My Point, Here It Is

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Last night, Chelsea Clinton was trending on Twitter, in part because she was obliged to respond (again) to male journalists insisting that she was running for office, despite the fact that she has not said that she has plans to run for office.


I had a few thoughts about that.


That is not to suggest, naturally, that Ivanka Trump is not intelligent. But she is not knowledgable, and she is not keenly concerned with facts and reality.

People can be intelligent, and still not be very smart—or wise, if you prefer.

Certainly, central to Ivanka Trump's personal branding is that she is a "brilliant" businesswoman, savvy and cunning, but decidedly not central to her personal branding is that she is a wonky nerdlady armed with solid facts and earned expertise.

To the absolute contrary, central to the entire Trump brand is being "business geniuses" while routinely claiming a lack of knowledge on an array of policy subjects to rationalize their tremendous fuck-ups.

Of course the movement against smart women doesn't target women whose innate intelligence doesn't threaten the status quo, who are armed with talking points and never facts, but instead targets women whose knowledge is used to agitate against privilege.

And whose competency itself indicts the status quo, by highlighting the cavernous disparity of opportunities between the smart women who are outside power centers looking in at the mediocre men running them.

Which is why no matter what indefensible horseshit comes out of Ivanka's mouth, there are large swaths of the political press who will either give it cursory scrutiny or none at all, or actively defend her—while Chelsea Clinton can insist all day every day that she's not running for office, and there are members of the political press who will effectively call her a fucking liar. Because they assert to know her better than she knows herself.
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