Sunday, March 02, 2014

Katha Pollitt vs. Sarah Kendzior, another Mikki Kendall enabler

UPDATE 6/10/2014 - I'm suddenly getting a bunch of visits to this article, so I had to check out what's up. It seems that Sarah Kendzior is making a name for herself by attacking leftists. Again.

It is truly stunning how often Social Justice Warriors like Kendzior and former Nation columnist Aura Bogado and the famous bully and yellow journalist Mikki Kendall and the infamous grade A fancy ninny Suey Park (good buddy of Michelle Malkin) attack liberals and leftists when they themselves are supposed to be part of the left.

I think it's time somebody did a little investigative journalism on these SJWs.

While of course it's entirely possible that they're all just stupid and wrong-headed and priority-wacked, I really do wonder if the right is paying them to attack liberals. It would be easy enough to do - there seems to be very little background information available on notorious Tweeters in spite of all the fame and celebrity they receive. It would be extremely easy for the right - which has plenty of money for astroturfing as anybody who has studied the Koch brothers knows - to invent Tweeters or pay off social justice warriors to attack the left.

In fact it's so easy to do why wouldn't the right attempt to use a bunch of tweeting stooges to attack real liberals and leftists?

Sarah Kendzior in particular has it in for Katha Pollitt, as this recent tweet demonstrates:



Kendzior doesn't provide anything to back up her claim about Pollitt, and she's already lied about Pollitt previously (see below) - and now she seems to have misrepresented - or lied about, if you will - what Elias Isquith said.

Kendzior is not big on backing up her claims about the alleged evil that leftists do, as we see again from a recent post on her blog:
For the past few weeks, I have been receiving rape threats and constant harassment from people who describe themselves as leftists or communists, and apparently want to rape their way to revolution.
So I have to ask the people visiting this post: has Sarah Kendzior provided any evidence whatsoever of actual leftists or communists rape threats to her? And I mean, threats that can be connected to actual people, rather than just random pseudonymous Twitter accounts?

Does anybody do investigative journalism any more?

I think I finally got to the bottom of Kendzior's charge against Pollitt. Apparently a friend of Kendzior's someone named Joshua Foust who writes for The Atlantic, is claiming this:


You can read the entire exchange here, where Foust basically insults people for questioning his claim. Another Twitterer made a reference to Foust's claim and Pollitt said this:


Clearly Kendzior has no interest in accuracy or fairness - she wants to get Pollitt by hook and by crook and she will use every nasty unethical trick in the book to do it. Typical operating procedure of a Social Justice Warrior.

As Pollitt said, many women get rape threats - it's certainly plausible Kendzior got some, although she doesn't offer any evidence. But even if you accept she did, why should you accept Kendzior's claim the threats are from "leftists" and "communists"? And on the basis of this "leftists or communists" Kendzior's friend Foust claimed the perps were writers for Jacobin and Salon.

Is that what it means to be a writer for The Atlantic these days?



ORIGINAL MARCH 2, 2014 post:

Wow, I was wondering if Katha Pollitt would ever be attacked by the Mikki Kendall gang and it finally happened.

I blogged recently about a member of Kendall's gang, Aaminah Khan, whining about poor Mikki Kendall, who only gets published by the Guardian and Salon and Jane and praised in Mother Jones, being picked on by people in big media outlets. What she means of course is the very moderate examination by The Nation's Michelle Goldberg of the viciousness of Tumblr bully slash Twitter bigot Kendall. Then today I found another Mikki Kendall pity party, this time hosted in Al Jazeera by one of Mikki Kendall's good friends Sarah Kendzior (you can observe Mikki Kendall and Sarah Kendzior's mutual admiration in this Twitter exchange, three months before Kendzior's defense of Kendall). Kendizor writes:
"Twitter is a poisonous well of bad faith and viciousness," tweeted Nation columnist Katha Pollitt after engaging in Twitter debate with feminists who disagreed with her views. Pollitt's comments were followed up by a Nation cover story called "Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars", which described Twitter as a site of "Maoist hazing" and "perpetual psychodrama".
The article was written by Michelle Goldberg, a journalist, who in December wrote a spirited defense of Justine Sacco, the white PR executive who tweeted a racist joke mocking black Africans dying of AIDS. The antagonists of Goldberg's "Toxic Twitter" were female activists of color, although particular wrath was reserved for Mikki Kendall, a prominent black intellectual best known for starting the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen to highlight the lack of support for women of color in the mainstream feminist community. The hashtag was partly inspired by white feminist defense of Hugo Schwyzer, a writer who had attacked women of color online and confessed to numerous acts of harassment, describing himself as "a breathtakingly cocky fraud" and a "piss-poor feminist".
Wow, I have to say it blew my mind to see someone describe Mikki Kendall as an "intellectual" while attacking a bona fide intellectual like Pollitt. And then I laughed a long and hearty out loud at the idea of someone who spends her time tweeting inanities and bigotry inspired hashtags being described as an intellectual.

Now Katha Pollitt has faced down far more formidable anti-feminists disguised as feminists long before Mikki Kendall and her horde of sycophants. She's been up against Rush Limbaugh's friend Camille Paglia decades ago and handed anti-feminist Katie Roiphe her ass in 1993.

If Pollitt is not going to put up with shit from pseudo-feminists like Paglia and Roiphe she certainly isn't going to take it from even lesser minds like Kendall and Kendzior. Pollitt responded to Kendzior in the comments of the Al Jazeera article:
That tweet of mine was not preceded by a debate on Twitter with feminists who "disagreed with my views." That is just false. It was a free-standing tweet (it came out of a discussion on a listserv). It is absurd to compare me to a dictator or the Saudi regime. Two people can have different problems with the same thing. But that idea is too subtle for Sarah Kendzior, who prefers wild potshots and smears.
Oh yes - now that is how you do a smack-down, ladies and gentlemen!

I couldn't resist - I tracked down Kendzior's email address at her web site and asked her directly what exactly she considers Mikki Kendall's intellectual accomplishments and if she's ever heard of Katha Pollitt before smearing her in her article. I doubt I'll get a response - social justice warriors like Kendzior just throw bombs and run away like the sad little cowards they are - they are certainly not going to face the people they've smeared. Just as Mikki Kendall makes damn sure nobody can find her email address to get a chance to virtually confront her on her viciousness and bullying.

But on the off-chance she does respond I will post it here.

UPDATE: she did respond:
Mikki is a public intellectual. She has published widely in both mainstream outlets (Guardian, Salon) and on her own website, Hood Feminism, and gives public talks. She has started hashtag movements that have attracted millions of people. Her works have reshaped public debate on race and feminism. 
As for your question about Katha Pollitt, yes, I knew who she was. I don't have a particular opinion about her as a person, only about her work and ideas. 

Well this is good news - I have my own web site, and have given public talks (about theater, but it still counts) so I guess I'm pretty much a public intellectual too.

And of course Kendall's infamous Salon article claiming, on no evidence, that a doctor wanted to see her dead before she got a life-saving abortion, should be counted as one of the lowest points in Salon's history. It would seem that the prestigious Salon doesn't actually bother with such things as editors.

And of course her hashtag movements generally reflect how much Mikki Kendall hates white women.

The idea that Mikki Kendall would be critiqued, even as gently as it was done in The Nation article, clearly drives social justice warriors/unethical journalists like Sarah Kendzior into a frenzy - Mikki Kendall can do no wrong in their minds, and so anybody who dares to criticize her in the least is just a meanie and probably - of course - a racist.

It should be noted that the SJW movement has one of their own writing for the Nation - Aura Bogado was a big participant in the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hash tag bigotry festival. You have to wonder why they don't acknowledge Bogado ever. I mean, Bogado loves Mikki Kendall:



Reply to  
Image will appear as a link


Social Justice Warriors love to tell people to shut up - that's one of their methods of social control and power.

I really do wonder how many of these extremists have heard of Pollitt - their idea of a true feminist is someone, like Mikki Kendall or Camille Paglia for that matter, whose claim to fame is attacking real feminists. And just as Camille Paglia found much common ground with Rush Limbaugh, it is inevitable that Mikki Kendall will find her very own right-wing buddy to help boost her feminist-bashing career.

Meanwhile, back to a true feminist and intellectual - I'm pleased to see that my contribution to the Katha Pollitt wiki (I added the bit about the Smurfette Principle) hasn't been stomped on by the wiki editors.