Corporate 'feminists' are lumping in legitimate opposition to Democrat Vice President-elect Kamala Harris with an eruption of misogyny from the ‘Manosphere’. But it’s her indefensible policies that should really concern women.
The ‘Manosphere’ – an ecosystem of blogs, message boards and Discord channels populated by unabashed male chauvinists who believe women shouldn’t even be voting, let alone serving in office – is terrified by the prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the US’ first female president. So says Jezebel, at least – the bible of corporate feminists and identity politics enthusiasts with two X chromosomes.
Also on rt.com Happily ever after? Electing Biden won’t make protesters’ problems disappear, but it might make them even angrierThe idea that Joe Biden, who turns 78 on Friday and would be the nation’s oldest-ever president if inaugurated in January, will be pushed to the side (or suffer further mental and physical deterioration) and Harris given the reins is framed in last week’s article as “part of a paranoid fantasy about gynocentric ‘pinkout’ of ‘femoid’ political control,” a testosterone-addled fever dream.
Yet the possibility of Biden stepping aside to hand Harris control is hardly a conspiracy theory. In fact, it’s so mainstream it was floated by CNN in August, while Quartz wrote an entire article playing out the scenario earlier this month. Many other establishment pundits have made no secret of their desire to see the old white neoliberal centrist step aside so a comparatively young mixed-race neoliberal centrist can take his place, and the candidate herself has been caught in a Freudian slip referring to the coming “Harris-Biden administration.”
The Manosphere’s crime, then, is seeing ‘Kamala’s technocracy’, ushered in under the cover of a rapidly sundowning Biden, as a negative. While this faction of internet misogynists represents only a tiny sliver of Harris detractors, Jezebel’s pearl-clutching outburst is part of what is sure to be a multi-pronged effort to tar all opposition to a Harris presidency as an outgrowth of this woman-hating swamp, whose tentacles have somehow managed to infect even the hapless progressives who think they’re opposing Harris for her policies. Poor things! Radicalized and they don’t even know it!
Those policies, it must be said, merit fierce opposition. A Biden-Harris administration will have Americans locked down and masked up as soon as possible in the name of quashing Covid-19, even though the evidence that such draconian measures actually stop the spread of the novel coronavirus is flimsy at best (and one recent study suggested they actually make it worse). They have vowed to return to Barack Obama’s policy of supporting terrorists masquerading as ‘pro-democracy’ forces in Syria while continuing Trump’s execrable support for Israel’s human rights abuses.
Biden has vowed to veto Medicare for All, while Harris has promised to enact strict gun control laws – positions guaranteed to make the pair pariahs on both ends of the political spectrum.
Harris campaigned on her record as California Attorney General, a record riddled with prosecutorial misconduct, suppression of exonerating evidence, and outright sadism (how else would one describe the practice of locking up mothers whose children skip school?).
If anything, it’s her policies that are misogynist, not her detractors. She was so unpopular as a candidate, she dropped out before the primaries even started – yet we’re supposed to believe only woman-haters are disturbed by the idea she’ll be president someday?
This tired old tactic of using protected characteristics to deflect criticism from a loathsome candidate has been deployed by the Democratic Party for the last decade to varying degrees of success. In the eyes of the establishment, those who recoiled at 2016’s warmongering sociopath Hillary Clinton were motivated by misogyny, and voters who balked at Barack Obama’s ‘drone lives matter’ foreign policy were racist.
It’s an easy way to force weak-minded liberals back into line – and shame their stronger-minded ideological comrades who refuse to back away from their principles. That Jezebel and its ilk aren’t also hammering at Harris detractors for also being racist is testament to the low regard in which the black community holds her.
The notion that Harris represents the “sisterhood” and women must unite behind her against the bogeyman of internet misogyny is ludicrous given her record and the havoc she would wreak as commander-in-chief. She represents the worst kind of opportunism, a careerist whose ‘convictions’ (pun intended) change with the prevailing winds, who leveraged sex to get ahead in politics. Should Biden fall and Harris take over as president, it will be one small step forward for one woman, and a giant leap backward for womankind.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.