An astonishing example of neoliberal hypocrisy

benfell

So, um, wow:


I don’t know this @WonderKing82, but it’s apparent from his timeline that he’s a neoliberal, whose ideology the Poor People’s Campaign challenges. @unos_dos_trey posted this with a screenshot of the above:


In this line of argument, I think I’d actually go back a few steps further, to um, Jesus Christ, especially the cleansing of the Temple in John 2:13-16, but let’s just set that aside for now.

The argument that preaching can be separated from activism—put this way, it rightly sounds absurd—assumes that morality is something we talk about, not something we do. It is to separate theory from praxis and thus to break the cycle of inquiry—and, um, yeah, spirituality is a form of inquiry—which, in the positivistic terms @WonderKing82, as a self-styled “professor,” might presumably prefer, flows from hypothesis to experimentation to theory and back to hypothesis again.

Perhaps @WonderKing82 should stop pretending to be a “professor.” His profile claims no supporting credential for such a claim, only that he is a “Hampton University Alum.” Even I, with a Ph.D., cannot claim to be a professor, as I am not employed in academia, let alone in a faculty role, let alone in a tenured or tenure-track role.

But the problem here is more profound and, in fact, “Sensei Carlos” reaches in this direction with his Martin Luther King, Jr., reference. Theology necessarily entails philosophy, a humanity, and is a humanity itself. The humanities have, of course, along with the social sciences, have suffered greatly under neoliberal influence on academia. (This is a factor in my own apparent unemployability and is in fact, why I lay so much blame on neoliberalism for my plight.[1])

Neither the humanities nor the social sciences tell neoliberals what they want to hear, the latter being that workers will be just fine being reduced to factors of production even on starvation wages, that they don’t really need to be able to pay rent or afford health care. It is, in neoliberal ideology, far more important that inflation be kept under control.[2] Rather, these fields of academia inform us of the problems of social injustice, which you most definitely don’t want to hear about if you’re any kind of conservative, including neoliberal.[3]

I see that Hampton University, which our self-styled “Black Professor” claims to have graduated from, is what’s widely referred to as an HBCU, an institution in a category of historically Black colleges and universities, schools which exist in part to remedy historic discrimination, something neoconservatives, who treat neoliberalism as a moral imperative, don’t want to hear about. Which is to say that in combination with neoliberalism’s assault on education, @WonderKing82 betrays not only the institution he graduated from but its entire reason for existence.

But @WonderKing82 presumes to lecture progressives on race, bashing Nina Turner, Susan Sarandon, and others, in favor of—are you ready?—Hillary Clinton.

When people complain about the flak they receive on Twitter, I occasionally remind them that the block button is their friend. I think I’m about to be intimate with that particular friend again.

  1. [1]David Benfell, “About my job hunt,” Not Housebroken, n.d., https://disunitedstates.org/about-my-job-hunt/↩
  2. [2]David Benfell, “A piper needs paying,” Not Housebroken, January 29, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/12/19/a-piper-needs-paying/↩
  3. [3]David Benfell, “My fellow kook,” Not Housebroken, August 1, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/08/01/my-fellow-kook/; David Benfell, “Ethics,” Not Housebroken, n.d., https://disunitedstates.org/ethics/↩

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