Ash Sarkar on the News Agents - the backpedaling continues...

[mantaraya]

Apparently identity politics is silly and divisive. According to Ash, oppression is not a competition and the left is eating itself up accommodating to "woke" victimhood. Any quotes that sound like she has been pushing this line of thinking have been taken out of context.

On trans - this is very unlikely to be in anyone's top 3 issues politically so we should all just shut up about it and focus on the real problems (please ignore the fact that Ash has been banging this drum for years). Oh and the reason the left (i.e. Ash) has supported (ridiculous) things like transwomen in women's sports is because there aren't enough trans political organisations leading the way so they're just trying to do the right thing and defend vulnerable trans people. Ahem.

Quite amusing to listen to just for the various attempts at arse covering. I only wish I could have been the interviewer!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tdUDCkv3oc3kBjN9VkzGI

Dear god. How can she have the brass fucking neck to be criticising OTHER PEOPLE for causing the idpol problem?

Fuck OFF, you vacuous luxury belief-espousing TWAT.

I usually enjoy The News Agents, but this one I turned off part way through. Ash was just too annoying.

I might be misinterpreting her, or more likely she wasn't very coherent, but in the Bastani interview her main take seemed to be that she hadn't actually been wrong on anything substantial, but maybe the execution wasn't ideal and different presentation is needed. Kind of a "Jeremy Corbyn could still win in 2029 with better PR" argument.

On idpol, she seems to have realised that it's really unpopular, but her solution to that is to get some white bloke like Mick Lynch to explain to working class white blokes that nonwhite idpol is really in their best interest if only they could see it. I have my doubts about whether Mick Lynch would by up for that kind of project.

Interestingly Bastani, who I've never really warmed to, seemed more sensible. At least he's figured out that the left activist world being full of really horribly people is a problem for the left.

The other really obvious thing with Ash is that all her reference points are American. She tosses off references to Angela Davis or Huey Newton as if these are household names in the UK.

Is Ash Sarkar not just a troll, really? IDK that much about her - is she a trained journo, or is it just rage-bait podcasts?

I was going to have a look to learn more. But then decided that I wasn't actually interested in Ash Sarkar, well, not enough to bother.

I really hate when people are dismissive of 'culture wars' when they were the ones who invaded Poland.

You just know the second being woke makes you popular again Sarkar and her ilk will do another U-turn. It's all about the money and the clicks and having the kind of acceptable views that get you invited on smug-ins like The News Agents.

Lewis is a full-on Righteous activist pretending to be a journalist.

Lewis hasn't been a journalist for quite a while. Shame, really, because he had the potential to be a good one.

I'd assume that by now the News Agents had degenerated into commentators rather than journalists and the show was simply a content generating machine.

But then I've only listened to one episode and wasn't that keen on being lectured at with views from the right side of history.

I think it was Labour politics did it to Lewis. I quite liked his book on Labour - not perfect by any means, but useful insights.

But these days his main function is to tell us what Keir Starmer wants us to think.

Interesting Spiked article.

I think one of the things I dislike most about wokeness is that it totally invalidates the opinions of:

1. middle aged women
2. working class people

These are two groups that it's seen as acceptable to scoff at and dismiss.

I'm sure I have been guilty of similar in the past, and didn't fully realise it until I joined one of those groups.

I used to be a loyal listener to the News Agents. Even sat through the various sycophantic cosy Lewis chats with TRA politicians trotting out all the usual thought-terminating cliches, because I felt it was important to hear a diversity of ideas.

What made me unsubscribe was in the run-up to the 2024 GE, Lewis got into some rant about some policy that the Tories were against. (I can't even remember what the policy was. And despite being politically homeless myself, I was 100% in agreement that the Tories had to go. And that Labour were clearly going to walk it.) But Lewis's OTT self-righteous shouty sneering at his perceived moral/political inferiors completely turned me off. I just stopped the podcast right there and hit "unsubscribe."

Here's the book she's plugging that @nauticant referred to

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/minority-rule-9781526648334/

I know that this is the lowest form of criticism, but I loathe AS.
It's not that I disagree with her views (though I do) but she is just SO pleased with herself, when in reality she's utterly vacuous.

One of the clips being circulated by the newsagents demonstrates exactly where she stands. She hasn't changed at all.

She starts by nutpicking 'somebody who said that Anne Frank had white privilege' to demonstrate that of course she isn't anti-semitic, criticises people who point out that their disabilities mean they rely on home deliveries, and then says what she really means:

AS: But I think some of the examples which are most laughable and I think actually get much less attention in our current media environment is that there is weaponisation of this of this form of identity politics in the interest of pro-Israeli advocacy. So at the Francis Crick Institute, some researchers wanted to put on a bake sail to raise money for medical aid for Palestinians. There was then a flurry of complaints to HR saying that it was an 'allegedly' peaceful bakesahle and it made them feel personally threatened and unsafe. If you feel unsafe around a slice of lemon drizzle cake, that's on you.

LG: I think that's a really interesting point because we often, the way it is often portrayed in the media is, I mean you're alluding to sort of the idea in a sense of snow flakery, right? And that's often used as a term of abuse or an insult from the right to the left. But the truth is, what you're describing, I agree with you, I think it is a really pervasive problem. This kind of cult of brittleness, this cult of endless kind of subjectifying or objectifying your own subjective experience, that's there on the right as well.

I don't know anything about this cake sale, but she is making a partisan political point here. This is not just an example, but the 'most laughable' example. She can't accept that the people who are upset might just be Jewish. She even throws in the trope of blaming the media. For Lewis Goodall to then editorialise that as 'right wing' 'snowflakery' is shameful.

Specks and planks in eyes, innit.

Whatever degree she has, clearly it only trained her to produce word salad.

I suppose she's less pretentious than Dickie Seymour, but Jesus that's a low bar.

AS on trans issues.

"Oh, it's so annoying. But when you look at the trans rights movement, there are remarkably few political organisations. There are charities and there are figureheads and role models, but there aren't political organisations going, this is what our strategy is going to be"

So who paid for the Denton's strategy document?

Can charities not lobby parliament?

What on earth does she mean?

(i.e. Ash, OJ and co)

What happened to OJ? He’s faded away completely

He's currently on a one-man jihad against Israel.

I would actually have a tiny amount of respect for AS if she actually said the movement was well intentioned but misguided (bollocks) but the way she's contorting to frame this as standing up for the underdog is nauseating.
Trans rights were never a victimless pursuit.
I'm not going to click on the Lewis G clip. I liked him on Newsnight but presumably the BBC had some restraining influence then.The News Agents now is just a smug fest. Apparently the whole team were dismayed when Trump won as they were so embedded in their bubble. Maybe if they'd got out of the studio and tried some actual journalism.
AS is a grifter and I really hope this style of journo activism is a short lived phenomenon.

I'd be mildly interested - though not interested enough to read her book - whether Sarkar has any sense of British labour history. The trade union movement, the match girls' strike, Keir Hardie and the founding of the Labour Party, the Jarrow March, Nye Bevan and the founding of the NHS, the Dagenham workers' strike - all that kind of thing. Does anyone know?

You want to know about Ash Sarkar's knowledge of contemporary political issues?

Remember the time was Sarkar crowed about the fact that Bindel had no knowledge of women in prisons because that's what Twitter told her?

x.com/AyoCaesar/status/1053248532377976832

It's just that once you notice it, you can't help noticing that she's always circling back to US black radicalism of the 1970s. Which is an interesting subject but:

• It doesn't tell you very much about the UK working class
• It doesn't even tell you very much about UK race relations, because we've got a very different history
• I'm sceptical that Ash even has more than a surface level knowledge of the subject, and suspect she's just name dropping
• It's very weird that our current Voice of Youth, who loves to pour scorn on those older than herself, is trying to find solutions to modern day problems in the politics of a time when Michael Jackson was black and Elton John was straight.