Sarah Jeong and the Rise of a New Power Structure

Emma Sulkowicz, Jin Hyun, now Sarah Jeong. Why does it seem like every Asian American nowadays that I come across in the media is constantly perpetuating the most puerile, pointless, SJW drivel? In addition to all of them being Asian American, I just realised that they're all women as well.

DEAR GOD.

Quick, throw some male representation in there!

Ahh, much better.

So for those who don't know, the New York Times has recently been involved in a spot of controversy for hiring Sarah Jeong, a well-known(?) journalist and social activist as their new tech writer. The controversy lies within the fact that she had been called out for posting a series of outrageously racist tweets in the past. They were so ridiculous that they would almost be funny if not for the genuine contempt that I felt seep out from my computer screen to envelop me in a dark murky fog. NYT not only did not retract their decision to hire her, they defended her white-bashing, cop-hating stance by claiming that she was counter-trolling online white harassers, and turned against one of their own for rightly claiming that Sarah Jeong has yet to have done anything for the NYT to warrant their warm welcome of her.

I have just spent all morning wading through the noxious swamp that is Sarah Jeong's Twitter and her previous journalistic works and it is...surprisingly tame. Definitely far left-leaning but aside from the racist, cop-hating tweets that were already published, it seemed like a typical Twitter feed filled with social justice grievances and a weird obsession with BigFoot.

So why the white hatred? By all accounts, Sarah Jeong is not a victim of white male patriarchy. She attended UC Berkeley and Harvard, so she obviously came from relative wealth. She has had a successful career in tech journalism, thus establishing herself as someone who has not suffered from workplace victimisation. Asian Americans have notoriously dominated the upper economic class of not only the US, but many Western nations, not to mention the fact that Asian countries are well on their way to stand toe-to-toe with Western countries in wealth and economic status, as I mentioned in my previous post. Therefore, it's hard to pinpoint how exactly she felt that she had been so marginalised by The System that she had no choice but to lash out. Of course, Sarah Jeong brought up the issue of her being harassed online, but doesn't it come with the job description of being a public figure? She is certainly not the only one getting harassed, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Christina Hoff Summers have all seen their fair share of death threats and slander. Candace Owens was confronted in person at breakfast just a few days ago. In the immortal words of Jonah Hill from 21 Jump Street, it might have been more [sexist/racist/homophobic] not to harass her just because she was [insert appropriate intersectional trait].

Sarah Jeong is very young still, so one of the reasons I can deduce from her behaviour is her still-potent, ever present need to part of the cultural tribe. She wants to be one of the cool kids, a progressive ethnic minority who as a result of her intersectionality, has been brutally oppressed by a system built by the powerful elite, and has had to struggle to succeed and find her place in the world. Obviously being an elite herself, there is very little within the victimhood classifications she can rightfully claim. Thus, her story has to be one of being harassed by angry white men who are constantly lurking around the web like dogs pissing on fire hydrants. Add to the fact that she explicitly refers herself as a women of colour, and you have someone who has been thoroughly swayed by the intersectional movement and who desperately wants to claim some form of victim status so that she can proudly proclaim to be one of the people. Sarah Jeong is not an elite, she has not benefitted from the system. Instead she has struggled most of her life due to her gender and skin colour, against a white male patriarchy that has conspired to keep her down.

Here's what I find so dangerous about the Sarah Jeong case. Of course, we have long ceased to assume political neutrality with our media, however we should still demand some degree of objectivity among journalists. Am I being naive if I expect a publication with a readership of 130 million per month to generate articles on certain grounds of reality? How do you trust a journalist's objectivity, if said journalist has clearly stated that she thinks all white people are dumb, she wants them to go extinct, and she thinks that objective reality is a white construct? Wait, what?

It's official. We're living in a simulation.

She is a tech journalist, so what exactly is stopping her from expanding her biases towards her work? If she was sent to cover Elizabeth Holmes, would she be able to feature that scandal objectively, or would she focus on John Carreyrou instead and lambast him as a white male working within a patriarchal system designed to oppress women, especially those attempting to break the glass ceiling in tech? I don't know. What would she say about James Damore? Definitely nothing good. And if you think I'm being harsh, remember that this is the same journalist who enjoys torturing sweet little peepaws.

Down with the patriarchy!

Symone Sanders who have spoken up in Jeong's defence, claimed that it was impossible for her to be racist, since racism is a combination of prejudice and power. Maybe Jeong was prejudiced against white people but as a women of colour, it was impossible for her to be racist. Putting aside for a minute the fact that the definition of racism has been altered to suit the political agenda of the radicals, let us analyze her words in the context of the events we have witnessed thus far. Are white people still the group holding unequivocal power? Really? The New York Times just hired Jeong despite her claims that white people should move to live underground and go extinct, with no mention of having her go through diversity trainings or any form of consequence for her actions. Now her words and political mindset is about to be spread through one of the world's most powerful and widely read publications in the world. Conversely, James Damore was fired after he published an internal memo criticising Google's discriminatory hires. Who truly holds the power in the US? Is it the ones who hold positions of authority? So why were white people still the ones with power when Obama was president? Is it then the ones who comprise the population majority? The Caucasian population is shrinking, and estimates suggest that they won't be the majority in the US within another few decades. When that happens, are African Americans and Hispanics the ones who hold the power? Will they remove affirmative action, or transfer it to white people? If left-wingers want to suggest that racism is prejudice plus power, they first need to define the boundaries of what those words imply. Who truly holds the power in this country? And what exactly does it mean to be prejudiced against someone?

Economist Amy Chua once quoted in her book Battle Hymns of a Tiger Mother: Assume strength, not weakness. I disagreed almost entirely with her methods, but I'm beginning to see that some tiger parenting could be good for the American millennials. The West is on a slow but gradual decline and one of the reasons for that is because the younger generation take pride in the fact that they are victims and thus through a self-fulfilling prophecy, turned themselves into fragile porcelain dolls incapable of even governing their own emotions, let alone their entire civilisation. Postmodernism has created an entire generation of coddled individuals who yearn to be unique and admired, and yet are unwilling to expend the effort to do so. Instead, they scramble to assert a form of victimhood status and transform it into the center of their personality and being, thus creating an oppression Olympics where nobody wins except their individual egos.

Review - Maroon 5 Girls Like You

I am back! And how amazing is it that the music video that I will be reviewing to bring my blog back from the dead, is from Maroon 5?

I wasn’t enthralled with the song at the beginning, but it grew on me after I listened to the song a couple more times. The best way I can describe how Girls Like Me sounds to me is clean, minimalist and unadorned. The main body of the song was really just Adam’s voice and James’ guitar accompaniment, and that sort of no-frills simplicity they presented was in my opinion, what made it a good song.

The music video was great, in that it was symbolized very well the minimalist approach of the song. There was just one set with no props, and the band was present but out of focus except for Adam. Even then, it becomes clear almost right away that he is not the main character of the video. The main characters were all the women who appeared at various intervals in the video. I think that it was a great idea on Maroon 5’s part to invite women from different industries, I believe there were athletes, models, celebrities and activists. It added some interesting depth to the music video, although personally I think that it is almost never a good idea to have activists on the music video set, and I'm going to add context to that by asking why Candace Owens was not invited. Or Sarah Haider? Surely political unicorns like them deserve the spotlight.

See what I mean? One or two would have been fine to add diversity, but having so many in your music video just opens a can of political worms that Maroon 5 did not have to, but I don’t want to get into politics in a song review. I was disappointed though, that Yuna was not invited to be on the music video. Was it because she wasn’t American? She would have been great on set! Then again, maybe I’m being biased. I just thought of another thing: How amazing would it have been if Gal Gadot appeared in her Wonder Woman gear? That would have blown my mind berries.

Let me ask this though: Does the final scene in the music video not look like Maroon 5 kidnapped a bunch of women and stuck them in a Hunger Games-esque arena to fight to the death?

May the odds be ever in your favor.

My money is on Eleven.

Remember how I said that the simplicity of Girls Like You was the best part of the song? Now this is where it also becomes a problem: The lyrics were too simple. The more I listened to it, the more I realized how it really says nothing at all. The depth that shows in the music video does not translate over to the actual song whatsoever, and most of Maroon 5 songs used to be intricate and meaningful. Songs like Animals and She Will Be Loved did not necessarily tell highly complex stories, but they still told stories. Girls Like You lacks the same substance.

I’ve always loved Maroon 5, and have followed their releases religiously for years. While Wait and Girls Like You was good, the truth is that the band has been on a slow and steady downward spiral ever since their V album. Here’s my theory: Ever since Adam Levine got married, his life has been so blissful and sparkly that it is reflecting in the band’s songs. Maroon 5 songs have always been amazing because there was a hint of darkness in them. Animals, One More Night, Maps, etc etc…Think about it. Even though songs like She Will Be Loved or Love Somebody, wasn’t dark in the same sense, there was an intense, raw emotion in them that lifted them above the average mundane. But now that the lead singer no longer has any melancholic emotions to inject in his songwriting, Maroon 5 songs are gradually taking their place as part of the endless sea of preppy pop music. I mean, yes, there have been poppy songs in the past like Sugar, which I thought was great by the way, but those have always been few and far in between.

The reason I think that Girls Like You is much better than their earlier songs have been is because it had the raw emotion that I spoke about. Furthermore, the music video was beautiful, especially at the end when his family made a cameo. It was pure, heartfelt and much better than the weird trippy stuff that Maroon 5 has been coming up with recently. Now I’m not trying to say that I want Adam Levine to wallow in angst and blasphemy in order to produce good music again. But I think that it would do Maroon 5 good if he could separate his work from his private life. I’ll say it again, Girls Like You was beautiful because there was a genuinely warm family moment in the end. But cameos in Wait and Cold were unnecessary. Like all celebrities, Maroon 5 represents an image, and that image is not Adam Levine, the doting family man. I’ll reinterate again, it’s good that he has such a fulfilling private life, but that should not be what Maroon 5 is about.

Right, now off I go back into hiding less the diehard Maroon 5 fans find me, murder me and decimate my dead corpse. Peace out.

Dear Asian Americans, Please Get Off Your High Horses

This is mostly a response piece to a truly awful article I read over the weekend, titled Dear white people, stop saying ‘Ni Hao’ to every East Asian student you see. DISCLAIMER: Before I go further into the complete asininity of the piece, I am not speaking about all Asian Americans, only for those who feel as strongly as the author about the issue. For the vast majority of Asian Americans, the real world is not actually a figment of their imagination.

The article was mainly a grievance piece about how white people make tactless assumptions about East Asians by calling out Ni Hao to every one they see. For those who do not know, Ni Hao is a Chinese greeting. She also pointed out that there have been threats of physical assault accompanying said verbal assaults, that gradually culminated to her having the equivalent of a minor heart attack every time she left the house. Now I absolutely do not condone physical violence or the threat of it in any form, and I fully acknowledge that that is extremely serious and should be reported to campus authorities. I am reasonably sure that physical assault on racial basis in the UK is a prosecutable offence, so she has the full backing of the law if she ever decided to take legal action against those people.

But let us focus on what she is really angry about, the verbal macroaggressions. And while I admit that saying Ni Hao to every Asian you meet is tactless (Please do not do this, I will get my hopes up and start talking to you in Mandarin, only to be disappointed if you are unable to follow through), it is not any more tactless than people in mainland China speaking to foreigners in English. What if the foreigner is French? Or Russian? If the author is being honest to herself, would she be able to tell the difference? Secondly, why are we still getting upset that Westerners cannot tell the difference between Asians? Let me divulge a long-kept secret: When I was an exchange student in South Korea, locals would come up to me and start talking to me in Korean until I explained that I didn’t speak the language. The truth is, most Asians can’t even tell each other apart. *Gasp*

Everyone else: I don't know what to believe anymore. 

Furthermore, there is a significantly larger Chinese student population than any other Asian group, so white people really are just applying basic statistics, much like we do when we say hello to white people. I’m sorry, but 1.3 billion is unequivocally a lot more than 50 million. Why am I talking about white and Asian people in group terms? It's so bizarre. People like Jin Hyun are turning me into a racist.

If someone says Ni Hao to you, laugh and call them out on it. Better yet, speak in your native language and embarrass them. But if being greeted in another language is enough for the author to develop ‘anxiety-inducing nightmares’, she needs a serious reality check.

When did we decide that it was alright to speak derisively about an entire race of people? We complain about being categorized into a tiny, single-race box, only to dismiss white people as exactly the same racist, bigoted group. Was it when it became trendy to bash Caucasians as the root of all evil in the world, and we decided we wanted to be hip like the cool kids on the left? Was it because that even after all the social progression that has been made, even after we conquered the top income/social class, we are still insecure enough to play the victim card and are thus compelled to post scathing opinion pieces that generalize white people as high-and-mighty Western imperialists out to conquer the poor, minority Asians?

We from the Four Tigers and the Cubs are unique in the sense that some of the fastest economic developments ever seen in the history of time are taking place in our countries at this very moment. When I was a child, my family was so poor that getting a meal at McDonalds was as likely as ordering a Beef Wellington hand prepared by Gordon Ramsay. Today, I am lucky enough to be given the opportunity of an education in the United States. There are people born in developed countries who grew up taking wealth and privilege for granted. There are also people who were born in less developed countries who might never ever have the chances that we were given. We were born during a time when our people were struggling to survive, and we are alive today to witness the economic boom that made it possible for us to stand our ground against the other big players. We alone understand what a blessing it is to be alive during this time, when the whole world is watching us and trying to emulate us. But instead of being proud of a civilization who had progressed this far, the author is appealing to her Asian heritage for the sole reason of playing the victim.

I am going to end the article with this comment: The author is American, not Asian. She has no idea of the experiences and struggles that people from Asia had gone through, and the article perfectly expresses this because I have never once heard of an equivalent article written by a Korean, Chinese or Vietnamese. We do not whine about macroaggressions and trigger warnings because there are always much more prevalent, serious issues that we are still dealing with. If the author truly cared about issues in regards to her ethnicity, I invite her to tackle challenges prevalent to South Korea, mainly the unrealistic beauty standards, suicide epidemic and treatment of women. The only question is whether or not she, like so many born in the Western world, would be willing to leave her privilege long enough to give a damn about the people she claims to speak on behalf of.