The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Left’s Make-Believe Victimhood

Posted on | February 13, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Does everyone remember “TrigglyPuff,” the obnoxious feminist who repeatedly disrupted a 2016 event at the University of Massachusetts? While claiming to be a victim of oppression, Cora Segal was attending elite private Hampshire College ($63,512 a year, including room and board) and is, in fact, the daughter of a Harvard professor. Her sole claim to victimhood is her evident inability to say “no” to second helpings.

The phenomenon of privileged young people claiming to be oppressed by social injustice is a product of what Robert Hughes called the Culture of Complaint, “in which seemingly everyone claims victim status.” Since the election of President Trump, liberals have ludicrously compared Trump to Hitler, claiming that America is now a “fascist regime.” The absurdity of these claims is apparent to anyone with two eyes and a brain, so why do liberals keep playing this make-believe game?

The left is playing at being oppressed and being brave resisters because they know they aren’t. They know they’re not in any way threatened, even if they’d probably rather die than admit it to themselves. They know they can go around sloganeering and screaming and calling a freely elected president a tyrant and the equivalent of Hitler, and no one will do anything. People won’t even be rude to them. They certainly won’t be as rude to them as they’d be to anyone who so much as dares to express a conservative opinion in liberal circles.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) What these spurious claims of oppression do is to justify the Left’s efforts to deprive their opponents of freedom of speech. Feminists are absolutely the worst in this regard. As I have said, feminism is a synonym for “shut up”:

A major goal of feminism is to silence opposition. Because their ideology cannot withstand informed and articulate criticism, feminists therefore require a dishonest vocabulary of jargon that functions to disqualify and discredit their opponents. A man expressing disagreement with a feminist will invariably be accused of “sexism” or “misogyny,” and if he persists in his criticism, he will be accused of “harassment.” . . .
Feminists have used this kind of dishonest rhetoric for so long that it is seldom recognized as what it is, a propaganda tactic of psychological warfare.

Feminism is always a lecture, never a debate. Accusations of “harassment” are automatic as soon as anyone tries to engage a feminist in debate. However, when a feminist like “TrigglyPuff” deliberately disrupts a conservative event, this is justified as a protest against sexism, so that the claim of oppressed victimhood — the premise of the feminist syllogism — always serves the same rhetorical function: “Shut up!”

You might think that’s just a joke, but fat feminism is a real thing:

So-called “fat-positive feminism” is a movement that “addresses how misogyny and sexism intersect with sizism and anti-fat bias.” While feminists blame “anti-fat bias” on male supremacy, the health risks of obesity are serious, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): “Obesity is a national epidemic and a major contributor to some of the leading causes of death in the U.S., including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer.”
Obesity is such a serious problem among lesbians that the National Institutes for Health funded a $3 million study to determine why “nearly three-quarters of lesbians are overweight or obese.”
When that study made headlines in September 2014, Mari Brighe wrote at the lesbian blog Autostraddle that lesbians “tend to be less critical of their bodies than straight women,” because they don’t “suffer the incessant, unreasonable pressure of the male gaze.”

Their victimhood is tautological, both the first premise and the conclusion of their circular argument, and there is thus no hope of persuading a feminist that she is not a victim. Her cult mentality — her fanatical devotion to “social justice” ideology — makes her incapable of comprehending such a possibility. By obverse implication, if you are male (particularly if you are a heterosexual white man) the feminist automatically categorizes you as “privileged,” and deserving of hatred as a perpetrator of oppression. Feminists hate all males. Your mere existence as male is sufficient to condemn you, according to feminist ideology.

You see, then, that the feminist’s claim of victimhood is necessary to justify her hatred of the demonized male enemy. Feminists treat men — yes, all men — as scapegoats, to be blamed for everything.

Donald Trump is a perfect symbol to such people, and it doesn’t matter what he actually does (or doesn’t do), they will continue to demonize him, because they have a psychological need for a scapegoat.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

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One Response to “The Left’s Make-Believe Victimhood”

  1. If All You See… » Pirate's Cove
    February 16th, 2018 @ 2:00 pm

    […] notice till late (was out on the links), a second blog of the day is The Other McCain, with a post on the Left’s make believe victimhood. Madison Chock is below the […]