“White Privilege” is the new “Be Quiet, and Do as You’re Told”
About 12 hours into our funding campaign, we’ve raised close to $1,000 from folks who are tired of the First Amendment offered up for rape by elected officials and civil servants. THANK YOU. If you haven’t donated yet, you can read about our case and donate here.
You might also find this article and video amusing, but I would ask you to consider it alarming and dangerous as well. This kind of reality is at the center of my own case, since I voiced objections to the genocidal bigotry of Louis Farrakhan, and wondered, out loud, why America wasn’t worried about Barack Obama courting his favor. This week, when a BBC round table discussed soon-to-be-ex-Prince Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle, panelist Rachel Boyle a) emphatically called press criticism of Markle “racism” and b) identified any objection to the racism charge as “white privilege.”
In view of the recent spate of antisemitic killings in New York, we may want to seriously consider the ugly side of the “woke” obsession. People like Boyle claim that certain “intersectionally oppressed” identity categories (gender fluid, people of color, immigrants) are incapable of bigotry and immune from criticism. (They claim their alleged “powerlessness” renders them both harmless and the assumed victims of bigotry themselves. Any criticism leveled at a member of these identity tribes, no matter how valid, earns the “racist, bigoted, homophobic” branding.)
Ponder the kind of power you have if you are one of those oppressed identities who can never be criticized? You can advocate just about any dangerous, foolhardy, bigoted nonsense you like and anyone who objects gets to lose his union card, his hosting gig, his job, and maybe, if you pile on hard enough, his family and his freedom.
I hate to say I warned you, but this double standard, when applied to a mad man like Louis Farrakhan, is very dangerous. In a world where machetes can be purchased online for a few dollars, we may seriously want to re-think the whole “powerlessness” thing. “Woke” theology and “woke” political maneuvering essentially creates two sorts of people: those who can complain and those who can’t, those who must meekly accept their status as “privileged” oppressor and those who get to scold them for it, those who must absurdly accept responsibility for ancient injustice and those who never suffered those injustices but who still get to submit an invoice for them. As we’ve seen with anti-Trump violence and anti-police violence, it creates a class of people who can rape, kill, and lie, not just with impunity, but with folk hero status. Can anyone explain the brassy legal immunity of a Jussie Smollett, except to admit that we are now pursuing the precise opposite of Martin Luther King’s Dream? Different standards for different classes?
The frightening thing? In our case, “proper-think” officialdom was so alarmed by my ridicule of Farrakhan, Stormy Daniels, and David Hogg that a few of them went so far as to cancel American History for their students. THAT is how much “privilege” people with the “wrong” ideas really have–none. In the case of Claremont Unified, a mutually beneficial two decade relationship was immediately cancelled for fear students might be somewhere on the same grounds with a man who possessed, on his own time, a rational objection to bigotry among the “powerless.”
Fortunately, in our case, most public, private, and religious educators still recognize the “Claremont mentality” for what it is: an abuse of power characteristic of extremists, but this kind of disease is cancerous. It will spread if we don’t fight it.
The state cannot tell you what to think, believe, or say. Not in America. Help us fight back.
