Supreme Idiocy
When everyone’s a white supremacist, no one is
Postmodern woke progressivism rests on three obsessional pillars: panic over “white supremacy,” gender ideology, and an existential dread of student loan debt. Only the last has some basis in reality; the other two are pure fantasy.
This not to deny the reality of racism, which no doubt will always be with us. For instance, the upsurge of antisemitism in progressive circles, disguised as opposition to Zionism, is a disturbing feature of the current scene. Humanity being a tribal species, such bigotry is never far beneath the surface.
Observed in proper focus, woke progressivism’s obsession with the threat of white supremacy is just such a manifestation of tribalism: panic fear of the Other, i.e. those who do not or will not accept the woke worldview. You are a white supremacist if you question the doctrine of diversity, equity, and inclusion; if you believe that all lives matter; if you remark that the overwhelming majority of black men who die by violence are killed not by the police or white people, but by other black men. And so it goes. The slightest deviation from progressive orthodoxy gets you branded as a hateful racist, misogynist, transphobe, etc. and so forth.
Actual white supremacists do exist, of course. But they’re nothing more than fringe lunatics of the Right, largely powerless, broadly despised. Such people can be dangerous, yes, but to describe them as the greatest domestic terrorist threat facing America is a gross and laughable exaggeration.
Ah, but progressives purport to have the stats to back up that description, courtesy of the FBI. Let us leave aside the amusing spectacle of our would-be revolutionaries and fundamental changers, citing the Authorities in support of their claim, and ask instead how the FBI arrived at its assessment.
That assessment relies on the number of domestic terrorism cases, ascribed to white supremacy, that the FBI opens. And indeed, that number has grown startlingly large in recent years and if one digs no deeper, it seems alarming. But in fact, the FBI is cooking the books. Here’s how it works.
Traditionally, FBI cases are opened and investigated by the regional office in which the alleged crime has been committed. Pursuant to that investigation, other FBI regional offices may be drawn in, say to interview potential witnesses, execute a search warrant, make an arrest, etc. But however many other regional offices become involved, there remains one case, managed by the office that opened it.
The investigation of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot is, or ought to have been, one case. But the FBI’s senior leadership decreed that every request to other regional office be treated as a new, separate case. This enables the FBI to claim that it’s dealing with a large number of domestic terrorism cases related to white supremacy, even though they all trace back to one incident, and even though some of them are trivial—requests for information, witness interviews or minor crimes like trespassing.
We should not be surprised by this example of official corruption and deceit. One may, as I do, dislike and deplore Donald J. Trump, and think that he should never have been president. But one cannot deny that in 2016 the FBI and other organs of state security colluded with the Clinton campaign to smear him as a Russian mole. Now the FBI is playing games with its own crime stats to further an absurd conspiracy theory.
This business gets even stupider when woke progressives seize upon some news item to further their lame narrative of white supremacy. The death of Jordan Neely on the NYC subway was instantly reduced to a racist narrative by these people: We were asked to believe that Daniel Penny was a white vigilante, just looking for a chance to kill some beloved black performance artist. Also in NYC, when a nurse, white and six months pregnant, was harassed and molested by a gang of black teenagers, we were expected to believe that she’s a racist Karen, and that the little maggots who assailed her were the real victims.
Indeed, we’ve arrived a place where it’s impossible for any white person, woke or not, to avoid being a white supremacist. So why worry?
I sometimes find myself wondering how woke progressives can possibly believe the rubbish they sprout, so radically at variance with reality. Then I remember Mr. Orwell’s principle of doublethink—in Standard English, reality control. He called it a state of “controlled insanity” whereby the contradictions of Oceania’s prevailing ideology could be reconciled. This is why I make it a point to reread Nineteen Eighty-four every few years: It explains so much of what I see happening around me in these bewildering postmodern times.
It’s ironic as well as probably actually dangerous that progressives, by propagating this lie that white people are constantly persecuting black people just by being white--they’re sowing the seeds for violence between ethnic groups. Their entirely political racial essentialism is no better than Houston Stewart Chamberlin’s pseudoscientific racial biology, not that progressives are paving the way to fascism, exactly. Nonetheless there’s a good argument they perversely will the perpetuation of the racism they purport to deplore.
Haha. That’s funny.
On my substack The Neoliberal Standard I’m working on a post on the hubris of bragg charging daniel penny, “white vigilante,” after having already indicted trump, alleged purveyor of white supremacy in chief, and the terrible ramifications such prosecutorial recklessness has for the rule of law in this country.