Like mother, like daughter-Clinton warmongering
“ Zei Squirrel” is my absolute favorite Twitter account. Squirrel’s principled politics and peerless knowledge are only matched by their polished prose. I’m always learning something new from them, and look forward to their tweets and their essays here on Substack. Recently the Squirrel tweeted an informative thread on how Natalie Wynn (of ContraPoints fame) had hosted butcher Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter.
Squirrel followed-up their Twitter thread on Liberal YouTuber Wynn’s platforming the Clintons with an essay.
There’s no need to recap Squirrel’s Twitter thread or subsequent essay since they’re both linked above. The reason for my brief commentary here is that one of Squirrel’s tweets featured a screencap of a November 2001 BBC article discussing Chelsea Clinton’s raging against the anti-war movement. I was unaware of this incident. The screencap included a passage discussing how young Clinton and her friends “heckled speakers” at an anti-war meeting. The Clinton spawn and her group further disrupted the meeting when they “shouted patriotic slogans and unfurled a Stars and Stripes flag”.
Later that same article mentioned that Clinton “was angry at people who questioned America’s actions in Afghanistan”. Putting aside the fact that Chelsea Clinton’s imperialist mother voted for the illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, it takes a certain type of individual to go beyond jingoistic warmongering and to actually attack the principled people in the anti-war movement.
Chelsea Clinton’s attacks on the antiwar movement instantly reminded me of a 2016 article I had read in Politico about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (“HRC”) own anti-anti-war “activism” in college. I tweeted a reply to Squirrel with the link to that piece. Here’s the pertinent passage from the article:
“That spring, when Rodham was a kind of president-elect, the campus grew increasingly anxious. Anti-war sentiment had surged to a point where even Wellesley-never close to a radical hotbed like Berkeley or Ann Arbor or Columbia-seemed like its own brand of tinderbox. ‘I stayed up all night,’ she would say more than two decades later to a writer from the alumni magazine, ‘to talk students out of staging a Vietnam War protest that would embarrass our college.’ “ [emphasis mine]
Given HRC’s myriad warcrimes in places including Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Libya, and Palestine, it’s no surprise that her college days were spent attacking anyone with the temerity to oppose imperialist wars waged by the US empire. In that and many other ways, the Clintons are like mother, like daughter.
Circling back to Squirrel’s Substack essay and how the Clinton’s new TV series is aimed at rehabilitating the Clinton brand. Centrist Liberals frequently float the idea of Chelsea Clinton running for office. I suppose their hope is that she will be able to carry on the family’s legacy of disastrous “Third Way” politics. The collective left needs to be able to recall incidents like what Clinton did at Oxford. We need to remember who Clinton invited to her wedding. We need to recall when Clinton cheered Ukrainian Banderite Nazis tearing down statues of Lenin to make way for statues of Nazi war criminal Stepan Bandera. We need to remember Clinton’s Islamophobia and anti-blackness as manifested in her vile attacks on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. We will need to be able to remind everyone that wealthy, white Chelsea Clinton will always center herself and attempt to erase Palestinian activists. She should not be rehabilitated, and neither should her family. We need to be able to remind the world of what the Clintons are.
Originally published at https://rdsathene.substack.com on September 23, 2022.
