Defense Contractors

There was a viral comedian set where this nepobaby guy does microaggressions at a clocky trans woman who reveals she works at a defense contractor but is also a self-identified leftist who was radicalized by working as a barista (but no, not at Starbucks, you bigot; it was at a local coffee shop). I've seen discourse transform over the last few days from "fuck you bitch", to "that cishet guy has no right to criticize a trans woman for something he wouldn't criticize another cishet man about", to "pointing out hypocrisy is a mark of privilege against marginalized people without a choice" (the woman in the video even says she sold her soul, as if her only choices were to work at the coffee shop or the defense contractor—has she tried applying to Starbucks?). If that sounds fucking exhausting, it is.

I wanted to talk about how frustrating it is that 'leftist' discourse—mind you, I don't even self-identify as a leftist because I think most people who do are trying to distinguish themselves from liberals, while only doing so quantitatively (meaning, measuring their distance from some ideological center), as if they were more liberal than liberals—so easily drifts towards a politics not only of identity but of identity centered on belief in the Protestant sense, i.e., faith without works. That was basically the thesis of the bit: that someone can claim to be a leftist because they were radicalized by petty bullshit, and still be okay with doing much worse because they're exempt from criticism on the basis of their belief or identity, or they can't be criticized by those who aren't of the same identity (which can become more specific as needed to deflect criticism, e.g., if both persons were trans women but now the defense contractor employee was black). I think part of the problem is that even though we pay lip service to "intersectionality", we still see different axes of social oppression as being laid on top of one another (ascribing degrees of oppression, and thus noble savagery, to axes based on their supposed verticality), rather than being orthogonal and resulting in a multi-dimensional matrix of various social positions. But I think the bigger issue is that we're doing this shit at all.

Maybe another part of it is the false dichotomy between doing nothing and apparently fucking dying, or doing something either stupid or reprehensible or both. My mother had me transferred from our local school district to the one where she worked so I could go to the rich kids' high school (you know how zip codes are), and we had in fact an engineering track which concluded with a senior-year internship at a nearby defense contractor. So I quit the track. My friends called me a wokie for it, and even my mother was mad that I didn't take the opportunity that came with the rich kids' school district. But I turned out fine. Didn't intern for defense contractors in college, and I didn't apply to any after graduating. I was also very upset when a friend started working for a defense contractor even though I offered to set them up with my firm, and they even referred to it as "queer liberation" for themselves. That was a few years ago and I understand the employment situation has gotten worse since then: there's too much supply, and even still the firms are acting like they don't need us now that they have Claude, and that's not to mention the discrimination against marginalized people which makes them vulnerable to taking unsavory jobs. Still, I asked myself: if I were laid off, or if I had graduated today, would I have applied to a defense contractor? No, dumbass. I'd apply to Starbucks.

I'm tired of people deflecting criticism by appealing to identitarian solidarity. I'd rather if the person criticizing the trans female defense contractor employee has a rich CEO daddy with Epstein connections, that we point out his hypocrisy too. If we have to not criticize someone, it should be on the basis of having a stick in our own eye, because that is a real sign of concern trolling and self-valorization. Sometimes people imply as such when saying that critics only bring out pitchforks for marginalized defense contractor employees and not the usual or stereotypical subjects but, besides never having seen selective discrimination against defense contractor employees, we should also fully expect a non-marginalized person to have less or no solidarity with marginalized people. It's a strawman to say this position implies that ideological purity is a requirement to be trans; I understand our condition to be a physiological one which patriarchy politicizes to its own ends, rather than a political condition which requires physiological intervention to costly signal one's identity as such. But I am saying that you're a piece of shit if you don't extend solidarity outside your own social position, and I have more reason to criticize such a person as an individual than someone who acts exactly as you'd expect. And with regards to politics, let us internalize the words of Chairman James: faith without works is dead.

If this seems related to anything else: maybe it is, maybe it isn't.