On Self-Reinventing Apples and Dumpster-Fire Oranges

Julia Salazar beat eight-term incumbent Martin Dilan this past Thursday, and now Bari Weiss is calling her "the Left’s Post-Truth Politician":  "According to The Washington Post’s running count, Donald Trump is averaging 7.6 'Trumpian claims' a day. One wonders how many Salazarian claims Julia Salazar has spoken."  Hmm, that depends on how we define "Salazarian claims" - if we mean it analogically, as in "things this person is known for saying," then probably a lot?  But I think Weiss pretty obviously means it synonymously, as in "just as bad."

I'm gonna go with "not nearly as many."

Weiss has a history of spouting nonsense that is somewhere between half-baked rationalizations at best, and disingenuous concern-trolling at worst (and, I'm sure, some very fine articles besides; my knowledge of her oeuvre is by no means comprehensive).  I've read a couple of her opinion pieces recently, on the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web" and on the creeping authoritarianism of the USA's political left.  The latter article only gets a brief mention because it's actually quite a bit better and much easier to summarize & criticize:  first, yes there is a creeping authoritarianism on the left and it's scary but it's not the same as fascism so don't pretend it is; and second, "freedom stops when it has a negative and violent impact on other individuals" does not mean "free speech is acceptable only when it doesn’t offend them" so don't pretend it does.

But the former article amounts to the insipid claim that the entrenched yahoos spouting old-ass ideas are somehow new, edgy, and intellectually courageous, and calling them "heretics" for daring to question the left's "dogma" (which, there's some, but that's not what's going on here).  To which I say Horse Shit, they're a pile of too-smart-for-their-own-good Entitled White Folks who think their bullshit views are a weird mixture of Patently Obvious, Secretly Brilliant, and What They Don't Want You to Hear.  Quick run-down:

• Jordan Peterson (a.k.a. The Dad Incels Will Listen to, Not the One They Need) is a Canadian psychology professor who thinks his freedom to misgender his students is more important than providing a welcoming environment for those students (and that's just shit pedagogy, which you'd think a fucking psych prof would know).
• Sam Harris (a.k.a. The World's Smartest Racist) is a brilliant polymath who somehow managed to slide from an understandable Islamophobic knee-jerk in 2001 to out-and-out medical racism in a series of double-downs and backpedals which everyone else noticed but him.
• Christina Hoff Sommers (a.k.a. The MRA in Feminist's Clothing) is an anti-feminist who thinks it's totally unproblematic to let stereotypes determine our treatment of individuals when those stereotypes are based on statistical averages and "common sense" observations (read:  bullshit assumptions she hasn't confronted since 1970).
• Joe Rogan (a.k.a. The Skeptic's Woo Man) is a comedian-turned-intellectual who questions everything except why he's friends with Alex Jones.  Although, I mean, maybe I'm being unfair and the guy's a laugh riot.  I've misjudged Jones in the past, I thought he was transphobic but it turns out he thinks tgirls are hot as fuck (yes I know chasers are still transphobes chill).
• Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (a.k.a. The Ones I Hadn't Heard of Before) are a couple of progressive biologists who seem pretty great until you find out they decided to quit their jobs one day over a pathological inability to check their own privilege (but Pro Tip:  exile is never self-imposed, what you're thinking of is butthurt - you are "professors in butthurt").
• Michael Shermer (a.k.a. The Velvet Tube Worm) is a guy who did great work for skeptics and then felt spurned by the left because he ignored the memo about updating his romantic playbook with the Consent Culture patch.
• Ben Shapiro (a.k.a. Do This One on Your Own) has a storied history of idiocy I won't even get into... today...
• Dave Rubin (a.k.a. The One I Don't Care About) doesn't get a turn because I'm Officially Bored of This.

But I'm getting off-topic.  Point is, I have a closetful of bones to pick.

Preamble:  Over.  To the On-Topic-Mobile!

Let's start with what Weiss does right:  she correctly identifies Salazar as someone who has completely reinvented herself in college (which, like, whoah). She notes with pithy wit that Salazar's 180 on multiple issues is "the ideological equivalent of a cinnamon-raisin bagel with lox. Strange. But technically kosher."  Moreover, Salazar's life story has some blatant half-truths and three genuine lies:

• Salazar claimed in an interview with Jacobin that "my mom ended up raising my brother and me as a single mom, without a college degree" - when it came out that her mom graduated college when Julia was 8, she clarified that her mother raised her without a degree up to that point.
• "Working class" is a weasel word that denotes a wide range of take-home pay but connotes a much lower and narrower one in common parlance; while her parents may well have been wage workers (as opposed to salaried), having a trust fund worth over $600,000 is definitely excluded from what most people think when they say or hear "working class."
• Salazar said in a July interview, "My family immigrated to the US from Colombia when I was a baby," a plain falsehood; then in early September, “I’m not an immigrant... I have always felt a deep connection to my father’s immigrant experience because of the time I spent with our family in Colombia at such a young age.”  So that's one outright lie.
• Salazar wrote in a comment, "Like most American Jews, I was raised with the delusion that Israel was a safe haven for me," except she was raised Catholic and converted in college.  Lie number two.
• Citizens Union dropped their endorsement of her because her application listed a BA from Columbia - Salazar completed her coursework but never actually graduated, so this is lie number three.  Frankly, this is a dumb rookie mistake, and the only part of this I actually care about.

This is optically bad, though apparently not bad enough, as Salazar still won almost 60-40.  Really, it's just branding*, which so many people and corporations do that it hardly seems worth mentioning as such:  just kinda cuddle up right next to whatever your target demographic likes, saying whatever you can legally get away with to cement the link.  This happens all the time, and while you'll never catch me saying that the existence, efficacy, & ubiquity of such supermarket psychology is unproblematic, we certainly have bigger things to worry about.

But then there's Salazar's Jewish identity:  Salazar was raised in a Catholic household and converted in college after finding out some family history.  Some people seem to think that this undermines her "Jewish identity," but it doesn't:  she converted, and was welcomed with open arms.  My brother JD did the same thing when he found out that our mother's maiden name was very similar (like "plausibly changed at Ellis Island" similar) to a bunch of Secret Jews living in the hills of Italy.  He's Jewish, The End.  Weiss writes, "her conversion story, which no one can verify, keeps changing" - but so what?  If you looked around at my various social media posts, you'd find "inconsistencies" as well - I often gloss over or change personal details when they're not relevant to the subject at hand or would make present company uncomfortable.  While this is not telling the whole unvarnished truth all the time, nobody is obligated to do that.  And moreover, you don't need to "verify" someone's personal account of a religious conversion, so why does this matter?

In August, Tablet published a profile on Salazar, which Weiss summarized as, "Incredible reporting here from @ArminRosen in @tabletmag on @SalazarSenate18. The candidate is running on her identity as a Colombian immigrant and Jew of color. But it seems she is neither of those things."  Salazar replied, "yeah I virtually never speak publicly about my religion unless media explicitly ask me about it. And that’s largely because I don’t enjoy subjecting myself to Tablet-esque race science, as a person from a mixed background" - which Weiss then seized on as an accusation of race science, because that's exactly what it - waaaaiiiit a second.

Let's watch the replay:  first, Tablet publishes a profile discussing Salazar's cultural heritage as a descendant of Catholic Colombian elites; next, Weiss, (who used to work for Tablet herself) tweets an inaccurate summary claiming that Salazar is not a Jew of color, which she most definitely is because Judaism is a religious belief; then Salazar, probably only reading the tweet and assuming it to be an accurate summary, calls it race science science for attempting to undermine her legit identity (and on Twitter's hyper-restrictive platform I'm gonna say that's close enough to count); finally, Weiss makes a big deal in her opinion column of an off-the-cuff reaction to her own inaccurate summary.

OK, that was a mouthful - but so is bait.

Weiss goes on to write,

No matter how many things Ms. Salazar makes up, it seems unfair to liken her to our post-truth president, who lies on a much grander scale and who has the power to do far, far greater damage.

And yet, the willingness of Ms. Salazar’s supporters to look past her fabrications sounds eerily familiar to the justifications Trump supporters made in 2016: Yes, he’s distasteful and prone to exaggeration. But he’s promising to pass policies we like. Supporting him is a price worth paying in pursuit of our goals.

Translation:  "This comparison seems unfair for obvious reasons, but I'ma make it anyway."  The objections to Trump aren't that he's "distasteful" and "prone to exaggeration," they're that he's a straight-up racist, proto-fascist, inexperienced, anti-environment, serial fuck-up, misogynist, ideologue who's going to run our country into the ground.  Trumpsters don't Trumpit because "he's promising to pass policies we like," he didn't make any policy promises on the campaign trail - they liked him because he used racist dog-whistles and appealed to their basest instincts.  The label of "post-truth" doesn't simply mean "untrue," because politicians have always lied, because humans have always lied.  Lying isn't the problem (it can be a problem, and often is, but mere lying is not this problem); it's the flagrant disregard for truth as a thing worth caring about that's noteworthy about post-truth politicians and their constituents.  Fuck's sake, if you look up "politicians who have lied" in the encyclopedia, you get:

It's funny 'cuz it's true - I didn't even Photoshop it!

Weiss closes by saying, "The right has been damaged beyond belief by its embrace of Mr. Trump. That Trumpian logic and Trumpian loyalty is now beginning to infect the left is nothing to cheer."  Don't worry, Bari - we're nowhere near that point yet.  Weiss' complaint seems to be that we haven't ostracized Salazar for telling three whoppers and a handful of half-truths about her background, as if the Democrats were the party of purity politics (you're thinking of the Greens).  This isn't even yellow journalism, it's blatant whataboutism, taking the facts and twisting them to fit the preconceived narrative that the left is somehow just as bad as the - waaaaiiiit a second.

The left doesn't have a post-truth politician - the New York Times has a post-truth writer.  Fixed that for you, Bari.

Notes

* - Again, the one exception to this is lying about her degree:  any undergrad degree outside a specialized field like pre-med or pre-law is basically only good for verification that you can take on a long-term project and complete it; apparently, Salazar couldn't, which raises questions from me.  But I don't care about her fitness for office here, I care about the false equivalence and the whataboutism in Weiss' article.  I'll be keeping an eye on Salazar to see what she actually does, don't get me wrong - this is just a clarification that my purpose here is to Fisk Weiss' smear piece, not say she's some untarnished angel or whatever.