America’s Anti-White Supremacists
By all means, let’s talk — and let’s combat — white supremacy. I’m serious. White supremacy is a cancerous ideology. But we cannot do that effectively unless we also confront the anti-white supremacy that the Left has been cultivating for a very long time.
I’ve been writing on this blog for years that the equal and opposite reaction of left-wing identity politics, especially racial identity politics, is right-wing white identity politics. When college professors (for example) valorize anti-white racial hatred and violence, whether they realize it or not, they are calling up demons from the dregs of white tribalism. They don’t want to hear this, but it’s true.
James Kirchick writes about “The Left’s Race War” in a brave Tablet essay. Excerpts:
Trump’s game isn’t difficult to discern. He is practicing the same sort of resentment-based, racial-identity politics that has fueled his political rise since the earlier part of this decade, when he began expressing doubts that the first black president was actually born in the United States.
Trump’s motives are mean, his tactics distasteful, and his manner of expression bigoted and unpresidential. But in the race to see who can press harder on the race button, Trump has a worthy opponent in today’s left. Just as it is hard to see Trump as anything other than a bigot and a button-presser, it is similarly impossible to deny the radical transformation of the progressive intellectual and activist universe in the nearly three years since Trump was elected into a self-appointed politburo that is trying to impose its own aggressively race-obsessed vision on America.
Indeed, many of Trump’s opponents on the left have turned themselves into committed ideologues with a programmatic understanding of human behavior and human differences rooted in some biological component that is impossible or nearly impossible to change. The way the left talks incessantly about “white men,” or openly puts membership in victim groups above individual rights and virtues, is the essence of what most people mean by racism. Not “reverse racism”—but real, actual, racism.
More:
In many progressive circles, the word “white” has become a gleeful synonym for “ignorant,” “bigoted,” or “unenlightened.” In mainstream media and other progressive discourse, attacks on “straight white men” are as ubiquitous as they are indiscriminate. When Pennsylvania state Rep. Brian Sims decided to harass a pro-life demonstrator standing peacefully outside a Philadelphia abortion clinic earlier this year, he described her as “an old white lady,” as if the color of her skin had anything whatsoever to do with the validity of her belief that life begins at conception. Recently minted New York Times editorial writer Sarah Jeong spent years tweeting vile insults about white people that would have ended her career had she written them about any other group or “race.”
Meanwhile, in such circles, anything nonwhite is sacralized. “Trans women of color” led the uprising at Stonewall. (Except they didn’t). Squad member Rashida Tlaib, in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, justified her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against “racist” Israel by referencing her growing up in the “blackest, beautiful city” of Detroit. Violent attacks on Jews in New York City are at record highs, and are being perpetrated almost exclusively by black and Hispanic men, and yet Mayor de Blasio bizarrely blames it all on a “right-wing movement.” “What if we just let black women run everything,” proposed author Molly Knight, to which the actor Mark Ruffalo smarmily responded, “I’m definitely ready for that. I said a prayer the other day and when God answered me back she was a Black Woman.”
Read it all. It’s important. The Left is completely blind to this. Left-liberal leaders cannot speak with any credibility about Trump’s racialized rhetoric as long as they welcome, and even engage in, the left-wing equivalent. As Kirchick points out, the Left has gone so berserk about this stuff that some of them are even trashing Barack Obama’s vice president as a new Bull Connor — something that Obama ought to criticize; his silence is deafening.
The only deliverance for this country on the race question is to return to the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Either we realize that we are brothers who share a common destiny, or we will perish in tribal hatred. There is no third option.
By the way, I have special knowledge of how Al Sharpton operates. In 2001, as a journalist in New York City, I had to hide out in my apartment for a week after receiving multiple death threats in connection with a protest Sharpton was leading against my newspaper and me, because he was offended by a dopey column I wrote. Sharpton knew I was getting death threats — but he didn’t care. He is a professional racist who had a career to advance.
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