NYTimes uncharacteristically put out a good article. Read it before it gets erased. The article details one of the “living while black” hoaxes. What I find curious is that there’s always a class aspect in these hoaxes. A bunch of rich, pampered people hound some poor working-class schmuck for fun, and everybody cheers.
I also highly recommend paying attention to the reaction of the ACLU to the hoax as it’s detailed in the article. It’s stunning. But not in a good way.
Clarissa's Blog 
I saw the article this morning and was shocked that it was published in the New York Times. How long before the rest of the staff lobby to get the person who wrote it fired?
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Shocking news! NYTimes actually did some reporting for a change!
Nothing in the article shocks me but the existence of the article itself does.
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They aspire to be Spartans: with themselves as the top-tier warrior class, and the rest of us helots grow their food, serve it to them, and occasionally get slaughtered for shits and giggles.
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(But of course, they’re much too effete to qualify as Spartans.)
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Jodi Shaw is articulate, courageous and has nerves of steel. She and her mighty followers are responsible for this article. Without her sacrifice and her brilliant articulation of the situation, this article would most likely not exist. Yes, I’m a fan. I’m also surprised this article didn’t mention Sarah Braasch and her situation over at Yale.
This is class warfare. Something people like Jason Reilly have been saying for years. His book, “Please Stop Helping Us” helped me understand after 2014 when Ferguson was destroyed by a lie. There was no “hands up don’t shoot” scenario.” It was all a lie. BLM was founded on it and now they are reveling in their $80 million donations.
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Yes, it’s an identical story to Sarah’s. Sarah stood out at Yale as a working class woman. She got bullied by a rich crowd. The similarities are striking. And nobody ever took back the egregious accusations against Sarah even after they were proven to be completely untrue.
Jodi Shaw is a hero. There’s no other word for it. An amazing person who stood up to this insane machine of oppression.
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Scott (formerly Slate Star Codex) has a nice piece up on his substack today that’s relevant:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
He wants Republicans to start talking about class warfare.
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methylethyl, thanks for the interesting link.
My fundamental problem with Scott is that he may want ‘Republicans to start talking about class warfare’, yet in his redefinition of the concept of class, he becomes a mirror image of ‘Smith College Hates The Working Class’ situation.
At Smith College we have:
While Scott proposes poor workers joining millionaires to fight against teachers, social workers and starving artists. The proposed steps against those evil-doers are unclear, except ‘End draft deferment for people who go to college. ‘ I think those steps may include slashing funding for social workers, public schools and beginning artists, with art in general being hurt. How Scott’s proposal will improve lives of working class people, whose jobs are automated away, is beyond me.
Class analysis cannot be toothless; otherwise, it’s meaningless and will be used as a distraction while workers’ rights are further eroded. The latter is how Scott’s proposal looks to me.
Clarissa, here is Scott’s proposal re universities:
‘Make universities no longer tax-exempt – why should institutions serving primarily rich people, providing them with regattas and musical theater, and raking in billions of dollars a year, not have to pay taxes?’
Does your institution serve primarily rich people? How many billions of dollars has it raked this year?
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He’s obviously talking about Yale and Harvard. I always have and always will support removing the tax exempt status from them immediately and completely.
I don’t know who that Batya person is but I can’t decipher the tweet. Many people are very illiterate.
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OK, I read the article. What a great article!
My discomfort with the leftist crowd is very class-based. My sensibilities are so different from theirs, and no number of college degrees and fancy publications can erase that. It’s not a money thing. It’s an aesthetics thing. I was miserable at Cornell and happy in rural Illinois because of this.
Great, great article.
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Glad you liked it!
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// He’s obviously talking about Yale and Harvard. I always have and always will support removing the tax exempt status from them immediately and completely.
He doesn’t differentiate between them and other academic institutions.
Have you read his post? Would love to hear your thoughts.
My impression was that Scott says your students would benefit from trade schools to learn doing practical things with their hands rather than wasting their time to rise above their station and learn Spanish.
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You are missing Scott’s point when you single out his term “rich people” there. Scott is very much talking about class but he is using “rich people” as a term he thinks Republicans should use more, rather than a term that is precise and literal. As he points out: in America, “working class” and “upper class” do not divide neatly along the lines of income. What he’s pointing out is a very real phenomenon, where teachers are upper class, even though they make less money than plumbers and pilots, who are generally working class. That particular thing is a gender divide: teacher is a socially acceptable profession for PMC wives. If you look at teachers generally (at least in my area) you will find that many of them are married to doctors, lawyers, and managerial types. But hardly any of them are married to plumbers or other non-college-degree professionals. This is an example of class divide that is not an income divide.
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// You are missing Scott’s point when you single out his term “rich people” there. Scott is very much talking about class but he is using “rich people” as a term he thinks Republicans should use more, rather than a term that is precise and literal.
I understand.
However, what is the final goal of it all? To score points and dupe people one more time, or truly improve lives of people (in danger of being) left behind by modernity? If the former, Scott is our man, but if the latter… ranting against sensibilities of teachers while jobs are automated away won’t help.
Scott’s offer is another example of (ab)using old terms till words lose all meaning. See: ‘socialism’ in America and ‘fascism’ in US and EU.
// PMC wives
What does PMC mean?
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Scott seems to want Republicans to drop the old “corporations are good” and “free markets are ideal” stance in favor of “We’re the party of the working class”– Which Trump was working toward, even if he wasn’t using those terms. Scott himself is not a Republican, but he’s sympathetic to the plight of the working class, and can clearly see that his own party has abandoned them in favor of the upper-class clerisy. Scott doesn’t like this, and thinks that Republicans becoming explicit champions of the working class would force Democrats to take that voting bloc seriously again, instead of being able to assume that working-class union members and minorities would vote Democrat because they always have. In Scott’s view, better competition would force his own side to do better. He’s not wrong, IMO.
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Unfortunately, I could not read the story since it’s behind the paywall. However, Rod described it in two posts, so if other readers are in my predicament, yet want to know what’s going on, they may read Rod too:
Part 1 – Smith College Hates The Working Class
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/smith-college-hates-the-working-class/
Part 2 – No Escaping The Eyes Of God
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/smith-college-no-escaping-eyes-of-god-identity-politics/
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