The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Social Justice’ as Fashion Accessory

Posted on | October 18, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘Social Justice’ as Fashion Accessory

“That’s the thing about a Missing White Woman story — the damsel-in-distress angle only works, in terms of TV news ratings, if the missing woman is young and attractive, preferably blonde. Males can and do go missing, but those disappearances never dominate national news. It’s always a woman, and a young, attractive woman — if she’s old, fat or ugly, nobody cares if she goes missing. But the nubile blonde? Oh, yeah, that’s nationwide headline stuff, because she’s Prime Rape Bait, and sex is the secret ingredient in the Missing White Woman story.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sept. 22

Going off on seemingly irrelevant tangents is one of my bad habits, and perhaps I should begin by telling you that this is not a post about the case of Gabby Petito, who was apparently strangled to death by her fiancé, Brian Laundrie. In saying “apparently,” I don’t mean to raise doubt about the cause of her death — the autopsy confirmed that she was strangled — but rather it’s because so far Laundrie has not been formally accused of Gabby’s death, but is what police call a “person of interest.” The manhunt for Laundrie continues, but this isn’t a post about that; rather, it’s about how social media is affecting the beliefs and behavior of young people. Gabby Petito evidently got the idea that she could find a career as a social-media “influencer,” by monetizing her Instagram posts and YouTube videos on the #vanlife hashtag. That was what she and Laundrie were doing on that trip out West where she got strangled to death.

Where would a middle-class girl from Long Island get the idea that #vanlife was something she could pursue full-time? Well, young people have been doing stupid things since time immemorial — no fair bringing up my disastrous 1979 psilocybin experience, OK? — but the particular forms of stupid youthful behavior are now being shaped by social media. It’s like the phenomenon of “social contagion” by which impressionable teens are sucked into the vortex of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.

So here is this blue-eyed blonde girl from the affluent Suffolk County hamlet of Blue Point, N.Y., deciding at age 21 that the thing to do is to save up, buy a van and then go driving westward, recording her travel experiences for an online audience, up until the point where she became the poster girl for the #strangledtodeath hashtag.

Excuse my caustic sarcasm, but Gabby Petito is an extreme example of a much larger problem of young people ruining their lives by following whatever trendy fashion caught their attention on social media.

Back in 2014, when I began my deep-dive into radical feminism, the reason was because I could see it becoming trendy, mainly because the strategists behind the Hillary Clinton campaign saw that promoting feminism as a “brand” would be helpful to her 2016 presidential bid.

That’s something many people don’t understand — a lot of trends these days don’t just spontaneously happen. The Democrat-Media Complex exerts a very powerful influence, and the army of naïve young women who suddenly became all “F–k Yeah Feminism!” circa 2014 are evidence of how easily people can be manipulated. And if you pay attention to such trends over time, you’ll notice that the same cohort of impressionable youth will jump from one issue to the next as the focus of their online activism, depending entirely on what narrative the Democrat-Media Complex happens to be promoting at any given time. The same twentysomething crowd that was ready to #SmashPatriarchy in 2014 shifted seamlessly to ranting against the “Alt-Right” and the sinister influence of Vladimir Putin in 2017. Then, quite suddenly in May 2020, the same people were marching in the streets for #BlackLivesMatter, and all the other activist causes they’d been concerned with were forgotten.

The marionettes in this puppet-play never notice the strings, and it does not seem to occur to them to ask, “Why should I care about this?” or “Who is really benefitting from my activism?”

Because I spent so many years inside newsrooms, seeing how the daily diet of news is assembled, I’m rather cynical about this stuff. As a blogger, there is always pressure to be part of the herd, everybody bleating in unison about the same stories — whatever is on Fox News, etc. From my perspective, resisting this herd mentality is part of the value-added calculation of my efforts: What is the value of my becoming the 27th blog to write about a particular subject? And if I’m going to dogpile on the same issue everybody else is writing about, how can I find something to say about it that is different? Otherwise, I might as well just be linking headlines or posting video clips. But you don’t get a lot of that kind of thinking — “What’s the point of what I’m doing?” — when the left-wing mob jumps onto something like the George Floyd story. Everybody just echoes the same insipid slogans, as if the sheer number of people mindlessly repeating this message is the whole point.

The frightening conformity of these mobs ought to attract more critical scrutiny than it does. On June 2, 2020, thousands of Instagram accounts posted nothing but a black square with the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday, which was basically the antithesis of critical thinking.

Examined closely, we can view this as an example of what Thomas Sowell famously called The Vision of the Anointed. What really matters to these people is perception — on the one hand, they wish to be viewed by their peers as “socially conscious,” but on the other hand, they’re also posing in a mirror to admire their own reflection, so to speak. Their perception of themselves as morally and intellectually superior is very important to them, and this drives them to join various “causes” as a venue for proving their superiority, both to themselves and others, so that over the course of time, their lives become a sort of political pageant.

There is a disturbing thoughtlessness to how such people behave. One day, the Instagram “influencer” is posting about her favorite coffee shop or the new sweater she bought, but then the next day, she’s repeating militant “social justice” slogans, demanding an end to oppression, etc. And this strange shift doesn’t seem to bother her in the least; whatever cognitive dissonance it may engender is expiated through an ostentatious display of hyperemotionality — literally crying about the latest “injustice” she saw on CNN. There is absolutely no rationality or objectivity to this kind of trendy activism; it’s all about feelings. Viewed objectively, nobody benefitted from her posting that black square on Instagram as an expression of BLM solidarity, but it made her feel like she was doing something, rather than being a passive spectator.

And we might just laugh at all this — “LOL silly kids!” — were it not for the fact that so many of them take it so seriously, to the extent that they are ruining their lives for “social justice.” Let me explain, for the benefit of any young woman who does not yet understand this: You’re not going to meet nice guys at an anarchist rally. Whatever else you might say about Republicans, the party tends to attract people who share certain beliefs, including an appreciation of the value of hard work, sobriety, thrift, etc. The young woman who starts hashtagging all those Communist “social justice” slogans is communicating to the world at large her contempt for the values of all decent and honest Americans.

On the one hand, she’s making it easy for guys seeking companionship of the conveniently slutty variety. Check her Instagram account, and if she was all about #BlackoutTuesday in June 2020, buddy, you’re in like Flynn. Of course, on the other hand, there’s the risk of herpes to consider. But why would I bring up Ella Dawson at this late date? (She’s “taking a break from men,” for which men should be grateful.)

A moment of total candor from Ella Dawson.

Even if you were the kind of reckless daredevil who would risk a hookup with someone like Ella Dawson, however, you certainly wouldn’t consider her “wife material.” No, when it’s time to settle down, any intelligent guy will be looking for a nice Republican girl, instead of some dingbat “progressive” who’s hashtagging social justice slogans. So the girl who thought it was all cool and clever to jump on the “activist” bandwagon as a 19-year-old college sophomore is apt to find herself at 29 living in a tiny apartment, with her cat, and prescriptions for Valtrex and Lexapro.

Did I mention that Ella Dawson recently published a “micro-memoir” with the altogether fitting title Life Ruiner?

What Ella Dawson did to her life by becoming a “pro-sex” feminist is just slightly less stupid than what Gabby Petito did with her life. But as hashtags go, #DamagedSkank is not much better than #ShallowGrave.




 

Category: Crime

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