If you're an antiracist, or a feminist, or a gay rights activist, or struggling against any form of oppression, Walter Benn Michaels has your number (via Pink Scare) - you're a neoliberal:

For me the distinction is that "left neoliberals" are people who don't understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.

Yes - neoliberalism, the political philosophy of Hayek and Friedman, of Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet, whose intellectual sources include the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt and the fascist sympathiser Ludwig von Mises. The ruling class praxis whose first practical expression was the fascist coup in Chile. The ideology of the New Right whose hallmark was a virulent attack on the gains of the Sixties, including a legal war against gay rights, a cultural battle to force women back into domesticity, and a racialised drug war that resulted in soaring rates of black imprisonment. That neoliberalism arose as a kind of commitment to feminism, gay rights, anti-racism, etc. Moreover:

it’s hard to find any political movement that’s really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it’s so inchoate and it’s so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right.

Meanwhile, the actual Tea Partiers seek a "return to the principles of Austrian Economics, and redirect the economy back to one of incentives to save and invest" and demand that the government "cut spending, balance the budget, and institute a plan for paying down debt."
Michaels' brew of logical inversion, fancy, tenuous connections and adolescent provocation should earn him a television spot.

Don't waste your time going to visit the Daily Mail website to read that Moir article. You can see the whole thing here. (Then, if you are moved by Charlie Brooker's column, you can complain here). As you'll have gathered by now, Mail columnist Jan Moir decided to use the death of singer Stephen Gately to suggest that something terribly sinister is afoot when gay men have relations. Gately died of natural causes, and the coroner's report confirmed this. Moir, though, smells a rat, and for once it isn't a co-worker. She induces that the cause of Gately's death must have actually been 'unnatural', in some sense related to his 'lifestyle'. (Can I just ask, in passing, whether my banal sexual and sumptuary habits amount to a lifestyle? Just curious.) Somehow, quite mischievously apparently, this was construed as homophobic. For, as Moir explains:

"The point of my column -which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all."

Yes. Unanswered questions. About the viability of gay relationships, particularly of 'civil partnerships', in light of the "ooze" of some supposedly "dangerous lifestyle" disclosed in the death not only of Gately, but also of Matt Lucas' partner, Kevin McGee. Those kinds of unanswered questions. Only a sick, politically correct, fascist bastard would construe that as evidence of homophobia. In fact, it's just common sense:

It seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death.

Coroner reports are all very well, but they can hardly be expected to deter the unflabble and infallible inquisitive instincts of the Daily Mail glitterati. And anyway, Moir clarifies that civil partnership stuff:

In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

Pause for a second and think about this. Moir is "on record" as supporting civil partnerships. That makes her practically a gay rights activist, for fuck's sake. Can you be so intolerant as to deprive a committed Stonewaller of the right to just ask some questions just because it might be a little bit inconvenient to your worn out ideology? Oh, sure. Some of you might have noticed the part of the article where Moir specifically contests the idea that civil partnerships are "just the same as heterosexual marriages", citing two recent celebrity deaths and the "dangerous lifestyles" they supposedly resulted from as evidence of her thesis. You might have even noticed that she appears to take exception to gays "always calling for tolerance and understanding". And, no doubt, in yet another affront to taste and manners, you are already forming your ignorant, ill-conceived opinions about her supposedly contradicting herself in a flatfooted attempt to evade responsibility for having written something vile. You might even be calling her a lying piece of shit at this point. But that's just because you are part of the conspiracy:

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

Quite. This is an orchestrated hate campaign, mounted by you-know-who against a tolerant, inclusive, committed supporter of the gay community. She's not a homophobe, she's just asking questions. Incidentally, something odd happened earlier in the week. A perfectly healthy gay man died, painfully and horribly, in the middle of Trafalgar Square. His lifestyle was definitely related to the cause of his death. I hope Moir will not be put off by this spiteful campaign, and will take the time to examine this case and its implications for those tolerance-begging, understanding-seeking types in our midst. More power to her typing finger.