Episode 68: Woke Race and Disability Politics of 'Tell Them You Love Me'
Love affair or sexual abuse? That is the question at the heart of 'Tell Them You Love Me' (available on Sky, NOW, and Apple TV), a documentary on woke Philosophy Professor Anna Stubblefield, who was convicted of sexually abusing a student, after gaining access to him (Derrick) through the debunked method of 'facilitated communication'. We discuss the woke race and disability politics surrounding the case and put forward that the attempt the claim disabled people have no limitations due to their disability plays a role in removing provisions and protections for those people. The idea of the resilient individual who thrives through greater agency under neoliberalism is just one way that neoliberal ideology has deformed the New Left since the 1970s (another is reducing structural issues of race and disability to mere identity politics). The wish to have moral superiority and experience a 'moral high' through enacting ones politics in ones own lifestyle is more to do with a fantasy of grandiosity and performative identity game-playing than creating meaningful political change in the wider world. Peter Boghossian is not wrong when he describes the scale of the intellectual fraud going on in woke academic departments in the United States, theories that in the Anna Stubblefield case when practiced led to a crime. Proving true that, indeed, ideas have consequences.The episode also covers the panic around black single mothers in the USA, the grift of identity politics as a form of poaching and proximity, the satanic panic, the myth around multiple personality disorder, and the difficulty of accepting apathy in others about subjects we feel passionately about. Plus, the ideologically-sponsored delusion of believing your own romantic love story is unique (which ultimately turns people into objects), the feminine grandiose fantasy of being the only one who understands a particular other person (usually a man), projecting your own internal world onto others as a sign of a lack of empathy, and how those heavily involved in ideologically production today, such as in Big Tech, are incredibly cautious about subjecting their own children to it.