Today one of the most offensively crude anti-semitic articles ever written was published by the the San Francisco chronicle bemoaning the apparently undeserved popularity of Senator Bernie Sanders.
The author starts by discussing the horror she and her students’, if her word on what her students are feeling can be believed, horror at the storming of the Capitol. She ties this event immediately with white privilege, as though civil disobedience and violent activism is an action that can only be taken by those with “white agency.” Though she precludes this by saying there were “no forces to stop them.” A deranged woman with a bullet in her neck might disagree. This might be a perfect time to attack those in places like the FBI for not protecting the people she seems to so revere, congresspeople, even though they seem they seem to have know about it beforehand. If they didn’t that seems to be an even more damning indictment.
But of course she instead shifts to attack one of those very congresspeople, one of the most popular elected officials in the country, one of the few actually fighting for working class Americans, and a proud Jew. She then paraphrases Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio, stating “this is white privilege. It can be hard to pinpoint, but when we see it, we know it,” suggesting that Bernie Sanders, a nearly eighty year old Jewish congressperson, for both his attire, and for his apparently undeserved popularity is an example of white privilege. The appallingly stupid implication is that the “white privilege” held by an elderly Jewish congressman who came out to support the incoming president in the bitter cold stole the spotlight from Joe Biden, who actually is white, apparently more deserving of attention now and forever.
The author then jumps to the inauguration, asking her students, or more likely cardboard cutouts of them pretending to care what their teacher has to say, “what do we see?” She claims they saw a range of diversity, though for someone that continues to genuflect about class, she doesn’t seem to acknowledge that there was essentially none to be seen at the inauguration. One thing she claims she didn’t notice was Papa Bernie.
All that changed when she was “harrassed” by images of him the following day, “he was everywhere,” ya hate to see it folks. She then asserts that she asked her students to analyze the image. While it is impossible to know whether she actually did or if she is indeed recounting what she heard from them, or in fact writing a whiny post because her students didn’t loath a guy who wants to give them healthcare and a living wage, we will never know. She claims that they saw “a white man in a puffy jacket and huge mittens, distant not only in his social distancing, but in his demeanor and attire,” showing how genuinely racist the author and her class were by failing to ask or acknowledge his identity, and instead focusing on the visible external traits of race and skin color to make his ethnicity primacy. This author taught her entire class that it is acceptable to prejudge a person based on their skin color and eyes, since nothing else was visible, and name his apparent ethnicity as the first and foremost trait, as if nothing else inside matters, only the outside. In trying to perform wokeness, she became a reductive racist focused not on the contents of a person’s character, but “on the color of their skin.”
If you’re looking at this from the point of class, I’m not sure the first thing you want to do is dump on someone because of a “puffy jacket and huge mittens,” for a septuagenarian in Winter attending the inauguration of a democrat, especially for someone who is constantly fighting for checks to keep food in people’s mouths while there are massive food lines throughout the country.
In addition to that, being distant from the inauguration is only one of the most relatable things to working class people. I know a total of zero working class people who know what it is like to debate with yourself about which Prada designer is going to help you design the best outfit to clap back against the big orange Cheetoh. Bernie did what most people would do at a boring, self-celebratory ceremony, he leaned back in his chair away from all the other pompous, rich donor class, and wore the single coat that he owns.
She instead turns into a fashion expert critiquing the fashion choices of attendees instead of focusing on substance. Opining on these “warriors” and “the colors of their educational degrees,” as if that means anything. If it does mean anything, it shows again that she is of such an elevated class that she can waste time on such things.
As an educator myself, I generally try to destroy these classical ideas of fashion. Many of my students are from middle to lower socioeconomic backgrounds and may feel inferior if I gawked over the amazing fashions that they will likely never be able to afford, and if they could I would pray they don’t waste their money on them and instead create their own, equally atrocious, but just as valid outfits.
Unsurprisingly this educator, of presumably very well-off students in Silicon Valley, was incensed that Sanders was about the only notable thing about the inauguration after her beloved former state prosecutor Harris who polled at 2% in the Democratic primaries had to share her spotlight as the second most powerful person in the world.
She also denies the very white Biden and the very multi-ethnic Harris any agency, whatsoever, over their political careers which led them to win the election by what is doubtlessly one of the lowest margins in political history despite a deeply unpopular incumbent president and a country near collapse, bemoaning that a genuine like Sanders is more popular because he is “white,” a notion most of the Charlottesville protestors would likely vigorously contest.
She describes Sanders as a “wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens,” in an expression of what is apparently self-loathing guilt, prejudiced misinformation, and putting her factually incorrect sense of his identity over what he stands for, which she and the families of her affluent may not, the dignity of the working class.
She fails to, perhaps on purpose, understand that many stand up for him because he is actually fighting for them. He is a principled representative, one of the few who actually lives up to that title. And while we have had our qualms with him, mostly over his unwillingness to continue fighting in the primaries (though to be fair he was against a conspiratorial and corrupt DNC which rigged both of the past two presidential elections), we try to be genuine and (mostly) policy based in our critiques.
Seyer-Ochi then really goes off the rails. She then draws parallels to Sanders and white supremacists. Though to be overly fair to her she does ‘graciously’ admit that the man who had family members murdered in the Holocaust, “is no white supremacist insurrectionist.” Is she not merciful. However she does say that he “manifests…white privilege, male privilege and class privilege in ways that my students could see and feel.”
How did her students “feel” this? The world may never know, the students may never know (hell they possibly never even felt this). She then laments that while her students noticed this “manifesting of privilege,” (pretty sure she doesn’t know what that word means), and no one else did. Part of the reason for this is that that is not true. However, many did use the Sanders meme to dump on him, many in fact to smear him as low class. She even condescends to admit that the gloves were knit by a fellow educator, derisively calling it “So ‘Bernie’.” But this is exactly the point that she is trying to miss, it is “so Bernie.” He is just too normal and unpolished for her. It is exactly what a class-ally who disdains the masturabatory back-patting of Washington would do. They would wear a designer coat, featured previously in a much loved meme, to attend a sanctimonious hobnobbing event, where everyone is dressed in inordinately overpriced pieces of fabric, lie to working class Americans about how they are going to give them $2000 checks, which are 12 months late and at least $22,000 short.
The writer bemoans the fact that so many are oblivious to the privileges that Sanders represents. This is obviously laughable as he is one of the few representatives that is actually fighting for working class first policies and actively profaning the class markers with which most of American royalty activally ascribe to.
She then vomits “I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie.” Honestly, she probably could have stopped at folk. The majority of people I know are working class and they wouldn’t go to an inauguration full stop, one because it is vain pageantry, but even then they don’t have the time, money, or influence to attempt it. Funnily enough, Bernie is one of the few fighting for rights that would make that possible. On top of that, working class people would most certainly show up looking like Bernie, many of them much to the chagrin of elitists like Seyer-Ochi, would show up in muddy, oil-stained coveralls, ripped jeans, and frayed ball caps. They would detest the opulence of the ceremony and rightfully so, and faux working class allies like Seyer-Ochi would likely privately gag at the sight of the true working class masses.
As part about the “struggling-to-be-taken-seriously” crowd, we back Bernie and any other politician fighting to improve the lives of working class citizens in the US and around the world. Please for the love of God stop taking these silver spoon grifters seriously and build some class solidarity.
The original post can be viewed here, though be forewarned, it is behind a paywall.
Staff writer: Jordan F. with contributions by Ari B.