“I am willing to wager that Molly Ball has never once applied the terms ‘extreme’ or ‘fringe’ to any contingent of the Democrat Party coalition. . . . No matter how far off into Crazyland a leftist may wander, so long as he or she continues to support the Democrat Party, no liberal journalist will ever stigmatize them as angry extremists. It’s only Republicans who get shoved through the plate-glass window, so to speak.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “The Angry Fringe,” The American Spectator
Talk about ironic coincidences: I woke up in the wee hours to find Molly Ball of the Atlantic characterizing Chris McDaniel’s supporters as fringe extremists, cranked out a thousand-word response at The American Spectator before 7 a.m. and then, checking Molly Ball’s Twitter account, discovered she had just won an award from the National Press Club:
Molly Ball of The Atlantic won the Lee Walczak Award for Political Analysis for her coverage of the divided Republican Party after the 2012 election.
The National Press Club is decadent and depraved, to borrow a famous phrase, and the fact that they gave Molly Ball an award is therefore proof that her analysis must be badly flawed. Q.E.D.
Here’s the genuinely weird part, though: I like Molly Ball.
She’s actually one of the more “fair and balanced” reporters within the viciously biased liberal gang of Mainstream Journalists.
A distaff Dave Weigel, as it were.
Molly Ball is an excellent reporter and a good analyst who, unlike the Vox/Salon/TPM crowd, doesn’t rely on Media Matters to tell her what to think. She actually goes out and talks to Republicans, which is something you’ll never catch Brian Beutler doing.
Yet as Rush Limbaugh says, if all he wanted to do is talk about liberal media bia, he could do it three hours a day, five days a week, and the same is true for bloggers. At some level, every story that interests me is a story about media bias. If the New York Times and other mainstream media had reported about Brett Kimberlin’s “progressive activism,” there would have been no need for me to pay attention, and I wouldn’t be getting sued for millions of dollars.
By the same token, I wouldn’t be writing daily about radical feminism if it weren’t for the fact that the mainstream media are so intent on pretending there is no such thing as radical feminism. All feminism is mainstream, the liberal media would have us believe, and only feminism’s opponents deserve the Extreme Fringe label. Gosh, if only there were an award-winning reporter available . . .
Here’s a story assignment for Molly Ball: There will be a conference of radical feminists in London Aug. 30-31. Among the speakers is Janice Raymond, a Women’s Studies professor at the University of Massachusetts who is the bête noire of transsexuals. The conference is “woman only” and, if Molly can prove that she does not have and never has had a penis, she could attend that conference and report on the “extreme elements” and “angry fringe” of the feminist movement — some of whom are so extreme that even I agree with them (e.g., people with penises are not women).
Am I joking? Do I really think that the Atlantic would send their award-winning political reporter to London to cover a conference of Marxist lesbian man-haters? I don’t know if they would, but I do think they should. It isn’t hard to imagine what excellent opportunities for genuine gonzo journalism might result from such an assignment, and if men weren’t forbidden to attend, I might be rattling the tip jar to scrape up plane fare to London myself. (Go ahead and hit my tip jar anyway — just to piss off the feminists.)
What kind of reporting could Molly Ball do at FemiFest 2014? She could do it in the same Anthropologist-Among-the-Natives style that liberal journalists use when covering CPAC every year. Or she might do it in “investigative undercover” style to Expose the Hidden Secrets of Radical Feminism, like a liberal journalist sneaking into a Koch-funded event. The possibilities are tantalizing, even aside from the lurid concupiscent imagination of what goes on behind closed doors at an international convocation of hard-core dykes.
No kidding: I believe Molly Ball could return from London with enough notes for a 10,000-word Serious Journalism article about radical feminism that could make the cover of the Atlantic print edition. perhaps becoming the basis of a book on the subject, and such a book is long overdue. Mainstream liberalism has spent decades pretending that radical feminism doesn’t exist, but in the post-Windsor era, aren’t these Marxist lesbian fanatics more relevant than ever?
It is a central part of our radical feminist analysis that gender is a tool of women’s oppression, not women’s liberation. FemiFest organisers share the view that gender is a human created power hierarchy based on reproductive sex. This gendered power arrangement relegates women to a social status that is secondary to men. None of the organisers consider ourselves to have an innate gender — neither masculine, feminine, trans, cis, gender queer, or any other gender. We are gender abolitionists who have been raised and socialized as girls and women because of our female bodies in the context of a male supremacist social system.
Yeah, baby. Keep talking sexy like that and I might buy you a drink.
