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Jan. 19, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
24:06
Warren's #MeToo Misfire
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Issue 2, Elizabeth Warren's Me Too misfire.
This past week, Elizabeth Warren leaked to the press that Bernie Sanders told her in private that a woman can't be president.
Bernie strongly denied it, and Warren's revolt against the patriarchy seems to have failed.
Bernie's supporters rallied behind him and Liz continued to dip in the polls.
Are the Bernie bros, the genuine left in the Democratic Party, getting woke to the Me Too movement and the whole sham of woke culture in general?
We discuss.
Alright, so a quick recap of the politics of this past week.
Elizabeth Warren has clearly peaked.
She was going up in the polls.
She's now flagging.
Bernie and Biden have both been consistently strong.
And Liz, from what I can see, was attempting some Me Too dirty tricks.
She first just tried to dance at rallies in order to demonstrate how relatable she was.
But then she went all in and claimed that...
Bernie Sanders, in private conversations that they had, Bernie Sanders claimed that a woman could not become president in the United States.
This was leaked to Politico.
It was clearly leaked either by her or a member of her staff.
And then it was brought up again in a CNN debate this past week.
Bernie strongly denied it.
He said that such a statement never happened.
And that there is clear evidence that he thinks a woman can become president.
So what are you saying?
The CNN moderator then proceeded to Elizabeth Warren and just assumed that she was true because, you know, is all true because, you know, believe all women and ask her, you know, what did you think when Bernie told you this?
You know, we can hammer out.
What we think about what actually happened to that conversation, I actually don't believe it at all.
I think Bernie is telling the truth.
But I think it's, and if he said anything related to a woman not becoming president, I imagine he said something like, you know, if you're running in 2020 against Trump, it's going to be very difficult as a woman.
Take it from me.
So I can imagine him saying something like that, which is, of course, entirely accurate and non-offensive in the slightest.
But I don't think he's a crypto-misogynist, crypto-patriarchalist or whatever.
But I think it is very interesting, and I'll go to you first, Tyler, that Bernie didn't cuck.
And even though Bernie is...
A get-along type person.
He wants everyone to be united.
He doesn't want to get into fights.
He's always talking about my friend Joe Biden, who's terrible on most all issues, but he's a great guy.
He wants to get along with everyone, but whatever you want to say about him, he didn't cock to Elizabeth Warren, and he had a big fundraising bonanza immediately after the debate, and he has gone up in the polls.
It's just one poll, but Clearly, he is not devastated, destroyed by these accusations, a la Bill O 'Reilly or Harvey Weinstein or so on.
And so, I would just put it to you.
Is Me Too, has it peaked?
Is it over?
Is Bernie the one who killed it?
Well, I certainly agree that I don't think Elizabeth Warren was telling the truth.
She's not exactly someone I would...
Look, too, for honesty.
So that's my first reaction to that when that came out.
But I do think there's a certain peak for the Me Too movement in the sense that when the Me Too movement was at its height, there's always a sort of cynicism behind it.
You're talking about Hollywood actresses speaking out against abuse.
Of course, there was also a lot of legit cases that came out of that, like the abuse in Hollywood and child actors speaking out, which is certainly, I think, important.
But there was a clear contradiction in the sense that you had these actresses speaking about the Me Too movement while supporting someone like Roman Polonski, right?
So what it always seemed to me was more of a certain flash-in-the-pan power play at the time, which preys on everyone's senses.
But at the end of the day, it was more of a power move and assertion of a certain social message that they wanted to push.
And I think that's certainly reaching its peak now in the fact that Bernie, this didn't harm Bernie at all.
Like you said, it shot him up in the polls.
And so I think that that cynical play is certainly coming to an end.
That's my initial reaction to that.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a silver bullet and this believe all women, which is ridiculous on its face.
I mean, it's ridiculous just from a liberal standpoint, even.
I mean, the fact is the liberal view is presumption of innocence.
Let's investigate this claim.
Some people lie.
Memory can be fallible.
There's two sides or many sides to any issue.
But in...
2017 and 2018, the Believe All Women became a kind of silver bullet.
If you decided that that affair you had with your boss, maybe years later, was something that involved harassment or a power move or whatever, you could just destroy him instantly with a tweet.
And I agree.
I think there was almost a kind of necessary backlash to that.
And Bernie, who's this guy who's kind of...
I mean, he's a retro leftist in his way.
He's conservative, you could say.
I mean, he's a social democrat from another era.
Just kind of doesn't really go along with the wokeness.
And I think it's also interesting because there's some clear power divisions within the left.
Involving the woke crowd, neoliberals, and then the socialists.
Whatever you want to say about Bernie and the realistic possibility of him implementing Medicare for All and a huge wealth tax and billionaires will become illegal.
Whether you think he can do all that, I think he would run into huge problems if he were elected.
He is a threat to an elite.
He is a real threat in a way that Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren is not.
And so there's this interesting power dynamic where the neoliberals and the establishment have embraced wokeness and used it against an actual genuine socialist.
And I think it's actually a positive thing.
I think all of these claims about the Bernie bros being...
I think this is interesting in the sense that they actually push back against neoliberals, and they are starting to view wokeness for what it is.
It's an ideology of capitalism.
It's a false version of the left that's not revolutionary at all.
It's about kind of maintaining the current order, but putting women there.
And they're actually fighting against it.
And I've seen a kind of, like, awakening, I mean, it's funny to use that word, but among genuine leftists with this issue that is actually quite, you know, refreshing.
Yes, I think I would agree.
I mean, first of all, with Elizabeth Warren, she's the person that said she was Native American, didn't she, on an application form, despite the fact that she has a very, very limited amount of Native American ancestry.
I literally have more Native American ancestry than she does.
I am, like, less than 1%, but I have some Mongolian heritage.
I used to play cowboys and Indians when I was a child, so I think I have more claims of Native American ancestry than she does.
So she's not a person that one would associate with being honest.
Secondly, there was a study in 2011 by Jewhurst et al., which found that all else being equal, women are more likely to generate false memories than men.
So all else being equal, all else is not equal, but were all else being equal, I would believe Bernie for that reason as well.
Thirdly, even if Bernie...
Did say what he is supposed to have said.
I'm sure, as you say, it was said in a certain context, and she's reading it out of context due to her dishonesty and propensity for false memories.
And also, he may well be right, and so I don't think anybody should be penalised for saying something that's empirically accurate.
In addition, yes, it may well be the case.
Whenever you get some extremist...
Movement like this, and it goes far too far.
Like transsexuality, that movement, there is now a pushback against that.
Even in Britain the other night on Question Time, there was some plastic-faced...
Left-wing academic who was accusing an actor who was on the panel of being racist.
And he said, you're a privileged white man.
And he said, I can't help the fact that I'm white.
You're being racist.
You're racist.
And there was this applause.
So there is, I think, some kind of gradual pushback even against that.
And you would expect a pushback against the Me Too movement because it's so ludicrous.
We know that females make false rape allegations and it damages men's lives.
We know the idea that you should just believe women is...
Absolutely nonsense.
A good example of this was with that judge who they appointed, and there was this hysteria at all these women remembering things from a long time ago as being harassment or whatever.
I forget, it was a Supreme Court judge or something, what his name was.
So, yeah, I would think that hopefully there is a movement against...
I mean, I don't think that...
Clearly, Elizabeth Warren is not going to become President of the United States.
That's not simply because she's a woman.
But it's maybe partly because she's a woman, but it's also because of the nature of her.
She's unattractive both physically and psychologically, and I think it's very improbable that she'd be elected.
Hopefully.
Yeah, I mean, the woke left versus the socialist left, or if you want to call it the neoliberal left versus the genuine socialist left, I think the woke left has this assumption that The reason that we see so many antagonisms come from capitalism is because the wrong people are in charge, right?
They just want more people to be drawn up into positions of power.
They want it to reflect themselves.
They want what they buy and consume to reflect themselves.
And all this ends up doing is instead of making a change in the system, it just provides band-aid solutions that ultimately are a part of the system.
They're a part of capitalism's eroding process.
And they create these multiplicity of identities which are purchased on the market.
And you create this identity, whether that be trans or female empowerment or whatever have you.
And there's a genuine pushback from the socialists left against this because they see this identity proliferation as stemming out of the antagonisms from capitalism itself.
Now, they do take a more materialist bent, which I don't quite agree with.
But regardless, there is a lot of antagonism coming to the forefront between these two groups, which are they make uneasy allies.
You see a lot of tension.
Just follow Amy Therese's Twitter feed and you'll see it in real time.
I think if Bernie wants to make an impact, he's going to have to keep pushing.
The message he's pushing and not cock like he did in 2016.
And he has to recognize the antagonism.
Because remember, so many of these cultural forces were not coming from government.
The conservatives always want to see, and understandably, historically speaking, want to see all these social, cultural innovations as being forced upon them by government.
Integration of schools was done at...
The point of a bayonet, etc.
But a lot of these things are actually coming from the culture and coming from corporate capitalism itself and government is actually following behind now.
I mean, the gay marriage issue, which is now passé at this point, but was quite big 10 years ago, that was...
You know, accepted and promoted by Google and Apple and Microsoft and Goldman Sachs long before Barack Obama came out in favor of gay marriage.
He was eight years behind the game and just following along.
And so, yeah, I mean, to put on a Marxist cap here, there's this way that the corporation, which are accumulating billions of dollars and attempting to sell an iPad to the world, We'll basically say, oh, look, see, we're not the bad guys here.
Forget about those sweatshops and forget about income inequality and forget about etc.
Remember, we accept transgendered employees.
We're leftist, effectively.
You can't criticize us.
And the wokeness just becomes this mask on capitalism and accumulation.
And I do think that...
The Bernie bro type does get this.
He might not articulate it like we do, but he does get it.
At some point, Bernie is going to have to address this.
I mean, Bernie will address this in a...
Friendly manner, basically saying, it doesn't matter what color you are, what gender you are.
It's all about, are you on the side of working people?
And that, you know, fair enough.
But I think at some point, he is going to, he is already running up against this buzzsaw of wokeness, of people who fear him legitimately and want to destroy him.
And he's going to, if he's going to actually have a movement that has an impact.
He's going to have to face down the dragon and say, actually, all this wokeness is bullshit.
It's a trick used by corporations to pretend like they're left wing, and we need to oppose it and engage in class politics.
Yes, can I just add, it's virtue signaling, and that's all these people that you were talking about that are altering the demographics or the voting patterns of Virginia.
Are exactly that.
They are wealthy people who signal their virtue, but really they are wealthy people.
And they want to be wealthy and they like being wealthy and they see themselves as superior to people that are less educated than them, less refined than them.
They look down on them.
They look down on them.
They hate working class people.
They hate working people.
Same in Britain.
Working people, these people that live in the North and vote for Brexit and whatever.
They live in the southern states and they vote for Trump.
They're considered to be absolute scum.
But they signal their virtue in relation to poor people who they don't really care about.
Really, they like poor people who aren't of their race, which is interesting.
It's interesting because there's evidence that you are less able to – you are less – often in some ways you are less disgusted by people of a different race because you are less good at reading signals of poor health in people of a different race than in your own race.
So there's a sense in which you will be less disgusted by a poor Indian person than a poor white person because the poor white person all reads these subtle statements.
Unlike Elizabeth Warren, who's...
Either fake with the wokeness or has a kind of middle class background.
Whenever she's gone after power, she goes after it in this kind of fake, maybe naive way.
It's like she'll yell at Wall Street while she's enacting a bailout for them.
She'll talk about reforming the kind of retail end of finance.
I'm not really a leftist, but I kind of respect someone.
He goes after the dragon, you know, and doesn't, you know, beat around the bush here and there, you know, who's going after things that aren't powerful, which is, you know, like the white working class.
So I think Bernie is genuine.
I think he's, again, due to his age, maybe to a large extent, he's just outmoded.
He's kind of a he's like a mainstream social democrat from Germany in the 1970s or something.
We need a social security system.
I mean, these are the kind of things that were...
Created in the 19th century by Bismarck and people like that, and he's now bringing them to America.
I don't think he quite gets the level of cultural virtue-signaling toxicity that defines the left now.
But if he's going to win, he's going to have to face it at some point.
Also, I would add, as Tattoo Vaden's research has indicated, the more genetically...
The more diverse a society is, the more difficult it is to have social goods, such as a welfare state.
It's because people don't trust each other, and it's not passing on their genes.
That's why I don't see...
It could work at a state level.
I mean, I could see how the state of Maine, or somewhere like that, presumably they're trying to make more diverse, just because it isn't, could sustain something like that.
But it would be very, very difficult in somewhere like...
New York City or whatever.
Look, I spent a lot of time in Germany 10 or 15 years ago.
Being in the subway system of Munich or something, I don't know the right analogy to have for it.
It was clean.
Everyone was reasonable.
You know, maybe a drunk person here and there, but it was safe.
It was like living in the future.
I have a friend who lives in New York, and we holiday together in Northern Ireland.
Oh, yeah.
And I'm talking about Belfast as well, so the biggest city, and he just couldn't believe it because everybody's white.
The New York subway, I mean, I've used it, but it is insane.
I mean, there's just vomit on the seat.
No one's talking to each other.
There's a crazy person in the corner yelling at people or yelling at no one in particular.
I mean, it feels...
I'm not exaggerating.
It is a bizarre journey you take into the underworld, you know, This is why we can't have nice things.
Because in the country, we hate each other.
And therefore, we can't create these just basic infrastructures.
I agree with so much of what Bernie wants.
I think he wants...
Why don't we have a light rail system that connects all these cities?
Why don't we have public transportation?
Why don't we have a healthcare system that is affordable and isn't bankrupting half the population and where we're not spending twice as much as they spend in France?
These are all completely reasonable things to say.
He is not a radical.
But it's like the reason we can't have nice things is because of multiculturalism and the fact that we all hate each other.
Which is very sad.
Yeah, there's a classicism that Bernie has to go up against as well.
And the Bernie bros is there's a classicism within the woke left that manifests in certain ways when they try to construct, say, a capitalism with a human face that attempts to deal with the excesses created by global capitalism.
So, for example, you see woke left solutions to environmental problems.
So one thing they'll do is say, okay, well, we need to return to organic, fair trade, food.
Cleanly erased.
So what ends up happening is it creates these products that you can purchase and you can clean your conscience of it.
Because you purchased it organic, you purchased it fair trade, you supported some poor worker somewhere.
But at the same time, you're creating a class system within your own state and within your own nation in which the people, the only very few amount of people is going to be able to afford this kind of.
This kind of luxury of saying, okay, I did the right thing.
I purchased the fair trade food.
You know, my conscience is clean.
Capitalism can go on and more as it needs to do.
And so there's this antagonism between the classism that creates between people that can afford that, people that can't, and then you have another.
And you have the moral antagonism between the one group saying, oh, well, why did you purchase this?
You're supporting this corporation over this one.
You're supporting this capitalist over that one.
And then you have the further antagonism and the fact that capitalism just morphs to include resistance into itself and becomes a part of its structure.
And I think the birdie and the birdie bros are going to have to tackle that sort of classism and ability for capitalism to metastasize and take within itself its own antagonism.
It's a bit like purchasing indulgences, isn't it?
In the Catholic.
It's like, oh, I went and bought some organic food.
I feel better now, even though I do nothing positive for the world, but I bought some organic food.
It's like indulgences.
Yeah, it is, exactly.
I mean, it's like we've...
Due to the left, we've kind of had a certain guilt of, you know, getting a Starbucks.
You know, this is frivolous expenditure.
There are people starving in Africa right now, and you're drinking a macchiato in New York City.
How dare you?
But then you purchase a fair trade Starbucks, and you think, oh, look, I'm actually helping the Africans by doing this.
You know, I'm actually better than you are.
I'm engaging in activism.
It's having your cake and eating it too, which is what capitalism is brilliant at.
Capitalism can absorb all of these energies.
It can absorb the left quite easily.
It can absorb its own contradiction and enemy and sell you that, which is brilliant and amazing.
Yes, well, when we engage in it, though, when we do the things that they want us to do, we're guilty about our carbon footprint or whatever it is.
We're giving the power over our minds.
That's why it has to be the attitude of Jonathan Bowden, of just, we're not sorry.
We're not sorry.
I'm not going to recycle.
I'm not going to recycle.
I'm not going to do any of the things that you want to put it.
It was perfectly acceptable to put it in one big bag in 1985.
Why isn't it now?
You people in power were telling me to do that in 85. Why not?
I'm not sorry.
Don't be sorry.
Get on with it.
Well, you should recycle that.
No!
Yeah, you should.
As Mr. Burns said, if Mother Nature wants us to look after her, why did she send us storms and hurricanes?
I mean, come on.
All right.
All right.
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