By David Futrelle
So what does it mean that two of the most prominent young alleged leftists are winning high praise from the performatively heterodox reactionary site Spiked?
Today Spiked published a puff piece interview with skidmarxists Amber A’Lee Frost and Anna Khachiyan, the former an irregular co-host of Crappo Chap House Chapo Trap House; the latter the co-host of the gleefully “edgy” Red Scare podcast. And it’s as bad as one might expect.
The problem isn’t just that these two — and the rest of the skidmarxist gang — are getting a big wet kiss from Spiked, but that they are happy to go along with the whole embarrassing spectacle.
Indeed, as if to prove her edgelord (edgelady?) bona fides up front, Khachiyan greets Spiked interviewer Fraser Myers with her version of the endlessly repeated alt-right joke “I identify as an attack helicopter.”
Among the most refreshing things about Frost and Khachiyan is that their politics are resolutely not woke. ‘You can tell people that I’m trans’, says Khachiyan, with characteristic irreverence, as Frost, Khachiyan and myself sit down to talk at Eastwood in the Lower East Side. ‘I’m not trans, but you can say that just for fun.’
Great. At a time when trans people face a huge and organized campaign of hate from the right and from transphobic pseudo-feminists, let’s just start off the interview with a half-assed transphobic joke.
Sounding more than a little like the faux-leftist version of the Honey Badger Brigade — the mostly female gang of antifeminists associated with hate site A Voice for Men — the two quickly throw feminism under the bus, with Frost dismissing it as little more than a female power trip fueled by whining. “[I]t’s, ‘Men are rude to me and they explain things to me,'” she tells Myers. Later she complains that, because of feminism, young “women today aren’t allowed to want a traditional relationship.”
As for #MeToo and sex positive feminists’ focus on sexual consent, well, the nicest thing the two can say about these things is that they’re nerdy.
“It’s because these people would rather negotiate sex than actually have it… They don’t want to take responsibility,” says Khachiyan. ‘That’s why nerds love this stuff’, says Frost. ‘It’s huge in Silicon Valley. They like games and rules. These are people who consider themselves leftists but probably don’t like anything about socialism except the gulags.”
What a sensible and reasonable reaction to … the idea that people shouldn’t be forced into sex.
And somehow this all relates. in their minds, with an inability to commit to relationships.
Khachiyan says ‘a lot of these people are tyrannical narcissists’. ‘They are noncommittal, incapable of tolerating conflict or taking consequences. So they would rather have a system like polyamory where you kick that can down the road.’ Frost adds that many millennials ‘think they can eliminate jealousy… But sometimes you’re going to have bad sex, sometimes you’re going to be jealous. It’s not the end of the world.’
The two pretend that their hostility towards feminism is based on their own much purer support of the working class.
‘I fundamentally think they are disgusted and horrified by working-class people’, says Khachiyan. ‘Real women don’t live up to the liberal-feminist pieties’, adds Frost. ‘And I think that’s very threatening for the uptight, white, overeducated, liberal women to be confronted with’, replies Khachiyan.
Meanwhile, Frost is part of a podcast that takes in more than $1.5 million annually from its Patreon and that is basically the Platonic ideal of Brooklyn hipsterism.
As for liberals trying to fight the literal fascist in the White House, Khachiyan trashes them as “nerds” — no, really — and dismisses their criticisms as little more than snobbery.
The problem with liberals, she says, is that “they can’t differentiate between their political critiques of Trump and their aesthetic critiques of him.” … It is not so much Trump’s policies that anger the liberals, but his brashness, his demeanour.
Never mind Trump’s racism. Never mind the literal children suffering and dying in concentration camps at the border. Never mind the rollback of basic rights for women and LGBTQ people. Liberals just don’t like his hair, or the way the guy talks.
The two are equally dismissive of Antifa, with Khachiyan declaring that
All these people who say they are anti-fascist don’t know what it means to be persecuted.
Myers ends the post with a paean to the two and their “dirtbag leftism.” (Er, I may be a little biased here but I believe that the correct term is “skidmarxists.”)
Voices like these, challenging woke orthodoxy and standing up for traditional left values, are needed now more than ever. Here’s to the dirtbags.
When you’re getting that sort of praise from reactionary publications like Spiked, how much of a leftist can you really be?
The answer is none. None leftist.
It would be one thing if these two were just some aberration, just two weird reactionary mutant frogs in an otherwise healthy leftist gene pool. But there are a lot of other skidmarxists out there — from Twitter bomb-thrower Aimee Terese to “independent journalist” and regular Tucker Carlson guest Michael Tracey. They’ve even got their own subreddit, r/StupIDpol, with more than 13 thousand subscribers.
So we’re going to be dealing with this bullshit for some time. What joy.
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@Weirwood Treehugger
I agree. I find it really annoying when people (usually people on the far left) try to draw some weird distinction between leftism and liberalism.
I don’t know what it’s like to be persecuted… and I’d rather not find out, thank you very much, so how about we stop the fascists before they’re in a position to persecute more people?
Sure, it would have been much better to stop them earlier, but just because we missed that bridge doesn’t mean we have to miss them all.
@Katamount
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it is my understanding that most of the biggest failures of Obama’s administrations were due to his need to kiss the GOP’s asses in order to not get the ACA immediately shot down (and really, to do almost anything else that he wanted Congress to not immediately block)- though in the case of the drones, I assume that he didn’t want to seem like the US had “lost” the Iraq war while still trying to decrease US casualties. Even if he wasn’t explicitly thinking about his image, the sunk cost fallacy had to be playing some kind of role.
In any case, his administration at its worst is still preferable to Trump’s at its “best”.
Also, I wouldn’t say their thinking is “class-first”, as that would imply that class isn’t the only thing are discriminated by. For them, race and gender discrimination is just a minor diversion from the great class struggle which is supposed to magically resolve all other forms of discrimination following the success of The Revolution.
The fact that nothing has ever worked like that is of no concern to them, of course, and any suggestion to the contrary gets you labeled as bourgeois.
Spiked is itself a Skidmarxist publication; it’s the continuation of another website called Living Marxism. Which was a right-wing, anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist publication that claimed to be communist. LM went out of business after losing a libel case related to LM’s denial of genocide in Bosnia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Marxism
Spiked is now funded by the Charles Koch foundation.
Boo transphobia.
@Bakunin:
It’s hilarious and very spot-on. I bought her “Talking with Bigots” collection a while back to give a little support, and exchanged some tweets with her back when I was on Twitter. She comes across as a really nice person; I honestly don’t know how she (or, indeed, anyone trans) puts up with the trolls.
Some O/T linkage: Rebecca Watson from Skepchick has just put up a video about those brain supplements a lot of the alt-right, alt-right-adjacent, and outright conspiracy-mongers like to shill on their sites… surprise, surprise, they’re useless.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mQZ_C8_ZAzY
The affectation for “noötropics” among those who regard themselves as Really Smart™ reminds me of this glossary of tech-bro jargon recently published by The Guardian; specially, the bit about “micro-dosing”:
?
I’m another long time Chapo listener and I tend to skip any episodes that are Amber heavy just due to her increasing dumb hot takes on any given issue.
From listening to her on Chapo and from reading her writing it’s fairly obvious that she has staked her entire political outlook and personality on being as contrarian as possible. That is probably what drew her to the left in the first place, considering she comes from small town Indiana. Now being a leftist is popular (particularly at the Brooklyn parties she goes to) so she needs a new shtick to be different from all the other girls. Throw in generous cocaine use as well, and it explains why a so called Marxist would give an interview in a Koch funded rag.
De-lurking just to say that, while I like Chapo Trap House, Amber is the worst one on the podcast. She’s an elitist, class reductionist. Red Scare is utter garbage, they’re just “I’m not like other girls” misogynists and they hardly ever seem to talk about socialism or communism. There are many superior leftist podcasts to choose from. I reccomend Delete Your Account.
I have absolutely seen liberals who seem more upset with how Trump talks than what he says, particularly when they go on to praise John McCain or other Republicans who support most of what Trump is doing. I’m sure that they have negative views of Trump’s actions as well, but it seems like they only have a surface understanding of what’s going on.
That said, fuck dirtbags. They’re an embarrassment.
@Anonymous
No republicans voted for the ACA and they have non-stop tried to get rid of it for years, so the excuse of “Obama had to do bad stuff to get Republicans on his side” is pretty empty.
David didn’t mention the part of the interview where Khachiyan claims Lena Dunham’s hysterectomy due to endometriosis was a “fake illness” she “cooked up.” Frost then claims that lots of American women are removing their reproductive organs because of “menstrual problems.” Because people casually decide to go through major surgery, and doctors are more than willing to do such surgery
@Betrayer
I wouldn’t say “get them on his side” so much as “have them attack him slightly less often”. Keep in mind that a lot of centrist Democrats also get twitchy about anything that seems overly “socialist” too, and not just because they want the corporations’ donations.
Although let’s be honest, that is a pretty big part of it. The other part is lingering Commie-phobia that should have died off with the Cold War.
I mean, I don’t know. I certainly see what you’re saying here, but at the same time I think this perspective can lead to weird kind of “no true Scotsman” situation.
To take an extreme example, what if a voter wants government-funded single-payer healthcare, universal basic income, and expansive safety net/welfare programs… but only for white people? (Some of the really extreme European “blood and soil” movements are kind of like this, though they’re a little more circumspect in their language.) As odious as that person would be, I think it would be most accurate to think of them as a fiscal liberal who is racist – not that they are in some way “really” fiscally conservative.
What I think you could argue (what I personally would argue) is that the stated goals of leftism as an ideology – broadly speaking, human equality, which is taken as the highest social good – cannot be achieved without a commitment to to both economic and social issues to at least some degree. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who supports a liberal policy, or a series of liberal policies, or even a whole liberal platform, necessarily subscribes to philosophical liberalism.
“They are noncommittal, incapable of tolerating conflict or taking consequences. So they would rather have a system like polyamory where you kick that can down the road.”
That’s…not inherently a political issue for these people to worry about. It is actually no one’s business except those people in those relationships’ business.
(Everything is political, but you know what I mean.)
Also, “traditional left”… that’s literally the opposite of how leftism is supposed to work. The political theory is like…supposed to evolve and grow and *change.* Embracing radical [political and social] change is literally supposed to be part of the thing.
@ Aaron
The end result of what the “racist liberals” in your example want would be a shifting of hierarchies toward their racist preferences, which is ultimately a right-wing stance. Helping the poor because you think the wrong people are poor isn’t really the same thing as helping the poor because you think people just shouldn’t be poor. A left-wing stance would work toward weakening hierarchies or abolishing them altogether.
I mean, it can be hard to determine what people believe based on what they purport to believe. Right-wingers and left-wingers often use the same terminology and phrasing toward very different ends, but that doesn’t actually say anything about the similarity of those ends. Usually it’s because right-wingers are not a creative bunch and have to steal all their ideas from left-wingers before warping them to their liking.
I think it’s much more useful to label beliefs based on who people end up allying with or even tolerating. In that framework, the social/fiscal divide doesn’t really exist. People do sometimes claim to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative, but I think a lot of that has to do with a misunderstanding of what conservatism is. There’s been a lot of investment into characterizing conservatism as simply being about budget mindfulness when it’s never been about that, and of course it’s never been about that, because what to fund depends on what you think is important to fund, which is highly subjective and the whole point of what the social political axis is supposed to be.
@M K:
I think that’s the point. They still want to believe it’s 1917 and none of the things that the Soviet Union (or China or Cuba or Cambodia or any of the others) did have happened.
Also, endometriosis is a “fake illness”? Endometriosis sufferer here, and I’m sure I’m not the only one on this site. Fuck you, Frost, you obviously have no idea what it’s like having your uterus attack all your other organs. You can go straight to hell.
An Impish Pepper: you’re trying too hard to fit all of politics on a single line.
People have strong feelings about policy, and they are often contradictory. With your definition of left-wing, if you then give an equivalent definition of right-wing, you’d end up with a lot of unclassifiable people. Or you’ll define the vast majority of people as right-wing.
doomcup: in the US, liberal and left-wing are generally synonymous. In Australia they’re antonyms. “Words have meaning” sure, but the meaning depends on context.
Similar concept: how does a republican view the relationship between religion and the state? In the US and France they will have precisely opposite views.
Oh, but why stop there? There are so many other great pull-quotes.
(Apparently Democrats needed to have more discussions about how to win back the white working class in the midwest.)
(If you don’t like being harassed, you’re “frigid.”)
People keep telling me how great Chapo Trap House and the “dirtbags” are, and how they’re the real left, not like those corporate Democrats, but if this is the caliber of person they have on there…
Liberal is often used as a synonym for leftist in the US because the US hasn’t had a political left in generations, and the right demonises the slightest nod towards social democracy as ultraleft communism. But that doesn’t make US liberals leftists and never has done.
They can be separate “enough”. As others have pointed out, tankies are a great example of being leftist economically while being very, very right-wing-fascist style socially – dictating how many kids people could have, how much property or money anyone can have, what religions if any are state sanctioned, etc. And that’s what makes them such a convenient strawman for neocons to point at as an example of “the left” whenever they’re busy wringing their hands about it. Tankies is exactly what they’re thinking of when they’re talking about the lefties coming to take your freedoms away and impose their own ideology at gunpoint. (They literally don’t care that they want to do basically the same thing. They just want to do it first before the lefties can.)
True libertarians (as opposed to the Youtube-personality schmucks who pretend to be libertarians but are actually alt-right fascists through and through when you start poking at their social views) are an example of the reverse… EXTREMELY laissiez-faire capitalist and anti-regulation of business and pro-VERY limited-government (so very right-wing there), but they are ALSO perfectly fine with traditionally liberal social ideals like women’s reproductive rights, gay marriage, legalization of marijuana (and other drugs), getting rid of the prison industrial complex (albeit in favor of a justice system where everyone has to sue each other in court in order to “prove” wrongdoing, and get paid accordingly), and keeping all kinds of religion out of the (very minimal) governmental style that they support, because to regulate those would infringe on the freedom of individual adults to pursue their own happiness as long as they are not infringing on the rights of others to pursue THEIR happiness. They also tend to be distrustful of government-run military and police forces, which are another big right-wing touchstone, and would like them dismantled in favor of smaller non-government volunteer militias. (The other place where these people really fall apart is when they start advocating that only property owners should have the right to vote. You can see how that would be a problem….)
In connection with a recent thread, I found an article in Jacobin about the SESTA/FOSTA thing that seems to concur with the majority opinion around here: that it was an all-around bad deal for marginalized people.
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/sex-work-backpage-sesta-fosta-free-speech
Alan Robertshaw never did answer the last round of critical comments he received in that thread …
I also found “A Guide to the 2020 Democratic Candidates You Should Not Vote For” over at Medium:
https://medium.com/@westonpagano/a-guide-to-the-2020-democratic-candidates-you-should-not-vote-for-c1c6e4c9c26
It details a lot of the problems that have been noted here about Biden and Harris, in particular. To its credit (for a relatively mainstream source) it did include Biden’s creepy handsiness with women and girls as one of his disqualifying factors.
I’m wondering if there’s any easy way to sort out the fauxgressives from the true progressives among the other 16 or so candidates. Most of the non-whitemen made many of the right noises at the debates, along with DeBlasio and Inslee, but that may not mean much — a lot of them would no doubt “triangulate” to the “center” (read: center-right at best) if nominated (and then would run a real risk of losing to Trump by not being able to excite the base and goose turnout).
Meanwhile up here in Canada we have just a few names to watch. Unfortunately current polling has the Tories and Liberals in a dead heat with everyone else trailing significantly, though there is an interesting recent surge in the support for the Green Party — they’re actually getting double digits now, sometimes into the low teens, mostly it seems at the expense of the NDP.
The joker in the deck is, of course, the economic collapse that is just around the corner:
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/30/737476633/what-just-happened-also-occurred-before-the-last-7-u-s-recessions-reason-to-worr
That points to an onset likely sometime during, and perhaps early in, your primary season and almost certainly before the general election, with a chance that it hits before our election. Bad news for Trump but how will it shake up the Democratic field? Danger also that if it hits too soon it will benefit Canada’s regressive right by damaging the incumbent LPC.
@footprints in wet clay
I’m not a fan of tankies since they give me and my comrades a bad rep, but “how much property or money anyone can have” is NOT a social issue, it’s the definition of an economic issue.
@ surplus
The subject was clearly upsetting some people; people I like and respect. So I just dropped the issue.
I’m very much a no-drama-llama; and I think it’s important that this is a space people can feel safe and comfortable in. So I can’t see the point in continuing a discussion where that is distressing people.