I have no personal animus towards Sean McCarthy, but a lot of his tweets lately are poorly thought out to a comical degree, and none of the points he’s been making with regards to Aaron Coleman, the role idpol plays in insulating capitalism from working class upheaval, and putting strategy above morality or ethics have been worthwhile.

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In this tweet, Sean seems to be taking at face value an allegation made against MLK by the FBI. You know, the same FBI who wanted King to kill himself, blackmailed him into doing so, and has every reason to lie about him and smear him in every way possible.

Not only is he taking FBI intel at face value, but he’s just getting details about the case wrong. King was accused of egging on a rape, not of physically abusing a woman. Importantly, Coleman admits to what he did, and we just have the word of the FBI to be honest about MLK.

On top of that, King never ran for public office. He was an organiser who made speeches and had no formal legislative power over women. He WAS elected as President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which necessarily means he has power over people, but if Sean is suggesting that there would be no problem with MLK having egged on a rape while being in a position of power above women, then it sounds like he just doesn’t care about sexual assault against women. These are big details Sean is either paving over intentionally or omitting accidentally, but either way, it makes it seem like he doesn’t care about the differences between Coleman and King, or believes that King being accused of promoting rape shouldn’t be an issue when it comes to being a leader.

Also, just as a side note: MLK stepping aside wouldn’t mean that Bull Connor would run the country all of a sudden. As important as MLK was to the protests in Birmingham, he wasn’t the only person there, and attributing its success to him exclusively sounds like liberal revisionism.

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In this tweet, he’s making the argument that people who are telling you to vote for Joe have no business telling you to not vote for Aaron Coleman. Which is fine, because I’d tell people to vote for neither. There isn’t much to say about this one. It’s an argument that only works if you support Joe, and Sean knows for a fact that most of the people in his mentions aren’t fans of Joe. He’s being disingenuous and projecting political opinions onto people so that he can comfortably dismiss their arguments.

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Here’s the next one. A recurring talking point from people defending Coleman is that he was a working class kid who was subject to abuse, and this makes what he did less bad, or more defensible, or something. Instead of arguing about the morality of what he did, it’s descended into a reductive view that bourgeois people have no business criticising the working class for anything, effectively infantilising them or making the issue seem like one of class conflict – even though it definitely isn’t. It’s a good thing I’m not bourgeois and I’m poor white trash who makes $10/hour, or this argument might damage my ego.

“He’s not responsible for his actions because he was in a bad situation” makes sense to a degree, because a person’s environment impacts their behaviour, but if he’s this bad at making responsible decisions, then why should he be a public official who has power over others? Is there any proof of a transformation in Coleman’s behaviour? Greenwald’s article failed to convince me.

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This is probably the dumbest thing he’s posted in the last 24 hours, while will require quite a bit of effort to unpack.

The most important thing I want to highlight is that this comic/meme comes off like a facile idpol fantasy of opposing forces coming together despite their differences to combat a greater enemy: capitalism. This is comically juvenile and childish. It’s like the plot to an episode of The Avengers cartoon. “They don’t like each other, but they’ll bring down the establishment TOGETHER!”

If the point Sean wants to make is that capital uses racial divisions and animosity to drive people apart for the purposes of atomising them and making them more ineffective at toppling capitalism, that’s fine, but pointing this tactic out doesn’t make those racial divisions and animosity disappear. And the idea that Media Matters is the reason black people don’t trust white people who associate with the Confederate flag is bafflingly stupid. Like, no dude. Black people being victims of discrimination and racism from people who use this symbol is why they don’t generally want to associate with guys like that. Media Matters has fuckall to do with it. This is so out of touch.

This is to say nothing of the fact that the sorts of people going around wearing an American flag T-shirt and Confederacy flag hat are the ones least likely to support BLM and the ones pretty likely to support the cops. I live in a rural area in the south surrounded by people who fit this description, and I know what I’m talking about. I’m not broadly stereotyping people who dress like this, and I know people like this who are very pro-BLM and very anti-cop. But they’re less common than the people who shower their trucks in Trump stickers and Blue Lives Matter flags and sit on my town square calling the mayor the N-word.

Like, sure. If black militants and white rednecks got together to oppose the government, that would rule. We could set aside differences to destroy something that is destroying all of us. But that ignores the material reality of decades of racism one group has perpetrated against the other.

Sean thinks of himself as a materially minded guy. I know because I listen to Grubstakers occasionally. But this comes off like utopian, unscientific nonsense cooked up by an idealistic liberal with no conception of reality. It’s fucking embarrassing.

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I’ll end on this one. I’m a working class white man. I have a background very similar to Aaron Coleman’s. I lived in a single mother house and occasionally found myself in an abusive environment. I did a lot of rough shit as a kid. I vandalised a basement, causing a lot of property damage. I broke into a guy’s truck once to look for money. I once stole my mom’s car and went out for a joy ride. But the material harm those things caused to anybody in a psychological or financial way was minimal. The rich bank that owned the house I vandalised flipped it and leased it at a marked down cost. I didn’t steal any money from the guy’s truck (though I probably made him more paranoid in the future). I didn’t wreck my mom’s car. What this guy did, on the other hand, was publish nude photographs of a preteen girl online while attempting to extort her for more nudes for his own gratification. He did this around the ages of 12 and 13. This required premeditation, constantly interacting with the person he was extorting, and intent to follow through (which he ultimately did).

He permanently damaged a girl’s life, and in no way has he actually made amends for this or been held accountable for his actions. She’s been open about this causing suicidal thoughts, and has had to live with them while he pursues politics. He ran for Governor of Kansas at the age of 17 – a mere 4 years after doing this. I’ll stress this point, because in no way does this sound like a person who deserves power: in the span of 4 years, he went from posting child pornography to shame a girl into having suicidal thoughts to running for Governor or Kansas. He comes off like a power hungry sociopath who gets off on exerting power and control over people.

Defending the working class doesn’t mean defending this guy. This degrades what it is to be working class and it infantilises us and expects the worse of us at every turn. Anybody who actually trusts this guy to help anybody is a fucking sucker.