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Progressive Tribalism Beats The War Drums

White feminist publishes NYT column denouncing pro-Kavanaugh white women as 'gender traitors' who profaned 'rivers of blood'
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I would like fair-minded liberal readers to take a look at this op-ed from The New York Times, and consider that this is exactly the kind of left-wing racist rant that drives many of us white people into the arms of the Republican Party — not out of any particular love for the GOP, but out of fear of what this progressive racism would do in power. Alexis Grenell, the author, is a white woman and a Democratic strategist. Here’s the headline on her article. Note well that authors do not choose their headlines. This was written by someone at the Times:

So, that starts well. More:

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol,

“Slit their wrists” … “rivers of blood through the Capitol”. Un-freaking-hinged. These people are working themselves up to doing something violent.

the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.

Here, she tears into women who express concern about men being falsely accused of sexual assault:

But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

Think about that: Alexis Grenell believes that having a uterus means that women should not be concerned that their sons, brothers, and husbands might be falsely accused of raping a woman, and suffer from the lack of due process.

Think about that.

And here, we get to the heart of the matter:

We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades. White women have broken for Democratic presidential candidates only twice: in the 1964 and 1996 elections, according to an analysis by Jane Junn, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.

Women of color, and specifically black women, make the margin of difference for Democrats. The voting patterns of white women and white men mirror each other much more closely, and they tend to cast their ballots for Republicans. The gender gap in politics is really a color line.

That’s because white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re placed on a pedestal to be “cherished and revered,” as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has said about women, but all the while denied basic rights.

“Patriarchy,” “whiteness” — she’s using these Grievance Studies buzzwords in response to women worried about their flesh-and-blood male relatives being falsely accused. That’s because these men are nothing but abstractions to Grenell.

Again, she returns to hysterically violent language — a language of tribalism:

This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”

I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.

“To the death”? What does that mean? What could that possibly mean, other than to signal that Alexis Grenell and her people are preparing to do violence to them, and that Alexis Grenell believes that they cannot be persuaded, only defeated, no matter what it takes.

Again: Alexis Grenell is a Democratic Party strategist. The New York Times, the most important newspaper in the world, and the voice of the liberal Establishment, saw fit to publish this racist, sexist call to arms. This is what elite liberalism in America has become.

If I were a person of color, and, following a major conservative political defeat, read an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “African-Americans, Come Get Your People/They will defend their privilege to the death;”

… and that headline topped an opinion piece calling black people who voted in a way the author didn’t like as “traitors” who profaned a blood sacrifice by the righteous;

… and that op-ed claimed that black people like this cannot be reasoned with, only destroyed, because they will defend their bigoted beliefs “to the death”;

… I would be terrified about what the leaders of the Right had in mind for me and people like me. I don’t care how bad the Democrats might be, I would vote for them without even thinking about it, just to prevent blood-lusting Republicans like the author and the editors who published her from coming anywhere near power.

Wouldn’t you?

Alexis Grenell — who earned her master’s degree in 2015 from an Ivy League school (Columbia) — is the face and the voice of elite liberalism. The Times editors read her savage essay and considered it within the mainstream of commentary, whereas no responsible editor of any serious publication would have published the same kind of rhetoric wielded against people of color.

Rivers of blood … blood pact … gender traitors … defend their privilege to the death. 

This is the language of tribalism. This is blessed by elite liberal gatekeepers, as long as it is wielded by the Righteous Tribe, against the Deplorable Tribe.

Members of the Deplorable Tribe are fools if they fail to notice this, and to respond to it. And you’re a fool if you don’t recognize that you are part of the Deplorable Tribe whether you want to be or not.

I prefer not to be. I prefer to be part of the American tribe, judging people not on the basis of their reproductive organs or the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That’s the America I want to live in. It’s the America that people like Alexis Grenell and the editors of The New York Times want to end.

Useful to get that learned. These people are Jacobins.

UPDATE: I know what you’re going to say. Yes, of course, you can find left-wing crazies everywhere, and right-wing crazies too. What sets this Grenell column apart is that it appeared in The New York Times, the flagship publication of elite liberalism. It has the imprimatur of its editors. That is significant.

UPDATE.2: Good grief. Only Dostoevsky could do justice to these berserkers.

UPDATE.3: A French reader writes:

I know you are fond of Revolutionary analogies, but I think these people are best described as Stalinists – replace “gender” with “class” and Grenell’s is straight from Uncle Joe’s textbook. Modern feminism is very much like communism. Both ideologies have a lot in common. They rely on a similar black-and-white worldview that shuns reform and mandates instead a brutal reversal of existing social hierarchies in favour of the “oppressed” (the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” in one case, and the matriarchy in the other) They’re also all-encompassing systems that inform their followers’s “thinking” not just in the political area but the intellectual, artistic and even personal ones and no deviance can be tolerated. Being a communist or a feminist is being that all the way, just like being a Jet. As a result, both communists and feminists often sound like robots toeing the party line and whose opinions and reactions can be predicted with a high level of accuracy.

How comes this totalitarian mindset resurfaces now in an Anglosphere that so prided itself with being immune to it? Well, it’s all McCarthy’s fault – let me explain. McCarthyism crushed communist subversion in the States (and destroyed lots of innocent lives in the process) but it also made communists martyrs in the eyes of the American Left which thus kept regarding them as “members of the family”. That’s why even today Hollywood keeps lionizing the Ten and stubbornly refuses to make movies that deal with the horrors that happened in communist-led countries (their craving for China’s market doesn’t help either) The result of all that is that the Left hasn’t grown the antibodies that its Western counterparts did with more or less success. Also millenials (sorry to bash them again but they are the driving force behind this) are awfully ignorant of history except as a narrative of oppression. Their embrace of old-school socialism is a case in point: they honestly have no idea that Bernie and Corbyn’s ideas have been tested and have failed repeatedly in the last century and this. Since both movements seem to be converging I worry that Marx’s time may have come — alas — and that the Fall of the Berlin Wall was but an interlude.

So what are we to do? Honestly I don’t know and I’m glad to not be concerned yet. What you Americans would need is a third party that would give a home to moderate conservatives and moderate liberals that want nothing to do with either Trump or Grenell. The problem is, your stupid system doesn’t allow for that. I used to admire it but the recent events have demonstrated that it no longer works, that your institutions are useless at best and toxic at worst, and that your Constitution needs a thorough revision — that won’t happen since the Founders made it almost impossible.

God bless America. She will need it.

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