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From John Ray's shorter notes
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9 September, 2022
How Anti-White Hate Won Open Acceptance among America's Leftist elite
The hate described below is certainly horrible and alarming and sounds quite deranged. It is undoubtedly designed to make most of the population uncomfortable. And that is the clue to it. That is its aim. That is what underlies it. Leftists WANT to make contented people unhappy. To them, contented people are "complacent" and they hate that and want to upset it
Probably the oldest manifestation of Leftism is envy. And envy is destructive and generates hate. The Ten Commandments rightly ordered against it. The haters/enviers decribed below have undoubtedly seen what they regard as complacency among many members of the white population. Large numbers of whites have the audacity to be reasonably happy with their lives. And a Leftist misery-guts hates that.
Even if the Leftist is himself well-off he cannot stand other people doing well for themselves. Tearing down the rich has always been what Leftism is about -- lifting up the poor is just a facade.
Although I am a libertarian conservative, I have some instinctive understanding of that. When I see a tall, well-built young man with blue eyes wearing a private-school blazer, I am conscious that he will probably not have to try hard to have an easy path to and through the best things in life. He is obviously the product of a family that cares enough about him and is economically successful enough to spend a lot of money in giving him a good and pleasant school experience. And that is a great start.
And he will only faintly be aware of the extent of his privilege. He will stroll though life with effortless ease and confidence. Most people will be nice to him and he will be casually nice back.
And that is all in some sense unfair and is felt as unfair and in need of a remedy. Why should one person have so much when others have very little? Should he not be taken down a peg or two?
And society does do a lot to equalize things. He will pay a lot of taxes that other people will live on. But is that enough?
In thinking about that I think of my own son. He is 6' tall, blue-eyed and well built. I sent him to a private school and he later acquired a first class honours degree in mathematics from a highly regarded university. And he has a father who is a distinguished academic and a mother who is very sociable. And he has inherited advantages from both sides.
So he is one of those privileged people that Leftists love to hate. But he has had difficult personal issues that left him unhappy for quite a while. He was betrayed by his flexibility and tendency to trust. He has got past his dark period now but it set him back a lot in various ways.
So we should not assume much about anyone. Even privilege is not an automatic path to happiness and fulfilment. It may even be a hindrance. Well-off men can be targeted by "gold diggers" for instance. And "affirmative action" is deliberately rigged against them.
The plain truth is that the path to happiness is much more influenced by personal relationships than anything else. People both rich and poor can find lasting love in their lives and it is they who are the lucky ones. But that is too deep for Leftists. In their usual way, they just see superficialities
So the hate described below can be understood but no remedy for it is obvious. One can only hope that normal people will eventually kick back against it in some way
In a 2021 lecture at Yale University titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani described her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor.”
Around the same time, a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed academic journal described “whiteness” as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility.” The author, Donald Moss, had also presented his paper as a continuing education course for licensed therapists who would presumably treat patients with this condition. The paper advises: “There is not yet a permanent cure.”
This is a sampling of the new racism that is gaining purchase in American society even as its advocates relentlessly punish speech they deem harmful and threatening to people of color. It parallels the acceptance of anti-male rhetoric that casts masculinity as “predatory” and “toxic,” or just casually demeans males as oafish and clueless, which allows the Washington Post to give a megaphone to Northeastern University professor Suzanna Danuta Walters to ask: “Why can’t we hate men?” (Her conclusion: We can and we should.)
The escalation of this inflammatory rhetoric is reaching the highest levels of American society, as when President Biden insinuated in a fiery campaign speech last week that Donald Trump supporters are “white supremacists” and when he maligned conservative mask skeptics last year for “Neanderthal thinking."
What strikes a casual observer is that such language would be instantly denounced if it targeted racial minorities or other protected groups. Just as remarkable is that this new rhetoric is not coming from dropouts and loners at society’s margins; it is being advanced by successful professionals who have scaled the heights of respectability and are given a platform on social media and in prestigious cultural outlets.
And though each of those examples generated a public furor, such inflammatory rhetoric is defended or downplayed by cultural gatekeepers. The incidents have been piling up especially in the past few years, especially since the election of Donald Trump to the White House during the ascent of Black Lives Matter in the age of social media, and even include cases of people calling for the hate of privileged groups and insisting it’s not hate speech.
In its ultimate sign of success, this messaging has taken hold in public schools, corporate workplaces, medical journals, scientific research and even diversity training in federal agencies. It’s not limited to any single race but endorsed by whites, blacks, Asians and others, and disseminated in diversity materials and workplace-recommended readings that characterize white people as flawed, predatory and dangerous to society. Its sudden spread has caused a sense of culture shock and given rise to acrimonious school board meetings and employee lawsuits over hostile work environments as legions of teachers, students and workers have been educated about white privilege, white fragility, white complicity, and the moral imperative to de-center “whiteness” so as not to “normalize white domination.”
This new take on speech produces a moral paradox, particularly among academics and journalists: Those who are most militant about policing what they deem to be hate speech against minorities, women, gays and trans communities are often the most tolerant of demeaning depictions, incendiary rhetoric and violent imagery against whites and men.
To those who see a double standard, such routine disparagement of masculinity and whiteness is a case study in hypocrisy that upends longstanding norms against stereotyping entire social groups. It’s a manifestation of what Columbia University linguist and social commentator John McWhorter dubbed “woke racism” in a 2021 book of the same name that warns of the dangerous spread of “the kinds of language, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction.”
But its advocates insist there is no double standard; they argue they are simply speaking truth to power, which should cause discomfort. In this belief system, reverse discrimination can’t exist because social justice demands tipping the scales to favor marginalized groups to correct for centuries of injustice.
They include Rutgers University historian James Livingston who, in a Facebook critique of gentrification, described a Harlem burger joint as being “overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white.”
The post concluded: “I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know, it’s about access to my dinner. Fuck you, too.”
In a phone call, Livingston, who is white, said his Facebook post was a joke targeted at white people who are privileged and therefore require less protection than marginalized groups.
“White males have been the norm of our culture and our politics and our society and our economy for so long that unearthing the unstated assumptions that go into that is pretty hard work, and it reveals things that make us uncomfortable,” Livingston said. “So do they need to be protected? I suppose. Everybody needs some protection. But I’m not too worried about people telling me that I have no right to speak on the issue of transgender individuals.”
Although Livingston was initially found in violation of Rutgers’ discrimination and harassment policy, Rutgers later reversed its decision, accepting his claim that his Facebook post was satire protected by academic freedom.
Festering for Decades
It can seem that such putdowns and trash talk have burst out of nowhere in the last few years. But the underlying justifications have been percolating for decades, and they are seen by skeptics as a modern repackaging of ancient us-versus-them tribal reflexes. Telltale signs of role-reversal have been described by serious thinkers, such as 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that “He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.”
More recently, author Douglas Murray has warned of the tendency for social justice movements to “behave – in victory – as its opponents once did” – which is to say: meanly – and which ultimately results in “the normalization of vengefulness.”
The idea that stereotyping and denigrating entire groups has no place in a society that strives for equality is one of the signature achievements of the Civil Rights era. By the 1970s, openly expressing racist slurs and jokes against black people was seen as a distasteful holdover from the Jim Crow era, an Archie Bunker-ism signifying low education and low intelligence.
The prohibition against racist speech rapidly became generalized to all identity groups. Ethnic slurs against Poles, Italians, Asians, and others became verboten as did mockery of gays and the disabled. Many words once commonly used to describe women, such as “dame” and “broad” became unacceptable, while terms that were once seen as neutral or descriptive, such as “colored,” “Oriental,” and “Negro,” suddenly took on negative connotations, and became unutterable in public (creating a replacement term, “people of color”).
But at the same time that these language taboos against expressing prejudice were becoming widely accepted across the political spectrum as a matter of civility, a far-more radical effort to regulate speech was percolating on the left.
This movement sought to limit speech on the rationale that language was a form of social control and therefore the source of oppression and violence. The assumption that hurtful language leads to harmful policies ultimately produced today’s cancel culture phenomenon, where otherwise well-regarded professionals are investigated, suspended, canned, or booted from social media for simply questioning the factual claims of Black Lives Matter, for affirming biological sex differences, for satirizing ritual land acknowledgements, and even for publicly saying the Mandarin word “nei-ge” (because it supposedly resembles a racial epithet in English).
The core proposition of this mindset can be traced to philosophers like Michel Foucault, who developed theories of language as a form of societal power and domination, and Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist scholar whose now-classic 1960s essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” argues that the oppressor class and the oppressed cannot be held to the same standard. Marcuse proposed that the classical liberal doctrine of free speech is a mechanism that benefits capitalists and others who wield power, that the struggle for “a real democracy” paradoxically necessitates “the fight against an ideology of tolerance.”
The subversive intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s passed on the torch to Critical Race Theorists and radical feminists, and in the 1990s the critique of bourgeoisie liberalism was taken up by Stanley Fish, a post-modernist literary critic and critical legal scholar who ridiculed the idea of “free speech” and “reverse racism,” giving wider exposure to these esoteric scholarly arguments.
“By insisting that from now on there shall be no discrimination, they leave in place the effects of the discrimination that had been practiced for generations,” Fish wrote. “What is usually meant by perfect neutrality is a policy that leaves in place the effects of the discrimination you now officially repudiate. Neutrality thus perpetuates discrimination, rather than reversing it, for you can only fight discrimination with discrimination.”
During the Obama era, Fish was a celebrity public intellectual publishing pieces in the New York Times titled “Two Cheers for Double Standards” and “The Harm in Free Speech.”
Thus it came to be accepted that creating a just society will require controlling speech to disempower the historically privileged and empower aggrieved groups, and to undo sex, gender, and racial disparities in society.
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