A Tale of Two Victims

Emma Sulkowicz [1]

Emma Sulkowicz

2,287 words

In the month of August the American press turned its spotlight on the suffering of two women. The attention they were given did not correspond to the depth of tragedy of each but rather to the priorities of the parasites occupying the positions of power.

As students returned to campus there was no doubt that Emma Sulkowicz was the victim of choice of our so-called elite. Her hashtag, #CarryThatWeight, was trending on Twitter and promoted by the humanities and arts students, by the secular Jewish females, and their rainbow coterie of Bourgeois feminists.

Parenthetically, I want to emphasize that I do not wish to cheapen the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of women raped around the world each year. I know numerous women in my personal life who have been subjected to this crime, and I do not share the views of those who wish to minimize its seriousness by quibbling over the word survivor, among other things. A White Nationalism that is stripped of chivalric values has cut itself off from its roots in Europe and beyond.

Emma Sulkowicz is a senior majoring in Fine Art at Columbia and has begun her thesis. She will, without a doubt, enter the annals of Degenerate Art alongside the pantheon of unforgettable Performance Artists like the guy who got shot in the arm on stage during the Vietnam War, the Jewish girl who stuffed things up her vagina in the ’60s, and the gay guy with AIDS who sent blood-soaked rags along a clothesline over his audience in the ’80s.

The Asian-Ashkenazi, Ms. Sulkowicz is carrying a futon mattress, a replica of the one on which she was allegedly raped, wherever she goes on campus. Others may help her to carry it but she may not ask for help. Her accused rapist is a fellow student at Columbia. She will carry the mattress until he is expelled . . . or until she graduates with a nice scholarship to an MFA program, and maybe a book contract with a fat advance.

Emma Sulkowicz [2]She has been featured on numerous national media outlets, including the cover of New York Magazine; on TMZ, Democracy Now, and local New York stations; and within pages of Newsweek, Time, the nationally distributed Arts & Design section of the New York Times, the Washington Post, various women’s fashion magazines, and all of the New York tabloids.

Her budding stardom has not been hurt by the fact that her claims are almost certainly false. She did not report their sexual encounter as rape until seven months had passed and two other women told her they had sex with the accused assailant. This Manhattan native who attended the ultra-exclusive Dalton School was contacted by the District Attorney’s Office (the prosecuting lawyer who represents the State), after being tipped off by the school. She rejected their offer to begin a criminal investigation. She has since characterized such an investigation as “a waste of time [for herself].” However, since her “thesis” began at the beginning of the year she has not demurred from calling for his expulsion without due process.

This new media darling caught the wave of #CampusRapeCulture at just the right moment, and she will ride it all the way to a tenured position on a Fine Arts faculty.

We have all known a guy who has had sex with a woman on the first day they meet. For about three days he felt like Casanova, that he is the special one. Once he realizes that he is not especially seductive, but she is especially slutty, he is filled with pain and embarrassment. The only half measure of balm for his pain is provided by attempting to sabotage her social life (now known as slut-shaming). Perhaps it was a similar pain that drove Emma to speak to the Columbia University administration back in her Sophomore year. At first, she just wanted to punish him with the same social sanction that sexually active women sometimes received in the days of dorm mothers and sexually segregated campuses over five decades ago. Luckily for him, her wrath didn’t extend to false criminal accusations. When she recalls this decision not to press charges, she does not regret it . . . rather she reflects on the bother of a legal process, “If I sit around waiting for that, I’ll be missing out on other opportunities like creating this piece, or doing other work.”

Her gang of followers across America, who mostly look like rejects from an American Apparel photo shoot casting call, have since taken to slandering the character of sexually active men with bathroom graffiti. There may in fact be true rapists among the accused, but my hunch is they are a minority.

As silly as the behavior of Emma Sulkowicz may seem, there are serious results for the young men being targeted. Many of whom have committed no crime more serious than breaking an immature girl’s heart.

A university run on New Right principles would not have time for such decadent foolishness. There will be a house-cleaning in the humanities faculties that will leave few professors. Our Arts and Letters will once again be in the service of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness rather than the service of the Jewish metapolitical project seeking to deny their existence.

As Greg Johnson has pointed out, in a society reflecting our principles, the only place to find a woman ready for a one night stand would be among the prostitutes working the shipyards. The pathetic spectacle of binge drinking beyond the point of consent that today seems inseparable from the university experience will be an embarrassing and distant memory, just as cross-dressing renditions of Gilbert & Sullivan musicals seem to students of today.

* * *

Maria Fernandes [3]

Maria Fernandes

There was another tragedy in August 2014. That was the death of Maria Fernandes in Newark, NJ. It was covered in the regional news section of the New York Times, NJ.com, other local outlets, and a handful of labor bloggers. She probably got more attention outside of the US than from the national media. It also came days before the “strike” of fast food workers seeking a living wage on Labor Day.

Maria Fernandes was born in Massachusetts to working class parents from Portugal. In case Jessica Alba or any Vantards are reading this . . . yes, Portugal counts as European. She was a woman who oozed maternal instinct and sympathy, as is evident from family photos. She loved animals and cared for her common law husband’s children as though they were her own. She was a huge Michael Jackson fan, a feeling I don’t share but understand and recognize in many people I have met, all of whom are lonely and disappointed with life and are memorable for their simplicity, their kind hearts, and their bitter-sweet life stories. (Her fellow fans raised funds for her funeral costs with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Qjyq7USTE [4]) Her immediate family returned to Portugal, but she remained in the US as one of the 7.5 million who worked multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Despite working 4 jobs, including three at separate Dunkin Donuts franchises, she was still eligible for Medicaid and EBT cards. Do you have any loyal Republican friends who wonder why their party rails against social programs like these but never move to defund them? The case of Maria Fernandes illustrates that a preposterously low minimum wage combined with welfare programs for the working poor create a wealth transfer from taxpayers to corporations employing cheap labor. In this case, the DC government is taking taxpayer money into a corporate welfare scheme to the benefit of the franchisees and shareholders of Dunkin Donuts. Taxpayers subsidize these companies so that they do not have to offer health insurance and a living wage to their workers or to make capital expenditures on process improvements to increase the efficiency of each worker. This keeps the dividends rolling in each quarter with minimal investment and effort from the owners of capital.

Maria Fernandes, her Common Law husband, and his daughter [5]

Maria Fernandes, her Common Law husband, and his daughter

Though she worked more than 40 hours per week, Dunkin Donuts kept her “part time” by separating her hours at different franchised locations for years on end, thus Ms. Fernandes was never eligible for the insurance and retirement benefits set aside for full-time employees. This is a very common practice in the US within corporations employing unskilled labor. Ms. Fernandes knew that she could never say no to her bosses or else they might reduce her weekly hours; there is no guaranteed minimum agreed upon with part time workers. The result was that in the last months of her life from Friday afternoon through Monday morning she worked almost continuously from one location to the next. She would sleep in her car on breaks to try and keep up with the workload. Because she would keep a gas can in her car to avoid an empty tank at the end of the month, she died of toxic fumes during her nap.

From the pre-recession high in 2008 to the time of her death, the US GDP rose over 7%. Over the same period, those who lost their job during the recession returned to work with an average 23% pay cut in similar positions. Post-crash hourly wages have been stagnant from 2009 to present. (All stats are available on the US Department of Labor website.). So who is capturing this newly created value? Obviously shareholders are doing much better than wage earners these past few years.

Had Maria Fernandes followed her parents and sister back to Portugal she would certainly have had a hard time finding a job since the crisis hit. However, neither the tragedy of her death nor of her life could have been possible. The strong labor laws in the civilized countries of Europe (ex-UK of course) guarantee a living wage and minimal health coverage. The tactics used by US bosses to make work precarious and part-time are illegal. The American legal concepts such as “fire-at-will” or the Orwellian “right-to-work” do not exist either. To fire someone, an employer must prove either a material adverse change in the business environment or a “serious fault” on the part of the employee in achieving reasonable expectations. These laws date to the days when Social Democratic parties were “national” by default and “socialist” by conviction. These laws are under attack by the Center-Right Parties who talk tough of Immigration and Identity but are entirely kosher in their policies (if not also in leadership).

The Democratic Party promised to raise the Minimum Wage in the month leading up to the election of November 2014, when the polls showed they would not control either house of Congress. Since the election, Barack Obama, spokesman of the DC government, proclaimed an Amnesty for 5 million illegal immigrants (almost entirely non-white). Counter-Currents readers are well aware of the benefits this will bring to the oligarchy. As for the minimum wage, I doubt American workers can count on an imperial decree to fix this . . . we have to think of the Constitution after all.

Maria Fernandes would not have been helped by the policy decisions and priorities of the Democratic Party. Millions of Americans in a similar situation must now compete more vigorously with millions of mostly single men who have no family duties to balance and whose third world standards of living will be easily exceeded with the minimum wage as it is. The cries for a minimum wage as a living wage will go unheard for years now.

* * *

Two points are worth making here about our movement.

The difference between White Nationalism the political movement and White Nationalism the internet subculture lies in its ability to serve and represent a constituency that is larger than the movement itself. Our Movement fights for “Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country” to benefit of those who have never heard of us, for white people who read Walmart paperbacks as much as for those who read Faye and Benoist, for those poor souls touched by Michael Jackson as much as for the heroic souls inspired by Arkona.

Finally, many comrades and potential sympathizers have a hard time imagining a White Nationalist America without an intervening zombie apocalypse. When you are painting a picture of a country remade on the order of our values, it might be best to highlight the most banal aspects when speaking with the skeptical. Moving the dial more in the direction of labor than capital when it comes to who captures that extra 7% of GDP might be a good start. Don’t let the banality of this suggestion fool them into believing that reform rather than revolution can fix this, though. When the Democrats had all branches of government, during Obama’s first two years as spokesman of the DC government, they failed to ensure a living wage. Rather they wrote a healthcare reform that was a gift to the private insurance companies and ensured pharmaceutical corporations that Americans would continue to overpay for their drugs. They enacted laws that gave a minimum of oversight to Wall Street while burdening future generations with billions in debt to pay unmerited bonuses to the Wall Street banksters. They wrote a stimulus package that privileged job creation in the affirmative action-addled make-work, desk job centers of the government when they could have invested in infrastructure improvements that would mostly employ white men in the skilled building trades.

Whether we are imagining a breakaway republic or a military caretaker government, only a revolutionary force driven by the ideas of White Nationalism, of the North American New Right, and of Third Way Economics could offer any redress to the injustices faced by millions of our people in America each day and which cost the life of Maria Fernandes.