The supply of oppression and victimhood simply can’t match the demand.

As is always the case in such things, when this happens one of two things occurs: the price rises or alternatives arise.

As we saw in the Jussie Smollet case, you can indeed purchase “oppression.” But in the case of racism and other forms of human nastiness, it is simply easier and cheaper to counterfeit it. Need an “indigenous” professor? Hire Elizabeth Warren. Need a hate crime? Call a door pull a noose. Need anti-trans violence? Call using the wrong pronoun “violence and genocide.”

One Columbia professor is desperate to be a victim of capitalist oppression, so she brilliantly claims to be desperately impoverished.

Now not many Columbia professors qualify, although I suppose that if she is an adjunct she is likely being royally screwed by the institution. But that isn’t capitalist oppression. It is a thoroughly socialist institution doing what they do best: rewarding the nomenklatura and exploiting everybody else.

But this professor is also a well-regarded published author with a novel coming out in a few months, so abject poverty is unlikely.

And, of course, we have the receipts.

Please note, this is a professor at Columbia. It’s magnificent. https://t.co/EFf7LFW1VL

— TimOnPoint (@TimOnPoint) June 15, 2023

Columbia University, for those of you who don’t follow such things, is in New York City.

While New York City is hardly the most expensive city in the world–Hong Kong, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo are more expensive to live in, it is wildly expensive and #1 in the United States. Studio apartments can easily be several thousand dollars a month, and having a “library” in your apartment would count as an unbelievable luxury for all but the most wealthy.

Professor Molly McGhee just finished decorating her library, and it looks like this:

Now Molly’s answer to the question “How on earth does a person worried about dying in poverty” afford a library in New York City? A library that is larger than most New Yorkers’ entire apartments?

“Thrifting.”

Uh, yeah. Whatever.

Molly is angry that she is expected to pay back her student loans and considers that the requirement is proof that America is a place where the poor cannot get ahead.

God I am starting to think that being poor is something that happens to you at birth and you can never escape it. I teach at an Ivy, I'm a New York Times Bestselling editor, I have a novel coming out, and I am still so fucking poor it's embarrassing.

— Molly McGhee ✨ (@mollymcghee) June 14, 2023

Being oppressed is the entire identity of a vast proportion of the Left, and no level of a reality check could possibly penetrate the thick skulls of true-believing leftists. Not that people at the top actually believe their claims, except perhaps Bernie Sanders, who I am certain is convinced buys his socialist drivel.

If a New York Times bestselling author considers herself to be in danger of dying in abject poverty, it is either because she is a profligate drug addict with a Hunter Biden-type lifestyle, or she is delusional and hasn’t seen real poverty. Now Molly insists she grew up in poverty and may have, but given her definition of poverty, I wonder if others would share her sense of what qualifies.

In any case, this is a great example of why you cannot take the word of anybody who is so driven by an ideology that it becomes their identity. It doesn’t matter what their ideology is, once it becomes something more than a heuristic (lens through which one interprets information) it distorts everything one sees.

There is no such thing as being ideologically pure–all of us need a framework through which we interpret the world–but it need not blind us to basic facts. Yet because so many people now use ideology as a substitute for religion, their entire worldview is hopelessly skewed.

Columbia professors and best-selling authors are not desperately poor. They can, through hideous life choices or horrible misfortune become so, of course; anybody can.

Of course, in the real universe, Molly is among the most fortunate people in the world. Most authors would kill to make the New York Times’ best-seller list.

She, on the other hand, feels oppressed by not having yet more.

Who are the selfish ones?