Chad A. Haag - Social Justice Madness

The Social Justice Stock Market

Sauted Assholes on a Stick,

Dipped in Butter and Served with Salsa

In November 2016, the single most ridiculous piece of clickbait news in a year with exceptionally stiff competition solidified its victory when the media tripped over its own feet graciously heaping praise and reverence upon Kevin Allred (an adjunct at Rutgers who was erroneously labelled a professor in many reports) for being the leftist political activist martyr of the year. Allred had earned the honourable title after he had reacted to the election of Donald J. Trump by tweeting out death threats which were quite literally filtered on the basis of race and race alone and was then genuinely surprised to find that the New York City police showed up at his Brooklyn apartment after a concerned citizen reported him to the authorities. Although an examination of the tweets themselves reveals that even a grammatical requirement so basic as capitalizing the personal pronoun I was simply too much work to demand of someone who literally claimed to be a professional thinker (a grammatical error which was also noticeably present in the 2019 Antifa Terrorist Manifesto which was only some three pages long and hardly deserving of the title) we can grant the benefit of the doubt that there is simply no time to waste on irrelevant bullshit like mere grammatical formalities when one is in a rush to rebel against a tyrant who had not yet been inaugurated at the time when this tweet was clumsily thrown together as quickly as possible in order to gobble up all the cyber-likes from sickos online who would publicly vote up a proposal to commit mass murder in a blatant instance of pre-meditated racial profiling:

Every single person that voted for Donald Trump is a racist... Will the 2nd amendment be as cool when i buy a gun and start shooting at random white people or no?

Quite predictably, shortly after the NYPD showed up at his residency to transport him to a nearby facility, Allred immediately took to Twitter to publicly lament (or, rather, to celebrate) his own hard-earned status as the first casualty in a totalitarian dictators crackdown on free speech (to use his own phrase) which was sure to extend to countless other courageous public intellectuals who would presumably be thrown into hard labour camps to suffer a miserable existence of being bound in chains and surviving on a meagre diet of 19 th Century-style prison gruel for years on end for no reason except that they had dared to use their brilliant minds to think in the era of Trumpian misinformation and post-truthism.

The only problem with the medias hagiographical account of the Martyrdom of Kevin Allred was, of course, the inconvenient fact that the police had been sent to his apartment not to arrest him but to take him in for a psychiatric evaluation, as even the Washington Post itself was forced to report (no doubt, simply to avoid violating anti-libel laws.) Needless to say, the gulag of thousands of imprisoned professors never materialized, as their jobs actually became much easier during Trumps presidency, an era in which the only thing one needed to do to secure a high-paying academic job (funded, of course, through bleeding 18 year old kids parents life savings dry or driving these same kids into systemically-unpayable student loan debt) was to mindlessly chant the magical words Orange Man Bad over and over again for four years straight while using the constantly-looming threat of a totalitarian dictatorship as an excuse to not do ones own job. It is a very strange kind of institutional oppression indeed which allows one to seize a six-figure salary and two-hour workweek as a professional intellectual while removing any need to produce anything of lasting value despite effectively working with an industry-wide budget which had easily exceeded the trillion-dollar threshold.

It is even more ridiculous to portray Allred as the Aristotle of the 21 st Century when one recalls that even his formal academic accomplishments had already made national news years before this 2016 incident for no reason except that he had won the top prize in a competition for the single most laughable academic industry publicity stunt. In 2014, radio host Dave Ramsey had mentioned Allreds notorious Politicizing Beyonce in a segment over the top ten silliest college courses currently being offered no doubt, in order to warn his listeners of the full extent to which the quality of education in America had declined to a comedically-abysmal low despite sustaining outrageous tuition hikes year after year for decades on end. Long before he had been canonized as the first martyr in Trumps supposed war on intellectuals, Allred had been crowned the academic Pope of Fools for providing the single stupidest reason for any person to ruin his or her life by going deep into student loan debt.

Ramseys segment was, in retrospect, something of a game in which listeners would have to guess whether a given ludicrous title referred to a real college course which some foolish 18-year-old kid had actually agreed to pay full tuition for or whether it was just a hypothetical chimera thrown together for the purposes of parody alone, the college-industry equivalent of the old-school segments on the Jay Leno Show asking the audience to guess whether a given title referred to a fictitious food or something disgusting which fat-ass Americans actually eat (to use Lenos own phrase.) Allreds notorious college course on Beyonce (his only notable academic accomplishment) is just the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of deep-fried Kool Aid, something which a shockingly-high number of stupid-ass Americans had actually agreed to go deep into debt to learn about despite the fact that it sounds like a joke which was crafted solely for the purpose of provoking laughter.

Interestingly, when Ramsey read the formal course description on the air it was quite obvious that the professor (or, rather, the adjunct) had actively excused himself from the need to do anything except name-drop all the categories of intersectionality in which he had personally bought stock, the academic equivalent of a Mad Money corporate brand endorsement broadcast:

Politicizing Beyonce is an examination of race, gender, class and sexual politics based on the music and career of the pop star.

A perceptive reader will surely notice that theres absolutely no content of substance in this course description whatsoever, for this advertisement does nothing except parade around a set of empty formal categories of intersectionality, effectively putting them on the for sale rack in the hope of luring in a handful of kids gullible enough to pay cold hard cash for a bundle of penny stocks on the gamble that their value would rise during the following quarter.

It is all the more ironic that Allreds 2016 martyrdom was portrayed through the absurdly dishonest clich of Trump arresting intellectuals for the crime of using their brilliant minds to think when Allreds own theory was, in itself, nothing except the purely quantitative recognition that it is far more profitable to gobble up race, gender, class, and sexual politics instead of settling for only one of them. Needless to say, as soon as one subtracts all the intersectional categories of disenfranchisement from the course description, its value instantly collapses into the paradoxical Zizekian status of a non-thing which somehow has to be less than nothing before it can even perform the travelling freakshow spectacle of becoming just nothing. Even achieving the nothingness of the void of SJW linguistification is somehow a secondary accomplishment which follows only after the course had been combined with as many intersectional fads as possible. Just as George Carlin joked that Americans would stuff their faces with sauted racoons assholes on a stick if you dipped them in butter and served salsa on the side, Allred proved that you can trick Americans into buying academic assholes bundles of nothingness if you sprinkle them with enough categories of intersectionality to cover up the bad taste of wasting ones own money.