The Other McCain

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Shameless Lesbian Misquotes Bannon

Posted on | January 17, 2017 | 1 Comment

In a 2011 radio interview, when Steve Bannon was promoting his documentary Fire From the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, he pointed out that women like Sarah Palin exemplified a type of “women’s liberation” feminists never imagined:

“That, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England. That drives the left insane and that’s why they hate these women.”

After Bannon joined the Trump campaign, his 2011 remark was spun into an expression of ignorant bigotry, which obviously it is not. The radical feminist movement indeed included a lot of lesbians from the elite “Seven Sisters” schools, e.g., Mount Holyoke College alumnae Joan Biren (Class of ’66) and Ginny Berson (Class of ’67), both founding members of the Furies collective. As a matter of fact, by the early 1990s, the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, was believed to have the highest per-capita concentration of lesbians in America, in part because it was home to Smith College, a Seven Sisters school, and only 15 miles from Mount Holyoke.  There certainly was a historical basis for Bannon’s description of New England “dykes” as prominent in radical feminism, but the distortions created by the liberal spin machine have a way of leaving a stain behind. And so “shameless lesbian” Jocelyn MacDonald, after quoting Andrea Dworkin, took this cheap shot at Bannon:

This is precisely why Steve Bannon, the neo-Nazi altar boy of our newly elected president, ridiculed women like Hillary Clinton — powerful, self-determining women — as a “bunch of dykes.”

That is such a complete misreading of what Bannon actually said as to be an almost 180-degree reversal of what he said. First, Bannon was praising the “powerful, self-determining women” of the conservative movement. Secondly, Bannon obviously wasn’t referring to Hillary Clinton in that 2011 interview. Although she attended a Seven Sisters school (Wellesley), Clinton had made her marriage to Bill Clinton the vehicle of her own ambition, and was perhaps in some sense less “self-determining” than Sarah Palin. The smear of Bannon as a “neo-Nazi” is just gratuitous character assassination, but the main point — which Jocelyn MacDonald for some reason wishes to ignore — is the extent to which “a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools” actually were influential in the feminist movement. It is remarkable that nothing makes feminists angrier than when someone tells the truth about feminism.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

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One Response to “Shameless Lesbian Misquotes Bannon”

  1. He was Hit in the Head with a Brick | Regular Right Guy
    January 17th, 2017 @ 3:17 pm

    […] Shameless Lesbian Misquotes Bannon […]