages were decimated when the unions were decimated. And that's precisely what conservatives wanted and why they went ahead with it. They have no business now portraying themselves as the champions of blue collar men.

• American liberals are not without blame here. The democrats of the Clinton and Obama eras largely acceded to the macroeconomic realities created by Reagan and Bush. Their politics is simply about putting a woman's or a person of color's face on the same neocon foreign policies and neoliberal economic policies. The conservative criticism of the democrats is not without some validity here. Creating whole blocs of demographics dependent on a threadbare welfare state in order to farm votes is no solution here. But we're not exactly seeing the G.O.P push for an industrial strategy that prioritizes full employment and living wages themselves. 

• White males abandoned in group preference and thus made themselves vulnerable to this. When I say in group preference, I don't mean it in the half way and degenerate sense that reactionaries mean it, which is the construction of an identity politics around a narrative of white male victimhood and resentment against a risen middle class of women and people of color. We don't need a white male version of feminism. I mean the only form of in group preference that really matters: class consciousness. White males were the demographic that most reliably supported Reagan in America, Thatcher in the UK, Mulroney and later Manning in Canada and others world wide who pushed for neoliberal policy. As such, white men should resist the allure of anti-feminist conservatives, libertarians and reactionaries. While feminism certainly isn't the friend of the white male, the right wing is his true enemy - all the more sinister an enemy for how it masquerades as his friend.

• Anyone celebrating the immiseration of the blue collar white male as a victory for women and people of color has no business calling herself a progressive or a leftist. To be on the left is to side with the poor and marginalized against corporate and state power. Full stop. Race and gender do not matter beyond that. The Huffpost's brand if "leftism" isn't at all leftist. It's conservatism for women and people of color. If the impoverishment and stagnation of the white male worker is to be considered a victory for feminism, then feminism is little better than fascism. And women would do well to take heed here, and not get too smug. Their newly arisen status has nothing to do with their inherent greatness that has been so long and unjustly suppressed by white males. It has everything to do with their being a relatively new market, and more easily used as workers and consumers. Once some other demographic, or maybe robots, can do their jobs for cheaper, they'll be cast aside just as quickly.

• Yeah, women aren't interested in marrying men with dismal economic prospects. Why should they, and why should we be surprised to discover that economic relations so consistently underlie social relations?  Why should women not seek greater independence and earning power? In their shoes, I'd do the same. It should go without saying at this point that women's increased earning power isn't why men are in decline. While stable marriages would certainly be a benefit for the reasons conservatives outline, a stable economy is a necessary prerequisite for this. Financial matters stress even secure marriages. A financialized banana republic of a nation firmly dedicated to trickle down economics, with minimal checks on wild speculation and zero protection for workers is no place to raise a family. So libertarian MRAs need to STFU and eat this one, because they brought it on themselves. So long as the men's rights movement tends towards libertarian capitalism, they will be their own worst enemies.

• As something of an aside, these same MRA types who lament women's declining interest in marrying men are themselves avid critics of marriage in other contexts, citing marriage as a trap best avoided by men. Who wants eighteen years (at least) of child support and alimony payments, they ask. Not the kinds of financially unstable men we're discussing here. And no, abolishing child support and alimony won't really help, since that merely shifts the risk from men to women, and further disincentivizing their marrying. No one commits to a disadvantage, as MRA godfather Warren Farrell once put it. This is a complex problem with no easy answers.

• The feminist IdPol left and the free market libertarian right need to step aside and let the Bernie Bros, the brocialists and the "dirtbag left" types step in and straighten this whole mess out, because we're the only ones who seem to know what the problem really is and what needs to be done about it.

Follow Ernest Everhard on these formats:

Ernest Everhard on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Twitter.

Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube.
Ernest Everhard on Minds

What's the Matter with YouTube's Alternative Influence Network?

Skipping over to YouTube and noting the subscription levels for various content creators deemed to be part of the right wing "Alternative Influence Network", I make the following observations. Note that these figures are rounded approximations, not exact figures as these fluctuate as subscribers come and go:

Styxhexenhammer666: 329,000 subs
Lauren Southern: 675,000 subs
Milo Yiannopoulos: 839,000 subs
Sargon of Akkad: 865,000 subs
Stefan Molyneux: 883,000 subs
Dave Rubin (Rubin Report): 899,000 subs
Jordan B Peterson: 1,670,000 subs
Steven Crowder: 3,168,000 subs

This is just a sampling of so called right wing YouTube. There are dozens more. I could go on. Now a quick detour for those of you who don't know, YouTube's "Alternative Influence Network" was a term coined by researcher Rebecca Lewis in a New Data & Society report entitled Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube.  Read a Guardian article on the subject here. The Alternative Influence Network apparently consists of "65 political influencers across 81 channels" that tend to lean right to varying degrees (though some vehemently deny this, with varying degrees of accuracy), do tend to be affiliated with one another despite numerous personal and political disagreements and play a prominent role in the alleged radicalization of socially marginal young men. Does this sound familiar?

As a matter of comparison:

Feminist Frequency: 222,000 subs
Kat Blaque: 135,000 subs
Chescaleigh (MTV Decoded): 247,000 subs

These being among the more prominent feminist and social justice channels. The new punching bag (as of this writing) of the YouTube reactionaries, Edinburgh University professor "Tiny" Tim Squirrell's channel has a whopping 364 subscribers as I type this, and he boasts 2,770 followers on Twitter, as of this writing. Proving that sometimes people really do live up to their names.  My own Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube dwarfs this (I have the big 513 subscribers, and I haven't really done any work in ages). Progressive media watchdog Sleeping Giants, allied with Squirrell who apparently claim responsibility for Alex Jones's deplatforming and was instrumental in Sargon's being kicked off Patreon, claims 214,000 followers on Twitter and 55,000 on Facebook.

To be fair, some leftist YouTube presences are substantial. The flagship here would be The Young Turks, with over 4 million subs. For ways of thinking closer to my own, Kyle Kulinski's Secular Talk has around 618,000 subs, David Pakman has around 558,000 subs, the Jimmy Dore Show has around 427,000 subs, and the Amazing Atheist has just over a 1 million subs, as of this writing. The later four would not participate in a deplatforming campaign against Sargon, I'd wager to say.

Still and all ... does anyone else see what I'm getting at here?

Now I get the fact that the social justice crowd has influence beyond their numbers. Their presence in academia and mainstream media is commanding. Despite a recent study finding that only 8% of Americans identify as "progressive activists" and that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of Americans believe that "political correctness is a problem in our country" and that these figures are remarkably consistent across all demographic lines, race and gender included.

Which is really the problem here. How did we end up in such a tail wagging the dog kind of situation? Are progressive activist dollars just worth ten times more than those of the subscribers to supposedly reactionary YouTube channels? Patreon and PayPal must certainly think so. How else does one explain the rapidity with which the mighty tech trusts of Silicon Valley, truly the robber barons of our era, knuckle under to the demands of social justice warriors so swiftly and readily, despite the greater numbers of reactionaries on these platforms?

Sargon of Akkad boasts approximately 865,000 subscribers on YouTube. For perspective, this is slightly higher than the current membership rolls for the United Steel Workers (currently about 860,000) and dwarfs the total number of employees for each single private employer in America except Walmart. This is greater than the total membership of all three of Canada's major political parties combined (near 300,000 for the governing Liberals, around 260,000 Conservatives and about 125,000 New Democrats).

Granted that many of these are generally passive followers, many no doubt haven't followed his channel in any real sense in years, or are not necessarily loyal true believing subscribers to his ideology but who agree with him on some things (I'd be among these). Never the less, he manages to continually get six digit view figures. "You can't Trust Patreon", detailing his expulsion from the platform, published 8 December of 2018 boasts a bit over 373,000 views as of this writing.

So the obvious question is: why can't this kind of subscriber base be wielded as a significant political or even cultural force? Can a constellation of social media personalities with millions of followers between them (granted a considerable degree of overlap) not use that to leverage access to more mainstream media platforms, and from there commandeer the narrative regarding what it is they exactly stand for, making them less vulnerable to "alt right" smears from pseudo leftist outlets with lower subscriber bases? This might have to entail some research and study into media and public relations, marketing, political strategy and similar disciplines, but I'm sure that's not beyond the capacities of the intellectual dark web. These guys aren't stupid.

One fourth of Sargon's subscriber base surpasses the number of twitter followers Sleeping Giants has. And that's just Sargon. So why are Sleeping Giants and not the legions of Kekistan calling the shots here? Is there something preventing them from, at their emperor's call, exerting their own leverage in the marketplace and leaning on advertisers a bit themselves? I can't help but wonder if that isn't why these faux progressives are actually so afraid of this alleged dark web of YouTube reactionaries. If they got their act together and flexed their muscle - really strategized and organized effectively - who knows what they could accomplish?

I'm here to tell you that with 865,000 followers, I'd be seriously discussing a general strike. When I wasn't hiding or running for my life from C.I.A assassins, that is.

So why is this Alternative Influence Network so vulnerable to social media deplatforming? They've hurt Patreon via a substantial exodus already. Imagine what a truly well coordinated strategy involving even a half dozen or so content creators close to Sargon (Jordan Peterson is an obvious choice here) could accomplish. It's not like they don't have the loyal and dedicated fan base.

Is it those dirty rotten SJWs refusing to listen to reason? Are social media executives fanatical SJWs themselves, or just stupid? If they're so willing to hemorrhage loyal paying patrons to appease a vocal ideological minority, than the CEO's basic competency must be called into question. Boards of directors, who hire the CEO, have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to maximize shareholder value and run the company responsibly. Notice that the fiduciary responsibility is to their shareholders, not to the women's studies department of their local college or university. Are you paying attention to this, libertarians and reactionaries? This is how the capitalist system you claim to so love works. There's more of you than there are social justice warriors if YouTube subscription rates and social media following figures are any indication. So take the hint. Anyway, is it the influence of George Soros? Of the "globalists?" Of the "cultural Marxists"  or of (((you know who?)))

Or is the real problem deeper and more subtle? A fundamental weakness embedded in the very deep structure of conservative, classical liberal and libertarian thought? A weakness that isn't so much a falsehood in the direct claims that this constellation of ideologies tend to assert, but rather something that's more nebulous and metapolitical, if I were to call it anything.

To illustrate, let's compare libertarianism with its opposed strands of critical theory. Deriving ultimately from Marxism, critical theory both in its specific formal Frankfurt School form and more generally as a tendency in political thought, tends to posit some sort of oppressed/oppressor dynamic as being at the heart of how western civilization operates. This has deep and significant implications: Individuals belong to broader classes of people, and different classes have different interests and thus naturally antagonistic relationships with one another. Marx's bourgeoisie vs proletariat dualism is, perhaps the ur-example of this. Other variations I'm sure we're all familiar with posit people of color vs. whites, or men vs. women and non cisgender heterosexuals.

Contrast with libertarianism, which tends more towards the kind of belief that "there is no such thing as society, just individuals and their families" or something similar. For the critical theorist, social inequality is seen as the result of some or another kind of social power structure, and its role is to ensure the dominance of one group of people over another. In this world view, inequality isn't a bug, but a feature, so to speak. The upshot of that is that there's an impetus to change the system.

Contrast with libertarianism, which isn't necessarily opposed to equal outcomes provided they occur on a free market and are thus "voluntary" or "volitional" as they'd put it. But let's be honest here. These transactions are often taking place between the owners of productive capital on the one hand and a proletariat who have only their own labor power to sell on the other. So the outcomes are going to be very unequal, and the libertarian is much more okay with this than they are with government intervention into the process to level the playing field at some point. This makes libertarianism fundamentally conservative, however different a policy direction they would go from dominant neoliberalism or neoconservatism. Reactionaries go further, and insist that inequality is indeed the natural order of things. Attempts at social change in a more egalitarian and inclusive direction is "cheating" as far as the reactionary and the libertarian are concerned, since this involves the imposition of more equal outcomes where more unequal outcomes would be more natural or even desirable.

The important takeaway here is that for the critical theorist, the marginalized and oppressed categories of people are individually weaker than their power wielding counterparts, it is therefore necessary for them to organize, which is to realize strength in numbers and to strategize, which is find and exploit choke points in institutional systems so that marginalized groups can achieve what they believe to be more balanced outcomes - social justice so called.

A very brief peek into the Alternative Influence Network and into libertarian, conservative and reactionary spaces is all it takes to quickly gather their opinion of this way of looking at the world. This is the "cultural Marxism" or the "postmodern Marxism" they're always railing against. Libertarianism (the purest form of what conservatism and classical liberalism are) denies the existence of competing power interests among differing groups in a capitalist society, where conservatives and reactionaries view society as something in which all have a shared stake. Some people earn more because they work harder or smarter, or fulfill a more important place in the social structure, and therefore deserve it. 

Now, read this next sentence closely, because it's the crux of the whole problem for the the right on social media and by itself the entirety of the reason they're losing the culture war against the social justice warriors: This denial of class, race or gender based antagonisms in western civilization obviates the necessity for organization and strategization on the right. That statement is bold red because it's that important. It's absolutely foundational for understanding why things like Sargon being booted from Patreon happen. If you don't get it yet, the core of the problem is that the conservative, reactionary and libertarian world views mitigate against their adherents organizing politically, except perhaps to exchange views or, at most, achieve electoral victories so as to reduce the tax burden on higher income earners. But electoral politics are fundamentally limited in liberal democracies, and a separation of politics and culture is actually a fairly crucial thing in classical liberal and conservative thought. This is precisely why the critical theorists and the social justice crowd long ago deemphasized traditional politics in favor of culture war long ago. 

The right simply has no idea how to effectively wage a culture war, because as far as they're concerned, culture is taking place in a realm consisting only of individuals and maybe their families. Not society and certainly not anything systemic or structural for the benefit of some people at the expense of others. If you don't believe me in that assessment, go and use words like systemic and structural in your next conversation with reactionaries or libertarians of any stripe and see what kind of response you get. 

So they don't think in terms of a "long march through the institutions" or of organizing any kind of wide scale political activity targeting the institutions they claim have been hijacked by social justice warriors. That sort of "playing dirty" is precisely what they despise about the SJWs. Some libertarians explicitly reject all forms of political activity, for it implies collective action.  For their part, the SJWs, on the other hand, have zero qualms about doing any of that. Indeed, the need to do so is likewise built into their ideology. There's no such thing as fighting dirty against the beneficiaries of structural oppression. 

The Alternative Influence Network, the Intellectual Dark Web, the Skeptic Community, the Cultural Libertarians, the Kekistanis or whatever they're calling themselves in current year cannot defeat the social justice warriors, even if they enjoyed five times the numerical advantage they already enjoy. They would never consider any kind of organized strategy for dealing with of any of these supposedly leftist social media platforms. They may seem to depart one for another in tandem, but only because each has decided on his own to do so for his own reasons. Hardly a recipe for changing the world in any sort of serious way.

The libertarian core of their philosophy was quite deliberately designed to mitigate against any kind of sustained organized activity against corporate power. We have them to thank in good part for four decades of neoliberal hegemony. The reactionaries may claim that feminism is cancer - a good metaphor since feminists operate by invading both public and private spaces of all kinds and shift the purpose of those spaces towards the promotion of feminist ideology. Very much like how a cancer cell operates. Could we not likewise suggest that libertarianism is AIDS. The capacity of individuals within the polity to politically organize is its "immune system" against tyranny, and libertarianism attacks that immune system to such a degree that the polity becomes vulnerable to capture by any interest with the desire and capacity to do so. As such, I sometimes find them hard to feel sorry for when they get kicked off of social media, though I certainly don't condone or support it. Hair of the dog that bit you, boys. Maybe learn your lesson here.

What then can defeat the social justice warriors?

Only one thing: the use of their methods of analysis and activism against them. That would mean viewing current year critical theory, feminism and social justice, however radical they may have at one time been, as being themselves systems of power designed to benefit a certain class of people at the expense of another.

The democratic centralist vanguard party in the Soviet Union is a clear and obvious example of a left wing version of an oppressive system of power - regressive leftism, so called. They appropriated the moral force of the worker's struggle and socialism - considerable at the time - to legitimize their claims on power, but never altered the fundamental relations of production because they were now the beneficiaries of those relations. Marxist ideology became mere slogans legitimizing Bolshevik claims to absolute power while upholding precisely the kind of alienating productive relations Marxism so rightly criticized.

The highly educated professional activists that make up the core of current year social justice activism are the cultural version of a democratic centralist vanguard party, as they were envisioned by the critical theorists who came to see it necessary to wage a cultural revolution as a prelude to the establishment of a centrally planned economy. They've merely replaced socialism and the worker's struggle with feminism and anti-racism as sources of moral legitimacy. Since totalitarian methods were not available to the self styled revolutionaries of the west, this kind of Marcusian kulturkampf became necessary instead. Where the power structures constrained by liberal democratic norms are forced to manufacture consent for their oppressive policies, the self styled revolutionary vanguard must manufacture dissent to achieve its own regressive goals. 

This has been a failure, and no metric more closely measures that failure than the historical materialism that so brilliantly animated Marx's initial critiques of class structure. 

Follow Ernest Everhard on these formats:

Ernest Everhard on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Twitter.

Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube.
Ernest Everhard on Minds

Leftists: Do NOT Support Corporate Censorship!

"Tim Squirrell" embodies everything wrong with the mainstream left of the current year. Viewing his twitter feed, I'm not seeing a whole lot of working class or marginalization here. From his personal website:

I started at the University of Cambridge in 2011, after finishing school in Cyprus. I began studying Medicine, but quickly realized that it wasn't for me, and switched into Natural Sciences, focusing on the History and Philosophy of Science. I graduated with a BA and MSci in 2015, having written my first Masters dissertation on the problem of moral responsibility when delegating medical decisions to cognitive computers.

Good stuff. With a guy like this in our corner, how can we lose? He looks like just the kind of guy I'd expect to meet at a $10,000 a plate Clinton Foundation fundraiser, positioning himself as the "resistance" against the ascendancy of "fascists" such as your typical incel on Reddit or 4chan troll. 

I'll not begrudge a fellow his education, but a look at his twitter feed suggests someone rather full of himself:

We’re not harassing you! You’re harassing us!” the anime avatars scream in their dozens and hundreds

I guess i would be scared of being deplatformed too if my income and indeed the only reason anyone knew or cared about me were all derived from  being arrested for being an edgelord

Regret to announce in a disappointing plot twist i was controlled by the russians all along

Yuk yuk yuk! What a card! Oh Tim, you're just so witty!  Which can be tolerated and ignored. The real problem with this fellow is here:

My mentions are blowing up bc the alt-right have found my attempts to aid in their deplatforming and are Very Upset. Please keep me and my mentions in your prayers at this difficult time.

And in case you missed it:

@slpng_giants another deplatforming success 

In case you don't know, this refers to a group called Sleeping Giants. "A campaign to make bigotry and sexism less profitable." Presumably active in attempts to lean on advertisers and boycott media outlets that host so called "hate speech" or "the alt-right" or whomever. Well, I suppose that's their right. But I have just one request for my fellows on the left who quite rightly want to oppose bigotry and hate but quite wrongly think deplatforming people who aren't really that right wing, bigoted or hateful is the way to do it:

Can we please stop doing this?

Or at the very least, can we at least try to be somewhat intelligent and judicious about what we consider "hate speech?" Last time I checked, Sargon of Akkad and Count Dankula, while not loyal card carrying progressives, were light years from the far right in terms of their actual beliefs. It's not exactly a secret that highly educated professional activists on college campuses and in Silicon Valley willfully smear their opponents as "Nazis" - in a kind of counterpart to the right's long tendency of red-baiting their own political opponents. Indeed, the "hate speech" for which Sargon was apparently deplatformed from Patreon was supposedly satirizing the kind of talk that alt-right clods engage in. Sargon has in fact had notorious quarrels with alt-right leaders, and is generally disliked by them.

This is why resorting to censorship over political disagreement is always a bad idea. Ideologues on one side of the spectrum tend to lump everyone on the other side into a single monolith. By similar rationale, if Sargon is a "Nazi" then I must be a raging SJW with my own set of gender pronouns forever calling on white males to check their privilege while donning the black bandanna to head out to "bash the fash." I am alt-left, after all. What stops the Proud Boy types from coming after me at some point, assuming this ever becomes a revenue source for me? After all, the Sleeping Giants and their ilk legitimized such tactics.

And that's the problem with all of this. And doubly so for the left, who've always been the advocates for the small players in the market.

Unless you are going after an institution or truly powerful person abusing their power, you have no business crawling into bed with corporate power and using that power to attack the livelihoods of your political opponents if you call yourself a leftist. Our whole project is built around the securing of the rights of the "little guy" - the common people in the face of the potential for corporate oligopoly to abuse the power that their strong position in the marketplace gives them. Boycotting a corporation over some malpractice or another is one thing. Calling for the ending of an otherwise powerless person's livelihood over a political disagreement is quite another. Doesn't the left typically emphasize the difference between punching up and punching down?

Even if it were the case that this "alternative influence network" really does universally promote far right reactionary views (some of them certainly do, but they're no more a monolith than the left is) what really constitutes the furtherance of the far right's true agenda: allowing reactionaries on social media to speak their minds, or empowering capital to silence those the strongest players in the marketplace, either singly or in concert, do not like?

How long before these kinds of tactics get used on corporate whistle blowers, environmental activists and union leaders? Today, those calling for less globalism and immigration are greater threats to the power and interests of capital (specifically unlimited access to cheap labor) than socialist union militancy is. Hence the far right rather than the left being public enemy number one. For today. But can this be counted on to last indefinitely?

It's especially galling when supposed leftists seem to suddenly start channeling the spirit of Ayn Rand when the subject of corporate censorship and the firing/deplatforming of right wing commentators is raised. "It's not censorship" when private entities do it, they claim. That's funny, because by that rationale, it shouldn't have been "discrimination" when employers, landlords, banks and so on discriminated against gays, racial minorities, atheists and socialists either. We don't get to pick and choose based solely on convenience dictated by political allegiance. And believe me when I say that anti-discrimination laws intended to bring marginalized groups into equal footing were resisted via very similar kinds of claims for a very long time. Segregationists had a long history of opposing "government telling business who they can and can't hire."

It was the left who dealt with blacklisting and persecution during McCarthyism and various red scares. In an increasingly conservative political climate, do we think ourselves immune to such tactics in the future? What happens to our capacity to credibly call it out when we in fact endorse such methods as Tim Squirrell is doing?

It is left wing people who should know that modes and relations of production are fundamental, and that the ideological climate flows from that. It should therefore be of greater import to us to protect smaller dissident voices online that we may disagree with than to call upon the real force for reaction - monopoly capital - to silence those voices.

We have in social media something that generations of leftist media critics could only have dreamed of: a means by which people with little capital and institutional clout can potentially reach a mass audience. A Carl Benjamin would have been unthinkable in the days before social media. So too would a host of leftist outlets: think Jimmy Dore, Kyle Kulinski and the like. Yet today's democratic centralist vanguard of highly educated professional activists chooses to use it to silence others. They are pretty much doing the Atlantic Council's work for them.

I think it says a great deal about just how "left" the Tim Squirrells and Sleeping Giants of this world really are when they have the ears of the corporate oligopolies and opt to use their influence in this manner. If they were leftists in any authentic sense, they should use their influence to advocate for better wages and working conditions in Silicon Valley, clean water in Flint, Michigan, greater protection for renters in Arkansas ... I could go on. On and on and on. There's real social injustice out there to fight. Let's use this powerful new social media tool to truly empower the poor and marginalized, rather than silence those only a tier or two up from the bottom. Even if they do have some genuinely odious opinions. The best way to fight fascism is to embed social democratic principles directly into the fabric of our political and economic structures. Calls for social media censorship push in exactly the opposite direction. Why do I get the feeling that future generations fighting to improve the lot of the poor and working classes will regret the precedents these pseudo leftists are setting?

But then, that would mean it would have to stop being about the egos of the Tim Squirrells of this world. It would have to stop being about what heroes he and Sleeping Giants are, and start being about actually addressing the real roots of marginalization. Which is a mode of production that's working out quite well for the likes of Mr. Squirrell, thank you very much. Must be nice being a professor in an elite educational institution. Check your privilege, good sir!

In short, they are not leftists at all. They are the voices of power and privilege, made all the worse by their adoption of a "progressive" veneer.

Of course, you, dear reader, may do business with whomever you like. You're under no obligation to patronize an outfit who likewise does business in some way you object to. Boycotts are a potentially powerful means of challenging corporate power. But let's be judicious when we employ this strategy, and let's use it to actually challenge rather than uphold corporate power. Let's reserve it for use against corporations that abuse their workers, spoil the environment, or engage in other shady business practices. Giving a platform to someone like Sargon of Akkad simply isn't something that we on the left should be objecting to.

As a bit of an aside, "extrordanormalguy" on twitter asked me this question:

I appreciate your principled view on this issue, but how can you align with the left as a whole anymore. The have largely become an authoritarian group hell bent on stifling free speech, and killing freedom for anyone who disagrees with them. Truly evil people.

Simply because the right will not, and can not deal with this issue effectively. The right's whole history has been about entrenching corporate power. Their recent concerns about free speech are more opportunistic than they are genuine. It wasn't so long ago it was the religious right playing these kinds of games with businesses that sold rock music records and role playing game books. Donald Trump is notoriously no friend of press freedom, however partisan the press has also been in their opposition to him. Furthermore, the right's individualistic framing of social and economic relations mitigates against the impetus to organize, or to see what they're engaged in as a struggle for power wherein their opponents see the need to win at all costs, as opposed to a mere clash of ideas to be resolved through honest and open debate. For a number of reasons, debacles such as these make quite clear the serious limitations of libertarian and conservative thought for all except those rich and powerful enough to benefit from them.

We Live in Strange Times

Moreover, the mainstream right simply doesn't care. That's all there really is to it. Republican leaders in America or prominent Conservative Party politicians in Canada and the UK may occasionally pay lip service to the importance of free speech, but it's not a priority for them, and certainly not for the broader institutions in which they operate. Free speech for YouTube's "alternative influence network" doesn't entail tax cuts for the top 1% of 1% of income earners. Therefore, it's off the radar as far as conservative power is concerned.

More mainstream kinds of conservatives are a heavily programmed and ideological lot, and this issue simply doesn't fall into their constellation of hot button issues. It's not about guns, it's not against abortion, it's not idolizing the flag, it's not in favor of middle-east power projection, it's not demonizing some or another Liberal or Democrat party politician: Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Justin Trudeau or whomever. And above all, it's not about tax cuts. Ergo, invisible to the right, with some exceptions, of course.

It's worth noting that the kinds of "reactionaries" and "bigots" that are the targets of these kinds of deplatforming campaigns are themselves strident advocates of free market capitalism, a fact the likes of Tim Squirrell are only too happy to point out. Strange that the so called left seems to be doing a better job than the right of leveraging market power in this scenario. Would that the left used this influence to demand and uphold worker's rights. Likewise, being on the receiving end of this kind of corporate maleficence should hopefully suggest to these libertarian and reactionary social media personalities that unlimited corporate power might not be such a good idea. While I don't condone the right being deplatformed on corporate social media, it bears mentioning that they have no real basis to protest it given their most cherished ideological principles.

Besides, I wonder whose idea of a "leftist" Tim Squirrell really is anyway?

Were I in a position to counsel the "Alternative Influence Network" in any way, I'd suggest the following:

You've been called the so called intellectual dark web. It's time to leave the dark web behind. Stop hiding. It's working against you. You need to make yourself known to the social media outlets who are hosting you. You actually represent their interests better than the social justice crowd does. You want them to pay less taxes and deal with fewer regulations, after all. Why not try to have a dialogue with them and establish a relationship with them? You say sunlight is the best disinfectant, start with yourselves. You know what you believe and why - don't fear. Use marketing strategies devised by the capitalist system you so love and publicly position yourselves as free speech advocates. Make certain you represent yourselves as promoters of something most people think are good. Don't come out against political correctness. Come out in favor of free thought and open dialogue. Know your values and frame the debate.

You've spent most of your time creating ideological content for consumption by like minded viewers out there in YouTube land. While important, this isn't enough. Now you're paying the price for your policy of isolationism. You need to start an outreach program to capture the hearts and minds of the political mainstream. Otherwise the Tim Squirrells of this world will represent you and will control the narrative around who you are and what you stand for. Your recent misadventures with Patreon and SubscribeStar show what the end result of that is.

Take a lesson from the SJWs you despise. The SJWs who figured out that positioning themselves as a radical counter culture was of limited efficacy, and found ways to work within the systems they professed to dislike to advance their agendas and thrust their narratives into the mainstream. They didn't like mainstream media and academia any more than you do now, but the hard truth is that the bulk of the population isn't abandoning legacy media any time soon. It has gravitas and credibility with both the bulk of the population, and policy making elites in positions of influence. It's how the feminist social justice crowd got to where they are today. Study their success and learn from it.

Above all, be you left or right leaning, do NOT spam Tim Squirrell, Sleeping Giants or similar people with threats, insults or hate speech. It only makes you look bad and lends credence to their narratives.

Follow Ernest Everhard on these formats:

Ernest Everhard on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Twitter.

Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube.
Ernest Everhard on Minds

How Trump Succeeded

Trump stepped into a leadership and ideological vacuum. That's how he succeeded. First in the Republican party, then in the nation as a whole. Not many people that I see seem to get this. But from the outside looking in, it seems obvious to me. The establishment refuses to come to terms with this because they're the ones who are ultimately responsible for it.

We can start with the Republican Party. With Lyin' Ted and Little Marco and Low Energy Jeb. Say what you will about the Donald, he really wasn't lying in these cases. He stepped into a party that was morally, ideologically and philosophically exhausted and everybody knew it. The same old Reagan era trickle down talking points. The same old neocon obsessions with middle east power projection. The same old evangelical grandstanding serving as a thin mask for untold corruption. It was dead as a national political force. Rightism was reduced to a protest vote against something or other that Obama did and a rag-tag of paleoconservative conspiracism. Not something relevant to most people.

Truth is, they were the ones who killed American democracy. Not Trump. They killed it with deregulation, with outsourcing, with Reaganomics and enabling the largest wealth and income gap in history. They killed it with pseudo libertarianism - a replacement or at least very serious nerfing of institutions of democratic oversight with a quasi religious faith that "free markets" can do anything and everything far better than human agency ever could. F**k, what a farce. How could anybody be so stupid? They killed it with the inauguration of an international economic order that enabled the super rich to dictate policy while holding the club of capital flight and investment strike over the polity's head. They killed it by abolishing the fairness doctrine and allowance of media conglomeration. They killed it through the manufacture of a state of perpetual national emergency and the passage of the Patriot Act.

Then the GOP establishment have the gall to display such shock and awe with the emergence of Trump and Bannon. What the hell did they think was going to happen? When you create a social order based on cut throat competition, don't be surprised if one such as Trump can actually make callousness into a sort of political asset. 

 As for Hillary and the democrats, they largely dug their own graves in their own ways. For all the crying we heard about Russia, about Wikileaks, about the Bernie Bro's, about deplorables, it was Hillary's own record that doomed her. That and a bad campaign. But it went back farther than that. As far back as Bill Clinton, the thinking was much more how to accommodate themselves to the order that Reagan brought in than to push back against that order, or at least the less savory aspects of it. While too many Trump supporters really did fit the profile of the basket of deplorables, a surprising number of people who rejected Hillary were rejecting her own hypocritical support for mid-east wars, for the Patriot act, for demonizing "super predators" and her husband's repeal of Glass-Steagall, among other things.  Most of all, they rejected the democratic party's stab in the back of the one candidate in 2016 who really did understand what was wrong with the country and what was needed to fix it. And they continue to reject the jaw dropping sense of entitlement that many democrats and the so called "resistance" continue to display, acting as if they were simply entitled to the political support of the country as though it were their due.

 The left, for its part, made its own Faustian bargains through all of this. Beginning in the colleges and universities, they acceded to the demands of the standpoint theorists in the women's studies and critical race theory departments for total and complete deference. As if possessing one or some "intersecting" combination of intersecting marginalized identities somehow made one morally and intellectually infallible. Especially since these people were not usually that marginalized, having had the privilege of attending elite colleges and all. Thus the most rank nonsense was given free reign so long as it was at the behest of some marginalized or oppressed group or anther. This was first normalized in certain branches of academia, then in areas where liberal/progressive dominance was the norm. So we end up with "progressives" who are perfectly willing to accede to the worst elements of neo-robber baron rule but get all up in arms over cultural appropriation and microaggressions.  Imagine their surprise when they found the broader culture wasn't having any of this. Since then, the response has been a whole grab bag of defense mechanisms, projections and rationalizations so as to keep up the illusion of unimpeachable integrity of their particular ideological systems, regardless of how obviously flawed they are.

This is the milieu into which Trump emerged. The mistake is to see Trump as himself being the problem. We just get rid of orange Cheeto-man Hitler and then everything can go back to being all hunky-dory. It's a breathtakingly naive and self congratulatory way of seeing things but one I encounter frequently. Indeed the moral panic they're perpetually engineering over Trump simply adds fuel to the fire. There's an obvious thirst for a populism that cuts to the heart of the problem - that gets Wall Street, the military industrial complex, national security apparatus, academia and media back on a leash and working for the benefit of all again, but the Democrats are having none of it. Could it be because they too are bought and paid for?

Trump couldn't have succeeded in a polity that had not previously compromised itself in so many other ways.

To close, I cite present day France as perhaps a better example of what can be done in the face of establishment complacency and entitlement.

Follow Ernest Everhard on these formats:

Ernest Everhard on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Twitter.

Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube.
Ernest Everhard on Minds

The Obama Presidency: who Benefited?

Obama was pro-black in the same sense that Trump is pro-white.

What a farce.

The color that matters in American politics is $green$ and how much of it you have. Period.

 While I don't think they were personally responsible for it, Obama and Hillary oversaw the transformation of the democratic party, in addition to the establishment of a safe and nerfed form of progressivism. One that frames power and privilege entirely in terms of race and gender. Who benefits from that, I wonder? The black kid in the ghetto? The single mother on food stamps?

 Guess again, sunshine!

 A form of progressivism wherein six digit salary earning humanities profs and Huffpost bloggers tell unemployed white male construction workers to check their privilege. A form of progressivism wherein trolls in places like 4chan are held up as the greatest threat to democracy and freedom and corporate media outlets like the New York Times are cast as part of the "resistance." A form of progressivism that worries about Halloween costumes and old jazz era Christmas songs being "problematic" while the deep state and the military industrial complex go unscrutinized. Are praised even, since the evil orange man said bad things about them at some point (with all of the sincerity you'd expect from Trump - ha ha).

 Quite a remarkable feat, I must say. You'd have to go back to Nixon's southern strategy, and the conservative ruse of convincing white male working class voters that their real enemies are minorities and women demanding equal rights, to find something comparable to it. Wall Street and the Pentagon are your friends, the conservatives told the white and/or male middle and working classes. It's those uppity blacks who are your real enemies. My only question regarding how corporate democrats pulled the exact same scam on minorities and women is what took them so long?

 So again, who benefits? Who benefited from Obama? The same people who benefited under Bush, under Clinton, under Bush Sr. and under Reagan. I'm sure we can all guess who they are. It wasn't black people, that's for damn sure. But their self appointed democratic centralist vanguard in academia and mainstream media did get to demand trigger warnings and safe spaces for things they found offensive, so progress, right? And meanwhile, the GOP was able to cast this as representative of "leftism" and the political mileage they gain from it goes along way towards getting deregulators and top 1% of 1% tax cutters elected to public office.

So again, who benefits?

Obama. The greatest conservative president the US ever had.

Follow Ernest Everhard on these formats:

Ernest Everhard on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Facebook.

Alternative Left on Twitter.

Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube.
Ernest Everhard on Minds