#this sort of 'dems r the real racists' argument never works

[arcticdementor]

Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.

The term projection more or less sums up much of the woke identity politics movement, in which obsessions with racial privilege and tribal exceptionalism are justified by accusing others of just such bias.

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In some sense, today’s hip new racists have adopted the ideology of Lester Maddox and not Martin Luther King, Jr. Segregation, not integration, is the new racist mantra—by dorm, by theme house, by caucus, by safe space, by graduation ceremony.

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The logic of the tribe leads to sectarian warfare, not harmony. We see just that when Asians revolt against black and Latino preferences in college admissions. Feminists push back against the endemic misogyny of rap music that is given an intersectional pass to demean women and freely employ the n-word. There is sometimes less, not greater, tolerance for unapologetic homosexuality in supposedly hyper-macho Latino culture. Doctrinaire Islam makes few concessions for the Muslim convert to Christianity; he is still an infidel to be shunned, even killed.

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Smollett, himself half-white, accused an innocent large segment of the U.S. population as racist without any worry of the consequences from such false charges. And rightly so: Smollett has faced little pushback, remains in the news, and believes that no one ultimately will dare to charge him as a racist who committed a hate-crime.

The Covington Catholic fiasco illustrated the same modus operandi. Native American activist Nathan Phillips sought media exposure and careerist advantage by deliberately confronting a group of young Catholic students on the National Mall. Phillips hoped the resulting staged optics would show privileged, male, young, white Christians with red MAGA hats haranguing a wizened Native American elder and Vietnam veteran.

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Most of the media bought his ruse and have retreated to the usual fallback defense for faked racist accusations: in a racist America, the charges could in theory have been true, and therefore that they were demonstrably not true this time means little.

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The new racism is epidemic among those in the so-called squad, the self-referenced nickname for four media-obsessed, first-term congressional representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who without their daily charges of bias largely would be unknown back-benchers laboring away in obscurity.

Take Pressley’s recent formulation of the new racism at a recent Netroots Nation conference:

If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice.

In sum, Pressley just outlined the classic anti-Enlightenment mindset: we are all permanent captives of our superficial race, religion, and sexual orientation. We must at all times think, act, and speak in such tribal fashion—and do so monolithically and collectively, in adopting the party line as set down by such elites as those like Pressley herself.

Blacks who oppose affirmative action, or Muslims who recognize Israel, or “queers” whose sexual preferences are incidental, not essential to their personas are thus declared not authentic and thus not to be welcomed by Pressley into the new racialist Democratic Party.

In practical terms, Pressley assumes that whites, reportedly about 70 percent of the population, tune her logic out. That is, they should never take her own racist advice and vote en masse according to their superficial shared skin color. If they did, the 55 percent of actual voters who are white in her otherwise minority-majority congressional district might never have elected someone who, according to her own rationale, is not part of their own tribe.

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No matter. There is no exemption from being charged with racism for old, rich, white, and liberal females like Pelosi. In the new racist cosmology, the multimillionaire Pelosi can never escape her white privilege. One element of the new racism is thus Jacobinism—the idea that the circle of racists always widens until the racists devour one another with charges that everyone but themselves is insufficiently racially woke.

Smollett taught us that is was not enough for a gay man to be attacked by homophobes, or a liberal crusader to be attacked by right-wing Trumpers, or a black man to be attacked by white racists. In the ever-spiraling rules of woke racism, only a gay, left-wing, and black victim can win singular revolutionary authority—and only when invented Trump fanatics scream racial taunts and routinely patrol the liberal neighborhoods of Chicago nightly armed with bleach and nooses.

On matters of immigration, it is no longer enough to endorse the old bipartisan compromises on border security and amnesties or to see the problem as one of illegality. No longer is it sufficient to advocate making DACA the law of the land and extending amnesty to the “dreamers.” Now instead the border has become for some presidential candidates an existential racial question of bringing in millions of supposedly “nonwhite” rather than just illegal immigrants—and in public photo ops escorting them as they illegally cross the border—providing them with amnesty, legal residency, sanctuary from immigration enforcement, and free health care, while calling anyone a “racist” who complains that such caravan immigration is not diverse, legal, measured or meritocratic.