Conservatives are Wretched, Snivelling, Woke Little Crybabies
And it’s neoliberalism all the way down
Look at this pitiful shit. PostMedia “journalist” Geoff Russ – who is paid by American oligarchs to write clucking propaganda for the kind of aggrieved Costco-Canadians who think bike paths are a Marxist plot – thinks universities should be defunded so that 18 year olds can’t say things that might upset people:
The article starts,
An ‘Anti-Canada Day’ barbeque and fundraiser will be hosted in Montreal on July 1 by the McGill students’ union, a group called the ‘Palestinian Feminist Collective’, and other equally worthy student activist groups. They form one of many cancerous cells of post-secondary students who spend most of their energy trying to undermine and demoralize everyone around them. To McGill’s credit, it moved to cut ties with the students’ union in April after it helped to lead a storming of the campus to protest the Israeli government and western support for it. Nevertheless, academia has much to answer for after spending years fostering this toxic political climate.
This petulant little bitch, who can’t handle a fucking barbecue organized by some teenagers because it’s ‘demoralizing’, has, along with the rest of his craven conservative ilk, pivoted from solemnly declaring war on ‘woke’ to espousing the maximalist ‘woke’ identitarian position that people should be institutionally and possibly legally silenced for causing offence, speaking out of turn, or saying things one doesn’t like about one’s favourite ethnicity. In beating a full retreat into tearful censoriousness the instant they are offended by anyone’s views, these brave free speech warriors remind us all that being a preposterous coward has always been the true domain of the right wing, and that the liberal interest in such things over the past decade has really been a form of cultural appropriation of a proud conservative tradition.
Russ continues,
Universities are packed with derision and outright slander for those who make higher education possible. Businessmen are portrayed as greedy, exploitative capitalists, while blue-collar labourers are portrayed as akin to racist zoo animals that must be studied as such. Those same people help ensure that public university tuition in Canada is generously affordable by covering the lion’s share of the costs through taxpayer subsidies.
Several of the words in this passage are links to ‘evidence’ that ‘universities’ are hives of Marxist villainy. Two of them are ridiculous: the word ‘capitalists’ links to a three sentence blurb on the UBC website about an Associate Professor in geography who studies ‘Black dispossession under capitalism and the resistance Black communities have put up in response’. Chilling! The word ‘racist’ links to a PDF of the introduction to Volume 7, Number 2 of the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, which is boilerplate critical race theory stuff from 2020 about ‘white rage’.
The funniest link, though, is attached to the word ‘exploitative’. This links to Chapter 12, entitled ‘We Must Abolish Capitalism’, of The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success by Mark Jaccard, a Canadian economist. Hilariously, Russ didn’t bother reading past the title because he is a fucking joke and a hack. If he had, he would have noticed that the subtitle of the book is Overcoming Myths That Hinder Progress. The chapter is about how Naomi Klein’s idea that we need to abolish capitalism in order to fight climate change is a myth and why it is not necessary to abolish capitalism. The author is a pro-capitalist liberal who thinks that Naomi Klein is too radical. Even for the National Post, this oversight is fucking embarrassing.
Ironically, the article in the critical race theory journal actually gets at one of the things that is definitely going on in Russ’s piece. The article is written in the overstated, hyper-identitarian and somewhat hysterical manner typical of lefty academics, but it’s not wrong when it points out that in North America, reactionary anger is often organized through “a defence against – rather than a commitment to – class politics” (p. viii)1. Russ is doing this classic delusional right-wing sleight of hand where ‘businessmen and blue-collar labourers’ are set up as one group in opposition to another group made up of ?????school?????. Class politics is thereby not just obscured, it’s put into an industrial blender, extruded in disgusting wobbly tubes, and sold back to us as mechanically-separated, finely-textured class product. In this conservative pink slime version of the world, capitalists and Real Workers2 pay for everything, while frivolous Palestinian feminists set money on fire and spit on white factory workers or whatever.
This favourite trick of right-wing psychos serves to reinforce the completely hegemonic idea that the people who own absolutely everything and hate normal people and think of us as bugs somehow have the same worldview and material interests as white guys who operate forklifts. It also of course reinforces the remarkably resilient idea that working people are all white guys who operate forklifts. In reality, obviously, the working class is disproportionately female and nonwhite, is in large part made up of service workers, and obviously has interests which are diametrically opposed to Geoff Russ’s billionaire bosses. Don’t get me wrong, lots of working people are indeed white guys who operate forklifts, and they deserve a worker’s party and worker democracy and to watch the Liberal cabinet be jailed for crimes against the population just like everybody else. But this attempt to rhetorically create a cross-class alliance between capitalists and the people they boss around, disrespect and exploit all day long, on the basis that both capitalists and workers ‘have to pay for’ teenagers having edgey barbeques at McGill, is ludicrous.
Gurgling dork Geoff Russ rambles on, calling Frantz Fanon a ‘bloodthirsty militant’, and brutally misunderstanding the point of his writing. He calls colonizers ‘so-called colonizers’, apparently in the belief that colonization was not a real thing? And of course he hysterically whines about ‘anti-Israel mobs’, ie people taking a stand against one of the most sickening episodes of mass violence against civilians in modern history. This last obsession is the real focus of the ‘woke right’, with conservatives across the continent clutching their skirts and fainting theatrically at the prospect of being offended by people wearing keffiyehs. These fucking losers, lips quivering and eyes brimming with tears, are totally unable to handle the concept of students who think it’s wrong to maintain a close alliance with a country which commits psychotic war crimes every four hours. People who spent the last decade huffing and puffing about freedom of speech now demand that someone protect their delicate ears from having to hear words they don’t like, and retreat into accusations of anti-Semitic racism that are such a wild reach they would make the most shameless liberal race-hustlers positively blush. This flagrant hypocrisy would be deeply funny if it wasn't so worrying to watch.
But it doesn’t end there. True to his conservative-goblin credentials, Russ finishes up by floating the fun idea of a little privatization, as a treat. He writes,
Instead of continuing to fund the cultural, social and political disintegration of the country, Canadians should demand true reform as part of a renewed social contract. This includes a debate on how public universities are funded and how the money is spent.
I’m sure that his evil bloodsucking bosses would love a little debate on how public universities are funded, considering that people from their class invariably prefer absolutely everything to be privatized. When things are privatized they can be bought. Normal people and ‘blue-collar labourers’ don’t have enough money to buy universities but rich people do. Not only do they have enough money, they actually materially need more stuff to invest their money in. One of the main economic motivations for the colonialism and imperialism that Russ doesn’t believe in was specifically that once capitalists in a given country have invested in everything there is to invest in, they need additional places to invest their capital so that it can continue to grow, and if there’s nowhere left at home, you go get yourself some colonies to do it in. Privatization is a continuation of the same logic. The class of ‘people’ that Russ works for want all our hospitals, schools, housing and everything else to be privatized so that they can own even more of our common institutions, extract our wages from us in even more ways, and, of course, pay less taxes.
This is the simple reason why the bitching and moaning of the elites and their propagandists – on either side of the liberal-conservative split – so often ends with a pitch for disgusting rich people being allowed to own more of our shit. You dress it up with some culture war nonsense about how nobody should be allowed to offend you and throw in some securitarian scare-mongering about Islamist terror-mobs or whatever your fear-flavour of choice is. You imply that the ‘good elites’ are on the side of the ‘good workers’ and the ‘bad elites’ are in league with the ‘bad workers’ and totally deny any possibility of the existence of real class politics or working-class solidarity generally. You say it’s ‘time for a change’ and that we need a ‘bold new vision’ and the bold new vision is just the relentless march of ice-cold neoliberalism. Contrary to the classless fairytale world of the National Post, we live in a class society ruled by an elite class. And at the end of the day, all this shit, this whole genre of article, is just a reflection of one fact that we should all be aware of: the elites cannot stand the idea of anything being off-limits to their capital, and fundamentally believe that their money entitles them to collect a profit off of absolutely everything, no matter what.
I drank three coffees writing this article. If you would like to buy one of them for me, considering clicking one of these buttons:
In the original, this reactionary anger is of course framed as ‘white rage’.
Both unsurprisingly male-coded and white-coded in this telling, with the capitalists called ‘businessmen’ and the workers struggling against accusations of white racism