Michael Harriot with Some Truth for Your Progressive White Ass

Speak, brother, speak!

“Only a white man can keep a job for three decades with absolutely no results and then expect a promotion. Only a white man would blame black people’s stupidity when his supposedly “diverse coalition of new voters” didn’t bother to show up to vote.

Maybe those “moderates” actually want a revolutionary. More than anyone, they know that revolutionaries get shit done. That’s because old black voters have actually been revolutionaries. They actually lived through revolutions. Simply surviving to become an old black person in the South is a revolutionary act in itself.”

Read the whole thing.

https://www.theroot.com/an-open-letter-to-white-liberals-blaming-low-informatio-1842100419

Petr Knava is Right

We’re fucked and getting fucked-er:

“The disappearance of Arctic ice; the collapse of insect populations and mass extinctions of land and sea fauna in general; the warming and acidification of the oceans and the disruption of fragile ecological chains worldwide; the dramatic spike in extreme weather events displacing and affecting millions of often the most vulnerable communities around the world. The capitalist climate catastrophe is very much already here, yet what the world has seen so far is but a meagre tip of the iceberg compared to what is soon to come. We have at most a decade left to comprehensively put in alternative energy systems and cut emissions in such a way so as to stave off the worst case projections for the century—projections that paint a picture of such compelling doom that they might be straight out of a science fiction novel.”

https://www.pajiba.com/politics/thanks-to-climate-change-the-amazon-rainforest-could-soon-turn-into-a-source-of-co2.php

Susan Matthews on Elizabeth Warren and the Elephant in the Room

The woman thing:

“But as I watched her campaign, I saw something else, too. She wasn’t just running as a teacher or a wonk. Elizabeth Warren was running as a woman. She was unapologetic about it. It went beyond embracing her identity as a teacher, though an identity as a teacher is surely gendered itself. Her stump speech included her own personal story of being alone with her children in Texas, with no idea how she was going to take care of them and also have a career. (She only managed to have one because her aunt came to watch the kids while Warren went to law school.) Later on in the campaign, she expanded her story further backward, to include her experience being let go from her first teaching job—a job she loved—because she was visibly pregnant. It wasn’t necessarily a winning narrative for her—the press jumped all over it, suggesting she was lying about the discrimination and picking her story apart for discrepancies. But it did resonate with one group of voters—women who in turn shared their own stories of discrimination in their pregnancies.

Warren was teaching here too. She was trying to explain to people what, exactly, it is like to be a woman in America, still, today. Her lessons were not just drawn from her own life, either. Warren launched her campaign in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the site of 1912’s Bread and Roses strike, led by seamstresses. She told those seamstresses’ stories, and she told other stories of other working-class women, black women, who led labor movements decades ago. In Atlanta, she spoke of the washerwomen who went on strike in 1881; in New York she spoke of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy. At one of her last appearances before Super Tuesday in L.A., she told the story of 1990’s Justice for Janitors strike, an effort led by immigrant women.* I was not surprised to see attendees describe it as a “lecture” on Twitter afterward—Warren’s events were closer to lectures than rallies. She was trying to teach people their own history, a project she understood as essential for building a better future.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/elizabeth-warren-ran-as-a-woman.html

Megan Garber on Elizabeth Warren and the Dangers of Competence

Still, apparently, unacceptable in women seeking power:

“The campaigns of those who deviate from the traditional model of the American president—the campaign of anyone who is not white and Christian and male—will always carry more than their share of weight. But Warren had something about her, apparently: something that galled the pundits and the public in a way that led to assessments of her not just as “strident” and “shrill,” but also as “condescending.” The matter is not merely that the candidate is unlikable, these deployments of condescending imply. The matter is instead that her unlikability has a specific source, beyond bias and internalized misogyny. Warren knows a lot, and has accomplished a lot, and is extremely competent, condescending acknowledges, before twisting the knife: It is precisely because of those achievements that she represents a threat. Condescending attempts to rationalize an irrational prejudice. It suggests the lurchings of a zero-sum world—a physics in which the achievements of one person are insulting to everyone else. When I hear her talk, I want to slap her, even when I agree with her.

To run for president is to endure a series of controlled humiliations. It is to gnaw on bulky pork products, before an audience at the Iowa State Fair. It is to be asked about one’s skin-care routine, and to be prepared to defend the answer. The accusation of condescension, however, is less about enforced humiliation than it is about enforced humility. It cannot be disentangled from Warren’s gender. The paradox is subtle, but punishing all the same: The harder she works to prove to the public that she is worthy of power—the more evidence she offers of her competence—the more “condescending,” allegedly, she becomes.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/america-punished-elizabeth-warren-her-competence/607531/

Charlie Pierce is Right: Warren was More of a Threat to the Oligarchy Than Sanders

That’s why they took her down:

“Instead, and accepting that sexism and misogyny were marbled throughout everything about the campaign, I think what did her in was her ideas. She committed herself to a campaign specifically to fight political corruption, both the legal and illegal kind. As an adjunct to that, she marshaled her long fight against the power of money in our politics and monopoly in our economy. And, opposed to Bernie Sanders, whose answer to how to wage the fight is always the power of his “movement,” which so far hasn’t been able to break through against Joe Biden, she put out detailed plans on how to do it. That made her much more of a threat to the money power than Sanders, who is easily dismissed as a fringe socialist by the people who buy elections and own the country.”

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a31250037/elizabeth-warren-drops-out-2020-race/