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The Endless Warren Butt-Hurt

Posted on | March 11, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Did any presidential candidate ever deserve to lose more than Elizabeth Warren? This is a women who fabricated her own biography, falsely claiming to be Native American, in order to be the “first woman of color” on the faculty of Harvard Law. Say what you will about Barack Obama — whom Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan dubbed The Worst President in History — at least he actually was half-Kenyan, whereas Warren’s Cherokee fakery was so complete that the possibility of it being true involves the merest fraction of a single percentage point. If you’re going to play identity politics, you need to have a real identity.

We must credit Professor William Jacobson for his tenacity in calling attention to Warren’s fakery, and we should also credit the Democratic primary voters who rejected this bald-faced liar. The fact that Warren could do no better than third place in Massachusetts — the state she represents in the U.S. Senate — was an embarrassment she deserved.

Warren’s feminist supporters refuse to accept this verdict. Permit me to remind you of what Amanda Marcotte wrote last month:

Warren is a rock star. Crowds love her and she tends to get bigger cheers than anyone, even Sanders. She always takes her analysis to the next level, but manages to explain complex topics without dissembling. The ideas that sound radical in Bernie’s mouth (probably by design, to be fair) sound like common sense coming from Warren. She’s probably the single most popular candidate in the field, with people talking about her positively, even if they support someone else.
It’s clear, however, after months of cable news seeding the idea that the public is too sexist to elect a woman, that voters aren’t backing her. This created a weird dynamic in New Hampshire, where Warren drew big crowds, often due in large part to political tourists from other states who came to see the hottest act in town, not because she was actually rallying local voters here. So because of sexism, the most popular politician in the field will probably falter in the actual primary.

And this is what Jessica Valenti wrote last week:

I knew going into Super Tuesday that Elizabeth Warren was unlikely to win big. I had prepared myself for that. What did take me by surprise, though, was just how poorly she fared: Even in her home state of Massachusetts, she finished third. . . .
It’s enough to make me feel, well, despairing: that we had the candidate of a lifetime — someone with the energy, vision, and follow-through to lead the country out of our nightmarish era — and that the media and voters basically outright erased and ignored her. . . .
Whoever the nominee is, their campaign is going to have to come to terms with the intense misogyny so many female voters have dealt with — and understand that it’s an issue we care deeply about. And their supporters are going to have to let us be sad — depressed, even — that once again we’re going to watch a race to leadership between old white men.

Feminist logic is a coin-toss: Heads, she wins. Tails, she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression. No amount of evidence can disprove this feminist belief. They believe in women’s victimhood as a matter of religious faith and, no matter how privileged or successful a woman actually is — e.g., Elizabeth Warren is a multimillionaire and a U.S. Senator — she’s still a victim if, for any reason, she is deprived of anything she might possible desire. Feminists believe that women are always entitled to everything they want, simply because they are women.

Of course, the butt-hurt over Warren’s failure is almost entirely a vestige of the Hillary Clinton butt-hurt. Democrats spent three years investigating non-existent Russian “collusion” in order to give some credence to Hillary’s paranoid belief that Donald Trump had cheated her out of the presidency. Thus, $120,000 in Facebook ads, some simple email “phishing” and a handful of Twitter bots were magnified into an vast international conspiracy to deprive Hillary of what was rightly hers. Mere sexism would not suffice; no, it took Russian military intelligence to defeat Hillary, who never even bothered to campaign in Wisconsin.

Having never recovered from the psychological trauma of Hillary’s defeat, feminists have gone completely bonkers over Warren’s defeat.

Here’s a paragraph from Megan Garber:

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.

Garber concludes that Warren (“competence incarnate”) lost because her achievements and admirable qualities — “her intelligence, her experience, her compassion” — were “understood as threats.”

Or maybe because she lied about being a Cherokee?

No, the possibility that Warren lost because voters perceived her as fundamentally dishonest cannot be considered, because this might diminish the Feminist Victimhood Narrative in which Ivy League women like Megan Gerber (Princeton BA, Columbia MA) are so deeply invested.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Category: Elizabeth Warren

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2 Responses to “The Endless Warren Butt-Hurt”

  1. “If you’re going to play identity politics, you need to have a real identity.” | 357 Magnum
    March 11th, 2020 @ 6:49 pm

    […] How she was ever in the Democratic Primary (the party of identity politics) after her lies is beyond me. The Endless Warren Butt-Hurt. […]

  2. The secular sharia: this week in reaction. - Dark Brightness
    March 13th, 2020 @ 9:30 pm

    […] Did any presidential candidate ever deserve to lose more than Elizabeth Warren? This is a women who fabricated her own biography, falsely claiming to be Native American, in order to be the “first woman of color” on the faculty of Harvard Law. Say what you will about Barack Obama — whom Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan dubbed The Worst President in History — at least he actually was half-Kenyan, whereas Warren’s Cherokee fakery was so complete that the possibility of it being true involves the merest fraction of a single percentage point. If you’re going to play identity politics, you need to have a real identity. […]