Contemporary conservatism is awash in irrationality. Right-wingers have eagerly embraced conspiracy theories of all sorts, from QAnonymish stories of pedophile illuminati to vaccine “skepticism.” Instead of worrying about real crises like COVID and climate change, they denounce imaginary “cultural Marxism” and innocuous Drag Queen Story Hours, convinced that both are literally demonic attacks on middle American children.
So naturally the right-wing Federalist, feeling the pull of projection, has decided to attack liberal — sorry, “woke” — women as overwrought proponents of “emotionally charged” politics on social media. Offering no logical rebuttals to the various “woke” positions she caricatures, Federalist staff writer Jordan Boyd turns instead to name-calling.
In a post with the attention-grabbing if intellectually vacuous title “Dear Women: Going Emotionally Crazy Over Politics Makes Us All Look Bad, And You Need To Stop It,” Boyd resurrects 19th-century tropes casting women as too “hysterical” to have opinions on politics. She castigates “woke white women” for “hop[ping] on the politics bandwagon, even if they don’t know what they are talking about,” less interested in the content of the policies they support than in “showing that they too care enough™ about whatever virtue-signaling campaign the left has dubbed important at the moment.”
In doing so, woke white women show themselves to be a bunch of silly old sillyheads, because
going emotionally crazy over politics on social media not only makes you look bad, but it makes you dumber and causes rifts in relationships.
Ladies! You surely don’t want to put your relationship with your men in danger by having opinions about politics in public!
As a matter of fact, deranged, uninformed blubbering on social media polarizes communities and debilitates people from understanding key issues and having meaningful discussions. Reposting garbled rants and activist graphics only further eradicates the potential for independent thinking.
There’s not a whole lot of thinking — independent or otherwise — going on in Boyd’s trite, backward screed, just a lot of insults being tossed in the general direction of her political foes. The closest she gets to making a real argument? Two paragraphs in the middle of the post in which she, for some reason, decides to fact-check a New Yorker cartoon.
It’s popular to amplify inflammatory political language, especially when it’s parroted on social media, but doing so makes you and other women look ignorant and hardly has a true impact on the nation.
Weird that Boyd isn’t worried that her half-baked argument, based on shame rather than any kind of logic, will make one woman, at least, look ignorant. That would be her, just her. Unlike the sexists on the right, we in the “woke” community don’t assume that one woman’s dumbassery somehow implicates the rest of womankind.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Sorry The Federalist, Mr Cholmondley-Warner was way ahead of you.
And now Milo Yiannopoulos is interning for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Because of course he is.
I need to stop it? Please. A thesaurus is no substitute for a well-reasoned argument.
Drag Queen story hour is scary, but white men shooting up schools is what the founders envisioned when they included the 2nd amendment.
I’m so completely over this country.
Yes, like the way antivaxxers and antimaskers flooded social media with so much unscientific misinformation that the US was unable to effectively mount a coherent response to Covid.
Or the way gun owners act like giant walking amygdalas every time someone suggests common sense ways to reduce gun violence.
Or any of the various other phantom boogeymen, from CRT to migrant caravans, that the right uses to whip their supporters into a frightened frenzy, deflect attention away from genuine problems, and block all forms of progress.
(As an aside, “debilitates” is a transitive verb and doesn’t take an extra clause. Boyd seems to be using it as a synonym for “prevents”. Somebody’s been reading too much Dan Brown.)
the political state of affairs would make anybody with a heart emotional. anybody that continues to behave as if their passions and beliefs about what’s right aren’t tied to their politics is a ghoul
There are days I wish I could get away with childish behavior, but the guilt (or general decorum) kicks in too quickly.
There is a microscopic grain of truth here in that white people (and non-marginalized people in general) tend to get way more concerned about incidents than the actual victims. Not that it isn’t serious, but sometimes “allies” do things that end up making it worse. The Federalists are terrible people but sometimes they end up doing good by mistake. Like “Lena Dunham abused her sister” is kinda homophobic in that it falls into “gay people are caused by child abuse” (the sister in question is a lesbian) but at the same time it was real sus what Lena did, and even ignoring that anyone remember the bit where she recalls bribing her sister with candy…”like a sexual predator?” Not to mention the assorted sh*t Lena did… Odell Beckham Jr anyone? Sometimes the Feds accidentally do good things even though they’re a*holes.
Well, that’s an amount of projection that would support 3D IMAX.
Rather telling that there’s no mention of non-white women, too.
Lena Dunham did abuse her sister, and she has never been a progressive ally. Give her a few years, and you’ll see her on Fox News railing about cancel culture.
Ladies, we’re too emotionally overwrought to be involved with politics, not like those paragons of logic who rationally performed a well thought out attempted coup riot.
OT but timely:
Mass murder in Smithsburg, Maryland, USA.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/09/smithsburg-shooting-maryland/