A few days before the RNC and all the shenanigans that unfolded at the event ever took place, a little-known hashtag campaign called #WeAreTheLeft lived for a brief period of time and died an ignominious death. While its creators would like to pretend it never existed, it is far better to take note of their mistakes, if only to laugh at their efforts to control the social media narrative of the liberal left.
It all began with an open letter from feminist writer Sady Doyle, who often writes about harassment on Twitter and accuses male public figures of engaging in abuse. The Hillary diehard played a big role in the firing of left-wing journalist Matt Bruenig, from the lefty think tank Demos; Bruenig often wrote articles critical of her favorite presidential candidate. In it, Doyle blamed Bruenig for the “harassment” that she and other prominent Clinton supporters received online after branding Bernie Sanders supporters “Bernie Bros.” She also took some time to take potshots at GamerGate, for whatever reason.
OK, I swear to God, I have real work, but one more stab at this: This is, basically, a Voltron of anti-woman, racist harassers in the left.
— Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle) May 22, 2016
Folks who went through GamerGate start to publicly note it's similar. GG starts to look at us, posts about us show up on GG forums.
— Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle) May 22, 2016
Any criticism of the “Bernie Bro” label was titled harassment of “some women & POC” by a “hate group.”
If you're checking, this is now Weird Twitter, a hate group, the staff of a magazine, all trained on some women & PoC they don't like.
— Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle) May 22, 2016
It was a rather successful attempt to erase any female supporters of Bernie Sanders and paint every single one who voted for him as a straight white male: If you don’t support Hillary, you’re not a real liberal—and you hate women, and that you’re probably also racist.
All of the infighting on the left between neoliberal Hillary supporters and their detractors led to the creation of the now-stillborn hashtag #WeAreTheLeft, the aforementioned open letter, and the creation of a dedicated Twitter account.
The crux of the letter was to condemn anyone who was critical of Doyle and her friends for labeling people sexist without cause. In line with the social justice paradigm that disagreement is violence, the letter’s author and its signees refuse to take responsibility for their own hostile actions on social media, blaming everyone but themselves for engaging in abusive behavior online.
In essence, it says, “Please don’t be mean to me if I lie about you and call you a bigot.”
Much of the letter is filled with emotional pleas regarding the oppression faced by trans, queer and other minority voices, as if no one is capable of disagreement without somehow being responsible for systemic oppression.
As with Christina Hoff Sommers’ anecdote about a feminist conference that saw “victim creep,” where various participants vied for oppression points. The #WeAreTheLeft hashtag soon devolved into infighting among those who signed the letter—and those who didn’t, but were told they supported it.
One of the first drafts of the letter included a reference to Marissa Johnson, a #BlackLivesMatter activist who climbed up on stage during a Bernie Sanders rally in 2015 to shout him down and deliver a sermon. It turns out that Johnson had never signed the letter, and that her name was simply thrown onto the list without her knowledge or approval. She was not very happy about it.
Without providing any explanation for how Johnson’s name got on the list in the first place, Sady Doyle attempted to do some damage control by offering to link her PayPal account.
Another prominent anti-Sanders voice who labeled the former candidate “anti-choice,” Imani Gandy, who goes by @AngryBlackLady on Twitter, later explained that she added Johnson’s name to the letter without her knowledge and admits: “I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”
Signing someone else’s name onto a letter to support your cause is totally an easy mistake to make.
Furthermore, trans activists took issue with some of the language used in the letter. It referred to transmen as victims of misogyny despite identifying as male. The problem was that the sentence they used could potentially misgender individuals. It read: “They affect not women alone, but people along the gender identity spectrum: Trans men, genderqueer and nonbinary people are all targeted for misogyny.”
The trans issues were compounded by the fact that the hashtag’s official Twitter account retweeted Cathy Brennan, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist infamous for her online beefs with trans activists. Many of the hashtag’s supporters were, of course, upset. Apologies ensued.
Victim creep has no limits.
Much as @deeperblue on Medium points out, it’s somewhat remarkable that the apologies offered two separate explanations for the retweet.
As a result of all the infighting and disagreements, the letter’s footnotes now contain a litany of corrections pertaining to the misgendering, women who prefer to identify as “black women” rather than “women of color,” sex work, “biphobia” and “sizeism.”
The hashtag has, of course, died, and all the demands for inclusion and correct terminology have amounted to nothing. All the outrage that lead up to its creation continues unabated as the left tears itself apart on social media with identity politics and arguments over the correct usage of words only the most obtuse of minds would find confusing or intentionally offensive. One wonders whether any of its participants will learn anything from this debacle, or how they’ll ever mount a proper defense against Donald Trump if they can’t even find common ground on the simplest of issues: mutual respect.
