@futurebird

Yes, of course she was. And so are AOC and Turner. And that was intentional, or at least opportunistic, on their part. They are willing victims.

Look, this deserves a much more thorough response than I can put together on the fly, but there’s more going on here than the surface level. I can try to summarize, but it’s not going to be a full-fledged argument; maybe I need to write up a blog post on this.

Briefly, the far left is extremely cynical about systemic bigotry. On the one hand, their Marxist class reductionism teaches them that it can safely be ignored because it’s just economic anxiety and will magically go away as soon as they finish eating the rich.

This trickle-down approach makes them, at minimum, anti-anti-racist, but there’s also quite a bit of active bigotry in there, with antisemitism and misogyny perhaps the most visible.

On the other hand, their cynicism allows them to make use of purely descriptive representation as a way to immunize themselves from accurate accusations about this topic.

Bluntly, they run skinfolk so that they can play the “I can’t be bigoted because I’m a minority myself” card as well as the “Any criticism of me stems from bigotry” one.

The former is an obvious lie, while the latter is also false but muddled by the fact that there is definitely bigotry involved in the R’s attacks.

However, as I alluded to earlier, these attacks are desired and baited. It makes them seem sympathetic and gets people who ought to know better to rush to their defense.

Anyhow, this is getting long, and I don’t have enough space in this margin for a full proof, so this will have to be my answer for now.

The bottom line is that Twitter has turned into a cesspool for performative culture war combat, and there are no heroes in this. The people attacking Turner are bigoted trash and so is she. I say let them rot.

#politics #uspol