The Cult of the Privilege Walk

Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté

Useful Idiots, LLC

News Commentary, Politics, News

4.6 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2021

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hear the ad-free version at http://usefulidiots.substack.com Journalist and professor Christian Parenti’s latest NonSite (the Adolph Reed site) article, The First Privilege Walk, if nothing else, has the greatest subtitle of all time: How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.The article, which Matt described as “an article after my own heart,” to which Katie replied: “It’s like it was made in a lab for you,” details the rapidly-growing movement disguising itself as left. The nexus of the movement is the privilege walk. As Parenti explains: Mainstream critics say the exercise propagates divisive identity politics and mock it as foundational to the Oppression Olympics. A Marxist critique would say that the Walk transmogrifies material problems into cultural ones, economic exploitation becomes the more nebulous problem of oppression.In the same way Professor Adolph Reed criticizes Robin DiAngelo’s antiracist jumble as fake left, the new liberal “identitarian psychobabble” not only contradicts the Sandersian left, but hurts it. Take a listen as Christian Parenti unravels the cult. Plus, Biden won’t extend the student loan pause, McConnell is still a hypocrite, and oh god the new Jimmy Fallon/Ariana Grande/Megan Thee Stallion song. #SMH It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:26.9	Slack.com slash DHQ.
0:34.9	Hello and welcome to Useful Idiots. I just decided to sign it up.
0:43.9	I wasn't, oh, I see, Useful Idiots. I did it you and the I, yeah.
0:47.9	Okay. Yeah. For those of us just listening, I traced to you and I traced just a heart vertical
0:54.3	line. It wouldn't be a very good looking symbol. I don't think. Oh, like a you like this.
1:00.3	Yeah, it would look like a pitch, like a pitch fork or a tuner. It could, yeah, it could
1:06.7	look a lot of things, not a bit positive. Right. You want to hear it very quick. Well,
1:11.7	and this is Matt Taihebi. I'm Matt Taihebi, by the way. Yeah. Why do you hear a very quick story
1:16.5	about a tuner? So my uncle, my mom and I were visiting my uncle. He was in like a, he had
1:23.8	surgery. So he was in a rehab center. We were visiting him and he wanted a guitar tuner
1:28.7	because he had a guitar and he played the guitar. And he also wanted to get stuff from
1:32.6	the deli and he wanted a pastrami. So we came with the tuner and then the pastrami sandwich.
1:40.3	My mom got a tuna melt. I don't remember what I got. I think maybe I got a tuna melt
1:45.1	too. So we're sitting there with my uncle and he goes, can I have the tuna? And my mom
1:51.1	was like, you want to pastrami? I was like, no, he's talking about the tuner. But he had
1:55.8	a thick New York accent. Right. Right. I get it. That's good. What do you think the percentage
2:00.2	chances that Alexa will tell us a good joke if I ask her right now? I don't want to get
	...

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