Amanda Marcotte is a liar



Amanda Marcotte is a liar. Her talent–her career–is her ability to say objectively untrue things that flatter the prejudices of center-right liberals. There is no good reason to engage with her or her kind. There is no way to achieve anything resembling a good faith discussion. Nothing she says is worth thinking about. She is a liar.



A recent, prominent example of Amanda Marcotte being a liar is demonstrated in these tweets:

Every single measurement of donation data proves that every single thing she says here is untrue. Sanders receives the smallest average donation of any Democratic candidates; Sanders’ donors mostly come from the lower and lower-middle classes, with teachers and nurses being his most prominent backers; and Sanders’ donors are disproportionately non-male and non-white. Every last part of Marcotte’s analysis, from the basal assumptions to the implications thereof, is incorrect. They are all lies. Amanda Marcotte is a liar.

But there’s no retraction forthcoming. She will face no personal or professional consequences. Anyone who dares to direct toward contradictory data is immediately dismissed as a Russian bot or accused of inciting violence against her. This is because, contrary to Marcotte’s worldview, a person’s identity markers only have so much bearing how loudly their voice gets projected or on whether or not one’s statements will be subject to scrutiny. In the end, all that really matters is whether or not a writer is willing to carry water for the powerful. And that’s all Marcotte does: she is a liar, and she lies to excuse the violence and incompetence of Democratic Party.

But, heck, why am I talking about her? Just a few paragraphs ago, I said there’s no point in engaging with her, because she is a liar. Sorry. Chalk this one up to self-indulgence. It’s rare to have your own point of view as thoroughly validated as mine was today, when Marcotte wrote a piece for Salon, in which she lies about the arrest of Julian Assange.

Not quite a year ago, I wrote a post about how identity liberals like Marcotte share the same worldview and basal assumptions of white supremacists like Richard Spenser. I said:

…

And then, today, Marcotte said:





It’s tempting to write this off as derangement, a symptom of a liberal culture so unable to account for its own shortcomings and so deeply dedicated to understanding all social relations through the lens of identity that it attributes a criticism of war crimes to a fear of powerful women. But this is much more malignant than that. Marcotte’s worldview makes sense within its own plane of reference. That plane, however, is racist and sexist. It’s as grounded to a white supremacist worldview as anything you’ll find in the contemporary Republican party.

People who operate within this worldview assert that personal agency is impossible in the face of race and gender-based determinism. She says, explicitly, that Assange’s actions were determined entirely by his fear and hatred of non-white and non-males exerting power–no other forms of causality or motivation warrant consideration. The unstated implication here is that Obama also had no choice but to authorize and cover up literal war crimes, and Clinton likewise could not have done anything other than deny and plan to perpetuate those war crimes, because that is simply how agency is structured within white supremacist patriarchy. The system is uncontrollable and absolutely deterministic: the best we can do is diversify the caste that benefits from it. Understanding structural horrors as the price that simply must be paid for the token success for a handful of elite minorities is the exact inverse of believing that minority success is the cause of these horrors. It’s impossible to come to such a conclusion without basing your worldview on a set of assumptions that are demonstrably false, but that’s okay, that actually benefits Marcotte. Because she is a liar.